Thursday, January 31, 2013

Save the Date: American Physical Society 2013 March Meeting ...

Newswise ? COLLEGE PARK, MD, January 29, 2013 - The American Physical Society?s 2013 March meeting will focus on some of the most dynamic and cutting-edge research areas in physics. The topics on tap include high temperature superconductivity, biophysics, and advanced materials, as well as talks and sessions dedicated to social issues, medical technology, energy, and national security. The meeting takes place March 18 to March 22 at the Baltimore Convention Center in Baltimore, MD.

Registration is free for journalists. Contact James Riordon (riordon@aps.org, 301-209-3238) to register as press. Meeting details, including housing information and the complete meeting schedule, are available at: http://aps.org/meetings/march/index.cfm.

*Note: the deadline to reserve rooms at the discounted APS rate is February 7, although it?s best to make reservations sooner to ensure that hotel space is available - http://www.aps.org/meetings/march/housing/index.cfm

Here is a brief list of some of the topics that will be highlighted in subsequent press releases and press conferences at the 2013 APS March meeting.

***
Physics of fracking, from drinking water to the global economy
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/SessionIndex2/?SessionEventID=191210

The architecture of better batteries
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/183682

Celebrating 100 Years of Physical Review at APS: A collection of talks honoring the anniversary, including the story of Einstein?s umbrage at a referee report whose criticism of his paper was eventually vindicated
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/SessionIndex2/?SessionEventID=191661

Soft polymers help steel armor stop bullets
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/184788

The physics of shells, plates and thin films: whirling skirts, Venus flytrap robots and buckligami (buckling origami)
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/SessionIndex2/?SessionEventID=188292

Social System Mechanics: power grid failures, word usage in digitized books, and the econophysics of retirement funds
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/SessionIndex2/?SessionEventID=184703

Dynamically changing surface wrinkling to reduce drag
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/190967

Listening to trees: tracking down the source of crackling emitted by trees suffering from droughts
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/189852

Climate change and global energy flow
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/191336

Fiber mats for water filtration
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/183875

Nanoscale motors made from DNA
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/184320

How women choose STEM careers
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/184460

Spiders use different cobweb architectures to snatch prey from the air and snare them from the ground
http://meeting.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/185643

Weight-loss surgery may owe its effectiveness to chemical responses in the body rather than physical changes
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/185813

Elusive Majorana fermions continue their quasi-particle debut
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/188088

High-contrast microscopy used in biomedicine can also give artwork a checkup
http://meeting.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/188681

The physics of mosh pits
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/190094

Remote-controlled worms: determining how an earthworm feeds by directly manipulating its neurons with light
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/190087

Studying how leaves survive falling raindrops gives insights into energy-harvesting
http://meeting.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/186347

Physics and the Future Economy: Industrial Physics Forum blends frontier investigation with competitive innovation http://www.aps.org/meetings/march/events/special/industrial.cfm

How cancer cells evolve drug resistance
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/SessionIndex2/?SessionEventID=191833

Distributing vaccines randomly to avert epidemics
http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR13/Event/183751

###

ABOUT APS
The American Physical Society (www.aps.org) is a non-profit membership organization working to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics through its outstanding research journals, scientific meetings, and education, outreach, advocacy and international activities. APS represents 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world. Society offices are located in College Park, MD (Headquarters), Ridge, NY, and Washington, DC.


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Source: http://www.newswise.com/articles/save-the-date-american-physical-society-2013-march-meeting-march-18-march-22-in-baltimore

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'Entourage' crew to make leap to big-screen

FILE - In this July 28, 2011 file photo, actor Kevin Connolly, left, and actor Adrian Grenier speak during The Television Critics Association 2011 Summer Press Tour in Beverly Hills, Calif. Grenier and Connolly star in the series "Entourage" on HBO. Warner Bros. confirmed Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2013, that a film version of HBO's hit series ?Entourage? is in the works. (AP Photo/Dan Steinberg, File)

FILE - In this July 28, 2011 file photo, actor Kevin Connolly, left, and actor Adrian Grenier speak during The Television Critics Association 2011 Summer Press Tour in Beverly Hills, Calif. Grenier and Connolly star in the series "Entourage" on HBO. Warner Bros. confirmed Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2013, that a film version of HBO's hit series ?Entourage? is in the works. (AP Photo/Dan Steinberg, File)

LOS ANGELES (AP) ? Vincent Chase and his entourage are jumping from the small screen to the big-screen.

