Drunken party photos used to be unceremoniously splayed out in public, privacy settings were almost nonexistent, wall posts weren’t status updates and there was little need to filter regrettably off-color comments. After all, the only people (you assumed) who saw that stuff were college buddies who were also posting the same incriminating photos of themselves on the site.

Now, after the Facebook explosion, users are more aware of privacy issues than ever before and, on Facebook, the new rule of thumb has become “curb public access to your profile as best you can.”

New research suggests that this is nearly impossible.

In a study conducted by Alan Mislove of Northeastern University and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, researchers tested an algorithm that could accurately infer the personal attributes of Facebook users by simply looking at their friend lists. The research culled profile information from two detailed social-network data sets: one from a sample of almost 4,000 students and alumni on Facebook at Rice University and another from more than 63,000 users in the New Orleans regional network.

Researchers developed an algorithm to see if they could accurately infer attributes like high school or college, department of study, hometown, graduation year and even dormitory by dissecting these users’ friend lists. The study cut to the core of the debate surrounding the social-networking site: Is your personal profile your own or, to paraphrase anti-Facebook crusader Leif Harmsen, is it the site’s profile about you?

“The current privacy debate that’s going on concerning Facebook is essentially covering explicitly provided attributes [i.e. information uploaded by you onto your profile],” Mislove wrote. “We see our work as pointing out that there exist many implicitly provided attributes that aren’t even being discussed.” Namely, that your friend’s profile can usually divulge more information than you think.

According to the study, only about 5 percent of users in each network had changed their privacy settings to make their friend list inaccessible. (To hide it, enter your Facebook profile, click on the edit icon above your friends and unclick the blue box marked “Show Friend List to everyone.”) In the New Orleans network, personal profiles remained largely accessible to researchers. Some 58 percent of users disclosed university attended, 42 percent disclosed employers, 35 percent disclosed interests and 19 percent gave the public access to their location.

Because of this information given, Mislove explained that it was relatively easy for his algorithm to accurately pinpoint attributes such as geography (dormitory or hometown) or education background (which high school or college users attend) for a specific user.

In the New Orleans regional network, the algorithm unsurprisingly found that users were 53 times more likely to share the attribute of the same high school with those on their friend list than with other random users in the network. At Rice, the algorithm accurately predicted the correct dormitory, graduation year and area of study for the many of the students. In fact, among these undergraduates, researchers found that “with as little as 20 percent of the users providing attributes we can often infer the attributes for the remaining users with over 80 percent accuracy.”

While marketing companies who specialize in targeted advertising may rejoice, these results may be troubling for those who’ve held out hope that Facebook could provide adequate privacy controls. Not to seem alarmist (“privacy” on the Web has always been overrated), but if these researchers could develop a limited algorithm that can infer rudimentary attributes off of locked profiles, the possibilities seem endless for others to harness advanced software that could render current privacy controls completely useless.

“The privacy story on these sites is more complicated that we like to think, as your privacy is not just a function of what you provide, it’s a function of what your friends and community members provide as well,” Mislove elaborated.

Researchers concluded that it wasn’t “sufficient” to just give users access to privacy controls for their own profiles; the option to censor friend lists should be given to make sure that private information cannot be inferred.

As the title of the study states, on Facebook, you are who you know.

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Perhaps the best part: Beaches are usually free.

But should they be?

In addition to providing the obvious recreational opportunities to sunbathe, swim and fly kites, beaches buffer the coastline from erosion and provide habitat for marine creatures. These benefits are referred to as ecosystem services, and they have long been recognized in inland environments, not just theoretically but economically. Through payment for ecosystem services, also known as PES, forested land can bring its owners money for everything from timber to aesthetic value to the trees’ removal of atmospheric carbon.

Is it time to extend the same concept to coastal land, like beaches, and even to the open ocean, where microscopic algae soak up carbon and produce oxygen in impressive quantities?

This question was the focus of the most recent meeting of the Katoomba Group, an international network of people and organizations working on PES. Brainchild of the conservation nonprofit Forest Trends and named for the location of its first meeting in 1999 in New South Wales, Australia, the Katoomba Group promotes PES through conferences, like February’s meeting in Palo Alto, Calif., and through articles on its Web site, Ecosystem Marketplace.

