Tuesday, December 14, 2010

doodle! now!

see:  vihart.com,
in particular, the doodle page http://vihart.com/doodling/ and balloons http://vihart.com/balloons/
find the geometrical fruit for yourself

compose, and play your own music box http://www.kikkerlandshop.com/1200.html

also see georgehart.com, scottkim.com (ambigrams),

Sunday, December 12, 2010

ikiru

Kurosawa http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000041/
wrote (?) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044741/
screenshot of end of movie, at Watanabe 's funeral, and the toy rabbit and clock are remembrances of Watanabe's kindness.   movie from 1952 --






 

 

 

What Are The English Lyrics To The Song Kanji Watanabe Sings? (+More Info.

This powerful song is generally accepted as follows:


Life is brief. Fall in love, maidens, Before the crimson bloom fades from your lips, Before the tides of passion cool within you, For those of you who know no tomorrow.

Life is brief. Fall in love, maidens, Before his hands take up his boat, Before the flush of his cheeks fades, For those of you who will never return here.

Life is brief. Fall in love, maidens, Before the boat drifts away on the waves, Before the hand resting on your shoulder becomes frail, For those who will never be seen here again.

Life is brief. Fall in love, maidens, Before the raven tresses begin to fade, Before the flame in your hearts flicker and die, For those to whom today will never return.

By Isamu Yoshii
It is known as: 'Gondora no Uta' (Song of the Gondola)
The melody was composed by Shimpei Nakayama.

Wednesday, December 08, 2010

carving pumpkins with ...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/artisansasylum/5112771324/in/photostream/

carvers are from
http://artisansasylum.com/
see their announcements - scroll down to November

prosopagnosia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia
wod

the fusiform gyrus (near the bottom of your brain)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusiform_gyrus

more narrowly the FFA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusiform_face_area

splitting the check fairly -

Oh no! It's the check.

One diner orders lobster and another gets chicken. Should they split the bill? In this economy, all diners turn into mathematicians when it's time to pay.

By Beth Teitell
Globe Staff / December 8, 2010|
When Ellen Berlin used to dine out with friends — at Stella in the South End, or West in West Roxbury — the routine was always the same: The check arrived and the pals tossed in their credit cards. No one examined the bill. No one questioned whether they should divide it evenly. No one secretly seethed at the person who ordered the high-end wine to everyone else’s house white, or cappuccino when others settled for coffee.
Now? “The first thing that happens is we all go for our glasses,’’ says Berlin, a publicist, of Dedham. “The nonchalance is gone. It becomes the dreaded moment.’’
Welcome to dining in a lousy economy. The recession has famously driven diners from restaurants and forced those who still do go out to share entrees and skip dessert. But there’s also a less-discussed side effect. All this joblessness and belt-tightening has ratcheted up the tension and the stakes when the check hits, turning friend against friend, diner against waiter, couple against couple.
Bon appetit!
At Marliave, in Boston, things can get heated when the drink tab arrives, reports bar manager Ben Cogswell. Emotions flare when one guy is drinking $3.50 Miller High Lifes, his friend is downing $10 martinis, and the beer drinker suggests that they each pay for what they had rather than split the tab. “When the check comes, it’s sobering,’’ Cogswell says. “Now people are like, ‘I had this and you had that.’ You can see people getting upset.’’
But with money tight, and the desire to go out still strong, what’s a diner to do? Dean Mellen, a stylist at the Patrice Vinci Salon on Newbury Street, and a man who eats all of his meals out, says the best defense is a good offense. “When the waitress takes my order I always say, ‘I might have to excuse myself before the end of the dinner. Would you mind writing me a separate check in case I have to scoot out?’ ’’
When the group’s bill arrives at the end of the meal, he says, “I’m smiling and everyone else is all tense.’’
Mellen says he tired of paying for friends’ champagne, flourless chocolate cakes, and other extravagances, and the recession has given him an excuse to be blunt. “I’d rather take a vacation at the end of the year.’’
Some of the behavioral changes can best be seen not in what people do, but in what they don’t do. Jen Ziskin, co-owner of La Morra, in Brookline, says fewer diners slip her their credit cards ahead of time so they can host friends. Now it’s every diner for herself. “Before, one person would say, ‘Please don’t bring the bill to the table. I want to pick it up without any argument over it.’ ’’
The National Bureau of Economic Research declared the recession officially over as of June 2009, but Bay State residents aren’t buying it. A Suffolk University-Boston Globe poll taken last month found that more then three-fourths of residents say it continues in Massachusetts. Among other cutbacks, 51 percent said they are eating out less than they did a year ago.
And no one is too happy about it. Forty percent of adults report they are not eating out as much as they would like to, according to Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of the research and knowledge group for the National Restaurant Association. But, he adds, they are still trying to make a meal out possible. “They will act to preserve the event [going to a restaurant], but work on minimizing the cash out of their own pocket.’’
That’s an approach Bonnie Riggs, a restaurant analyst at the NPD Group, calls “check size containment.’’ You can see it at Oleana, in Cambridge, where diners are more willing to learn about and order wine from smaller, and less pricey, vineyards. And at Hamersley’s Bistro, in the South End, some guests celebrating birthdays have started bringing their own cakes.
At Masa, in the South End, thrift takes yet another form. Some diners are exploiting the tiniest lapses in service as an excuse to leave a smaller tip. “Let’s say the server wasn’t keeping on top of keeping the wine glasses or water glasses full. In the guest’s head, it’s minus one [percentage point], so a 20 percent tip goes to 19 or 18,’’ says Mohamad El Zein, the restaurant’s co-owner and general manager.
Other diners, he adds, are trying to make up for stingy tips by being extra friendly on the way out. “Some people try to overcompensate for the tip by giving a verbal thank you. Then you turn around and the gratuity is 14 percent or sometimes even 10 percent.’’
Considering that not everyone is brave enough to bring their own food or ask for a separate check (or want to stiff a waiter), how can diners “eat, drink, and be merry,’’ not “eat, drink, and be so annoyed that you never speak to your friend again’’?
Candor is your only hope, says Manisha Thakor, coauthor of “Get Financially Naked,’’ and founder of the Women’s Financial Literacy Initiative. “I tell people it’s going to be awkward. The only choice you have is at what point in the outing it’s awkward. Do you want to take care of it on a full stomach, or when you are planning?’’
Honesty, about choosing an appropriate restaurant, and/or who’s going to pay, makes the meal more enjoyable, she says. “When you go out to eat, it can be an appreciating asset if it’s an experience you enjoy. Or, it can be a depreciating asset. You end up chewing up your enjoyment of the meal as Joe orders a $100 bottle of wine.’’
Hey, soon there will be an app for that. Next month, a South End startup called Fig plans to introduce iPhone and Android apps that allow diners to pay with their smartphones at participating restaurants. For check splitters, the app does the dirty work by migrating each diner’s tab to his phone directly.
“People want a solution to this problem, but they don’t want it to be too pronounced,’’ says Fig cofounder Dave McLaughlin. “They don’t want to announce they’re a cheapskate.’’
But when the check arrives, everyone is.
Beth Teitell can be reached at [email protected]

