It's sort of understood these days that global warming carries with it cascading impacts—higher sea levels, for example, or shifts in arable land—which in turn promise a bit of social unrest.

Climate shifts might well make kings out of former paupers (witness the boom in potato yields in icy Greenland, which now has a longer growing season), but the expected increase in competition for resources (water, anyone?) has long inspired experts to warn of new and looming bouts of local, regional and international envies—some of which could lead to conflicts.

Of course, that sort of predictability—climate change leads to conflict—has been tough to quantify, though a study out of the University of Hong Kong, published late last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, makes a convincing stab at establishing a historical correlation between cooling periods and warfare.

That's right: cooling temperatures.

Eric Wagner of Conservation Magazine (source of the chart above), interpreted the study from David Zhang and his colleagues, which looked at historical temperature fluctuations and conflicts—as well as other variables like food prices and population—between 1400 and 1900:

Global cooling, their hypothesis goes, led to decreases in rainfall, which made the land less fertile. The result: food shortages, skyrocketing food costs, and sometimes famine. Communities fell into disarray, fomenting broad social unrest. Armed conflicts surged. The number of wars in years with the coolest average temperatures—1450, 1650, and 1820—was nearly twice that of the mild eighteenth century. When temperatures rose again, relative calm was restored.

The findings were in keeping with an earlier analysis by Zhang et al that focused exclusively on China. In that study, the researchers note, "the number of war outbreaks and population collapses in China is significantly correlated with Northern Hemisphere temperature variations and that all of the periods of nationwide unrest, population collapse, and dynastic change occurred in the cold phases of this period."

Before anyone assumes that concerns over rising temperatures nowadays are undermined by the study, the researchers suggest that the correlation is likely to have more to do with the rate and duration of climate fluctuations in either direction than specifically with cooling periods. That is to say, dramatic shits of the mercury either upward or downward would be expected to yield similarly rowdy times—unless...

Yes, there's one more caveat. The period studied may well have been more susceptible to Darwinian fits because many of the mechanisms that might mitigate social unrest were either non-existent or suppressed by political or geographical circumstance.

Animals, for example, can respond to resource stresses in really only two ways: decreasing population size (i.e., starvation), or migration to areas where resources are more plentiful. Humans have more tricks up their sleeves: they can go to war, as we've seen, or migrate, but there's also, according to Zhang et al, "economic change, innovation, trade, and peaceful resource redistribution."

Political boundaries may have prevented mass migrations, the authors note, and when they did occur, war often ensued. And fundamental economic adaptations, developments in new technologies, etc., were painfully slow.

Today, the authors imply, human beings have developed "international and national institutions" that might well be strong enough to buffer the tensions caused by food resource scarcity.

We'll see.

Chart: Conservation Magazine

Last month, we took a look at Ötzi, the Iceman up in Bolzano, Italy—his mummified remains offering, among myriad other insights, one of the earliest instances of tattooing.

With that in mind, we leave you this week with the following moment of international YouTube Zen: fresh ink bestowed—old-school style—onto the back of a Cleveland police officer, on the occasion of his visiting Bangkok. (Click to view video):

The cop, Sergeant Robert Bartos, tells me in an email that Piya Dhammu Piku, aka "Uncle Monk," has earned the respect of local policemen, who come to him for his skills as a tattoo artist.

Says Bob:

"What is not on the video with me is that once the actual tattooing was completed, [Uncle Monk] prayed over and anointed the tattoo he had just given me. And as crazy as this may sound, with my brother watching, he rested his hands on my back for about 8-10 min. While praying, his hands felt like they were on fire. I mean very noticeably hotter that the ambient air..."

Freaky.

Bob's new art is a Thai Buddhist protection tattoo, aimed at guarding the wearer against invasive weapons (think: bullets and knives). It's a tactic that, according to a National Public Radio feature last August, is gaining a global base of devotees among members of law enforcement, the military and other professions in the line of fire:

"For centuries, Thai soldiers have covered their bodies in protective tattoos called Sak Yant. Today, the ancient ritual is booming and thousands of people—in Thailand and beyond—are flocking to master artists to have the powerful designs inked on their bodies."

A quick search of YouTube would seem to bear that out.

If I were a woman, there's little question that a series of studies, recently published he journal Psychological Science, would tick me off. Trouble is, on becoming angry, the larger share of my colleagues would assume that I'm just an angry sort of gal.

Similar outrage expressed by a man, the studies suggest, would cause onlookers to assume that external forces were at work, making him angry.

