RoguePundit

Random Nature #240

New Italian Cuisine:  The Romans, who were great at documenting things, never mentioned the tomato.  There's a good reason for that...the species--Solanum lycopersicum--is a tender perennial that's native to the Andes region in South America.  However, genus Solanum isn't restricted to the New World.  Yes, the potato (S. tuberosum) is also from the Andes, but for instance the egg plant (S. melongena) is from India and the purple African nightshade (S. marginatum) is native to Ethiopia.

Why mention the purple African nightshade?  Well, it's one of several sources of solasodine.

In the 1980s, Solanum marginatum was experimentally used by a pharmaceutical company to produce birth-control pills. The standard source for the hormones in oral contraceptives had been diosgenin, which is chemically very similar to progesterone and oestrogen, which was harvested from wild yams--dioscoreas--mostly in Mexico. It was thought to be becoming unsustainable and so alternatives were tried for the production of diosgenin analogues. A plantation was established in Ecuador and the fruits harvested to extract the solasodine, which was then chemically changed to diosgenin. However, this practice too proved unsustainable over time, and it became cheaper to produce diosgenin chemically rather than to harvest it from plants.

However, the kangaroo apple (S. aviculare) has been cultivated since the '60s in Russia and Hungary for the production of steroid contraceptives like "the pill."  The native of Australia and New Zealand is an invasive species in parts of California and Oregon.  It's one of several members of the genus that produces solasodine. 

From a classification perspective, genus Solanum--a member of the nightshade family--is a mess.  It has somewhere 1,500 and 2,000 species, with the tomato being one of the newer ones.  Its former scientific name, Lycopersicon esculentum, means edible wolf peach.  More on that in a moment.

By the by, if the name Solanum sounds familiar for a different reason, maybe you've read "The Zombie Survival Guide."  Solanum is the fictional virus that creates zombies.

Vegetable?:  We don't often think of putting berries in lettuce-based salads or adding them to burgers, but the tomato is actually a berry.  That's because its fruit comes from a single superior ovary.

A superior ovary is an ovary attached to the receptacle above the attachment of other floral parts.

Other examples of berries are the chili pepper, eggplant, grape, guava, and kiwifruit. However, several of what we traditionally think of as berries--like the blackberry and raspberry--are aggregate fruits rather than berries.  The strawberry is a "false fruit" because it grows from the base of the flower rather than the ovary.  The little seeds on the surface of a strawberry are the actual berries.  The blueberry is a "false berry" because it has an inferior ovary.

An inferior ovary lies below the attachment of other floral parts.

Other false berries include bananas, cranberries, melons, gourds, cucumbers, cantaloupes, and members of the cactus family.

Meanwhile, vegetable is a culinary rather than scientific term.  It's also a legal term.

The United States Congress passed the Tariff Act of 1883, a rather innocuous piece of legislation requiring a 10% tax on imported vegetables, in response to growing international trade. Just a few short years later, a tomato importer evaluated the law closely, and decided to challenge it on the botanical grounds that a tomato was in fact technically a fruit, not a vegetable, and should therefore be exempt from said tax. John Nix's case posed merit enough to land the case before the Supreme Court in 1893. In Nix vs Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893), Justice Gray wrote, "Botanically speaking, tomatoes are fruits of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas. But in the common language of the people...all these are vegetables, which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked or raw, are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery and lettuce, usually served at dinner in, with or after the soup, fish or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert." The court rejected the botanical truth that the tomato is in fact a monstrously sized berry, and deferred to the culinary vernacular of vegetable to describe it. Thus is tax yet paid on imported tomatoes.

Our lawmakers have a long history of corrupting science. 

The Little Yellow Berry:  Early peoples in South America used the tiny dried berries of the tomato as decoration.  However, there's no evidence the Incans or their ancestors ever grew or used tomatoes as food.  Best as researchers can tell, the tomato was domesticated in Central America.  Moving northward, genetic evidence points to modern tomatoes being derived from the small, yellow, and probably rough-skinned berries the Aztecs cultivated and consumed.  Curiously though, the only edible wild tomatoes are ones with red berries.

There is no record of who brought the tomato to Europe...the earliest documentation of the berry is by an Italian scientist.  It was called the pomo d'oro--the golden apple.  Italians weren't quick to begin eating the berry.  That's because it looks like several of its poisonous relatives in the nightshade family.

Deadly nightshade, Atropus belladonna, in particular bears good resemblance to a tomato plant. It is a poisonous plant which has been used as both a hallucinogenic drug and a beauty aid in different parts of Europe. The Latin name "belladonna" literally means beautiful woman, in reference to the practice of ladies in medieval courts who would apply a few drops of nightshade extract to their eyes to dilate their pupils, a look considered most fashionable at the time. The hallucinogenic properties of the plant, comprised of visions and the sense of flying, most likely led to the association of nightshade with witchcraft. Old German folklore has it that witches used plants of the nightshade family to evoke werewolves, a practice known as lycanthropy.

The tomato first appears in an Italian cookbook (published in Naples, where the modern pizza was developed) in 1692.  Tomato sauces gradually joined and in some cases replaced the traditional white sauces in Italy. 

It was British colonists who brought the tomato back from Europe to America. 

The Influx:  A few short years ago, The U.S. was the world's leading producer of tomatoes.  Nowadays, China produces about a quarter of the world's supply (130 million tonnes in 2007), which is almost triple the amount grown in the U.S.  We rank second, ahead of Turkey, India, and Egypt. From an article published in late 2007...

China, it turns out, now grows more tomatoes for processing—the kind that get turned into ketchup, pasta sauce, salsa—than any place in the world besides California, and maybe Italy. The precipitous rise of the country's tomato industry, which scarcely existed a decade ago, is wreaking some havoc. The Senegalese claim that cheap Chinese tomato paste is driving farmers off the land. Turks, Aussies, and Russians have similar complaints. The Italians are especially unhappy: The Silk Road over which Marco Polo brought home the pasta has turned into a pipeline of cheap tomato paste.

Yet, most Chinese shun tomatoes.

Nevertheless, in 1993, a private domestic company called Tunhe decided to start growing tomatoes in China's arid western highlands, an area studded with camel herds, yurts, oil derricks, and ancient underground irrigation systems.

Most of the tomatoes are grown in the province of Xinjiang, an ancient, landlocked crossroads on the Silk Road where many of the natives are Kazakhs, Uyghurs, or members of various Muslim ethnic groups. A few years ago, Tunhe went flamboyantly bankrupt and was taken over by a Chinese state-run food conglomerate, Cofco. Its chief competitor in the tomato business is the Chinese army. The army's Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps is a shadow power in the province and has about 1 million employees.

...

The point of growing all these tomatoes in Xinjiang—as well as in Inner Mongolia and Gansu province—was not so much to secure vital spaghetti Bolognese resources for China, as it was to create jobs for some of the Han Chinese sent to the region during the heroic age of Chinese communism.

The influx of Han Chinese has been a major source of discontent amongst the native Uyghurs.  China has been struggling with violence in the remote western province (examples here and here).

Some Italians are especially worked up over what they view as a Faustian bargain their industry made here. In the 1990s, searching for cheap product for their export markets, Italian companies began setting up tomato-processing plants in China to provide paste, which Italian canners repackaged, slapped with "Made in Italy" stickers, and shipped to Africa. Soon, though, the Chinese figured out a way to market their paste directly to the Africans and began selling it in Europe as well. In 2002, customs agents seized 160 tons of rotting, worm-infested Chinese paste at the Italian port of Bari. Much to their horror, Italian consumers soon learned that some of the paste on their shelves had come from China, where, as it was pointed out, there were lax controls on sanitation, pesticides, and heavy-metal contamination. "Italy—Invaded by Chinese tomatoes!" screamed a Corriere della Sera article in 2005. That year, Italian tomatoes rotted in the fields because Chinese paste imports had lowered the price so far that the Italian tomatoes were no longer worth harvesting.

