Louis Sheehan's Notes: Dakotadad x-97

nts -- the police estimate is about 90 -- were in the library on the day after Thanksgiving. Normally, there would have been hundreds. "There wasn't any kind of real security in the building because it wasn't considered to be necessary," said Wayne Baumgardner, a librarian. "Once [the Aardsma slaying] happened, the university put in major security regulations and things and really tightened up." Aardsma was on level 2 of what is known as the core area, and after checking in the card catalog walked to rows 50 and 51 to retrieve a book she needed for her research project. The time was between 4:30 and 4:45 p.m. One of the last people to see her alive was Dean Brungart, an assistant stacks supervisor at Pattee. He told the Daily Collegian in 1987 that it was close to quitting time when he went to level 2 to get a book. Brungart saw two men chatting near the west end of the core and then passed Aardsma, who was between rows 50 and 51. The space between the rows is narrow, not large enough for two people to pass unless one turns sideways. At the time, the shelving units extended to the wall, making it impossible to escape if cornered. Aardsma's killer approached, carrying a hunting-style knife with a one-edged blade 31/2 to 4 inches long, according to the autopsy report. There was no scream, no apparent effort to ward off the blade. Aardsma's hands had no wounds. The killer plunged the blade through her breastbone -- which doctors said requires real strength and force -- and deep into her chest, severing the pulmonary artery and hitting the heart. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com "The findings also suggest that the wound was inflicted with considerable force at the time of a face-to-face confrontation of the victim and the assailant, and that this weapon was held in the right hand of the assailant," Centre County pathologist Dr. Thomas Magnani wrote in his autopsy report. It was a perfect killing blow, investigators later said. Most state troopers involved in the investigation, however, believe the killer grabbed her from behind before plunging the knife into her chest. It remains unresolved. The severe internal wound bled almost completely into her lungs. Aardsma's red dress camouflaged the tiny amount of blood that leaked to the outside. There was no "pool of blood" as later reported in news accounts. She was not sexually assaulted. The killer pulled out the knife and walked away. Aardsma slumped to the floor of the library, pulling books down on herself as she fell. Magnani estimated she died in about five minutes. A level above, Brungart heard the sound of falling books through a floor vent, he told the Daily Collegian, but he did not go to investigate. Perhaps nine people were within 70 feet of Aardsma when she was stabbed, but none, because of the intervening shelves of books, saw anything. Skucek said some of them reported hearing a noise, more a gasp than a scream. Mary Erdley, a student who knew Aardsma, rose from her desk and walked around the corner. She encountered two men, one of whom said, "Somebody better help that girl." They led her back toward rows 50 and 51 and then vanished. Erdley had no clue what had happened to Aardsma. She stayed by her side, and over the next 15 to 20 minutes tried to get passing students to help her before anyone would stop, the Centre Daily Times of State College reported Dec. 1, 1969. A library employee phoned Ritenhour Student Health Center, which was a few hundred yards from Pattee Library. An ambulance arrived after 5 p.m. By this time, as many as seven people were at the scene, milling about and touching things, according to Bernier, the current investigator. Another librarian was giving Aardsma mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. They still didn't know she had been stabbed. The ambulance attendants assumed Aardsma was still alive and had suffered an epileptic seizure. They took her to Ritenhour, where she was pronounced dead at 5:50 p.m. 'In a daze': Wegner recalled that the news came as the Aardsmas were finishing supper at their home in Holland that Friday evening. The Rev. Gordon Van Oostenburg, their pastor at Trinity Reformed Church, came to the front door. He walked in, "with this awful look on his face," Wegner said. "And he told us Betsy was dead." http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com Ron Cotts, Betsy Aardsma's first cousin, remembered his parents, Louis and Ruth Cotts, receiving a "horrible phone call" about her killing at their home in Michigan City, Ind. The younger Cotts was a Delta Airlines pilot who owned a small plane and was visiting for the holiday. On Saturday morning, he flew his parents to Holland, picked up Richard and Esther Aardsma, and flew them all to Chicago, a flight of about 200 miles, to catch a plane to State College to bring Betsy's body home. http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com "Esther and Dick were absolutely silent from Holland, Mich., all the way to Chicago O'Hare," he said. "Almost didn't say a word." Phyllis Wich Vandenberg, who was living in Washington, D.C., heard the news from her father on Friday night. While working as a waitress Sunday morning in a restaurant in the DuPont Plaza Hotel, she was horrified to see her first customer of the day looking at a story, "Coed is Murdered In College Library," about her friend's killing on Page 3 of the New York Daily News. "He was reading it, and on that page ... is a full, huge picture of Betsy!" she said. "I was just stunned. I don't know what would have happened if my dad hadn't called me." Verne Kupelian, Aardsma's former teacher at Holland High, was living in Columbus, Ohio, and heard the news on Paul Harvey, then a ubiquitous presence on American radio. "And it shook me," Kupelian recalled. "I called up to Holland to one of the kids, and they confirmed it. I still don't understand it." The violence of 1969 was underscored two days later by the arrest of the Manson family in California in the Tate-LaBianca murders, which knocked Betsy Aardsma's murder from the headlines in some newspapers. Her funeral was held Dec. 3, at Trinity Reformed Church in Holland. David Wright said he thought about not attending the funeral because it was so close to finals, but his family convinced him that he had to go. He sent a dozen roses to the funeral, one of which was placed in Betsy's hands in the coffin. "But that's pretty much the only thing I remember," he said. "I was sort of in a daze." And he was upset that the state police seemed to think he might be the killer. Louis J. Sheehan 5178819 2008-12-08 03:15:25 2008-12-08 03:15:25 open open betsy-aardsma-7-bet-999299-louis-j-sheehan-5178819 publish 0 0 post 0 murder 18483716 David DeKok http://wordpress.com/ 127.0.0.1 2012-10-30 17:45:52 2012-10-30 17:45:52 This is plagiarized--stolen--from two articles I wrote for The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, PA, on Dec. 7 &8, 2008. Nearly word for word. I'm shocked that Esquire would tolerate this. --David DeKok 1 0 0 Prohibition 8.pro.12705 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/12/07/prohibition-8-pro-12705-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5174424/ Sun, 07 Dec 2008 04:45:57 +0100 Beforethebigbang Today is the 75th anniversary of that blessed day in 1933 when Utah became the 36th and deciding state to ratify the 21st amendment, thereby repealing the 18th amendment. This ended the nation's disastrous experiment with alcohol prohibition. http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com It's already shaping up as a day of celebration, with parties planned, bars prepping for recession-defying rounds of drinks, and newspapers set to publish cocktail recipes concocted especially for the day. But let's hope it also serves as a day of reflection. We should consider why our forebears rejoiced at the relegalization of a powerful drug long associated with bountiful pleasure and pain, and consider too the lessons for our time. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com The Americans who voted in 1933 to repeal prohibition differed greatly in their reasons for overturning the system. But almost all agreed that the evils of failed suppression far outweighed the evils of alcohol consumption. The change from just 15 years earlier, when most Americans saw alcohol as the root of the problem and voted to ban it, was dramatic. Prohibition's failure to create an Alcohol Free Society sank in quickly. Booze flowed as readily as before, but now it was illicit, filling criminal coffers at taxpayer expense. http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com Some opponents of prohibition pointed to Al Capone and increasing crime, violence and corruption. Others were troubled by the labeling of tens of millions of Americans as criminals, overflowing prisons, and the consequent broadening of disrespect for the law. Americans were disquieted by dangerous expansions of federal police powers, encroachments on individual liberties, increasing government expenditure devoted to enforcing the prohibition laws, and the billions in forgone tax revenues. And still others were disturbed by the specter of so many citizens blinded, paralyzed and killed by poisonous moonshine and industrial alcohol. Supporters of prohibition blamed the consumers, and some went so far as to argue that those who violated the laws deserved whatever ills befell them. But by 1933, most Americans blamed prohibition itself.http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com When repeal came, it was not just with the support of those with a taste for alcohol, but also those who disliked and even hated it but could no longer ignore the dreadful consequences of a failed prohibition. They saw what most Americans still fail to see today: That a failed drug prohibition can cause greater harm than the drug it was intended to banish. Consider the consequences of drug prohibition today: 500,000 people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails for nonviolent drug-law violations; 1.8 million drug arrests last year; tens of billions of taxpayer dollars expended annually to fund a drug war that 76% of Americans say has failed; millions now marked for life as former drug felons; many thousands dying each year from drug overdoses that have more to do with prohibitionist policies than the drugs themselves, and tens of thousands more needlessly infected with AIDS and Hepatitis C because those same policies undermine and block responsible public-health policies. And look abroad. At Afghanistan, where a third or more of the national economy is both beneficiary and victim of the failed global drug prohibition regime. At Mexico, which makes Chicago under Al Capone look like a day in the park. And elsewhere in Latin America, where prohibition-related crime, violence and corruption undermine civil authority and public safety, and mindless drug eradication campaigns wreak environmental havoc. All this, and much more, are the consequences not of drugs per se but of prohibitionist policies that have failed for too long and that can never succeed in an open society, given the lessons of history. Perhaps a totalitarian American could do better, but at what cost to our most fundamental values? Why did our forebears wise up so quickly while Americans today still struggle with sorting out the consequences of drug misuse from those of drug prohibition? It's not because alcohol is any less dangerous than the drugs that are banned today. Marijuana, by comparison, is relatively harmless: little association with violent behavior, no chance of dying from an overdose, and not nearly as dangerous as alcohol if one misuses it or becomes addicted. Most of heroin's dangers are more a consequence of its prohibition than the drug's distinctive properties. That's why 70% of Swiss voters approved a referendum this past weekend endorsing the government's provision of pharmaceutical heroin to addicts who could not quit their addictions by other means. It is also why a growing number of other countries, including Canada, are doing likewise. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com Yes, the speedy drugs -- cocaine, methamphetamine and other illicit stimulants -- present more of a problem. But not to the extent that their prohibition is justifiable while alcohol's is not. The real difference is that alcohol is the devil we know, while these others are the devils we don't. Most Americans in 1933 could recall a time before prohibition, which tempered their fears. But few Americans now can recall the decades when the illicit drugs of today were sold and consumed legally. If they could, a post-prohibition future might prove less alarming. But there's nothing like a depression, or maybe even a full-blown recession, to make taxpayers question the price of their prejudices. That's what ultimately hastened prohibition's repeal, and it's why we're sure to see a more vigorous debate than ever before about ending marijuana prohibition, rolling back other drug war excesses, and even contemplating far-reaching alternatives to drug prohibition. Perhaps the greatest reassurance for those who quake at the prospect of repealing contemporary drug prohibitions can be found in the era of prohibition outside of America. Other nations, including Britain, Australia and the Netherlands, were equally concerned with the problems of drink and eager for solutions. However, most opted against prohibition and for strict controls that kept alcohol legal but restricted its availability, taxed it heavily, and otherwise discouraged its use. The results included ample revenues for government coffers, criminals frustrated by the lack of easy profits, and declines in the consumption and misuse of alcohol that compared favorably with trends in the United States. Is President-elect Barack Obama going to commemorate Repeal Day today? I'm not holding my breath. Nor do I expect him to do much to reform the nation's drug laws apart from making good on a few of the commitments he made during the campaign: repealing the harshest drug sentences, removing federal bans on funding needle-exchange programs to reduce AIDS, giving medical marijuana a fair chance to prove itself, and supporting treatment alternatives for low-level drug offenders. But there's one more thing he can do: Promote vigorous and informed debate in this domain as in all others. The worst prohibition, after all, is a prohibition on thinking. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 5174424 2008-12-07 04:45:57 2008-12-07 04:45:57 open open prohibition-8-pro-12705-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5174424 publish 0 0 post 0 drugs eyelids 7.eye.0283 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/12/06/eyelids-7-eye-0283-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5170300/ Sat, 06 Dec 2008 02:09:25 +0100 Beforethebigbang Generally speaking, heaviness of the muscles around the eyes, including the levator muscles that open the upper eyelids, is similar to fatigue of any muscle of the body. Ocular and brow muscles are especially prone to fatigue because they are active for most of our waking hours. Over the course of the day, they gradually grow leaden with extended use, as our arms and legs do.http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com Such a feeling may be compounded by general fatigue, including a lack of sleep, or by specific muscle overuse related to long hours of focusing on, say, a computer monitor. Excess skin of the eyelid, or prolapsed fat pads underneath the eyes, makes an individual more prone to this sensation. Chronic allergies and sinus infections may also exacerbate the heaviness, and sun exposure may cause eyelid swelling and thereby increase the probability that the drooping will interfere with vision. http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com Although heavy eyelids do not typically indicate underlying medical issues, some conditions do cause drooping eyelids, or ptosis. A stroke or a muscular disorder such as myasthenia gravis or myotonic dystrophy can damage facial muscles or their nerves and cause ptosis, as can elective facial surgery or interventions such as Botox injections to the brow. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 5170300 2008-12-06 02:09:25 2008-12-06 02:09:25 open open eyelids-7-eye-0283-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5170300 publish 0 0 post 0 eyelids depression and heart problems 5.dep.388 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/11/29/depression-and-heart-problems-5-dep-388-louis-j-sheehan-5130021/ Sat, 29 Nov 2008 03:37:06 +0100 Beforethebigbang The long-standing connection between depression and heart problems might be traceable to the fact that depressed people are less physically active than others, a new study of heart patients shows. A greater tendency in depressed people to smoke and to fail to take medications regularly may also play a role, researchers report in the Nov. 26 Journal of the American Medical Association. Previous studies have suggested that depression seems to increase the risk of heart problems in people with no history of them, and that depression often coincides with worsening health in people who have an existing heart condition. Yet the medical reason for this association is unknown, and it’s not even clear whether depression leads to heart problems or vice versa. Scientists have investigated possible side effects from antidepressant drugs, chemical imbalances in the brain, stress, diet, chronic inflammation, smoking and a lack of exercise as reasons for the link between depression and heart problems. To sort out these possibilities, researchers began a study in 2000, identifying people visiting clinics in the San Francisco Bay area who had chronic but stable coronary heart disease. Of the 1,017 patients enrolled, tests showed that one-fifth, average age 63, had symptoms of depression at the start of the study. The other four-fifths were age 68 on average and weren’t depressed. Researchers monitored the health of all the volunteers using lab tests, checkups, interviews, death records. Follow-up averaged five years, and researchers logged the final data entries in early 2008. During the study, the scientists periodically asked volunteers whether they had had any episodes of “heart trouble” or stroke that had necessitated a visit to a hospital. In cases where a volunteer had died or couldn’t respond, relatives or other caregivers provided information. By the end of the study, 341 incidents were reported. These included cases of heart failure, heart attacks, strokes or deaths. After accounting for past medical histories and other differences between the depressed and nondepressed groups, the researchers calculated that people with depression had a 31 percent increased risk of having at least one such incident during the study, says study coauthor Mary Whooley, an internist at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco. The depressed people were also slightly more likely to have high levels of inflammatory proteins in the blood, which may have explained some of these participants’ added coronary risk. Inflammatory cells and proteins contribute to plaque formation and vessel damage. But the clearest differences between groups were behavioral, Whooley says. When researchers accounted for differences between the groups in smoking habits, exercise habits and discipline in taking medications, the heart risk apparently imparted by depression evaporated. Meanwhile, the depressed people were nearly twice as likely to smoke and were more likely than the nondepressed group to fail to take medications on schedule. The depressed group also exercised less. “This particular finding is important,” says cardiovascular epidemiologist Viola Vaccarino of Emory University in Atlanta. “In this particular group, behavioral risk factors, especially low physical activity, seem to explain away the depression risk.” But she cautions that this explanation might not hold for other groups. For example, it’s unclear whether these findings apply to people who are outwardly healthy with no signs or history of heart trouble, but may nonetheless be at risk of heart disease. On the other end of the spectrum, these findings also might not apply to people with acute coronary ailments, such as recurring chest pain. “It doesn’t really make any sense to ask them to up their physical activity,” Vaccarino says. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG Meanwhile, Whooley and her coauthors note that it’s also difficult to determine whether a relative lack of physical inactivity is the cause or the result of depression, since the effect probably goes both ways. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG Whooley and Vaccarino agree that it can be very difficult to change the behavior of depressed patients, who often aren’t very motivated, even while on medication. “They’ll [exercise] for a few months, then stop,” Whooley says. She hopes these new findings make doctors more aware of the risks that depressed patients with heart disease run in maintaining a sedentary lifestyle and other detrimental behaviors. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 5130021 2008-11-29 03:37:06 2008-11-29 03:37:06 open open depression-and-heart-problems-5-dep-388-louis-j-sheehan-5130021 publish 0 0 post 0 depression and heart problems 1931 http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/11/25/1931-5101985/ Tue, 25 Nov 2008 04:07:27 +0100 Beforethebigbang Even after Friday’s large stock market rally, only 10 of the stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500, the premier American stock index, are higher than they were at the end of 2007, and the index itself is down almost as far as it was in the worst year it ever experienced, at the height of the Great Depression. Although the accompanying charts focus on the United States, similar things can be said in most markets. Only a handful of European stocks are up this year, and within the once buoyant Chinese and Indian stock markets, there are almost no stocks showing gains. There has, in other words, been nowhere to hide from the collapse of 2008. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG The ubiquity of the problems reflects how integrated the international financial system has become, as well as the fact that most of the world is now in recession or getting close to it. Moreover, many asset prices were pumped up in years past by excessive debt, and are now falling as many investors choose to, or are forced to, reduce their borrowing. Standard & Poor’s has been keeping statistics on the breadth of the 500 stocks in the index only since 1980. Until now, 2001 was the worst year on record in that regard, when just 131 of them rose. But unless there is a substantial year-end rally, that figure could be 10 times the one for 2008. One measure of the depth of the market malaise is that there are as many stocks in the S.& P. 500 that have declined by 90 percent this year — 10 — as there are stocks that have risen at all. Several of the winners, among them Rohm & Haas, the chemical company, and UST, the maker of snuff tobacco, are up only because they agreed to all-cash takeovers early in the year. Their acquirers are down sharply. So far this month, the figures are little better. Just 24 of the stocks in the index are up. S.& P. has been keeping track of the monthly figures only since 1999. Until this year, the lowest number rising in a month was 56 in September 2002 — just before the last bear market ended. That number was challenged in September of this year, when 65 rose, and shattered last month, when just 28 of the 500 stocks showed gains. The S.& P. 500 has lost more than a third of its value in a calendar year only twice before, both during the Great Depression. It fell 41.9 percent in 1931, and 38.6 percent in 1937. The worst post-Depression year, until now, was 1974, when the index fell 29.7 percent amid the worst postwar recession the country has yet seen.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG But this year, the index is down 45.5 percent. Amazingly enough, it has done better than leading indexes in many other countries, at least when currency changes are filtered out. Measured in dollars, the leading indexes in Britain, France, Germany, Canada, China, India, Australia, Brazil and Mexico have all lost more than half their value. Japan’s leading index is down almost 50 percent in yen, but just 40 percent in dollars because of the rise of the yen this year. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 5101985 2008-11-25 04:07:27 2008-11-25 04:07:27 open open 1931-5101985 publish 0 0 post 0 future traffic control Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/11/23/traffic-control-louis-j-sheehan-5089250/ Sun, 23 Nov 2008 01:56:01 +0100 Beforethebigbang Traffic-control measures can significantly reduce urban air pollution, a field study done in Beijing this summer indicates. http://louis1j1sheehan.us Beijing, a city of 15 million people and 3 million cars, has notoriously bad air, and it's getting worse, says Tong Zhu, an atmospheric chemist at Peking University in Beijing. To assess how traffic-control measures might help curb pollution during this summer's Olympics, researchers reduced the number of vehicles on the city's roads from Aug. 17 through Aug. 20, a 4-day period that included two work days and one weekend. Pollution was measured by sensors on satellites, low-flying aircraft, and balloons, and at ground stations around the city. http://louis1j1sheehan.us During the test, half of the region's non-commercial, nongovernment vehicles—around 1.3 million—were kept off the roads from 6 a.m. to midnight each day. In general, reductions in pollution were larger on weekdays than on the weekend. Overall, daily reductions in nitrogen oxides in city air during the experiment ranged from 17 to 50 percent, and decreases in the concentrations of volatile organic chemicals, major contributors to the formation of ground-level ozone, ranged from 20 to 33 percent. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide consistently measured about 22 percent lower than they do on normal traffic days, Zhu adds. Such reductions won't meet the goals for air quality set by the government for the upcoming Olympics, Zhu and his colleagues note. Additional traffic control, as well as restrictions on construction, industries, and power plants in the region, will be necessary to reduce pollution the requisite amount. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 5089250 2008-11-23 01:56:01 2008-11-23 01:56:01 open open traffic-control-louis-j-sheehan-5089250 publish 0 0 post 0 traffic 15862492 SergGoreliys http://wordpress.com/ 127.0.0.1 2011-06-09 23:13:00 2011-06-09 23:13:00 ÇÀÊÐÛÂÀÅÒÑß ÞÂÅËÈÐÍÛÉ ÁÓÒÈÊ MONROE GEMS CH !!! Ñòàðòóåò ïîñëåäíÿÿ ëèêâèäàöèÿ èçäåëèé ñ áðèëëèàíòàìè è äðàãîöåííûìè êàìíÿìè ïî íèçêèì öåíàì . ÈÌÅÍÍÎ ÄËß ÂÀÑ ÄÎÏÎËÍÈÒÅËÜÍÛÅ ÑÊÈÄÊÈ !!! Äîñòàâêà â ëþáîé ðåãèîí . 1 0 0 15905261 smuscurse http://wordpress.com/ 127.0.0.1 2011-06-16 16:47:16 2011-06-16 16:47:16 Здравствуйте! Если Вы хотите провести свой отпуск не покидая пределы России, то Вам обязательно потребуется рассмотреть как вариант Активный отдых. Огромный выбор туров по РФ можно посмотреть на сайте Larussia он посвящен отдыху в России, подбору билетов и отелей. Отдых в Росии http://www.larussia.ru/russia/aktinye-tury/ <a href="http://www.larussia.ru/russia/aktinye-tury/" target="_blank">Активные туры по России</a> 1 0 0 bigfoot 99.big.1112 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/11/23/bigfoot-99-big-1112-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5089241/ Sun, 23 Nov 2008 01:40:58 +0100 Beforethebigbang The first accounting of who's stomping on whom finds rich nations leaving supersized boot prints of ecological damage on poor countries, adding up to more than those nations' debt to the wealthier countries. Rich nations' doings during the last 4 decades of the 20th century caused up to $2.5 trillion in environmental impacts on poor countries, Thara Srinivasan of the Pacific Ecoinformatics and Computational Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and her colleagues estimate. Middle-income nations did about the same amount of damage to the low-income countries. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.BIZ Each wallop is bigger than the total that poor countries have borrowed from wealthier nations. In 2000, that borrowing added up to $1.8 trillion. (All amounts are in 2005 international dollars, which are adjusted for purchasing power around the world.) "This makes me wonder who owes who here," says Jonathan Foley, who directs the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Environmental economists have experimented with ways to measure footprints of various activities since the 1990s, but Srinivasan says she doesn't know of another attempt at a broad global accounting. The team used the World Bank's groupings of countries. Poor nations, with annual per capita income of $875 or less, included Bangladesh, India, and Nigeria, among others. Brazil, China, and the Russian Federation fall into the middling group. Income of $10,726 or more put such countries as Japan, the United States, and European nations into the rich group.LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.COM The researchers scoured the environmental literature for data on impacts. Workable information, from such sources as the United Nations and the United Kingdom's Stern Review, turned up for six topics: climate change, ozone depletion, expanding agriculture, deforestation, overfishing, and the loss of mangrove swamps. Ecological damage included such miseries as the costs of health problems due to thinning ozone and storm damage along coasts no longer buffered by mangrove swamps. For ozone depletion and climate change, the researchers included impacts still to come (until 2100) of the activities in their 40-year study period. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO Srinivasan laments the gaps in information that kept the analysis from toting up the ecological toll of other problems, such as pollution, invasive species, waterway modification, and war. The team also looked at studies on which nations were driving particular environmental changes. For climate change, for example, the analysts calculated the proportion of greenhouse gases emitted by each of the nation groups. Seafood consumption measured the responsibility for overfishing. The well-off disproportionately affected the poor for climate change, ozone depletion, and, less predictably, overfishing. "We were surprised," says Srinivasan. The results appear this week online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET "The injustice inherent in the current environmental crisis may well exacerbate the divide between rich and poor," says Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 5089241 2008-11-23 01:40:58 2008-11-23 01:40:58 open open bigfoot-99-big-1112-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-5089241 publish 0 0 post 0 environment eyes 992.eye.20 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/11/21/eyes-992-eye-20-louis-j-sheehan-5077352/ Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:54:47 +0100 Beforethebigbang I attend college at a fairly large Northeastern university. Walking alone around campus, I’m puzzled over whether — and how — to acknowledge people. Do I divert my eyes whenever someone is walking by me? Do I stare them down? Or can I just smile without being creepy and flirtatious? It’s difficult because we’re all so young, but it’s definitely not like home. I have a feeling that if I were to say “Good morning” to a few of these groggy passers-by, I might get an obscenity or coffee thrown my way. LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.COM Audrey Soukup, New Brunswick, N.J. Take it from someone who spent the vast majority of his bright college years wearing black from head to toe, trying to appear massively cooler than he was — your cheery greetings will definitely be met with haughty smirks, if not the aforementioned obscenities and coffee cups. But I still think you should take the high road, Audrey. The too-cool-for-school act is clichéd and a silly waste of time. Rise above it. There’s no reason to divert your eyes in passing. It’s not as if you’re on a photo shoot with Mariah Carey. And there’s no need to stare people down, either. But when you pass a classmate on the path and your eyes happen to meet, give a smile and a nod; the response be damned. In the end, behaving politely every time will be much easier on you. You’ll spend less time worrying about silly things like greetings, and get down to the serious work of alcohol poisoning and lying to your parents about spring break. It also happens to be great training for the real world, where people tend not to ignore their colleagues or chain smoke clove cigarettes — not unless they work at Condé Nast, that is. Louis J. Sheehan Swag for Singles I’ve decided that marriage is not for me. But at 32, I’m missing the domestic “set up” that my friends received from their bridal showers. I love to cook and bake, and have so far made do with cheap appliances and tools. I will soon be moving from an apartment to a house, and I would like to leverage this change into a housewarming that I can register for. After being in eight weddings, I feel it’s time my friends and family set me up for domesticity — even if it isn’t in the traditional mode. But the Midwestern Puritan in me thinks this may be tacky and greedy. What’s a girl to do? Sarah, Cleveland Well, in this case, Sarah, you should thank your lucky stars for the Midwest Puritan in you — since it saved you from making a tacky, greedy fool of yourself! We’ve all felt ill-used by friends, especially if we make the mistake of totaling up the dollar value of our unreciprocated gifts. But you’re forgetting all the other benefits of friendship: sitting through lousy movies our friends want to see, for instance, and waiting for them at busy restaurants for seeming eternities. But the difference between their weddings and baby showers and your housewarming scheme is that their sole intent was not to rack up gifts. Don’t get me wrong: a housewarming is a great idea, and you may nab some nice loot. No gift registry, though. The party should be for celebrating your new place with friends, not for telling them how to outfit your kitchen.LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.COM In the meantime, start saving up! Not to go all Suze Orman on you, but it won’t take many weeks of putting money aside before you can afford a KitchenAid mixer of your very own. And if you don’t like this approach, scrap the housewarming and go for the gusto: tell your friends you’re knocked up and engaged to a rocker who’s conveniently on tour. With a baby and wedding shower combined, you’ll double your take-home! Write, Send, Panic A person sends an e-mail message containing sensitive financial information, without copying anyone on it. The recipient broadcasts his response to three other people. What do you do? Jane It all depends: Are you the poor soul whose tax returns were trumpeted to the four corners of the earth, or the bonehead who did it? The great attribute of e-mail, of course, is that we’re able to convey quantities of information to multitudes with ease — which happens to be its great drawback, as well. Perhaps if it weren’t quite so easy to punch “send,” we might take a moment to think about what we’re doing. But it is that easy, and so we don’t. Let the cyberblabbermouth know that your privacy was breached and ask for more caution in the future. And the next time you’re sending sensitive information by e-mail, type an extra line or two in the body of your message. “This hotel bill includes receipts for several adult movies that I ordered by mistake — several times. Please do not forward.” 5077352 2008-11-21 21:54:47 2008-11-21 21:54:47 open open eyes-992-eye-20-louis-j-sheehan-5077352 publish 0 0 post 0 social tesosterone 44.tes.0002 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/11/19/tesosterone-44-tes-0002-louis-j-sheehan-5060983/ Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:43:33 +0100 Beforethebigbang A small but significant portion of men taking large doses of testosterone experience mania, although moderate doses of the male sex hormone show promise in boosting the mood and sex drive of HIV-infected men.http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com/ A pair of new studies offers a glimpse of the contrasting faces of the male sex hormone testosterone, at least from a psychiatric perspective. Testosterone has developed a negative image from reports of bodybuilders and athletes who become agitated and violent after injecting themselves with huge doses of the hormone or its synthetic relatives. The largest placebo-controlled study of testosterone use to date, published in the February Archives of General Psychiatry, confirms that a small but significant portion of men taking large doses of the hormone experiences symptoms of mania. It remains unclear why these reactions plague some testosterone users but not others, asserts a research team headed by psychiatrist Harrison G. Pope Jr. of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. Testosterone's sunnier countenance emerges in its ability, when given in moderate doses, to boost mood, energy, and sex drive in otherwise healthy men who produce unusually low levels of the hormone. Preliminary findings, also reported in the February Archives of General Psychiatry, suggest that testosterone use offers a comparable lift to men infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Pope's group studied 56 healthy men, ages 20 to 50, who received six weekly testosterone injections in doses starting at 150 milligrams and rising to 600 mg. Participants also went through a separate trial of six weekly placebo injections. Neither volunteers nor experimenters knew when the sex hormone was being administered. Of the total sample, 26 men reported at least 2 years of regular weight lifting. Half of the weight lifters acknowledged prior steroid use. During each trial and for 6 weeks after it ended, the researchers had a spouse or close friend of each participant maintain a diary of his behavior. The participants provided regular reports on their own mood, as well. In a further test of aggressive urges, the men periodically played a computer game that randomly deprived them of points and offered opportunities to take points away from an unseen opponent after these provocations. Self-reported symptoms of mania, such as euphoria and an inability to sleep, rose moderately or sharply in 14 volunteers when they received the 600-milligram dose of testosterone. The rest cited minimal manic symptoms, even on the highest dose. However, the diaries and the computer game yielded no marked aggression differences between these two groups. Other studies indicate that many users of testosterone or equivalent substances opt for 1,000 mg or more per week. Manic reactions to testosterone injections probably occur more often and with greater intensity in real-world situations, the researchers say.http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com/ The challenge remains to identify the mechanisms of testosterone's action in the minority of individuals who respond to high doses with mood and aggression problems, remarks psychiatrist William R. Yates of the University of Oklahoma Sciences Center in Tulsa in a comment published with the new research. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com/ In the other study, psychologist Judith G. Rabkin of Columbia University and her coworkers find that the injection of moderate testosterone doses enhances sex drive and energy, boosts mood, and increases muscle mass in men with symptoms of HIV infection. The researchers randomly assigned 74 HIV-infected men to receive injections every other week of a placebo or 400 mg of testosterone. During the 6-week trial, symptoms abated dramatically in a large majority of the testosterone group but in only a minority of the placebo group. Beneficial effects of testosterone injections also appeared in a subsequent 12-week trial, in which participants were allowed to request testosterone treatments. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 5060983 2008-11-19 04:43:33 2008-11-19 04:43:33 open open tesosterone-44-tes-0002-louis-j-sheehan-5060983 publish 0 0 post 0 tesosterone 44.tes.0002 louis j. sheehan mormons 662.mor.81 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/11/15/mormons-662-mor-81-louis-j-sheehan-5039234/ Sat, 15 Nov 2008 12:03:55 +0100 Beforethebigbang Less than two weeks before Election Day, the chief strategist behind a ballot measure outlawing same-sex marriage in California called an emergency meeting here. “We’re going to lose this campaign if we don’t get more money,” the strategist, Frank Schubert, recalled telling leaders of Protect Marriage, the main group behind the ban. The campaign issued an urgent appeal, and in a matter of days, it raised more than $5 million, including a $1 million donation from Alan C. Ashton, the grandson of a former president of the Mormon Church. The money allowed the drive to intensify a sharp-elbowed advertising campaign, and support for the measure was catapulted ahead; it ultimately won with 52 percent of the vote. As proponents of same-sex marriage across the country planned protests on Saturday against the ban, interviews with the main forces behind the ballot measure showed how close its backers believe it came to defeat — and the extraordinary role Mormons played in helping to pass it with money, institutional support and dedicated volunteers. “We’ve spoken out on other issues, we’ve spoken out on abortion, we’ve spoken out on those other kinds of things,” said Michael R. Otterson, the managing director of public affairs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons are formally called, in Salt Lake City. “But we don’t get involved to the degree we did on this.” The California measure, Proposition 8, was to many Mormons a kind of firewall to be held at all costs. “California is a huge state, often seen as a bellwether — this was seen as a very, very important test,” Mr. Otterson said. First approached by the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Francisco a few weeks after the California Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in May, the Mormons were the last major religious group to join the campaign, and the final spice in an unusual stew that included Catholics, evangelical Christians, conservative black and Latino pastors, and myriad smaller ethnic groups with strong religious ties. Shortly after receiving the invitation from the San Francisco Archdiocese, the Mormon leadership in Salt Lake City issued a four-paragraph decree to be read to congregations, saying “the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan,” and urging members to become involved with the cause. “And they sure did,” Mr. Schubert said. Jeff Flint, another strategist with Protect Marriage, estimated that Mormons made up 80 percent to 90 percent of the early volunteers who walked door-to-door in election precincts. The canvass work could be exacting and highly detailed. Many Mormon wards in California, not unlike Roman Catholic parishes, were assigned two ZIP codes to cover. Volunteers in one ward, according to training documents written by a Protect Marriage volunteer, obtained by people opposed to Proposition 8 and shown to The New York Times, had tasks ranging from “walkers,” assigned to knock on doors; to “sellers,” who would work with undecided voters later on; and to “closers,” who would get people to the polls on Election Day. Suggested talking points were equally precise. If initial contact indicated a prospective voter believed God created marriage, the church volunteers were instructed to emphasize that Proposition 8 would restore the definition of marriage God intended. But if a voter indicated human beings created marriage, Script B would roll instead, emphasizing that Proposition 8 was about marriage, not about attacking gay people, and about restoring into law an earlier ban struck down by the State Supreme Court in May. “It is not our goal in this campaign to attack the homosexual lifestyle or to convince gays and lesbians that their behavior is wrong — the less we refer to homosexuality, the better,” one of the ward training documents said. “We are pro-marriage, not anti-gay.” Leaders were also acutely conscious of not crossing the line from being a church-based volunteer effort to an actual political organization. “No work will take place at the church, including no meeting there to hand out precinct walking assignments so as to not even give the appearance of politicking at the church,” one of the documents said. By mid-October, most independent polls showed support for the proposition was growing, but it was still trailing. Opponents had brought on new media consultants in the face of the slipping poll numbers, but they were still effectively raising money, including $3.9 million at a star-studded fund-raiser held at the Beverly Hills home of Ron Burkle, the supermarket billionaire and longtime Democratic fund-raiser. It was then that Mr. Schubert called his meeting in Sacramento. “I said, ‘As good as our stuff is, it can’t withstand that kind of funding,’ ” he recalled. The response was a desperate e-mail message sent to 92,000 people who had registered at the group’s Web site declaring a “code blue” — an urgent plea for money to save traditional marriage from “cardiac arrest.” Mr. Schubert also sent an e-mail message to the three top religious members of his executive committee, representing Catholics, evangelicals and Mormons. “I ask for your prayers that this e-mail will open the hearts and minds of the faithful to make a further sacrifice of their funds at this urgent moment so that God’s precious gift of marriage is preserved,” he wrote. On Oct. 28, Mr. Ashton, the grandson of the former Mormon president David O. McKay, donated $1 million. Mr. Ashton, who made his fortune as co-founder of the WordPerfect Corporation, said he was following his personal beliefs and the direction of the church. “I think it was just our realizing that we heard a number of stories about members of the church who had worked long hours and lobbied long and hard,” he said in a telephone interview from Orem, Utah. In the end, Protect Marriage estimates, as much as half of the nearly $40 million raised on behalf of the measure was contributed by Mormons. Even with the Mormons’ contributions and the strong support of other religious groups, Proposition 8 strategists said they had taken pains to distance themselves from what Mr. Flint called “more extreme elements” opposed to rights for gay men and lesbians. To that end, the group that put the issue on the ballot rebuffed efforts by some groups to include a ban on domestic partnership rights, which are granted in California. Mr. Schubert cautioned his side not to stage protests and risk alienating voters when same-sex marriages began being performed in June. “We could not have this as a battle between people of faith and the gays,” Mr. Schubert said. “That was a losing formula.” But the “Yes” side also initially faced apathy from middle-of-the-road California voters who were largely unconcerned about same-sex marriage. The overall sense of the voters in the beginning of the campaign, Mr. Schubert said, was “Who cares? I’m not gay.” To counter that, advertisements for the “Yes” campaign also used hypothetical consequences of same-sex marriage, painting the specter of churches’ losing tax exempt status or people “sued for personal beliefs” or objections to same-sex marriage, claims that were made with little explanation. Another of the advertisements used video of an elementary school field trip to a teacher’s same-sex wedding in San Francisco to reinforce the idea that same-sex marriage would be taught to young children. “We bet the campaign on education,” Mr. Schubert said. The “Yes” campaign was denounced by opponents as dishonest and divisive, but the passage of Proposition 8 has led to second-guessing about the “No” campaign, too, as well as talk about a possible ballot measure to repeal the ban. Several legal challenges have been filed, and the question of the legality of the same-sex marriages performed from June to Election Day could also be settled in court. For his part, Mr. Schubert said he is neither anti-gay — his sister is a lesbian — nor happy that some same-sex couples’ marriages are now in question. But, he said, he has no regrets about his campaign. “They had a lot going for them,” Mr. Schubert said of his opponents. “And they couldn’t get it done.” http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com/ Mr. Otterson said it was too early to tell what the long-term implications might be for the church, but in any case, he added, none of that factored into the decision by church leaders to order a march into battle. “They felt there was only one way we could stand on such a fundamental moral issue, and they took that stand,” he said. “It was a matter of standing up for what the church believes is right.” That said, the extent of the protests has taken many Mormons by surprise. On Friday, the church’s leadership took the unusual step of issuing a statement calling for “respect” and “civility” in the aftermath of the vote. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com/ “Attacks on churches and intimidation of people of faith have no place in civil discourse over controversial issues,” the statement said. “People of faith have a democratic right to express their views in the public square without fear of reprisal.” Mr. Ashton described the protests by same-sex marriage advocates as off-putting. “I think that shows colors,” Mr. Ashton said. “By their fruit, ye shall know them.” Louis J. Sheehan 5039234 2008-11-15 12:03:55 2008-11-15 12:03:55 open open mormons-662-mor-81-louis-j-sheehan-5039234 publish 0 0 post 0 mormons 15537704 love http://wordpress.com/ 127.0.0.1 2011-04-20 00:29:39 2011-04-20 00:29:39 Achievement is really a ladder that can't be climbed with your hands inside your pocket 1 0 0 Freon 773.fre.9 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/11/09/freon-773-fre-9-louis-j-sheehan-5010326/ Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:08:38 +0100 Beforethebigbang Quick: What’s the name of the big UN global climate treaty? If you said the Kyoto Protocol – you’d be wrong. Because it’s a trick question. Although the Kyoto Protocol is indeed the treaty developed to address the issue of arresting global warming and the climate perturbations that will be spawned by such a growing planetary fever, this treaty has yet to actually accomplish much in terms of putting a brake on warming. Indeed, it hasn’t even gotten the United States to sign on yet, and discussions among active parties to the treaty have been languishing. The only treaty to have had a big impact on climate is the 20 year old Montreal Protocol, a treaty to which the United States is a signatory. This fabulously successful treaty has fostered a dramatic reduction in the production and use of chemicals that pose a threat to stratospheric ozone. It targets a range of chemicals, mainly chlorofluorocarbons. The best known of these chemicals is Freon, which chills major appliances, from refrigerators to air conditioners. Most ozone-damaging agents have another nasty property. They serve as very potent greenhouse gases, chemicals that like carbon dioxide, contribute to helping trap solar energy at or near Earth’s surface. This means that chlorofluorocarbons are boffo global warmers. A side benefit of the Montreal Protocol, then, has been its effects on moderating the planet’s growing fever. Provisions of the Kyoto Protocol ask that signatory nations collectively reduce their releases of CO2 by some 5 billion tons, notes Durwood Zaelke. He’s director of the secretariat of the International Network for Environmental Compliance and Enforcement. http://www.theenvironmentsite.org/forum/members/louis-j-sheehan-esquire.html Actions taken under the Montreal Protocol, by contrast – which is adhered to by 191 nations – have cut emissions of ozone-destroying chemicals by amounts that have the greenhouse-warming equivalence of 135 billion tons of CO2, he observes. These measures have had that impact because some of the regulated ozone-damaging chemicals are literally thousands of times more effective at global warming than CO2 is. Zaelke cites published data from climate analysts indicating that the Montreal Protocol’s ozone-protection measures have delayed the repercussions of global warming by 12 years. http://www.theenvironmentsite.org/forum/members/louis-j-sheehan-esquire.html For all that the ozone-protection treaty has done for Earth’s climate, clearly it has not been nearly enough because our oceans and atmosphere continue to warm. But representatives of island nations, which are at special risk of being submerged by rising sea levels associated with global warming, have been big proponents of strengthening the Montreal Protocol. Zaelke, who has been working with them, reports they made huge headways last fall and offered a proposal last Thursday to do even more. Most of these new measures would affect appliances that serve as reservoirs of CFCs. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 5010326 2008-11-09 23:08:38 2008-11-09 23:08:38 open open freon-773-fre-9-louis-j-sheehan-5010326 publish 0 0 post 0 environment Leonardo 21.leo.445 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/11/01/leonardo-21-leo-445-louis-j-sheehan-4965642/ Sat, 01 Nov 2008 11:45:12 +0100 Beforethebigbang 1 Leonardo was the love child of Caterina, a peasant, and Ser Piero, a lawyer and landlord. He was homeschooled and lacked a formal education in Greek and Latin. 2 He was an accomplished lyre player. When he was first presented at the Milanese court, it was as a musician, not an artist or inventor. 3 Leonardo narrowly beat a sodomy rap—possibly involving one of his male models—brought against him by Florentine officials. 4 Mona Lisa theory #1: Her smile means she was secretly pregnant. 5 Theory #2: She was amused by the musicians and clowns who entertained her while Leonardo painted her. (Another theory says the Mona Lisa is a portrait of Leonardo himself, slyly disguised. But you'd heard that one before, hadn't you?) 6 Columbia University art historian James Beck retorts, "As sure as the moon is not made of green cheese, this is not da Vinci in drag." 7 Then again, unusual for a painter, Leonardo left no definitive image of himself. 8 Of course, that was before she saw the picture: Researchers at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Illinois used face-recognition software to determine that the Mona Lisa is 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful, and 2% angry. 9 Bill Gates bought the Codex Leicester in 1995 for $30 million. This manuscript, the only one not held in Europe, includes da Vinci's studies on hydraulics and the movement of water. 10 And Leonardo loved water: He developed plans for floating snowshoes, a breathing device for underwater exploration, a life preserver, and a diving bell that could attack ships from below. In case one had to. 11 Leonardo was the first to explain why the sky is blue. (It's because of the way air scatters light.) 12 And he figured out why the entire moon is dimly visible when it is a thin crescent. Its nightside is lit by light reflected from Earth, which appears 50 times brighter from the moon than the full moon appears here. 13 An ambidextrous, paranoid dyslexic, Leonardo could draw forward with one hand while writing backward with the other, producing a mirror-image script that others found difficult to read—which was exactly the point. 14 The Louvre recently spent $5.5 million rehanging the Mona Lisa inside a display case set into a wall, six feet behind a wooden barrier. 15 In August 2003, da Vinci's Madonna of the Yarnwinder, valued at $65 million, was stolen from Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland by two men posing as tourists. They escaped in a Volkswagen Golf. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com/ 16 Leonardo designed an armored car, a scythed chariot, a pile driver, a revolving crane, a pulley, a lagoon dredge, and a flying ship. 17 In December 2000, skydiver Adrian Nicholas landed in South Africa using a parachute built from one of Leonardo's designs. 18 I wonder what happens if . . . After dissecting cadavers, Leonardo replaced the muscles with strings to see how they worked. 19 Sometimes he could be such a dick: He was a big fan of puns and word games, and Folio 44 of his Codex Arundel contains a long list of playful synonyms for penis. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com/ 20 He crushed intelligent design before anyone even thought of it: His studies of river erosion convinced him that the Earth is much older than the Bible implies, and he argued that falling sea levels—not Noah's Flood—left marine fossils on mountains. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 4965642 2008-11-01 11:45:12 2008-11-01 11:45:12 open open leonardo-21-leo-445-louis-j-sheehan-4965642 publish 0 0 post 0 da vinci astrnauts 733.ast.3 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/11/01/astrnauts-733-ast-3-louis-j-sheehan-4965633/ Sat, 01 Nov 2008 11:42:56 +0100 Beforethebigbang 1 Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, died when he crashed his MIG-15 on a training mission. An outdated weather report failed to warn of low clouds. 2 Up to 200 people died when an R-16 rocket exploded at the Baikonur Space Center on October 24, 1960. It was kept secret until the Soviet Union collapsed. 3 On a lighter note, at least he wasn't blown up: Slated to follow Gagarin into space, G. G. Nelyubov got into a drunken fight with an army patrol, refused to apologize, and was demoted and airbrushed out of the official cosmonaut team photo. 4 Five years later he committed suicide. 5 In 1967 Vladimir M. Komarov became the first person to die on a space mission when parachutes on his Soyuz 1 capsule failed to open during descent. 6 The three crew members of Soyuz 11 suffocated on June 30, 1971, due to a faulty air valve. They are, so far, the only people to die in outer space. 7 The Soyuz program has not had a single fatal accident since then. NASA, however, has lost two of its original four-shuttle fleet, with 14 deaths. 8 Maybe NASA should wait until after Groundhog Day: The fire on Apollo 1 (January 27, 1967), the explosion of the shuttle Challenger (January 28, 1986), and the disintegration of Columbia (February 1, 2003) all occurred during the same calendar week. 9 Gus Grissom nearly drowned in 1961 when his Liberty Bell 7 capsule sank after splashdown in the Pacific. 10 Six years later, along with Ed White and Roger Chaffee, he died in the Apollo 1 launchpad fire. 11 The $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter crashed on the Red Planet because the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used metric units, while engineers at Lockheed Martin used feet and pounds. 12 In 1975 the U.S. half of the Apollo-Soyuz crew choked on toxic nitrogen tetroxide propellant during descent because pilot Vance Brand failed to deactivate the craft's thrusters. 13 Give or take a thousand: Prior to the Challenger disaster, NASA officials put the risk of a shuttle accident at 1 in 100,000. Physicist Richard Feynman found the odds were more like 1 in 100. 14 The Challenger accident was the 25th shuttle flight, Columbia the 114th. 15 All seven Columbia astronauts died, but hundreds of nematode worms, carried in canisters to study the biology of weightlessness, survived. 16 Pretty much like the suburbs: According to a persistent rumor, in 1996 an astronaut couple tested 10 sex positions in space and found that six were impossible without an elastic belt, an inflatable tunnel, or a third partner. 17 NASA denies the story, noting the flight in question had an all-male crew. 18 Meanwhile, Italian researchers found that testosterone levels temporarily drop in male astronauts in space, along with a decrease in sexual desire. 19 It would be the Italians. 20 Floating like a tin can: Tåhe International Space Station orbits amid 11,000 pieces of man-made space junk orbiting at 18,000 miles per hour. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 4965633 2008-11-01 11:42:56 2008-11-01 11:42:56 open open astrnauts-733-ast-3-louis-j-sheehan-4965633 publish 0 0 post 0 astronauts 16556204 vorschaubild http://wordpress.com/ 127.0.0.1 2011-10-02 06:47:39 2011-10-02 06:47:39 Shocking Mtv 2012 video awards Hello We dont agree with this year Mtv video awards 2012 decision. Please attend our little survey micropoll.com/trtzucxydgweas4567 Kiss can not be better than Goombay Dance Band Poll supported by Mtv 2012 awards sponsor Donkervoort <a href="http://garlinks.wordpress.com" target="_blank">brustverkleinerung</a> tortenfisch96 Mtv video awards 1 0 0 16673039 plastische chirurgie http://wordpress.com/ 127.0.0.1 2011-10-22 07:47:31 2011-10-22 07:47:31 2012+2013 Hi everyone We think that England should reward us fans with a better style of playing! Please look at our litte poll micropolll.com/t/WkimTTzuztt The poll is supported by Sponsor Lufthansa schönheitsblog <a href="http://www.gigahouse.eu/bruststraffung-fotos.html" target="_blank">Beste Schönheitsklinik Bruststraffung Fotos</a> tortenfisch98 By the way: Vuvuzelas shoud be forbidden football 2013 1 0 0 telescopes 663.tel.34 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/11/01/telescopes-663-tel-34-louis-j-sheehan-4965598/ Sat, 01 Nov 2008 11:34:23 +0100 Beforethebigbang 1. Conventional wisdom says that Dutchman Hans Lippershey invented the telescope in 1608, but legend has it that the device was really invented three years earlier by kids playing with lenses in a spectacle-maker’s shop. That kind of stuff used to happen in the days before the Xbox. 2. Early telescopes sold like mad to merchants, who used them to spot approaching trade ships in hopes of beating out competitors. 3. Telescopes gave rise to the first high-speed telecommunications networks: spyglasses that were used to relay semaphore signals from miles away. 4. Galileo was the first to turn the telescope skyward, leading to the discovery of Jupiter’s satellites and craters on the moon. Less cleverly, he also pointed his telescope at the sun, which may have triggered his later blindness. 5. Ireland’s “Leviathan of Parsonstown,” a 40-ton reflecting telescope built by the Earl of Rosse in 1845, was the world’s largest for seven decades. But wet weather kept it shut down most of the time. 6. Almost every major observatory since then has been built in the clear, thin air of a remote mountaintop. 7. To deliver the 100-inch mirror for the Hooker Telescope on Mount Wilson in California, nearly 200 men with ropes guided a truck along a tortuous, eight-hour drive to the top. 8. But it was worth it. The Hooker Telescope proved that other galaxies exist and that the universe is expanding. 9. Today, using an Internet-based telescope such as the Seeing in the Dark scope at New Mexico Skies, any amateur can command a robotic observatory while lounging at home. 10. Most professional astronomers now work that way too, operating telescopes remotely with computers and rarely looking through an eyepiece. 11. Long time coming: NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, seven years late and $2 billion over budget. 12. Hubble’s eight-foot light-collecting mirror had to be polished continuously for a year to an accuracy of 10 nanometers, about 1/10,000 the width of a human hair. 13. Unfortunately, the contractors polished the mirror precisely wrong, off by a painful 2,200 nanometers. 14. Since the problem was fixed in 1993 by installing corrective lenses, Hubble has become the source of roughly 25 percent of all published astronomy research papers. 