Warner Bros. confirmed Wednesday that a film version of the HBO hit series "Entourage" is in the works.

Series creator Doug Ellin is writing and directing the film, which does not yet have a production start date or release date. The studio also has not finalized the cast.

"Entourage" ran for eight seasons and followed the Hollywood exploits of hot young actor Vince (Adrian Grenier) and his inner circle, including Kevin Connolly as his manager, Kevin Dillon as his half brother, Jerry Ferrara as an old neighborhood friend and Jeremy Piven as his slick super-agent.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/4e67281c3f754d0696fbfdee0f3f1469/Article_2013-01-30-Film-Entourage/id-2262084932f5439d96dc4b2838f380ee

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Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Empathy varies by age and gender: Women in their 50s are tops

Jan. 30, 2013 ? According to a new study of more than 75,000 adults, women in that age group are more empathic than men of the same age and than younger or older people.

"Overall, late middle-aged adults were higher in both of the aspects of empathy that we measured," says Sara Konrath, co-author of an article on age and empathy forthcoming in the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological and Social Sciences.

"They reported that they were more likely to react emotionally to the experiences of others, and they were also more likely to try to understand how things looked from the perspective of others."

For the study, researchers Ed O'Brien, Konrath and Linda Hagen at the University of Michigan and Daniel Gr?hn at North Carolina State University analyzed data on empathy from three separate large samples of American adults, two of which were taken from the nationally representative General Social Survey.

They found consistent evidence of an inverted U-shaped pattern of empathy across the adult life span, with younger and older adults reporting less empathy and middle-aged adults reporting more.

According to O'Brien, this pattern may result because increasing levels of cognitive abilities and experience improve emotional functioning during the first part of the adult life span, while cognitive declines diminish emotional functioning in the second half.

But more research is needed in order to understand whether this pattern is really the result of an individual's age, or whether it is a generational effect reflecting the socialization of adults who are now in late middle age.

"Americans born in the 1950s and '60s -- the middle-aged people in our samples -- were raised during historic social movements, from civil rights to various antiwar countercultures," the authors explain. "It may be that today's middle-aged adults report higher empathy than other cohorts because they grew up during periods of important societal changes that emphasized the feelings and perspectives of other groups."

Earlier research by O'Brien, Konrath and colleagues found declines in empathy and higher levels of narcissism among young people today as compared to earlier generations of young adults.

O'Brien and Konrath plan to conduct additional research on empathy, to explore whether people can be trained to show more empathy using new electronic media, for example. "Given the fundamental role of empathy in everyday social life and its relationship to many important social activities such as volunteering and donating to charities, it's important to learn as much as we can about what factors increase and decrease empathic responding," says Konrath.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Michigan. The original article was written by Diane Swanbrow.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. E. O'Brien, S. H. Konrath, D. Gruhn, A. L. Hagen. Empathic Concern and Perspective Taking: Linear and Quadratic Effects of Age Across the Adult Life Span. The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1093/geronb/gbs055

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/gyFcc_UYhn0/130130184324.htm

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Apple v. Samsung: Judge Rules Samsung Did Not Willfully Infringe

Apple v. Samsung: Judge Rules Samsung Did Not Willfully Infringe
Samsung’s infringement of Apple’s design and utility patents was not “willful,” a federal judge ruled Tuesday, rejecting Apple’s bid for bonus damages in the Apple v. Samsung smartphone lawsuit. Judge Lucy Koh of the Northern District of California reasserted that ...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GearFactor/~3/i6_nIvp7Aow/

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UK bans sale of five alien plants

Five species of invasive non-native aquatic plants are to be banned from sale, the UK government has announced.

In the first ban of its kind, officials hope the move will save money and help protect vulnerable habitats.

Environment Minister Richard Benyon said tackling the impact of invasive species costs ?1.7bn each year.

The plants to be banned from April 2014 are water fern, parrot's feather, floating pennywort, water primrose and Australian swamp stonecrop.

"Tough laws to curb the sale of these plants could save the country millions of pounds as well as protecting wildlife such as fish and native plants," Mr Benyon said.

"But as well as saving money and protecting wildlife the ban will also help maintain access to rivers and lakes for anglers and watersport fans."

A Defra spokesman told BBC News that it was the first time that non-native plants have been banned from sale in England.

He added that the UK action was distinct from existing European Union safeguards that prohibit organisms harmful to native plants from entering the 27-nation bloc.

