The Chronicle: If conservatives and liberals can’t see eye to eye, it may be because their brains are wired differently from birth, according to researchers who have for the first time found a link between people’s political leanings and their physiology. The researchers’ report, published in today’s issue of the journal Science, suggests that genetic differences may help explain why some people favor capital punishment and the Iraq War, while others support gun control and...

Kara Swisher says the post-Seinfeld Microsoft’s ads are a vast improvement. She gives them a rhetorical Most Improved Award (It Wasn’t Hard Though): The message is aimed at attacking the more elitist message of Apple (AAPL) ads, which have effectively mocked PC guy relentlessly over the years as an oaf. In Microsoft’s ads, its own PC guy complains at the start of each that “I’ve been made into a stereotype.” They then proceed to show regular folk with some celebrities mixed in (including...

Yesterday, in my winning ways of our lying pols post, I pointed to Slate’s Farhad Manjoo asking Why isn’t Obama stretching the truth more often? I don’t know if Obama took the advice, but today I read that he has gone negative: In line with the expectations of most observers, the campaign has turned more negative since the conclusion of the Republican Convention. In the first week of advertising after the conventions, Obama aired a higher percentage of negative ads than did McCain. 56 percent...

In an AJC story on the growing DOT deficit in Georgia Jim Galloway noticed that the department has been seizing rights-of-way to no purpose: In one case, for a project on Ga. 316 and Ga. 81 in 1999, DOT told a man it needed land that he had bought less than six months before, intending to build a gas station. It usually takes years for a project to arrive at the construction stage, and the man asked DOT if it would let him build his station and make what profit he could until the agency was ready...

The state of Georgia is scheduled to execute Troy Anthony Davis at 7 p.m. on September 23. Dave Zirin, writing in the Huffington Post: Jocks 4 Justice (including the great Jim Brown) say: SAVE TROY DAVIS! Contact the Georgia Parole board to reconsider their decision denying Troy clemency. Fax: 404-651-8502 PH: 404-657-9350 Email: Clemency_information@pap.state.ga.us [...] HERE ARE UNDISPUTED FACTS: 1 – Troy’s fingerprints didn’t match those found at the crime scene 2 – There...

Valleywag said yesterday that Microsoft is set to make the announcement today: Microsoft’s version of the story: Redmond had always planned to drop Seinfeld. The awkward reality: The ads only reminded us how out of touch with consumers Microsoft is — and that Bill Gates’s company has millions of dollars to waste on hiring a has-been funnyman to keep him company. A PR person quoted says there is the “potential to do other things” with Seinfeld. Hardly anyone liked the ads....

Banks may be falling down but money management web sites are springing up all over. ReadWriteWeb has a roundup of the top Banking in the Cloud sites: These sites aren’t just simplified versions of our former desktop apps… they offer a number of features that take advantage of their “always on” status. Forget downloading updates and typing in your transactions line-by-line, these new banking 2.0 sites can offer you better insight into your financial situation with no additional...

And now for something completely different… EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo. A triumph of corporate-sponsored art. But why did the Spectacular Sticky Note Experiment premiere during the ABC Family miniseries Samurai Girl, and why did the show’s stars participate in the antics? “ABC Family was looking to do something innovative to promote Samurai Girl,” Grobe said via email, “and when they saw our test footage of the sticky note experiments, they liked...

Richard Cohen’s column in which he goes from lap dog to attack dog, The Ugly McCain, is sweeping through the blogosphere. A snippet: McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains — his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country...

Later: MSNBC analysis, “Video games can provide hands-on learning opportunities for kids that can be much more meaningful than reading a textbook.” ******* The Pew Internet and American Life Project is out with a new study (pdf) today that finds game playing is universal: 98% of American teens ages 12-17 play some kind of video game. Game playing experiences are diverse, often involve social interaction, and can cultivate teen civic engagement. From the MacArthur Foundation announcement: A...

Convicted of the 1989 killing of a Savannah police officer, Troy Anthony Davis is scheduled to be put to death in Jackson, Georgia at 7 p.m. on September 23. There is real reason to believe that he is being penalized for maintaining his innocence. He was denied clemency just six days before his Supreme Court hearing. He now faces near-certain death. Mary Jean Goode, a retired nurse writing in the AJC today, says she’s pro-life. And as a citizen of Georgia she pleads do not kill in my name: The...

In just about a half an hour, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report return from a week long hiatus after their hilarious Indecision 2008 convention coverage. While they were on break, I took the opportunity to speak about that coverage with Dr. Robert J. Thompson, Professor of Television and Popular Culture and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University: How do you think they did with the convention coverage? I have to say it again and I’ve said...

