Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

What’s the Latest Development?

A team of researchers from Duke University have combed through nearly three decades of standardized test scores concluding that the general level of American intelligence is increasing and that girls are closing the gender gap. The first conclusion drawn by the researchers, that intelligence is steadily increasing, is based on the Flynn effect which states that average IQs around the world have been rising at the rate of 0.3 points a year for the past eight decades. The second conclusion states that part, but not all, of the historic difference between the brainiest men and women has vanished.

What’s the Big Idea?

Whether intelligence is determined more by nature or nurture remains a debate in the scientific community. It is a debate that cannot escape the social implications behind it, such as whether one gender is predisposed to be more intelligent than the other. Concerning the disproportionately quick…

AOD trends over megacities based on space monitoring using MODIS and MISR(11 page pdf, Pinhas Alpert, Olga Shvainshtein, and Pavel Kishcha, American Journal of Climate Change, Nov. 2012)

Also discussed here: Tracking Pollution from Outer Space: Team Uses NASA Satellites to Measure Pollution Hovering Over World’s Megacities(ScienceDaily, Nov. 27, 2012)

Today we review research that used three different satellite sensors to estimate atmospheric optical depth for 189 large cities world-wide over an eight year period. One big advantage of this method is that it gets away from the sometimes non standard or inconsistent pollution monitors on the earth’s surface. Another is that trends in air quality in various cities can be measured and compared using the saem equipment. While cities in Southeast Asia and Northeast USA show an improvement, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Northern China show deteriorating air quality. This approach looks very promising…

Blog #25 – Re-imagining the City critically

Re-imagining the city can be a provocation to reconsider and expand the range of possibilities for a city in the future. It can simply be an opportunity for an unfettered imagination physically to design something completely new and different, not tethered to the existing city. Or it can open the door to a fundamentally critical view of the existing city, questioning the social and economic and organizational principles that underlie its present constitution and are normally taken for granted. The best of classic utopias do both. What follows focuses only on the latter, on the imagining not of the physical but of the human principles and practices on which an imagined city could be based. It raises some critical questions about some of principles and practices as they implicitly exist today and imagines some alternatives.

If we were not concerned with the existing…