Free land, almost free labor, and a lax regulatory environment are hard to compete with.

Random Nature #239

Squalor:  Liberia has suffered two brutal civil wars in the last 20 years.  While the relative peace since the middle of the decade has unquestionably brought a number of improvements, conditions for many people today are arguably worse than they were back in 1989.  For instance back then, the nation had 250 doctors to serve a population of 2.5 million.  Now is has 50 doctors to serve a population of 3.5 million.  Meanwhile though, infant mortality rates have dropped because inoculation rates are up.  Thus, many survive to live in the following conditions.

In the Clara Town slum, 75,000 people share 11 public toilets and 22 public taps; West Point's 70,000 residents must make do with just four public toilets, said Bessman Toe, head of the Montserrado County slum-dweller association, which represents over 40 slum communities in and around the capital [Monrovia].

Some households build their own toilets, but these tend to collapse during the seven-month rainy season, Oxfam emergency health engineer Jennifer Lamb told IRIN, so people defecate in the narrow alley-ways between their houses, on the beach, or into plastic bags, which they dump on nearby piles of rubbish or into the sea.

A visit to a toilet in West Point costs 2.5 US cents; the young men running the latrines said there were around 500 users a day. The facilities can be smelled 160 feet away, with the floor of each squalid cubicle 6 inches deep in soiled newspaper that residents use to wipe their posteriors. Staff use gloved hands to scoop the used paper into a wheelbarrow, which they lug to the nearby river or beach to dump its contents into the water.

While the population of Monrovia certainly mushroomed due to the violence in the countryside, it's not like there were much in the way of services to overwhelm.  According to a government report published last year, the entire nation still has less than 20,000 toilets.  Less than one in three people has access to potable water.  Little wonder the nation has appalling rates of many of the diseases spread via fecal-oral contamination.

But back to the potable water thought...

In Clara Town's aptly named "Struggle Community"--a network of haphazard, rubbish-strewn streets, many of which are flooded for several months of the year--10,000 residents share two privately owned water taps.

... Land-owners employ young men to manage the taps, who charge between 7 US cents and 14 US cents for 1.3 gallons to 4.0 gallons of water, depending on where the tap is located.

In June 2007, the nation had $4.9 billion in debt.  At eight times GDP, that was easily the highest in the world.  On most lists, only Burundi and the Congo (the former Zaire) have a lower GDP per capita.  If one adjusts for inflation, Liberia's GDP per capita has indeed dropped since 1990. 

Fortunately between write-offs and paying three cents on the dollar, Liberia's debt was reduced earlier this year to about $1.7 billion...which is still almost $500 per person.  The average Liberian lives on about a dollar per day.

One Despot After Another:  In 1980, Samuel K. Doe led a coup in which it's claimed by many that he and some of his men disemboweled the Liberian president in the Executive Mansion.  Within 10 days of Doe's takeover, all 14 cabinet members were tried by kangaroo court, sentenced to death, and with one exception publicly executed.  Charles M. Taylor supported the coup and was put in charge of purchasing for the government.  Unfortunately, Taylor eventually ran afoul of the boss. 

He fled the country, only to be arrested in 24 May 1984, by two US Deputy Marshals in Somerville, Massachusetts [near where he went to college], on a warrant for extradition to face charges of embezzling $922,000 of government funds, intended for machinery parts. Citing a fear of assassination by Liberian agents, it was announced by Taylor's lawyer, former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, that Taylor would fight extradition from the safety of jail. He was detained in a House of Corrections in Plymouth, Massachusetts. ... Taylor [escaped and] managed to flee the United States and shortly thereafter it is assumed he went to Libya where he underwent guerrilla training under Muammar al-Gaddafi, becoming Gaddafi's protegé. Eventually he left Libya and used the training he gained there to begin a civil war in Liberia. 

Libya funded Taylor's rebel effort, which was based in neighboring Ivory Coast.  It was Prince Johnson, one of his allies in the rebellion, who actually overthrew Doe in 1990.  Johnson was filmed drinking a beer while his men were torturing Doe...who was eventually executed.  It wasn't that long until he and Taylor had a falling out, and Johnson fled the country until 2004.  A year later, he was elected Senator.  At Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission last year, Johnson claimed that Taylor didn't escape from jail in the U.S., but was released to orchestrate an overthrow of Doe.  Anyway...

Liberia didn't have an official leader until the first civil war was over.  Taylor won election in 1997, but was soon battling another rebellion in the northern part of the country--likely supported by neighboring Guinea.  The civil war didn't settle down until Taylor finally resigned in 2003.  As you might have guessed, he was no angel either.

Slowly But...:  After a long build-up, the UN began (and is still) trying Taylor for 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.  Because the conflicts straddled multiple borders, the jurisdiction is the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone.  From an article on the testimony last year.

Charles Taylor celebrated his rise to power in Liberia with a ceremony involving a human sacrifice, burying a pregnant woman alive in sand, one of his former military commanders has testified.

The admission came during a trial at The Hague where the former president is accused of war crimes.  During a day of grim testimony, Joseph "Zigzag" Marzah described the ceremony and acknowledged committing hundreds of other murders on Taylor's orders.

"We executed everybody - babies, women, old men. There were so many executions. I can't remember them all," Marzah told the court.  Among the victims were Taylor's opponents and former allies who he thought had betrayed him, Marzah said.

...

Under prompting from Courtenay Griffith, defence counsel, Marzah said: "It's not difficult to kill a baby. Sometimes you just knock them on the head, sometimes you throw them in a pit, sometimes you throw them in the river and they are dead. Then you give the report to Charles Taylor."

Ugh.  And from testimony earlier this year...  

Taylor is accused of arming, training and controlling Sierra Leone's notorious Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, blamed for many of the mutilations, in exchange for diamonds used to fund warfare.

...

Alusine Conteh told the Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone that he, his wife and four-year-old son had encountered a group of soldiers on the road in January 1999 while fleeing attacks in the capital Freetown on foot.

After being made to watch as a man in civilian clothes chopped off a family friend's hands on the soldiers' instructions, Conteh was himself ordered to step forward.

"The only thing I asked of them, was 'What have I done?'. I put my left hand on the slab. He raised the axe and hacked once.

"My child screamed out: 'Don't cut off my father's hand'. The soldiers said he was making a noise and they said we should untie him from his mother's back.

"I said: 'Instead of you chopping off his hand, chop off both of mine'. They said I should place my right hand, and they hacked it twice."

As you can imagine, the civil wars and associated chaos have left thousands--probably tens of thousands--of amputees in both nations. 

Begging for Aid:  Sadly, one could go on and on with the horrors and devastation still impacting life in Liberia.  Instead, let's just cut to a pet peeve. 

This past week at the launch of the UN Population Fund's 2009 State of the World Population report...

Liberia’s Vice President Joseph N. Boakai says climate change poses a serious threat to the way of life in Liberia as in the rest of the world.

With the conditions as bad as they still are in Liberia, it's sad that anyone could make such a statement or view such statements as sensible...or at least politically correct.  Developing nations quickly learn what terminology is selling when it comes to getting aid money.

Random Nature #238

Green But Not Authentic:  Years ago, I had a boss who talked about knowing the difference between traditions and bad habits.  There's a lot of tradition in the production of scotch.

For the past two years the [Loch Lomond Distillery], based in Alexandria near Glasgow, has been producing almost 12m litres of grain alcohol and 4m litres of single malt annually. Some has been produced using a single-still method that cuts CO2 emissions by thousands of tonnes every year. Distillery bosses say they have already smashed government climate change targets for 2011 by cutting energy use by 7%.