Monday, November 15, 2010

fairness - economic

http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/11/deficit-commission-fair


Deficit Commission: What’s Fair?
We look at deficit reduction plans, inequality and fairness in the United States. See the specific proposals that are on the table.
Erskine Bowles, left, accompanied by former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, co-chairmen of the bipartisan deficit commission, Nov. 10, 2010. (AP)
Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson says a big deficit reduction plan is now on the table for Americans to chew on. Former Clinton aide, Democrat Erskine Bowles, says the deficit’s a cancer we’ve got to cure.
They’re the chairmen of the panel that’s supposed to recommend how. Reaction to their first word is hot.
Inequality expert Jacob Hacker says it would make inequality markedly worse. He’s with us. So are voices of support and of conservative resistance to more taxes.
We look at what’s right, what’s fair, what will work in bringing down the great American deficit.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests:
Lori Montgomery, financial reporter for the Washington Post.
Jacob Hacker, professor of political science at Yale University.  Co-authors, with Paul Pierson, of “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.”  You can read an excerpt here.
Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and director of the Fiscal Policy Program at the New America Foundation.
Ryan Ellis, director of tax policy at Americans for Tax Reform.

Friday, November 12, 2010

now what was I thinking about ?


Mind-wandering a fact of life, study says
By Carolyn Y. Johnson
Globe Staff November 12, 2010
Regardless of what they are doing, almost without exception, people’s minds wander — whether they mull over
arguments with loved ones in the shower, think about weekend plans at work, or stumble on a creative new insight on
their commute.
Everyone knows they do it, but new research by Harvard researchers, which used the iPhone to periodically interrupt
2,250 people’s lives, found that about half the time, people’s minds are wandering. Most strikingly, they found that
overall, people whose minds are wandering are less happy than those focused on the task at hand.
“It’s paradoxical and ironic, in the sense that you would think if you leave the present, you’d go someplace better, but
people seem to go to places that make them less happy,’’ said Matthew Killingsworth, a psychology graduate student
at Harvard University and lead author of the work, published today in the journal Science. He said mind-wandering
obviously has its benefits, but the research has given him some insight into his mood when he is feeling down.

Monday, November 08, 2010

lies and medicine ?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/


Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.

By DAVID H. FREEDMAN

IMAGE CREDIT: ROBYN TWOMEY/REDUX


IN 2001, RUMORS were circulating in Greek hospitals that surgery residents, eager to rack up scalpel time, were falsely diagnosing hapless Albanian immigrants with appendicitis. At the University of Ioannina medical school’s teaching hospital, a newly minted doctor named Athina Tatsioni was discussing the rumors with colleagues when a professor who had overheard asked her if she’d like to try to prove whether they were true—he seemed to be almost daring her. She accepted the challenge and, with the professor’s and other colleagues’ help, eventually produced a formal study showing that, for whatever reason, the appendices removed from patients with Albanian names in six Greek hospitals were more than three times as likely to be perfectly healthy as those removed from patients with Greek names. “It was hard to find a journal willing to publish it, but we did,” recalls Tatsioni. “I also discovered that I really liked research.” Good thing, because the study had actually been a sort of audition. The professor, it turned out, had been putting together a team of exceptionally brash and curious young clinicians and Ph.D.s to join him in tackling an unusual and controversial agenda.













Last spring, I sat in on one of the team’s weekly meetings on the medical school’s campus, which is plunked crazily across a series of sharp hills. The building in which we met, like most at the school, had the look of a barracks and was festooned with political graffiti. But the group convened in a spacious conference room that would have been at home at a Silicon Valley start-up. Sprawled around a large table were Tatsioni and eight other youngish Greek researchers and physicians who, in contrast to the pasty younger staff frequently seen in U.S. hospitals, looked like the casually glamorous cast of a television medical drama. The professor, a dapper and soft-spoken man named John Ioannidis, loosely presided.


