Archive for July 28th, 2008
Why you should play with your cat
In America, the feline has officially replaced the canine as the most popular pet and the beloved pet of choice. More families in the USA have cats now than dogs – and the majority of families with cats have more than one feline sharing their home. As more and more people are realizing the high risks in these modern times of letting their cat roam outdoors – (the current statistics are very grim in that outdoor only and indoor/outdoor cats without human supervision now live an average of only 2 to 3 years, versus an average of 16 to 17 years for indoor only cats), in order to keep our cats healthy and safe, we are keeping them confined indoors. It is not a coincidence, however, that as this change has taken place, the incidence of feline behavior problems such as self-mutilation, excessive self-licking, marking with urine or feces, and loud, compulsive vocalization, has been on the rise – all with no apparent physical or medical cause.
This phenomenon is not limited to house cats, but is also happening in zoos, and other areas and parks where felines are confined. Behaviorists at the San Diego Zoo, however, have discovered that simply by adding some safe, creative challenges each day within the enclosures of their Indo-Chinese Tigers, for example, keep these felines stimulated, both physically and mentally, and they are happier and live longer, without displaying some of the same compulsive behaviors as their indoor domestic feline relatives.
Boredom, loneliness, and a lack of challenge can be extremely stressful to cats. The feline by nature is inquisitive, social, and playful, and when their lives become so isolated, without adventures to observe or participate in, and without any trouble to get into or new things in their environment to explore, they can get depressed, and perhaps even feel no sense of purpose to their lives. This of course, can lead them to becoming lethargic and more susceptible to illness.
So, what are the options available for providing more stimulation for your own indoor cat??
OpenOffice 3.0
I have some OpenOffice fans among my readers, I know. Via Becoming a Writer Seriously, here’s what to expect.
Monica Badling
Today’s Justice Department report — which faults department aide Monica Goodling for “violating federal law” through politicized hiring practices — reveals Goodling’s bizarre and thorough way of ensuring she hired only the most tried and true conservatives. Besides asking applicants, “Why are you a Republican?” or “What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?”, Goodling also judged applicants by asking them to name public officials they admired:
Several candidates interviewed by Goodling told us they believed that her question about identifying their favorite Supreme Court Justice, President, or legislator was an attempt to determine the candidates’ political beliefs. For example, one candidate reported that after he stated he admired Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Goodling “frowned” and commented, “but she’s pro-choice.”
The report noted that Goodling refused to hire one Assistant U.S. Attorney because she thought he was a “‘political infant’ who had not ‘proved himself’ to the Republican Party by being involved enough in political campaigns.”
Police officers and daily life
First, a little video from Treehugger taken during a “Critical Mass” rally.
Critical Mass is a peaceful, nonviolent bicycle ride promoting the use of nonpolluting transportation,” said Critical Mass participant Barbara Ross, in a statement. “There is no reason for the police to use such unprovoked violent tactics.” Cyclist Richard Vazques then evidently had to spend 26 hours in jail for resisting arrest.
Now you’re prepared to watch these two videos, offering very sound advice.
American citizen being held by DHS
WASHINGTON: Nayyar Zaidi, the well-known US-based Pakistani-American journalist, who has been a citizen of the United States for more than 30 years has been in US custody for the last four months on what are said to be terrorism-related charges.
According to one report, Zaidi is being held on the charge of “obstruction of justice”, a very serious offence. He is also said to be awaiting a trial.
The Homeland Security Department or the FBI have made no announcement about his arrest or incarceration. His family, when asked for his whereabouts, has continued to claim that “he is in Pakistan”. The Pakistan embassy, like Zaidi’s journalist colleagues, who have repeatedly phoned the family, has also been given the same answer. When asked why he is in Pakistan and what has taken him there or how long he is to be away, the callers have been told, “We cannot say” or “We do not know.” The news of Zaidi’s arrest – he is believed to be in an Ohio prison – was broken by the New Jersey-based website Des Prades at the weekend.