However, under the new definition of what constitutes "Scotch malt whisky", due to come into force on 23 November, Loch Lomond will have to close the still or see millions knocked off the value of its product because it can no longer be classified as malt whisky. According to the Scotch Whisky Association (SWA), which helped draw up the amendments to the Scotch Whisky Order 1990, a true malt will only be classed as such if it is made "by batch distillation in pot stills".

Here's why Loch Lomond thinks that some of the traditions are bad habits.

"We have a method that produces a very good malt spirit but are being penalised because we are innovators," said John Peterson, distilling director of Loch Lomond. "We want to make the process better and save considerable amounts of energy. As it is, we prevent more than 1,400 tonnes of CO2 being released every year and they want us to go back to the old inefficient ways.

"The SWA wants us to call it grain whisky, but it's not; if anything that's an even more misleading description. Politicians are quick to shout about climate change and how industry has to find new ways to reduce carbon output, but when we try to do something innovative we get slapped down for it."

...

Environmental groups, however, have applauded Loch Lomond Distillery and the whisky industry for trying to address the climate change issue. "The Scottish whisky industry is becoming a hotbed of innovation for the adoption of renewable and low-energy technologies, and it's essential that it does so as a major employer and exporter," said Duncan McLaren, chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland.

The primary motivation is the bottom-line...saving energy saves money. Tellingly, the company's website--which offers on-line sales (though not to the U.S.)--goes on and on about tradition but fails to mention emissions or climate change. 

Helping to Spread Pathogens:  The following attaches numbers to something we already knew--that food-borne pathogens tend to hit children harder.

Children under 4 are disproportionately the victims of poisoning by Campylobacter, E. coli O157:H7, Listeria monocytogenes and salmonella.  And roughly half of all reported cases of food-borne illness affect those younger than 15. Because younger kids are smaller, it takes a smaller dose of harmful bacteria to sicken them, and their less-experienced immune systems don't combat food-borne pathogens as effectively as do those of adults.

In somewhat related research also published this past week...

A Kansas State University study has shown that when preparing frozen foods, adolescents are less likely than adults to wash their hands and are more susceptible to cross-contaminating raw foods while cooking.

"While half of the adults we observed washed their hands after touching raw chicken, none of the adolescents did," said Casey Jacob, a food safety research assistant at K-State. "The non-existent hand washing rate, combined with certain age-specific behaviors like hair flipping and scratching in a variety of areas, could lead directly to instances of cross-contamination compared to the adults."

...

Beyond the discrepancy between adult and adolescent food safety practices, the researchers also found that even when provided with instructions, food preparers don't follow them. They may not have even seen them or they assume they know what to do.

And if you thought that was a case of discovering the obvious...

They also found that observational research using discreet video recording is far more accurate than self-reported surveys. For example, while almost all of the primary meal preparers reported washing hands after every instance in which they touched raw poultry, only half were observed washing hands correctly after handling chicken products in the study.

That's an example of why it's always worth taking surveys with a grain or two of salt.

Data Blowing Both Ways:  Earlier this year, the were many headlines on the following.

The study found that surface wind speeds, especially in the Midwest and the Northeast, have decreased by an average of 0.5 percent to 1 percent each year since 1973.

"We see this trend toward slower wind speeds and our unanswered question is whether this is part of global warming or something else," said Bill Gutowski, a professor of geological and atmospheric sciences and one of the four Iowa State scientists working on the study.

...

The scientists looked at surface wind data around the country from 1973 to 2005 using wind-speed measurements from anemometers and computerized climate models to reach their conclusion.

That study would have been stronger if it had just depended upon actual data...why dilute it with climate models?  And if the researchers wanted to avoid suspicions of cherry-picking regarding climate change, they should have worked with data starting before the abnormally-cool 1970s. It's not like we don't have good wind speed measurements going back several more decades.

Yesterday, a study was published on the change in wind speeds over Lake Superior.

Since 1985, surface water temperatures measured by lake buoys have climbed 1.2 degrees per decade, about 15 percent faster than the air above the lake and twice as fast as warming over nearby land.

...

A wide temperature differential between water and air makes for a more stable atmosphere with calmer winds over the relatively cold water. However, as warming water closes the gap, as in Lake Superior's case, the atmosphere gets more turbulent.

"You get more powerful winds," Desai says. "We've seen a 5 percent increase per decade in average wind speed since 1985."

That's an even smaller data set...too bad the researchers didn't go back a few more years to see if the wind speeds dropped during a cooling spell.

If it's blowing that much more over the lake, it has to be impacting the surrounding lands as well. Evidently, the winds in other parts of the Midwest have been slowing enough to absorb the increases around Lake Superior?  Both groups of researchers used multiple sets of data, but did they use the same data.  If not, why?

Random Nature #237

More Control Through Meters:  Smart meters can be designed to do all sorts of things.  For instance, here's what over 27 million Enel customers already have in Italy...

These meters are fully electronic and smart, with integrated bi-directional communications, advanced power measurement and management capabilities, an integrated, software-controllable disconnect switch, and an all solid-state design. They communicate over low voltage power line using standards-based power line technology from Echelon Corporation to Echelon data concentrators at which point they communicate via IP to Enel's enterprise servers.

The system provides a wide range of advanced features, including the ability to remotely turn power on or off to a customer, read usage information from a meter, detect a service outage, detect the unauthorized use of electricity, change the maximum amount of electricity that a customer can demand at any time; and remotely change the meter's billing plan from credit to prepay as well as from flat-rate to multi-tariff.

That sure makes shutting off power for lack of payment more efficient. 

The average person doesn't mind helping other power customers who are genuinely in need.  The same isn't necessarily true for those who try to take advantage of such generosity to live beyond their means.  The prepaying option--if executed well--can motivate some of those folks to manage their money better.  Or maybe for instance the kids will suffer for the sins of their parent(s)/guardian.  

Notice the reference to multi-tariff.  One of the most touted features of smart meters here in the U.S. is dynamic pricing.

Flattening Peaks:  One of the key things power companies want to motivate via price is a reduction in demand during peak periods. That brings up the concept of the "elasticity of substitution." 

...the percentage change in daily peak electricity usage (relative to off-peak usage) in response to a one percent change in relative peak prices.

It's easier to understand that definition via example.  The Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation (NPMC) in upstate New York has had dynamic pricing for non-residential customers since 1998.  In the following, that pricing is referred to as the SC-3A rate class.  Bear in mind that these non-residential customers had other rate choices--like traditional flat pricing. 

NMPC’s is the first and longest-running default-service [real-time price] tariff implemented in the context of retail competition. The mix of NMPC’s large customers exposed to day-ahead hourly prices is roughly 30% industrial, 25% commercial and 45% institutional. They have faced periods of high prices during the study period (2000-2004), thereby providing an opportunity to assess their response to volatile hourly prices.

...

As a group, SC-3A customers' price response is modest -– the load-weighted average substitution elasticity of 119 customers included in the model is 0.11, which means that their combined ratio of peak to off-peak electricity usage declines by 11% in response to a doubling of peak prices (relative to off-peak prices). This result is consistent with other studies of large customers facing similar pricing circumstances.

Business Category             Number       Average substitution elasticity

Government/education         34                              0.10
Public Works                        17                              0.02
Commercial/retail                16                              0.06
Healthcare                             8                              0.04
Manufacturing                      44                              0.16

Total                                  119                              0.11

Doubling the price only drove an 11 percent reduction in demand?  Of course, when a utility is facing a peak load that could cause brown outs and/or the purchase of high-priced power on the open market, an 11 percent reduction in demand would be quite valuable.  It would also likely reduce the use of fossil fuels and push back the need for additional generating capacity.  And don't forget that we expect utilities to satisfy peak demand 24/7, which wind and solar can't guarantee.