Other Katoomba meetings have produced action plans and test projects, but for Katoomba’s first foray into the marine arena, the February meeting was mostly an educational and networking opportunity for participants. The smorgasbord of panels, meant to showcase all possible applications of PES at sea, covered topics from fishery management to alternative energy to coastal development. Panelists came from around the world and included scientists, government officials, activists and private investors.

Despite criticism on both ethical and practical grounds, payment for ecosystem services is finding support among academic, public and private sectors. On land or sea, PES always struggles with two big questions: Who pays? And who gets paid?

People benefiting from ecosystem services can’t give money directly to the ecosystem; a beach doesn’t know what to do with a handful of greenbacks. So Erin Hughes, senior program officer at the conservation organization Winrock International, answers this way: “Whoever has the control and is damaging the resource — you pay them to stop.”

Cash can also flow the other way. If the people with control over the resource are unwilling or unable to stop damaging it, then they can pay for the privilege of pollution, by giving money to cleanup efforts, or paying to conserve equivalent undamaged ecosystems elsewhere. That’s roughly the idea between the cap-and-trade systems proposed for limiting greenhouse gases, and examples of both kinds of payment, and other schemes, can be found in The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity initiative from the U.N.

In the case of California beaches, as anyone knows who has ever suffered the disappointment of a beach closure, or, far worse, gotten ill from swimming in contaminated water, plain old-fashioned sewage usually damages the ecosystem. Who should pay to clean it up? While there might be a single sewage handler, there isn’t a single point-source polluter — sewage comes from all residents of the region.

“People have to vote to tax themselves, and that’s hard,” says Linda Sheehan, executive director of the California Coastkeeper Alliance. She has been frustrated by a lack of community involvement, a contrast to the sense of intense individual responsibility she recalls from Earth Day in 1970. Since then, she says, “there’s been this gradual devolving of responsibility from the public to the government and to NGOs to take care of things.”

But at least there are simple fixes for the California beaches if the money can be found: replace leaky beach bathrooms, repair old sewer lines, improve storm water drainage.

In other parts of the world, beaches face extinction from an unexpected problem with a more elusive solution: coral reef degradation.

Take the Dominican Republic, where millions of dollars have been spent on beach replenishment, carting loads of sand from one location to another. It is a losing battle. These beaches used to be protected from the ocean’s fury by offshore coral reefs, but no longer. As the Dominican Republic’s reefs have suffered from the now-familiar litany of coral abuses, so have their beaches.

This connectivity between ecosystems is a focus of University of Exeter biologist Peter Mumby. His research has illuminated intimate interdependencies between coral reefs — with their colorful fish and nearby bright sands — and other coastal habitats, particularly less charismatic mangrove forests.

Mangroves certainly aren’t sunbathing, swimming or kite-flying destinations. But this collection of trees and shrubs along tropical coastlines offer a unique safe haven to young fish, which then grow up and move out to the reefs. Mangroves also buffer the coast against storm damage, and serve as remarkably effective carbon sinks.

And, as of 2001, they were being destroyed faster than rainforests or coral reefs.

Can mangroves be saved with market-based conservation? The Katoomba meeting rang with enthusiasm for this strategy. “In order to do PES, the first thing is to value the services properly at the right scale,” Mumby says. He adds that, “Of any marine tropical system, we know most about the valuation of mangroves.”

Mumby published a mangrove valuation model in the journal Theoretical Ecology in 2008 with economist Jim Sanchirico, who was also present at Katoomba. They constructed a mathematical model of the costs and benefits of coastal land-use decisions, based on the economic contribution of mangroves to fishery revenue. The destruction of mangroves so clearly decreases the value of fisheries that Mumby and Sanchirico suggested there are incentives for fishers to pay for coastal conservation or restoration.

It may be promising, but right now it’s all theoretical. Many mangrove stories don’t have happy endings, especially in places where fishers don’t have the resources to pay off the source of ecosystem damage.

