Or is it? Opposed in principle to the practices of the Coca Cola Corp. but compelled by their customers who crave the real thing, the managers of an alternative cinema in Bristol are on a quest to replicate the recipe themselves. (Guardian.UK)
Daily Archives: 29 Jul 06
Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time
The ‘serious games’ movement: “Video games have long entertained users by immersing them in fantasy worlds full of dragons or spaceships. But Peacemaker is part of a new generation: games that immerse people in the real world, full of real-time political crises. And the games’ designers aren’t just selling a voyeuristic thrill. Games, they argue, can be more than just mindless fun, they can be a medium for change.” (New York Times )
Psychologists Produce First Study On Violence Desensitization From Video Games
Exposure to violent video games can desensitize individuals to real-life violence: “When viewing real violence, participants who had played a violent video game experienced skin response measurements significantly lower than those who had played a non-violent video game. The participants in the violent video game group also had lower heart rates while viewing the real-life violence compared to the nonviolent video game group.” (ScienceDaily)
Researchers ‘Text Mine’ The New York Times, Demonstrating Ease Of New Technology
“Performing what a team of dedicated and bleary-eyed newspaper librarians would need months to do, scientists at UC Irvine have used an up-and-coming technology to complete in hours a complex topic analysis of 330,000 stories published primarily by The New York Times.
The demonstration is significant because it is one of the earliest showing that an extremely efficient, yet very complicated, technology called text mining is on the brink of becoming a tool useful to more than highly trained computer programmers and homeland security experts.
“We have shown in a very practical way how a new text mining technique makes understanding huge volumes of text quicker and easier,” said David Newman, a computer scientist in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UCI. “To put it simply, text mining has made an evolutionary jump. In just a few short years, it could become a common and useful tool for everyone from medical doctors to advertisers; publishers to politicians.”
Text mining allows a computer to extract useful information from unstructured text. Until recently, text mining required a great deal of preparation before documents could be analyzed in a meaningful way.” (ScienceDaily)
Honey Helps Problem Wounds
“A household remedy millennia old is being reinstated: honey helps the treatment of some wounds better than the most modern antibiotics. For several years now medical experts from the University of Bonn have been clocking up largely positive experience with what is known as medihoney. Even chronic wounds infected with multi-resistant bacteria often healed within a few weeks.” (ScienceDaily)
The Last Ones Standing
“Only four Shakers are left in the world, all living in southern Maine. But if they can’t attract converts to their celibate lifestyle and this really is the end for them, they have a plan to ensure that their legacy lives on forever.” (Boston Globe)
Mysterious quasar casts doubt on black holes
“A controversial alternative to black hole theory has been bolstered by observations of an object in the distant universe, researchers say. If their interpretation is correct, it might mean black holes do not exist and are in fact bizarre and compact balls of plasma called MECOs.” (New Scientist)
Sergeant Tells of Plot to Kill Iraqi Detainees
“In a lengthy sworn statement, he said he had witnessed a deliberate plot by his fellow soldiers to kill the three handcuffed Iraqis and a cover-up in which one soldier cut another to bolster their story. The squad leader threatened to kill anyone who talked. Later, one guilt-stricken soldier complained of nightmares and “couldn’t stop talking” about what happened, Sergeant Lemus said.
As with similar cases being investigated in Iraq, Sergeant Lemus’s narrative has raised questions about the rules under which American troops operate and the possible culpability of commanders. Four soldiers have been charged with premeditated murder in the case. Lawyers for two of them, who dispute Sergeant Lemus’s account, say the soldiers were given an order by a decorated colonel on the day in question to “kill all military-age men” they encountered.” (New York Times )
In last month’s “Medlogs controversy” here, the anonymous commenter contrasted my printing of lengthy excerpts from the New York Times with his/her ‘true’ journalism. Apart from the fact that (a) commentary is not journalism; and (b) the commenter betrayed her/his lack of understanding that excerpting and logging is one of the original traditional forms of weblogging, a news story like this one illustrates potently how some stand on their own without need for fatuous pseudo-punditry and that I have served the purpose I intend merely by pointing you to them.