One of the researchers, a biostatistician named Georgia Salanti, fired up a laptop and projector and started to take the group through a study she and a few colleagues were completing that asked this question: were drug companies manipulating published research to make their drugs look good? Salanti ticked off data that seemed to indicate they were, but the other team members almost immediately started interrupting. One noted that Salanti’s study didn’t address the fact that drug-company research wasn’t measuring critically important “hard” outcomes for patients, such as survival versus death, and instead tended to measure “softer” outcomes, such as self-reported symptoms (“my chest doesn’t hurt as much today”). Another pointed out that Salanti’s study ignored the fact that when drug-company data seemed to show patients’ health improving, the data often failed to show that the drug was responsible, or that the improvement was more than marginal.


Salanti remained poised, as if the grilling were par for the course, and gamely acknowledged that the suggestions were all good—but a single study can’t prove everything, she said. Just as I was getting the sense that the data in drug studies were endlessly malleable, Ioannidis, who had mostly been listening, delivered what felt like a coup de grĂ¢ce: wasn’t it possible, he asked, that drug companies were carefully selecting the topics of their studies—for example, comparing their new drugs against those already known to be inferior to others on the market—so that they were ahead of the game even before the data juggling began? “Maybe sometimes it’s the questions that are biased, not the answers,” he said, flashing a friendly smile. Everyone nodded. Though the results of drug studies often make newspaper headlines, you have to wonder whether they prove anything at all. Indeed, given the breadth of the potential problems raised at the meeting, can any medical-research studies be trusted?


That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.


THE CITY OF IOANNINA is a big college town a short drive from the ruins of a 20,000-seat amphitheater and a Zeusian sanctuary built at the site of the Dodona oracle. The oracle was said to have issued pronouncements to priests through the rustling of a sacred oak tree. Today, a different oak tree at the site provides visitors with a chance to try their own hands at extracting a prophecy. “I take all the researchers who visit me here, and almost every single one of them asks the tree the same question,” Ioannidis tells me, as we contemplate the tree the day after the team’s meeting. “‘Will my research grant be approved?’” He chuckles, but Ioannidis (pronounced yo-NEE-dees) tends to laugh not so much in mirth as to soften the sting of his attack. And sure enough, he goes on to suggest that an obsession with winning funding has gone a long way toward weakening the reliability of medical research.


He first stumbled on the sorts of problems plaguing the field, he explains, as a young physician-researcher in the early 1990s at Harvard. At the time, he was interested in diagnosing rare diseases, for which a lack of case data can leave doctors with little to go on other than intuition and rules of thumb. But he noticed that doctors seemed to proceed in much the same manner even when it came to cancer, heart disease, and other common ailments. Where were the hard data that would back up their treatment decisions? There was plenty of published research, but much of it was remarkably unscientific, based largely on observations of a small number of cases. A new “evidence-based medicine” movement was just starting to gather force, and Ioannidis decided to throw himself into it, working first with prominent researchers at Tufts University and then taking positions at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health. He was unusually well armed: he had been a math prodigy of near-celebrity status in high school in Greece, and had followed his parents, who were both physician-researchers, into medicine. Now he’d have a chance to combine math and medicine by applying rigorous statistical analysis to what seemed a surprisingly sloppy field. “I assumed that everything we physicians did was basically right, but now I was going to help verify it,” he says. “All we’d have to do was systematically review the evidence, trust what it told us, and then everything would be perfect.”


It didn’t turn out that way. In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.


But beyond the headlines, Ioannidis was shocked at the range and reach of the reversals he was seeing in everyday medical research. “Randomized controlled trials,” which compare how one group responds to a treatment against how an identical group fares without the treatment, had long been considered nearly unshakable evidence, but they, too, ended up being wrong some of the time. “I realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,” he says. Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.


This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”


Perhaps only a minority of researchers were succumbing to this bias, but their distorted findings were having an outsize effect on published research. To get funding and tenured positions, and often merely to stay afloat, researchers have to get their work published in well-regarded journals, where rejection rates can climb above 90 percent. Not surprisingly, the studies that tend to make the grade are those with eye-catching findings. But while coming up with eye-catching theories is relatively easy, getting reality to bear them out is another matter. The great majority collapse under the weight of contradictory data when studied rigorously. Imagine, though, that five different research teams test an interesting theory that’s making the rounds, and four of the groups correctly prove the idea false, while the one less cautious group incorrectly “proves” it true through some combination of error, fluke, and clever selection of data. Guess whose findings your doctor ends up reading about in the journal, and you end up hearing about on the evening news? Researchers can sometimes win attention by refuting a prominent finding, which can help to at least raise doubts about results, but in general it is far more rewarding to add a new insight or exciting-sounding twist to existing research than to retest its basic premises—after all, simply re-proving someone else’s results is unlikely to get you published, and attempting to undermine the work of respected colleagues can have ugly professional repercussions.


In the late 1990s, Ioannidis set up a base at the University of Ioannina. He pulled together his team, which remains largely intact today, and started chipping away at the problem in a series of papers that pointed out specific ways certain studies were getting misleading results. Other meta-researchers were also starting to spotlight disturbingly high rates of error in the medical literature. But Ioannidis wanted to get the big picture across, and to do so with solid data, clear reasoning, and good statistical analysis. The project dragged on, until finally he retreated to the tiny island of Sikinos in the Aegean Sea, where he drew inspiration from the relatively primitive surroundings and the intellectual traditions they recalled. “A pervasive theme of ancient Greek literature is that you need to pursue the truth, no matter what the truth might be,” he says. In 2005, he unleashed two papers that challenged the foundations of medical research.