Africa’s largest expanse of mangrove forest, the Niger Delta, has been devastated both environmentally and socially by the effects of oil extraction. Dredging to set up pipelines and facilities is a direct mangrove killer, while pollution from oil spills penetrates quickly into the soil and suffocates mangrove roots.

A valuation model could determine the economic costs of this habitat destruction — the loss of fishery revenue and storm protection. But can the academic model help the Niger Delta situation? According to Odigha Odigha, chairman/CEO of the Cross River State Forestry Commission in Nigeria, the primary problems are government corruption and exploitation by foreign companies. Massive oil profits are split between them, leaving little for the people whose land is despoiled. “What a paradox — they’re born inside wealth, but live in penury and poverty,” Odigha laments.

He fears that the tragic trajectory from environmental degradation to armed conflict will repeat itself in Ghana due to the recent discovery of oil there. Prevention, he contends, lies in engaging local people in negotiations from the beginning, rather than leaving it all up to government and companies.

“If you empower local people, for the first time elected officials have to be accountable,” agrees Hughes, the senior program officer at Winrock who has seen this strategy work in a water management project in Bangladesh.

The need for engagement of local communities is echoed by Sheehan, based on her experience in California. “People assume the government is going to take care of it. If they think the government or NGOs are going to take care of it, they don’t have to step up.”

In fact, private involvement is a central tenet of all market-based conservation. The ultimate goal of those who advocate PES is not government regulation, but the recognition by ordinary people that “natural capital” has real value, and we’re losing money by not taking it into account on our balance sheets. From Californians finding cash to keep their beaches clean to Ghanaians demanding compensation from foreign oil for their mangrove forests, private individuals — and the private sector — are an integral part of today’s conservation business.

“We should not fold our hands and wait,” Odigha says. “It’s not Ghana’s problem, it’s our problem.”

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Ernest L. Abel and Michael L. Kruger at Wayne State University have found that the larger your smile, the longer you may live. Yes, that’s right; “smile intensity” seems to have a statistically significant effect on a person’s longevity.

In their research, to be published in the journal Psychological Science, the professors conducted an amusing case study that used a sampling of 230 photographs of baseball players culled from the now-defunct Sporting News Baseball Register. The professional ball players were chosen as a representative sample because detailed life statistics (such as birth, death, education, marital status, etc.) were available for each, leading to a more conclusive study.

The players’ headshots, taken in the lead-up to the 1952 season, were analyzed by the researchers and their assistants and given flat distinctions of either “no smile,” “partial smile” or “full (Duchenne) smile.” After some Web sleuthing, the researchers compiled the life data for the baseball players and controlled for body mass index, career length, marital status, college attendance and other longevity factors.

The results? Even a partial smile added years to a player’s lifespan.

On average, the players with no smile lived for 72.9 years, a full two years less than those who exhibited partial smiles. Those with the largest grins reaped an even longer lifespan: Players with full smiles lived to 79.9 years, almost two years longer than the typical life expectancy for an American. That’s an overall difference of seven years of life between those players that chose not to smile and those who gave wholehearted grins.

The researchers also ran the same study again and rated each of the players headshots based on a three-point scale of attractiveness. Unlike a player’s smile, there was no significant correlation between a player’s perceived attractiveness and their longevity.

But smiles, it seems, can be telling about our characteristics.

“Individuals whose underlying emotional disposition is reflected in voluntary or involuntary Duchenne smiles may be basically happier than those with less intense smiles and hence maybe more predisposed to benefit from the effects of positive emotionality,” concluded the researchers.

Before you smirk and explain that there must be some other factor involved, it’s worth mentioning that this study is not an anomaly. The researchers cited numerous other studies displaying the powerful effects of relatively simple facial expressions and emotional conditions like involuntary happiness or sadness.

Last year, widely published research by Matthew J. Hertenstein found that smile intensity in yearbook photographs could predict relatively accurately whether or not a person would later go through a divorce. In 2005, a study found that participants could predict the outcome of 70 percent of Senate congressional elections with just a split-second judgment of the facial appearance of the candidates. Related studies with controlled circumstances have found that facial appearance (and smiles or lack thereof) can also predict sexual orientation and socioeconomic status.