(Readers of either gender are welcome to address these injustices in the comments section at the end of this post).

Indeed, as the folks at the MindHacks Blog point out, women who express anger at the workplace are more likely to be thought of as just plain old angry people—or worse, as being "out of control"—by their colleagues. Men, on the other hand, get the benefit of the doubt, and were generally viewed more positively by evaluators.

One caveat: men who expressed sadness at the office were looked down upon as well. No crying, folks!

An abstract from the abstract:

...Both male and female evaluators conferred lower status on angry female professionals than on angry male professionals. This was the case regardless of the actual occupational rank of the target, such that both a female trainee and a female CEO were given lower status if they expressed anger than if they did not. Whereas women's emotional reactions were attributed to internal characteristics (e.g., "she is an angry person,""she is out of control"), men's emotional reactions were attributed to external circumstances. Providing an external attribution for the target person's anger eliminated the gender bias. Theoretical implications and practical applications are discussed.

As pointed out at MindHacks by Dr. Vaughn Bell, a researcher at Kings College, London, this is in keeping with other less-than-conscious, socially reinforced workplace injustices, including the proclivity among employers to view women who negotiate for pay raises to be pushy and unpleasant, while harboring no similar reaction to men who do the same.

The Washington Post covered a study dealing with this phenomenon—one spearheaded by Hannah Riley Bowles, an organizational psychologist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government:

[The study] found that men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations. Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women's reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more—the perception was that women who asked for more were "less nice."

Volunteers were asked to evaluate potential "hires" based on hypothetical descriptions of job-candidates—some of whom had negotiated for more money, some of whom had not. In the end, both men and women were viewed more negatively if they dickered over dollars.

However, dickering female job candidates were more than twice as likely to be "rejected" by experiment participants than their male counterparts. Ouch.

Photos: Oliver Uberti (top); Mariel Furlong (bottom)

For those who missed the news when it first circulated, the latest issue of Conservation Magazine revisits a study out of  Michigan State University, which lays a statistical foundation for what seems a pretty straightforward point: getting divorced is bad for the environment.

Why? Well, for starters, because what was one household (read: energy and resource consuming engine), typically becomes two when marriages go sour.  The study—co-authored by Eunice Yu and Jianguo Liu, both researchers at the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability in East Lansing—suggests in just the 12 countries surveyed, roughly 7.4 million extra households were created between 1999 and 2002, as a result of divorce.

The U.S. alone contributed the lion's share of extra households—6.1 million. The study also found that the United States might have saved on the order of 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water in just one year—2005—had those couples divorcing at the time decided to make it work.

The chart above, which compares married households to divorced households along three lines—rooms-per-person, electricity and water use—provides the tale of the tape.

Note well: China is burping smog in record amounts, and chugging along on track to become the world's biggest energy consumer sometime after 2010—or so says the International Energy Agency in Paris. Another statistic on the rise in that country, as everywhere? Divorce—there were 1.9 million in 2006,  up from 1.6 million in 2004, according to Conservation Mag.

Whatever the implications of the Michigan State study, one thing seems certain: more efficient energy consumption habits—on a person-by-person basis—are important to develop long before people get married. As well, more efficient appliances, heating, cooling, and water systems will also help to offset the uptick in energy consumption due to divorce.

But the study also begs this how-green-are-YOU question of the year: Should environmentally conscious couples languish in unhappy unions because it will reduce their carbon footprint? Hmmmm...

The Iceman—aka Ötzi (right), the 5,000-year-old mummy discovered 17 years ago in the melting snow and ice of the Italian Alps—proves not just that the dead can talk, but that they often contradict themselves (and rarely shut up).

After numerous theories emerged regarding the demise of the hapless wanderer (He died of exposure! No, he was sacrificed in some Neolithic mountain ritual!), this magazine pointed out last summer that Mr. Ötzi was likely the victim of murder—via an arrow through the shoulder. Indeed, that arrowhead remains lodged in the mummified remains, which are now permanently held at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy.

The arrow-through-the-shoulder theory was based on the work of researchers in Switzerland, who published their findings last June in the Journal of Archaeological Science. But just a few months later, in August, a new theory emerged -- this one suggesting that the Alpine hiker died not from the arrow wound (though he surely was shot), but from a blow to the head, sustained either upon falling to the ground or, in keeping with the murderous plot line, when an attacker clocked him.