Changing Bills:  When one digs into the above results, it turns out that the savings were even lumpier than they first appear.  Just 18 percent of the customers produced 75-80 percent of the reduction in demand.  Meanwhile, 35 percent of the customers showed no reductions.  It's not like sewage slows down, hospitals have control over when people need emergency treatment, or successful retailers can provide uncomfortable conditions for shoppers.  In other words, the results would seem to indicate that targeting the dynamic pricing rather than inflicting it upon everyone would produce most of the desired reduction in energy demand.

Most utilities that provide retail service have a natural monopoly.  Thus over the long run, they're essentially guaranteed enough income to cover their expenses--including the cost of smart meters.  Customers who save money by helping the utility save money is a good thing...unless maybe that includes the utility mining and selling the data it gains from its customers' smart meters.  However, dynamic pricing brings into play customers saving money at the expense of others.  Who loses?  Well, just about everyone who can't or won't do much to reduce their energy utilization during peak pricing.  It's the "can't" part that can be problematic.

A Foreign Example:  Energy Australia, the state-run utility in New South Wales, Australia (home to Sydney), is already rolling out smart meters.  At this point, the new meters are just going into new homes and replacing broken meters; however, the government is considering accelerating the process.  In the following, I've converted the currency to U.S. dollars.

A study by the St Vincent De Paul Society ... found that low-income earners could pay as much as 40 per cent of their fortnightly income on electricity.

The report says smart meters will increase the average domestic electricity bill by an average of $74 a year by changing billing from a flat rate to one based on the time of use, if the NSW Government makes their installation mandatory.

It says the biggest impact will be on low-income households including pensioners, young families, people with disabilities and the unemployed because they are at home during energy-use peak periods.

...

"It is reasonable to suggest that if the Government decides to roll out smart meters in NSW, annual electricity bills for households may rise in the order of $296 per annum,'' the report says.

...

A spokesman for Energy Australia disputed claims that time-of-use tariffs would force up costs. He said 74 per cent of the 180,000 NSW customers on time-of-use tariffs were paying less than what they paid when they were on the fixed rate. Of the rest, 60 per cent were paying $19 a year more.

The Vincentian report may exaggerate, but the Energy Australia data is clearly skewed away from low income earners...those folks generally aren't buying or renting new homes.  At $296 per year, that extra $25 a month isn't huge...unless you don't have it.

Closer to Home:  In October of last year, Pennsylvania enacted a law which drives reductions in energy consumption and directed utilities to develop plans (by April 2011) for making smart meters with real-time pricing available to customers upon their request.  Allegheny Power, which serves about 700,000 customers in the western part of the state, has pursued this aggressively.  From late last month...

Allegheny Power Co.'s plan to begin charging customers $5.86 a month in February to pay for sophisticated electric meter technology has been nixed by the state.

...

According to the company, all customers beginning in February would pay a monthly surcharge of $5.86, which would increase to $14.34 a month by June 2011, $15.57 a month by June 2012 and $15.77 each month by June 2013.

"At $15 a month — that's a massive rate increase for consumers," Popowsky said.

Allegheny Power spokesman Doug Colafella referred to the company's PUC filing, which said surcharge changes will be based on forecasted revenue requirements for the next 12 months. He said the total cost to Allegheny Power for its smart meter plan will be $620.4 million, with more than $40 million of the total cost not charged to the utility's in-state customers.

The smart meters--which will include wireless communications--are a few hundred dollars, and there's the cost of installation for both the meters and the supporting infrastructure.  While the article says the plan was nixed, it may have only been delayed for more thorough consideration.  Meanwhile, maybe Allegheny Power will--like some other utilities already have (example here)--get some stimulus money to subsidize the cost of converting to smart meters.

Wonder if the company is overestimating how much demand reduction the smart meters will drive.  What percentage of a drop in peak load will merely be shifted to cheaper hours? 

Night and Day:  One other thought...if a factory converts to night-shift operations to save on its electrical bills, the workers can end up paying more for their own electricity to sleep comfortably during the day.  Hope they get paid more for making that sacrifice.

Random Nature #236

Reducing Worries:  People with less stress can usually sleep better.  So, who tends to sleep better, workers or retirees?  That depends upon the job, the financial situation upon retirement, one's health, on and on.

The study involved employees from the French national gas and electricity company, Electricité de France-Gaz de France, who retired between 1990 and 2006 at a mean age of 55 years. The study includes data from 11,581 male and 3,133 female workers who reported sleep disturbances at least once before and once after the year of retirement. Thirty-five percent of participants had worked night shifts, and 17 percent reported having depression.

Let's see...the workers there have socialized medicine, strong job security, and a generous pension (80 percent of salary) upon retirement that begins between ages 55 and 60.  The average retiree must sleep better.

Results show that the odds of having disturbed sleep in the seven years after retirement were 26 percent lower than in the seven years before retiring. Sleep disturbance prevalence rates among 14,714 participants fell from 24.2 percent in the last year before retirement to 17.8 percent in the first year after retiring. The greatest reduction in sleep disturbances was reported by participants with depression or mental fatigue prior to retirement. The postretirement improvement in sleep also was more pronounced in men, management-level workers, employees who reported high psychological job demands, and people who occasionally or consistently worked night shifts.

The only exception was for folks who retired for health reasons--illness and disability.  Their odds for sleep disturbances increased 46 percent after retirement.

"We believe these findings are largely applicable in situations where financial incentives not to retire are relatively weak," said Vahtera. "In countries and positions where there is no proper pension level to guarantee financial security beyond working age, however, retirement may be followed by severe stress disturbing sleep even more than before retirement."

That seems rather obvious.  The researchers did note that after retirement, the tendency towards sleep disturbances slowly trended upward, though it remained below the rate before retirement. 

Promoting Tai Chi:  If Tai Chi didn't provide physical benefits, there wouldn't be so many people doing it.  Here's a study regarding its impacts on knee osteoarthritis (OA), a condition which is common amongst senior citizens. 

For this study, Chenchen Wang, M.D., M.Sc., and colleagues recruited 40 patients from the greater Boston area with confirmed knee OA who were in otherwise good health. The mean age of participants was 65 years...  Patients were randomly selected and 20 were asked to participate in 60-minute Yang style Tai Chi sessions twice weekly for 12 weeks. Each session included: a 10-minute self-massage and a review of Tai Chi principles; 30 minutes of Tai Chi movement; 10 minutes of breathing technique; and 10 minutes of relaxation.

...

The remaining 20 participants assigned to the control group attended two 60-minute class sessions per week for 12 weeks. Each control session included 40 minutes of instruction covering OA as a disease, diet and nutrition, therapies to treat OA, or physical and mental health education. The final 20 minutes consisted of stretching exercises involving the upper body, trunk, and lower body, with each stretch being held for 10-15 seconds.

At the end of the 12-week period, patients practicing Tai Chi exhibited a significant decrease in knee pain compared with those in the control group. ... Researchers also observed improved physical function, self-efficacy, depression, and health status for knee OA in subjects in the Tai Chi group.

That's good to know.  However, it's too bad the researchers didn't compare Tai Chi with other forms of exercise that improve fitness.  Despite the seemingly rather placid movements, Tai Chi clearly involves physical exertion.  The average stretching exercise is mostly about stretching.  Compounding this issue is the fact that the stretching group spent less time exercising than the Tai Chi group.

"Our observations emphasize a need to further evaluate the biologic mechanisms and approaches of Tai Chi to extend its benefits to a broader population," concluded Dr. Wang.

That's definitely not an unbiased researcher.