He chose to publish one paper, fittingly, in the online journal PLoS Medicine, which is committed to running any methodologically sound article without regard to how “interesting” the results may be. In the paper, Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time. Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials. The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views. “You can question some of the details of John’s calculations, but it’s hard to argue that the essential ideas aren’t absolutely correct,” says Doug Altman, an Oxford University researcher who directs the Centre for Statistics in Medicine.


Still, Ioannidis anticipated that the community might shrug off his findings: sure, a lot of dubious research makes it into journals, but we researchers and physicians know to ignore it and focus on the good stuff, so what’s the big deal? The other paper headed off that claim. He zoomed in on 49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years, as judged by the science community’s two standard measures: the papers had appeared in the journals most widely cited in research articles, and the 49 articles themselves were the most widely cited articles in these journals. These were articles that helped lead to the widespread popularity of treatments such as the use of hormone-replacement therapy for menopausal women, vitamin E to reduce the risk of heart disease, coronary stents to ward off heart attacks, and daily low-dose aspirin to control blood pressure and prevent heart attacks and strokes. Ioannidis was putting his contentions to the test not against run-of-the-mill research, or even merely well-accepted research, but against the absolute tip of the research pyramid. Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable. That article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.


DRIVING ME BACK to campus in his smallish SUV—after insisting, as he apparently does with all his visitors, on showing me a nearby lake and the six monasteries situated on an islet within it—Ioannidis apologized profusely for running a yellow light, explaining with a laugh that he didn’t trust the truck behind him to stop. Considering his willingness, even eagerness, to slap the face of the medical-research community, Ioannidis comes off as thoughtful, upbeat, and deeply civil. He’s a careful listener, and his frequent grin and semi-apologetic chuckle can make the sharp prodding of his arguments seem almost good-natured. He is as quick, if not quicker, to question his own motives and competence as anyone else’s. A neat and compact 45-year-old with a trim mustache, he presents as a sort of dashing nerd—Giancarlo Giannini with a bit of Mr. Bean.


The humility and graciousness seem to serve him well in getting across a message that is not easy to digest or, for that matter, believe: that even highly regarded researchers at prestigious institutions sometimes churn out attention-grabbing findings rather than findings likely to be right. But Ioannidis points out that obviously questionable findings cram the pages of top medical journals, not to mention the morning headlines. Consider, he says, the endless stream of results from nutritional studies in which researchers follow thousands of people for some number of years, tracking what they eat and what supplements they take, and how their health changes over the course of the study. “Then the researchers start asking, ‘What did vitamin E do? What did vitamin C or D or A do? What changed with calorie intake, or protein or fat intake? What happened to cholesterol levels? Who got what type of cancer?’” he says. “They run everything through the mill, one at a time, and they start finding associations, and eventually conclude that vitamin X lowers the risk of cancer Y, or this food helps with the risk of that disease.” In a single week this fall, Google’s news page offered these headlines: “More Omega-3 Fats Didn’t Aid Heart Patients”; “Fruits, Vegetables Cut Cancer Risk for Smokers”; “Soy May Ease Sleep Problems in Older Women”; and dozens of similar stories.


When a five-year study of 10,000 people finds that those who take more vitamin X are less likely to get cancer Y, you’d think you have pretty good reason to take more vitamin X, and physicians routinely pass these recommendations on to patients. But these studies often sharply conflict with one another. Studies have gone back and forth on the cancer-preventing powers of vitamins A, D, and E; on the heart-health benefits of eating fat and carbs; and even on the question of whether being overweight is more likely to extend or shorten your life. How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.


For starters, he explains, the odds are that in any large database of many nutritional and health factors, there will be a few apparent connections that are in fact merely flukes, not real health effects—it’s a bit like combing through long, random strings of letters and claiming there’s an important message in any words that happen to turn up. But even if a study managed to highlight a genuine health connection to some nutrient, you’re unlikely to benefit much from taking more of it, because we consume thousands of nutrients that act together as a sort of network, and changing intake of just one of them is bound to cause ripples throughout the network that are far too complex for these studies to detect, and that may be as likely to harm you as help you. Even if changing that one factor does bring on the claimed improvement, there’s still a good chance that it won’t do you much good in the long run, because these studies rarely go on long enough to track the decades-long course of disease and ultimately death. Instead, they track easily measurable health “markers” such as cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and blood-sugar levels, and meta-experts have shown that changes in these markers often don’t correlate as well with long-term health as we have been led to believe.


On the relatively rare occasions when a study does go on long enough to track mortality, the findings frequently upend those of the shorter studies. (For example, though the vast majority of studies of overweight individuals link excess weight to ill health, the longest of them haven’t convincingly shown that overweight people are likely to die sooner, and a few of them have seemingly demonstrated that moderately overweight people are likely to live longer.) And these problems are aside from ubiquitous measurement errors (for example, people habitually misreport their diets in studies), routine misanalysis (researchers rely on complex software capable of juggling results in ways they don’t always understand), and the less common, but serious, problem of outright fraud (which has been revealed, in confidential surveys, to be much more widespread than scientists like to acknowledge).


If a study somehow avoids every one of these problems and finds a real connection to long-term changes in health, you’re still not guaranteed to benefit, because studies report average results that typically represent a vast range of individual outcomes. Should you be among the lucky minority that stands to benefit, don’t expect a noticeable improvement in your health, because studies usually detect only modest effects that merely tend to whittle your chances of succumbing to a particular disease from small to somewhat smaller. “The odds that anything useful will survive from any of these studies are poor,” says Ioannidis—dismissing in a breath a good chunk of the research into which we sink about $100 billion a year in the United States alone.