Much of the evidence, it appears, has been written all over our faces.

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Political scientist Shauna Wilton of the University of Alberta analyzed 23 whole episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, that wonderful show about an adorable cartoon train and his zany adventures on a fantastical island, and presented her findings at a recent conference of the Canadian Political Science Association.

Wilton found that the show, which is broadcast in 130 countries, carries subversive themes that pose a danger to the nation’s children (referring, presumably, to Canadian children, whose principal education includes broken front teeth as a result of adult-sanctioned fisticuffs-on-ice).

Nonetheless, Wilton concluded that Thomas‘ storylines too often stereotyped characters by class and punished those who tried to assert their individuality. As she put it: “While the show conveys a number of positive political values such as tolerance, listening, communicating with others and contributing to the community, it also represents a conservative political ideology that punishes individual initiative, opposes critique and change, and relegates females to supportive roles. … Any change is seen as disrupting the natural order of things.”

Now, the Napkin was initially doubtful of this conclusion, since our interest in what Canadians had to say about television ended roughly when SCTV died, but we were rebuked, frankly, by an editor’s pen. “There is a controlling/bossy/corporatist element to the show,” we were informed, “that I think you’d do well to acknowledge: Sir Topham Hatt, who runs the trains on the Island of Sodor in a paternalistic but clearly manipulative and fear-inducing way. He’s the boss, and everyone snaps to it when he says anything, no matter how self-serving his orders.”

In that case, we have only one question: Does Sir Topham Hatt have plans for 2012?

The Cocktail Napkin appears at the back page of each issue of Miller-McCune magazine, highlighting current research that merits a raised eyebrow or a painful grin.

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The administration invited anyone working for a government agency to submit an idea for saving money and improving efficiency. Some 38,000 suggestions poured in to be included in the fiscal year 2011 budget, and 84,000 people voted online for the best among them. The winner, announced in December, was a Veterans Affairs employee named Nancy Fichtner, who got to tell Obama herself that she thinks VA hospitals should stop throwing away perfectly good inhalers, eye drops and ointments.

When patients are discharged, such leftover bulk medicine is currently thrown out behind them. Fichtner suggests instead giving it to patients to take home, reducing both waste and out-of-pocket expenses for veterans who currently have to go to the pharmacy to buy exactly what’s just been trashed at the hospital.

Click here for more Idea Lobby posts.

The award illustrates a nexus of open-government tenets: the democratizing power of the Internet, the accountability promoted when average people have a platform to chide government waste and the crowd-sourcing that’s possible when government releases information the public can then recycle back to Washington in the form of better ideas.

All of these notions go under the spotlight next week as politicians, nongovernmental and media organizations, and citizen-activists converge to observe Sunshine Week, a national campaign for promoting open government. Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), for one, is planning to introduce the Public Online Information Act, a bill that would require all public government-held information be made available on the Web.

The Obama administration has been inviting this conversation since the day it took office.

“Promoting electronic pay stubs, or scheduling Social Security appointments online, or repurposing unused government supplies may not be the most glamorous reforms in our nation’s history,” Cass Sunstein, head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House, told a crowd at the Brookings Institution today, “(but) they’re helping people, and they’re adding up. They’re key to transforming how government works effectively and efficiently.”

He points to a number of illustrations of open-government innovation already floating around the Web today (including Fichtner’s). Transparency advocates and journalists won a long-fought battle when the administration in October began releasing records from the White House visitor logs, which contain key clues to exactly who — Wall Street bankers? Insurance executives? — has been bending ears inside the executive branch’s inner sanctum.

For information technology nerds, the government now has a new IT dashboard that allows the public to track federal investments by agency in IT projects (of which 7 percent are rated as having “significant concerns” with performance).

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, meanwhile, now allows consumers to search online for recalls of products by company, date or hazard (in the first week of March alone, you should be concerned about microwavable heat packs, machetes and boys’ hooded sweatshirts).