Image and Activity:  Teen girls have sex for a number of reasons.  Self-image can definitely impact the riskiness of such behavior.

Of the nearly 7,200 high school girls asked about their sexual activity and risky sexual behavior as part of the 2005 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance survey, half reported ever having sex. Those girls who were both sexually active and overweight, or who thought they were overweight, were less likely to use condoms than normal-weight sexually active girls. Underweight girls also were less likely to use condoms.

Ethnicity also plays a role.

- Caucasian girls who believed that they were underweight, whether accurate or not, were more likely to have had sex and to have had four or more sexual partners. Overweight Caucasian girls were less likely to use condoms.

- Underweight African-American girls also were less likely to use condoms while overweight African-American girls reported four or more sexual partners.

- Latina girls of all weights were more likely to engage in a wide variety of sexual risk behaviors -- lack of condom or oral contraception use, sex before age 13, greater than four sexual partners and use of alcohol.

The referenced CDC survey didn't delve into why the kids engaged in risky behaviors.

Random Nature #235

Needle Stewardship:  Del Norte County (that last "e" is silent) is in the rural northwestern corner of California.  From this link...

It's hardly the kind of place where you would expect a conservative local government to adopt what may be the most progressive solid waste management policy in the United States. But in February 2000, Del Norte did just that by passing the nation's first comprehensive zero waste plan.

That paragraph is just as pretentious as the concept of zero waste.  The soggy coastal county was facing the closure of its only landfill, and options like a waste-to-energy incinerator weren't panning out.  So, Del Norte County understandably pursued "discard management" strategies, knowing that it would soon cost a lot more to dispose of its garbage...in Oregon.  Neighboring Humboldt County sends most of its garbage to the same place--the Dry Creek Regional Landfill in Eagle Point, near Medford.

Here's an example of how Del Norte County reduced the amount of waste it produced.  

In the early 1990s, about 50 percent of the material going to the county landfill was fish waste, he says. The county couldn't continue to provide that level of disposal capacity to the fisheries, but eliminating that disposal option would have meant shutting down the fishing industry, a potentially lethal blow to the local economy.

Instead, the county worked cooperatively with fish processors and local manufacturer Hambro Forest Products, Crescent City, Calif., to form a new company Eco-Nutrients Inc. Eco-Nutrients uses fish carcasses and crab and shrimp shells to make a slurry for organic agriculture and animal feed.

It sure makes a lot more sense to find companies which make organic fertilizers from fish byproducts near the coast than someplace like Bakersfield (previous blog here).

Here's another way that Del Norte County is now pushing to reduce--or at least redirect--its waste stream.

The Del Norte Solid Waste Authority is taking it one step at a time in embracing product stewardship — the concept that sellers of certain merchandise should be responsible for their disposal.

First it was batteries, and now the authority is taking aim at hypodermic needles, which were banned from normal disposal methods in 2008.

"Needles are really the scariest product we know of," said authority director Kevin Hendrick. "If not handled correctly they end up in the garbage, and sometimes in garbage collectors. There’s nothing more scary than getting poked by a used needle."

No doubt some folks don't know (or maybe care) that medical wastes require special disposal.  No doubt the cost of such disposal deters some folks from doing so properly.  Since it's pretty easy to get away with dumping "residential sharps" in the garbage (and elsewhere), the county needs to ensure that needle stewardship is easy for the customers. 

Del Norte County is currently in the outreach phase.

"We are going to be calling and even visiting businesses in person," Hendrick said. "If necessary we do have the ability to come up with an ordinance that forces businesses to comply, but we would prefer it to be entirely voluntary."

So, will the businesses, health clinics, vets, etc. pass along the costs to all their customers or just the ones who use the service?  And are folks there ever going to worry about the greenhouse gas emissions involved in trucking garbage 100 miles?

Downwind of Berkeley:  Alameda County, California is home to famous cities like Oakland and Berkeley. This urban East Bay county also stretches across the Altamont Hills to the western edge of the San Joaquin Valley (map here). 

 

In the rural northeastern corner of Alameda county is the town of Mountain House.  The prevailing winds blow east, taking most of the pollution--but not the property taxes--into San Joaquin County. 

Cheap land and proximity to major electrical substations, gas lines and water sources have attracted Calpine Corp., Florida Power & Light and Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to the swath of land west of Mountain House on the far eastern edge of Alameda County.

...

The Mariposa Energy Project, Tesla Power Plant and East Altamont Energy Center range in size from 200 to more than 1,100 megawatts. A megawatt powers roughly 750 to 1,000 homes, according to the California Independent System Operator, which runs the state electrical grid.

Add to those the fourth full-fledged power plant slated for the area, the GWF Tracy Combined Cycle Power Plant.

GWF Energy LLC — corporate owner of the 7-year-old Tracy Peaker Plant — is poised to begin construction in 2012 to expand from a 169-megawatt station to one with a second turbine that could feed 314 megawatts into the grid.

The plants in question would all burn natural gas...wind and solar don't produce 24/7.  Note though that the Tesla project is nearly dead, and the Tracy plant shows that San Joaquin County is willing to accept the air pollution if it receives the property taxes.  Tracy's irrigation district might also make some money selling (cooling) water to the plants.  But still, how can places like Berkeley pretend to be green or ethical when they're a party to something like this?  And one more thought...

Anderson cited a study, done in July by the University of California, Berkeley that analyzed the effects of all power plant openings nationwide since 1993. The study said that said a large power plant (380 megawatts or more) could decrease local property values by 9.3 percent.

NIMBYism is motivated by selfishness. 

No New Lines Needed:  Fort Irwin is in the remote desert area between Barstow and Death Valley.  That and the presence of nearby transmission lines sure reduces the NIMBY issues.  About two weeks ago...

The US Army Corps of Engineers signed an agreement with Irwin Energy Security Partners to build a $2 billion, 500-megawatt (MW) solar energy complex at Fort Irwin located in the Mojave Desert, California.

Through an enhanced use lease (EUL) agreement, the Army will lease about 14,000 acres at Fort Irwin to Irwin Energy Security Parnters, a joint venture of ACCIONA Solar Power in Henderson, NV and the Clark Energy Group in Bethesda, MD. The project will be financed and developed by the joint venture partners who will deliver services in kind (e.g., operation and maintenance) to the Army in exchange for the lease of military landholdings. The venture will be able to sell electricity not used by Fort Irwin on the commercial grid via two high-power transmission lines in the vicinity of the base.

The 500 MW project will be the largest DoD solar power project, dwarfing the 14 MW solar farm at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada and the 2 MW installation at Fort Carson in Colorado.

The project will include both photovoltaic and concentrated solar thermal (previous blog here) and could eventually expand to 1,000 MW.  The initial phase should be up and running in 2014. 

By the by, ACCIONA Solar Power is owned by the venerable Spanish infrastructure conglomerate ACCIONA SA.

Random Nature #234

Pet Informants:  "Animal Cops: Houston" is a show which follows the actions of the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (HSPCA), which is privately funded.  Meanwhile, Houston also has the Bureau of Animal Regulation and Care (BARC), the city's underfunded and poorly-managed animal shelter.  It's a matter of priorities...the city pays for BARC through its general fund.  Meanwhile, Houston does a lousy job of collecting money from its residents who own pets. 

It's estimated that only four percent of the city's cats and dogs are properly licensed.  The lax enforcement could be costing the city $1 million a year.     

Licensing Fees	First Year		Renewal
Unaltered Pet	$50.00		$50.00
Altered Pet (Spayed/Neutered)	$10.00		$10.00
Senior Citizen (Age 60+ with altered pet - proof of age required)	$5.00		$2.00
Certified Assistance (Seeing/Hearing Altered Pet License)	no fee		$2.00
A $10 late fee is due if submitted 30 days or more after vaccination date or anniversary of vaccination date.

