Music affects how we perceive facial expressions

Music can be thought of as a form of emotional communication, with which the performer conveys an emotional state to the listener. This "language" is remarkably powerful - it can evoke strong emotions, and make your heart race or send tingles down your spine. And it is universal - the emotional content of a piece of music can be understood by anyone, regardless of cultural background.

Are the emotions evoked by piece of music similar to, and can they influence, other emotional experiences? The answer to these questions is unclear. But a new study, which has just been published in Neuroscience Letters, provides both behavioural and physiological evidence that the emotions evoked by music can be transferred to the sense of vision, and can influence how the emotions in facial expressions are perceived.
(via NYTimes science section)

Device for Visually Challenged People by Erik Rydell

Visually handicapped people are facing difficulties to perform everyday communications. Sometimes, bad eye sight occurs to many people for reduced self confidence due to not being able to perform independently. This is an innovative concept device that will help visually handicapped people when they are in a mobile situation.

This electronic device is combined with a speech synthesis and a digital camera with a shape of a traditional product.

Vitamins Found to Curb Exercise Benefits

If you exercise to improve your metabolism and prevent diabetes, you may want to avoid antioxidants like vitamins C and E.

Sight Unseen : Photographs by Blind Photographers

A spectacular new exhibit at the University of California, Riverside raises extraordinary questions about the nature of sight
Enter

Happy Mother's Day and Happy Birthday Bono

To celebrate both of the above I present the U2 song
"Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World"

The 4 hour Workday

I totally try to work in the manner described here (although I call it "explode into the moment").
Some of the most effective people I know work in like manner.
uvealblues

How to complete a full workday by noon? Sounds impossible, right? But on many days, by 12 o’clock, I have completed work that should normally take eight hours. And I don’t wake up at 4 a.m. to achieve this.

Fish hook surgery

Fish hooks in the eye can be a tricky situation due to the barbs. The surgeon here chose to enlarge the entrance wound to pull out the hook. Another option would have been to cut the hook internally and remove the piece from the initial wound, which had been used to remove the cataract via the lens glide...
uvealblues
More interesting videos here.


(via kevinmd)

Farrow ends Darfur protest fast

In a statement posted on her website the 64-year-old said: "I have been instructed by my doctor to stop my fast immediately due to health concerns." The actress fasted for 12 days over the Sudanese government's decision to expel foreign aid agencies. On Friday entrepreneur Richard Branson took over Farrow's hunger strike.

Premiere: "War/No More Trouble" Playing for Change

My man, Bono, makes an apperance here!

Recalculating Happiness in a Himalayan Kingdom

The formula for happiness (at least in Bhutan):
= 1-(.25+.03125+.000625+0)

= 1-.281875

= .718

Mathematical formulas have even been devised to reduce happiness to its tiniest component parts. The G.N.H. index for psychological well-being, for example, includes the following: “One sum of squared distances from cutoffs for four psychological well-being indicators. Here, instead of average the sum of squared distances from cutoffs is calculated because the weights add up to 1 in each dimension.”

Every two years, these indicators are to be reassessed through a nationwide questionnaire, said Karma Tshiteem, secretary of the Gross National Happiness Commission, as he sat in his office at the end of a hard day of work that he said made him happy.

One nation, seven sins

The question of evil and where it lurks has been largely ignored by the scientific community, which is why a recently released study titled
“The Spatial Distribution of the Seven Deadly Sins Within Nevada” is groundbreaking: Never before has a state’s fall from grace been so precisely graphed and plotted.

Eden? Maybe. But Where’s the Apple Tree?

Locations for the Garden of Eden have been offered many times before, but seldom in the somewhat inhospitable borderland where Angola and Namibia meet.

A new genetic survey of people in Africa, the largest of its kind, suggests, however, that the region in southwest Africa seems, on the present evidence, to be the origin of modern humans. The authors have also identified some 14 ancestral populations.

Ultrasound Exams by Phone

When we talk about game-changing phone accessories, it usually means something like silicon cases are now available in lime green. But a pair of engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have a new phone accessory that could affect health care worldwide.

William D. Richard and David M. Zar have adapted an ultrasound probe that works on a half-watt of power from a cellphone.

UNICEF: Niger villages say "No" to female genital mutilation

via theblogthatatemanhattan

Google Docs Guide: How to do Stuff with Google Docs

A Practical guide to Google Docs: Learn how to do anything and everything with your online Google Office.

Aerobics (Cardio) is Not Your Priority in Lasting Weight Loss

Dr. Kenneth Cooper, the father of aerobic exercise (and the person who coined the term) completely recanted his assertions regarding aerobic exercise. After observing a disproportionate number of his aerobic-enthusiast friends die of cancer and heart disease, he reversed his ideas on the benefits of excessive aerobic exercise. He now claims anything in excess of 20 minutes has greatly diminishing returns. In fact, he’s now an advocate of scientific weight training.

You're Gonna Poke Your Eye Out Kid

The Happy Hospitalist always finds the most interesting stories!
This is one on scleral tattooing--which I guess is the next step in the evolution of eye decoration (following eye jewelry)

Eye Jewelry

The waterfall illusion can be transferred between vision and touch

If you look at a waterfall for about 30 seconds, and then shift your gaze to a nearby stationary object, such as a rock or a tree, that object will seem to drift slowly upwards. This well known optical illusion demonstrates a phenomenon called the motion after-effect, which is thought to occur as a result of adaptation - the brain compensates for movement in one direction, causing us to momentarily perceive a stationary objects to be moving in the other.

Although illusory motion can also be induced in the sense of touch, the brain is thought to process visual and tactile motion separately. But now researchers from MIT have found that not only can moving visual stimuli induce a tactile motion after-effect, but also that moving tactile stimuli can induce a visual motion after-effect. The findings, which are published in Current Biology, show that the senses of vision and touch are closely linked, and that each can influence the other.

Top 31 motivation hacks

Some good motivational tools here

Poems and Tears for 'Silent Mentors' Spark a Surge of Cadavers in Taiwan

HUALIEN, Taiwan -- A young medical student stood in front of a corpse as sobbing filled the operating room.

The aspiring doctor, Hsu Jun-k'ai, worked up the nerve to glance at the relatives crying next to him. Tears trickled down his own cheeks. But the surgery wasn't a failure. It hadn't even begun.

Mr. Hsu was taking part in an elaborate farewell for eight people who had donated their bodies to Tzu Chi University's medical school for use in a surgery-simulation class. Medical schools around the world have ceremonies to honor donors, but Tzu Chi (pronounced Seh-Gee) is taking the practice to unusual levels.

By the time students here wield their scalpels, they will know the dead intimately, composing poems and slide shows to them, writing their biographies and sometimes lighting incense in their honor. When they are finished, the students will carry the donors' coffins to the crematory, mourning them as their "silent mentors" who taught them with their bodies.