“In an open government, anecdotes and guesswork, speculation and tales can be replaced with hard evidence,” Sunstein said. “That’s a big goal of transparency.”

But this, of course, is not universally true, as was illustrated on the sidewalk outside the Brookings Institution during Sunstein’s talk. Open government advocates shouldn’t mistake the Obama administration’s enthusiasm for the issue to mean 100 percent of the federal government’s business will soon be searchable on Google.

As Sunstein was talking, a half-dozen environmentalists were outside protesting his involvement in a debate over regulating coal ash that has largely been conducted behind closed doors.

As Sunstein conceded, goals for open government likely will run into three conflicting obstacles: the need, in some areas, to protect privacy, national security, and the deliberative process that goes into many decisions the executive branch ultimately makes. When those decisions are announced, they’ll undoubtedly go up on the Web, but that doesn’t mean we’ll learn everything about how they’re made.

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Recent research in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters highlights the hope that the consistent levels of methane on the Red Planet could be the result of microorganisms in the Martian soil that are producing the gas as a “by-product of their metabolic processes.”

“As Sherlock Holmes said, ‘Eliminate all other factors and the one that remains must be the truth,’” said professor Mark Sephton of the department of earth science and engineering at Imperial College London in a press release, stepping delicately around the subject. “The list of possible sources of methane gas is getting smaller and excitingly, extraterrestrial life still remains an option. Ultimately the final test may have to be on Mars.”

In other words, the search for extraterrestrial life has been reduced to … drum-roll please … alien farts.

The Cocktail Napkin appears at the back page of each issue of Miller-McCune magazine, highlighting current research that merits a raised eyebrow or a painful grin.

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The European Parliament rejected a plan to let U.S. intelligence agencies monitor European bank transfers. The so-called “SWIFT agreement” was supposed to be a quick and relatively quiet extension of an unusual freedom the Americans had enjoyed for years after 9/11 — the capacity to scoop up masses of European bank data and sift them for evidence of terrorist funding.

Other, less democratic arms of the European Union were ready to wave the agreement through. But the European Parliament — the only elected group of EU lawmakers — had been granted new powers at the end of 2009, and on Feb. 11 asserted them by vetoing the SWIFT agreement, saying the U.S. would have too much command of personal data that was frankly none of its damn business.

SWIFT stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. The Brussels-based outfit arranges billions of dollars’ worth of bank transfers every day. Until 2009, it maintained a server in the United States, and just after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, the CIA and other intelligence-hungry government agencies subpoenaed SWIFT and started to help themselves to European data. Some European leaders knew about the snooping, but it belonged to a much wider surveillance project that was largely hushed up.

When American newspapers broke stories about the so-called “Terrorist Finance Tracking Program” in 2006, European privacy advocates howled. They said the Americans were taking data not even their own governments could legally see. “Why does the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld need to know when I transfer some money from Rabobank to the Sparkasse bank?” Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn said at the time.

The data helped catch terrorists, or so a restricted report on the program claims. Three of the four would-be terrorists who were sentenced last week for plotting an attack on German soil belonged to a group called Islamic Jihad Union, which U.S. and German officials reportedly tracked using SWIFT data. The Americans “shared information” with European law enforcement, and the European investigators didn’t mind being privy to otherwise restricted data from their own part of the world.

So the EU drafted a new agreement last year to keep the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program running even after the first of February, by which time SWIFT had moved its servers away from U.S. soil. But in December the EU had also ratified the Lisbon Treaty, a constitution-like document that gives new, more government-like powers to the EU’s lawmaking bodies. Now any international treaty entered into by EU executives in Brussels had to be approved by the normally feckless European Parliament.

The Parliament’s first high-profile act — in the face of Washington’s lobbyist armies led by Vice President Joe Biden — was to veto the SWIFT agreement. European legislators found it a shabby back-room deal, without enough privacy protection. They sent it back for a re-draft.

Some American commentators have lamented the loss of the agreement and accused Europe of leaving everyone more vulnerable to terrorism. But the European Parliament intends to reach a more detailed SWIFT agreement later this year and put the terrorist tracking program on a sound legal footing.