 

The vaccination in question is rabies.  Vets are supposed to send a listing of vaccinated pets and their owners to the city so that it can check if the pets have been properly licensed.  That's been the law since 1985; vet compliance is about 20 percent.  That's obviously low, but it's still way higher than the percentage of registered pets.  Anyway...

Alfred Moran, director of the city's regulatory affairs, has sent a letter to all veterinarians with warnings in boldfaced type that they may be fined up to $500 for each day they violate the city's ordinance.

"We've given them a grace period so that they can decide how they want to comply. Either mail, e-mail or fax copies of the data to the city. Or they could become deputized to collect the license fees themselves, but I've not heard of any wanting to do that," said Elena Marks, director of health and environmental policy for the mayor's office. "We don't want to become vet police, but if we don't see any movement, we will use our authority."

Most vets don't want to be tax collectors, and they're concerned that the money won't go to BARC.  The city claims the fees will go towards facility improvements that BARC definitely needs.  However, that money isn't fenced...it simply goes into the general fund.  Plus...

[Jeff Chalkley, president-elect of the Harris County Veterinary Medical Association] fears once customers learn that their names are being turned over to the city--forcing them to license their pets or face citations--it could discourage some from getting rabies shots.

Another option would be for pet owners to switch to clinics outside the city limits such as Bellaire, the Memorial villages, Katy or Sugar Land to avoid being reported.

BARC is only a priority as long as it's in the headlines.

Expanding Sales Taxes:  Late last year when California was wrestling with how to balance its budget, one of the proposals was to institute a 9 percent veterinary service tax.  It wasn't a novel idea...Hawaii, New Mexico, and South Dakota have such taxes, and Michigan had defeated one the year before.  But understandably, there was considerable concern that by making such services more expensive, some people would have to cut back on care for pets.  That's not good for the animals, and scrimping for instance on rabies shots can also adversely impact human health.

It wasn't too long until that tax was off the table. 

"The opposition of veterinarians, pet owners and concerned citizens was so intense, a special extension was added to the governor's budget voicemail line to handle the opposition to the tax on pets," Grant says, adding thousands of calls and letters flooded the governor's office. "We believe the overwhelming number of calls delivered an emphatic message to the governor that taxing pet owners would be hugely unpopular and inequitable."

However, most states are still having financial problems.  Thus for instance...

A proposal is in the works by the Arkansas finance department to make retail sales of items at a veterinary clinic taxable. Veterinary services and boarding as part of medical treatment are currently tax-exempt, so are medications prescribed by the veterinarian. The state promises to make the final rules available to veterinarians through the Arkansas VMA.

No doubt that some customers will react by making such purchases on-line, thus avoiding the sales tax. 

Not Single Payer:  North American Pet Health Insurance Association (NAPHIA), which was only founded two years ago, is concerned that cats receive about half as much health care as dogs.

There are more than 82 million pet cats and over 72 million pet dogs in the United States and Canada. Pet owners in households with at least one dog and one cat were more attached to their dogs than their cats by a 3-to-1 margin (57 percent to 19 percent, respectively), according to a special report by the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (JAVMA). This could account for the statistic included in the JAVMA report that 33 percent of these pet owners believe it's more important to take a dog versus a cat to the doctor for a wellness exam.

That's a wee ominous, as cats are better at hiding the fact that they are sick or in pain.  NAPHIA is pushing for pet owners to take more care of their animals, in part because it could drive increased sales of health insurance...which have been growing nicely despite the recession.

While NAPHIA is reporting robust double digit growth in pet health insurance sector, the association is alarmed that cats represent only 10% of the insured pets in North America.

...

About 60% of U.S. households have at least one dog, cat, bird, or other companion animal. Many have more than one. There are more than 82 million pet cats and over 72 million pet dogs in the U.S. Projected 2009 pet expenditures for North America are over $45 billion, of which $25 billion will be spent on veterinary related care.

I'm sure that NAPHIA would like it if people could write-off the cost of their pet health insurance.

Spending on Pets and Vets:  Our senators and representatives introduce huge numbers of bills which go nowhere.  The point of many of them is simply to wave the flag in exchange for political brownie points.  HR 3501 probably falls into that category.   

Republican Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan has thrown pet owners a bone by sponsoring a bill that would allow them to deduct animal care expenses from their taxes.

The bill, Humanity and Pets Partnered Through the Years, or "HAPPY Act," would allow taxpayers to deduct up to $3,500 a year.

...

"Well, we've had reports of people having to turn in pets because of the economic recession," he said. "And when you think about the relationship between people and pets and the humane way that it helps people think, it seemed to me to be a good idea, and we dropped it in" to the congressional hopper.

Talk about forcing an acronym...  The bill was forwarded to the House Committee on Ways and Means on July 31.  On the same day, the Veterinarian Services Investment Act was also dropped into the hopper.

HR 3519 would establish a new grant program under the jurisdiction of the USDA to assist states in addressing their own unique veterinary workforce needs. After all, what is needed in one state may differ greatly from what is most needed in another. Awards under the new grant program may be used to support a wide array of activities including to recruit and retain practicing veterinarians and veterinary technicians to work in underserved areas, to bolster knowledge in food safety/protection and food animal medicine all along the veterinary continuum from students to veterinarians in practice, to establish mobile and portable veterinary clinics, to conduct the assessments that will be needed to designate veterinary shortage situations, for surveillance of food animal disease; to establish or expand veterinary residency, internship and externship programs, and to provide continuation to veterinarians.

This bill was sponsored by Congressmen Leonard Boswell (D-IA) and Adrian Smith (R-NE).  It was referred to the House Committee on Agriculture.  A companion bill (S 1709), sponsored by Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and John Thune (R-SD), was introduced last month.  It was referred to the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. 

From the most recent link...

According to a recent American Veterinary Medical Association, the demand for food supply veterinarians will increase by 12 to 16 percent over next seven years, but the rate of veterinarian school graduates is projected to decrease by four to five percent annually over the same period.

Gee, food producers like China are driving the need for more vets here in the states.

None of these bills have gone anywhere thus far.

Random Nature #233

Oversensitive: The following sure seems like an example of discovering the obvious.

For the study, a total of 133 American college students were randomly assigned to write an essay about either a negative or positive comment about their appearance that they had received in the past. Compared to participants with lower appearance-based rejection sensitivity, those with higher sensitivity felt more rejected and expressed greater interest in getting cosmetic surgery after recalling a negative versus positive appearance comment.

...

Peers/friends/romantic partners were the most frequently cited source of both positive and negative appearance comments.

Building on that, if a woman has breast cancer and a mastectomy offers her the greatest chance of a successful outcome...

Researchers found that patient attitudes about surgery, as well as the opinion of family and friends, contribute to the surgical choices made by women with breast cancer. Greater patient involvement in decision making was associated with greater receipt of mastectomy in all racial and ethnics groups.

Also, women who considered the chance of recurrence or radiation side effects very important were more likely to receive mastectomy initially than those who were less concerned. Those who reported that concern about body image and their spouse's opinion were very important factors in their surgery decision were less likely to receive mastectomy initially than those who were less concerned.

Maybe some of them don't know that the divorce rate is 8% lower for breast cancer survivors (previous blog here). Of course, if a husband is more concerned about his wife having two breasts than improving her chance of survival...

Making an Effort:  This next piece is a study of studies--conclusions drawn from analyzing 57 earlier studies on the relationship between exercise and body image.

"Body dissatisfaction is a huge problem in our society and is related to all sorts of negative behavior including yo-yo dieting, smoking, taking steroids and undergoing cosmetic surgery," she said. "It affects men and women and all ages, starting with kids who are as young as five years old saying they don't like how their bodies look."

