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More results!
As I'm writing up my dissertation (ahh!), I've been geeking out with graphs and statistics (and the beloved/hated stats program R). I thought I'd share a cool little tidbit.
Full disclosure: this is just a bit of an expansion on something I posted back in March about how well the camera traps reflect known densities. Basically, as camera traps become more popular, researchers are increasingly looking for simple analytical techniques that can allow them to rapidly process data. Using the raw number of photographs or animals counted is pretty straightforward, but is risky because not all animals are equally "detectable": some animals behave in ways that make them more likely to be seen than other animals. There are a lot of more complex methods out there to deal with these detectability issues, and they work really well — but they are really complex and take a long time to work out. So there's a fair amount of ongoing debate about whether or not raw capture rates should ever be used even for quick and dirty rapid assessments of an area.
Since the Serengeti has a lot of other long term monitoring, we were able to compare camera trap capture rates (# of photographs weighted by group size) to actual population sizes for 17 different herbivores. Now, it's not perfect — the "known" population sizes reflect herbivore numbers in the whole park, and we only cover a small fraction of the park. But from the graph below, you'll see we did pretty well.
Actual herbivore densities (as estimated from long-term monitoring) are given on the x-axis, and the # photographic captures from our camera survey are on the y-axis. Each species is in a different color (migratory animals are in gray-scale). Some of the species had multiple population estimates produced from different monitoring projects — those are represented by all the smaller dots, and connected by a line for each species. We took the average population estimate for each species (bigger dots).
We see a very strong positive relationship between our photos and actual population sizes: we get more photos for species that are more abundant. Which is good! Really good! The dashed line shows the relationship between our capture rates and actual densities for all species. We wanted to make sure, however, that this relationship wasn't totally dependent on the huge influx of wildebeest and zebra and gazelle — so we ran the same analysis without them. The black line shows that relationship. It's still there, it's still strong, and it's still statistically significant.
Now, the relationship isn't perfect. Some species fall above the line, and some below the line. For example, reedbuck and topi fall below the line – meaning that given how many topi really live in Serengeti, we should have gotten more pictures. This might be because topi mostly live in the northern and western parts of Serengeti, so we're just capturing the edge of their range. And reedbuck? This might be a detectability issue — they tend to hide in thickets and so might not pass in front of cameras as often as animals that wander a little more actively.
Ultimately, however, we see that the cameras do a good overall job of catching more photos of more abundant species. Even though it's not perfect, it seems that raw capture rates give us a pretty good quick look at a system.
Lions and cheetahs and dogs, oh my! (final installment)
I've written a handful of posts (here and here and here) about how lions are big and mean and nasty…and about how even though they are nasty enough to keep wild dog populations in check, they don't seem to be suppressing cheetah numbers.
Well, now that research is officially out! It's just been accepted by the Journal of Animal Ecology and is available here. Virginia Morrell over at ScienceNews did a nice summary of the story and it's conservation implications here.
One dissertation chapter down, just two more to go!
Big Cat Wars
I'm in the process of writing up some *really* cool camera trap results from Seasons 1-6, and plan to share them here next week (as soon as I make them pretty). It would never have been possible without your guys' help. But in the meanwhile, this just aired again on TV, and thought you might enjoy a bit of a break! They talk about the camera traps a bit ~33 minutes in.
What we still don't know
Weather.com says it's a whopping 6 degrees outside right now, but that it feels like -14. I am really wishing I were back at the conference in California right now…
By now, both Meredith and I have gushed about all the "bio-celebrities" at the Gordon Research Conference on Predator Prey Interactions. How we got to come face to face with the scientists whose work we've read, memorized, admired for years. But what I think has been an even more exciting outcome of this research conference than getting to hang out with our scientific heros and listen awe-struck about everything they've done in the past that has led to their fame today, was a chance to sit down with them over a beer or glass of overpriced red, and talk about the future. Not just where our various and varied subfields have been, and not even just where they are going, but where they need to go. Where the holes are in our knowledge, and what we need to do to fill them.
Much of ecology is about developing "predictive capacity." The ability to not just describe the patterns we see in the world about us, but the ability to predict what will happen when things change. Understanding how climate change affects annual bird migrations, for example, or what losing species means for the spread of disease. We develop conceptual frameworks to tie together outcomes from different experiments and scattered observations drawn from ecosystems around the world, and these frameworks give us a way to articulate our expectations about 1) what underlying processes we think are driving the dynamics of a system and 2) a way to test those hypotheses: do the outcomes match what we predicted would happen? Or is something else going on that we need to investigate further?
One of the things I slowly worked up the courage to articulate at the conference was that I think that science surrounding predator-predator dynamics really lacks this sort of integrated, synthetic, predictive framework. We draw on a whole bunch of different sets of theories to understand the patterns of suppression and coexistence apparent in apex-mesopredator (top- and middle- predator) systems. There's a ton of theory out there on how species coexist when they eat the same thing, or how they coexist when they eat the same thing and also eat each other. There's a lot of theory on how predators coexist with the things they eat. There are predictions for when we expect to see species able to coexist, when we don't, and how these different outcomes change from, say, low productivity tundra to high productivity rainforests.
But around the world, top predators suppress populations of smaller predators (called mesopredator suppression). It's not because the top predators are eating up all the food, and it's not because the top predators are eating the mesopredators. It seems to happen because the bigger guys chase, harass, and kill the smaller guys. This is bad enough, but it also creates a "landscape of fear" in which that the smaller guys change their behaviors to try and avoid these aggressive encounters. There are lots and lots of ways in which mesopredator suppression can happen…but we (as a community of ecologists) don't have a good, integrated framework for making predictions about when we expect to see mesopredator suppression vs. when we don't. We don't have a set of expectations about how these patterns change with different behaviors or different types of environments. We don't have a solid understanding of what mesopredator suppression means for other small predators, prey animals, and the plants that the prey animals eat. We have lots and lots of examples of all sorts of complex things happening…but we don't yet have the ability to predict how these things play out in new systems.
And that, to me, is one of the most exciting "holes" that needs filling. How do we tie together our knowledge from all of these disparate studies, where lions suppress wild dogs but not cheetahs, or coyotes kill foxes left and right but aren't actually the reason that fox populations are low. I guess my PhD is trying to fill a tiny, tiny bit of that hole. But it's a damn big hole and sometimes it's hard to see how one PhD will cover a whole lot of ground. I guess what was so exciting at the GRC is just how many other people are also trying to fill those holes…and with all of us working together, we just might actually be able to understand the world around us that much better.
The curious case of the giraffe and the oxpecker
As you all ready know Snapshot Serengeti's thousands of camera-trap images are part of an ongoing study into predator interactions by Ali. There are few projects that use camera-traps as extensively as Snapshot Serengeti and of course Ali has her hands full analysing the bits relevant to her. The cameras work around the clock recording details of daily and nightly life in the Serengeti and do not discern between the stuff Ali does and doesn't want. That's why, Ali's sanity aside, they are such perfect tools. Those same cameras providing Ali's data could also be the basis of a future ecologist's research.
One of the most striking asides for me is the case of the giraffe and the oxpeckers.
Oxpeckers are small birds that feed on ticks and other parasites that they glean from the bodies of large mammals. Most usually they are seen riding along on large mammals such as buffalo, wildebeest and giraffe whilst they search their hosts for ticks or open wounds. This in itself is not an unusual occurrence and most of you will have hit the bird /other button with these guys. Much more unusual are the shots of giraffe at night time with these birds using them as roosting spots. There are two species of oxpecker, the red-billed (Buphagus erythrorhynchus) and the yellow-billed (Buphagus africanus) both of which are found in the Serengeti.
According to research carried out by M. Stutterheim and K. Panagis that looked at the roosting habits of both species the red-billed oxpecker roosts in trees but the yellow-billed was often found roosting on their preferred host species. Apparently red-billed oxpeckers feed on a wide range of host species where as yellow-billed oxpeckers are much more picky preferring buffalo and giraffe. It is thought that the habit of roosting at night on their favourite host species is an adaptation to save the birds time looking for the right animal the following day. Given that buffalo and giraffe are prone to walking large distances this is probably very sensible.
From most of the images we have of oxpeckers on giraffe at night it is hard to tell which species they are but there are one or two where you can see the tell-tell yellow bill confirming that they are indeed yellow-billed oxpeckers. The images also show that the birds seem to prefer settling between the hind legs of the giraffe. This must be a nice warm spot in winter and keeps them safe from any nocturnal predators.
Perhaps the behaviour is not so unusual after all but rather little documented. Getting photographic evidence of birds at night on mobile roosts is obviously not easy. Looks like our camera-traps have excelled themselves again.
Why does the zebra have stripes?
While procrastinating on this lovely Sunday afternoon, I stumbled across this incredible video of a octopus camouflage in action:
Now, we don't have anything quite that camouflaged in the Serengeti, but in watching that video my thoughts turned to one of our more strikingly colored species: the zebra. Their starkly contrasting black and white stripes have puzzled researchers and naturalists for a long time.
For starters, the stripes seem like they would be terrible camouflage. I mean, how much more could you stand out from the open plains of waving gold grass? But at dawn and dusk, especially from a distance, the stripes seem to bleed into gray, making them look a surprising lot like elephants (no joke), or rocks, or even nothing at all. Still, up close they still look like bright black-on-white zebras, and it's hard to imagine that any lion lurking in the thickets nearby would be fooled.
Some researchers have mused that the bold patterns disrupt the perception of predators, and that when the zebras run en masse from an attacking lion, they become a confusing jumble of stripes into which the initial target disappears. Others have pointed out that every zebra has a unique set of stripes, and that these stocky equids might use these patterns to identify herd members, mates, or even mothers (if you're a hungry foal).
One of the my favorite explanations has always been that the stripes protect against the savanna's most fearsome creature: the tsetse fly. These blood-sucking insects are not only vectors for some nasty diseases (such as sleeping sickness), but also hurt. A lot. (Having spent more time than I care to remember in the woodlands where these terrible, terrible creatures thrive, just the thought of tsetses makes me shudder. I have spent many hours hurling expletives (fruitlessly) at the tiny terrors.) Tsetse flies suck. A lot. And if wearing stripes were a way to fend them off, I'd have gone out in a zebra suit every day. There are in fact stories of one intrepid researcher back in the day dressing up in a stripey suit and attempting to test whether zebra stripes deter tsetses. But there's only so much that one man in a zebra outfit can do, and field experiments are notoriously difficult…and so this remained a buried rumor until last year.
Last year, Swedish researchers discovered that horseflies (a close cousin to the terrible tsetse) don't like stripes. And they tested this on an experiment useing number of fake, plastic zebras painted solid black, solid white, and various things in between. Turns out that the flies really like dark colors over light colors, but still like solid light colors over stripes. And while in the real world, there are things (such as smells) that may attract tsetses to stripey animals despite their off-putting pattern, this study is pretty exciting. And next time I have to venture into the savannah woodlands? You can bet I'm wearing that zebra-striped shirt.
March of the Elephants
When you think of elephants, you may immediately think of their defining characteristics: trunks, big ears, tusks. Or you may think about how they live in large family groups and are very social. You may even think about the story of the blind men and the elephant. You probably don't think about them as engineers of their ecosystem. But they are.
Elephants are native to the Serengeti ecosystem, but Serengeti elephants were likely all killed off for ivory in the 1800's. At least, there weren't any recorded there until the middle of the twentieth century when they started moving back in again. In the 1960's they migrated in from both the north and the south, and by 1970 there were over 3,000 elephants in the Serengeti. Things got rocky for elephants again in the 1980's as severe poaching reduced their numbers in Serengeti National Park to around 500. In 1988, elephants were given CITES endangered species status and worldwide trade in ivory was banned. This was good news for Serengeti elephants and their numbers rebounded again into the thousands.