What Are Friends for? A Longer Life

In the quest for better health, many people turn to doctors, self-help books or herbal supplements. But they overlook a powerful weapon that could help them fight illness and depression, speed recovery, slow aging and prolong life: their friends.
(..)
In 2006, a study of nearly 3,000 nurses with breast cancer found that women without close friends were four times as likely to die from the disease as women with 10 or more friends. And notably, proximity and the amount of contact with a friend wasn’t associated with survival. Just having friends was protective.

The silence of evidence

This blog entry from "Junkfood Science" is definitely worth reading...
Uvealblues

The reality of nationalized electronic medical records is recognized among most medical professionals, who know that the claims of saving money and lives are not supported by the preponderance of credible evidence and that improving health care isn’t about having everyone’s medical records in a federal database for governmental oversight. But the general public has largely been kept in the dark about the controversies surrounding electronic medical records.
One reason for this disconnect and why the full story isn't reaching consumers was explained in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association
(..)
It turns out that electronic medical record vendors have negotiated contract deals that leave them free and clear of liability when their software is inferior and harms patients, and prohibits problems from being revealed to the public.

Lizards Sunbathe for Better Health

Lizards and other cold-blooded critters bask in the sun to keep warm. But they also do it for the vitamin D, a new study finds.
(..)
"The chameleons were as effective as mathematically possible by our methods at regulating toward optimal UV exposure for their vitamin D profile," he said. "We thought they were probably pretty good at regulating their UV exposure; we just didn't think they'd be this good."

It's not clear, however, by what mechanism they are able to sense their internal vitamin D levels, but Karsten thinks there may be a brain receptor sensitive to the vitamin.

The Free Online Ophthalmology Book

Written by Tim Root, ophthalmology resident..
The Free Online Ophthalmology book

I can see clearly now the leech has gone

The Australasian College for Emergency Medicine has reported the first case of a leech being safely removed from a human eye.

via Suture for a Living

Braille e-reader concept can't be far from reality

The technology's already here, we just need a venture capital firm and a determined entrepreneur to make it happen. A foursome of designers -- Seon-Keun Park, Byung-Min Woo, Sun-Hye Woo and Jin-Sun Park -- have banded together to create the above pictured concept, an e-reader for those with limited or no vision. Their Braille E-Book concept theoretically relies on electroactive polymers in order to change the surface's shape as pages are turned, and while we fully expect the battery life to suffer due to all the necessary commotion, it's definitely a start that needs to happen.

The diagnosis? Fir on the lung

The annals of medical anomalies bulge with stories from far-flung places where the idea of a reliable source is a chap sitting on a gate in a goatskin fleece who waves to passersby, even if there are none. And so to the Urals, where medics are reported to have removed a tiny fir tree from a man's lung, after he complained of chest pains. Before doctors opened him up, they were convinced he had lung cancer.
Now, they're convinced he inhaled a seed, which sprouted inside him.
via the Happy Hospitalist

National Geographic's New Infinite Photograph

Check out the video of this new Web app from National Geographic. It's called Infinite Photograph and is live today at www.ngm.com/infinite.

The browser-based program features stunning user-submitted photography from the natural world to create a massive As Seen on Earth photo mosaic that you can navigate by clicking on color patterns to create an infinite number of photograph mosaics.

Cool product: $20 artificial knee for patients in the developing world

(PhysOrg.com) -- Last year Joel Sadler and his classmates faced a daunting challenge in their Biomedical Device Design and Evaluation course: Create a low-cost, high-performance prosthetic knee joint for amputees in the developing world. Dubbed the JaipurKnee Project, the team aimed to help rectify lives ravaged by war and diseases such as diabetes.
via dvice.com

Don't look down: The incredible daredevil who balances on the edge of 1,000ft cliffs

It's the ultimate balancing act - travelling upside-down on a bicycle 1,000 metres above an icy Norwegian fjord, with just a weight dangling below him for stability.

This is the latest jaw-dropping trick from extreme artist Eskil Ronningsbakken, who enjoys nothing more than precariously perching on the edge of a clifftop or walking on a tightrope between two hot-air balloons.

The 29-year-old with a head for heights describes himself as an 'educated balancing performer', and has been honing his death-defying skills since the age of five, with circus troupes around the globe.

How to Raise Our I.Q.

From Nicholas Kristof at the NY TImes...

Professor Nisbett provides suggestions for transforming your own urchins into geniuses — praise effort more than achievement, teach delayed gratification, limit reprimands and use praise to stimulate curiosity — but focuses on how to raise America’s collective I.Q. That’s important, because while I.Q. doesn’t measure pure intellect — we’re not certain exactly what it does measure — differences do matter, and a higher I.Q. correlates to greater success in life.

Aiding is Abetting

More from Dambisa Moyo...
An interview with Dambisa Moyo
African author and economist Dambisa Moyo on ending western aid to Africa now, what Bono and Geldoff don’t get, and the deadening of African independence and entrepreneurship.
Dambisa Moyo’s prescription for economic sustainability in Africa—which includes cutting off all aid within five years—might seem insane if the statistics weren’t so grim: despite one trillion dollars in western aid over the past sixty years, the economic lot of the average African has only gotten worse. Most Africans now live on one dollar per day, and sub-Saharan Africa remains the poorest region in the world. Despite a deluge of aid between the years of 1970 and 1998, poverty on the continent skyrocketed from 11 percent of the population to 66 percent, which means over six hundred million Africans are now impoverished. The average African can only expect to live to be about fifty, and half the continent’s citizens are under the age of fifteen. In addition to poverty, AIDS, corruption (half the continent is still under un-democratic rule), civil war, and genocide ravage the continent. Indeed, Africa seems constantly embroiled in a steady stream of horrors, the likes of which are not seen anywhere else on the planet. Why? Are Africans innately different from the rest of us? Nonsense, says Moyo. She blames aid.

Study Finds Pattern of Severe Droughts in Africa

For at least 3,000 years, a drumbeat of potent droughts, far longer and more severe than any experienced recently, have seared a belt of sub-Saharan Africa that is now home to tens of millions of the world’s poorest people, climate researchers report in a new study.
(..)
“Many of the 390 million people in Africa living on less than $1.25 a day are smallholder farmers that depend on two things: rain and land,” he said. “Even small climate blips such as a delay in rains, a modest shortening of the drought cycle, can have catastrophic effects.”

Given the sub-Saharan region’s persistent vulnerability, Mr. Watkins added, the new findings and the prospect of further global warming could be “early warning signs for an unprecedented and catastrophic reversal in human development.”

Famed economist, Uwe Rhinehardt, on the healthcare systems of Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland...
None of these countries uses a government-run, Medicare-like health insurance plan. They all rely on purely private, nonprofit or for-profit insurers that are goaded by tight regulation to work toward socially desired ends. And they do so at average per-capita health-care costs far below those of the United States — costs in Germany and the Netherlands are less than half of those here.
(..)
In Europe, as in Canada, that social ethic is based on the principle of social solidarity. It means that health care should be financed by individuals on the basis of their ability to pay, but should be available to all who need it on roughly equal terms. The regulations imposed on health care in these countries are rooted in this overarching principle.

