Thriving Norway Provides an Economics Lesson

OSLO – The global financial crisis has brought low the economies of just about every country on earth. But not Norway.

In the midst of the worst global downturn since the Depression, Norway’s economy grew last year by just under 3 percent. The government enjoys a budget surplus of 11 percent and its ledger is entirely free of debt. By comparison, the United States is expected to chalk up a fiscal deficit this year equal to 12.9 percent of its gross domestic product and push its total debt to $11 trillion, or 65 percent of the size of its economy.

Norway is a relatively small country with a largely homogeneous population of 4.6 million and the advantages of being a major oil exporter. It counted $68 billion in oil revenue last year as prices soared to record levels. Even though prices have sharply declined, the government is not particularly worried. Instead of spending its riches lavishly, it passed legislation ensuring that oil revenue went straight into its sovereign wealth fund, state money that is used to make investments around the world. Now its sovereign wealth fund is close to being the largest in the world, despite losing 23 percent last year because of investments that declined.

“The U.S. and the U.K. have no sense of guilt,” said Anders Aslund, an expert on Scandinavia at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “But in Norway, there is instead a sense of virtue. If you are given a lot, you have a responsibility.”

Eirik Wekre, an economist who writes thrillers in his spare time, describes Norwegians’ feelings about debt this way: “We cannot spend this money now; it would be stealing from future generations.”

As in much of the rest of the world home prices have soared here, tripling this decade. But there has been no real estate crash in Norway because there were few mortgage lending excesses. After a 15 percent correction, prices are again on the rise.

Norwegian banks, said Arne J. Isachsen, an economist at the Norwegian School of Management, remain largely healthy and prudent in their lending. Banks represent just 2 percent of the economy and tight public oversight over their lending practices have kept Norwegian banks from taking on the risk that brought down their Icelandic counterparts. But they certainly have not closed their doors to borrowers. Mr. Isachsen, like many in Norway, has a second home and an open credit line from his bank, which he recently used to buy a new boat.

Some here worry that while a cabin in the woods and a boat may not approach the excesses seen in New York or London, oil wealth and the state largesse have corrupted Norway’s once-sturdy work ethic. “This is an oil-for-leisure program,” said Knut Anton Mork, an economist at Handelsbanken in Oslo. A recent study, he pointed out, found that Norwegians work the fewest hours of the citizens of any industrial democracy.

To Ms. Halvorsen, the finance minister, even the underside of the Norwegian dream looks pretty good compared to the economic nightmares elsewhere. “As a socialist, I have always said that the market can’t regulate itself,” she said. “But even I was surprised how strong the failure was.”

Full article at the NY Times

Cutting calories ‘boosts memory’

Reducing what you eat by nearly a third may improve memory, according to German researchers.

They introduced the diet to 50 elderly volunteers, then gave them a memory test three months later. However, a dietician said the reduction could harm health unless care was taken.

There is growing interest in the potential benefits of calorie restricted diets, after research in animals suggested they might be able to improve lifespan and delay the onset of age-related disease. However, it is still not certain whether this would be the case in humans – and the the levels of “caloric restriction” involved are severe.

The precise mechanism which may deliver these benefits is still being investigated, with theories ranging from a reduction in the production of “free radical” chemicals which can cause damage, to a fall in inflammation which can have the same result.

The researchers from the University of Munster carried out the human study after results in rats suggested that memory could be boosted by a diet containing 30% fewer calories than normal. The study volunteers, who had an average age of 60, were split into three groups – the first had a balanced diet containing the normal number of calories, the second had a similar diet but with a higher proportion of unsaturated fatty acids, such as those found in olive oil and fish. The final group were given the calorie restricted diet.

After three months, there was no difference in memory scores in the first two groups, but the 50 in the third group performed better. They also showed other signs of physical improvement, with decreased levels of insulin and fewer signs of inflammation. The researchers said that these changes could explain the better memory scores, by keeping brain cells in better health.

They wrote: “To our knowledge, the current results provide first experimental evidence in humans that caloric restriction improves memory in the elderly. “The present findings may help to develop new prevention and treatment strategies for maintaining cognitive health into old age.”

However, care was taken to make sure that the volunteers, despite eating a restricted diet in terms of calories, carried on eating the right amount of vitamins and other nutrients.

Dr Leigh Gibson, from Roehampton University, said that the drop in insulin levels were one plausible reason why mental performance might improve. The hormone was known to act on parts of the brain related to memory, he said, and the higher levels found in people with poorly controlled type II diabetes had been directly linked to worse memory and cognitive function.

A spokesman for the British Dietetic Association said that people, particularly those already at normal or low weight, should be “extremely careful” about attempting such a diet. She said: “There is other evidence that, far from enhancing memory, dieting or removing meals can interfere with memory and brain function. A drop of 30% in calories is a significant one for someone who is not overweight, and should not be undertaken lightly. It could even be dangerous if the person is already underweight.”