These ups and downs in elephant population have allowed scientists to study the impact elephants have on their environment. I've written before about how the rainfall patterns in the Serengeti affect grasses, and about the role that fire plays. Elephants have their greatest impact on trees. Elephants eat both grasses and trees, but depend on trees for food during the dry season.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the number of trees per hectare was slowly declining across the Serengeti. But starting in the 1970's, the number of trees rapidly increased. Scientists believe that the initial decrease in trees was due to the the disease rinderpest. Rinderpest killed off the majority of Serengeti's wildebeest, allowing the grass to grow tall, and fueling huge, strong fires. These fires killed most tree seedlings, meaning that as trees died, they were not being replaced. When rinderpest was halted, the wildebeest population exploded, and the wildebeest kept the grass short and the fires smaller, allowing trees to gain a foothold once more.
Okay, but what about elephants? Well, elephants eat trees — especially small, tender saplings and regrowth from trees damaged by fire. In the 1980's, while poaching was particularly severe on the Tanzanian side of Serengeti (Serengeti National Park), the Kenyan part of Serengeti (Maasai Mara) mounted a strong anti-poaching effort and kept its elephant numbers high. Across the Serengeti, the trees were increasing, but in the Maasai Mara there were also a lot of elephants. It turns out that in the Maasai Mara, the trees didn't increase like they did across the border in Tanzania where the elephants had been greatly reduced. Instead the high number of elephants in the Maasai Mara is keeping tree numbers down, despite the reduction in fire intensity.
So elephants are key players in maintaining what scientists call "alternative stable states" in the Serengeti. While there are plenty of elephants once again in the Tanzanian part of the Serengeti, they don't reduce the higher tree numbers; only fire can do that. But on the Kenyan side of the border, tree numbers remain low because elephants there have been continuously eating saplings; the tree population cannot increase because of the constant elephant pressure. The key difference between the two areas is simply their history.
I think the fourth blind man should get extra credit.
The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he:
"'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a TREE!"
Lions, cheetahs, and dogs, oh my! Part 2.
Last week, we left off with this crazy biological paradox: lions kill cheetah cubs left and right, yet as the Serengeti lion population tripled over the last 40 years, cheetah numbers remained stable.
As crazy as it sounds, it seems that that even though lions kill cheetah cubs left and right, it doesn't really matter for cheetah populations. There are a number of reasons this could be. For example, cheetahs are able to have cubs again really quickly after they lose a litter, so it doesn't take long to "replace" those lost cubs. It's also possible that lions might only be killing cubs that would probably die from another source – say, cubs that would otherwise have died from starvation, or cubs that might have been killed by hyenas. Whatever the reason, what we're seeing is that lions killing cheetah cubs doesn't have an effect on the total number of cheetahs in the area.
I think this might hold true for other animals, not just cheetahs. It's a bit of a weird concept to wrap your head around – that being killed, which is really bad if you're that individual cheetah, doesn't actually matter as much for the larger population – but it's one that seems to be gaining traction among ecologists who study how different species live together in the natural world. Specifically, ecologists are getting excited about the role that behavior plays in driving population dynamics.
Most scientists have studied this phenomenon in predator-prey systems – say, wolves and elk, or wolf spiders and "leaf bugs".
What scientists are discovering is that predators can suppress prey populations not by eating lots of prey, but by causing the prey to change their behavior. Unlike many spiders, wolf spiders actively hunt their prey – sometimes lurking in ambush, other times chasing their prey for some distance. To avoid being eaten, leaf bugs may avoid areas where wolf spiders have lots of hiding places from which to stage an ambush, or leaf bugs may avoid entire patches of land that have lots of wolf spiders. If these areas are the same ones that have lots of mirid bug food, then they've effectively lost their habitat. Sound familiar?
Back to Africa – what does this mean for wild dogs and cheetahs? Interestingly enough, lions do not displace cheetahs from large areas of the Serengeti. We've discovered this in part from historic radio-collar data that was collected simultaneously on both species in the late 1980's. Below is a map that shows average lion density across the study area. Green indicates areas with higher densities. The black "+" symbols show where cheetah were tracked within the same study area. They are overwhelmingly more likely to be found in areas with lots of lions. This is because that is where the food is – and cheetahs are following their prey, regardless of the risk of encountering a lion. The Snapshot Serengeti data confirm this – cheetahs are way more likely to be caught on cameras inside lion territories.
Unfortunately, we don't have radio-collar data on the Serengeti wild dogs from the 1980's. But we do have radio-collar data for the wild dogs that have been living in the larger Serengeti ecosystem for the past 8 years. As you can see in the map below, wild dogs regularly roam within just 30km of the lion study area. But they don't settle there – instead, wild dogs remain in hills to the east of Serengeti – where there are local people (who kill wild dogs), but very few lions.
Other researchers in east and southern Africa are starting to pick up on the same patterns in their parks. From Tanzania, to Botswana, to South Africa, researchers are finding that wild dogs get kicked out of really large, prime areas by lions…but that cheetahs do not. What they're finding (since they have all these animals GPS-collared) is that cheetahs are responding to lions at a very immediate scale. Instead of avoiding habitats that have lions, cheetahs maintain a "safe" distance from the lions – allowing them to use their preferred habitats, but still minimize their risk of getting attacked.
Carnivore researchers are only really just beginning to explore the role of behavior in driving population-level suppression, but I think that there's good reason to believe that large scale displacement, or other behaviors, for that matter, have greater effects on population numbers of cheetahs and wild dogs, as well as other "subordinate" carnivores – not just in African ecosystems but in systems around the world. It's a new way of thinking about how competing species all live together in one place, but it's one that might change the way we approach carnivore conservation for threatened species.
Complex Landscapes
This past week I've been reworking a paper about a study with Anna Mosser and Craig. The study asks the question: How did lions come to live in groups? It doesn't seem like group-living in lions would be something you would spend much time thinking about – until you realize that lions are the only cat that regularly lives in groups. What's special about lions?
Craig's work over the past decades has shown that seemingly intuitive ideas about why lions form groups are wrong. Lions don't form groups in order to hunt more efficiently. Lions don't form groups to cooperatively nurse their young. Lions don't form groups to protect young against aggressive outsiders. Instead, it appears that the primary purpose of lion groups is to defend territories against other groups of lions.
So territorial defense appears to be the key to group living in lions. But is territorial defense the only thing that matters? That's what we set out to investigate. We created a computer model that simulates a bunch of lions living on a landscape. The model is a simplification of what happens in real life, but it contains some essential aspects of lion living.
First, we have complex landscapes. Previous research suggests that group territoriality is more likely in complex landscapes because there are highly desirable areas that are worth defending. If you had a landscape where everything was more or less the same, then you wouldn't need to fight your neighbor over some small patch of it; you could just wander off and find your own patch that would be more-or-less the same quality as your neighbor's.
Second, we have various behaviors that we can turn on or off in our simulated lions. For example, we can tell them that they can live together in a territory, but they can't cooperate to defend it. We can also tell them whether or not they can live in a territory with their parents when they grow up. And we can tell them whether they're allowed to make their territory bigger if they recruit more lions into their group.
By manipulating the types of landscapes and the various behaviors, we explored how often our simulated lions formed groups. Our results suggest that while territorial defense is important, it's also important to have complex landscapes with high-value real estate. If the landscape isn't very complex, then it's easy enough to find an area to set up a territory without fighting for it. And if the landscape is complex, but doesn't have any areas with high value, then there's nothing worth fighting for or defending. It's also important that lions be able to pass their valuable territories on to their offspring, for without inheritance, the benefits of all that fighting and defending are gone in a generation.
Lions evolved on the savannas of East Africa, where the landscape is complex with patchy areas of high value (near where rivers come together, for example). Humans did too. It's possible that the same sorts of savanna landscapes that shaped group living and territorial defense for lions did so for people, as well.
Big, Mean, & Nasty
I recently gave a talk at the Arusha-based Interpretive Guide Society – a really cool group of people interested in learning more about the natural history of Tanzania's places and animals. I've taken a few clips from the presentation that describe in a bit more detail how lions bully their competitors.
Looking at the photos above (all nabbed from the internet), how many of you would like to be a wild dog? A leopard? A cheetah? There's no doubt about it – lions are big, and mean and nasty. If you are any other carnivore species in the Serengeti – or across Africa, lions chase you, steal your food, even kill you. So what do you do? How do you survive? That's essentially what my dissertation seeks to answer. How smaller "large carnivores" – hyenas, leopards, cheetahs, and wild dogs — live with lions. Under what circumstances do they persist? Under what circumstances do they decline or even disappear?
There are a handful of ways in which these species interact, but what I'm most interested in is aggression and it's repercussions. As the above pictures suggest, lions tend to dominate aggressive interactions.
The relationship between lions and hyenas is one that has wormed its way into the public psyche through nature documentaries such as "Eternal Enemies." While such movies play up the frequency of such interactions, they certainly do happen. Lions not only kill a number of hyenas, but steal their hard-won kills. Dispel any notion of lions as some noble hunter — they in fact steal a lot of their food from other carnivores. In fact, research from Kay Holekamp's group in Masaai Mara indicates that lions can suppress hyena populations just because they steal food from them! It's actually a similar story for wild dogs – lions kill wild dogs too, but since wild dogs expend so much energy hunting, that if lions steal just a small fraction of the food that wild dogs catch, wild dogs simply cannot recover. They would have to hunt for more hours than there are in a day to make up for this caloric loss.
It doesn't stop there. We don't know how much food lions steal from cheetahs or leopards. We also don't know how often lions kill leopards, but lions kill cheetah cubs left and right. Studies from Serengeti indicate that lions may be responsible for up to 57% of cheetah cub mortality!
So how do hyenas, wild dogs, leopards, and cheetahs survive? Well, that's what I'm trying to figure out. But what I can tell you is that not all of these smaller carnivores sit back and take their beating quietly. Take hyenas. They're about 1/3 the size of a lion, but they live in groups. Big groups. Much bigger groups than lions. And if there are no male lions around, if hyenas have strength in numbers, they can steal food from female lions, and even kill their cubs. While leopards don't live in groups, they can easily kill (and eat!) a lion cub that has been hidden while mom is away hunting.
Unfortunately, what we don't know is whether this reciprocal aggression by leopards and hyenas has any measurable affect on lion populations, and whether it's this aggression that allows hyenas and leopards to coexist with lions. The cameras behind Snapshot Serengeti will provide the first-ever map of leopard and hyena distributions within the long-term lion study area – by comparing lion reproductive success (which we know from >45 years of watching individually identified animals) to leopard and hyena distributions, we can see if lions do better or worse in areas with lots of hyenas or leopards – and whether this is due to getting less food or producing fewer cubs.
What about cheetahs and wild dogs? Even though wild dogs, like hyenas, live in groups, there's no evidence that this helps them defend themselves or their kills against lions. And cheetahs, well, there's no record of them killing lion cubs, but who knows?
So how do these guys live with lions? To be honest, wild dogs don't tend to do very well in places with lots of lions. In fact, it's generally believed that wild dogs have failed to recolonize Serengeti, despite living *just* a few km from the border, because lion populations are so high. For a long time, researchers and conservationists believed that cheetahs also couldn't survive in places with lots of lions – but that perception is beginning to change, due, in part, to data coming in from Snapshot Serengeti! It seems that cheetahs not only do just fine in reserves with lots of lions, but use the same areas within the park as lions do. I have a sneaking suspicion that how cheetahs use the habitat with respect to lions, how they avoid encountering lions even though they're in the same places, holds the key to their success. Avoidance, combined with habitat that makes avoidance possible (read: not the short grass Serengeti plains you see below).
I'll write more about avoidance and habitat another day. In fact, I'm currently revising a paper for a peer-reviewed journal that addresses how cheetahs and wild dogs differ in the ways they avoid lions – if accepted, it will be the first appearance of Snapshot Serengeti data in the scientific literature! I'll keep you posted…