However, there is a history to this story. On Feb. 20, 2003, Zaidi was visited by three FBI agents at his residence in Prince County, Virginia, while he was away from home. The three agents tried to interrogate Zaidi’s 15-year old son Zain Zaidi, who immediately phoned his father but by the time he got home, the agents were gone, leaving a phone number that they said he should reach them at. When Zaidi called that number, he was asked to come over to the FBI’s Washington field office and asked several questions about his personal, social and religious activities. The agent questioning him, also asked him to bring his phone notebook with him because of an FBI claim that Zaidi’s home phone had been used for making calls to 10 numbers in Pakistan, China, India, the Netherlands and Thailand. Those numbers, an agent by the name of Chris MdKinney, added, were under investigation for links to the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
Two of the numbers – one in Pakistan and the other in China – that they claimed had been called from Zaidi’s phone respectively were (9221) 2633066 and 86-51081254. The Pakistan number, Zaidi told the FBI, bore similarity to a fax number that he often called in Karachi to file his news and other reports.
Zaidi has filed for the Jang Group of Newspapers for more than 25 years. The Pakistan phone number was officially investigated by Pakistani authorities, which found it to be the disconnected number of a textile company that had gone bankrupt. When Zaidi asked to be given other numbers that had allegedly been called from his phone, the request was refused.
Zaidi offered to cooperate with the FBI but refused to hand over his phone notebook or any records unless the agents came up with legal grounds to make such a demand. He was left alone until August 8, 2003 when two different FBI agents came to his home while he was away.
When he called them on August 11, leaving three messages, his calls were not returned. The embassy also took up the issue of this FBI intrusion with the State Department, which promised to look into the matter. Nothing more was heard of it till Zaidi’s mysterious disappearnce in late March this year.
Excellent tip re: brown rice and neuropathy in diabetes
You know what I’m having tomorrow:
You may want to soak your brown rice.
Researchers have found that a compound that helps rice seed grow, springs back into action when brown rice is placed in water overnight before cooking, significantly reducing the nerve and vascular damage that often result from diabetes.
“You have to let it grow, germinate a little bit,” says Dr. Robert K. Yu, director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine and Genetics and Institute of Neuroscience at the Medical College of Georgia. “Some of the active ingredients generated as a result of the germination process are beneficial to you.”
Germinated brown rice’s ability to help diabetics lower their blood sugar has been shown but how it works remained unknown. New research, published online in the Journal of Lipid Research, shows the growth factor acylated steryl glucosides or ASG, helps normalize blood sugar and enzymes that are out-of-whack in diabetes.
“The advantage of knowing this key ingredient and its structure is we can now make a ton of it; you don’t have to rely on rice to produce it or eating rice to get this beneficial effect,” says Dr. Yu, the paper’s corresponding author.
Studies were done in animal models of type 1 diabetes with two different blood sugar levels that reflect patients’ varying blood sugars. They were fed diets of white, brown or pre-germinated brown rice. Unlike white rice, less-processed brown rice still has some of the germ or growth structure that, after about 24 hours in water, resumes activity. Scientists watched as the resurrected ASG, a growth factor and lipid, helped normalize metabolism.
“When blood sugar levels increase, the metabolic balance changes,” says Dr. Seigo Usuki, neurobiologist in the MCG School of Medicine and the paper’s first author. “Part of the way we know this growth factor works is by increasing levels of good enzymes that are decreased in diabetes.”
Dr. Usuki is talking about enzymes such as ATPase, which help maintain nerve membranes so they can conduct electricity and communicate. Decrease of ATPase is a hallmark of the nerve damage that accompanies diabetes. Also reduced in diabetes is homocysteine-thiolactonase, or HTase, an enzyme that decreases levels of homocysteine, a known risk factor for vascular disease. The liver produces a low level of homocysteine but that level is elevated in diabetes while the enzyme that controls it decreases. Unchecked, homocysteine makes oxidative stress compounds that injure and kill cells. HTase is one way HDL, the so-called “good cholesterol,” helps protect blood vessels from disease. A regular diet of pre-germinated brown rice diet helps get both back to a healthier level.