The plants have been listed in the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, but it was only illegal to dump the plants into the wild.

Growing problem

The Non-Native Species Secretariat (NNSS) described invasive species as plants that had been introduced (deliberately or accidentally) by humans since the last ice age, which were having a detrimental impact on the economy, wildlife or habitats of Britain.

It added that a recent study carried out in England showed that there were 2,721 non-native species living in England, of which the majority (1,798 or 66%) were plants.

A report in 2000 in Scotland found a minimum of 988 species, of which 70% were plants, it observed.

Defra said that the plants listed in the ban have been sold and planted in garden ponds but have escaped into the wild taking, overwhelming native species.

Because the plants had no natural controls in the habitat, there was little to limit the spread of the plants.

As a result, the plants formed dense mats in water, depleting oxygen and light availability, causing declines in the numbers of fish and other aquatic species.

As well as being a threat to native species, the NNSS said invasive non-native aquatic weed plants also contributed to increased flood risk and damaged structures such as bridges.

"We've recommended retailers not to sell these five plant species, in some instances, for at least a decade," said Keith Davenport, chief executive of the Ornamental Aquatic Trade Association.

"So this is welcome news from Defra, making it very clear there is now a ban in place. We will continue to actively encourage our members to support the Be Plant Wise campaign."

Chris John, national ecologist at the Canal & River Trust, described the ban as the correct decision.

"Our waterways are unique wildlife corridors, home to huge variety of animals and plants, to which non-native invasives can cause all sorts of problems," he told BBC News.

"They grow rapidly, choking up canals and rivers, which affects some of our best wildlife spots and creates problems with navigation.

"As a charity, we spend a considerable amount of time and effort managing these outbreaks and the ban on sale will help reduce the chance of their reintroduction."

Carrie Hume, head of conservation policy for the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust said: "Thankfully, some of the most destructive non-native plants will no longer be on sale in our garden centres.

"This is the right move - the environmental and economic cost of dealing with this problem is already huge and dealing with it now is a great saving for the future."

The ban means that all retailers will now have to stop selling these plants or face a fine of up to ?5,000 and possibly up to six months in prison.

Although details of the ban have been announced now, it will not come into force until next spring to give retailers enough notice to conform to the new measures and identify and stock alternative plants.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21232108#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

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Google Science Fair 2013 kicks off, uses Hangouts to help inventive teens (video)

Image

The Google Science Fair began in 2011 as a way to spur a love of science among teens and, just possibly, spark a few breakthroughs for science as a whole. It's back for a third year, and there's big improvements to both the competition's technology and rewards. The 2013 Fair will have Google+ Hangouts on Air for help and motivation, as well as to introduce us to the 15 finalists during the vote for a public-chosen award in August. The early talks will include Segway pioneer Dean Kamen and sea explorer Fabien Cousteau, among others. Finalists once again get prizes from Google itself, Lego, National Geographic and Scientific American, but there's extra bonuses this year for the grand prize winner: along with the $50,000 scholarship, Galapagos Islands trip and other individual gifts, the winner's school will get both $10,000 and a Hangout session with CERN. Young inventors have until the end of April 30th to submit their projects, and we'll learn about the very cream of the crop on September 23rd.


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Via: Google Official Blog

Source: Google Science Fair

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/YBcfH1yfoKU/

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Ouya developers create 166 game prototypes at 'game jam' event

Ouya console

Ouya got its developer consoles out to eager Kickstarter backers on time, and now these devs are putting themselves to work creating game prototypes for the console. In a partnership with Kill Screen, the folks at Ouya hosted a "game jam" to get developers interested in making new games for the platform. The jam produced 166 different game prototypes in just 10 days -- quite a feat for any platform -- and the games will go on to be judged and awarded prizes. The Ouya team says that its software kit for developing games has already been downloaded 22,000 times by developers.

Those are some pretty impressive numbers, and the console hasn't even been released to the general public yet. We hope these early game prototypes are a sign of good things to come for Ouya once consoles are in the hands of regular consumers. You can see a full list of the games created during the game jam at the second source link below.

Source: Ouya (Kickstarter)Kill Screen Daily



Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/jmuaNjysSmk/story01.htm

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Kennedy Center plans expansion, with floating stage on Potomac

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is planning a $100 million addition, including an outdoor floating stage on the Potomac River, in its first major expansion since it opened in 1971.