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The Hottest Guys of the NFL 2012
Looks like Kim stole her outfit from teeny pageant queen Honey Boo Boo.
You never know when cotton balls will come in handy, right Myolie?
Tennis O-Faces
Martha's ready to leave for her weekend in the Hamptons. Like, now.
anyone got a fire extinguisher?
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Just another livestock auction in Amish country.
Category: People
Photo and caption by Dusty Destler
While working on an organic farm in Spring Mills, PA, we were able to check out the produce and livestock auction over in Belleville. I got this shot through the gate at the far end of the cattle preview room where men are seen chatting and taking notes about 20 minutes prior to the auction. We stayed for the first half-hour of the bidding. What a surreal scene - some horses went for less than 100 bucks!
Location: Belleville, PA, USA
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Immigration and the Human Person
CHICAGO - A Conversation on Immigration Reform
CHICAGO - A Conversation on Immigration Reform
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HOUSTON - Through the Sculptor's Eyes
NEW YORK - The human person's aspiration toward beauty: A yearning for the ideal
HOUSTON - A discussion about the currently known pros and cons to embryonic and adult stem cell therapy.
NEW YORK - Why read literature? How will it enhance my life?
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NEW YORK - A discussion on charity on the occasion of the publication in the U.S. of Msgr. Luigi Giussani's: IS IT POSSIBLE TO LIVE THIS WAY? Vol. 3: CHARITY
NEW YORK - Eyewitness accounts of the largest week-long public cultural Catholic event in the world. The Rimini Meeting for 30 years has sought to create points of contact between experiences and people of different faiths and cultures.
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Jay Hoag's form 4 filing just hit the wires. He sold 300,000 shares of stock near the $162 area...he picked up a cool $50 million!
Follow Director Jay to sell will be the smart move. He was the one who bought when Netflix was cheaper, and now he sold ALL his stocks. Tells you it is hopeless.
Sentiment: Strong Sell
When an insider dumps that much stocks its time to take profits. Of course if you think you know more about the company than an insider by all means keep buying :)
rats go out first
Actually, director Jay Hoag sold 344,317 shares at $163.20 for $56,198,061. He bought those shares back in May of last year 200,000 for $72.55 and 143,400 for $73.06 for $24,986,627. So he made $31,211,434 in less than 8 months. 225% return is a great return on an 8 month investment. I'm sure he isn't complaining and is happy to have found enough hedge fund suckers to unload his shares to. I think if he believed the stock was going to go a lot higher he would have waited longer or at least would have only sold 45% of his position meaning that his risk would then be zero and the rest would be the houses money to play with. His dumping of the entire position tells me that he is a lot less optimistic about Netflix future than the momentum players out there who appear to love playing tulip mania. Any serious investor would not be buying at these levels. The stock is riding on hot air and there is no solid fundamental reason for Netflix to be sporting a $9.8 BILLION market cap!
great sell
It is very amusing when the only people causing downward pressure on the stock are insiders. Again I say it is no wonder the average retail investor says *&%^ You to wall street.
He sold 344,317 shares for an average price of $ 163.22
Total sale $ 56,198,078 big ones.
He sold it all.
At least insiders haven't lost their minds. This is a large sale. At a minimum it has to make people think before they buy this #$%$ at these levels when insiders are dumping their entire load.
every one will be out, not value investors like HLF.