The irony is that politicians in Europe who have hollered loudest about the Americans’ cavalier attitude toward private European data are the ones most aligned with down-home American values. Europe’s liberals — Americans would call them “libertarians” — stand for smaller government, lower taxes, free markets and individual liberty. They came out swinging against the SWIFT agreement. It wasn’t quite Asterix clobbering the Romans, but Alexander Alvaro, a member of the Free Democrats, Germany’s liberal party, said the parliament’s decision was “a victory for European data protection and for European democracy.”

Washington — needless to say — saw things differently.

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Although during a recent appearance in California he called his successor, Felipe Calderón, “courageous” for his crackdown on the drug cartels, Fox also declared, “It’s time to debate legalizing drugs.”

In the U.S., one might expect calls for drug legalization to come from a Libertarian or the fringe of the political left, but Fox is considered a conservative in Mexico. Many of the positions he expressed in his speech to an audience of 800 in Santa Barbara would be approved by most U.S. conservatives: support for the North American Free Trade Agreement, an emphasis on personal responsibility over governmental solutions, urging the U.S. to reduce its indebtedness and a call to open up Mexico’s state monopoly on energy to private investment.

Indeed, in his autobiography, Revolution of Hope, Fox describes his National Action Party (PAN is its Spanish acronym) of the late 1980s in terms that bear uncanny similarities to the contemporary Republican Party: a party whose base lay in a region of the country whose residents were culturally conservative and deeply religious, and where many distrusted the federal government and supported free-market reform.

But Fox as a conservative is hardly a perfect analog to the U.S. variety, and that’s not due simply to the Obama-esque title of his memoir. He opened his remarks by extending a greeting to “Pedro and María and Gilberto” — that is, to all his fellow Mexicans who had made their way, with or without documents, to the U.S. seeking economic opportunity.

“I want to tell them,” Fox proclaimed, “that I’m with them all the way. I don’t understand why this nation is building walls.”

Although Republicans have hardly presented a unified front on the subject of immigration reform, one can imagine such comments setting teeth on edge among conservatives in the party. Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo based his 2008 presidential candidacy primarily on his advocacy of stringent new controls on immigration and border security (in his book, Fox describes Tancredo, fairly or not, as a “rabid Mexico hater”).

Fox also diverges from his U.S. counterparts on foreign policy: He did not support the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and in his speech suggested that the U.S. should scale back its foreign military interventions and rely more heavily on the U.N. to promote peace and harmony in the world.

And Fox is consistent in condemning Latin American dictators, whether of the left- or right-wing variety — not just Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who are favorite targets of conservatives (and who sometimes get a pass from the American left), but also the late and not-so-great Augusto Pinochet of Chile, Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, who all had the backing of the U.S. government.

Is there a lesson for U.S. conservatives to learn from Fox?

Some might argue that he is a regional politician whose experience resists cultural and geographical transfer. But with the Republican National Committee having recently rejected an ideological purity test proposed by a conservative faction, and with newly elected Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts already fallen from favor among Tea Party movement members for his recent vote in favor of the jobs bill, mainstream Republicans may already be seeing the value of Fox’s approach.

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One study finds exploring contrasts and commonalities between cultures helps unlock creativity — news that would not surprise Picasso, who was strongly influenced by African art. The second suggests seeding the imagination is as simple as allowing yourself to think like a 7-year-old.

The research on multiculturalism and creativity was conducted by two scholars from Singapore and published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology. Lead author Angela Ka-yee Leung of Singapore Management University describes five studies that show “multicultural experiences can provide a valuable cognitive resource for creative thinking.”

In one study, 65 American college students, all of European ancestry, participated in two creativity tests. Specifically, they read a summary of the Cinderella story and wrote a new version of it for Turkish children. They were given a few facts about Turkey and the everyday life of its citizens and were instructed to “use their wildest imagination.”

The participants were divided into five groups, the first of which began the assignment with no advance preparation. The other four viewed an approximately 45-minute presentation including still photos, music videos and movie trailers.