My point for a long time with regard to the atrocities committed by US forces in Iraq has been that the influences, if not the direct orders, shaping them emanate from the top, by intention, despite insidious efforts from the right to portray each of the burgeoning number of such events as attributable to some ‘rogue’ soldiers who snapped, or who were sociopaths to begin with. Draw your own conclusions. And, please, by all means, shoot the messenger once you have done so!
Rice on the Defensive After Rome Summit
“…[I]n the space of one hour in Rome on Wednesday, the public rewards of [Rice’s] hard work — the view around the world that the United States may now be more willing to play nice with others — may have been undone. Once again, it seemed, the United States had reverted to its my-way-or-the-highway approach, and Ms. Rice was on the defensive.” (New York Times )
Tide of Arab Opinion Turns to Support for Hezbollah
“At the onset of the Lebanese crisis, Arab governments, starting with Saudi Arabia, slammed Hezbollah for recklessly provoking a war, providing what the United States and Israel took as a wink and a nod to continue the fight.
Now, with hundreds of Lebanese dead and Hezbollah holding out against the vaunted Israeli military for more than two weeks, the tide of public opinion across the Arab world is surging behind the organization, transforming the Shiite group’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, into a folk hero and forcing a change in official statements.” (New York Times )
How is Floyd Landis the Opposite of Bode Miller?
The fabulous furry Freakonomics brothers said:
“After Bode Miller told 60 Minutes that he often drank the night before ski races, and that he’d even raced while still drunk, he was raked over the coals and forced to grovel and apologize. Now we learn that Tour de France winner Floyd Landis (here’s a recent posting on the subject), who tested high for testosterone after his miraculous comeback stage, drank pretty heavily the night before that stage—“two beers and at least four shots of whiskey,” according to the Wall Street Journal. But instead of being disgraced, Landis may find that his drinking was his salvation: “According to several studies,” Sam Walker wrote in the WSJ, “alcohol consumption can increase the ratio between testosterone and epitestosterone, which occur naturally in the body. Mr. Landis failed the test because it showed an elevated ratio between the two.””
While testosterone can be an aid in training, it is not a night-before performance enhancer, and it is much more useful in sports performance requiring explosive bursts of energy rather than the endurance challenges of the Tour de France. If Landis’ impetuous use of an illegal drug after his disastrous performance in the prior stage had been the explanation of his comeback, I would have expected him to use something like epoeitin instead. And as for the comparison with Bode Miller, Landis drank in despair, he says, for one night when he thought he was washed up. Miller’s debauchery was part of his training regimen, it seems, and one reason for his performance deficits. Why, then, is testosterone among the banned substances, one commenter to this post asks. For part of the answer, listen to the interviews with the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency and tell me if there doesn’t seem to be a veneer of religious zeaoltry and missionary zeal there. [thanks, walker]
Cool Tool: Home Safety First Aid Tips
“The 3M company puts out a free index-card-sized booklet of first aid tips. The 32-page booklet contains no advertising (beyond the name of the company and the Nexcare division)… [T]he booklet puts all the standard first aid info in one convenient form that can be kept where most likely to be needed and consulted quickly in time of need while under stress to do the correct thing. And most folks, in my experience, don’t have a clue about what to do for common injuries (witness all the butter scraped off burns in emergency rooms). I keep one copy in each of our car’s glove boxes and one in our medicine chest, so I can instantly check the proper approach when time is short and the pressure to DO SOMETHING arises.
Nexcare will send out a reasonable number of copies on request. I requested and received 100 copies and distributed them via a local neighborhood group. They even paid my toll-free call! Ain’t capitalism great?” (Cool Tools)
- Nexcare Home Safety First Aid Tips, free from 800-537-2191
