Terence R. Wilken writes: Do any of you remember the TV serial called The Prisoner?  It was a British story that starred Patrick McGoohan.  It was a story that involved a British under cover that got caught and imprisoned on an island.  He had his own apartment, and there were other townspeople that lived on the same island.  They were all happy, and pleased with their plight.  He was not.  He tried to escape in every episode.  When he was about to escape, the “guards” sent a big clear bubble after him.  It enveloped him inside and returned him to civilization. Will the same thing happen to the housing market? The bad news is that it may have already started.  When everyone jumps on the housing market as the latest money making fad, it may be time to get out.  The first sign of a bubble is when everyone decides to join the money making scheme. Interest rates are relatively cheap.  People are of the opinion that the price of housing can never go down.  They are buying housing with 0 down, and interest only payments. If housing ever starts down, there will be a lot of owners trying to get out at the same time. The bubble will burst. (06/02/05)
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BBC Nature –
Italian environmentalists face a battle to stop the hunting of
protected birds, a pursuit considered acceptable in many areas despite
its illegality. On the rugged, volcanic island of Ischia on the Bay of
Naples, I visited a camp where volunteers from WWF Italy have been
trying to stop the trapping and hunting of birds on their migratory
journey from Africa to Northern Europe. Leading the team was an
enthusiastic amateur ornithologist from Milan, Daniele Colombo. Daniele
and his friends gave up their holidays to perform a depressing and
often fruitless task. I joined them at their headquarters one morning
as they surveyed the evidence of their night’s work. From the early
hours of the morning they had been patrolling the cliffs and hillsides,
searching for traps and snares and hoping to intercept hunters armed
with shotguns. They had enjoyed some success. Laid out on a table were
about 50 small spring-loaded traps. Daniele explained how the traps do
their deadly work. He pointed out that each trap was baited with a
maggot or a worm, still wriggling on its pin. Hungry and exhausted
birds, desperate for food, take the bait and spring the trap which
captures them around the neck, killing them instantly. At least half of
the traps held pathetic little corpses. “Today all of them are
whinchats,” Daniele told me, “they are the most numerous victims. But
we also find pied flycatchers, nightingales, stonechats, redstarts,
robins, thrushes and various warblers.” I remarked that most of these
are very small species, weighing only a few grammes, but I was assured
that nothing is too small to be trapped and eaten. … When I travelled
from Ischia back to Naples I came across another example of how
thoroughly established illegal hunting is in Italian culture. … I had
an appointment to see General Fernando Fuschetti of the Forestry Police
who wanted to show me what he regarded as one of his recent successes.
He took me to a wetland near Naples where his men had raided and shut
down a string of 10 hunting ponds. “These ponds,” he told me, “have
been run by an organised crime syndicate for poaching wildfowl during
the closed season.” The business had allegedly been turning over
millions of euros for the bad guys. (06/02/05)
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BBC Environment — A
list of the 800 most important sites for wild plants in central and
Eastern Europe has been published by the charity, Plantlife
International. Many of the sites contain endangered species yet a fifth
is without legal protection. Agriculture, forestry and tourism are the
main threats to “Europe’s last areas of wilderness,” says the report.
If they cannot be saved “we risk a spiritual impoverishment such as no
generation has known before”, it says. Hundreds of specialists from
academic institutions and non-governmental organisations identified the
best sites for wild plants, fungi and their habitat in seven countries.
They were Belarus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland, Romania,
Slovakia and Slovenia. The report also looked at the threats to each
internationally important site for wild plants (IPA). It found that:
poor forestry practices threaten 44% of IPAs, tourism threatens 38%,
and agricultural intensification (grazing, hay-making, arable)
threatens 29%. Other threats include development, urban and transport,
and invasive plant species. (06/02/05)
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BBC Health — A
key hormone helps determine whether we will trust lovers, friends or
business contacts, scientists claim. Exposure to an oxytocin “potion”led people to be more trusting, tests by University of Zurich
researchers found. They say in Nature the finding could help people
with conditions such as autism, where relating to others can be a
problem. But one expert warned it could be misused by politicians who
want to persuade more people to back them. Oxytocin is a molecule
produced naturally in the hypothalamus area of the brain which
regulates a variety of physiological processes, including emotion. It
also acts on other brain regions whose function is associated with
emotional and social behaviours, such as the amygdala. And animal
studies have shown oxytocin is linked to bonding between males and
females and mother infant bonding. The Swiss team suspected the same
effect may occur in humans and invited 58 people to take part in a
“trust test”. The participants in the study played a game, in which
they were split into “investors” and “trustees”. The investors were
then given credits and told they could chose whether to hand over zero,
four, eight or 12 credits to their assigned trustee. If the investor
showed trust, the total amount which could be distributed between the
two increased, but the trustee initially reaped all the reward. It was
then up to them to decide if they would honour the investor’s trust by
sharing the profit equally - or if they would keep the lot. At the end
of the game, the credits were translated into real money, meaning both
participants had a selfish financial incentive. Investors and trustees
were either given oxytocin via a nasal spray, or a dummy, or placebo,
version. Of 29 investors who were given oxytocin, 13 (45%) displayed
“maximal trust” by choosing to invest highly, compared to six (21%) of
the 29 investors who were given the dummy spray. Oxytocin did not
change the behaviour of trustees. In addition, when trustees were
replaced by a computer, the oxytocin effect was no longer seen on the
investors. (06/02/05)
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