Fancl Hatsuga Genmai Co., Ltd., in Yokohama, Japan, which funded the studies and supplied the pre-germinated rice, already is working with Dr. Usuki on a supplement that can provide consumers who prefer not to soak – or eat – rice with the benefits of ASG.
The MCG research team reported in December 2007 in Nutrition & Metabolism that pre-germinated brown rice was better at protecting nerves from diabetes than un-soaked brown or white rice. They showed a then-unidentified lipid helped protect the nerve membrane and increase activity of HTase and the good cholesterol. Germination also is known to increase levels of the neurotransmitter GABA, which is believed to have many beneficial health effects such as lowering blood pressure, improving cognition and lowering blood glucose levels. However the MCG scientists have shown the lipid has a more powerful impact on HTase activity.
The germ layer activated by soaking brown rice contains many vitamins and minerals in addition to the bioactive ingredient that would be beneficial to everyone, Dr. Yu says. The roughage of the rice grain also is helpful.
More good stuff from Russ Kick
The Memory Hole does an invaluable service. The most recent post:
ACLU posts three more torture memos from CIA and Justice Dept [ACLU]
53 new documents posted at the CIA’s FOIA site [CIA]
Pentagon Inspector General audit: “Accountability for Defense Security Service Assets With Personally Identifiable Information” [DOD IG] [News article]
Pentagon FOIA release: “National Security Personnel System payouts FY 2007″ [DOD]
>>> background: What is NSPS? [SecDef]Terrorism-related DOJ / US Attorney indictments, January 1994 – April 2004 [Government Attic]
Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction audit: “Comprehensive Plan Needed to Guide the Future of the Iraq Reconstruction Management System” [SIGIR]
Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction report: “Key Recurring Management Issues Identified in Audits of Iraq Reconstruction Efforts” [SIGIR]
Justice Dept Inspector General report: “An Investigation of Allegations of Politicized Hiring by Monica Goodling and Other Staff in the Office of the Attorney General, July 2008″ [DOJ IG]
EPA graciously allows 3 Senators to briefly view document concluding that greenhouse gases contribute to climate change [WaPo]
>>> related: Republicans block effort to subpoena global warming documents [LAT]
>>> related: Documents show EPA staff ordered to stonewall investigators and media [PEER]
Authorized Classification Markings in U.S. Intelligence [Secrecy News]
Why Is It So Hard to Get Documents from the National Archives About the National Archives? [HNN via FGI]
NIOSH report shows prison staff & inmates exposed to toxic metals for years [PEER]
UK: Leaked witness statements in trial of Corporal Daniel James [Cryptome]
Want to know what’s in your FBI file? [Exhibit A Baltimore] (Thanks, M)
Corruption of the Department of Justice
The blogs and papers are filled with stories about how totally the Department of Justice has been corrupted, including Goodling’s and Samson’s clearly illegal activity. Question: Will they be prosecuted? No, because in Washington today people who break the law, however openly, are not prosectued unless they are street criminals. Crimes committed in the halls of power are immune from prosecution. Our government is corrupt.
Here are some good posts, worth clicking through:
Kate Klonick at TPMMuckraker
Preparing your home for sale
A good list of tips, though it strangely omits a tip I have found effective: create a pleasant and homey fragrance in the house when it’s shown. For example, if you can bake a loaf of bread just before a prospect arrives, or a batch of cinnamon buns. In a pinch, just put some sticks of cinnamon and whole cloves in a pan of water, bring to the boil, and boil it for a while. The more attractive the house smells, the more appealing it will be.