Three connected pavilions to house classrooms, rehearsal rooms, lecture space and other facilities were also included in initial plans for the U.S. capital's premier performance space, which were laid out on Tuesday.

The expansion, designed by architect Steven Holl, will take place south of the Center and includes an outdoor video wall. One pavilion will float on the Potomac as an outdoor stage, and public gardens will link the Center with the water.

"Steven's wonderful concept will create a strong visual presence that bolsters the Center's prominence as the national cultural center, while maintaining its unique presence among Washington's iconic landmarks," Kennedy Center Chairman David Rubenstein said in a statement.

The expansion will be paid for from private funds. Rubenstein, a founder of the Carlyle Group private equity firm, is contributing $50 million towards the roughly $100 million cost.

The Center is seeking to raise another $25 million for programming.

Exteriors for the project will include use of Carrara marble, the same Italian marble which clads the site now.

The project is expected to take five years - three years for design and approval by the various agencies and two years for construction.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by David Gregorio)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/kennedy-center-plans-expansion-floating-stage-potomac-225328846--sector.html

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Test for hormone-disrupting chemicals gets global seal of approval

Jan. 29, 2013 ? A test for hormone-disrupting pollutants, originally developed at the University of California, Davis, has been approved as an international standard by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development as well as by the U.S. government.

"Endocrine disruptors" are chemicals that interfere with the action of hormones on cells. There has been growing concern that such chemicals, from a wide variety of products, might have an impact on both human health and the environment.

Hormones such as estrogen act on cells by triggering a receptor on the cell surface, setting off a chain of events inside the cell. The new test uses a cell line, BG1Luc4e2, which produces a glowing firefly protein called luciferase when exposed to estrogens or similar chemicals.

The test was originally created by Professor Michael Denison and colleagues at the UC Davis Department of Environmental Toxicology. It has been validated by the National Toxicology Program at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and now by the OECD.

The test is licensed to users through UC Davis, in collaboration with UC San Diego and Promega, Inc. of Madison, Wisc., and which own patents on some components of the test. Typical customers are companies that carry out environmental testing for clients.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California Davis (UCD), via AlphaGalileo.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/S75LdgyWLbw/130129130909.htm

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Price vs. Incentives - Business Innovation Zone

English: "Happy Hour" sign on a pub ...

English: ?Happy Hour? sign on a pub in Jerusalem (in Hebrew: all draft beers, 1 + 1 free) ?????: ?Happy Hour?, ??? ???????? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Many new entrepreneurs and a few experienced business people try to use price changes to motivate sales.? While this sounds good on the surface, price is something you should take great care in changing.? It is better to use incentives to motivate behavior and let price remain constant.? Here are a few examples of using incentives to drive behavior:

  • The first five customers receive a 50% discount
  • 40% off all weekend on certain items
  • 10% off for every referral up to 40%
  • 1/2 price draws of beer from 4pm to 6pm

In each case the incentive has boundaries and attempts to drive a time specific behavior.? Another incentive usage is to accelerate payments.? In business to business transactions it is common to give a 1% or 2% discount for paying a bill within the first 10 days of receipt. ? In each case the incentive is targeted to a specific result.? In addition, the incentive result can be measured and analyzed for future use.?

?While some are advocating dynamic pricing, understand that changing prices frequently will lead to confusion and frustration.? By leaving the price stable and using incentives to drive specific behavior you will have a better chance of motivating the behavior you want.?

?

Source: http://bizci.org/price-vs-incentives/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=price-vs-incentives

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Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Plane crash kills 22 in Kazakhstan: emergencies official

KYZYL TU, Kazakhstan (Reuters) - A passenger plane crashed in thick fog near Kazakhstan's commercial capital of Almaty on Tuesday, killing all 22 people on board, an emergency services official said.

The Canadian-built Bombardier Challenger CRJ-200 was en route from the city of Kokshetau in northern Kazakhstan to Almaty in the southeast when it crashed near the village of Kyzyl Tu, Deputy Almaty Mayor Maulen Mukashev said.

He told reporters near the scene that the plane belonged to private Kazakh airline SCAT, which operates extensive domestic services and some international flights.

"There was no fire, no explosion. The plane just plunged to the earth," Yuri Ilyin, deputy head of the city's emergencies department, told Reuters near the scene.

Ilyin put the death toll at 22.

Almaty and the surrounding area were veiled in thick fog on Tuesday.