Full article at BBC Health

Chemicals ‘may reduce fertility’

Chemicals commonly found in food packaging, upholstery and carpets may be damaging women’s fertility, say US scientists.

A study published in the journal Human Reproduction measured levels of perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) in the blood of 1,240 women. Those with higher levels were more likely to take longer to become pregnant.

PFCs are useful in industry because they are resistant to heat, and have the ability to repel water and oil. However, high concentrations have been linked to organ damage in animals, and the chemicals have the ability to persist for long periods in the body.

The researchers, from the University of California in Los Angeles, analysed blood samples taken at the time of the woman’s first antenatal visit, then interviewed the women about whether the pregnancy was planned, and how long it had taken them to get pregnant.

The levels of the chemicals varied from 6.4 nanograms per millilitre of blood – a nanogram is a billionth of a gram – to 106.4 nanograms per ml.

When the group of women were divided into four groups depending on these levels, they found that, compared to women in the group with the lowest readings, the likelihood of infertility – taking more than a year or IVF to get pregnant – was significantly higher for women with higher levels of PFCs in their bloodstream.

Dr Chunyuan Fei, one of the researchers, said that earlier studies had suggested that PFCs might impair the growth of babies in the womb. She said that more women in the groups with higher exposure to PFCs had problems with irregular menstrual cycles, which might suggest that interference with hormones was the reason.

Professor Jorn Olsen, who led the study, said that the team were now waiting for further studies to confirm the link between fertility problems and PFCs.

Full article at BBC Health

Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers

Researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results.

“Obama is obviously inspirational, but we wondered whether he would contribute to an improvement in something as important as black test-taking,” said Ray Friedman, a management professor at Vanderbilt University, one of the study’s three authors. “We were skeptical that we would find any effect, but our results surprised us.”

The study has not yet undergone peer review, and two academics who read it on Thursday said they would be interested to see if other researchers would be able to replicate its results.

Researchers in the last decade assembled university students with identical SAT scores and administered tests to them, discovering that blacks performed significantly poorer when asked at the start to fill out a form identifying themselves by race. The researchers attributed those results to anxiety that caused them to tighten up during exams in which they risked confirming a racial stereotype.

In the study made public on Thursday, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues compiled a brief test, drawing 20 questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Exam, and administering it four times to about 120 white and black test-takers during last year’s presidential campaign.

In total, 472 Americans — 84 blacks and 388 whites — took the exam. Both white and black test-takers ranged in age from 18 to 63, and their educational attainment ranged from high school dropout to Ph.D.

On the initial test last summer, whites on average correctly answered about 12 of 20 questions, compared with about 8.5 correct answers for blacks, Dr. Friedman said. But on the tests administered immediately after Mr. Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, and just after his election victory, black performance improved, rendering the white-black gap “statistically nonsignificant,” he said.

“It’s a nice piece of work,” said G. Gage Kingsbury, a testing expert who is a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association, who read the study on Thursday. But Dr. Kingsbury wondered whether the Obama effect would extend beyond the election, or prove transitory. “I’d want to see another study replicating their results before I get too excited about it,” he said.

Full article at the NY Times.

‘Huge year for natural disasters’

The past year has been one of the most devastating ever in terms of natural disasters, one of the world’s biggest re-insurance companies has said.

Munich Re said the impact of the disasters was greater than in 2007 in both human and economic terms. The company suggested climate change was boosting the destructive power of disasters like hurricanes and flooding. It has called for stricter curbs on emissions to prevent further uncontrollable weather scenarios.

Although there were fewer “loss-producing events” in 2008 than in the previous year, the impact of natural disasters was higher, said Munich Re in its annual assessment.

More than 220,000 people died in events like cyclones, earthquakes and flooding, the most since 2004, the year of the Asian tsunami. Meanwhile, overall global losses totalled about $200bn (£137bn), with uninsured losses totalling $45bn, about 50% more than in 2007. This makes 2008 the third most expensive year on record, after 1995, when the Kobe earthquake struck Japan, and 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina in the US.

Torsten Jeworrek of Munich Re said the pattern continued a long-term trend already observed. “Climate change has already started and is very probably contributing to increasingly frequent weather extremes and ensuing natural catastrophes,” he said.

Asia was the continent worst hit by natural disasters in 2008, Munich Re reported. Cyclone Nargis in Burma killed an estimated 130,000 people and devastated much of the low-lying Irrawaddy Delta region, while the earthquake which struck China’s Sichuan province in May left an estimated 70,000 dead and millions homeless.

Munich Re said the losses of $85bn made Sichuan the second most expensive earthquake after Kobe.