Those findings were presented at the newly minted Institute for Mummies and the Iceman at the European Academy, also in Bolzano, where All-Terrain chatted last week with with researchers about the distinctions between spontaneous mummification—that is, those mummies that came about by happenstance, as with Ötzi—and intentional mummification (think Egypt).

Folks might not think so, but Italy has a fair bit of experience with both sorts of mummification—not just courtesy of Ötzi, but also the myriad mummies occupying the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Sicily. The mummies, in fact, are the main research interest of the newest member of the Bolzano mummy institute, Dario Piombino-Mascali, a Sicilian native whose fascination with the Capuchin corpses—as well as the hundreds of other mummies scattered about the island (that's one at right)—has become his life's work.

"For many years no one ever cared about their conditions or any conservation issue," Dario wrote in a recent email. "After having tried hard to socialize with the Capuchin friars, I managed to get friends with them, and now they are granting me permission to study these remains."

Their remains, like that of Ötzi and, indeed, the thousands of bodies around the globe that have been mummified either ritually or by pure chance, have much to tell us—and not just about the cultures from which they came, though this is interesting enough (visitors to Bolzano should be sure to check out the Iceman's Neolithic underwear).

The genetic study of mummies is also uncovering much about the evolution of pathogens (based on ancient strains that a mummy might have borne), the ways in which human tissue and cells deteriorate over time (which can be useful in modern forensic science), and other data points.

Not to be overlooked, of course, while poking around at the molecular level, is what can be revealed by a mummy's tattoos. Ötzi had several, and some researchers speculate that their positioning on his body suggest an awareness in Europe of acupuncture—or something like it—some 2,000 years earlier than was previously thought.

A retrospective of the practice of tattooing and body modification throughout the ages—and across cultures—is currently on display at the Bolzano museum, just upstairs from Ötzi.

Photos: South Tyrol Museum of Archeology (Iceman); Dario Piombino-Mascali (Sicily mummy)

Is Venice sinking?

Depends on what you mean by sinking, exactly.

The population, it has been widely noted, has dropped by almost half, from roughly 120,000 down to about 60,000 today, since the great flood of 1966, when tides rose to record levels and signaled to the world that the Queen of the Adriatic—seen above from a helicopter overflight on Friday—faced a watery grave unless something was done.

So the population has been sinking of late, to be sure.

But the surface of the city itself was also losing an unprecedented amount of height over the course of the 20th century—largely due to the plumbing of artesian wells drilled into the substructure of the lagoon. Typical losses, due to natural subsidence, are estimated in the 2 cm per century range. But a half-century of well water extraction caused the city to sag several times that amount.

That practice was banned in the 1960's, but the damage was done. And experts continue to quibble over whether the city continues to lose ground. But almost no one, over the last 40 years, has argued that Venice was NOT in need of a plan to keep from drowning.

Trouble was, no one could agree on just what course of action to take.

In Chris Carroll's  excellent piece for the January issue of this magazine, he notes that, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, an estimated 30 to 40 million PCs will be ready for what is called, rather euphemistically, "end-of-life management" in each of the next few years.

That is to say, as with nearly all electronics, which are well on the way to obsolescence even as they roll off the assembly line, consumers will soon be chucking 'em for newer models.

How many folks will be doing THAT in the postholiday hullabaloo, eh?  And as Chris notes, it ain't just computers:

A switchover to digital high-definition television broadcasts is scheduled to be complete by 2009, rendering inoperable TVs that function perfectly today but receive only an analog signal. As viewers prepare for the switch, about 25 million TVs are taken out of service yearly. In the fashion-conscious mobile market, 98 million U.S. cell phones took their last call in 2005. All told, the EPA estimates that in the U.S. that year, between 1.5 and 1.9 million tons of computers, TVs, VCRs, monitors, cell phones, and other equipment were discarded. If all sources of electronic waste are tallied, it could total 50 million tons a year worldwide, according to the UN Environment Programme.

Some of this technojunk, about 70 percent, ends up in the nation's landfills, where the once vital, now toxic lifeblood of these deceased machines—lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, beryllium—can slowly leach into the environment.

But a growing share is being channeled to a burgeoning "recycling market"—which, as Chris's piece highlights, can often mean export to a vast and unregulated emporium in the developing world, where components are melted, smelted, and resold for pennies on the dollar in toxic sweatshop conditions.

You can check out some of the potentially hazardous components of a typical personal computer here.