"The preliminary cause of the accident is bad weather," Mukashev said. "Not a single part of the plane was left intact after it came down."

It was the second plane crash in the Central Asian country and former Soviet republic in just a over a month.

On December 25, a military transport airplane crashed in bad weather near the southern Kazakh city of Shymkent, killing all 27 people on board.

Prosecutors have said that a fatal combination of technical problems, bad weather and human errors caused that accident.

(Reporting by Mariya Gordeyeva; Writing by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Timothy Heritage)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/passenger-plane-crashes-kazakhstan-agency-says-21-board-084403126--sector.html

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Hate Crimes: A Rape Every Minute, a Thousand Corpses Every Y ...


Kit B. (308)
Sunday January 27, 2013, 9:15 am
(Image Credit: bling cheese)

Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime, the rape and gruesome murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi on December 16th was treated as an exceptional incident. The story of the alleged rape of an unconscious teenager by members of the Steubenville High School football team was still unfolding, and gang rapes aren?t that unusual here either. Take your pick: some of the 20 men who gang-raped an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas, were sentenced in November, while the instigator of the gang rape of a 16-year-old in Richmond, California, was sentenced in October, and four men who gang-raped a 15-year-old near New Orleans were sentenced in April, though the six men who gang-raped a 14-year-old in Chicago last fall are still at large. Not that I actually went out looking for incidents: they?re everywhere in the news, though no one adds them up and indicates that there might actually be a pattern.

There is, however, a pattern of violence against women that?s broad and deep and horrific and incessantly overlooked. Occasionally, a case involving a celebrity or lurid details in a particular case get a lot of attention in the media, but such cases are treated as anomalies, while the abundance of incidental news items about violence against women in this country, in other countries, on every continent including Antarctica, constitute a kind of background wallpaper for the news.

If you?d rather talk about bus rapes than gang rapes, there?s the rape of a developmentally disabled woman on a Los Angeles bus in November and the kidnapping of an autistic 16-year-old on the regional transit train system in Oakland, California -- she was raped repeatedly by her abductor over two days this winter -- and there was a gang rape of multiple women on a bus in Mexico City recently, too. While I was writing this, I read that another female bus-rider was kidnapped in India and gang-raped all night by the bus driver and five of his friends who must have thought what happened in New Delhi was awesome.

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it?s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn?t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

Here I want to say one thing: though virtually all the perpetrators of such crimes are men, that doesn?t mean all men are violent. Most are not. In addition, men obviously also suffer violence, largely at the hands of other men, and every violent death, every assault is terrible. But the subject here is the pandemic of violence by men against women, both intimate violence and stranger violence.

What We Don?t Talk About When We Don?t Talk About Gender

There?s so much of it. We could talk about the assault and rape of a 73-year-old in Manhattan?s Central Park last September, or the recent rape of a four-year-old and an 83-year-old in Louisiana, or the New York City policeman who was arrested in October for what appeared to be serious plans to kidnap, rape, cook, and eat a woman, any woman, because the hate wasn?t personal (though maybe it was for the San Diego man who actually killed and cooked his wife in November and the man from New Orleans who killed, dismembered, and cooked his girlfriend in 2005).

Those are all exceptional crimes, but we could also talk about quotidian assaults, because though a rape is reported only every 6.2 minutes in this country, the estimated total is perhaps five times as high. Which means that there may be very nearly a rape a minute in the U.S. It all adds up to tens of millions of rape victims.

We could talk about high-school- and college-athlete rapes, or campus rapes, to which university authorities have been appallingly uninterested in responding in many cases, including that high school in Steubenville, Notre Dame University, Amherst College, and many others. We could talk about the escalating pandemic of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment in the U.S. military, where Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta estimated that there were 19,000 sexual assaults on fellow soldiers in 2010 alone and that the great majority of assailants got away with it, though four-star general Jeffrey Sinclair was indicted in September for ?a slew of sex crimes against women.?

Never mind workplace violence, let?s go home. So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over 1,000 homicides of that kind a year -- meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11?s casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular terror. (Another way to put it: the more than 11,766 corpses from domestic-violence homicides since 9/11 exceed the number of deaths of victims on that day and all American soldiers killed in the ?war on terror.?) If we talked about crimes like these and why they are so common, we?d have to talk about what kinds of profound change this society, or this nation, or nearly every nation needs. If we talked about it, we?d be talking about masculinity, or male roles, or maybe patriarchy, and we don?t talk much about that.