Productivity myths
Yet another good post from Dustin Wax. The first two myths:
Myth 1: Organized equals clean
Too many people equate “organization” with the cold, sterile, un-lived-in spaces they see in glossy magazines. That’s not organization – the cleanest-looking space might still take forever to find anything in.
An organized space is simply one in which the things you need the most are close at hand, the things you need often are easily found, and the things you need rarely are out of the way but easily retrieved when needed. That means that organization has to meet your needs, not some imposed notion of cleanliness.
If you never spend more than a minute trying to find anything in that mountain of clutter you call your office (or room or cubicle or kitchen), then leave it alone. At the same time, be honest with yourself – most people claim they can find anything they need, but when put to the test, they’re left scratching their heads. If your clutter isn’t working for you, put some time into figuring out how to make sure it does work for you.
Myth 2: I don’t have time for a system
This is a popular complaint about systems like David Allen’s GTD. The thinking goes something like this: “If I spend all my time maintaining my list and doing weekly reviews, I’ll never get anything done.”
The reality is that while most systems take some time to get set up, once you start using your system, the time you use in “maintenance” is more than made up for by the time you save not having to think about what to do – or making up for the things you didn’t remember to do.
Myth 3: …
LEDs for lighting
Good story in the NY Times:
When the Sentry Equipment Corporation in Oconomowoc, Wis., was considering how to light its new factory last year, the company’s president, Michael Farrell, decided to try something new: light emitting diodes, or L.E.D.’s.
“I knew L.E.D.’s were used in stoplights. I wondered why they can’t be used in buildings,” Mr. Farrell said. “So I went on a mission.”
What Mr. Farrell found was a light source that many of the biggest bulb manufacturers are now convinced will supplant incandescent bulbs and compact fluorescent bulbs.
By lighting all of the building’s exterior and most of its interior with L.E.D.’s, Sentry spent $12,000 more than the $6,000 needed to light the facility with a mixture of incandescent and fluorescent bulbs. But using L.E.D.’s, the company is saving $7,000 a year in energy costs, will not need to change a bulb for 20 years and will recoup its additional investment in less than two years.
“I’d do it again,” Mr. Farrell said. “It was a no-brainer.”
L.E.D. bulbs, with their brighter light and longer life, have already replaced standard bulbs in many of the nation’s traffic lights. Indeed, the red, green and yellow signals are — aside from the tiny blinking red light on a DVD player, a cellphone or another electronic device — probably the most familiar application of the technology.
But it is showing up in more prominent spots. The ball that descends in Times Square on New Year’s Eve is illuminated with L.E.D.’s. And the managers of the Empire State Building are considering a proposal to light it with L.E.D. fixtures, which would allow them to remotely change the building’s colors to one of millions of variations.
The nation’s Big Three of lighting — General Electric, Osram Sylvania and Royal Philips Electronics — are embracing a new era of more efficient technologies, like halogen, compact fluorescent and solid-state devices. Encouraged by legislation and the rising cost of energy, as well as concerns about greenhouse gases, consumers are swapping out incandescent bulbs.
The switch is forcing a fast change in strategy, as companies reposition their manufacturing lines. General Electric, for instance, said earlier this month that it was spinning off its unit that makes bulbs.
The bulb makers face a tough problem. Their businesses were built on customers who regularly replaced light bulbs. How do you make a profit when new lighting may commonly last 50 to 100 times as long as a standard bulb? Compact fluorescents, which use less than one-third the power and last up to 10 times as long as standard bulbs, have replaced incandescent bulbs in many homes and offices.
In some types of commercial buildings, L.E.D.’s are rapidly replacing older products. The industry seems convinced that new lower-cost L.E.D. bulbs, with their improved efficiency, will eventually become the chief substitutes for incandescent bulbs in homes.
Losing hearts and minds
ThinkProgress:
“The American military admitted Sunday night that a platoon of soldiers raked a car of innocent Iraqi civilians with hundreds of rounds of gunfire” in Baghdad on June 25. The military also acknowledged issuing a faulty news release “larded with misstatements, asserting that the victims were criminals who had fired on the troops.