First, these countries all mandate the individual to be insured for a basic package of health care benefits.

Many Americans oppose such a mandate as an infringement of their personal rights, all the while believing that they have a perfect right to highly expensive, critically needed health care, even when they cannot pay for it. This immature, asocial mentality is rare in the rest of the world. An insurance sector that must insure all comers at premiums that are not contingent on the insured’s health status — a feature President Obama has promised — cannot function for long if people can go without insurance when they are healthy, but are entitled to premiums unrelated to their health status when they fall ill.

Second, these nations try to tailor the individual’s contribution to the financing of health care closely to the individual’s ability to pay — almost perfectly so in Germany, albeit less perfectly in the other two countries.
(..)
All three countries offer their citizens reliable, portable health insurance based on the principle of social solidarity, but without a government-run health insurance plan like Medicare. The $64,000 question is whether America’s private health insurers would be willing to countenance the tight regulation required for that approach.

Life and Death on the Operating Table

After reading this interview of Dr. Starzl by Dr. Paula Chen, I think I am going to have to Dr. Starzls' memoir, "The Puzzle People."

After finishing a difficult liver transplant, when the fear of losing the individual on the table has finally passed, it is hard not to step back for a moment and wonder about the surgeon who did the very first such operation.
(..)
At the end of the operation, he writes, “[Bennie] was wrapped in a plain white sheet after being washed off by a weeping nurse. They took him away from this place of sanitized hope to the cold and unhygienic morgue.... The surgeons stayed in the operating room for a long time after, sitting on the low stools around the periphery, looking at the grown and saying nothing.... It was not the last time I would see this scene, both in my dreams and in reality. I never heard anyone who was there describe this as ’the Solis case,’ or the first human liver transplantation. If they mentioned it at all, it was always just about Bennie.”

I recently spoke with Dr. Starzl, who at 83 continues to be involved in transplantation research and with patients (he excused himself from one of our conversations to take a call from a patient). He shared some of his thoughts on the patient-doctor relationship, health care reform, and on being a patient and doctor...

Sound of Music Train Station

The power of music is mighty indeed....

Sound of Music Train Station @ Yahoo! Video

Tip of the hat to S.A. and Pat

Eyeborg Project: An Exciting and Creepy Hack I Hope You Never Try

It goes without saying that experimenting with your eyesight is neither the easiest hack in the world or the safest, but apparently a few brave souls out there are driven to take it on regardless. The Eyeborg Project is the brainchild of one of those.


EYEBORG-- The Two Week Trial from eyeborg on Vimeo.

Deserted

AL WALEED, IRAQ — What does it feel like to raise a newborn baby in an inhospitable desert where scorpions crawl about and sandstorms threaten to bring down one’s tent?

Lubna Falah is about to find out. She will soon deliver her baby. This is not her first child, but she has never tried to raise one in a tent.

In Baghdad, Lubna had a beautiful home. That was then. Now she is left with bad dreams and repeated nightmares. Lubna is an Iraqi Palestinian, a double refugee, living in the desert close to the border with Syria. Her ancestors fled Palestine 60 years ago when Jewish forces took control of their home in Haifa, and now she is trying to flee Iraq. She is the sister of my friend Lina.

Almost a billion iphone app downloads

This is pretty amazing--check out the link...
We're about to hit a billion...


Join the celebration. Download any app and you automatically get the chance to win a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook Pro.

Mugabe Aides Said to Use Violence to Get Amnesty

HARARE, Zimbabwe — President Robert Mugabe’s top lieutenants are trying to force the political opposition into granting them amnesty for their past crimes by abducting, detaining and torturing opposition officials and activists, according to senior members of Mr. Mugabe’s party.

Review: iPhone apps for nearly every waking minute

An iphone addict myself, I appreciated this article detailing how the iphone can become so integrated into one's life...My latest use of an iphone app was when I was called to the Nevada Assembly for a "stat" eye consult and was able to use an eye exam app on my iphone as part of the exam.
uvealblues
PHILADELPHIA — Hi, my name is Deborah Yao, and I am an iPhone applications addict.
I didn't see it coming. I bought the iPhone because it is the Swiss Army knife of gadgets — a video iPod, phone and Web browser and more. But then I discovered what would become the source of many bleary-eyed nights: the iPhone applications store.
The apps are software programs you download to the phone to give it new features. So now my phone is a pedometer, a voice recorder, a gym coach and a budget tracker. It promises to find my parked car, give me a shoulder massage and even repel mosquitoes, for free or 99 cents and up.

Gold-Plated Economy in Nevada Town Becomes Rare Beacon for the Jobless

ELKO, Nev. -- Gold fever has inoculated this historic cow town from the state's economic malaise, making it an island of relative prosperity in a state flooded with unemployed workers.

While Las Vegas, Reno and other onetime hot spots reel from the real-estate crash and wider recession, this area's gold-mining operations are adding jobs and spreading wealth in surrounding Elko County. The area boasts 26,700 jobs, up from 25,500 a year ago, while Nevada has lost many jobs. Construction is up here, as are taxable sales

From Medical School to Middle Age

This could be an interesting show. No matter what our professions, we all wonder at some point if we would recommend the same to our children. My view is that it is much easier and gratifying to be a teacher, engineer, doctor etc. in areas of great need and where warmth, respect, and civility are hallmarks of society.
When one of my sons was 6 years old, I told him that if at that age God had "told" me that when I grow up I was going to help blind people see, I would have been flabbergasted...
Uvealblues


Tonight and next Tuesday, PBS shines the retrospectoscope on doctors as “Nova” airs “Doctors’ Diaries,” the most recent installment of a 22-year chronicle about seven former Harvard medical school students.
(..)
These last views offered by the retrospectoscope are tinged with sadness, the kind of regret that inevitably comes with nearly 20/20 hindsight. Each doctor goes on to address the question: Would you do it over again? And it’s uncomfortable watching these once voluble or spontaneous young students now pause and offer the measured responses of middle age.

But what leaves the viewer, and any future doctor who might watch the series, with hope is the surprising lack of regret each expresses regarding his or her choice to become a doctor. Their work today reflects a broad range of deeply committed and patient-centered work — caring for the underserved; doing clinical and basic science research that will ultimately affect patients’ lives; traveling to Third World countries to offer care; running a nonprofit that helps to fund community service projects here and abroad. It is work that transcends the challenges of their personal lives and far surpasses the quality of what they might have ever offered patients earlier on in their careers.

There is a discussion at the nytimes on this subject here.

Benjamin Zander: Classical music with shining eyes

U.S. Reduces Subsidies for Private Medicare

The federal government made good on its plan to cut 2010 payments for private Medicare plans, whittling the subsidies to health insurers sooner than the industry originally expected.

The cuts, announced late Monday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, are slightly less severe than the 5% reduction the federal agency signaled in February, but still raise concerns about what has been a critical source of profit growth for many health insurers. Reimbursements to private insurers that administer so-called Medicare Advantage plans would fall by as much as 4% to 4.5% next year.