Meanwhile, alongside Chris's piece this month, I circled back to the broader question of recycling in general, in an attempt to revisit that hot-button question that so vexed the political poles back in the 1980s and '90s, when barges laden with trash were floating haplessly without a home (remember the Mobro?), and John Tierney of the New York Times famously opined in 1996 that "Recycling Is Garbage."

Back then, there was a lot of hyperbole being thrown around on both sides of the political spectrum. Environmentalists were quick to argue that we were running out of landfill space (not really true).

And on the flip side, opponents of recycling argued that the environmental footprint caused by recycling was greater than landfilling or other forms of waste disposal—and more expensive to boot (this was Tierney's argument). Well, at the time, this was true—sometimes and only due to inefficiencies in the way recycling was being undertaken.

Think big, C02-belching trucks repeating garbage pickup routes while hauling minimal amounts of recyclable materials far afield to regional processing facilities. The energy sinks often eclipsed the recycling gains—both in terms of dollars and environmental impacts—before the last pickups were made.

Are  you a musical univore?

That is to say, do you savor only the tranquil meanderings of, for example, Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte (Sweet Remembrance in E Major, Op. 19, No. 1) perhaps, and turn up your nose at, say, Ludacris's Chicken-and-Beer anthem, "Stand Up," ("When I move YOU move!")?

Mmmmm...

Well, if you answered yes—or no—a new study out of Oxford University, funded by Britain's Economic and Social Research Council, suggests that your preference will have little to do with class and everything to do with education and social status.

Does that strike anyone today as remarkable? Perhaps it still does, given the persistent belief in the notion of a "cultural elite" that, as set forth in the example above, sets its sights exclusively on what is perceived as being high-minded and ignores the cultural common, the base, the "pop."

From an overview of the survey, which apparently took the pulse of populations in the UK as well as in Chile, France, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, and the U.S.:

Researchers sought to refine the differences in the hierarchical arrangement, known as social stratification, of people in society. To achieve this, their work took into account the backgrounds of the people surveyed, including education, income and social class. Previous research in this field had used such factors interchangeably, but this project sought to draw a clear distinction between social class and social status.

Dr. Tak Wing Chan, who conducted the research with his colleague Doctor John Goldthorpe, commented: "Our work has shown that it's education and social status, not social class that predict cultural consumption in the UK, and broadly comparable results were obtained from other countries in our project too."

Among the categories used to describe cultural consumers in the study (which, by the by, derive in large part from the sociological lexicon developed by the American sociologist Richard Peterson in the early 1990s), were the following:

Univores - people who have an interest in popular culture only.
Ominvores - people who consume the full variety of different types of culture.
Paucivores - people who consume a limited range of cultural activities.
Inactives - people who access nothing at all.

For various sorts of cultural consumption, various species of consumer were identified—and in most cases, the results were all over the map. For theater, dance, and film, for example, the sample for Britain (which broke down similarly elsewhere, according to the researchers), pointed up two major types of consumer: univores (62.5%) and omnivores (37.5%).

"There's little evidence for the existence of a cultural elite who would consume 'high' culture while shunning more 'popular' cultural forms," said Dr. Chan, in the ESRC announcement. "Furthermore, at least a substantial minority of members of the most advantaged social groups are univores or inactives."

Of course, as another social scientist, Michèle Ollivier at the University of Ottawa, has pointed out in her own research on cultural tastes, there may well be an inferred benefit among survey takers in identifying themselves as culturally omnivorous, when they are actually a fair bit less so.

“There is much virtue in being culturally diverse," Ollivier says in a Research Perspectives gloss published by the University last year.

But, she asks, "Are educated people really more open, more tolerant, more liberated, more enlightened, because they indicate having wider tastes in questionnaires? We should not confuse knowledge and open-mindedness.”

According to Ollivier, the very idea of omnivores and univores may be too simplistic.

And on that note, I want to know, where does "A Charlie Brown Christmas" land on the cultural continuum, 'cause that's good stuff.

Photos: Web Archive (Brahms); BUDSMR (author, Britney Spears image) — used under Creative Commons License Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

The OECD (that is, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) has released a broad global study of 15-year-olds and their facility with science. It comes on the heels of other studies that, in 2000 and 2003, measured students' skills in reading and mathematics, respectively.

This go 'round, the organization—which busies itself with this sort of data collection for the benefit of its 30, mostly industrialized, democratic members—took a look at what students  "knew about science and their ability to use scientific knowledge and understanding to identify and address questions and resolve problems in daily life," according to an OECD press release.