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ApeFace is the official winner of the 250 custom sticker giveaway from UPrinting.com!
Congrats ApeFace! All you have to do now is send your name and email address to email@example.com by 11 a.m. on Nov 3 and then UPrinting.com will contact you directly with instructions to make your custom stickers.
Not ApeFace? It's okay, there will be plenty more giveaways in the coming weeks. So stay tuned and you could be the next winner!


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"The middle class ... in the U.S. and other industrialized nations spend money on things we do not need. We could instead donate that money to organizations that make a huge difference in the lives of the world's poorest people."
Archive – January 2011
Bernard Haykel's fascinating selection paints a worrying picture of a country at odds with the cultural riches of its past. With internal conflicts and poor governance, Al Qaeda is the least of its problems.
The Progress Report (PDF) provides a summary of Princeton's Grand Challenges Program including novel research and teaching initiatives that address global environmental issues.
PEI Visiting Professor George Hawkins '83 promotes sustainability as head of The District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority.
Sandra McCardell '76, has pursued a rather eclectic career since graduation - although her efforts have always managed to be in "The Spirit of Service."
Senior Tucker Willsie Weighs in on Whether Fixing Market Externalities Will Speed Clean Energy Innovation
For proponents of clean energy technology, the holy grail is to reach price parity with conventional power sources such as coal. For photovoltaics, this tipping point is generally regarded as a dollar per watt ($1/Wp), a measure that indicates the generation capacity of a cell in peak sunlight.


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THE CAPITAL, TALLAHASSEE, August 23, 2012
Michael Peltier, The News Service of Florida
With Tropical Storm Isaac heading into the Caribbean, Florida officials said Wednesday it's too early to tell how the storm may affect the upcoming Republican National Convention slated to begin Monday in Tampa.
But they said the state is as ready as it can be.
"I am confident in our preparation, and the decision process in place to ensure the safety of both our residents and visitors during the convention," Gov. Rick Scott said in a statement.
With thousands of delegates and media scheduled to begin arriving in a matter of days, Bryan Koon, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said preparations that began months ago continue, but final decisions are still days away.
"The (Republican National Convention), I will tell you, is a complicating factor," Koon said in an interview with the News Service Wednesday. "As far a hurricane goes, we will be preparing much like we normally do in these situations."
National Hurricane Center forecasts have put the Republican bash in Isaac's potential path. Still more than a thousand miles off shore, the storm's exact track won't be clear for a couple of days.
The state had already planned to elevate its emergency response level on Sunday in anticipation of the convention. That may now happen sooner.
"There are a lot of people interested in the potential overlap of the two events there so we have to make sure we are coordinating properly with the (RNC's) Committee on Arrangements," Koon said.
He said the decision on whether the convention goes forward will likely be made by the party, not state emergency officials, though government agencies will provide as much information as possible to help the RNC make that call.
"They have a bigger picture to think about: how they get their convention business done --so we have not established a drop dead date," Koon said. "But we are making sure they are fully aware of the forecast at this point, the uncertainty of the forecast at this point and the time of arrival et cetera…."
That said, convention goers will be treated like any other visitors. That means they may be required to move depending on the path of the storm.
"There are many parts of Tampa Bay area that are in evacuation zones because of the low lying nature of the terrain there," Koon said.
In May, state emergency responders conducted a tabletop exercise that considered a Category 3 hurricane hitting Tampa Bay. The irony was not lost on the former Wal-Mart executive who now oversees the state's emergency preparedness.
The practice exercise allowed state officials to work with local responders and federal agencies, in what may have been a dress rehearsal for the real thing.
One contingency not factored in to that exercise was the loss of the division's email system. Tangled up in a thwarted attempt to migrate to a new statewide email system, the division will be without email access beginning Wednesday evening as the state reverts to another server system.
Plans are for the email to be running again Thursday.
Tallahassee, Florida- August 22, 2012
Tropical Storm Isaac is expected to become a hurricane and could make landfall near Tampa during next week's Republican National Convention. It's a scenario emergency workers in Tallahassee have been preparing for, for more than a year.
'Prepare for the worst and hope for the best', it's the mantra of employees at Florida's Emergency Operation Center.
It's so ingrained in their DNA that back in May emergency managers worked a scenario, where a category four hurricane hit Tampa on the second day of the Republican National Convention.
"We have been working on this for a year and a half," said Division of Emergency Management Director Bryan Koon.
Koon picked the right scenario. A situation similar to the drill is developing. Tropical Storm Isaac is expected to become a hurricane and could make landfall in Florida, although it's less intense than the storm in the drill.
"It is better to exercise for a stronger storm so that you are prepared for a lesser event when it comes by, but it still could potentially be right now a category one or a category two hurricane when it makes landfall sometime in Florida over the weekend or next week," said Koon.
Regardless of what happens with Isaac there are already plans in place to go to a level two activation here at the Emergency Operation Center for national security reasons.
A level two activation means, departments and agencies directly involved in the disaster will be in the Emergency Operations Center. Level One means all hands on deck. Koon says the storm may force a level one activation.
"We will likely go a bit earlier depending on the path of the storm," said Koon.
And if an evacuation is ordered in Tampa, Koon has already worked out an escape plan with the Secret Service for political dignitaries.
Governor Rick Scott released this statement today.
"Although Tropical Storm Isaac is still far from Florida's shores, we are closely tracking the potential for the storm to impact part or all of the state, including the Tampa Bay region during the Republican National Convention. Florida's state emergency management team and local emergency teams have been working closely with convention officials and have been planning for this event for more than a year, and the possibility of a hurricane hitting the convention has been part of that planning process.
"I am confident in our preparation, and the decision process in place to ensure the safety of both our residents and visitors during the convention.
"As Florida's governor, I'm urging everyone across the state to monitor the storm track, and use the next several days to prepare for a potential storm. As we know, storms this far from land are still unpredictable and everyone should be vigilant and prepared."
August 22, 2012- Noon
Tropical Storm Isaac is out in the Atlantic. While it's path is unclear, the storm is already getting attention in Tampa where the Republican National Convention begins next week.
It's important to note Isaac is more than 1700 miles from Tampa. At this point, our meteorologist Rob Nucatola says it's far too soon to predict if the convention could be affected.
However, emergency operations administrators in Tampa are watching the storm closely. They've been planning for more than a year for the possibility of a storm hitting the area during the convention. With so much water, there are few options when it comes to evacuating Tampa. The area is riddled with bridges and bottlenecks.
With an estimated 60,000 visitors for the convention and roughly a million residents on the peninsula, it could mean earlier evacuations than normal.
One example of how difficult an evacuation might be is Davis Islands, home to Tampa's main hospitals.
When a sign blew down on the bridge there overnight, it caused back ups all morning long.
August 22, 2012 -
A tropical depression in the Atlantic Ocean has become Tropical Storm Isaac, the ninth named storm of the season – giving Republican National Convention officials something to think about. While the storm is not terribly well organized, early forecast tracks have the storm moving into the Caribbean, crossing Hispaniola and Cuba, possibly by Sunday evening. But after that, Isaac could become a problem for the GOP convention, which starts Monday in Tampa. Official forecast tracks don't project much beyond Sunday, but some early possible paths would include the Gulf coast of Florida early in the week. State emergency officials have said they've done exercises contemplating the possibility of a hurricane hitting Tampa during the convention, and have drawn up evacuation plans that account for the huge influx of delegates and media.


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MUSCAT, Oman (AP) — Iraq's foreign minister says he and other international envoys are "waiting for the next Iranian move" on the case of two Americans jailed in Tehran as spies, but he's "optimistic" they'll be released soon.
Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal have been held in a Tehran prison since being arrested along Iran's border with Iraq's Kurdish region more than two years ago. The two men deny they were spying, but they were convicted in an Iranian court and each sentenced to eight years in prison.
Earlier this week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the Americans could be freed in a matter of days. But Iran's judiciary later said it was reviewing the bail provisions, which include payments of $500,000 for each man.
Iraq and Oman have sent high-level envoys to Tehran as part of the complicated judicial and diplomatic dealings. Swiss officials also are involved as representatives of U.S. interests in Iran, which has no diplomatic ties with America.
Iraq's foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari tells The Associated Press that his country's leaders have urged Iran to release the Americans on humanitarian grounds.
(Copyright 2011, The Associated Press)