Willpower: A Game Of Strategy

Willpower is a very familiar phrase, but what is it really and where does it come from? What happens in the mind when you resist your impulses in the face of temptation?
(..)

The second strategy used by the mind to resist an impulse, says Mischel, is a little more complicated. It involves not distracting yourself, but actively changing the way that you think about the object of desire. "The pre-wired way that a 4-year-old thinks about a marshmallow if she allows herself to think about it," says Mischel, "is how yummy and chewy they're going to taste."

People tend to focus on the immediate pleasure of the experience. They will think of the temptation, Mischel likes to say, in a "hot" or emotional way that makes it hard to resist. The same can be said of an adult smoker or alcoholic. But if you do want to resist, says Mischel, what you need to do is think about the object you desire in a cold or cognitive way.

So, for example, to help the children resist the treat, before leaving the room Mischel told the kids to imagine the treat in front of them differently. "I told them to think about those marshmallows as if they were just cotton puffs, or clouds. Those instructions to the 4-year-old had a dramatic effect on her ability to wait for the thing that she couldn't wait for before."

Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory

As someone who spent considerable time as an undergraduate pursuing "the memory molecule" in a lab, I find this quite exciting...uvealblues

Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain. Could make you forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, even a bad habit.

For all that scientists have studied it, the brain remains the most complex and mysterious human organ — and, now, the focus of billions of dollars’ worth of research to penetrate its secrets.

Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills.

Save the Words

Weirdly addicting for all the wordsmiths...check it out here

The World is Flat

For those of you who haven't read Friedman's excellent book, you can get a nice video summary here from his talk at MIT...
uvealblues

Believing in Treatments that Don't Work

This article highlights the doctor mindset of advocating treatments that don't work. Of course there is also the patient side, in which patients would rather try unproven treatments for diseases which appeal to them instead of treatments which have much data to prove their efficacy. The other issue that can come up for physicians is trying to convince patients insistent on various treatments for various ailments that they don't need them...often times this discussion arises from misleading advertisements from big pharma...Regardless the author makes very important points in this article...
uvealblues
As Washington debates health care reform, emergency room physician Dr. David H. Newman explores how medical ideology often gets in the way of evidence-based medicine.
(..)
The practice of medicine contains countless examples of elegant medical theories that belie the best available evidence.(read on)

Treatment based on ideology is alluring. Surgeries to repair the knee should work. A syrup to reduce cough should help. Calming the straining heart should save lives. But the uncomfortable truth is that many expensive, invasive interventions are of little or no benefit and cause potentially uncomfortable, costly, and dangerous side effects and complications.

Heart Muscle Renewed Over Lifetime, Study Finds

In a finding that may open new approaches to treating heart disease, Swedish scientists have succeeded in measuring a highly controversial property of the human heart: the rate at which its muscle cells are renewed during a person’s lifetime.
(..)
“I think this will be one of the most important papers in cardiovascular medicine in years,” said Dr. Charles Murry, a heart researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle. “It helps settle a longstanding controversy about whether the human heart has any ability to regenerate itself.”

If the heart can generate new muscle cells, researchers can hope to develop drugs that might accelerate the process, since the heart fails to replace cells that are killed in a heart attack.

More or less equal?

The gap between rich and poor has been widening for 30 years. It has started narrowing again.

African Bush Meat and Viral Disease

via White African

Andrea Mead Lawrence, Skiing Champion, Dies at 76

A fitting tribute in the NY Times to one of my patients, Ms. Andrea Lawrence, who remained an absolute delight with beautiful, dancing blue eyes to the very end...
uvealblues

Andrea Mead Lawrence, who as a 19-year-old newlywed at the 1952 Olympics rocketed down the Norwegian slopes to win two gold medals in Alpine skiing, a feat unmatched by any American, died Tuesday at her home in Mammoth Lakes, Calif. She was 76.

Hellhole

A great article by one of the best medical writers out there, Atul Gawande, on the effects of social isolation...

The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long-term solitary confinement. Is this torture?

The Darfur the West Isn’t Recognizing as It Moralizes About the Region

For many who survey an African landscape strewn with political wreckage, nowadays merely to raise the subject of European colonialism, which formally ended across most of the continent five decades ago, is to ring alarm bells of excuse making.

Clearly, the African disaster most in view today is Sudan, or more specifically the dirty war that has raged since 2003 in that country’s western region, Darfur.

Rare among African conflicts, it exerts a strong claim on our conscience. By instructive contrast, more than five million people have died as a result of war in Congo since 1998, the rough equivalent at its height of a 2004 Asian tsunami striking every six months, without stirring our diplomats to urgency or generating much civic response.

Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan-born scholar at Columbia University and the author of “When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda,” is one of the most penetrating analysts of African affairs. In “Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror,” he has written a learned book that reintroduces history into the discussion of the Darfur crisis and questions the logic and even the good faith of those who seek to place it at the pinnacle of Africa’s recent troubles. It is a brief, he writes, “against those who substitute moral certainty for knowledge, and who feel virtuous even when acting on the basis of total ignorance.”

Out of Africa

The masked face with its feathers of hair glares from the instep. And the savage hybrid of a shoe mixes python straps and a sky-high heel with beads, wooden pearls, a cord and a tassel.

When it appeared on the runway at the Louis Vuitton show in October, who could have believed that the fantastical footwear — selling at €1,250 to €2,250 (about $1,650 to $3,000) a pair — could be the hottest item for summer 2009?

Gregory Petsko: The coming neurological epidemic

The Quiet Coup

Wow--this is a must read for an insightful viewpoint on the current banking crisis. It is written by Simon Johnson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund during 2007 and 2008. There is so much good writing here, that it is very hard to excerpt....
Uvealblues

But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.
(..)
Of course, the U.S. is unique. And just as we have the world’s most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.

In a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or the threat of violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more typical of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts. Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the American political system, old-fashioned corruption—envelopes stuffed with $100 bills—is probably a sideshow today, Jack Abramoff notwithstanding.

Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system.

(..)
A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. Alan Greenspan’s pronouncements in favor of unregulated financial markets are well known. Yet Greenspan was hardly alone. This is what Ben Bernanke, the man who succeeded him, said in 2006: “The management of market risk and credit risk has become increasingly sophisticated. … Banking organizations of all sizes have made substantial strides over the past two decades in their ability to measure and manage risks.”

Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn’t.

(..)
From this confluence of campaign finance, personal connections, and ideology there flowed, in just the past decade, a river of deregulatory policies that is, in hindsight, astonishing: (read on)

X-Treme Censorship

Suzie, writes a great blog from Saudi Arabia. It is entertaining and really captures the flavor of the culture.
Her latest post on censorship of in Saudi Arabia, takes me back. Sometimes the "man with the magic marker" was so precise I would think that the girl was wearing an evening gown, without realizing that the photo had been doctored to cover up her bare flesh! Check out the precision in the photos below! I have always wondered how many chaps are employed in this sector (and how they get this job), what with the thousands of magazines coming in to the Kingdom weekly (not to mention cd covers)...
Uvealblues


One of the CDs I got for Capt. Kabob is called "One of the Boys," by a female artist named Katy Perry. Ok, I have to admit here that 16 year old Capt. Kabob thinks Katy Perry is pretty hot, but he really likes her music too. When he opened up the CD, we were both astonished however. I hadn't noticed when I bought it, but the tightly sealed plastic wrap packaging had been removed and had been replaced with a clear plastic resealable envelope-type wrapper. The front cover of the little booklet tucked inside serves as the front of the CD cover. This little booklet insert has photos of the artist, a list of the songs and lyrics, as well as the artistic credits.