Instead, we hear that American men commit murder-suicides -- at the rate of about 12 a week -- because the economy is bad, though they also do it when the economy is good; or that those men in India murdered the bus-rider because the poor resent the rich, while other rapes in India are explained by how the rich exploit the poor; and then there are those ever-popular explanations: mental problems and intoxicants -- and for jocks, head injuries. The latest spin is that lead exposure was responsible for a lot of our violence, except that both genders are exposed and one commits most of the violence. The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.

Someone wrote a piece about how white men seem to be the ones who commit mass murders in the U.S. and the (mostly hostile) commenters only seemed to notice the white part. It?s rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible: ?Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family.?

Still, the pattern is plain as day. We could talk about this as a global problem, looking at the epidemic of assault, harassment, and rape of women in Cairo?s Tahrir Square that has taken away the freedom they celebrated during the Arab Spring -- and led some men there to form defense teams to help counter it -- or the persecution of women in public and private in India from ?Eve-teasing? tobride-burning, or ?honor killings? in South Asia and the Middle East, or the way that South Africa has become a global rape capital, with an estimated600,000 rapes last year, or how rape has been used as a tactic and ?weapon? of war in Mali, Sudan, and the Congo, as it was in the former Yugoslavia, or the pervasiveness of rape and harassment in Mexico and the femicide in Juarez, or the denial of basic rights for women in Saudi Arabia and the myriad sexual assaults on immigrant domestic workers there, or the way that the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case in the United States revealed what impunity he and others had in France, and it?s only for lack of space I?m leaving out Britain and Canada and Italy (with its ex-prime minister known for his orgies with the underaged), Argentina and Australia and so many other countries.

Who Has the Right to Kill You?

But maybe you?re tired of statistics, so let?s just talk about a single incident that happened in my city a couple of weeks ago, one of many local incidents in which men assaulted women that made the local papers this month:

?A woman was stabbed after she rebuffed a man's sexual advances while she walked in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood late Monday night, a police spokesman said today. The 33-year-old victim was walking down the street when a stranger approached her and propositioned her, police spokesman Officer Albie Esparza said. When she rejected him, the man became very upset and slashed the victim in the face and stabbed her in the arm, Esparza said.?

The man, in other words, framed the situation as one in which his chosen victim had no rights and liberties, while he had the right to control and punish her. This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.

Murder is the extreme version of that authoritarianism, where the murderer asserts he has the right to decide whether you live or die, the ultimate means of controlling someone. This may be true even if you are ?obedient,? because the desire to control comes out of a rage that obedience can?t assuage. Whatever fears, whatever sense of vulnerability may underlie such behavior, it also comes out of entitlement, the entitlement to inflict suffering and even death on other people. It breeds misery in the perpetrator and the victims.

As for that incident in my city, similar things happen all the time. Many versions of it happened to me when I was younger, sometimes involving death threats and often involving torrents of obscenities: a man approaches a woman with both desire and the furious expectation that the desire will likely be rebuffed. The fury and desire come in a package, all twisted together into something that always threatens to turn eros into thanatos, love into death, sometimes literally.

It?s a system of control. It?s why so many intimate-partner murders are of women who dared to break up with those partners. As a result, it imprisons a lot of women, and though you could say that the attacker on January 7th, or a brutal would-be-rapist near my own neighborhood on January 5th, or another rapist here on January 12th, or the San Franciscan who on January 6th set his girlfriend on fire for refusing to do his laundry, or the guy who was just sentenced to 370 years for some particularly violent rapes in San Francisco in late 2011, were marginal characters, rich, famous, and privileged guys do it, too.

The Japanese vice-consul in San Francisco was charged with 12 felony counts of spousal abuse and assault with a deadly weapon last September, the same month that, in the same town, the ex-girlfriend of Mason Mayer (brother of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer) testified in court: "He ripped out my earrings, tore my eyelashes off, while spitting in my face and telling me how unlovable I am? I was on the ground in the fetal position, and when I tried to move, he squeezed both knees tighter into my sides to restrain me and slapped me." According to the newspaper, she also testified that ?Mayer slammed her head onto the floor repeatedly and pulled out clumps of her hair, telling her that the only way she was leaving the apartment alive was if he drove her to theGolden Gate Bridge ?where you can jump off or I will push you off.?" Mason Mayer got probation.

This summer, an estranged husband violated his wife?s restraining order against him, shooting her -- and six other women -- at her spa job in suburban Milwaukee, but since there were only four corpses the crime was largely overlooked in the media in a year with so many more spectacular mass murders in this country (and we still haven?t really talked about the fact that, of 62 mass shootings in the U.S. in three decades, only one was by a woman, because when you say lone gunman, everyone talks about loners and guns but not about men -- and by the way, nearly two thirds of all women killed by guns are killed by their partner or ex-partner).

What?s love got to do with it, asked Tina Turner, whose ex-husband Ike once said, ?Yeah I hit her, but I didn't hit her more than the average guy beats his wife.? A woman is beaten every nine seconds in this country. Just to be clear: not nine minutes, but nine seconds. It?s the number-one cause of injury to American women; of the two million injured annually, more than half a millionof those injuries require medical attention while about 145,000 require overnight hospitalizations, according to the Center for Disease Control, and you don?t want to know about the dentistry needed afterwards. Spouses are also the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the U.S.

?Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined,? writes Nicholas D. Kristof, one of the few prominent figures to address the issue regularly.

The Chasm Between Our Worlds

Rape and other acts of violence, up to and including murder, as well as threats of violence, constitute the barrage some men lay down as they attempt to control some women, and fear of that violence limits most women in ways they?ve gotten so used to they hardly notice -- and we hardly address. There are exceptions: last summer someone wrote to me to describe a college class in which the students were asked what they do to stay safe from rape. The young women described the intricate ways they stayed alert, limited their access to the world, took precautions, and essentially thought about rape all the time (while the young men in the class, he added, gaped in astonishment). The chasm between their worlds had briefly and suddenly become visible.

Mostly, however, we don?t talk about it -- though a graphic has been circulating on the Internet called Ten Top Tips to End Rape, the kind of thing young women get often enough, but this one had a subversive twist. It offered advice like this: ?Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone ?by accident? you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can call for help.? While funny, the piece points out something terrible: the usual guidelines in such situations put the full burden of prevention on potential victims, treating the violence as a given. You explain to me why colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators.

Threats of sexual assault now seem to take place online regularly. In late 2011, British columnist Laurie Penny wrote, ?An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the Internet. Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they'd like to rape, kill, and urinate on you. This week, after a particularly ugly slew of threats, I decided to make just a few of those messages public on Twitter, and the response I received was overwhelming. Many could not believe the hate I received, and many more began to share their own stories of harassment, intimidation, and abuse.?

Women in the online gaming community have been harassed, threatened, and driven out. Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic who documented such incidents, received support for her work, but also, in the words of a journalist, ?another wave of really aggressive, you know, violent personal threats, her accounts attempted to be hacked. And one man in Ontario took the step of making an online video game where you could punch Anita's image on the screen. And if you punched it multiple times, bruises and cuts would appear on her image.? The difference between these online gamers and the Taliban men who, last October, tried to murder 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai for speaking out about the right of Pakistani women to education is one of degree. Both are trying to silence and punish women for claiming voice, power, and the right to participate. Welcome to Manistan.

The Party for the Protection of the Rights of Rapists

It?s not just public, or private, or online either. It?s also embedded in our political system, and our legal system, which before feminists fought for us didn?t recognize most domestic violence, or sexual harassment and stalking, or date rape, or acquaintance rape, or marital rape, and in cases of rape still often tries the victim rather than the rapist, as though only perfect maidens could be assaulted -- or believed.

As we learned in the 2012 election campaign, it?s also embedded in the minds and mouths of our politicians. Remember that spate of crazy pro-rape thingsRepublican men said last summer and fall, starting with Todd Akin's notorious claim that a woman has ways of preventing pregnancy in cases of rape, a statement he made in order to deny women control over their own bodies. After that, of course, Senate candidate Richard Mourdock claimed that rape pregnancies were ?a gift from God,? and just this month, another Republican politician piped up to defend Akin?s comment.

Happily the five publicly pro-rape Republicans in the 2012 campaign all losttheir election bids. (Stephen Colbert tried to warn them that women had gotten the vote in 1920.) But it?s not just a matter of the garbage they say (and the price they now pay). Earlier this month, congressional Republicans refused to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, because they objected to the protection it gave immigrants, transgendered women, and Native American women. (Speaking of epidemics, one of three Native American women will be raped, and on the reservations 88% of those rapes are by non-Native men who know tribal governments can?t prosecute them.)