One group saw material culled from contemporary American culture, including architecture, scenery, apparel and cuisine; the second watched similar material reflecting Chinese culture. The third was exposed to both Chinese and American cultures, with characteristic images from both shown back to back. The fourth viewed images of Chinese-American culture, including foods such as rice burgers that combine elements from both traditions.

Their stories were judged by independent coders who assessed their creative content. Those written by students who saw images of both cultures, as well as those exposed to fusion culture, were significantly more creative than those written by the control group. Exposure simply to American or Chinese culture did not have the same effect.

The students were brought back into the lab five to seven days later and asked to perform a different creative experiment. Once again, those in the dual cultures and fusion culture groups scored highest, suggesting the effect of the multicultural exposure did not wear off rapidly.

The results suggest exposure to multiculturalism enhances “creativity-supporting cognitive skills, such as a spontaneous tendency to sample ideas from divergent sources and to attempt creative integration of seemingly unconnected ideas,” the researchers write.

They go on to note that this positive relationship is significantly weakened “in situations where individuals crave firm answers or are preoccupied with mortality concerns.” Of course, neither of those mindsets provide a particularly fertile environment for creativity in any case.

In the second paper, published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, psychologists Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson of North Dakota State University describe a study featuring 76 undergraduates. The students were asked to imagine that school was canceled for the day and instructed to write detailed, specific descriptions of what they would think, feel and do in such a situation.

For half the participants, the phrase “You are seven years old” was added to their instructions. All their responses were assessed using a version of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking.

“Individuals randomly assigned to the mindset condition involving childlike thinking subsequently exhibited higher levels of creative originality than did those in the control condition,” the researchers report. They add that their findings indicate “it is possible to recapture the spirit of play and exploration characteristic of childlike thinking.”

Looking at practical applications, the researchers suggest games and “guided imagery exercises designed to facilitate a childlike mindset” could help foster originality in both the classroom and the workplace. “Our results reveal that even very short-term interventions designed to focus individuals on spontaneous thinking and play are likely to be effective in fostering creative originality,” they write.

Anyone for a quick round of Duck Duck Goose?

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In 2008, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, featured my work on holistic future’s forecasting.

I am old enough to recall the 1980s predictions of both the paperless society and of technology fostering so much leisure time that people’s future lack of need to work would become a severe societal problem. “Machine replaces human” in a world as complex as this one has a poor track record. Moreover, slowness of thought (fostered by handwriting) has its irreplaceable benefits, which can be merged with technology to produce highest-order results: Careful, careful, on what we bring to pass.

I “get” the symbolism that this comment is being e-mailed — my books and articles are handwritten, then word-processed.

Guntram F. A. Werther, Ph.D.
Thunderbird: The School of Global Management
Glendale, Ariz.

Wrong, in four dimensions
In “Handwriting Is History,” Anne Trubek predicts that handwriting is fated to die out and claims that its cultivation does little to benefit the person who has learned to wield a pen beautifully. Her view falls short in several ways: First, her high praise for the “automaticity” of touch-typing (which she likes because she says it can keep up with one’s “speed of cognition”) is unimaginative. With but a little imagination, we should see that touch-typing is very nearly as technologically primitive as handwriting: It would be short-sighted not to foresee the demise of QWERTY skills once we can, for example, don headgear and see our verbalized thoughts appear instantaneously on screen (or whatever the medium for the message has by then become). Touch-typing is not here to stay either. We can already dictate to our computers in speech recognition mode faster than most of us can QWERTY.

But Ms. Trubek makes other, and psychologically more important, claims, and these we would do well to question. She asks, “Does good handwriting signal intelligence?” and she then too quickly answers with an unexplained, categorical “no!”

The following observation is purely anecdotal, but may have a place here: In some four decades of academic life, during which I pre- and post-tested many students using standard IQ tests (not of course designed to detect associations between above-average intelligence and above-average handwriting), I could not help but notice that students (as well as fellow faculty) with good penmanship do, on average, show certain signs of above-average intelligence — specifically a more developed ability to organize their thoughts and express those thoughts with clarity, plus greater intellectual discipline and the abilities to exercise care, diligence and attentiveness. Can Ms. Trubek cite empirical studies that demonstrate no correlation between intelligence (in connection with the skills just mentioned) and good handwriting? Or is she simply expressing a rhetorical opinion — like mine, purely anecdotal?