The military is, sadly, not to be trusted.
UPDATE: More info here.
Pooling knowledge
Jack from the Netherlands pointed out this interesting article, which begins:
John Davis, a chemist in Bloomington, Illinois, knows about concrete. For example, he knows that if you keep concrete vibrating it won’t set up before you can use it. It will still pour like a liquid.
Now he has applied that knowledge to a seemingly unrelated problem thousands of miles away. He figured out that devices that keep concrete vibrating can be adapted to keep oil in Alaskan storage tanks from freezing. The Oil Spill Recovery Institute of Cordova, Alaska, paid him $20,000 for his idea.
The chemist and the institute came together through InnoCentive, a company that links organizations (seekers) with problems (challenges) to people all over the world (solvers) who win cash prizes for resolving them. The company gets a posting fee and, if the problem is solved, a “finders fee” equal to about 40 percent of the prize.
The process, according to John Seely Brown, a theorist of information technology and former director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, reflects “a huge shift in popular culture, from consuming to participating” enabled by the interactivity so characteristic of the Internet. It is sometimes called open-source science, taking the name from open-source software in which the source code, or original programming, is made public to encourage others to work on improving it.
The approach is catching on. Today, would-be innovators can sign up online to compete for prizes for feats as diverse as landing on the Moon and inventing artificial meat.
This year, researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Washington began recruiting computer gamers to an online competition, named Foldit, aimed at unraveling one of the knottiest problems of biology — how proteins fold.
And in a report last year, a panel appointed by the National Research Council recommended that the National Science Foundation, the major government financing agency for physical science research, offer prizes of $200,000 to $2 million “in diverse areas” as a first step in a major program “to encourage more complex innovations” addressing economic, social and other challenges. (The report is available here).
Grave finding on PTSD
It’s not just a mental problem—there are neurological changes:
At a recent conference for some of the area’s leading neurologists, San Francisco physicist Norbert Schuff captured his colleagues’ attention when he presented colorful brain images of U.S. soldiers who had returned from Iraq and Afghanistan and were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
The yellow areas, Schuff explained during his presentation at the city’s Veterans Affairs Medical Center, showed where the hippocampus, which plays major roles in short-term memory and emotions, had atrophied. The red swatches marked hyperfusion – increased blood flow – in the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for conflict resolution and decision-making. Compared with a soldier without the affliction, the PTSD brain had lost 5 to 10 percent of its gray matter volume, indicating yet more neuron damage.
Schuff, who was dressed in a Hawaiian shirt just as colorful as the brain images he’d brought, reminded his colleagues that while his findings were preliminary and the trials ongoing, researchers were at least inching closer to finding the biological markers that distinguish a brain affected by PTSD. As the technology of brain imaging improves and the resulting data are refined, doctors believe that one day they will be able to look at a computer screen and see PTSD as clearly as they now see a brain tumor.
“But we’re still in the infancy of neuroimaging,” Schuff cautioned later in his office. “Do you get PTSD because you have a small hippocampus? Or does a small hippocampus mean you’ll develop PTSD? That, we still don’t know.”
Schuff’s research is at the forefront of a bold push by the Department of Defense to address PTSD, the psychological disorder that will haunt an estimated 30 percent of the veterans returning from the current two wars, according to the Pentagon. Forty thousand veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, Pentagon officials say, have already been diagnosed with PTSD, which is defined as an anxiety disorder triggered by exposure to traumatic events; symptoms can include nightmares, flashbacks and panic attacks.
Left untreated, clinicians say, patients with PTSD are more likely to engage in anti-social behaviors such as alcohol and drug abuse. The disorder, neurologists are now learning, can also lead to long-term maladies, such as Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Cute idea in auto insurance
Auto insurance is not an industry famed for cute ideas, but I rather like this one: insurance rate adjusted to reflect how much and how fast you drive.