That's a sample, above, of the type of question that test-takers would have received. More are available from the OECD.

(A bit of scuttlebutt: Seems the full report was not due out until next week, but according to a statement at its Web site, "advance details are being made available following the publication by a Spanish magazine of partial leaked figures." Tsk-tsk, Spanish magazine.)

What's revealed? Well, if you're the sort who tends to think that the American education system is lagging behind a few other countries, then you won't be surprised. Students in the United States, yes, ranked 29th overall, just ahead of the Slovak Republic, but nudged out by much (though not all) of Western Europe, as well as Latvia, Slovenia, Korea, Croatia, Japan, New Zealand, Australia and ... well, you get the picture.

The top three, in order, were Finland, Hong Kong-China, and Canada. Finns took first honors in reading and math in previous years as well. Oikein hyvää!!

Among those lagging behind the U.S. were countries like Spain, Italy and Norway, most of the South and Central American countries included in the study, as well as the Russian Federation.

The list of rankings is available in full PDF format here.

"In today's competitive global economy, quality education is one of the most valuable assets that a society and an individual can have," OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría was quoted as saying in comments prepared for today's release.

"PISA is much more than just a ranking," he added. "It is about how well individual education systems are equipping their young people for the world of tomorrow. First and foremost, it tells countries where their strengths and weaknesses lie."

Image: OECD sample test

You're looking right at it up there, boys and girls. The safest, coziest little womb-borough in this fair land is Mission Viejo, California—the one city (among those with a  population of 75,000 or more) where you're least likely to be murdered, raped, robbed, burgled, generally assaulted or to have your vehicle disappear from the Safeway parking lot.

Or so says an annual crime ranking that has routinely miffed plenty of law enforcement agencies, civic organizations and local governments whose cities ranked at the scary end the scale. Detroit was ranked "most dangerous."

The tale of the tape is called "City Crime Rankings: Crime in Metropolitan America" and it is issued each year by CQ Press, a division of Congressional Press Quarterly, Inc., according to The Associated Press. Alongside Mission Viejo among the "safest" cities were Clarkston, New York, Brick Township, New Jersey,  Amherst, New York, and Sugar Land, Texas. After Detroit, among the most crime-ridden cities, according to the ranking, were St. Louis, Missouri, Flint, Michigan, Oakland, California and Camden, New Jersey.

But while little was heard from the pacific communities at the top of the list, there was much dissent from those at the bottom, who felt that CQ Press was giving a thin reading to the social trends behind the statistics.

In a statement released last night, Detroit Police Chief Ella M. Bully-Cumming suggested that merely tallying data from the FBI's crime statistics report ignores what's happening on the ground in each community, where certain behaviors dictate concepts like "safety" and "danger," and that risk, therefore, is not randomly distributed across the populous.

From Bully-Cumming's statement:

[A] snapshot of crime statistics complied by the Detroit Police Department from January 1 - August 31, 2007 reveals that over 76 percent of homicide victims in the city had prior contact with law enforcement. Department investigations also indicate that at least 60 percent of shootings occurring in the city have had a narcotic nexus. Analysis such as this refutes the notion that overall crime in the city is random and provides residents and visitors with an opportunity to truly understand crime data.

And even the FBI, at the front end of its online 2006 Uniform Crime Report, which provides the source data for the CQ Press analysis, now issues a caveat:

Each year when Crime in the United States is published, some entities use reported figures to compile rankings of cities and counties. These rough rankings provide no insight into the numerous variables that mold crime in a particular town, city, county, state, or region.  Consequently, they lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents. Valid assessments are possible only with careful study and analysis of the range of unique conditions affecting each local law enforcement jurisdiction.

For its part, the publishers of the report told The Associated Press that while the data may be imperfect, the numbers speak for themselves and, according to Doug Goldenberg-Hart, acquisitions editor at CQ Press, all the hullabaloo is a bit of "blaming the messenger."

"It's not coming to terms with the idea that crime is a persistent problem in our society," he said.

Oh, and for those still curious about Mission Viejo, well, there's nothing surprising—except, perhaps, for the fact that the name of the city only roughly translates from the Spanish as "the old mission." Technically, that would be La Misión Vieja, so it's unclear what went wrong there.

Otherwise, the town is roughly 83 percent white, according to the 2000 Census, with Asians and Mexican Hispanics comprising most of the rest. Median income is just under $80,000 for a household (well above the national average). And the town slogan? "The California Promise."

Photo: Wikipedia Commons, public domain image