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Back to Main...
Photo Coverage: Oscars Red Carpet Arrivals Part 1
by BWW Special Coverage - February 22, 2015
Hollywood takes center stage tonight with the 87th annual Academy Awards, and BWW Fashion has you covered when it comes to the glamour hitting the red carpet. Check out the first round of arrivals. Some big trends so far have been red, pearl embellishment and as always, sparkles!... (more...)
Photo Coverage: SAG Awards Red Carpet
by BWW Special Coverage - January 26, 2015
SAG-AFTRA presented its coveted Actor® statuettes for the outstanding motion picture and primetime television performances of 2014 at the 21st Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards® in ceremonies attended by film and television's leading actors, held Sunday, Jan. 25, at the Los Angeles Shrine Expositio... (more...)
Photo Coverage: 72nd Annual Golden Globes Red Carpet Arrivals
by BWW Special Coverage - January 11, 2015
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) and dick clark productions (dcp) present the 72nd Annual Golden Globe Awards tonight, Sunday, January 11, 2015. Hosted by Golden Globe Award winners Tina Fey and Amy Poehler for the third year in a row, the ceremony will air on NBC live coast-to-coast f... (more...)
Zac Posen Named Creative Director of Brooks Brothers' Womens Collection
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From: FashionTV... (more...)
Naomi Watts Wears a Prudential Financial Dress at Cannes
by BWW News Desk - May 16, 2014
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Photo Coverage: Best Dressed from The 86th Annual Academy Awards
by Rachel Stone - March 03, 2014
Last night was the night all fashionistas look forward to - the Academy Awards! It is not only a night to celebrate the year's film achievements but it has become a major night for fashion and glamour. And for those at us at home, we get to watch all afternoon as the stars arrive on the carpet and... (more...)
Photo Coverage: Golden Globes Best Dressed
by Rachel Stone - January 13, 2014
The 71st AnnuAl Golden Globe Awards, hosted by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler for the second year in a row, aired last night, January 12, 2014, LIVE coast-to-coast on NBC from the Beverly Hilton. When it came to last night's fashion, the women really delivered. The red carpet was filled with a lot of bl... (more...)
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- Report: #927411
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Complaint Review: POWER4HOME
POWER4HOME855 VILLAGE CENER Dr. #386 55127 NORTH OAKS, Minnesota United States of America
POWER4HOME TOTAL SCAM / USELESS INFORMATION NORTH OAKS, Minnesota
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Just don't understand why some one goes to the effort in making a CD marketing setting up payment shipping and handling and then just sends you useless information, makes no sense to me.
If only they put an effort into the content as they did in taking your money and giving you a BIG NOTHING.
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Definition of fall guy in English:
fall guy
nouninformal, chiefly North American
A scapegoat: he contends that he is innocent, that he was set up as a fall guy
More example sentences
- And then they picked this one auditor who could be their fall guy.
- She's obviously being set up to be the fall guy and she's it.
- Whether or not the person who actually takes the blame is the real culprit or a fall guy, we may never know.
For editors and proofreaders
Line breaks: fall guy
Definition of fall guy in:
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Comments that don't adhere to our Community Guidelines may be moderated or removed.
= trending


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In Praise of Older Men
I love the One Handed Writers blog. It's a fantastic place for some of my friends and fellow erotica authors to sit down and share their thoughts on not just writing erotic fiction, but what turns us on and inspires us as well. A couple weeks ago, I posted my first blog over there. It was called "Who's Your Daddy" and I talked about why I think the pseudo-incest and stepdad stories are such a big hit.
Alix Storm bounced off of my thoughts and wrote a fantastic post today called In Praise of Older Men. Anyone who's read my work or blog can probably tell I have a soft spot for older men. The more distinguished and emotionally mature, the more excited I get.
One of my favorite actors of all time is Keith Carradine. I sort of fell in love with Mr. Carradine back when he guest starred on season two of Showtime's Dexter as FBI serial killer tracker, Frank Lundy. He was mature, set in his ways and so sexy that Dexter's hard-ass cop sister, Debra, fell head over heels in love with Lundy and ready to sacrifice her future to spend her life with a much older man.
The interesting thing about the Debra Morgan/Frank Lundy relationship, at least to me anyway, was that Deb had serious "Daddy" issues. Her father, after adopting seriously damaged Dexter, found himself wrapped up in trying to control this out of control serial killer on the rise, and Deb always took a backseat to her brother in their father's eye. Everything she did in life, she did to try to get her father's love and attention, and after he died, she found herself stuck in that cycle–still trying to stand out and live up to what she felt her father's expectations of her would be.
When she met Frank Lundy, she found a man not much unlike her father, but who took interest in her thoughts, ideas and gave her the much-needed praise and encouragement she'd been craving from her father her entire life. He provided her with stability and understanding, compassion and confidence, in essence putting her on a much stabler path until he left to track down another serial killer at the end of the season.
His dedication to his work was a large enough slight that it pushed Deb back into that state of disarray and confusion.
Keith Carradine played the role beautifully, and I was so excited when they brought him back to Dexter in season four…even if his presence was only short-lived.
If you've got a thing for older men, who are some of the distinguished guys you find attractive? Does Harrison Ford get your motor running? How about Sean Connery or William Shatner? And what is it about that particular man that turns you on? As for the men, are you attractive to older women, and if so, what is it about them that turns you on?
And if you've got a moment, why not drop by One Handed Writers and see what Alix has to say about Older Men?


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Please feel free to visit the Science Internship & Career Services office to obtain information science career resources, workshops, information about potential job opportunities in your field or about the Science Internship Program, or to review your cover letter and resume.
We are located in WSC 191, and have weekly office hours.
The Leadership and Mentorship Program (LAMP) at Western is part of the University's efforts to provide first-year students with a strong sense of both academic and community support. First-year students are guided through their transitional first year to university life by upper-year students in similar fields of academic interest and study. You will be connected with a supportive learning community to enhance your academic success.
Visit www.success.uwo.ca/index.cfm/first-year-programs/lamp/ for more details.


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Posted: Tue May 12, 2009 3:34 pm
Post subject:
Hi there. I was in Rome in September with my husband. A friend in work recommended staying near the Termini Station, which I regret because there is nothing of interest close by in this part of rome and, if truth be told, I found it to be quite a slummy area of Rome, a lot of alcholics on your doorstep, local drugs drop off point, etc. I would really recommend a hotel near the Spanish Steps or Trevi Fountain. This area of Rome is really beautiful and the hotels we passed looked lovely and it night you would have beautiful views to have your meals. I would highly recommend buying a ticket for a bus tour, this is an excellent way of getting your bearings in Rome and also a cheap way of getting around, you can hop on and off these buses up until around 10.00pm. Hope this helps. Enjoy your break!!
Posted: Tue May 12, 2009 3:59 pm
Post subject:
How much you looking to spend? ive been a few times to Rome so i know a few good hotels.
This ones quite cheap and clean. For the lcoation its not too bad either
The year we first got married i stayed at a hotel at the top of the spansh steps called Hotel Dea Ville
This one is alot more expensive however the location is amazing!
Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 10:45 am
Post subject:
Hi Guys,
Thanks so much for the responses, I do appreciate it. However, plans have changed, due to the fact that I got a BFP this morning!!! All spare cash is now going in the baby fund.
I had a tough time with a blighted ovum and MC over Christmas, so the holiday to Rome was a treat because of that. I'm nervous about being pregnant again, but lets hope this one goes according to plan!
I'm off to sort out my ticker!