How effective is the free market?
I’m talking a purely free market: no government regulation or oversight at all. Not very effective, I’ll warrant. From Paul Krugman’s column today:
… The back story to the current [financial] crisis is the way traditional banks — banks with federally insured deposits, which are limited in the risks they’re allowed to take and the amount of leverage they can take on — have been pushed aside by unregulated financial players. We were assured by the likes of Alan Greenspan that this was no problem: the market would enforce disciplined risk-taking, and anyway, taxpayer funds weren’t on the line.
And then reality struck.
Far from being disciplined in their risk-taking, lenders went wild. Concerns about the ability of borrowers to repay were waved aside; so were questions about whether soaring house prices made sense.
Lenders ignored the warning signs because they were part of a system built around the principle of heads I win, tails someone else loses. Mortgage originators didn’t worry about the solvency of borrowers, because they quickly sold off the loans they made, generally to investors who had no idea what they were buying. Throughout the financial industry, executives received huge bonuses when they seemed to be earning big profits, but didn’t have to give the money back when those profits turned into even bigger losses.
And as for that business about taxpayers’ money not being at risk? Never mind. Over the past year the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury have put hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on the line, propping up financial institutions deemed too big or too strategic to fail. (I’m not blaming them — I don’t think they had any alternative.)
Meanwhile, those traditional, regulated banks played a minor role in the lending frenzy, except to the extent that they had unregulated, “off balance sheet” subsidiaries. The case of IndyMac — which failed because it specialized in risky Alt-A loans while regulators looked the other way — is the exception that proves the rule.
The moral of this story seems clear — and it’s what Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has been saying for some time: financial regulation needs to be extended to cover a much wider range of institutions. Basically, the financial framework created in the 1930s, which brought generations of relative stability, needs to be updated to 21st-century conditions. …
Keeping track of revisions
In writing a long work—particularly a long work of fiction—it’s difficult to keep things straight as you go through revisions, with the result that a surprising number of published novels have continuity errors. I seem to be somewhat sensitive to these—something will come up in a novel, a reference to an earlier incident, and I look back and it’s not there. In A.S. Byatt’s Possession, for example, there’s a howler: some knowledge that is gleaned from a letter and when you look back and read the letters, there’s no mention at all. Clearly something was edited out of one draft without the correction being carried forward. (I even wrote to A.S. Byatt about that one, and got a nice reply from her agent.)
Tom Colvin references a series of tutorials on keeping track of revisions—the methods certainly won’t solve all continuity problems, but they will help.
The Prison Nation
The US is a nation of prisons and prisoners, imprisoning a higher percentage of its population than any other nation, including the totalitarian nations. We, as a nation, just love to lock people up. We apparently think it’s some kind of solution. Mother Jones has a series of articles about this phenomenon:
Mother Jones series on prisons
Worth reading and pondering. Go to the link to read individual articles.
TODAY ONLY: Statistical package for Excel (Windows)
UPDATE: See this list of FREE statistical software.
Excel has many good properties, but for serious statistical work it’s lacking. StatFi, today’s giveaway, remedies some of them:
Perform powerful data analysis in the familiar Microsoft Excel environment. Get repeatable results and empower Microsoft Excel with accurate, reliable statistics. StatFi offers a great, straightforward upgrade path to the demanding users who’ve outgrown the limited statistical capabilities provided by Microsoft Excel. Offering the same familiar, convenient Excel look and feel, StatFi greatly expands the analytical and statistical capabilities of Microsoft Excel. Supporting ISO standards ensures repeatable results of every analysis.
Get the convenience of Microsoft Excel combined with the power of ISO-compliant statistical analysis in a convenient statistic and data analysis extension pack for Microsoft Excel!
As always, read the comments at the link. And, as always, you must download AND install the package today.
Later On 