This is what the real cover of the CD should have looked like:



And here's what the actual CD cover that I purchased looks like:

Depending on Context, Bird Couples Sing in Harmony or Discord

It takes two to duet, and one question for scientists is how these coordinated performances arise — in birds. Are they the result of cooperation, a way in which one pair signals to others that they’ve got it together? Or are they the result of conflict, evolving to avoid one partner’s song interfering with the other’s?

A study of duetting in Peruvian warbling antbirds suggests that it might be a little of both, and that context is everything. Joseph A. Tobias and Nathalie Seddon of the University of Oxford show in Current Biology that sexual conflict can cause the female of a pair that normally cooperates to “jam” the male’s song by singing over it.

Surgery Grand Rounds

Surgexperiences 220 is up with alot of good posts, including two on ophthalmology...

Waseda University's heartbeat compensation robot be stills our hearts

Look closely. No, closer. See that slab of pink meat in the middle of Waseda University's surgical robot? That's a heart... now imagine it's your heart. Don't worry, if you ever do pit flesh-to-servo against this device, it'll likely be saving your life during a coronary bypass. After making a small incision, the robot compensates for the natural shake and movement of the organ caused by heartbeats so that surgery can proceed as if the organ is still.

Poison Takes Toll on African Lions

Wow--the lion population in Kenya has declined from 200,000 to 30,000 over the past 20 years..
Kenyan Cattle Herders Are Using The American Pesticide Furadan To Kill The Predators

Here is a link to the 60 minutes video:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom

This article is a bit dated (June 2008) but a good profile of Nicholas Taleb, the author of the well-known book, "The Black Swan."
Uvealblues
When this man said the world’s economy was heading for disaster, he was scorned. Now traders, economists, even Nasa, are clamouring to hear him speak

As I Sat Sadly By Her Side

A Boy Living in a Car

This is a very informative article (by my favorite NYTimes editorialist, Nicholas Kristof) in its own right. It also reminds me of the people I work with in Orbis, who like Sasha and Sarah, "get it." They "get" that there are billions of people suffering and they have made a conscious commitment to help "right" the world. Incredible and inspiring are the Orbis crew, similar to Sasha and Sarah, profiled here...
The Orbis people are a fantastic antidote to those who fall into the orbit described by one of my favorite songwriters, Nick Cave in one of his seminal songs, "As I Sat Sadly By Her Side, in which he describes the "usual state of affairs"--
"But watch the one falling in the street
See him gesture to his neighbours
See him trampled beneath their feet
All outward motion connects to nothing
For each is concerned with their immediate need
Witness the man reaching up from the gutter
See the other one stumbling on who can not see"
Uvealblues.

As America’s unemployment rate rises, those paying the severest price aren’t necessarily in Detroit or Miami. One of the newest street children here in this northern Haitian city is a 10-year-old boy whose father was working in Florida but lost his job and can no longer send money home. As a result, the family here was evicted, the mother and children went separate ways to improve their odds of finding shelter, and the boy found refuge in an abandoned wreck of a car.

The boy is one of 46 million people in the developing world — more than double the New York State population — who will be driven into poverty in 2009, according to a World Bank estimate.
(..)
It’s natural in an economic crisis to look inward, to focus on America’s own needs, but it’s worth remembering that the consequence of a deep recession in a poor country isn’t just a lost job but also a lost child.

In Cité Soleil, a woman named Chantal Dorlus told me that her 5-year-old daughter, Nasson, starved to death last month, and neighbors confirmed the account. Ms. Dorlus said that her three other children would have starved as well if not for the generosity of her neighbors, who share their meager food supplies.

If slum-dwelling Haitians can share what little they have, I hope we can be equally generous during this downturn when needs are greatest.
(..)
On this trip, I met a couple of American women, Sasha Kramer and Sarah Brownell, both in their early 30s, who offer an example of outward commitment at a time when most of us are retrenching and focusing on ourselves. Sasha and Sarah run a hand-to-mouth aid group, called SOIL; they speak fluent Creole and get around on motorcycle taxis while waving back at legions of fans on every street. (You can watch a video of them at nytimes.com/ontheground.)

I was interested in their work because it addresses two of the developing world’s greatest but least glamorous challenges. One is sanitation, for human waste in poor countries routinely spreads disease and parasites. The second is agriculture, for poor countries must increase crop yields if they are to overcome poverty and hunger.

It’s Time to Make a Coffee Run

Any data that supports my morning cup of coffee is a good one ;)

So even as sports stars from baseball players to cyclists to sprinters are pilloried for using performance enhancing drugs, one of the best studied performance enhancers is fine for them or anyone else to use. And it is right there in a cup of coffee or a can of soda.

Exercise physiologists have studied caffeine’s effects in nearly every iteration: Does it help sprinters? Marathon runners? Cyclists? Rowers? Swimmers? Athletes whose sports involve stopping and starting like tennis players? The answers are yes and yes and yes and yes.

Staying in Touch Internationally, on the Cheap

For iphone users, this post highlights the application "Fring" which I use routinely as a conduit to skype--it works quite well...

The first thing you’ll need is an unlocked mobile phone — that is, a phone that’s not tied to one particular carrier. (In the United States, some carriers will unlock your phone if you ask; abroad, most phones come already unlocked.) Then, whenever you arrive in a new country, you can buy a local SIM card (the tiny, interchangeable chip inside the phone that actually lets you connect to a particular carrier; they’re sold at mobile phone stores and kiosks for $2 to $25, depending on the country) and make phone calls and send text messages without paying exorbitant international roaming fees.

Simple enough. But for folks back home to reach you, you’ll need Skype. In the last few years, Skype has revolutionized how global nomads like myself keep in touch. Install its software on your Mac or PC, and as long as you’ve got an Internet connection, you can make high-quality audio and video calls to other Skype users almost anywhere on earth. (A few countries, like the United Arab Emirates, unfortunately block the service.)

The Happy Hospitalist comments on Drug Reps

What Happened To All The Drug Reps?
My the times they are a changing. From American Medical News comes this piece about the changing landscape of pharmaceutical detailing in the doctor's office. With many blockbuster drugs going off patent, few in the pipeline, new rules regarding "gifts" and a recession, it appears that the days of the drug rep might be limited. Peaking at 102,000 reps in 2007, the industry expects no more than 75,000 by 2012.

