Kids, ethics, and religion

Breitbart.com reports on a study of the ethics of American youth. After discussing such topics as lying and stealing, the authors turn to education:

“Cheating in school continues to be rampant and it’s getting worse,” the study found. Amongst those surveyed, 64 percent said they had cheated on a test, compared to 60 percent in 2006. And 38 percent said they had done so two or more times.

Despite no significant gender differences on exam cheating, students from non-religious independent schools had the lowest cheating rate, 47 percent, compared to 63 percent of students attending religious schools.

Wing Luke Asian Museum

Kate, Hannah and I spent the morning on a guided tour around the Wing Luke Asian Museum, just a couple of blocks from the apartment. It’s a really great place to visit, but don’t just go to the museum. Take a tour. It costs a dollar more, but you see many additional exhibits, including the painstakingly restored rooms of the old hotel that once occupied the top two floors of the building.
Rather than trying to give my impressions of the museum, let me refer you to this excellent review from the New York Times which describes it much better than I could.

Moving to the Mini

About a year ago I started having problems with my Powerbook. The most common pattern was that I would try to restart it (after, say, a software upgrade), and I’d be faced with a black screen, requiring me to reset the Power Management Unit. This was a hit-or-miss affair, and required at least one trip to the Genius Bar. My diagnosis:

The PMU is dying, slowly, and inducing a variety of failure modes. The trick is going to be inducing a hard failure, or at least a failure that the Genius will take seriously.

In March this year I bought myself a MacBook Air, intending to use the Powerbook as a remote CD, print server, iPhone backup, and media hub. Realizing that the PB might fail at any time, I shifted my iTunes and photo libraries to an external HD.
Last week, things took a turn for the worse. I installed some new software on the PB, the restart failed, I reset the PMU (with difficulty), and when it rebooted I decided to check the disk. There were lots of errors. I rebooted from the OS X DVD, repaired the disk, and restarted. A day later, the system failed again, and Disk Utility reported more errors. And this time, when I tried to repair them, I saw:
"The volume Macintosh HD could not be repaired."
And just to make sure that I didn’t try anything rash, Disk Utility marked the HD as unbootable.
What to do? I had a complete backup on my Time Capsule, so I had the option of scrubbing the disk, reinstalling Leopard, and then restoring my backup. But how much could I trust the hardware? I decided that the time had come to replace the PB – but with what? I couldn’t really use the MacBook Air for all of those functions, but I didn’t want to spend much money.
At this point I remembered that I still had my Samsung monitor. When I first arrived in Seattle, I bought myself a nice SyncMaster 940MW that could work as a TV or a computer monitor. A few months later, I acquired a Sharp HDTV, and the SyncMaster was relegated to occasional use as a second screen for the PB. I had a mouse (plenty of them, actually), so the obvious solution was to get a Mac Mini and an Apple keyboard. I decided that I didn’t really need a DVD burner or extra RAM, which meant that I could get the basic Mac Mini (1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, Combo Drive) and be up and running for around $700.
So I ordered the Mac Mini and an Apple Keyboard on Monday, and they arrived yesterday. Basic setup was a breeze, and it all just works – though I’m holding off for a couple of days before restoring stuff from the Time Capsule. I love the minimalist design of the keyboard – like the keyboard on the MacBook Air, it’s way ahead of what I was used to on the PB, and significantly better than the white MacBook I’m using for work. And the Samsung monitor works perfectly, via DVI. (No VGA nonsense here.) It’s looking good…..

The Bond market declines

Kate, Hannah and I went to see The Quantum of Solace at the Cinerama this evening. After the success of Casino Royale, I had great hopes for it. Sadly, no. Muddled plot, unmemorable characters (except for Bond and M), and a ridiculous reliance on special effects. The film does set some kind of record for the variety of chases: a car chase, a running-across-the-rooftops chase, a boat chase, and a plane chase. Each raises the improbability level a notch: picking a random beat-up old boat in a harbour and finding that it had a supercharged engine that could outperform the bad guys, then renting a decrepit old DC-3 in the Bolivian desert and performing low-level aerobatics in narrow canyons that would be the envy of Top Gun – and without the wings coming off. That was just silly. On the plus side, the computer user interface in use at MI6 takes the design from Minority Report and raises the bar a couple of notches.

Religion and niceness

Over at Slate, Paul Bloom takes a look at a seeming paradox. On the one hand, American atheists seem to be less happy than believers. On the other, mostly atheistic societies like Norway and Sweden are much happier and healthier than the US. He suggests that it’s the result of community and exclusion.

American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community life. The studies that Brooks cites in Gross National Happiness, which find that the religious are happier and more generous then the secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness can have a corrosive effect on morality. As P.Z. Myers, the biologist and prominent atheist, puts it, “[S]cattered individuals who are excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of community, nor do they feel willing to contribute to the communities that exclude them.”

The sorry state of American atheists, then, may have nothing to do with their lack of religious belief. It may instead be the result of their outsider status within a highly religious country where many of their fellow citizens, including very vocal ones like Schlessinger, find them immoral and unpatriotic. Religion may not poison everything, but it deserves part of the blame for this one.

Coincidentally vjack has a piece up at Atheist Revolution endorsing the idea that philanthropy may be a good organizing principle for atheist community.

Emergency preparedness

Following on from my recent posting about securing the bookshelves to the wall, I’ve now obtained a three day disaster readiness pack. It’s a good basic kit, but I had to throw in a few obvious extras: a crank-chargeable flashlight, a Swiss Army knife, and some glucose and caffeine tablets. Add a few litres of bottled water (replenished regularly), and we should be all set. Let’s hope it remains unused.

Redefining "Single-Celled"

You think “single-celled” means “microsopic”? Meet Gromia sphaerica. 1.2 cm across. That’s the size of a grape. And they leave trails – and they may have been doing so all the way back to the Preambrian Precambrian.

Gimme that old time dysfunctionality…

Ruth Gledhill reviews belatedly catches up with Gregory Paul’s study in the latest a 2005 issue of the Journal of Religion and Society. She begins thus:

Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.

Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.

The correlations between religious belief and social dysfunction won’t come as a surprise to my (mostly) secular liberal readers. However one should always be cautious about leaping from correlation to causation. Case in point: there is a strong regional correlation in the USA between religiosity and violent crime. However both are also negatively correlated with education and economic status, and these are rather more plausible causal agents.
Gledhill writes:

He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills.

Really? This could be interesting, and certainly worth reading. At the very least, it looks pretty conclusive that religion does nothing to mitigate or reduce social dysfunction.
UPDATE: Thanks to benjdm for the correction.