fak3r

A sad study showing that most kids are already prejudiced by age 6. Damn, this is awful.

By age 6, many kids are well schooled in societal prejudice. In a study, researchers interviewed 92 African-American first- and sixth-graders from varying socioeconomic backgrounds about job status and their own interest in particular occupations.

Children from all economic backgrounds associated white workers with jobs that they saw as higher in status. Furthermore, when asked about unfamiliar and even imaginary jobs such as a “tenic,” someone who organizes and marks handicapped parking spaces, children rated careers pictured with white workers above those depicted with black workers or a mixed group.

“It’s troubling that children in our society take race as something that defines the status, importance, and pay of jobs,” says Lynn S. Liben, professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University and coauthor of the study, published in Developmental Psychology.

Liben also found that poor children in the sixth-grade group showed less interest in high status jobs such as a doctor or airline pilot, which they saw as occupied primarily by whites. She speculates that underprivileged children in particular may “self-select” away from high status jobs because they assume a lack of access to the education and resources needed to attain them.

Go to the Eracism site and get a sticker, shirt or something to spread the word that we want an end to this disgusting way of thinking.

Looks like the merits of prayer on under fire again, “A recent study conducted by the Duke University Medical Center on 700 patients, found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. Researchers emphasized their work does not address whether God exists or answers prayers made on another’s behalf. This result seems to contradict a previous study by the same authors that reported “cardiac patients who received intercessory prayer in addition to coronary stenting appeared to have better clinical outcomes than those treated with standard stenting therapy alone.” We’ll see how this plays out, for now if I get sick I’d like everyone to curse for me, I suspect that might be more helpful.

Since I’ve been running Typo for this blog I’ve been having Apache do a mod_proxy to pass anything bound for fak3r.com to a port that Typo is running on with LightTPD spitting up the pages. I’ve read about how much faster Lighttpd is, but today I wanted to test it out on my own enviroment in the hopes that it would convince me to migrate over, if for nothing else that to learn a new webserver. Well, you can draw your own conclusions from the results, and I’ll update things later. First we run the ApacheBench (packaged with Apache, or available via CPAN - HTTPD::Bench::ApacheBench) benchmarking tool set for 10 concurrent users, each making 1000 requests (so a total of 10,000 requests) with Apache 2.0.55 running. Note that is simply pulling whatever it finds in /:

[13:50:01] [root@pepe ~]# ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev <$Revision: 1.121.2.12 $> apache-2.0
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking localhost (be patient)
Completed 1000 requests
Completed 2000 requests
Completed 3000 requests
Completed 4000 requests
Completed 5000 requests
Completed 6000 requests
Completed 7000 requests
Completed 8000 requests
Completed 9000 requests
Finished 10000 requests

Server Software:        Apache
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        1494 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   17.28184 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      17280000 bytes
HTML transferred:       14940000 bytes
Requests per second:    587.26 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       17.028 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       1.703 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          991.00 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.9      0      84
Processing:     2   15   3.2     16     102
Waiting:        0    8   5.3     10     100
Total:          2   15   3.3     16     102

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50%     16
66%     16
75%     17
80%     17
90%     17
95%     17
98%     18
99%     19
100%    102 (longest request)

And now the same test, 10,000 requests total, but with LightTPD 1.4.9 running the show:

[14:07:16] [root@pepe /usr/local/etc]# ab -n 10000 -c 10 http://localhost/
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev <$Revision: 1.121.2.12 $> apache-2.0
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/

Benchmarking localhost (be patient)
Completed 1000 requests
Completed 2000 requests
Completed 3000 requests
Completed 4000 requests
Completed 5000 requests
Completed 6000 requests
Completed 7000 requests
Completed 8000 requests
Completed 9000 requests
Finished 10000 requests

Server Software:        lighttpd/1.4.9
Server Hostname:        localhost
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /
Document Length:        1494 bytes

Concurrency Level:      10
Time taken for tests:   6.337037 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Total transferred:      17270000 bytes
HTML transferred:       14940000 bytes
Requests per second:    1578.02 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       6.337 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       0.634 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          2661.34 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.0      0       1
Processing:     4    5   1.0      6      22
Waiting:        0    5   1.0      5      22
Total:          4    5   1.0      6      22

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50%      6
66%      6
75%      6
80%      6
90%      6
95%      6
98%      7
99%      7
100%     22 (longest request)

So yes, this just shows Lighttpd kicking ass on pulling a small (1.5K) file over and over, but shows that they have a different approach. I’m going to do some more benchmarking, but want to move my entire webserver over to Lighttpd, and will once I figure out how to fix the Drupal 4.6 not working with lighttpd 1.4, php 4.4. Essentially it fails to find any of the multi hosted ‘sites’ hosted under the same Drupal instance. I currently have 3, but it defaults to ‘default’ making it unable (or unwilling?) to display the other sites. My options are try to fix it, or migrate all the sites over to Typo; both are being considered.

In more good eating news, a recent finding has determined that dark chocolate is good for the heart. Again, like beer and coffee, moderation is the key, but again, it’s that ‘daily’ mention that I like! ”Only a small daily treat of dark chocolate may substantially increase the amount of antioxidant intake and beneficially affect vascular health,” the report’s authors said. … The group, who were asked to abstain from eating foods rich in antioxidants for 24 hours, were given 40 grams of chocolate to eat. … After two hours, ultrasound scans revealed that dark chocolate - made up of 74 per cent cocoa solids - significantly improved the smoothness of arterial flow, an effect which lasted eight hours. When the experiment was repeated with white chocolate - with only four-per-cent cocoa - there was no effect, the study published in Heart medical journal said. The researchers, who said further studies were needed, suggested that the possible benefits arose from the antioxidants in dark chocolate. Dark chocolate contains more antioxidants per gram than other food and drink with the same properties, such as red wine, tea and berry fruits.”

I’m always seeing reports that basically state the same thing; moderate drinking is good for you, but now we also learn that it can may lower risk of becoming obese! So while past reports have touted decreased chance of heart disease and high blood pressure, today’s report states that, “…new research suggests it may also help you stay svelte. Regular drinkers who consume one or two drinks a few times a week are less likely to be obese compared with people who do not drink” with the obvious disclaimer, “However, having four or more drinks per day increases the risk of being obese by 46 percent, researchers report.” So there’s another reason that it’s not only OK, but perhaps benificial in many ways for you to have a few beers at night after a (boring) day at work. So in the words of James Rohrer, from the department of family medicine at the Mayo Clinic, “Moderation is the best policy,” he says. “Moderate drinking is probably a reasonably healthy behavior. We cannot show any benefits from the complete abstention from alcohol.” Bottoms up.

A nursing home in Ireland has hit on a cheering way to keep up the spirits of its elderly patients — by providing its own pub. St Mary’s Hospital in County Monaghan, near the Irish border with Northern Ireland, believes ready access to a good pint may help its patients — average age 85 — actually live longer. “We would say the whole social aspect of life does extend the years — it means the patients aren’t bored to death,” Rose Mooney, assistant director of nursing told Reuters. The pub, which opens at 11 a.m. and closes at 9 p.m. and charges normal bar prices, had also led to an increase in the number of visitors, she said. Having its own bar made the hospital, which has around 140 patients, unique in Ireland, she added. The benefits are twofold; moderate beer consumption is good for you (”beer drinking has equal or perhaps more benefit than wine or spirits“), as is socializing (”Social engagement was as strong as anything we found in determining longevity. “It was stronger than things like blood pressure, cholesterol, or other measures of health”) So, either having pubs in nursing homes is going to catch on here, or I’m going to retire to Ireland.