And so it goes for all medical studies, he says. Indeed, nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest. The exciting links between genes and various diseases and traits that are relentlessly hyped in the press for heralding miraculous around-the-corner treatments for everything from colon cancer to schizophrenia have in the past proved so vulnerable to error and distortion, Ioannidis has found, that in some cases you’d have done about as well by throwing darts at a chart of the genome. (These studies seem to have improved somewhat in recent years, but whether they will hold up or be useful in treatment are still open questions.) Vioxx, Zelnorm, and Baycol were among the widely prescribed drugs found to be safe and effective in large randomized controlled trials before the drugs were yanked from the market as unsafe or not so effective, or both.


“Often the claims made by studies are so extravagant that you can immediately cross them out without needing to know much about the specific problems with the studies,” Ioannidis says. But of course it’s that very extravagance of claim (one large randomized controlled trial even proved that secret prayer by unknown parties can save the lives of heart-surgery patients, while another proved that secret prayer can harm them) that helps gets these findings into journals and then into our treatments and lifestyles, especially when the claim builds on impressive-sounding evidence. “Even when the evidence shows that a particular research idea is wrong, if you have thousands of scientists who have invested their careers in it, they’ll continue to publish papers on it,” he says. “It’s like an epidemic, in the sense that they’re infected with these wrong ideas, and they’re spreading it to other researchers through journals.”


THOUGH SCIENTISTS AND science journalists are constantly talking up the value of the peer-review process, researchers admit among themselves that biased, erroneous, and even blatantly fraudulent studies easily slip through it. Nature, the grande dame of science journals, stated in a 2006 editorial, “Scientists understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality, and that the public conception of peer review as a stamp of authentication is far from the truth.” What’s more, the peer-review process often pressures researchers to shy away from striking out in genuinely new directions, and instead to build on the findings of their colleagues (that is, their potential reviewers) in ways that only seem like breakthroughs—as with the exciting-sounding gene linkages (autism genes identified!) and nutritional findings (olive oil lowers blood pressure!) that are really just dubious and conflicting variations on a theme.


Most journal editors don’t even claim to protect against the problems that plague these studies. University and government research overseers rarely step in to directly enforce research quality, and when they do, the science community goes ballistic over the outside interference. The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly retest each other’s results—except they don’t. Only the most prominent findings are likely to be put to the test, because there’s likely to be publication payoff in firming up the proof, or contradicting it.


But even for medicine’s most influential studies, the evidence sometimes remains surprisingly narrow. Of those 45 super-cited studies that Ioannidis focused on, 11 had never been retested. Perhaps worse, Ioannidis found that even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades. He looked at three prominent health studies from the 1980s and 1990s that were each later soundly refuted, and discovered that researchers continued to cite the original results as correct more often than as flawed—in one case for at least 12 years after the results were discredited.


Doctors may notice that their patients don’t seem to fare as well with certain treatments as the literature would lead them to expect, but the field is appropriately conditioned to subjugate such anecdotal evidence to study findings. Yet much, perhaps even most, of what doctors do has never been formally put to the test in credible studies, given that the need to do so became obvious to the field only in the 1990s, leaving it playing catch-up with a century or more of non-evidence-based medicine, and contributing to Ioannidis’s shockingly high estimate of the degree to which medical knowledge is flawed. That we’re not routinely made seriously ill by this shortfall, he argues, is due largely to the fact that most medical interventions and advice don’t address life-and-death situations, but rather aim to leave us marginally healthier or less unhealthy, so we usually neither gain nor risk all that much.


Medical research is not especially plagued with wrongness. Other meta-research experts have confirmed that similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics (where the highly regarded economists J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang once showed how a remarkably consistent paucity of strong evidence in published economics studies made it unlikely that any of them were right). And needless to say, things only get worse when it comes to the pop expertise that endlessly spews at us from diet, relationship, investment, and parenting gurus and pundits. But we expect more of scientists, and especially of medical scientists, given that we believe we are staking our lives on their results. The public hardly recognizes how bad a bet this is. The medical community itself might still be largely oblivious to the scope of the problem, if Ioannidis hadn’t forced a confrontation when he published his studies in 2005.


Ioannidis initially thought the community might come out fighting. Instead, it seemed relieved, as if it had been guiltily waiting for someone to blow the whistle, and eager to hear more. David Gorski, a surgeon and researcher at Detroit’s Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, noted in his prominent medical blog that when he presented Ioannidis’s paper on highly cited research at a professional meeting, “not a single one of my surgical colleagues was the least bit surprised or disturbed by its findings.” Ioannidis offers a theory for the relatively calm reception. “I think that people didn’t feel I was only trying to provoke them, because I showed that it was a community problem, instead of pointing fingers at individual examples of bad research,” he says. In a sense, he gave scientists an opportunity to cluck about the wrongness without having to acknowledge that they themselves succumb to it—it was something everyone else did.


To say that Ioannidis’s work has been embraced would be an understatement. His PLoS Medicinepaper is the most downloaded in the journal’s history, and it’s not even Ioannidis’s most-cited work—that would be a paper he published in Nature Genetics on the problems with gene-link studies. Other researchers are eager to work with him: he has published papers with 1,328 different co-authors at 538 institutions in 43 countries, he says. Last year he received, by his estimate, invitations to speak at 1,000 conferences and institutions around the world, and he was accepting an average of about five invitations a month until a case last year of excessive-travel-induced vertigo led him to cut back. Even so, in the weeks before I visited him he had addressed an AIDS conference in San Francisco, the European Society for Clinical Investigation, Harvard’s School of Public Health, and the medical schools at Stanford and Tufts.