15. Telescopes that pick up radio waves, not visible light, got their start in 1932 when engineer Karl Jansky noticed that the static plaguing his equipment varied on a daily schedule. His antenna was picking up celestial radio sources rotating in and out of view. 16. In 1965 engineers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were also bugged by microwave static, this time from every part of the sky. After eliminating poop from roosting pigeons as the cause, they realized they’d discovered the cosmic microwave background, the Big Bang’s afterglow. 17. See for yourself: Tune an old analog TV to an empty channel. Much of that “snow” is from the cosmic microwave background. 18. Gamma ray telescopes can detect light from the most violent explosions in the universe, probably caused by stars collapsing into black holes. If a gamma ray burst occurred within 6,000 light-years of us, we’d all be fried. 19. Weirdest telescope ever? In the 1960s physicist Raymond Davis Jr. used 100,000 gallons of dry-cleaning fluid to detect invisble neutrino particles as they stream from the sun. 20. Davis’s bizarre telescope worked, revealing fundamental new physics and netting him a Nobel in 2002. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 4965598 2008-11-01 11:34:23 2008-11-01 11:34:23 open open telescopes-663-tel-34-louis-j-sheehan-4965598 publish 0 0 post 0 telescopes nitrogen 234.nit.4 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/10/31/nitrogen-234-nit-4-louis-j-sheehan-4959493/ Fri, 31 Oct 2008 02:35:35 +0100 Beforethebigbang The Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager: In the early 1900s, the German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch staved off global starvation by turning nitrogen from the air into fertilizer for crops. Their explosive discovery fed millions, but it also kick-started the chemical weapons industry and helped fuel Hitler’s rise to power. This scientific adventure spans two world wars and every cell in your body: About half the nitrogen in every human being today originated in a Haber-Bosch factory. 4959493 2008-10-31 02:35:35 2008-10-31 02:35:35 open open nitrogen-234-nit-4-louis-j-sheehan-4959493 publish 0 0 post 0 water 945.wat.4321 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/10/25/water-945-wat-4321-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-4931968/ Sat, 25 Oct 2008 23:59:09 +0200 Beforethebigbang Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Public utilities spend a fortune each year cleaning water and supplying it to distribution lines that feed our faucets. Much of that water, however, is lost en route. Corrosion is rusting through water mains, opening holes that allow, on average, some 15 percent of the starting flow to disappear into the ground, notes Marc Edwards, an environmental engineer at Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg. The estimated cost of those losses: $3 billion annually. But financial waste is not the leaks’ only cost, Edwards observes. He described a host of water concerns to a handful of attendees from the Society of Environmental Journalists annual meeting who toured his lab last Saturday. One particularly nasty ancillary cost: germs that enter water mains through holes eaten out by rust. access THE MAIN PROBLEMThis segment of a small water main shows corrosion's ability to open dramatic holes in pipes.J. Raloff Edwards points out that water mains are often laid underground near sewer pipes, which also corrode and leak. Fecal germs can migrate from sewage leaks toward a water main. Admittedly, when water is squirting out under pressure from holes in those mains, bugs can’t enter. However, Edwards told me, mains occasionally experience significant drops in water pressure. When that happens, instead of water squirting out of the pipe, water will momentarily get sucked in from the anything-but-sterile environment outside it. When pressure in the main picks up again, it propels the now potentially tainted water toward our homes. Yuck. Think he’s exaggerating to grab a reporter’s attention? Uh, no. Modeling data indicate that 13 to 31 percent of pipe-intersection joints are at substantial risk for germ intrusion, such as when pressure drops occur during pumping transients, water-main breaks, or repairs. The source for these stats: a 2001 report by Gregory J. Kirmeyer of the Omaha, Neb.-based HDR Engineering and Mark W. LeChevallier of the utility American Water, in Voorhees, N.J. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com/ And it gets better. Kirmeyer and LeChevallier reported results of monitoring tests. These “confirmed that waterborne pathogens are very common in the environment external to water distribution mains.” Those germs were identified “in undisturbed soil and water samples immediately adjacent to distribution system pipelines,” they said. Okay, a germ here or there isn’t likely to make most of us sick. Our bodies have a tremendous capacity to fight infection. But homeowners can do things that can inadvertently — and quite dramatically — spur the growth of any incoming germs, Edwards says. Such as by turning down the temperature on a home’s hot water heater. http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping 4931968 2008-10-25 23:59:09 2008-10-25 23:59:09 open open water-945-wat-4321-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-4931968 publish 0 0 post 0 http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping To the Moon 45.ttm.453 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/10/25/to-the-moon-45-ttm-453-louis-j-sheehan-4927432/ Sat, 25 Oct 2008 03:41:37 +0200 Beforethebigbang Don’t bother bringing ice skates to the moon’s Shackleton crater. The crater sits at the moon’s south pole and never receives direct sunlight. Even though it is chilly enough to contain frozen water, it has no visible patches of ice, new images from a Japanese spacecraft reveal. Planetary scientists have hotly debated for years whether craters on Earth’s moon contain substantial reserves of frozen water. Although it could be difficult to dig out the ice, especially if it’s mixed with soil, the frozen material could provide hydrogen fuel or drinking water for lunar settlers. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/ Because the sun makes a shallow angle at the moon’s poles, the bottoms of polar craters there never directly see the light of day and are an ideal place to trap frozen water. In 1994, the Clementine spacecraft bounced radio waves off the moon and found tentative evidence for frozen water inside polar craters, although more recent radar studies from Earth found no signs of ice in the crater. In 1998, a NASA spacecraft called Lunar Prospector (SN: 3/14/98, p. 166) found a small excess of hydrogen nuclei at the lunar poles, a further indication that some polar craters, including the sunless Shackleton, contain ice. Prospector lacked a camera, but high-resolution images taken by Japan’s lunar-orbiting Kaguya craft, launched in 2007, show that Shackleton has no obvious deposits of pure water-ice, Junichi Haruyama of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in Sagamihara and his colleagues report online October 23 in Science. Although data gathered by the craft indicate that Shackleton’s floor has a temperature of less than 90 kelvins (–183° Celsius), cold enough to freeze water, the crater’s bottom has, at most, only a small percentage of frozen water interspersed with soil, the researchers say. The craft’s Terrain Camera, which can discern features as small as 10 meters, was able to image Shackleton’s floor because sunlight scattered from the crater’s inner wall, near the rim, illuminates the floor. Ice would show up as bright, highly reflective patches, and the images show no such features. It’s possible, the researchers note, that the small excess of hydrogen ions recorded by the Lunar Prospector are merely ions from the solar wind that became trapped in the crater’s lunar soil, rather than evidence of frozen water. “Who ever claimed there was visible water-ice inside Shackleton?” asks Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, a researcher affiliated with the Clementine mission. “If you read our original 1996 Science paper, we advocated patchy, dirty ice in Shackleton to explain our observations. Nothing in these new pictures shows this configuration to be untenable.” http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/ Spudis made his comments from India, where he witnessed the October 22 launch of the robotic mission Chandrayaan-1, India’s first venture to the moon. With two NASA instruments on the mission — a detector that will map the moon’s minerals and a radar instrument that will examine the nature of material about two meters below the surface — “we’ll soon have more data on this area of the moon,” says Spudis. “The search [for ice] continues.” Louis J. Sheehan 4927432 2008-10-25 03:41:37 2008-10-25 03:41:37 open open to-the-moon-45-ttm-453-louis-j-sheehan-4927432 publish 0 0 post 0 http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping Herakles 774.her.4432 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/10/23/herakles-774-her-4432-louis-j-sheehan-4916034/ Thu, 23 Oct 2008 03:41:30 +0200 Beforethebigbang Eleventh Labor - Hercules (Heracles - Herakles) Apollodorus Labor 11 - Apples of Hesperides This is Apollodorus' tale of the eleventh of twelve labors the Greek hero Hercules performed for Eurystheus. In the 11th Labor, Hercules had to retrieve the Apples of the Hesperides. Originally Hercules had to perform ten labors. This was an extra one because Hercules was considered to have had help or pay for earlier ones. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/ [2.5.11] When the labours had been performed in eight years and a month,1 Eurystheus ordered Hercules, as an eleventh labour, to fetch golden apples from the Hesperides,2 for he did not acknowledge the labour of the cattle of Augeas3 nor that of the hydra4 . These apples were not, as some have said, in Libya, but on Atlas among the Hyperboreans. They were presented by Earth to Zeus after his marriage with Hera, and guarded by an immortal dragon with a hundred heads, offspring of Typhon and Echidna, which spoke with many and divers sorts of voices. With it the Hesperides also were on guard, to wit, Aegle, Erythia, Hesperia, and Arethusa. So journeying he came to the river Echedorus. And Cycnus and marshalled the combat, but a thunderbolt was hurled between the two and parted the combatants. And going on foot through Illyria and hastening to the river Eridanus he came to the nymphs, the daughtres of Zeus and Themis. They revealed Nereus to him, and Hercules seized him while he slept, and though the god turned himself into all kinds of shapes, the hero bound him and did not release him till he had learned from him where were the apples and the Hesperides. Being informed, he traversed Libya. That country was then ruled by Antaeus, son of Poseidon, who used to kill strangers by forcing them to wrestle. Being forced to wrestle with him, Hercules hugged him, lifted him aloft, broke and killed him; for when he touched earth, so it was that he waxed stronger, wherefore some said that he was a son of Earth. After Libya he traversed Egypt. That country was then ruled by Busiris, a son of Poseidon by Lysianassa, daughter of Epaphus. This Busiris used to sacrifice strangers on an altar of Zeus in accordance with a certain oracle. For Egypt was visited with dearth for nine years, and Phrasius, a learned seer who had come from Cyprus, said that the dearth would cease if they slaughtered a stranger man in honour of Zeus every year. Busiris began by slaughtering the seer himself and continued to slaughter the strangers who landed. So Hercules also was seized and haled to the altars, but he burst his bonds and slew both Busiris and his son Amphidamus. And traversing Asia he put in to Thermydrae, the harbour of the Lindians. And having loosed one of the bullocks from the cart of a cowherd, unable to protect himself, stood on a certain mountain and cursed. Wherefore to this day, when they sacrifice to Hercules, they do it with curses. And passing by Arabia he slew Emathion, son of Tithonus, and journeying through Libya to the outer sea he received the goblet from the Sun. And having crossed to the opposite mainland he shot on the Caucasus the eagle, offspring of Echidna and Typhon, that was devouring the liver of Prometheus, and he released Prometheus, after choosing for himself the bond of olive, and to Zeus he presented Chiron, who, though immortal, consented to die in his stead. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/ Now Prometheus had told Hercules not to go himself after the apples but to send Atlas, first relieving him of the burden of the sphere; so when he was come to Atlas in the land of the Hyperboreans, he took the advice and relieved Atlas. But when Atlas had received three apples from the Hesperides, he came to Hercules, and not wishing to support the sphere he said that he would himself carry the apples to Eurystheus, and bade Hercules hold up the sky in his stead. Hercules promised to do so, but succeeded by craft in putting it on Atlas instead. For at the advice of Prometheus he begged Atlas to hold up the sky till he should put a pad on his head. When Atlas heard that, he laid the apples down on the ground and took the sphere from Hercules. And so Hercules picked up the apples and departed. But some say that he did not get them from Atlas, but that he plucked the apples himself after killing the guardian snake. And having brought the apples he gave them to Eurystheus. But he, on receiving them, bestowed them on Hercules, from whom Athena got them and conveyed them back again; for it was not lawful that they should be laid down anywhere. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 4916034 2008-10-23 03:41:30 2008-10-23 03:41:30 open open herakles-774-her-4432-louis-j-sheehan-4916034 publish 0 0 post 0 miller 48820.ie Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/10/18/miller-48820-ie-louis-j-sheehan-4892311/ Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:52:19 +0200 Beforethebigbang In 1953 a student named Stanley Miller did an experiment showing that the simple chemicals present on the early Earth could give rise to the basic building blocks of life. Miller filled a flask with water, methane, hydrogen and ammonia—the main ingredients in the primordial soup. Then he zapped the brew with electricity to simulate lightning, and, voila, he created amino acids, crucial for life. Now, scientists have reanalyzed this classic experiment, and found that the results were even more remarkable than Miller had realized. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis_J_Sheehan_Esquire/ Jeffrey Bada, a former student of Miller’s, preserved the chemicals that were produced by those original sparks. And he analyzed the samples using equipment that wasn’t available in the ‘50s. He discovered an even greater variety of organic materials than Miller originally reported. For example, Bada’s team identified 22 amino acids where Miller only saw 11, results that appear in the October 17th issue of Science. They also found that Miller didn’t even report his best results, which came from a flask that was bathed in some steamy volcanolike vapors. That setup produced an even richer mix of amino acids. I guess Miller felt that he’d proved his point without needing any data that were primordially souped up. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 4892311 2008-10-18 18:52:19 2008-10-18 18:52:19 open open miller-48820-ie-louis-j-sheehan-4892311 publish 0 0 post 0 http://www.soulcast.