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Local racing news
SIKESTON -- Here are Saturday's results from the Sikeston Drag Strip:
In the Super Pro Class, Dexter's Ken Parris posted his first win of the season. Parris dialed 5.25 and ran 5.25 at 129 m.p.h. His reaction time was .667. Benton's Jim Wade took second place. He ran 5.62 on a 5.39 dial at 97 m.p.h. His reaction time was .554.
Sikeston's Floyd Foreman won the Pro Class with a 8.67 dial. He ran 8.71 at 71 m.p.h. His reaction time was .568. Campbell's Tony Jacques took second place with a 6.39 dial. He ran 6.45 at 104 m.p.h. His reaction time was .574.
Carbondale's Don Hooker won the E.T. Class. With a 7.92 dial he ran 7.87 at 88 m.p.h. His reaction time was .588. Stanley Byrd of Bertrand took second. He ran 8.36 on a 8.38 dial at 80 m.p.h. His reaction time was .475.
BENTON -- Opening night at the Auto Tire and Parts RacePark belonged to the 2002 MARS Series Rookie of the Year Champion Joey Mack of Benton. For the first time in five years the Late Models returned to the Benton facility with a total of 22 Late Models on a very chilly spring evening.
Joey Mack dominated the Late Model Class by winning his main event and finishing second in his heat. The Mack Racing Team did an awesome job in preparing the 97M car for a smooth track surface that turned "dry slick" early on in the program.
"I'm very proud to get to win a feature just three miles from my home this one is very special to me and my crew" Mack said.
Not only did a Benton, Missouri driver win his main event in the Late Models so did two other drivers from Sikeston which both live just 15 miles south of the RacePark.
Twelve year old Nathan Rettig won his Pure Street Feature and Nineteen Year Old Daron Clayton drove his 92 car to victory lane in the Outlaw Wing Sprint Class.
In the Modified Class Tennessee Driver Bart Richardson captured the feature win. "I like this track and I will be back" Richardson said in victory lane after winning the Modified main event.
A total of 92 cars turned out for opening night at the Auto Tire and Parts NAPA RacePark. "I was very pleased with the total number of cars we had tonight for such a cold evening, and I commend all of our drivers, fans, and race teams for a job well done on a night that mother nature was not at her best", Promoter Jerry Wolsey said.
After taking a week off racing action will return to the Auto Tire and Parts NAPA RacePark on April 19th. Find all of the results in the scoreboard on page 11.
SIKESTON -- SEMO Raceway, located on Highway U in Sikeston, kicked off the 2003 racing season on April 5 with the U.S. Army sponsored Micro Sprint Spring Shootout with drivers from Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Indiana vying for the big purse.
Oklahoma was represented very well with three drivers taking first place in each of their features.
In the A Class, Kenny Koelsch of Tulsa took the first place victory with Kevin Bayer of Broken Arrow coming in a very respectful second place.
Bayer would come back out later in the Multi Class, taking first place in the feature race with Travis Senter Jr. from Osceola, Ark., taking second place.
In the Restricted 600 Class, Riley Adair of Tulsa would take the Checkered flag victory with Jonathan Hendricks from McCordville finishing second.
SEMO Raceway's 2003 opening events will continue next Saturday with Karters from Missouri, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Illinois, and Indiana competing for a $13,000 purse.
MALDEN -- Malden Speedway was the victim of thunderstorms last Friday night pushing the season opener back a week. Just after hot laps a strong thunderstorm pushed through the area. 94 race cars were on hand to race on a new track layout. The racing surface is now 15 feet wider which will see 3 and 4 wide racing this season.
Weekly events will consist of 5 classes of race cars: Pure Street, Hobby, Modified, Late Models and Cruiser. The 4th Friday of each month winged sprint cars will replace Late Models.
The first special of the season will be Friday April 25th when the M.A.R.S. Late Model Touring Series makes its first of two appearances along with winged Sprints and Modifieds. The M.A.R.S. Late Model Series is a great touring series with some well-known names such as Bill Frye, Wendell Wallace, Steve Rushin, Donnie Barnhart and others.
The M.A.R.S. Late Model Series will return to the Malden Speedway Friday, July 4th along with the regular classes. A big fireworks show can be seen from the speedway that night also.
The season finale will be held in October (the date still being worked out). "The 2nd Annual Cotton Boll Cup" will pay $50,000 in purse money.
The Speedway is located 1 mile north of Malden County Rd. 102. Pit gates open at 5:00 p.m.--Grandstands at 6:00 p.m.--Hot Laps at 7:00 p.m. with racing at 7:30 p.m.


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Pictures of the Day
A Russian Orthodox Christian held a candle up to a picture of the late Patriarch Alexy II inside Moscow's Epiphany Cathedral Wednesday. The post-Soviet religious leader was buried Tuesday. (Alexey Sazonov/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
Supporters of late Chilean leader Augusto Pinochet shouted slogans outside a Santiago church where a Mass was held Wednesday to commemorate the second anniversary of his death. The dictator is blamed for the deaths of some 3,200 dissidents during his 1973-1990 rule. (Claudio Santana/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
A member of the human rights group Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo protested outside the Buenos Aires government building Wednesday, demanding to know the whereabouts of their children detained during Argentina's dictatorship. (Natacha Pisarenko/Associated Press)
Opposition activists wearing mock prison attire marched outside the Belarusian KGB's headquarters in Minsk, Belarus, Wednesday. Police arrested dozens of activists after a series of protests marking International Human Rights Day. (Sergei Grits/Associated Press)
Amazonian Koruba tribe members rallied Wednesday in Brazil as their country's Supreme Court continues to debate whether the vast Raposa Serra do Sol reservation will be broken up to benefit large-scale rice farmers. (Eraldo Peres/Associated Press)
Fatiha Houssaini, the wife of Omar Maarouf, protested her husband's death sentence Wednesday outside the Council of Human Rights in Casablanca, Morocco. Mr. Maarouf was convicted of deadly 2003 bombings in the city. (Abdelhak Senna/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
President George W. Bush met with Halima Bashir — who was tortured and gang-raped in Darfur — at the Oval Office Wednesday. The president praised the author, who covered herself for fear of retaliation. Mr. Bush said Sudan's president must be held accountable for the five-year conflict that the United Nations estimates has claimed up to 300,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million. Sudan claims the figures are exaggerated. (Chris Kleponis/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
A 3-year-old girl stood in her Baghdad, Iraq, home Monday. Her young life changed when a car bomb exploded in 2006 near her father's car, killing her mother. (Khalid Mohammed/Associated Press)
From left to right, Swedish Crown Princess Victoria, U.S. Nobel prize chemistry laureate Martin Chalfie, French Nobel prize medicine laureate Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf and Japanese Nobel prize chemistry laureate Osamu Shimomura, right, attended the Nobel Prize banquet Wednesday at the Stockholm City Hall. Finnish mediator Martti Ahtisaari accepted this year's Nobel Peace Prize with a plea to President-elect Barack Obama to start pressing for Middle East peace. (Henrik Montgomery/Scanpix Sweden via Associated Press)
Little Angel Brodie points while attending a homecoming parade in Stirling, Scotland, Wednesday. The soldiers returned from a six-month deployment in Afghanistan. (David Moir/Reuters)
About 400 people held candles and chanted slogans Wednesday at a Taipei, Taiwan, prison in protest of former President Chen Shui-bian's detention. Mr. Chen was jailed Nov. 12 on suspicion of money laundering, taking bribes and other offenses. He said he's being persecuted for his anti-China stance. (Wally Santana/Associated Press)
A riot police officer standing near flames threw tear gas Wednesday during rioting in Thessaloniki, Greece. The violence comes after police fatally shot a 15-year-old boy Saturday in Athens. (Nikolas Giakoumidis/Associated Press)
Police officers escorted suspected Basque ETA members to an airport Wednesday. French antiterrorism police arrested the group's alleged military chief and two other ETA suspects Monday in Gerde, France, after receiving an intelligence tip. (Bob Edme/Associated Press)
Health workers donned masks and protective suits to dispose of dead chickens at a Hong Kong market Wednesday, a day after authorities raised the bird flu alert level to "serious" after an outbreak at a farm. The outbreak was the city's first in five years, despite mass bird vaccinations. (Woody Wu/Reuters)
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev shook hands with Argentine President Cristina Kirchner Wednesday at the Kremlin. According to Russia's energy minister, Moscow will give LUKOIL political backing in its quest for a stake in the Spanish-Argentine company Repsol, should the large private oil company ask for help. (Mikhail Klimentyev/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
Harare, Zimbabwe, residents waited to collect drinking water Wednesday. About 775 Zimbabweans have died and 16,141 have become ill due to the waterborne bacteria cholera, according to the United Nations. (Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters)
A newlywed couple walked in the snow Wednesday at a Milan park. Italy has endured extreme weather swings — floods in Venice, strong winds fanning wildfires in the south and snow in the north. The snow temporarily closed one of Milan's two airports Wednesday. (Stefano Rellandini/Reuters)
A picture released Wednesday by the European Space Agency shows an artist's impression of the Jupiter-size extrasolar planet "HD 189733b" being eclipsed by its parent star. (Reuters/European Space Agency/NASA/M. Kornmesser )


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According to Steam's recent hardware survey, gamers are ditching their trusty Windows XP and flocking to the new kid, Windows 7.
The statistics show a total increase of 2.47% for Windows 7, which includes both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions, while Windows XP is seeing a sharp decrease of 3.2%. Which means, 23% of Steam gamers are Windows 7 users!
Looks like Microsoft finally got things right, after the disaster that is Vista.
Another item of interest is the 64-bit OS adoption rate. Be it the odd Windows Server 2003 or even Windows XP, every single version of 64-bit Wiindows is seeing an increase in adoption.