The psychological advantages of exercise have been less explored, including the reduction of depression or confidence in body image, compared with the well-researched and understood physical benefits, she said.

The study found no difference in body image improvement between people who met the American College of Sports Medicine guidelines by exercising at least 30 minutes a day five days a week and those who did not, Hausenblas said. The guidelines are considered the minimum amount of exercise needed to receive the health related benefits of physical activity, she said.

...

While the frequency of exercise mattered for boosting body perceptions, there were no differences for the duration, intensity, length or type of exercise, the study found

The people who exercised least were the ones who said they were the most dissatisfied with their body image.  Meanwhile in a newer study not included in the above...

Napolitano and a team of researchers looked at the smoking habits and weight gain of women aged 18-24. The first phase collected data from focus groups who stated that stress, peer pressure and weight management were the main reasons why they smoked. Participants also felt that group-based programs that provide ongoing social support would be instrumental in helping them quit.

Those results laid the groundwork for the project's next phase, dubbed Fit to Quit, a small pilot study of 24 women who were randomly assigned to either a supervised group exercise program or body image group counseling sessions. All women were provided with a nicotine patch as well.

After eight weeks, the body image counseling group showed a rate of smoking cessation that was more than double that of the exercise group (18 percent vs. 8 percent). In addition, the body image group lost more than three times the weight of their exercise counterparts (3.3 pounds vs. less than a pound). These findings were presented this week at the Society for Behavioral Medicine's annual meeting.

Two problems with the weight loss reference...the women in the study weren't necessarily overweight, and exercise can add healthy weight in the form of muscle.  

There are a number of studies which show that in the short term, one doesn't need to exercise hard, if at all, to improve one's body image.  However, it's likely that poor fitness will eventually take its toll on one's body image--and health. 

Healthy Habits and Perceptions:  Edward Abramson, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at CSU-Chico, is one of the go-to guys for the media when it comes to discussing weight and eating problems. The following is related to a presentation he did on how to help prevent obesity. 

Bad eating habits can start with "emotional eating," or eating when one is not hungry, or from following a strict diet, Abramson said. "This can lead to a weight problem or an eating disorder," he added. "Parents' attitudes and behaviors also have an influence on children's eating, and mothers more than fathers affect children's eating habits and body image."

After noting some useful information regarding the establishing of eating habits, the summary switched to exercise.

Physical activity can also help prevent obesity even when there is a tendency to gain weight due to genetics, Abramson said. Research has shown that 4- to 7-year-old children of active parents were six times as likely to be active. Exercise in school lowers the risk for obesity, whereas time spent watching TV or on the computer playing video games increases the risk.

Research has shown that most babies and toddlers start out liking their bodies, said Abramson. But this doesn't last for girls. By the time girls reach pre-adolescence, many start to suffer from warped body images. "Thirty percent of 9-year-old, 55 percent of 10-year-old and 65 percent of 11-year-old girls think they're fat," he said. "Entering puberty isn't as bad for boys. They're more satisfied with their bodies than before they entered puberty."

He offered a number of recommendations, though a couple of them seemed rather dubious.  Surely Abramson must know that parents need to set some boundaries when it comes to allowing children to select the clothing they want to wear.  And, how practical is the advice that parents "should encourage their children to have friendships with other children who are less concerned with appearance?" Well, he does have two grown children, and he's had to work through his own weight issues.  People major in psychology to figure themselves out.

Undersensitive?  Some people who are overweight seem oblivious to their extra girth.  Maybe they are.

Temple researchers studied the body image perceptions of 81 underweight, normal weight, overweight or obese women in the North Philadelphia area and found that as their body mass index (BMI) increased, two-thirds of the women still felt they were at an ideal body size.

...

All participants were measured for height and weight and completed an anonymous survey to determine their self-perceived, current and ideal body sizes. Each woman was then shown an illustration of different-sized women that correlated with increasing BMIs, and were asked which size they felt they were at currently, and what their ideal would be.

While most of the participants selected illustrations of women in the normal to overweight range, about 20 percent of the obese women selected an overweight or obese silhouette as their ideal body shape. Further, 68 percent (15 out 22) of overweight participants and 84 percent (26 of 31) of obese women underestimated their current BMI. African-American and Hispanic women had significantly underestimated their current body size, while the white women overestimated.

That brings up a number of questions that the researchers would like to pursue. And of course it's entirely possible that the BMI--like our glamour imagery--is biased towards being unhealthily thin.  But, that's a subject for another day.

Random Nature #232

Popeye's Steroid:  The United States is second in the world in spinach production, growing a measly 3 percent of the world's crop.  China produces 85 percent, including some of the best.  For instance, the pretentiously-named Woodstock Farms Organic Cut Spinach earned a "Hall of Fame" rating from five food experts in a blind taste test conducted by the San Francisco Chronicle last year...the spinach was produced in China. The Trader Joe's Organic Spinach which came in second was also produced in China.

Spinach contains a goodly number of vitamins and minerals.  However, cooking destroys some of the vitamins, and our bodies simply aren't capable of absorbing all of the high mineral content.  And speaking of that, when it comes to building strong muscles...

During the 1930s Popeye, probably the world's most famous consumer of spinach, was indeed credited with a 33% increase in the consumption of spinach in the USA. These days the Popeye brand of spinach is one of the market leaders.

The mythical strength-giving properties of spinach are, however, mostly credited to a simple mistake concerning the iron content of the vegetable. In 1870, Dr E von Wolf published figures which were accepted until the 1930s, when they were rechecked. This revealed that a decimal point had been placed wrongly and that the real figure was only one tenth of Dr von Wolf's claim.

Nonetheless, it's still a good food for those of us who are iron anemic.

Lush Leaves:  Spinach is the lone member of genus Spinacia, part of the goosefoot family...which in some classifications has been added to the amaranth family.  In either instance, that means it's related to beets, swiss chard, the fourwing saltbush native to our desert Southwest, and the tumbleweed, which isn't native to our desert Southwest.  As I've noted before, Prussian Mennonites accidentally brought the tumbleweed in flax seed.  Despite what movies show, the invasive species didn't make it to Arizona until the 1890s...the gunfight at the OK Corral was in 1881.

Wild forms of spinach are found in Nepal, which is probably where it was domesticated in ancient times.  There, spinach is a tender perennial.  It didn't spread beyond the Indian subcontinent until early Muslim traders visited the region.

Nowadays, we know of spinach as a fast-growing annual that does best in cooler temperatures (40°- 75° F) and can survive hard frosts.  Thus, it's usually planted as a cool-season crop.  In the U.S., nearly three-quarters of our spinach is grown in California--year-round in coastal areas and during the winter in deserts.  Spinach is typically harvested just before setting buds...reproduction saps most of the energy from leaf production.

Accidental Content:  Spinach is a thirsty crop with a shallow root system.  This helps make it vulnerable to absorbing pesticides, herbicides, and fecal contaminants.  When it comes to pesticide residues in produce, spinach is usually near the top of the list (example here)--not a good thing. And this isn't just a domestic issue.

For instance, Chinese spinach was recalled in Japan in 2002 after finding unacceptable levels of chlorpyrifos contamination and some fenvalerate contamination.  Chlorpyrifos, also known as dursban, is yet another pesticide that essentially acts as a nerve agent.  In people, it's a suspected endocrine disrupter that has been linked to asthma.  Fenvalerate is a naturally-occurring pyrethroid that attacks the nervous system of various insects and is moderately toxic to mammals.  From this link...

Citing excessive chlorpyrifos in frozen spinach, Japan issued a regulation in May 2003, which stipulated that its importers would be responsible for any problematic frozen spinach from China. The regulation led to a de facto suspension of frozen spinach import from China.