Third, recognizing that handwriting as well as touch-typing are technologically primitive means of expression, we might be wise to ask whether the enforced slower speed of handwriting, for the great majority of us, serves as a desirable speed governor, putting the brakes on the inferior quality of the written word when it is allowed to flow to the screen at touch-typed velocity. Well-written prose is usually not accomplished at the hurried pace of most people’s stream of consciousness.

Last, as we become habituated to a society that has developed amnesia for the meanings of Platt Roger Spencer’s key terms, we might want to study (empirically, of course) whether learning the art of fine penmanship may, in fact, help to make a person more refined, genteel and upstanding. Certainly in these respects, we need all the help we can get. Cultivating fine handwriting can be a step, albeit perhaps only a small one, toward cultivation.

Steven J. Bartlett, Ph.D.
Visiting scholar in psychology, Willamette University
and senior research professor, Oregon State University
Salem, Ore.

And the minimum monthly payment on $825B would be … ?
Eighty billion dollars for clean energy sounds like a lot of money (“Adventures in Capitolism,” January-February 2010). However, it would buy approximately 40 gigawatts of land-based wind power, 26.67 GW of offshore wind or 12.3 GW of solar power. Building a new energy infrastructure based on clean, renewable energy would cost about $825 billion, less than the cost of the war in Iraq, which is, according to Alan Greenspan, “a war for oil.” Using technology available today, we would need about 100 GW of land-based wind, $200 billion; 100 GW of offshore wind, $300 billion; and 50 GW of solar, $325 billion. Saving civilization in the parlance of Madison Avenue, “priceless.”

Unlike coal and nuclear power, solar and wind power systems are not fuel dependent and don’t create wastes. Once the facility is built, it runs on a natural process, sunlight or wind. Fuel equals waste. No fuel, means no waste: no mercury, no radionucleotides, no arsenic, no greenhouse gases, no mines, mills, despoiled rivers and stripped mountains.

Harnessing natural processes is clean and sustainable. Consuming resources is neither.

Larry Furman
XBColdFingers.com
Englishtown, N.J

Let’s talk about the definition of legitimate
We have read several issues of Miller-McCune, and the articles seem to be well researched. However, what we have found missing is the lack of anything written about the other side of an issue where legitimate difference of opinion exists.

An example is the long-standing dispute, but never debated openly, about anthropogenic climate change. This is an issue of profound importance. Both sides of the issue should be presented before any decisions are made that could drastically affect all of us.

How many people know, for example, the history of Roger Revelle who started the global warming/CO2 controversy with an article co-authored with Hans Suess in 1957? Revelle is considered the “grandfather” of global warming and was the mentor of Al Gore. However, he authored an article in 1991 with Chauncey Starr for Cosmos magazine in which he stated that CO2 was not a problem. Revelle died of a heart attack three months after the Cosmos article was printed, but it appears that he would likely be a denier of anthropogenic climate change today.

The recent revelations from the Climatic Research Unit e-mails clearly suggest that there should be more discussion of the issue. There are many well-known scientists that need to be heard such as Lord Christopher Monckton, who is chief policy adviser of the Science and Public Policy Institute, and I hope Miller-McCune would consider an article on this important issue.

Verne E. Dow
Topeka, Kan.

Editor in Chief John Mecklin responds: As the saying goes, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. The deniers of anthropogenic climate change are — according to an overwhelming consensus of thousands of scientists around the world, as embodied in the most recent assessment report of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — simply wrong. This is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of facts, determined to a high level of likelihood through decades of research. We do not publish the writings of geocentrists who want to argue with Copernicus and, therefore, we direct climate change denialists in search of a forum to the Web site of The Flat Earth Society, which has been “Deprogramming the masses since 1547″ and may be in need of new writers.

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