The Hippest Band You Don't Know

America's the only place where Amadou & Mariam are not stars. That's about to change.
Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia are unlikely pop stars. They’re a middle-aged couple from Mali’s capital city, Bamako, who started playing together in a house band for the city’s Institute for Young Blind People, where Amadou was a music teacher and Mariam a Braille student. Thirty years later, they’ve emerged as global pop’s band to watch—M.I.A. be damned—as heirs to the storied West African musical throne and as embodiments of the worldly, cosmopolitan flair that defines 21st century hipness.
(..)
The music of Amadou & Mariam, as their band is named, is certainly drawing universal acclaim. Their 2005 album, Dimanche à Bamako (Sunday in Bamako), took Europe by storm. Its bold mishmash of genres and sounds from around the world garnered barrels of approving ink, sold 600,000 copies and won a Grammy nomination. It was helped along a good deal by the work and support of Manu Chao, who is Europe’s reigning superstar producer.

The Welcome to Mali follow-up in late 2008 similarly gripped Europe, while stateside, it cemented Amadou & Mariam as one of those bands for which you earn cool points for knowing and loving. They’ve been in high rotation on Los Angeles’ renowned KCRW music shows (you should stream Tom Schnabel’s Café L.A.—really). And the music webzine Pitchfork ranked the album’s opening track “Sabali” (Because) 15th on its list of top 100 songs of the year.

Sanwa Throat Microphone: how the military does Bluetooth

Here is another cool gadget (via dvice)

Throat microphones, although popular in military and police applications, haven't quite caught on in the civilian ranks. Yet. The Sanwa Throat microphone might change that — if you can get past a few funny stares.

GlideCycle lets those who can't, run and ride again

Check out the link for a cool video of the GlideCycle in action...

Most of us take the ability to run or ride a bike for granted. Sadly, for some folks, running and cycling are just dreams. However, the GlideCycle might make those dreams a reality.

Developed by a sailor in Oregon, the GlideCycle can be powered with just one leg, or two disabled legs. Perfect for overweight individuals, disabled folks, amputees, or even injured able-bodied people, the no-impact GlideCycle lets folks exercise outdoors with ease.
via dvice (0ne of the best tech blogs out there imo).

Lost Generation

via presentationzen

Drummer Comes Up With World's Best Tiered Pricing Structure For New Album

Trent Reznor and Radiohead have been dealt a serious blow in the tiered pricing war for album releases. Josh Freese, a member of Devo and A Perfect Circle who's also played for NIN, Sting, The Offspring, and more!, has just released his solo album today. Aside from the free single or vanilla $7 album download option, you can pay anywhere from $15 to $75,000 for increasingly more bizarre package deals.

At the cheaper end of the tier, $50 will get you the digital download, a double disc set, a t-shirt, and a 5-minute phone call with Freese to discuss anything you like—including what you liked or didn't like about the album. Too boring? Buy the $250 package and you'll get signed drumsticks, plus you can have lunch with Freese at The Cheesecake Factory or PF Changs. The $5,000 package includes (among other things) a letter from Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam telling you about his favorite song on the album.

But wait there's more! If you're willing to spend a sizable amount of money, the perks get even weirder...

The Inner Beauty of a McNugget: A Cultural Scan

Doctors and researchers regularly rely on CT scanners to create images of body parts like brains, chests and knees. But an artist-turned-medical-student in Manhattan is using one such machine to peer into the meat and guts of cultural icons like the Big Mac, the Barbie and the iPhone, creating whimsical and occasionally creepy images.

Religious Directives....hmmm....

Pope Decries ‘Clouds of Evil’ Over Africa at Mass
LUANDA, Angola (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass for the largest gathering of his African pilgrimage Sunday, telling a crowd on the outskirts of this seaside capital that reconciliation on the war-ravaged continent would come only with a ''change of heart, a new way of thinking.''

The Vatican said as many as 1 million people turned out on the dusty field near a cement factory to hear the pope at the last major event of his seven-day trip, which began Tuesday in Cameroon.

Speaking from a tented pink altar, the pope said evils in Africa had ''reduced the poor to slavery and deprived future generations of the resources needed to create a more solid and just society.''

''How true it is that war can destroy everything of value,'' said Benedict, wearing a pink cape and mopping his sweaty brow with a white handkerchief kept inside his sleeve.

Later he was scheduled to meet with representatives of women's rights groups to praise the role of women in African society.
(..)
''It is nearly always the woman who maintains intact human dignity, defends the family and protects cultural and religious values,'' the pontiff said, lamenting that the importance of family ''is not given the consideration it deserves.''


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Hardline Saudi clerics urge TV ban on women, music

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – A group of Saudi clerics urged the kingdom's new information minister on Sunday to ban women from appearing on TV or in newspapers and magazines, making clear that the country's hardline religious establishment is skeptical of a new push toward moderation.
In a statement, the 35 hardline clergymen also called on Abdel Aziz Khoja, who was appointed by King Abdullah on Feb. 14, to prohibit the playing of music and music shows on television.
"We have great hope that this media reform will be accomplished by you," said the statement. "We have noticed how well-rooted perversity is in the Ministry of Information and Culture, in television, radio, press, culture clubs and the book fair."
(..)

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, in town for meetings with Saudi officials, told a news conference that during lunch he sat between a female Saudi surgeon and a female journalist. He said while one woman is allowed to perform surgery and another is allowed to teach, neither is permitted to drive.
"I find that bizarre," he said.

Diet Bloggers Deal in Brutal Honesty in Quest for Weight Loss

In a world where New Year's weight loss resolutions routinely fall by the wayside, a growing legion of dieters like Schroeder have found their resolve within the blogosphere, documenting their daily successes and failures for a sometimes-anonymous audience.
(..)
Diet bloggers use their blogs and the community support built around them to not only record the progress of their health and fitness goals but also to examine the cultural and psychological stigmas of poor health and how they fell as far as they did. And often they find that it's the constant cheerleaders populating their comments sections -- providing a mixture of tough love and gentle coaxing -- that allow them to fight the cravings and pitfalls along the way.

"The interesting thing is even though you don't know these readers, you feel accountable to them," Schroeder told me. "They know your personal life, they see pictures of your hideous body on the internet that you've pretty much opened everybody to see...There are confessionals there. If I've fallen, I'm not going to bulls*** the readers. I want them to know that I'm human and I make mistakes. I eat poorly. I make bad decisions about food still. Although some people read the blog for entertainment value, I'm not just putting fluff in there. This is who I am and I'm trying to be as real as possible."

In fact many of these bloggers will say that brutal honesty is necessary for the diet blogging to work -- after all, most will post shirtless, unflattering pictures of themselves, exposing every physical insecurity for the world to see. "I don't think that it's like a Weight Watchers meeting, where you go in and everyone circles around and they clap for you," Schroeder said. "It's more raw than that. I don't pretend to be in that class of people."

Smart People Really Do Think Faster

The smarter the person, the faster information zips around the brain, a UCLA study finds. And this ability to think quickly apparently is inherited.

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, looked at the brains and intelligence of 92 people. All the participants took standard IQ tests. Then the researchers studied their brains using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging, or DTI.