The irony of his having achieved this sort of success by accusing the medical-research community of chasing after success is not lost on him, and he notes that it ought to raise the question of whether he himself might be pumping up his findings. “If I did a study and the results showed that in fact there wasn’t really much bias in research, would I be willing to publish it?” he asks. “That would create a real psychological conflict for me.” But his bigger worry, he says, is that while his fellow researchers seem to be getting the message, he hasn’t necessarily forced anyone to do a better job. He fears he won’t in the end have done much to improve anyone’s health. “There may not be fierce objections to what I’m saying,” he explains. “But it’s difficult to change the way that everyday doctors, patients, and healthy people think and behave.”


AS HELTER-SKELTER as the University of Ioannina Medical School campus looks, the hospital abutting it looks reassuringly stolid. Athina Tatsioni has offered to take me on a tour of the facility, but we make it only as far as the entrance when she is greeted—accosted, really—by a worried-looking older woman. Tatsioni, normally a bit reserved, is warm and animated with the woman, and the two have a brief but intense conversation before embracing and saying goodbye. Tatsioni explains to me that the woman and her husband were patients of hers years ago; now the husband has been admitted to the hospital with abdominal pains, and Tatsioni has promised she’ll stop by his room later to say hello. Recalling the appendicitis story, I prod a bit, and she confesses she plans to do her own exam. She needs to be circumspect, though, so she won’t appear to be second-guessing the other doctors.


Tatsioni doesn’t so much fear that someone will carve out the man’s healthy appendix. Rather, she’s concerned that, like many patients, he’ll end up with prescriptions for multiple drugs that will do little to help him, and may well harm him. “Usually what happens is that the doctor will ask for a suite of biochemical tests—liver fat, pancreas function, and so on,” she tells me. “The tests could turn up something, but they’re probably irrelevant. Just having a good talk with the patient and getting a close history is much more likely to tell me what’s wrong.” Of course, the doctors have all been trained to order these tests, she notes, and doing so is a lot quicker than a long bedside chat. They’re also trained to ply the patient with whatever drugs might help whack any errant test numbers back into line. What they’re not trained to do is to go back and look at the research papers that helped make these drugs the standard of care. “When you look the papers up, you often find the drugs didn’t even work better than a placebo. And no one tested how they worked in combination with the other drugs,” she says. “Just taking the patient off everything can improve their health right away.” But not only is checking out the research another time-consuming task, patients often don’t even like it when they’re taken off their drugs, she explains; they find their prescriptions reassuring.


Later, Ioannidis tells me he makes a point of having several clinicians on his team. “Researchers and physicians often don’t understand each other; they speak different languages,” he says. Knowing that some of his researchers are spending more than half their time seeing patients makes him feel the team is better positioned to bridge that gap; their experience informs the team’s research with firsthand knowledge, and helps the team shape its papers in a way more likely to hit home with physicians. It’s not that he envisions doctors making all their decisions based solely on solid evidence—there’s simply too much complexity in patient treatment to pin down every situation with a great study. “Doctors need to rely on instinct and judgment to make choices,” he says. “But these choices should be as informed as possible by the evidence. And if the evidence isn’t good, doctors should know that, too. And so should patients.”


In fact, the question of whether the problems with medical research should be broadcast to the public is a sticky one in the meta-research community. Already feeling that they’re fighting to keep patients from turning to alternative medical treatments such as homeopathy, or misdiagnosing themselves on the Internet, or simply neglecting medical treatment altogether, many researchers and physicians aren’t eager to provide even more reason to be skeptical of what doctors do—not to mention how public disenchantment with medicine could affect research funding. Ioannidis dismisses these concerns. “If we don’t tell the public about these problems, then we’re no better than nonscientists who falsely claim they can heal,” he says. “If the drugs don’t work and we’re not sure how to treat something, why should we claim differently? Some fear that there may be less funding because we stop claiming we can prove we have miraculous treatments. But if we can’t really provide those miracles, how long will we be able to fool the public anyway? The scientific enterprise is probably the most fantastic achievement in human history, but that doesn’t mean we have a right to overstate what we’re accomplishing.”


We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough. But as long as careers remain contingent on producing a stream of research that’s dressed up to seem more right than it is, scientists will keep delivering exactly that.


“Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor,” he says. “I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.”


This article available online at:


http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

big trees protect your neighborhood

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/11/big-trees-may-make-communities-safer-says-study.php


Big Trees May Make Communities Safer, Says Study

by Stephen Messenger, Porto Alegre, Brazil  on 11. 1.10
tree with eyes photoOriginal photo: this lyre lark / CC
They might not be too effective when it comes chasing down vandals or spooking away would-be burglars -- but it turns out that our humble city trees may be apt crime-fighters, nonetheless. According to the findings of a new report, data suggests that there's a relationship between the size and presence of trees in a neighborhood and a lower rate of criminal activity. Not bad for such a stationary life-form that's literally all bark and no bite.
According to a report from Science Daily, the study conducted by researchers from theU.S. Forest Service revealed that some urban trees may actually reduce incidences of property crimes and acts of violence. The findings are the result of an unprecedented look into the relationship between trees and crime -- using neighborhoods in the city of Portland, Oregon as a case sample.
Geoffrey Donovan, one of the researchers who worked on the study, is encouraged by the results which show that trees indeed offer communities much more than a place to hang a hammock.
We wanted to find out whether trees, which provide a range of other benefits, could improve quality of life in Portland by reducing crime, and it was exciting to see that they did. Although a burglar alarm may deter criminals, it won't provide shade on a hot summer day, and it certainly isn't as nice to look at as a tree.
To arrive at their theory that trees reduce crime, Donovan and his team poured over two years worth of police reports for property and violent crimes while noting various neighborhood characteristics, including the quality of tree-coverage where each incident occurred using aerial mapping and on-the-ground observations. When analyzed, the data suggests that areas with large trees, both in front and backyards, had lower levels of crime.
"We believe that large street trees can reduce crime by signaling to a potential criminal that a neighborhood is better cared for and, therefore, a criminal is more likely to be caught," says Donovan.
While large trees tend to be associated with reduced crime rates, some trees in a neighborhood actually had the opposite effect. Smaller trees run the risk of being "view-obstructing," says the researcher, which can make criminal acts like vandalism or burglary less easy to detect.
As if we needed another reason to love big, towering trees in our communities, it turns out that they may be making us safer, too. It seems only fair then, that in return, we continue to cherish and protect them -- and sure, a little hug now and then never hurt either.