Although Nargis and the Sichuan quake brought the biggest cost in terms of human lives, the economic losses were mostly uninsured.

The most expensive single event in 2008 was Hurricane Ike, which brought $30bn in losses. It was one of five major hurricanes in the North Atlantic over the year, which saw a total of 16 tropical storms.

In addition, roughly 1,700 tornadoes across the US caused several billion dollars of damage, as did periods of low pressure weather activity in Europe.

Munich Re quoted World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) figures showing that 2008 was the 10th warmest year since reliable records began, meaning that the 10 warmest years on record all occurred in the past 12 years.

“It is now very probable that the progressive warming of the atmosphere is due to the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity,” said Prof Peter Hoppe, head of Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research. “The logic is clear: when temperatures increase there is more evaporation and the atmosphere has a greater capacity to absorb water vapour, with the result that its energy content is higher. The weather machine runs into top gear, bringing more intense severe weather events with corresponding effects in terms of losses.”

The company said world leaders must put in place “effective and binding rules on CO2 emissions” to curb climate change and ensure that “future generations do not have to live with weather scenarios that are difficult to control”.

“If we delay too long, it will be very costly for future generations,” said Mr Jeworrek.

Full article at BBC Business

‘Viagra lure’ for Afghan warlords

America’s CIA has found a novel way to gain information from fickle Afghan warlords – supplying sex-enhancing drug Viagra, a US media report says. The Washington Post said it was one of a number of enticements being used.

In one case, a 60-year-old warlord with four wives was given four pills and four days later detailed Taleban movements in return for more.

The newspaper said the use of Viagra had to be handled sensitively as the drug was not always known about in rural areas.

It quoted one retired agent as saying: “You didn’t hand it out to younger guys, but it could be a silver bullet to make connections to the older ones.”

In the case of the 60-year-old warlord – the head of a clan in southern Afghanistan who had not co-operated – operatives saw he had four younger wives. The pills were explained and offered. Four days later the agents returned.

“He came up to us beaming,” the Post quoted an agent as saying. “He said, ‘You are a great man.’ And after that we could do whatever we wanted in his area.”

The pills could put chieftains “back in an authoritative position”, another official said.

The paper said the CIA had a long line of inducements for the notoriously fickle warlords, including dental work, visas, toys and medicine. It quoted one private security official as saying that simply handing over large sums of money would raise suspicions about newfound wealth.

Full article at BBC Americas

Artistic clues to coastal change

Nineteenth Century artwork is a useful tool for studying coastal erosion, according to a retired coastal engineer.

Robin McInnes assessed the accuracy of geological and topological features in more than 400 paintings of the Isle of Wight and Hampshire coastline. Dr McInnes said such old masters gave engineers the chance to see coastal features before they were changed by industrial development.

He was standing in London’s Tate Gallery, admiring a painting entitled Pegwell Bay, Kent – a recollection of October 5th 1858 by Pre-Raphaelite artist William Dyce, when the thought struck him that the detailed accurate depiction of groynes and foreshore, despite being painted 150 years ago, might be of use in his work as a coastal engineer.

Combining his interests in paintings of the local environment, geology and coastal erosion, he looked at hundreds of artworks and came up with a method to assess their value as indicators of coastal change – especially erosion.

“From the late 18th Century, Europe was cut off by the Napoleonic wars, this resulted in travellers and artists paying greater attention to the picturesque landscapes of the British Isles,” said Dr McInnes.

Dr McInnes began to examine images from the 1770s to the 1920s. From more than 400 paintings, prints and illustrations he drew up a scale to asses how useful such artworks were as coastal engineering tools.

“The ranking system is based on four or five factors, it is a qualitative assessment,” he said. “I looked at issues such as the material and the nature of the media, oil paintings versus prints; generally, water colour allowed the most accurate depiction. The next question was what do they actually show, do they provide understanding of the geology or beach levels? I gave each a score for that. Also to time periods, from a coastal engineers point of view, the most relevant period is when rapid coastal development took place.”

He also gave marks for the accuracy of the artistic style, and whether the painting showed the topography.

“In Italian landscape style accuracy was not the prime consideration, (whereas) traditional Victorian coastal painting was the most accurate as the idea was to provide an exact image to take home. Followers of the pre-Raphaelites captured in precise detail this period, it coincided with an interest in geology and natural sciences. “

He added that the paintings of the period were not just a tool for categorising physical change, but also environmental and developmental issues. “Many artists returned to the same spot to capture the same scenes over a period of years. The study shows how Victorian development has radically changed the coastline; it’s nice to strip it back because it helps you understand what might be the underlying problems of erosion and instability.”

“Natural processes in the past are largely masked by coastal development,” Dr Innes explained. “Looking back 150 years, it’s easier to understand the geography and topography when you don’t have this coastal development covering the slopes.”