SONNY SHARROCK: ON IMPROVISATION

Danette Hill interviewed Sonny Sharrock on improvisation--this is a very insightful piece that I think musicians and non-musicians, alike, will enjoy...

MY VIEW OF IMPROVISATION IS VERY PERSONAL, FULL of love, anger, truth, lies, and, in the end (I hope), sense. According to Webster's, to improvise is "to compose without previous preparation," or "to make or devise from what is at hand"

Color Vision: How Our Eyes Reflect Primate Evolution

Analyses of primate visual pigments show that our color vision evolved in an unusual way and that the brain is more adaptable than generally thought

In One Ear and Out the Other

For researchers who study memory, the ease with which people forget jokes is one of those quirks, those little skids on the neuronal banana peel, that end up revealing a surprising amount about the underlying architecture of memory.

US Mint Suspends Production of More Gold and Silver Coins

The United States Mint has officially announced the suspension of another slate of gold and silver products. The affected products are 2009 dated American Gold and Silver Eagle coins produced for collectors. These coins are considered collectible versions of the bullion coins.

Ignoring the Austrians Got Us in This Mess

Their ideas warned us of the bubble; their prescription for the bust is too harsh, however.
(..)


On the latter score, Minsky was indeed almost completely unknown by the current generation of economists. When I wrote of the economy having a "Minsky Moment" as the credit crisis first erupted in 2007, the name was met by a blank stare except from a few. Now, Minsky is widely cited as having discerned the link between market crashes and the economy.

But to say that anyone who is a serious student of economics is not thoroughly familiar with Keynes' ideas beggars credulity. The standard construct of the economy used by virtually all forecasters, from the Federal Reserve on down, is basically Keynesian, with varying opinions about how the model works. That none of them predicted the current crisis is telling, and indeed damning of the approach.
(..)

The Austrian prescription, of course, was rejected first by the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and now by massive response by both the purportedly conservative Bush administration and now the Obama administration. First came the $700 billion TARP last year to stabilize the financial system, followed by the $787 billion fiscal stimulus enacted last month. Across party lines, it's accepted that government's role is to prevent the economic pain that would come of "liquidate, liquidate, liquidate."

But the Austrians were the ones who could see the seeds of collapse in the successive credit booms, aided and abetted by Fed policies, especially under former chairman Alan Greenspan. While he disavows (again) the responsibility for the boom and bust, most recently on Wednesday's Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page ("Fed Policy Didn't Cause the Housing Bubble," March 11), monetary policy played a key role in creating successive bubbles and busts during his tenure from 1987 to 2006.

Greenspan always contended that monetary policymakers can neither predict nor prevent bubbles in asset markets. They can, however, clean up the after-effects of the bust -- which meant reflating a new bubble, he argued.

That had a profound effect on risk-taking. Knowing that the Greenspan Fed would bail out the markets after any bust, they went from one excess to another. So, the Long-Term Capital Management collapse in 1998 begat the easy credit that led to the dot-com bubble and bust, which in turn led to the extreme ease and the housing bubble.

Austrian economists assert the current crisis is the inevitable result of the Fed's successive efforts to counter each previous bust. As the credit expansion pumped up asset values to unsustainable levels, the eventual collapse would result in a contraction of credit as losses decimate banks' balance sheets and render them unable to lend. That sounds like an accurate diagnosis of the current problems.

7 Timeless Thoughts on Taking Responsibility for Your Life

From the positivity blog.....I especially liked Point 4:

4. Taking action becomes natural.

“Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It is often said that your thoughts become your actions. But without taking responsibility for your life those thoughts often just stay on that mental stage and aren’t translated into action. Taking responsibility for your life is that extra ingredient that makes taking action more of a natural thing. You don’t get stuck in just thinking, thinking and wishing so much. You become proactive instead of passive.

Africa, Business Destination

Up to a point. In Africa's case, the perception has long been that where you are renders all but irrelevant what you do. Africa is hopeless, a place of war and famine seemingly populated almost entirely by tyrants and children with flies in their eyes. According to this view, if Africa generates any kind of growth, it is in suffering—and in the overseas aid sent to address that, now a $40-billion-a-year industry. Naturally, with a new appeal every year and a new disaster every other, some people have begun to wonder if all that money is doing any good. They argue that aid creates dependence, fuels corruption, undermines democracy and stifles development. They have written books with titles like The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working (by an ex-spokesman for the World Bank in Africa) and Dead Aid (by a Zambia-born former Goldman Sachs investment banker).

And that debate is important, no doubt. But it is drowning out a more significant development. Ecobank's success is not an isolated blip, and aid is no longer Africa's main source of foreign income. Africa is becoming a business destination.

In 2006, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, foreign investment in Africa reached $48 billion, overtaking foreign aid for the first time. That gap has only widened, reflecting a quadrupling of foreign investment since 2000. As the senior adviser in Africa for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), David Nellor, noted in a report last September, sub-Saharan Africa today resembles Asia in the 1980s. "The private sector is the key driver," wrote Nellor, "and financial markets are opening up." War is down. Democracy is up. Inflation and interest rates are in single digits. Terms of trade have improved. Crucially, said Nellor, "growth is taking off." The IMF puts Africa's average annual growth for 2004 to '08 at more than 6% — better than any developed economy — and predicts the continent will buck the global recessionary trend to grow nearly 3.3% this year.
(..)
Perhaps the most compelling evidence that Africa is now a business destination is China's new love for it. While the old superpowers still agonize over Africa's poverty, the new one is captivated by its riches. Trade between Africa and China has grown an average of 30% in the past decade, topping $106 billion last year. Chinese engineers are at work across the continent, mining copper in Zambia and cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo and tapping oil in Angola.
(..)
Ecobank CEO Ekpe says part of the explanation for China's zeal for Africa is a new way of looking at Africans. "[The Chinese] are not setting out to do good," he says. "They are setting out to do business. It's actually much less demeaning."
(..)
And that gets to what, for Africans, is the emotional heart of the matter — and why joining the business world means so much. Though it rarely occurs to Westerners who've been instructed that Africa needs their help, charity is humiliating. Not emergency charity, of course: when disaster strikes, emergency aid is always welcome, whether in New Orleans or Papua New Guinea. But long-term charity, living life as a beggar, is degrading.

Guide to Most useful Bookmarklets

Amit Agarwal from India writes one of the most useful tech oriented blogs on the internet. Check out this entry on bookmarklets.

Twig and Turtle Launch Party!

For all locals, please check out the launch party of Candice Towell's new photography business, Twig and Turtle March 19th. Candice is an amazing photographer who has taken our family portraits as well as pictures of my daughter. She is also a skilled photojournalist who has braved incredibly dangerous situations to document the plight of many unfortunate people. For example, she went to Kenya last year around this time despite the political uprisings (which caused me to cancel my trip to Kenya during the same time) and published her work in the Reno Gazette. She also routinely does fundraisers for various causes in Africa.

From her website...
"Candice is an award-winning, independent photojournalist who graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno, in 1999. That same year she began her career working as a staff photographer at the RGJ, teaching photography at UNR, and working as a freelance photojournalist. She has earned numerous awards ranging from the William Hearst Organization, the National Press Photographers Association, the NPPA's Women in Photojournalism Conference and the Associated Press. She has extensive experience working in Africa and her intimate coverage in East Africa won five awards by the National Press Photographers Association. Candice has freelanced for several international press agencies and non-governmental organizations and her images have appeared in hundreds of publications, including US News and World Report, The New York Times, NEED Magazine, USA Today and Stern Magazine. Her favorite subject: documenting her very imaginative daughter. Candice teaches digital photography at UNR and works out of her home for Twig & Turtle,candicetowellweddings and ctowellphotos.com."

Mastery, Just 10,000 Hours Away

Forget All the Talk of Natural Prodigies -- Being the Best Really Takes Hard, Hard, Hard Work

Golf's Grand Illusion is that, secretly, we're a lot better than our scores would indicate. All we need is a little more practice and a few more rounds under our belt to get there. But who has the time?

The illusion stems from the ease with which all of us, on rare occasions, drain long putts from the fringe, pitch to tap-in distance from 85 yards and hit drives on the sweet spot. Surely learning to pull off such shots regularly could only be a matter of making a little more effort.

Two recent business books concur, provided we drop that phrase "a little" from the supposition. The common thesis of "Outliers," by Malcolm Gladwell, and "Talent Is Overrated," by Geoff Colvin, is that super-high achievers are not fundamentally different from you and me, they just work harder and smarter.

Both books, for instance, debunk the myth that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a born supernatural. The musical works he composed as a child were not particularly good (and were suspiciously written in the hand of his father, Leopold, a well-known composer). Most of them, even into his late teens, were rearrangements of other composers' pieces. As for his precocious skills on stage, modern musicologists estimate that his abilities were actually only about half as advanced as those of a run-of-the-mill prodigy today.
(..)
In explaining the development of extraordinary talent, both Mr. Gladwell and Mr. Colvin zero in on seminal research by Florida State Professor Anders Ericsson and colleagues that suggests the threshold for world-class expertise in any discipline -- music, sports, chess, science, business management -- is about 10 years, or 10,000 hours, of persistent, focused training and experience. Mr. Gladwell leaves the work component of success mostly at that, and moves on to examine how other factors, such as obscure circumstances from their early lives, contribute to the achievements of hard workers.

Mr. Colvin, on the other hand, bores into the details of all that hard work to identify the most productive components. This is where things get interesting for golfers.

The most successful performers in any area, he writes, engage in "deliberate practice." This is activity specifically designed, ideally by an expert teacher, to improve performance beyond a person's current comfort and ability level. These activities are repeatable, provide clear feedback and are highly demanding mentally, even when largely physical. The training Mozart received as a youth is a perfect example.

As Indian Growth Soars, Child Hunger Persists

NEW DELHI — Small, sick, listless children have long been India’s scourge — “a national shame,” in the words of its prime minister, Manmohan Singh. But even after a decade of galloping economic growth, child malnutrition rates are worse here than in many sub-Saharan African countries, and they stand out as a paradox in a proud democracy.

Sandstorm Riyadh March 10, 2009

Well this will wreak havoc with your sinuses! It apparently shut down the airport as well!

Saudis Race All Night, Fueled by Boredom

We used to witness a fair amount of drag racing in Riyadh as well and hence drove with extra caution on the weekends..

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia
This may be the most popular sport of Saudi youth, an obsessive, semilegal competition that dominates weekend nights here. It ranges from garden variety drag racing to “drifting,” an extremely dangerous practice in which drivers deliberately spin out and skid sideways at high speeds, sometimes killing themselves and spectators.

For Saudi Arabia’s vast and underemployed generation of young people, these reckless night battles are a kind of collective scream of frustration, a rare outlet for exuberance in an ultraconservative country where the sexes are rigorously segregated and most public entertainment is illegal. They are, almost literally, bored out of their minds.

“Why do they do it?” said Suhail Janoudi, a 27-year-old sales clerk who was watching the races from the roadside with a faint smile around 1:30 a.m. “Because they have nothing else to do. Because they are empty.”

The Rant List

I am having a tough time dealing with news that the former president of Countrywide Financial, the mortgage company that did so much to dig the hole in which we all now reside, is making a killing buying up delinquent mortgage loans from the government at bargain basement rates.

“It’s like Jeffrey Dahmer selling body parts to a clinic,” sniped one of my friends.

As Eric Lipton reported in The Times, Stanford Kurland, who was president of Countrywide during the years when it was selling mortgages with temporary low “teaser” rates that later turned into permanent unaffordable ones, now leads Private National Mortgage Acceptance Company, known to its friends as PennyMac.

In what one company official said was “off-the-charts good” business, PennyMac buys troubled mortgages from the government (which got them from failed banks) at rates like 38 cents on the dollar. Then it offers the beleaguered homeowners a chance to refinance at far more favorable terms. PennyMac makes money, the homeowner gets an affordable mortgage and the government gets a share of the profit.

Everybody’s happy! Except, of course, those of us who helped come up with the other 62 cents on the dollar.

Musicians Have Biological Advantage In Identifying Emotion In Sound

ScienceDaily (Mar. 5, 2009) — Looking for a mate who in everyday conversation can pick up even your most subtle emotional cues? Find a musician, Northwestern University researchers suggest.

‘Dead White People’s Clothes’

It's impossible to have a conversation about fashion in Africa—traditional or contemporary—without talking about the used-clothing industry and how damaging some people say it’s been.

A whole industry has cropped up around apparel that's been donated to charities located oceans away, imported throughout the African continent and then sold cheaply in African marketplaces. These low prices undercut local retailers and undermine the entire textile and garment business in Africa.

Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary

Mr. Zerden’s minor stir four years ago has lately grown into a full-blown movement by more than 200 Harvard Medical School students and sympathetic faculty, intent on exposing and curtailing the industry influence in their classrooms and laboratories, as well as in Harvard’s 17 affiliated teaching hospitals and institutes.

They say they are concerned that the same money that helped build the school’s world-class status may in fact be hurting its reputation and affecting its teaching.

The students argue, for example, that Harvard should be embarrassed by the F grade it recently received from the American Medical Student Association, a national group that rates how well medical schools monitor and control drug industry money.

Harvard Medical School’s peers received much higher grades, ranging from the A for the University of Pennsylvania, to B’s received by Stanford, Columbia and New York University, to the C for Yale.

Researchers Find Safer Way to Produce Stem Cell Alternative

Skin Cells Transformed Without Worrisome Use of Viruses

No Line On The Horizon

Here is an incredible deal--maybe one day only though--download the new U2 album from Amazon for 3.99$

Liked the Show? Maybe It Was the Commercials

Maybe they don’t. In two new studies, researchers who study consumer behavior argue that interrupting an experience, whether dreary or pleasant, can make it significantly more intense.