Big Oil wins this round; offshore ban is gone

(Photo of offshore oil platform from Flickr and photographer absolutwade/Beau Wade)

Washington Report: Big Oil has won, at least for now. After spending millions on lobbying, and taking advantage of the rise in gas prices to win over two powerful advocates, President Bush and John McCain, it has two-thirds of the country believing we need to drill offshore – and drill now. Not to mention those omnipresent American Petroleum Institute ads of an annoying woman of indeterminate age in a black pantsuit who strides across the U.S. map as if she owns it, telling us Congress has put most of the oil reserves in the U.S. off bounds. Well, they aren’t anymore. For the first time in 26 years, Congress has let the moratorium on offshore drilling expire. Starting Oct. 1 oil rigs technically could spring up just 3 miles offshore, except within 150 miles of Florida’s Gulf Coast, which was placed off-limits by a 2006 law. Also gone is the ban on oil shale in the West. It’s a huge step backward for the environment and a win for fossil fuels. Not satisfied, some lawmakers continue to push their drilling agendas. Republicans want to give the states a portion of the royalties (which some gulf states had and lost) and speed up leasing and permitting. Democrats from Massachusetts want to make sure to protect the Georges Bank fishing grounds (“shellfish, not Shell Oil”) and national marine sanctuaries from drilling. A new president and Congress could reinstate the ban. (E&E News PM)

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Watching television and films 'can make you mean'

The study, conducted in the UK but published in the United States, found that watching mean actions on screen makes people just as prone to violence as sitting through footage of violence itself.

The findings will fuel the controversy about the link between onscreen violence and real life behaviour.

Violence in films has long been blamed for physical aggression among children but the revelation that watching cruel and malicious behaviour is just as damaging could transform the debate about the age ratings applied to films.

The research was conducted by Dr Sarah Coyne, an assistant professor at Brigham Young University in Utah, but it focused on British women she observed while working at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston.

The students who took part in the experiment had their behaviour tested after watching one of three films: a knife fight from Kill Bill, which features Uma Thurman as an assassin; Mean Girls, which focuses on a character played by Lindsay Lohan who turns the tables on three bitchy female school bullies; and a calming séance scene from the romantic film What Lies Beneath.

Dr Coyne told The Sunday Telegraph: "We showed them the clips and then monitored their behaviour afterwards.

"They were told they were competing in a game against someone online and the loser would get a really loud blast of noise. They were able to set the level of the noise."

Those who watched Kill Bill or Mean Girls turned the noise up much louder than those who did not.

A second test used an actor who pretended to be a rude job applicant seeking a reference.

"Those who watched Kill Bill or Mean Girls were more aggressive on both tests than the third group."

Dr Coyne said the study is important because mean behaviour is far more prevalent than extreme violence. "Most of us are not physically violent. We don't go and kill somebody or stab somebody," she said. "But after watching they might just beat up their wife or talk down to their kid or spread a rumour. We see these lower level forms of aggression, this meanness, all the time."

Dr Coyne said the findings might drive some parents to push for episodes of aggression in films to be taken into account in assigning their ratings.

The study is in November's Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Dr Coyne's earlier work probed incidences of aggressive behaviour resulting from watching British soap operas, which feature up to 15 incidences of bitchy behaviour each hour.

UCLA mathematicians discover a 13-million-digit prime number

UCLA mathematicians appear to have won a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for discovering a 13-million-digit prime number that has long been sought by computer users.

While the prize money is nothing special, the bragging rights for discovering the 46th known Mersenne prime are huge.

"We're delighted," said UCLA's Edson Smith, leader of the effort. "Now we're looking for the next one, despite the odds," which are thought to be about one in 150,000 that any number tested will be a Mersenne prime.

Prime numbers are those, like three, seven and 11, that are divisible only by themselves and one. Mersenne primes, named after the 17th century French mathematician Marin Mersenne, who discovered them, take the form 2^P - 1, where P is also a prime number.

In the new UCLA prime, P = 43,112,609.

Thousands of people around the world have been participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, in which underused computing power is harnessed to perform the complex and tedious calculations needed to find and verify Mersenne primes. The prize is being offered for finding the first Mersenne prime with more than 10 million digits.

Smith and his UCLA colleagues have, since last fall, harnessed the power of the 75 machines in the university's Program in Computing/Math Computer Lab, which is used by students for computer projects. Smith, a system administrator, realized that the lab was using only a fraction of its available CPU power. Rather than let it go to waste, he and his colleagues decided to use it for the GIMPS project.

The new Mersenne prime was discovered Aug. 23 on a Dell Optiplex 745 running Windows XP. The number was verified by a different computer system running a different algorithm.

The new prime is the eighth Mersenne prime discovered at UCLA. In 1952, mathematician Raphael Robinson found five of them using UCLA's Standards Western Automatic Computer. They were the 13th through 17th Mersenne primes discovered, the first ones found in more than 75 years, and the first to be discovered using a digital computer. Each had a few hundred digits.

In 1961, mathematician Alexander Hurwitz discovered two more, each with more than 1,200 digits, on the university's IBM 7090 mainframe.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an activist group supporting individual rights on the Web. The group established a series of prizes in 1999 to promote cooperative computing on the Web.

The prize will be awarded when the new prime is published, probably next year. By prearrangement, half of the money will go to UCLA, a quarter of it will go to charity and the rest will go to other GIMPS participants and the organization itself.