the richer get richer

if this is considered class warfare, it's pretty obvious who has already lost...
November 1, 2010

Fast Track to Inequality

The clearest explanation yet of the forces that converged over the past three decades or so to undermine the economic well-being of ordinary Americans is contained in the new book, “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.”
The authors, political scientists Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of the University of California, Berkeley, argue persuasively that the economic struggles of the middle and working classes in the U.S. since the late-1970s were not primarily the result of globalization and technological changes but rather a long series of policy changes in government that overwhelmingly favored the very rich.
Those changes were the result of increasingly sophisticated, well-financed and well-organized efforts by the corporate and financial sectors to tilt government policies in their favor, and thus in favor of the very wealthy. From tax laws to deregulation to corporate governance to safety net issues, government action was deliberately shaped to allow those who were already very wealthy to amass an ever increasing share of the nation’s economic benefits.
“Over the last generation,” the authors write, “more and more of the rewards of growth have gone to the rich and superrich. The rest of America, from the poor through the upper middle class, has fallen further and further behind.”
As if to underscore this theme, it was revealed last week (by David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for The New York Times), that the incomes of the very highest earners in the United States, a small group of individuals hauling in more than $50 million annually (sometimes much more), increased fivefold from 2008 to 2009, even as the nation was being rocked by the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Last year was a terrific year for those at the very top. Professors Hacker and Pierson note in their book that investors and executives at the nation’s 38 largest companies earned a stunning total of $140 billion — a record. The investment firm Goldman Sachs paid bonuses to its employees that averaged nearly $600,000 per person, its best year since it was founded in 1869.
Something has gone seriously haywire in the distribution of the fruits of the American economy.
This unfortunate shift away from a long period of more widely shared prosperity unfolded steadily, year after year since the late-’70s, whether Democrats or Republicans controlled the levers of power in Washington. “Winner-Take-All Politics” explores the vexing question of how this could have happened in a democracy in which — in theory, at least — the enormous number of voters who are not rich would serve as a check on policies that curtailed their own economic opportunities while at the same time supercharging the benefits of the runaway rich.
The answer becomes clearer when one recognizes, as the book stresses, that politics is largely about organized combat. It’s a form of warfare. “It’s a contest,” said Professor Pierson, “between those who are organized, who can really monitor what government is doing in a very complicated world and bring pressure effectively to bear on politicians. Voters in that kind of system are at a disadvantage when there aren’t reliable, organized groups representing them that have clout and can effectively communicate to them what is going on.”
The book describes an “organizational revolution” that took place over the past three decades in which big business mobilized on an enormous scale to become much more active in Washington, cultivating politicians in both parties and fighting fiercely to achieve shared political goals. This occurred at the same time that organized labor, the most effective force fighting on behalf of the middle class and other working Americans, was caught in a devastating spiral of decline.
Thus, the counterweight of labor to the ever-increasing political clout of big business was effectively lost.
“We’re not arguing that globalization and technological change don’t matter,” said Professor Hacker. “But they aren’t by any means a sufficient explanation for this massive change in the distribution of wealth and income in the U.S. Much more important are the ways in which government has shaped the economy over this period through deregulation, through changes in industrial relations policies affecting labor unions, through corporate governance policies that have allowed C.E.O.’s to basically set their own pay, and so on.”
This hyperconcentration of wealth and income, and the overwhelming political clout it has put into the hands of the monied interests, has drastically eroded the capacity of government to respond to the needs of the middle class and others of modest income.
Nothing better illustrates the enormous power that has accrued to this tiny sliver of the population than its continued ability to thrive and prosper despite the Great Recession that was largely the result of their winner-take-all policies, and that has had such a disastrous effect on so many other Americans.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

belle ile en mer

http://www.latartinegourmande.com/2010/09/24/belle-ile-en-mer-la-bien-nommee/

take your time browsing this -

can you play chopsticks ?

okay http://www.thinkgeek.com/geek-kids/3-7-years/e675/
a new take on some of the oldest utensils...

halloween spider

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/10/47_halloween_spider.html

47 feet - but which direction?  does it matter ?

Monday, October 18, 2010

alternate take on: love makes you stupid

Those Swiss are good at not only banking and chocolate -
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/love-ignorance/#more-39045



Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/love-ignorance/#more-39045#ixzz12lm4hs00

Thursday, October 07, 2010

story of stuff

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

whatever your politics...

Monday, September 20, 2010

it's not really about entropy either

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/04/01/chaos-theory.html

the blog is at http://37signals.com/svn/  (signal vs noise)
home page for 37signals is http://37signals.com/

31 copies in the library network in September (put in your request):
https://library.minlib.net/record=b2751095~S1

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

check the security status of your browser (all of them) and your addons/plugins (all of them)

https://browsercheck.qualys.com/

is a free web browser checking tool to check whether the addons are up to date or known to be vulnerable --  whether the installed versions are up to date or known to be vulnerable:  flash, quicktime, realplayer, acrobat reader, wmediaplayer, silverlight, etc as well as the basic browser.