The study – carried out with help from Portsmouth University, the Crown Estate and the National Maritime Museum – has been well received by organisations concerned with coastal erosion. Dr McInnes recently presented his findings at a coastal engineering conference in Venice, where he learned of similar research that used Caravaggio’s paintings to asses historic water levels in the sinking Italian city.

Full article and graphics at BBC Science.

Fat kids found to have arteries of 45-year-olds

Obese children as young as 10 had the arteries of 45-year-olds and other heart abnormalities that greatly raise their risk of heart disease, say doctors who used ultrasound tests to take a peek inside. “As the old saying goes, you’re as old as your arteries are,” said Dr. Geetha Raghuveer of Children’s Hospital in Kansas City, who led one of the studies. “This is a wake-up call.”

The studies were reported Tuesday at an American Heart Association conference.

About a third of American children are overweight and one-fifth are obese. Many parents think that “baby fat” will melt away as kids get older. But research increasingly shows that fat kids become fat adults, with higher risks for many health problems.

Raghuveer wanted to see if early signs of damage could be documented. She and colleagues used painless ultrasound tests to measure the thickness of the wall of a major neck artery in 70 children, ages 10 to 16. Almost all had abnormal cholesterol and many were obese.

No one knows how thick a 10-year-old’s artery should be, since they’re not regularly checked for signs of heart disease, so researchers used tables for 45-year-olds, who often do get such exams. The kids’”vascular age” was about 30 years older than their actual age, she found.

A separate study tied childhood obesity to abnormal enlargement of the left atrium, one of the chambers of the heart. Enlargement is a known risk factor for heart disease, stroke and heart rhythm problems. Julian Ayer, a researcher at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital Sydney Australia, did ultrasound exams on 991 seemingly healthy children ages 5 to 15. He saw a clear link between rising weight and size of the left atrium.

A third study by Dr. Walter Abhayaratna of Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, also used ultrasound tests and found impairment in the heart’s ability to relax between beats in children who were overweight or obese. The study involved the first 150 children participating in a larger community-based study.

Earlier research he helped conduct found more rigid arteries in such children — a possible sign of plaque deposits starting to form. “Even at this young age of 10, you can have children who have got arterial stiffness who are comparable to 30- and 40-year-olds,” he said.

Full article at the San Francisco Chronicle

Black and white TV generation have monochrome dreams

New research suggests that the type of television you watched as a child has a profound effect on the colour of your dreams. While almost all under 25s dream in colour, thousands of over 55s, all of whom were brought up with black and white sets, often dream in monchrome – even now.

Eva Murzyn, a psychology student at Dundee University who carried out the study, said: “It is a fascinating hypothesis. It suggests there could be a critical period in our childhood when watching films has a big impact on the way dreams are formed.”

Research from 1915 through to the 1950s suggested that the vast majority of dreams are in black and white but the tide turned in the sixties, and later results suggested that up to 83 per cent of dreams contain some colour. Since this period also marked the transition between black-and-white film and TV and widespread Technicolor, an obvious explanation was that the media had been priming the subjects’ dreams.

However it was always controversial and differences between the studies prevented the researchers from drawing any firm conclusions. But now Miss Murzyn believes she has proved the link. She re-looked at the old studies and combined them with a survey of her own of more 60 people, half of which were over 55 and half of which were under 25.

She asked the volunteers to answer a questionnaire on the colour of their dreams and their childhood exposure to film and TV. The subjects then recorded different aspects of their dreams in a diary every morning. Miss Murzyn found there was no significant difference between results drawn from the questionnaires and the dream diaries – thus proving that the previous studies were comparable.

She then analysed her own data to find out whether an early exposure to black-and-white TV could still have a lasting effect on her subjects’ dreams, 40 years later. Only 4.4 per cent of the under-25s’ dreams were black and white. The over-55s who had had access to colour TV and film during their childhood also reported a very low proportion of just 7.3 per cent. But the over-55s who had only had access to black-and-white media reported dreaming in black and white roughly a quarter of the time.

Even though they would have spent only a few hours a day watching TV or films, their attention and emotional engagement would have been heightened during this time, leaving a deeper imprint on their mind, Miss Murzyn told the New Scientist.

“The crucial time is between three and 10 when we all begin to have the ability to dream,” she said. “I have even had a computer game player who dreams as if he is in front of a computer screen.”

Miss Murzyn concedes it’s still impossible to verify whether the dreams are actually in black-and-white, or whether media exposure somehow alters the way the mind reconstructs the dreams once we wake.

Full article at the Telegraph.

Repeat glacier photography

The National Park Service has an online collection of Repeat Glacier Photography with photos of glaciers in Alaska from early explorers side by side with photos taken in the present day. Needless to say, it’s a trend of icy photos next to photos of a lot of water: