{ The BarRectum was an actual bar built inside a giant anatomical model representing the human digestive system, from tongue to anus | via Boing Boing | Thanks PP }
In a rented room between a Southwest Side auto body yard and a scrap metal facility, Francisco Rendon allegedly performed dental work on willing patients, despite not having a dentist’s license, authorities said. (…)
Rendon, 49, clandestinely ran a dentist’s office equipped with syringes, painkillers and dentures. (…)
Instead of sitting in a traditional reclining dentist’s chair, patients sat in a leather office seat, according to police reports. The reports said that Rendon, 49, worked on teeth using something similar to a power tool usually used for polishing metal and that patients spit into a garbage can instead of a sink. Rendon told police he had a dental license he said he had earned in Mexico.
That seemed to be enough for his clientele, police said. Officers arriving to investigate an anonymous tip found five persons waiting to be treated.
As airport security employees scan luggage for a large variety of banned items, they may miss a deadly box cutter if they find a water bottle first. According to new research at Duke University, identifying an easy-to-spot prohibited item such as a water bottle may hinder the discovery of other, harder-to-spot items in the same scan. (…)
Missing items in a complex visual search is not a new idea: in the medical field, it has been known since the 1960s that radiologists tend to miss a second abnormality on an X-ray if they’ve found one already. The concept — dubbed “satisfaction of search” — is that radiologists would find the first target, think they were finished, and move on to the next patient’s X-ray.
…Mr. Sibayan’s prize was the equivalent in the world of rarefied coffees: dung containing the world’s most expensive coffee beans.
Costing hundreds of dollars a pound, these beans are found in the droppings of the civet, a nocturnal, furry, long-tailed catlike animal that prowls Southeast Asia’s coffee-growing lands for the tastiest, ripest coffee cherries. The civet eventually excretes the hard, indigestible innards of the fruit — essentially, incipient coffee beans — though only after they have been fermented in the animal’s stomach acids and enzymes to produce a brew described as smooth, chocolaty and devoid of any bitter aftertaste.
As connoisseurs in the United States, Europe and East Asia have discovered civet coffee in recent years, growing demand is fueling a gold rush in the Philippines and Indonesia, the countries with the largest civet populations.
photo { Christophe Kutner }
Mobile Phone Harrassment: An exploration of students’ perceptions of intrusive texting behavior
Limited research has explored the link between mobile phone use and harassment behaviors. This paper details the findings from a preliminary study that examined perceptions of unwanted communication. (…)
Findings indicated that harassment by text is more prevalent than other forms of off-line stalking and, despite recipients reporting being distressed, there was still a higher level of acceptance of this form of harassment than other forms.
Furthermore, responses to text harassment were associated with a high frequency of behaviors perceived as not actively discouraging further texts, therefore having the effect of prolonging unwanted contact.
Emails feel so transient, so disembodied, that we’re more tempted to lie when sending them compared with writing with pen and paper. That’s according to Charles Naquin and colleagues who tested the honesty of students and managers as they played financial games.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc was charged with fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its marketing of a debt product tied to subprime mortgages that was designed to fail.
The lawsuit is the biggest crisis in years for Goldman, which emerged from the global financial crisis as Wall Street’s most influential bank. (…)
The SEC alleged that Paulson & Co, a major hedge fund run by billionaire John Paulson, worked with Goldman in creating a collateralized debt obligation, and stood to benefit as its value fell, costing investors more than $1 billion. That is roughly the amount that Paulson is estimated to have made by betting against the CDO.
When pain is pleasant
Ever prodded at an injury despite the fact you know it will hurt? Ever cook an incredibly spicy dish even though you know your digestive tract will suffer for it? If the answers are yes, you’re not alone. Pain is ostensibly a negative thing but we’re often drawn to it. Why?
According to Marta Andreatta from the University of Wurzburg, it’s a question of timing. After we experience pain, the lack of it is a relief. Andreatta thinks that if something happens during this pleasurable window immediately after a burst of pain, we come to associate it with the positive experience of pain relief rather than the negative feeling of the pain itself. The catch is that we don’t realise this has happened. We believe that the event, which occurred so closely to a flash of pain, must be a negative one. But our reflexes betray us.
Andreatta’s work builds on previous research with flies and mice. If flies smell a distinctive aroma just before feeling an electric shock, they’ll learn to avoid that smell. However, if the smell is released immediately after the shock, they’re actually drawn to it. Rather than danger, the smell was linked with safety. The same trick works in mice. But what about humans?
quote { Charles Baudelaire, The Man Who Tortures Himself, 1857 }
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{ Death In Vegas, Dirt | Directed by Andrea Giacobbe | via Colleen Nika } |
{ Aphex Twin - Come to daddy | Directed by Chris Cunningham } |
Although humans usually prefer mates that resemble themselves, mating preferences can vary with context. Stress has been shown to alter mating preferences in animals, but the effects of stress on human mating preferences are unknown. Here, we investigated whether stress alters men’s preference for self-resembling mates. (…) Our findings show that stress affects human mating preferences: unstressed individuals showed the expected preference for similar mates, but stressed individuals seem to prefer dissimilar mates.
Did you hear about the Bangladeshi brick company that beheaded an employee to improve the color of its bricks?
This tragic incident raises many questions. The article is vague, but I assume a supervisor or some sort of boss was leading this strategy. So I wonder how the employee was chosen? Was he the worst worker, the biggest complainer, or the guy who looked the most like a brick? (…)
I wonder how the boss broke the news to the employee. Did he work up to it with a list of criticisms about the employee’s job performance? As a boss, you don’t want to start that sort of conversation with the beheading part. Begin with something like “I noticed you’ve been late twice this week.” That way it isn’t such a cruel shock when you get to the decapitation scenario.
{ Jennifer Reed Bike Crash Portrait | Crash portraits | more }
Black holes may constitute all dark matter
Dark matter is the mysterious stuff that cosmologists believe fills our Universe. The evidence for its existence is that there is not enough visible mass to hold galaxies together. But since galaxies manifestly do not fly apart, there must be some invisible stuff, some missing mass, that generates the gravitational forces holding them together.
But there’s a problem with this idea. Two of them actually. First, physicists’ best guess at the laws of physics give a good description of all of the particles they’ve discovered so far and a few they expect to discover soon. The trouble is that none of these particles have the right kind of properties to be dark matter ie electrically neutral, long-lived and slow moving. But none of the known or reasonably hypothesised particles fits the bill. To make room for a dark matter particle, the laws of physics have to be changed in ways that many theorists feel uncomfortable with.
Second, despite a decade spent searching for dark matter with experiments costing tens of millions of dollars, nobody has laid eyes on the stuff. Most physicists think these experiments have found nothing: zip, zilch, zero.
photo { Nick Waplington, S-M Club Ceiling, 2004 }
{ Wound Man is an illustration which first appeared in European surgical texts in the Middle Ages. It laid out schematically the various wounds a person might suffer in battle or in accidents, often with surrounding or accompanying text stating treatments for the various different injuries. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }
About 3,000 New York City taxi drivers routinely overcharged riders over two years by surreptitiously fixing their meters to charge rates that would normally apply only to trips outside the five boroughs, according to the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission.
The drivers’ scheme, the commission said, involved 1.8 million rides and cost passengers an average of $4 to $5 extra per trip. The drivers, officials said, flipped switches on their meters that kicked in the higher rates, costing New York City riders a total of $8.3 million.
The 1.8 million fares represent a tiny fraction of a total 360 million trips over the 26-month period in question.
photo { Terry Richardson | Related: After two models spoke out about Terry Richardson’s alleged sexual misconduct on shoots, Jezebel asked readers to write in with any stories they may have about the prolific photographer. | NY mag | full story }
There is increasing awareness within the Defense Department that wars are interactively complex or “wicked” problems. (…) This article will examine the challenges interactively complex problems pose to U.S. military planning and doctrine. It will offer some modest suggestions for dealing with these problems. We use the terms “interactively complex,” “ill-structured” and “wicked” interchangeably throughout the article. (…)
Ill-structured problems are interactively complex. By definition, these problems are nonlinear. Small changes in input can create massive changes in outcome, and the same action performed at different times may create entirely different results. It is very difficult if not impossible to predict what will happen. Yet our war-planning process often promulgates detailed plans for well over the first 100 days of a conflict. Obviously, the true value of planning comes from the interactions of those doing the planning, not the plan itself. By shifting our planning focus from details of the plan to defining the problem, we can reap the benefits of intensive planning while exploring other problem definitions that should drive branch planning.
Ill-structured problems have no “stopping rule.” By definition, wicked problems have no end state. Rather, the planner must seek a “good enough” solution based on maintaining equilibrium around some acceptable condition. Unfortunately, our doctrine and practice continue to focus on developing an end state for every plan. When dealing with wicked problems, thinking in terms of an end state will almost certainly lead to failure. Instead, we should think about how to sustain “steady state” over the long term. While apparently a semantic quibble, accepting that wicked problems don’t “end” is vitally important for campaign planners and commanders alike.