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Category: People
Photo and caption by Leo Edwards
Rice grows best in a field covered with shallow water. Farmers build low dirt walls called dikes or levees to hold water in the paddies. Many Nepali farmers flood their fields before leveling them. They work the soil into soft mud to make it easier to plow and to bury weeds. The practice of working flooded land is called puddling.
Location: NEPAL
More People Entries »
By Aidas Banaitis
By Rachel Glogowski
By Sameer Masand


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PARKERSBURG - Wood County Habitat for Humanity is hoping to raise $100,000 by Feb. 14, 2014, as part of its annual Caring Campaign fund drive.
Officials met Monday morning at the Habitat home currently under construction at 13th and Dillaway streets in Parkersburg to announce the start of the fund drive and introduce the campaign chairman, Mike Tucker, president and CEO of West Virginia Central Credit Union.
The fund drive began Monday with more than $20,000 in pledges, including $5,000 from the WVCCU.
Article Photos
Photo by Wayne Towner
The Wood County Habitat for Humanity is working on its 67th home at 13th and Dillaway streets in Parkersburg. Habitat has begun working to raise $100,000 by Feb. 14 as part of its annual Caring Campaign fund drive.
Photo by Wayne Towner
Kayla Corbin, left, and Michael Oyler with their 2-year-old daughter, Braelyn Oyler, in the house being built for the family by Wood County Habitat for Humanity at 13th and Dillaway streets in Parkersburg.
Photo by Wayne Towner
Mike Tucker, president and CEO of West Virginia Central Credit Union, is the campaign chairman for Wood County Habitat for Humanity's Caring Campaign fund drive.
Habitat for Humanity is a Christian ministry that builds or renovates homes with lower-income families who are currently living in substandard housing. After being approved, a family works "sweat equity" hours for months, helping with other homes, at the Habitat office and in other ways.
The home - the 67th for the Wood County chapter - is being built for Michael Oyler and Kayla Corbin and their 2-year-old daughter Braelyn Oyler. During Monday's kickoff, Corbin thanked all of the volunteers who have helped the family.
The credit union was a sponsor of the house in 2012, with Tucker and members of his staff and family helping on the construction. The WVCCU also donated money to last year's Caring Campaign.
"For years I told myself that I would love to be part of Habitat for Humanity, but never made the time," Tucker said. "I am so glad that I now have had an opportunity to meet the volunteers and the future homeowners. Through our efforts of working together, we have all been blessed in many ways."
Tucker said he agreed to chair this year's Caring Campaign because he has seen first-hand what it means to a family to have their own home and to build it with others who care about their future.
"I have been fortunate to have a nice home in which my wife, Martha, and I have raised our children. It's a great feeling to be able to make that dream come true for someone else," Tucker said.
Alvin Phillips, executive director for Wood County Habitat, said the local chapter expects to complete four houses - including the one at 13th and Dillaway streets - by the end of the year. The goal is to do four to six more next year.
Those interested in becoming a homeowner can visit the website at www.woodcountyhabitat.org or stop at the office at 1450 Seventh St. to complete an interest form. Contributions can also be made through the website or by mailing to P.O. Box 462, Parkersburg, WV 26102.
"We are actively seeking new homeowners now," Phillips said.
Lisa Collins, Wood County Habitat's resource development coordinator, said at the time of Monday's campaign kickoff, the fund drive had already collected a total of $20,640 through pledges and donations.
"Our goal is to raise $100,000 by Feb. 14. We figure that's the day we celebrate love and that's an important part of what we offer at Habitat," she said.
Last year's fund drive was able to reach the same $100,000 goal and Collins hopes to do the same this year. The fund drive will include a letter campaign, personal calls and other methods of seeking support. The chapter also has a Facebook page which will include weekly updates and offers a chance to donate online, she said.
"That's getting more and more common, so we'll be using a lot of social media," Collins said.


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5 stars Sunday Express A wonderful souvenir for anyone who wants to know more about our future king and queen. Illustrated with the latest wedding snaps, this beautiful keepsake is just lovely The Sun Andrew Morton's explosive new book is set to publish exclusive interviews and never-before-seen photos of the couple Reveal Wait for the wedding and Andrew Morton's in-depth biography FInancial Times William & Catherine offers a psychological insight into their relationship, sourced from people who know them as a couple Ham & High (Hampstead & Highgate Express) 5 stars Woman's Own Morton has followed the prince's life since birth and has great insight into the royal family Manchester Evening News An enthralling portrait of William and Catherine and a superb memento of the day, lavishly illustrated throughout and produced superbly Parents in Touch


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Many people I know drink water constantly – they are always taking a swig out of a water bottle that never leaves their side. After having renal stones recently, I tend to try to drink more, but just don't like drinking water, and I find that I am not thirsty most of the time anyway. Who's right – those who tell me to drink water constantly, or my body, which rarely makes me feel thirsty?
Doctor Skeptic
Saturday, 9 July 2016
Saturday, 18 June 2016
Treatment for pre-term rupture of membranes in pregnancy
Another large international trial is published, and another standard practice based on little more than our bias towards doing something rather than doing nothing is reversed.
Saturday, 12 March 2016
Book review, of my book: Surgery, the ultimate placebo.
This will be a test of how unbiased I am. Writing a review of my own book (regardless of any bias) seems like shameless self-promotion, but what the hell, it's better than just saying "Hey, I wrote a book".
Saturday, 13 February 2016
Knee arthroscopy for "mechanical symptoms"
I have previously written about the (non) role of arthroscopy for osteoarthritis or degenerative meniscus tears in the knee (here, here and here). Surgeons have continued to operate, based on a belief that (now) centres on the presence of mechanical symptoms. An analysis of the recent sham surgery trial of arthroscopic partial meniscectomy (APM), which showed APM to be no better than sham for patients with meniscus tears without arthritis, has shown that this procedure is no better than sham surgery for patients with mechanical symptoms.
Monday, 2 November 2015
Laparoscopy for bowel adhesions
Laparoscopy is keyhole surgery of the abdomen in which a camera and instruments are inserted through holes in the skin, into the abdomen to see the structures within (diagnostic laparoscopy) and to correct pathology where possible (therapeutic laparoscopy). In patients that have had previous pathology or surgery to the abdomen, adhesions can develop whereby loops of bowel can get caught up in scar tissue. If this causes an obstruction of the bowel, it can be very serious, but often people just have abdominal pain that coexists with adhesions.
Sunday, 4 October 2015
Prophylactic mastectomy
Prophylactic mastectomy reduces the risk of getting breast cancer (here), but does it reduce your overall risk of dying? And what are the other risks?
Sunday, 23 August 2015
Sham physical therapy
Paradoxically, it is easier to perform a sham trial in surgery, the most invasive physical act, than in physiotherapy because the patient is asleep when it is delivered. Physical therapy involves physical acts that are hard to imitate as placebo treatment, but the influence of the patient-therapist interaction makes it important to tease out any placebo effect. Researchers have, however, performed sham trials in physiotherapy.
Saturday, 15 August 2015
Fixing a hole
Migraine is common, affecting millions of people worldwide. A patent foramen ovale (PFO – a 'hole in the heart' that lets blood cross from the right heart to the left) is common as well, present in about 30% of people. When cardiologists started surgically closing PFOs, they noticed that many patients with migraine got better. As with the discovery of any association in medicine, theories of a causal link soon followed, and doctors started treating migraine by closing the hole in the heart; before properly testing it, of course.
Tuesday, 19 May 2015
Placebo trials of surgery
In a recent systematic review of placebo trials of surgery (here) it was found that in half of the 53 trials found, surgery was not better than placebo treatment. And in the ones where it was better, the difference wasn't great. This may not be big news to my readers, but this review was important because it highlighted many of the problems with surgery, namely that:
1) placebo studies are needed to determine the true effectiveness of surgical procedures, but …
2) surgery and associated devices are regulated less strictly than drugs, consequently …
3) surgery is often not subjected to placebo / sham studies, even though …
4) such studies are ethical and practical.
1) placebo studies are needed to determine the true effectiveness of surgical procedures, but …
2) surgery and associated devices are regulated less strictly than drugs, consequently …
3) surgery is often not subjected to placebo / sham studies, even though …
4) such studies are ethical and practical.
Sunday, 17 May 2015
My right foot: predicament versus illness
My right foot hurts. It hurts in the middle, underneath, but not all the time, and only when I walk or take any weight on it, especially when I get up in the morning, when it becomes difficult to walk. It has been hurting on and off since I did an 80km trek three months ago. It could be a stress fracture, or some kind of fasciitis, soft tissue tear, fatigue, injury or degeneration, but I don't really care, because I am not going to have any tests or see any health care practitioners to get their version of a diagnosis. I'm just going to leave it alone. I am going to be a person with a predicament that I can cope with, and not a patient with an illness.
Tuesday, 28 April 2015
Do shoulder fractures need surgery?
Fractures that occur at the upper end of the humerus near the shoulder (called humeral neck fractures) are common. They are often treated with surgery despite a lack of supporting evidence for this, particularly in older, osteoporotic patients. Now, thanks to a recent study from the UK, it is possible that most of these fractures don't need surgery, even in young patients. This is big news, but will this research jump the gap from research into practice and influence the decision making of the end users – the patient and their surgeon?
Monday, 8 December 2014
Predatory publishing: when scientific quality gets in the way of a good business model
Science progresses because it is open to scrutiny. For findings to be accepted, they must pass peer-review and must be presented to other scientists for them to question, refute, or confirm. Publication in a scientific journal (and presentation at conferences) is key to this process. However, the number of journals and conferences have increased massively over the last 10 -20 years, and many of them are not the real thing – so called 'predatory' publishing and predatory conferences have sprung up everywhere. The problem with this is that there is no clear line between what is real and what is fake.
Sunday, 26 October 2014
Lessons from history #13: Hormone replacement therapy
Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for post-menopausal women was thought to decrease the chance of cardiovascular problems like heart attack and stroke. This 'made sense' because the risk of cardiovascular disease in women rose sharply after menopause, indicating that female hormones had a protective effect. Many large observational studies supported this belief, and HRT was widely prescribed in the 1980s and 1990s. Later evidence from large, placebo controlled, randomised trials failed to show any cardiovascular benefit. Again, observational evidence was shown to overestimate the effectiveness of a common medical treatment and again, practice became established before the definitive trials were done.
Sunday, 19 October 2014
Surgery for high blood pressure
The most recent casualty of the sham surgery trial, adding to the list of operations that looked good and had good results until put to the leased biased test, is a procedure called renal denervation (cutting the nerves to the kidney). Years of good results showing that this procedure lowered blood pressure are now met with a blinded sham-controlled trial that showed no significant benefit over placebo.
Thursday, 18 September 2014
The replication problem
One of the fundamental principles of science is that the results of any experiment should be reproducible. Reproducibility is essential because it means that the results can be relied upon, as they are more likely to be true. Unfortunately, there is little fame in replicating someone else's study; it is also hard to get such studies funded (because they are not 'novel'). Consequently, many studies are not repeated and many findings stand alone without verification from separate, independent researchers. This is a problem because often when studies are replicated, they fail to reproduce the original findings.
Wednesday, 10 September 2014
Patients should have a voice in medical policy and treatment. 'Grass-roots' groups of patients are more likely to have that voice heard and to effect change if they are organised and well funded. Patient advocacy groups can therefore be more effective if they accept industry (pharma) funding. However, such groups can also serve the interests of the industry doing the funding. It is even better for the industry, however, if they organise the grass-roots patient advocacy group from the start; so-called 'astroturfing'.
Sunday, 17 August 2014
Lessons from history #12: Lobotomy
In the 1940s and 50s (tapering into the 70s and 80s) tens of thousands of prefrontal lobotomies (severing the front part of the brain) were performed in Europe and North America for many types of mental conditions. It was done because doctors at that time believed that it worked, and they didn't have many effective alternatives. However, it didn't work, it made people worse and it even killed a few, despite a Nobel prize being awarded to one of the developers of the procedure.
Monday, 11 August 2014
Lessons from history #11: Extra- to Intra-cranial Bypass Surgery
This story is about a procedure that made sense and had supporting evidence, became common practice, but was later discontinued because a high quality study showed it to be ineffective. The story of extra-cranial intra-cranial bypass surgery ticks all the boxes: overestimation of benefit, seduction by the theory, unrecognised bias in studies, and just plain ineffectiveness despite our best effort and beliefs.
Friday, 27 June 2014
Lessons from history #10: How magnesium lost its mojo
Wouldn't it be great if there was a cheap, non-proprietary, readily available treatment for patients with heart attacks (acute myocardial infarction - AMI)? That's what doctors wanted to believe, so when they saw the early results of magnesium therapy, they did exactly that. Magnesium therapy for AMI has been labelled a "lesson in medical humility", but I see it as another example of the pervasive bias amongst researchers, doctors and the public that leads them to overestimate the effectiveness of medical therapies. Put simply, it was another case of 'believing is seeing'.
Sunday, 22 June 2014
Animal research: just another WOFTAM?
The idea is that experiments are first performed in the lab, are then performed in animals, and these experiments inform the eventual human studies. As a (seemingly) necessary step in this chain, animal experiments are (rightly or wrongly) tolerated based on their eventual benefit to humans. Animal studies however, are not good predictors of human trials, often do not inform human trials, and are methodologically inferior to human trials, so much so, that the results from animal studies are unreliable and biased. In other words, animal studies are often of no benefit to humans. Arguably, they do not benefit humans at all, let alone enough to justify their use. We either need to fix the problem or get out of the animal research game.
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Assos pride themselves on producing the best cycling garments available, setting industry standards since producing the first Lycra cycling shorts in 1976. Their Cycling Body Research & Development laboratory in Switzerland draws from over 350 years of expertise, and Assos' Advanced Ergonomic Pattern Design represents the pinnacle of cycling specific fit. Often imitated, never equalled.
Assos strive to provide ultimate comfort and performance, and recognise the differing needs of female cyclists. Patented ABC closure system utilises a Y-panel design for increased comfort, while also making it easier to dress or undress. Also patented are the specially designed leg grippers that provide a half circumference grip to prevent unflattering skin impressions.
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text:
email@example.com wrote:
> Anyone know what HP screwed up on the DC7700 series computers that prevents
> Linux from coming up unless ACPI is completely shut off?
No, but the output of dmesg will give you some instructions on commands to run and where to send the
output. Keeping the ACPI code working with the brain-dead BIOS's in new machines is a full-time
activity. Your output will help them fix Linux to work with that machine.