And they?re out to gut reproductive rights -- birth control as well as abortion, as they?ve pretty effectively done in many states over the last dozen years. What?s meant by ?reproductive rights,? of course, is the right of women to control their own bodies. Didn?t I mention earlier that violence against women is a control issue?

And though rapes are often investigated lackadaisically -- there is a backlog of about 400,000 untested rape kits in this country-- rapists who impregnate their victims have parental rights in 31 states. Oh, and former vice-presidential candidate and current congressman Paul Ryan (R-Manistan) is reintroducing a bill that would give states the right to ban abortions and might even conceivably allow a rapist to sue his victim for having one.

All the Things That Aren?t to Blame

Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the U.S. military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused of any sexual assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those male football players in Steubenville, aren?t likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds.

No female bus riders in India have ganged up to sexually assault a man so badly he dies of his injuries, nor are marauding packs of women terrorizing men in Cairo?s Tahrir Square, and there?s just no maternal equivalent to the11% of rapes that are by fathers or stepfathers. Of the people in prison in the U.S., 93.5% are not women, and though quite a lot of them should not be there in the first place, maybe some of them should because of violence, until we think of a better way to deal with it, and them.

No major female pop star has blown the head off a young man she took home with her, as did Phil Spector. (He is now part of that 93.5% for the shotgun slaying of Lana Clarkson, apparently for refusing his advances.) No female action-movie star has been charged with domestic violence, because Angelina Jolie just isn?t doing what Mel Gibson and Steve McQueen did, and there aren?t any celebrated female movie directors who gave a 13-year-old drugs before sexually assaulting that child, while she kept saying ?no,? as did Roman Polanski.

In Memory of Jyoti Singh Pandey

What?s the matter with manhood? There?s something about how masculinity is imagined, about what?s praised and encouraged, about the way violence is passed on to boys that needs to be addressed. There are lovely and wonderful men out there, and one of the things that?s encouraging in this round of the war against women is how many men I?ve seen who get it, who think it?s their issue too, who stand up for us and with us in everyday life, online and in the marches from New Delhi to San Francisco this winter.

Increasingly men are becoming good allies -- and there always have been some. Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy. Domestic violence statistics are down significantly from earlier decades (even though they?re still shockingly high), and a lot of men are at work crafting new ideas and ideals about masculinity and power.

Gay men have been good allies of mine for almost four decades. (Apparently same-sex marriage horrifies conservatives because it?s marriage between equals with no inevitable roles.) Women?s liberation has often been portrayed as a movement intent on encroaching upon or taking power and privilege away from men, as though in some dismal zero-sum game, only one gender at a time could be free and powerful. But we are free together or slaves together.

There are other things I?d rather write about, but this affects everything else. The lives of half of humanity are still dogged by, drained by, and sometimes ended by this pervasive variety of violence. Think of how much more time and energy we would have to focus on other things that matter if we weren?t so busy surviving. Look at it this way: one of the best journalists I know is afraid to walk home at night in our neighborhood. Should she stop working late? How many women have had to stop doing their work, or been stopped from doing it, for similar reasons?

One of the most exciting new political movements on Earth is the Native Canadian indigenous rights movement, with feminist and environmental overtones, called Idle No More. On December 27th, shortly after the movement took off, a Native woman was kidnapped, raped, beaten, and left for dead in Thunder Bay, Ontario, by men whose remarks framed the crime as retaliation against Idle No More. Afterward, she walked four hours through the bitter cold and survived to tell her tale. Her assailants, who have threatened to do it again, are still at large.

The New Delhi rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey, the 23-year-old who was studying physiotherapy so that she could better herself while helping others, and the assault on her male companion (who survived) seem to have triggered the reaction that we have needed for 100, or 1,000, or 5,000 years. May she be to women -- and men -- worldwide what Emmett Till, murdered by white supremacists in 1955, was to African-Americans and the then-nascent U.S. civil rights movement.

We have far more than 87,000 rapes in this country every year, but each of them is invariably portrayed as an isolated incident. We have dots so close they?re splatters melting into a stain, but hardly anyone connects them, or names that stain. In India they did. They said that this is a civil rights issue, it?s a human rights issue, it?s everyone?s problem, it?s not isolated, and it?s never going to be acceptable again. It has to change. It?s your job to change it, and mine, and ours.
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By: Rebecca Solnit | alternet |

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