NOTE:  it does install a plugin/addon/ depending on your browser, but there are clear instructions on how to remove it as you wish.     When updating your addons/plugins, read what you are agreeing to and DON"T INSTALL THINGS YOU DON"T NEED (or don't want).

I checked my IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari and they all came back with different versions of the plugins, in varying combinations of "up to date" and "vulnerable"  .  

NOTE2:   the RealPlayer update seems to want to install Pro when you select "Fix It", so I just canceled; I'll get the free one myself later.

NOTE3:   Apple software update will update sw from Apple, but does not seem to check the status of the add-ons and plug-ins.

Note4:  if you own a web site you can have qualys check it for malware (say installed by an advertiser or vulnerable component  on the page.  that service is free also:  http://www.qualys.com/forms/trials/stopmalware/.

Monday, September 13, 2010

charge your electronics by walking / breathing ...

http://www.princeton.edu/~mcm/

Professor Michael C. McAlpine
Biomechanical Energy Harvesting
The development of a method for integrating highly efficient energy conversion materials onto stretchable, biocompatible rubbers could yield breakthroughs in implantable or wearable energy harvesting systems. Piezoelectric nanomaterials represent a particularly interesting class of smart materials due to their highly efficient electromechanical coupling. Printing piezoelectric nanomaterials onto flexible rubber and plastic substrates has enabled the development of highly efficient energy conversion hybrids, which could result in energy scavengers for converting breathing and walking into portable power.

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

self-folding origami

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=origami-sheets-that-fold-themselves

Origami Sheets That Fold Themselves
By John Matson

Researchers have invented a real-life Transformer, a device that can fold itself into two shapes on command. The system is hardly ready to do battle with the Decepticons—the tiny contraption forms only relatively crude boat and airplane shapes—but the concept could one day produce chameleonlike objects that shift between any number of practical shapes at will.

Self-folding sheets are just one facet of programmable matter. “Instead of programming bits and bytes, you program mechanical properties of the object,” says Daniela Rus, a roboticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The system, described online June 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, consists of a thin sheet of resin–fiberglass composite, just a few centimeters across, segmented into 32 triangular panels separated by flexible silicone joints. Some of the joints have heat-sensitive actuators that bend 180 degrees when warmed by an electric current, folding the sheet over at that joint. Depending on the program used, the sheet will conduct a series of folds to yield the boat or airplane shape in about 15 seconds.

The researchers say that in principle the system could produce many more shapes than two. “We were looking for ways to embed a bunch of different functionalities into one low-profile sheet,” says co-author Robert J. Wood, an electrical engineer at Harvard University.

In the near term, Rus envisions the computational origami technology forming the basis of three-dimensional displays—for instance, maps that can reproduce the topography of a given region on demand. In the more distant future, applications might move beyond shape mimicry to involve programmable optical, electric or acoustic properties.

Saturday, September 04, 2010

How do you store your passwords ?

How to keep your passwords safe ?
Lock them up in a safe !
Bruce Schneier provides a free password storage utility program
http://www.schneier.com/passsafe.html
http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/


look for the link to download:
Secure your passwords now![click here for latest version]


remember:
1) don't lose this password, or you won't be able to unlock your own safe
2) update the passwords you do use, so the ones that you are storing on spreadsheets, etc won't be useful to anyone who discovers your password folder and file called "secret".  


:-) 

Monday, August 30, 2010

ah yes bankrolling tea

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage


<...>
Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.
<...>

note: your library's online resources might have access to newspaper archives; e.g. bpl.org
and don't give up if you can't get to the library - look for your own ecard without making the trip yourself http://www.bpl.org/general/circulation/ecards.htm

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Magnificent

http://www.yelp.com/biz/magnificent-muffin-and-bagel-shoppe-medford

recommended ...

speechless...

http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2010/08/pundits-blame-the-victims-on-obama-muslim-myth-.html

Friday, August 27, 2010

Thursday, August 26, 2010

google chat /voice calls in US free in 2010 ?

Looks like chat now allows you to make voice and video calls from inside Gmail or from iGoogle...
Free for 2010 ??

http://www.google.com/chat/voice/

Monday, August 23, 2010

retrieving that email (soon) after you just hit "SEND"

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/web/08/23/undo.gmail/index.html?eref=rss_tech
in Gmail --

To enable 'Undo Send':
1. Log in to Gmail and go to Google Labs. If you've never gone to Labs before, click the word "more" in the very top left corner, then scroll down and click "even more."
2. In the column on the right, click "Labs." It's next to the icon of a beaker filled with green stuff.
3. Click "Gmail Labs" in the column on the right.
4. Scroll down almost all the way to the bottom until you see "Undo Send." Click "enable" and the feature is now on. Then scroll the rest of the way down and look in the bottom left corner for the "Save Changes" box. Click it.
5. Now, go back to the main Gmail page and click "Settings" in the top right. You should also see your green Labs beaker icon there now -- this will let you go straight to Labs from now on.
6. Scroll down to "Undo Send" -- it should be right above "My Picture." Your default should be set to 10 seconds. But you can use the drop-down bar to stretch that to 30 seconds.
7. Scroll down and hit "Save Changes."
8. To undo an email, just look for the box at the top of the screen that will have the words "Your message has been sent." After that, you should see the "Undo" option. Click that and you'll be sent back to the e-mail's draft form, where you'll have 30 seconds to edit or delete it before it goes out.