Signing the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act 
Dec 13, 2010 Video

Video: Rush Lilmbaugh - hungry children should dumpster dive for food
Rush Limbaugh attacks school lunches.

CBO: Up to 3.6 Million People Owe Their Jobs to the Recovery Act  

3.6 Jobs Saved By Recovery Act

Nothing in this year's exit polling hurt more than this:

 

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

My job is to do whatever I can to get this economy moving Video:

President Barack Obama on Tuesday said his willingness to extend tax cuts for the rich in exchange for a broader deal with Republicans was an unfortunate product of harsh political realities, but insisted his position hasn’t changed and promised he’ll seek to end them in two years.

"I'm as opposed to the high-end tax cuts today as I’ve been for years," Obama said at a White House press conference. "In the long-run we simply can’t afford them. And when they expire in two years, I will fight to end them, just as I suspect the Republicans will fight to end the middle class tax cuts."

"But in the meantime, I’m not here to play games with the American people or the health of our economy.

My job is to do whatever I can to get this economy moving," he added.

The deal brokered between the White House and Congressional Republicans involves a temporary two-year extension of tax cuts for all income-earners, a 13-month extension of unemployment benefits, and a reduction in the payroll tax. - Video for OFA participants

CNN brief explaination  - Bush Tax Cuts


Tax Cuts Explained  - White House Tax Facts

1. The American Opportunity Tax Credit, which gives students and families up to $2,500 in tax savings to help pay for college tuition and other expenses. The AOTC and other tuition benefits have helped more than 12.5 million students and their families pay for college, an increase in tax benefits for higher education of more than 90 percent from the year before.

2. The Earned Income Tax Credit, which helps moderate-income working families make ends meet. The Recovery Act increased the credit for families with three or more children, bringing the maximum amount to $5,657.

3. The Child Tax Credit, which helps low-and moderate-income families with children. More families are benefitting from the child tax credit under the Recovery Act, which reduced the minimum amount of earned income used to calculate the additional child tax credit to $3,000 from $12,550.

4. COBRA and Unemployment Benefits:For those who lost their jobs in the recession, to help them get back on their feet, the Recovery Act provided a 65 percent tax credit  to help cover the cost of health care and made the first $2,400 in unemployment benefits tax-free, when normally 100 percent of those benefits are taxable.

5. Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Incentives: Taxpayers are eligible for up to $1,500 in tax credits for making some energy-efficiency improvements to their homes such as adding insulation and installing energy efficient windows.

Interlude from Politics:

Video: Rough Science Mediterranean Mystery: Longitude & Latitude
Rough Science Part 1
Rough Science Part 2
Rough Science Part 3

Symphony of Science

Main Page: Symphony of Science

[Hawking]
We observe that distant galaxies are moving away from us
They must have been closer together in the past

It was the beginning of the universe
And of time itself
Anything that happened before the big bang
Could not affect what happened after

[Dawkins]
The poetry of the expanding universe
The poetry of the complexity of life
We're not normally equipped to understand
And science gives it to us

Science is opening your eyes
To the wonderfulness of what's there
Science is opening your eyes
To the poetry of the expanding universe

[Sagan]
The early cosmos was everywhere white hot
But then as time passed
The radiation expanded and cooled

Then little pockets of gas began to grow
Steadily brightening, we call them the galaxies

[Shears]
In the big bang we had equal amounts of matter and anti-matter
And as soon as they met each other,
They annihliated together

And this battle played out
Whilst the universe expanded
In its first minute of exisistence

[DeGrasse Tyson]
It's not all that hard to detect the big bang
All you need to do is change the channel
Until you come between two stations

About one percent of the snow and noise
Comes from the big bang itself
We're all eavesdropping
On the birth pains of the cosmos

Politics Resumes:


Preview Film - Inside Job
The 2008 Economic Meltdown 2008 Was Avoidable

Bubble Machines and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

The financial crisis that exploded in 2008 isn’t past but prologue. The stunning rise, fall, and rescue of Wall Street in the bubble-and-bailout era was the coming-out party for the network of looters who sit at the nexus of American political and economic power. The grifter class—made up of the largest players in the financial industry and the politicians who do their bidding—has been growing in power for a generation, transferring wealth upward through increasingly complex financial mechanisms and political maneuvers. The crisis was only one terrifying manifestation of how they’ve hijacked America’s political and economic life.

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Tonotopic Map

ARMS - Attention-related modulations

Attention-related modulations (ARMs) were larger in lateral than medial regions of auditory cortex and appeared to arise primarily in belt and parabelt auditory fields. ARMs lacked tonotopic organization, were unaffected by acoustic parameters, and had distributions that were distinct from those of sensory responses. Unlike the gradual adaptation seen for sensory responses, ARMs increased in amplitude throughout stimulus blocks.

Significance: The results are consistent with the view that medial regions of human auditory cortex contain tonotopically organized core and belt fields that map the basic acoustic features of sounds while surrounding higher-order parabelt regions are tuned to more abstract stimulus attributes.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005183

Normally, we hear sounds only when they make our eardrums vibrate. The vibrations cause nerve hairs in the inner ear to shiver, and that triggers electric signals that travel along the auditory nerve into the brain. One of their first stops is a patch of gray matter called the auditory cortex.

Each nerve hair is tuned to a particular frequency of sound and excites only certain neurons in the auditory cortex. As a result, the neurons in the auditory cortex form what is known as a tone map. The neurons at one end of the auditory cortex are tuned to low frequencies; the farther you go toward the other end, the higher the tuning of the neurons.

This sound system comes with an elaborate feedback mechanism. Neurons do more than just relay signals forward into the brain. They also signal back down the line, reaching out to neighboring neurons tuned to nearby frequencies, exciting some and muzzling others.

These feedback controls allow us to sift through incoming sounds for the most important information, so that we are not overwhelmed by meaningless noise. In young brains, the neurons and their feedback controls grow and link up to each other. Even in adulthood, experiencing new sounds can rewire the auditory cortex.