At his home after a battle with cancer. More here and here. _______________ Photo Creative Commons copyright: ©2006, patrizio1981.

Slate has commissioned a series of articles on aging and the aged: Last week, the Republican Party nominated John McCain as its candidate for president. As you may have heard, McCain is no spring chicken. Having just turned 72, he would be the oldest man ever elected president of the United States if he wins. McCain’s age has provided much fodder for the nation’s political cartoonists and late night television hosts, who have mercilessly portrayed the candidate as a doddering coot. Here...

Last night All Things Considered weighed in on the “lipstick on a pig” brouhaha by talking with Joel Salatin, a farmer from Swoope, Va., as he attempted to actually put lipstick on a pig. Of course, given that he was doing this on radio, we couldn’t actually see anything. As it happens, I visited Joel’s farm last summer… and have footage of the pigs (sans lipstick)… What does it say about us that on the seventh anniversary of 9/11 this is the lead on our morning...

Adam Thierer groups recent net books: Internet Optimists Internet Pessimists Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur Chris Anderson, The Long Tail and “Free!” Lee Siegal, Against the Machine Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody Nick Carr, The Big Switch Cass Sunstein, Infotopia Cass Sunstein, Republic.com Don Tapscott, Wikinomics Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited Kevin Kelly & Wired mag...

Jonathan Weisman, writing in the WaPo, says that As Campaign Heats Up, Untruths Can Become Facts Before They’re Undone. A sad truth: John Feehery, a Republican strategist, said the campaign is entering a stage in which skirmishes over the facts are less important than the dominant themes that are forming voters’ opinions of the candidates. “The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there’s a bigger truth out there...

Kaltura Wired’s Threat Level brings word of an ambitious new nonprofit organization. Remix America is headed by Emmy Award-winning comedy television writer Fred Graver, and was co-founded with Norman Lear. Their goal is to use mashups to engage an online audience in political ideas and expression. And, through a licensing arrangement with Kaltura for an online video editing tool, they provide the means to do it: “I thought to myself: Gee, there’s a whole culture out there, but nowhere...

Fortune quotes analyst Gene Munster, suggesting his appearance at Let’s Rock signals Steve Jobs must be feeling better: In a note to clients Monday, Munster doesn’t claim to have any inside information about the health of Apple’s (AAPL) CEO, who had a cancerous tumor removed from his pancreas in 2004 (see “The trouble with Steve Jobs“). At his last public appearance in June (pictured right), Jobs looked surprisingly thin, setting off several rounds of speculation about what might have...

You don’t want to miss Ariel Levy’s New Yorker profile of Cindy McCain: When I travelled with the campaign in late spring, I asked the McCains, who were seated on the curved banquette at the back of the Straight Talk Express, how they imagined Cindy’s role as First Lady might affect her humanitarian work. “I think some of her travels might be curtailed,” Senator McCain, who was wearing a blue Navy baseball cap, replied. “She’s been to Cambodia, where land mines are very dangerous,...

Benjamin Barber argues in his latest book, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, that the market has consumerism has begun to replace citizenship. From an interviewed in the Free Lance Star Ledger: Capitalism has been an immensely productive and efficient form of social and economic organization, and it was predicated at its birth on the notion that if you produce goods and services that people really needed, you could both provide for the public...

Clive Thompson has a fascinating piece in the NYTimes Magazine today, Brave New World of Digital Intimacy, delving into the effects of news feeds, Twitter and other forms of online contact: Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook...

The Comedy Central gang had fodder for a terrific week. As a freshly-minted small town guy, I’ll start with their “best news team on the planet” finding out what small town values really mean at the RNC:

Amid reports this week that textbook sales are down at university presses while students flock to web sites offering pirated textbooks, there’s this: If professors make chapters of a book available as e-reserves in the library, or get that material to their classes via Blackboard, students don’t need to buy the book, and the professors may get out of having to pay a permission fee to the publisher. To resolve the problem, presses “are going to have to start making it easy for people...

Update: The clemency  hearing has been set for Friday, Sept. 12th. ************** The recantations of seven of the nine witnesses against him and support from Amnesty International, Hollywood celebrities, civil rights activists, the European Parliament, and Pope Benedict XVI have not stopped the Georgia Department of Corrections from ordering the execution to take place on September 23, 2008, at 7 p.m. EST. EyeID: Mr. Davis is charged with killing a police officer, based entirely on eyewitness evidence. ...