AQSIQ stepped up supervision of frozen spinach preparation, and China consulted with the Japanese ministry. Japanese experts also visited the companies. Following those steps, Japan in June 2004 dropped the accountability regulation on Japanese importers of frozen spinach from 45 Chinese companies and imposed compulsory inspections. Every container had 16 samples sent for inspection, and the inspection fee reached 800,000 yen ($7,080).

Finally, after those inspections had found no chlorpyrifos contamination for 3.5 years, Japan dropped the requirement.  Unfortunately, the USDA is far more trusting.

Slowly But Slowly:  Back in 2006, Dole baby spinach grown in California sickened more than 200 people because of E. coli contamination (previous blogs here and here).  From this link...

A massive product recall, accompanied by a Food and Drug Administration warning against eating the leafy vegetable, was estimated to have cost the spinach industry $100 million.

A bad situation was made worse by the lack of standardized tracking between growers, shippers, wholesalers, retailers and food service distributors, which wasted precious time trying to pinpoint and isolate the source of the tainted produce.

"That was a tremendous wake-up call," said Julia Stewart, public relations director for the Produce Marketing Association, a Delaware-based trade association representing almost 3,000 produce and flower supply companies.

She says a uniform, industrywide, electronic tracking system was being considered before 2006, but this food safety alert provided the impetus to "move more quickly."

More quickly...proponents hope to have the system up and running by 2012.  I'm sure a number of growers are a wee bit nervous about that.  From consumer research done on the spinach recall...

• Nearly nine out of 10 consumers said they had heard about the recall, and the majority cut spinach out of their diet in response to the government’s warning.

• Far more people heard the warning not to eat spinach than the subsequent message that the vegetable was safe to eat again. Nearly one in three said they did not realize the recall was over when interviewed by Rutgers' researchers in November,­ more than six weeks after the government gave the all-clear to spinach grown outside the implicated counties in California.

• The outbreak caused consumers to be leery of other fresh produce. About one in five respondents who had heard of the recall stopped eating other bagged produce.

• More than 40% of respondents said they thought washing contaminated produce makes it safe to eat. That's contrary to what the top food safety officer at the Food and Drug Administration publicly stated — that no amount of washing will remove certain kinds of bacteria on produce.

The issue here was that E. coli was in the produce.

Random Nature #231

Thirstier Trees:  It's a bad sign when a researcher begins with a false premise--or two--when highlighting what's supposedly been discovered.  This press release was entitled "Exotic timber plantations found to use more than twice the water of native forests."

"Scientists used to think that forests in same environments use water in the same way," says Lawren Sack of The University of California at Los Angeles, who coauthored the study with graduate student Aurora Kagawa in the September issue of the ESA journal Ecological Applications. "Our work shows that this is not the case. We need to know the water budget of our landscape, from gardens to forests to parks, because water is expensive."

Where did Sack--who's got a PhD from Cambridge--find even one scientist who believes "that forests in the same environments use water in the same way?"  Heck, there are numerous examples going back thousands of years where man has planted thirsty trees to help dry out soggy land.  As we know here in the West, forests with fewer, larger trees are often healthier and less fire-prone than those with numerous smaller trees that are slowly competing each other to death.  Et cetera.

And how could any scientist in California pretend that water is expensive?  Key to California becoming an economic powerhouse was making inexpensive water readily available.  Few Californians truly take water conservation seriously because their water is so cheap.  Yeesh.  Back to the politicized science...

Kagawa, Sack and their colleagues compared the water use of trees in native forests, composed mostly of native ohia trees, with water use in timber plantations containing exotic eucalyptus and tropical ash.

...

The researchers found that individual eucalyptus and tropical ash used three and nine times more water, respectively, than individual ohia trees. Since each of these forests is dominated by these three species, the team was able to scale up their results to predict how much water a whole section of forest uses. Even when including other native plants that use water quickly, such as tree ferns, the tropical ash forests still used water at a rate of 1,800 kilograms of water per square meter per day, more than 2.5 times that of the other forests.

One of the key reasons that trees in plantations often use more water is that frequently the trees were chosen--often specially bred--to grow quickly.  These fast-growing trees also tend to absorb carbon more quickly.  But like so much research we're seeing nowadays, this study was designed at least in part to undermine efforts to address climate change through means other than conservation.

"When making decisions to restore a native forest or preserve or establish a plantation, we need to do a more detailed valuation that includes the cost of water they're using," he says. "There are a lot of reforestation projects underway to take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, where people are prioritizing fast-growing trees. But we shouldn't let alien plants sweep over native forests. Our findings make a clear case that we need to know how much water landscapes are using and conserving."

This study was simply an excuse to state that opinion.

Learning While Vegetating:  People in a persistent vegetative state are unresponsive, yet seemingly partially awake.  But as the following shows, some of them can learn to respond a bit.

Scientists have found that some individuals in the vegetative and minimally conscious states, despite lacking the means of reporting awareness themselves, can learn and thereby demonstrate at least a partial consciousness.

...

By using classical Pavlovian conditioning, the researchers played a tone immediately prior to blowing air into a patient's eye. After some time training, the patients would start to blink when the tone played but before the air puff to the eye.

The study noted that people under anesthesia don't learn to blink. 

This learning in response to conditioning is an interesting discovery, but what does it matter?

By establishing that they can [learn], it is believed that this simple test will enable practitioners to assess the patient's consciousness without the need of imaging.

And, maybe--hopefully--this could form the basis for some sort of rehabilitation.

Benefits of Working Hard:  Does anyone believe that once women pass menopause, exercise wouldn't provide them much benefit?  Actually, the researchers were documenting how much benefit.

"There have been very few studies looking at postmenopausal women, who are different because of decreased estrogen, decreased lean body mass and decreased aerobic capacity," said Zinta Zarins, a newly minted UC Berkeley Ph.D. who conducted the experiments and is now a post-doctoral fellow at UC San Francisco. "Yet, despite changes in hormones and changes in body composition, postmenopausal women can make significant changes in their cardiovascular fitness without going on extreme diets."

The researchers made ten women in their 50s work, riding exercise bikes an hour a day--at 65 percent of max lung capacity--five days a week for twelve weeks. 

In a paper appearing in the September issue of the journal Metabolism - Clinical and Experimental, Brooks and Zarins report that participants increased their body's capacity to consume and use oxygen - their VO2 max - by an average of 16 percent and dropped their resting heart rates by an average of 4 beats per minute. Brooks said that after the age of 30, people lose the capacity to consume and use oxygen at about 1 percent per year.

"So, in effect, the women in our study had the cardiovascular and metabolic capabilities of women 16 years younger," he said.

This was about getting in shape, not weight loss.  However, losing fat and gaining muscle allowed some of the women to reduce dress sizes.  The researchers figure that folks should get similar results from jogging on a treadmill or swimming.

Note that women derive some different benefits from exercise than men.

"While men tend to burn carbohydrates first during exercise, women are better fat burners, and in our study, the women improved fat burning and decreased their reliance on carbohydrate after training," Brooks said. Because they burn fat more than carbohydrates during exercise, women, in general, are better than men at maintaining stable blood glucose levels - the glucose comes from stored carbohydrates - and maintaining their weight, even while undergoing vigorous training, he said. In fact, men continue to burn carbohydrates for several hours after exercise, while women's metabolism immediately returns to normal.

A second paper, published in the July issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology, showed that the women's use of blood glucose and their insulin levels during exercise showed similarities to those of younger women.

Unfortunately though, most people are too lazy to start, much less stick to such a strenuous program.  In fact, most of the women in the study no longer train as vigorously, or in some cases at all.  But at least they know what they can again be capable of.