text: Spotlight: Jana Venable, Kentucky by You're C. on Sunday, May 12, 2013 Jana Venable Kentucky On October 5, 2010, one day before my 44th birthday, I went to the emergency room with severe back pain. Little did I know that week, when I was feeling so bad and having symptoms of fatigue, pressure, and headache, my aorta was dissecting from my brain stem to my kidneys. I was diagnosed with thoracic and abdominal dissections, and my family was informed that the chance of me surviving was less than 5%. However, through God's grace, and a large team of talented surgeons, doctors and nurses, I survived a 10 hour aortic surgery, and was diagnosed with Malignant Hypertension (severe high blood pressure). With the research done in vascular surgery, the advances in technology for quicker diagnosis, and the advances in blood pressure medicines available, they were able to miraculously save my life. I had a history of high blood pressure, but quit taking medicine thinking I could control it with diet and exercise. If there is one thing I would stress the most through this venue is that it is extremely important to check your blood pressure, and follow your doctors orders about medication and treatment. As it stands today (2 years later), my aorta has started to go back down to normal size due to the advances in blood pressure medicine, and I am back to walking 3-5 miles, exercising, and excited every day to be alive to see my daughters. « Now share your story Share This


text:
In this study, Toh et al used data from the Mini-Sentinel program to assess the risk of angioedema associated with angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEIs), angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs), and the direct renin inhibitor aliskiren. Compared with the use of β-blockers, the angioedema risk was approximately 3-fold higher for ACEIs and aliskiren and was 16% higher for ARBs.
See Article
In a preliminary investigation, zonisamide, an antiepileptic drug, administered at up to 600 mg/d, led to 6% weight loss (vs 1% for placebo) over 16 weeks in obese adults. This randomized controlled trial examined the weight loss efficacy of 2 doses of zonisamide (200 mg and 400 mg) vs placebo in 225 obese adults over 1 year. Change in body weight was −4.0 kg (95% CI, −5.8 kg to −2.3 kg) for placebo; −4.4 kg (95% CI, −6.1 to −2.6) for zonisamide, 200 mg; and −7.3 kg (95% CI, −9.0 to −5.6) for zonisamide, 400 mg. A weight loss of 10% or greater was achieved in 8% of patients assigned to placebo; 22% of patients assigned to zonisamide, 200 mg; and 32% of patients assigned to zonisamide, 400 mg. Gastrointestinal, nervous system, and psychiatric adverse events occurred at a higher incidence with zonisamide than with placebo. The authors conclude that zonisamide, 400 mg, moderately enhanced weight loss achieved with diet and lifestyle counseling but had a high incidence of adverse events.
In a meta-analysis of 7 randomized controlled trials, Komócsi et al evaluated the safety and efficacy of new-generation oral anticoagulants compared with placebo in 31 286 patients receiving antiplatelet therapy after an acute coronary syndrome. The use of oral activated factor X antagonists or direct thrombin inhibitors was associated with a 3-fold increase in bleeding events (odds ratio, 3.03; 95% CI, 2.20-4.16; P < .001). Significant but moderate reductions in the risk for stent thrombosis or composite ischemic events were observed, without a significant effect on overall mortality. Regarding net clinical benefit, oral anticoagulant treatment provided no advantage over placebo (odds ratio, 0.98; 95% CI, 0.90-1.06; P = .57).
Tobias et al evaluated the association between adherence to 3 healthful dietary patterns and risk of progression to type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) among 4413 female participants in the Nurses' Health Study with a history of gestational diabetes mellitus. Food frequency questionnaires measured usual diet, from which authors assessed adherence to the Alternate Mediterranean Diet (aMED), Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH), and Alternate Healthy Eating Index (aHEI) dietary patterns. After 16 years of follow-up, women with greater adherence to these dietary patterns were significantly less likely to develop T2DM. For a 1–standard deviation increase in score, the aMED, DASH, and aHEI patterns were associated with 23%, 18%, and 30% lower risk of T2DM, respectively.
Aragon et al examined patterns of Medicare skilled nursing facility (SNF) benefit use in the last 6 months of life among 5163 decedents from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). They found that 30.5% of HRS decedents used the SNF benefit in the last 6 months of life and 9.2% had died while enrolled in the SNF benefit. The use of the SNF benefit was greater among patients who were 85 years or older, had at least a high school education, did not have cancer, resided in a nursing home, used home health services, and were expected to die soon. These findings suggest that palliative care should be a focus in SNFs alongside the goal of functional improvement.
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