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire/ polio 6643/ Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/10/16/polio-6643louis-j-sheehanca61a08f20170ae81df878a4f477d70d-4878709/ Thu, 16 Oct 2008 03:16:29 +0200 Beforethebigbang A simplified vaccine for poliomyelitis might be just what the doctor ordered. A pared-down vaccine that was introduced in 2005 is knocking back the poliovirus better than the long-standing vaccine, two studies published in the Oct. 16 New England Journal of Medicine show. The newer vaccine overcomes a curious weakness that has developed in the older version. The new findings might put the campaign against polio back on a beeline toward eradication after being sidetracked in recent years. That setback arose from a combination of limited effectiveness of the old vaccine and a disastrous immunization stoppage in Nigeria in 2003 that allowed the virus to regain momentum there and spread to 20 other countries in short order. The newer vaccine and a revised vaccination strategy helped to reverse the Nigerian outbreak by 2007 and may form the basis of a public health model that could lead to eradication, says Nicholas Grassly, a mathematical epidemiologist at Imperial College London who coauthored one of the studies, an analysis of the Nigerian campaign. “It is certainly achievable,” he says. Polio exists only in humans, having no other animal host. And although there is no cure for polio, effective vaccines make it vulnerable to elimination, just as smallpox was wiped out in the 1970s. The poliovirus comes in three types — dubbed 1, 2 and 3. All three cause infection, which results in mild and even unnoticed disease in nearly all patients. But about 1 percent of people who are infected suffer paralysis. Researcher Albert Sabin devised and licensed a trivalent, or triple-acting, oral polio vaccine a half century ago that engenders at least some immunity against all three types. This inexpensive vaccine, delivered in oral drops, uses a weakened live virus and remains the standard throughout most of the world, although industrialized countries have reverted to the original, injectable form, which uses a killed virus. The typical polio vaccine regimen, be it oral or injected, is three to four doses. The broad effects of the oral vaccination have been potent enough to knock out polio in most of the world. The disease remains endemic in only four countries: Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan. Research in the past decade, however, suggests that the vaccine induces an imbalanced immunity, leaving gaps in its coverage that no one could have foreseen. It turns out that not all three types are created equal. Over the years, the type 2 component of the vaccine has been more aggressive than the others and has out-competed them in the intestines, where the bulk of poliovirus — and the vaccine — gets absorbed into cells. That means people immunized against polio develop a potent antibody corps against type 2 but much less protection against the other types of polio. As a result, naturally occurring type 2 polio has disappeared. While that would seem like a success story, it actually has made the final coup de grace against polio more difficult to deliver because now the trivalent vaccine is dominated by the wrong component. “It’s really good against type 2, which is gone,” says Grassly. That in part explains why, just when it seemed that polio was on its last legs, the virus has hung on doggedly in Asia and Africa, he says. In one of the new studies, Grassly and his colleagues analyzed the effect of two orally administered vaccines — the standard trivalent vaccine and a monovalent, or single-acting, vaccine against type 1, one of the two remaining dangerous types. The team found that in the Nigerian epidemic the monovalent vaccine was four times as effective against type 1 as the trivalent vaccine. The trivalent vaccine did confer some protection against type 3 polio. While the trivalent vaccine still offers some broad coverage, the findings suggest that monovalent vaccines against type 1 or type 3 can have dramatic effects in stopping outbreaks, Grassly says. Polio is highly contagious, spreading through contaminated water or by person-to-person contact. “In an epidemic, you want to quickly raise the immunity levels in the population to stop transmission,” says Mohamed Wahdan, an infectious disease physician with the World Health Organization’s Cairo, Egypt office. “You can push immunity higher more quickly with a monovalent dose than with the trivalent.” For example, public health officials in Yemen recently quelled an outbreak there by using a combination of monovalent vaccine aimed at type 1 and routine trivalent vaccination, says Wahdan. In the other new study, Wahdan worked with an international team of scientists in Egypt who randomly assigned 421 newborns to get an oral dose of polio vaccine at birth and again at one month. Of these, 231 got a monovalent vaccine aimed at type 1 and 190 received the trivalent vaccine. The researchers assessed the infants at age 2 months and found that more than half of those getting the monovalent vaccine had generated antibodies against type 1 polio, which was nearly twice as many as those receiving the trivalent vaccine. While the type 1 monovalent vaccine didn’t protect against the type 3 virus, the trivalent vaccine wasn’t much better — protecting only about 17 percent of newborns from type 3. When a new outbreak of polio occurs, mainly from travelers exiting polio-endemic countries, “you want to hit it hard with the best thing we’ve got, and that thing is probably the monovalent vaccines,” says virologist Ellie Ehrenfeld of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md. “Both of these papers report data that document that.”http://louis-j-sheehan.biz Type 1 poliovirus seems more prevalent than type 3. But, even though scientists have devised live attenuated monovalent vaccines against both, these probably won’t eradicate polio, she says. Like other live-virus vaccines, these leave open a glaring risk — that the virus built into the vaccines will swap genes with other viruses and become rogue but real polio viruses, she says. This has happened with the trivalent vaccine, albeit rarely, and has caused paralysis in about one person per 2.5 million vaccinated, by some estimates. Therefore, Ehrenfeld says, the endgame for polio may rest not on using these live-but-weakened viruses developed by Sabin, but rather with the original — the injectable polio vaccine devised by Jonas Salk. While more expensive, Ehrenfeld says, that vaccine is ultimately safer because it uses a killed virus that can’t recombine with anything.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz To make matters worse, the oral vaccines suffer from reduced potency because children in poor countries often confront bouts of diarrheal diseases, which usher the vaccine out of the body before it can induce an immune response. The injectable vaccine isn’t compromised by diarrhea. 4878709 2008-10-16 03:16:29 2008-10-16 03:16:29 open open polio-6643louis-j-sheehanca61a08f20170ae81df878a4f477d70d-4878709 publish 0 0 post 0 esquire louis j. sheehan tb Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/10/15/tb-louis-j-sheehan-4873140/ Wed, 15 Oct 2008 02:45:13 +0200 Beforethebigbang TB or not TB? That was the question created by a pair of human skeletons excavated more than a decade ago at a 9,000-year-old village submerged off Israel’s coast. Bone damage apparently produced by some type of infection created the Shakespearean dilemma that puzzled excavation director and anthropologist Israel Hershkovitz, head of the Dan David Laboratory for the Search and Study of Modern Humans at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Thanks to a genetic analysis of the skeletons directed by Helen Donoghue and Mark Spigelman, both of University College London, Hershkovitz now knows that his team unearthed the earliest known cases of human tuberculosis. A roughly 25-year–old mother had apparently passed on the bacterial infection to her 1-year–old child, after which they both died and were buried together. Other instances of human tuberculosis that have been confirmed by ancient DNA analyses date to no more than about 5,500 years ago in Egypt and Sweden. Examination of DNA from the Israeli skeletons supports the idea, based on earlier studies of genetic variation in different strains of modern tuberculosis bacteria, that bovine tuberculosis evolved after human tuberculosis did, Hershkovitz and his colleagues conclude in a report published online October 15 in PLoS ONE. Work at the ancient village of Atlit-Yam, which has been covered by water for the past several thousand years, yielded the skeletons and some of the earliest evidence for agriculture and for cattle domestication. Infection-related bone damage is difficult to pin on any specific disease, notes biological anthropologist George Armelagos of Emory University in Atlanta. “The genetic analysis of the Atlit-Yam skeletons really opens up our understanding of the human form of tuberculosis by showing that it was not derived from cattle but evolved well before animal domestication,” Armelagos says. According to one longstanding hypothesis, tuberculosis initially infected people who drank the milk of domesticated cattle that carried a unique strain of the bacterium. New DNA data from the two Atlit-Yam skeletons “give us the best evidence yet that in a community with domesticated animals but before dairying, the infecting strain of tuberculosis was actually the human pathogen,” Donoghue says. Unpublished DNA analyses of two additional human skeletons found at Atlit-Yam have also yielded genetic evidence of human tuberculosis, according to Hershkovitz. He estimates that human tuberculosis first evolved around 10,000 years ago, when agriculture’s emergence led to densely populated settlements that acted as petri dishes for infection. Tuberculosis may have infected small numbers of people before that, but the bacteria could not have spread widely in small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers, the Israeli anthropologist argues. Hershkovitz suspects that tuberculosis epidemics led to the demise of early farming communities and their distinctive cultural practices around 8,000 years ago. A new wave of agricultural settlements, which featured the first examples of pottery making, soon followed. In Armelagos’ view, human tuberculosis could have originated as early as 20,000 years ago. Confirmation of the bacterium’s evolutionary age will depend on finding late Stone Age skeletons that show signs of infection, and then successfully extracting DNA from them. Earlier this year, another research team reported that a 500,000-year–old Homo erectus skull found in Turkey displayed bone damage that probably resulted from tuberculosis. Both Hershkovitz and Armelagos regard that claim as unsubstantiated. “It is now clear that any identification of tuberculosis in a skeletal population without the confirmation of DNA analysis is pure speculation,” Hershkovitz says. Donoghue and her coworkers were able to extract pieces of DNA from infection-damaged spots on the two Israeli skeletons. Salt water, sand and clay had covered the bodies, providing excellent conditions for bone preservation. Atlit-Yam was located within a coastal marshland before its immersion by the rising ocean. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz Five different genetic sequences obtained from the skeletons matched corresponding sequences of DNA from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the principal agent of human tuberculosis. In addition, the Atlit-Yam bones yielded fatty acids found in the cell walls of M. tuberculosis. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 4873140 2008-10-15 02:45:13 2008-10-15 02:45:13 open open tb-louis-j-sheehan-4873140 publish 0 0 post 0 http://louis j sheehan.biz 20619007 ENTWISTLE http://wordpress.com/ 127.0.0.1 2015-03-15 21:50:57 2015-03-15 21:50:57 Very quickly this site will be famous amid all blog viewers, due to it's pleasant articles| 1 0 0 sida 44r Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/10/14/sida-44r-louis-j-sheehan-4872008/ Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:49:43 +0200 Beforethebigbang The leading cause of infant death in developed countries, sudden infant death syndrome, is still largely a medical mystery. Past studies have revealed that in the brain stems of more than half of infants who die from SIDS, the neurons that produce serotonin—a chemical responsible for regulating heart rate, body temperature and mood—are overly prevalent and abnormally shaped. Until now, no one has known how these problems might cause death, but a July 4 Science study reveals clues about what might be going wrong in SIDS and how doctors might prevent it. Mood researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Monterotondo, Italy, were investigating how serotonin levels affected anxiety-related behavior in mice when they got a surprise. They bred the mice to have too many 5-HT1A receptors, which are known to signal neurons to slow down the release of serotonin when the chemical is abundant in the brain. Having more receptors ultimately lowers serotonin levels and overall serotonin activity. The team was startled to find that nearly three quarters of the mice died before they turned four months old, typically after suffering sudden drops in heart rate and body temperature so drastic that the complications killed the animals. Although the researchers do not yet know what prompts these crises, co-author Cornelius Gross speculates that they occur when serotonin activity cannot ramp up properly. For instance, serotonin systems are turned off during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, so waking is typically accompanied by a rapid increase in serotonin activity. In the mice, Gross explains, the compromised 5-HT1A feedback loop may prevent serotonin neurons from firing when they should, disrupting nervous system function. If Gross is right, the unexpected findings reveal how a seemingly simple alteration in the serotonin system can lead to infant death. Although SIDS babies have normal 5-HT1A receptors, one of their many other serotonin feedback mechanisms may be malfunctioning in a similar way. If so, the key to preventing SIDS could one day be as simple as finding a way to regulate abnormal serotonin feedback. Louis J. Sheehan 4872008 2008-10-14 19:49:43 2008-10-14 19:49:43 open open sida-44r-louis-j-sheehan-4872008 publish 0 0 post 0 Boris Yefimov 887.98.0 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/10/12/boris-yefimov-887-98-0-louis-j-sheehan-4860378/ Sun, 12 Oct 2008 18:13:52 +0200 Beforethebigbang Boris Yefimov, a Russian cartoonist despised by Hitler and beloved by Stalin who for 70 years and 70,000 drawings wielded his talent as a keen sword to advance the goals of his country, died in Moscow on Wednesday.http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com He was 109, old enough to have seen the last czar pass in a coach; become friends with Trotsky; have Stalin personally edit his cartoons; and vote for Vladimir V. Putin. In dispatches about his death, his age was first reported as 108, then corrected by his family.http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com When Mr. Yefimov was just 107, several Israeli newspapers reported that he was very likely the oldest living Jew, though he began to practice his religion only when he was 100. The death of Mr. Yefimov, whose name is sometimes transliterated from the Cyrillic as Efimov, was widely reported by Russian news media. Some reporters could not resist leading with his oddly warm but necessarily precarious relationship with Stalin, that famous lover of cartoons. Others first mentioned Hitler, whom Mr. Yefimov depicted as a sinister mix of the crazy and creepy. Hitler vowed to shoot the cartoonist as soon as he captured Moscow. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire Over almost the entire history of the Soviet Union, Mr. Yefimov’s cartoons provided sharp commentary on subjects as varied as laziness on collective farms, bureaucratic inefficiency, the trials of Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, foreign policy trouble spots like Berlin and Yugoslavia, the Kennedy assassination and Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s attempt to reform and salvage communism. The most famous story about Stalin and Mr. Yefimov is about something that happened in 1947, when Mr. Yefimov drew a cartoon for Pravda that is sometimes described as an opening shot in the cold war. It showed Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower arriving at the North Pole to find Eskimos and polar wildlife. Mr. Yefimov’s caption had the general exclaiming that the greatest threat to American freedom was right there. The pretext for the cartoon was a report that United States troops were penetrating the Arctic to counter a Russian threat. Stalin ordered the cartoon to illustrate how ludicrous he considered such an action. But it came at a time of mounting tension between the nations, and American media reported the cartoon as serious news. The tension Mr. Yefimov felt was at least as intense. In 1940, for political reasons, Stalin ordered the execution of Mr. Yefimov’s brother, Mikhail Koltsov, a leading Soviet journalist who had been the model for the character Karkov in Hemingway’s novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” His brother’s death was very much in Boris Yefimov’s mind when Stalin summoned him to hear his idea for a cartoon. Mr. Yefimov told Stalin it was a great idea. The cartoonist did not know whether to rush to finish it quickly, or take more time to show how important he considered the project. He proceeded methodically, until Stalin called him at 3:30 the next afternoon. He wanted the cartoon by 6. In an interview with Russian Life in 1999, Mr. Yefimov said, “A cold shiver went down my spine.” Mr. Yefimov finished on time. For many years, the original cartoon, with Stalin’s personal editing marks in red pencil, hung on his wall. Mr. Yefimov was born as Boris Fridland in Kiev on Sept. 28, 1899, the second son of a Jewish shoemaker. Within three years, his family moved to Bialystok, which is now part of Poland. It was there that he began to draw, when he was 5, and saw Czar Nicholas II, when he was 11. He studied art and then law before going to Moscow to escape the chaos of the civil war in Ukraine. In the 1920s, he and his brother changed their last name, Fridland, partly because it sounded Jewish at a time when anti-Semitism was on the rise. He got a job at Izvestia through his brother’s connections. Throughout his life, Mr. Yefimov was at the center of his country’s cultural elite. He and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky became friends, despite Mr. Mayakovsky’s remark upon first seeing Mr. Yefimov’s drawings. “Rather poor, aren’t they,” Mr. Mayakovsky said, according to The Morning Star, a London newspaper. “In fact, very poor.” Trotsky, however, liked Mr. Yefimov’s cartoons so much that he wrote the introduction to the first book collecting them, in 1924. Only reluctantly did the editor of Izvestia agree to print the words of Trotsky, who by then was on Stalin’s bad side. The editor was executed for this decision. But even after Mr. Yefimov’s brother fell into disfavor with Stalin, he himself remained one of Stalin’s favorites. Stalin criticized the buckteeth he gave Japanese characters as racist, but nothing happened to the man who drew them. Mr. Yefimov worked for many prestigious publications, and some of his cartoons in effect became national icons, like the one showing frozen German soldiers carrying a coffin labeled “the myth of the invincible German Army.” He received two Stalin prizes, among many honors. Mr. Yefimov — who said his longevity might or might not have been affected by his taste for vodka, cognac and beer — married twice and outlived both his wives. Obituaries in British newspapers said he had a son but did not specify whether he was still living. Mr. Yefimov said he hated Stalin for killing his brother but was proud of the Soviet Union’s successes and glad he propagandized about them. He told Russian Life, “When you are a political cartoonist, you have to keep pace with politics.” One of his potentially huge mistakes was putting a penguin at the North Pole in the famous 1947 drawing. But Stalin, who loved the cartoon, apparently did not notice that the Antarctic bird was out of place in the Arctic. Nobody said anything. 4860378 2008-10-12 18:13:52 2008-10-12 18:13:52 open open boris-yefimov-887-98-0-louis-j-sheehan-4860378 publish 0 0 post 0 http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com Quebec 334.09.oi Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/10/12/quebec-334-09-oi-louis-j-sheehan-4857074/ Sun, 12 Oct 2008 00:36:32 +0200 Beforethebigbang The age of exploration was once regarded by almost everyone except native peoples as a heroic epoch of plumes and masts, of intrepid adventurers setting out from early modern Europe for the New World. These explorers are not exactly forgotten: The legacy of Hernán Cortés, who conquered Mexico with his "galleons and guns," remains hotly contested, and Ponce de León's quest for youth is part of North America's mythic history, not least in Florida, where youth is still sought and still not found. Yet while the quadricentennial of Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage was marked by the extraordinary Columbian Exposition in Chicago, its 500th anniversary was observed with a kind of shamefaced silence. Samuel de Champlain is not reviled, but he is now an obscure figure, except to those who live near a certain upstate New York lake. He has "all but disappeared" from school curriculums, laments historian David Hackett Fischer. In "Champlain's Dream," Mr. Fischer seeks to restore the French explorer's importance to North America's past and to highlight the ideas of tolerance and peaceful co-existence that Champlain championed -- yes, in the 17th century. To the "father of New France" (what we now call Quebec) Mr. Fischer applies his signature blend of social history and classic narrative, a form he put most memorably on display in "Paul Revere's Ride" (1994) and "Washington's Crossing" (2004). Mr. Fischer also combines the independent-minded intellectual tradition of his native Baltimore with the proprietary patriotism of his own New England haunts. (Since 1962 he has taught at Brandeis University, near Boston.) History, to Mr. Fischer, comprises real people and places to which we the living are connected -- not by blood necessarily but by experience, by inhabitance. Writing of Champlain's 1604 explorations along the coast of present-day Maine, Mr. Fischer observes a "small stand of chokecherry trees . . . which several generations of this historian's family have happily harvested." http://louisgjgsheehan.blogspot.com Champlain's hyperkinetic life is often a dizzying whir of playing courtier, navigating treacherous if non-metaphoric shoals, and dodging icebergs and the "dreaded black flies" of North America. But "Champlain's Dream" is as ruminative as it is action-filled. What Mr. Fischer has really done is to sketch a character whose virtues -- prodigious curiosity, respect for other cultures, a sense of fairness -- he considers exemplary. The mariner-mapmaker-soldier was born circa 1570 in the province of Saintonge on the Biscay Coast, the sunniest region of France. Mr. Fischer examines the speechways, maxims and the regional ethos of this place, noting its "strong individualism." Champlain was "probably baptized and raised as a Protestant" before his later conversion to Catholicism, though, as with many facts of his early life, we just do not know for sure. Champlain's pedigree was not royal -- the closest he came to blue blood was a cousin-in-law who was "chief whipper of dogs in the royal kennels." But Mr. Fischer respectfully considers the rumor that Champlain was the illegitimate son of Henri IV, who, ahem, "scattered his seed widely through his kingdom." Whatever their connection, Henri IV was a generous patron to Champlain and his colonial ambitions. "Henri's interest was truly global," writes Mr. Fischer, who fully approves the king's expansionist (and expensive) policy, though we catch a too-brief glimpse of an anti-Champlain faction whose paladin was Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully, Henri's chief government minister: His cause was "free trade, low taxes, and no spending for colonies." Mr. Fischer dismisses these advocates of a Little France too quickly for my taste, but then his subject, Champlain, was so constantly on the move, spreading the blessings of French culture to North America, that the source of that culture may inevitably get lost in his ship's churning wake. “Few faces in modern history have been reinvented so often and from so little evidence.” Read an excerpt from "Champlain's Dream" Champlain kept his eye on the main chance, even if she was prepubescent. With his lifeline to the monarchy severed after Henri's assassination in 1610, he married the daughter of a well-connected administrator. Groom was 40; bride was 12. The match, which likely went unconsummated, was "a disaster." His wife would not find contentment until she entered a convent. But Champlain won over Louis XIII, the boy-king, and continued his explorations. By the 1630s New France was being settled, not just plundered for furs. Champlain, argues Mr. Fischer, sailed for neither gold nor conquest but rather "to increase the power and prosperity of France, to spread the Christian faith, to learn more about the world, and to bring together its many people in a spirit of humanity." His first trip across the Atlantic had been to New Spain, where he was appalled by the Spaniards' treatment of the indigenous population. The colonies Champlain later planted in Quebec would reject "cruelty and violence," writes Mr. Fischer, and be based in "an ethical tradition that has deep roots in the teachings of Christ." The grant of a royal monopoly on trade and commerce -- over howls of protest from French merchants -- didn't hurt, either. Mr. Fischer depicts Champlain as a wise gleaner of facts who listened to Basque whalers, Breton fishermen, African slaves -- anyone who could impart information. He was a man of talents -- royal geographer, meticulous cartographer, skillful if selective autobiographer -- as well as a visionary who imagined "a new world where people of different cultures could live together in amity and concord," a point Mr. Fischer emphasizes throughout. Champlain was among America's first gastronomes, at least as far as such a role is possible when beaver's tail sits on the dining table. He was also an adept nomenclator, and many of his names, French and Indian, still dapple the land. They include Lake Rossignol and Port Mouton, both in Nova Scotia -- the latter named for a luckless sheep that fell overboard. A beautiful lake -- touching on the borders of today's New York, Vermont and Quebec -- he named for himself. Discovery has its privileges. Mr. Fischer disdains political correctness; his historical world consists not of saints and demons or insulting caricatures of duplicitous, avaricious white men exploiting noble savages. His aim is to "write about both American Indians and Europeans with maturity, empathy, and understanding." Champlain had "a deep interest in native Americans," whose humanity he never doubted. He parleyed with them, asking more questions than he answered, though he regretted that the Indians had no foi, no loi, no roi: no faith, no law, no king. [Chaplain's Dream] Simon & Schuster "Champlain's dream of harmony with the Indians" was interrupted by the occasional raiding party. He fought the Mohawk and Onondaga with wooden armor and an early firearm called the arquebus; he became legend in the act of pulling an arrowhead out of his own neck and then admiring its craftsmanship. Now that's panache. (To Champlain, though, the word described the white plume atop his helmet, "a badge of courage worn to make its wearer visible in battle.") Yet Mr. Fischer praises Champlain for treating the Indians as equal parties in the New World, not primitive obstacles to be vanquished or pushed westward. "Our young men will marry your daughters," Champlain told the Montagnais, "and henceforth we shall be one people." http://louisgjgsheehan.blogspot.com Champlain might have regarded Indians as being endowed with dignity, but he considered his own French servants as mere lackeys, rarely even referring to them by name -- "a common attitude among gentleman-humanists in the early modern era," remarks Mr. Fischer. Champlain was no democrat; liberty and equality were as foreign to him as the ideas of monopoly and an absolute ruler were natural. Yet he defended the right of Protestants to worship in Catholic Quebec, and when in the winter of 1628-29 the settlers were on short rations of dried peas "he took the smallest share for himself." He died on Christmas Day 1635, peacefully, and unlike many Great Men his death was genuinely mourned. Give him this: Champlain acted boldly to make real his dreams. How boldly? Between 1599 and 1635, he crossed the ocean at least 27 times, yet Samuel de Champlain never learned to swim. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 4857074 2008-10-12 00:36:32 2008-10-12 00:36:32 open open quebec-334-09-oi-louis-j-sheehan-4857074 publish 0 0 post 0 quebec louis j. sheehan aig 9993.44rw Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/10/11/aig-9993-44rwlouis-j-sheehan-4853059/ Sat, 11 Oct 2008 02:07:11 +0200 Beforethebigbang A day after Richard S. Fuld Jr. was compelled to explain the millions of dollars he made at Lehman Brothers, two former executives of the American International Group took their turns in government witness chairs on Tuesday, answering critical questions from lawmakers about business and pay practices and outsize spending that continued even after the company received an $85 billion lifeline from the government. One particular point of contention during the hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was a weeklong retreat that a life insurance subsidiary, AIG General, held for its top sales agents at the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif., only a week after the government extended its $85 billion loan last month. The $442,000 in expenses for the week included $150,000 for food and $23,000 in spa charges, according to documents obtained by the committee. Joe Norton, A.I.G.’s director of public relations, said in an interview that the event had been scheduled last year, though he did not know whether executives had considered canceling the retreat after the bailout. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com/ In addition to questions about spending, the two A.I.G. executives who appeared before legislators, Martin J. Sullivan and Robert B. Willumstad, faced sometimes heated inquiries into risky bets by the company on complicated financial products that insured mortgage-backed securities. A.I.G., for decades the largest insurance company in the world, must now sell wide swaths of its businesses to repay the government loan, made because of the potential catastrophe that the company’s bankruptcy would have unleashed. Mr. Sullivan was criticized for his reassurances to investors about A.I.G.’s health in December despite warnings from company auditors that its exposure to those contracts was growing. And many legislators berated the two men for large pay packages dispensed to top executives despite evidence that the company’s financial health had begun deteriorating in 2007. Mr. Sullivan was questioned by several lawmakers over why he had requested that accounting losses from A.I.G.’s exposure to these swaps be excluded from calculating one particular compensation plan. The two former executives also took criticism from their outspoken predecessor, Maurice R. Greenberg, who sought to deflect responsibility in a statement to the committee. Yet Mr. Greenberg, who also questioned the need for the government’s de facto takeover of the company as part of its rescue package, declined to appear, citing illness. The nearly five-hour hearing was the second this week held by the House committee after the pointed questioning on Monday of Mr. Fuld about the collapse of Lehman, the investment bank he led. Committee members, led by Henry A. Waxman of California, are seeking more information from troubled financial companies after the passage of the Bush administration’s $700 billion bailout plan last week and the chaos gripping the markets. “A.I.G. had to be bailed out by taxpayers because of your investments in credit-default swaps,” Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York, said. “I don’t believe any of your management deserves a bonus.” Mr. Sullivan, who was ousted as A.I.G.’s chief executive in June, and Mr. Willumstad, who was the company’s chairman before succeeding Mr. Sullivan, blamed wider market tremors for the company’s stumbles. They also attributed A.I.G.’s $25 billion in write-downs to mark-to-market accounting rules, which forced the company to take paper losses that led to debilitating credit downgrades. Yet both Democratic and Republican lawmakers dismissed those arguments, citing testimony from a former chief accountant for the Securities and Exchange Commission. “A.I.G. is blaming its downfall on accounting rules which require it to disclose losses to its investors,” the witness, Lynn E. Turner, said. “That’s like blaming the thermometer, folks, for a fever.” Instead, lawmakers focused on efforts by company management to shield inquiries into the London subsidiary that had underwritten the derivatives contracts that became devalued during the global credit crisis. Both PricewaterhouseCoopers, the company’s auditor, and an independent accountant complained of a lack of access to the London unit and its leader, Joseph Cassano. The accountant, Joseph St. Denis, said in a statement to the committee that he had been deliberately blocked from questioning Mr. Cassano because he might “pollute the process.” Mr. St. Denis later resigned in protest. Mr. Cassano has continued to draw $1 million a month in consulting fees from A.I.G., a fact that aroused ire from several lawmakers. He earned $280 million over the last eight years. For his part, Mr. Greenberg sought in his written statement to cast A.I.G.’s troubles as arising after he left in 2005, under the shadow of an accounting inquiry. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com/ “When I left A.I.G., the company operated in 130 countries and employed approximately 92,000 people,” Mr. Greenberg said in a statement. “Today, the company we built up over almost four decades has been virtually destroyed.” When asked about Mr. Greenberg’s contention that risk controls at A.I.G. had loosened after his departure, Mr. Sullivan argued that risk controls had actually tightened since then. Louis J. Sheehan 4853059 2008-10-11 02:07:11 2008-10-11 02:07:11 open open aig-9993-44rwlouis-j-sheehan-4853059 publish 0 0 post 0 louis j. sheehan Arctic sea ice 53300.ed334 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/10/03/arctic-sea-ice-53300-ed334-louis-j-sheehan-4817894/ Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:00:26 +0200 Beforethebigbang This summer, the share of the Arctic Ocean covered by sea ice was the second-lowest since satellite measurements began in 1979. And because much of the ice had formed just this past winter and was therefore relatively thin, the volume of floating ice at the top of the world probably reached a record low, scientists estimate. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de The area of the Arctic Ocean for which floating ice covers at least 15 percent of the sea’s surface — a parameter called sea ice extent — fell to about 4.67 million square kilometers this September. http://www.bebo.com/LouisS205 That’s an area just under three times the size of Alaska. That’s also 9 percent higher than last year’s record low value (SN: 10/13/07, p. 238), but 34 percent below the average measured for September since 1979, says Walt Meier, a remote sensing analyst at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. Since 1979, sea ice extent has declined, on average, about 11.7 percent each decade, Meier and his colleagues report in an Oct. 2 press release. access In March 2008, after a wintertime recovery from last year’s record low ice coverage, thin first-year ice covered a record-high 73 percent of the Arctic Ocean. First-year ice is more prone to break up and melt than thicker, multiyear ice, so the stage was set for massive ice loss this summer, the researchers note. That ice loss, in turn, primes the ocean to warm even further: Open water absorbs about 90 percent of the sunlight that falls on it, as compared with snow-covered ice, which reflects between 70 and 90 percent of the sunlight that falls on it. Then, when ice breaks up, it’s bathed in warm water on several sides, not just on the bottom — a scenario that accelerates melting even further, says Meier. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de First-year ice typically measures between 1 and 1.5 meters thick, whereas multiyear ice averages about 3 meters thick. That disparity, plus the near-record low sea ice extent this year, suggests that the total volume of ice floating atop the Arctic Ocean this summer dropped to a new record low. http://www.bebo.com/LouisS205 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 4817894 2008-10-03 22:00:26 2008-10-03 22:00:26 open open arctic-sea-ice-53300-ed334-louis-j-sheehan-4817894 publish 0 0 post 0 http://louis j sheehan.de prime 3992220.333a Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/10/02/prime-3992220-333a-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-4812248/ Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:58:47 +0200 Beforethebigbang Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Here’s a number to savor: 243,112,609-1. Its size is mind-boggling. With nearly 13 million digits, it makes the number of atoms in the known universe seem negligible, a mere 80 digits. And its form is tidy and lovely: 2n-1. But its true beauty is far grander: It is a prime number. Indeed, it is the largest prime number ever found. http://louis-j-sheehan.info The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, a computing project that uses volunteers’ computers to hunt for primes, found the prime and just confirmed the discovery. It can now claim a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for being the first to find a prime number that has more than 10 million digits. Prime numbers make up the “periodic table” of numbers, the building blocks that combine to form all numbers. A prime number is a whole number divisible only by 1 and itself. Euclid in 300 B.C. proved that there are infinitely many of them (click for his beautifully simple proof). Still, that doesn’t make them easy to find. At the beginning of the number line, the primes seem to be everywhere — 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13… — but in the number line’s more distant reaches, prime numbers become elusive. Because 243,112,609-1 has the form 2n-1, it’s called a “Mersenne prime,” after a French monk born in the 16th century who made an (incorrect) conjecture about them. Mersenne primes are of particular interest partly because they can be expressed in such a compact form. (It sure is easier to write 243,112,609-1 than to type out all 13 million digits!) More significantly, though, some clever methods have been developed to identify them. The most obvious way to go about identifying any prime number is to try factoring it. First, try dividing by 3, then 5, then 7, etc., and if none of them work, you’ve got a prime. But the last time a new prime was identified this way was in 1588, because as the numbers get bigger, the division takes longer and longer. So mathematicians have developed clever tests for primeness that are simpler to compute. The best one of all, called the Lucas-Lehmer test, only works for Mersenne primes. Remarkably, the method requires no division at all, making it extremely quick. Only 46 Mersenne primes have ever been found, and GIMPS has found 12 of them. The project recruits volunteers to donate their computers’ CPU cycles when they would otherwise be idle. Each computer works on a single number, first trying to find small factors. If that fails, it applies the Lucas-Lehmer test. A computer working full-time can test a single 10-million-digit number in eight days. The processing power of all the individual computers linked together is equivalent to one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. No supercomputer, though, would devote all its processing time to computing prime numbers. The finding is unlikely to have significance for number theory, although number theory’s great unanswered question, perhaps, is to find how the prime numbers are distributed. Still, “you never know where discoveries may lead you,” says George Woltman, founder of GIMPS. “But really, it’s like climbing Mt. Everest. You do it because it’s there. It’s a lot safer, though. You can do it from the air-conditioned comfort of your home.” Or, if you prefer, the air-conditioned comfort of your office. The computer that found the prime was administered by Edson Smith at the University of California, Los Angeles mathematics department. Smith downloaded the GIMPS software, and when the computers in the math department weren’t busy with other work, they searched for primes and communicated their results back to GIMPS. This prime is the eighth found at UCLA, although the first with GIMPS. Half the prize money will go to the UCLA math department, a quarter will go to charity (probably a math department with an open faculty position for number theory, Woltman says) and most of the remainder will go to those who found previous Mersenne primes using GIMPS. http://louis-j-sheehan.info Remarkably, GIMPS found another Mersenne prime two weeks after this one – after a two-year dry spell with no new primes. This prime had fewer digits, just 11 million. The Electronic Frontier Foundation became interested in prime hunting because it makes an excellent challenge problem for cooperative, distributed computing. “The award is an incentive to stretch the computational ability of the Internet,” says Landon Noll of Cisco Systems Inc., one of the judges for the Electronic Frontier Foundation prize and a discoverer of a former biggest known prime. More prizes remain to be claimed: a $150,000 award for a prime with 100 million digits, and a $250,000 award for one with a billion digits. GIMPS has used well-established methods, while continuing to refine its implementations for greatest efficiency. Finding the numbers for the larger awards, though, will require major innovations, Noll says: “People are going to have to go back to the drawing board.” He points out that testing a single 100-million–digit number for primeness would take a single desktop computer more than four years, and testing a billion-digit number would take it more than 500 years. So at a minimum, he says, algorithms will have to be developed that allow multiple computers to test a single prime. Current cryptographic systems rely on the challenge of factoring large primes. This task is distinct from verifying primeness, but the root difficulty is the same: limited computing power. Through this prize, “we maintain a pulse on what people might be able to do in breaking cryptosystems,” Noll says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 4812248 2008-10-02 15:58:47 2008-10-02 15:58:47 open open prime-3992220-333a-louis-j-sheehan-esquire-4812248 publish 0 0 post 0 http://louis j sheehan.info seal 339902003 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/10/01/seal-339902003-louis-j-sheehan-4803964/ Wed, 01 Oct 2008 01:07:35 +0200 Beforethebigbang ShareThis dolphin boneNeanderthals living in coastal caves in Gibraltar hunted and feasted on seafood, researchers say, adding another piece of evidence to the argument that Neanderthals weren’t outmatched and driven to extinction by more skilled and sophisticated Homo sapiens. “I don’t think that the success of one or the other had to do with subsistence, with the way they hunted or fed,” [researcher Clive] Finlayson said. “There may be other factors coming into this, or it may just have been a question of luck” [National Geographic News]. The discovery of seal, dolphin and fish remains in the caves dating from 60,000 to 30,000 years ago provides the first evidence that Neanderthals ate sea mammals as well as land grub. Archaeologists found the mammals’ remains among Neanderthal hearth sites in Vanguard and Gorham’s Caves on the Rock of Gibraltar. The bones of some of the animals have cut marks that were likely made by Neanderthals using flint knives, also found on site, to cut the meat off [LiveScience]. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com The researchers’ report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [subscription required], describes hearth sites containing a mix of bones from marine and land animals, including boars and bears, which suggests a degree of flexibility in the Neanderthals’ diets and habits. But the study sheds no light on how Neanderthals managed to capture seals and dolphins, says palaeontologist Erik Trinkaus…. “Seals have a very good escape mechanism. It’s called swimming,” he says. Neanderthals may have hunted young seals during the breeding season, when they were more likely to be found near land, while beached dolphins would have been easy prey for the spear-wielding hunters [New Scientist]. Previous research by Finlayson’s team has suggested that Neanderthals may have made their last stand at these Gibraltar caves; they used radiocarbon dating of pieces of charcoal to determine that Neanderthals occupied the caves as recently as 28,000 years ago. Given the diverse diet, “it may therefore be no coincidence that they survived longest in this part of the world,” said Prof Finlayson [Telegraph]. Read about one scientist’s attempt to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome in the DISCOVER article, “Will We Ever Clone a Caveman?” Louis J. Sheehan 4803964 2008-10-01 01:07:35 2008-10-01 01:07:35 open open seal-339902003-louis-j-sheehan-4803964 publish 0 0 post 0 http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com frankincense 0000200.18 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/09/23/frankincense-0000200-18-louis-j-sheehan-4768801/ Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:33:15 +0200 Beforethebigbang Incense has been key to religious and societal ceremonies for thousands of years, wafting over the offerings of kings in ancient Egypt and the aisles of St. Peter’s Basilica as a holy and worship-inducing smoke. But researchers have found that at least one type of incense may also act as an uplifting drug. A team of Israeli and U.S. scientists recently isolated a compound from Boswellia tree resin (best known as frankincense) and injected it into mice. The chemical soothed mice that were placed in anxiety-inducing situations—such as having to tread water for prolonged periods. “It seems to have similar effects as an antidepressant and antianxiety drug,” says Arieh Moussaieff, a pharmacologist from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who led the study. Further investigation revealed that the compound, named incensole acetate, can regulate the flow of ions in and out of neurons in a manner similar to the way antidepressant drugs work. This incense chemical may be the key to a new class of antidepressants and shed light on the molecular workings of the brain and emotion. Louis J. Sheehan 4768801 2008-09-23 16:33:15 2008-09-23 16:33:15 open open frankincense-0000200-18-louis-j-sheehan-4768801 publish 0 0 post 0 louis j. sheehan working on the railroad 0000199.5 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/09/21/working-on-the-railroad-0000199-5-louis-j-sheehan-4759815/ Sun, 21 Sep 2008 21:39:58 +0200 Beforethebigbang Louis J. Sheehan. To understand what it’s like to work on the railroad — the Long Island Rail Road — a good place to start is the Sunken Meadow golf course, a rolling stretch of state-owned land on Long Island Sound. During the workweek, it is not uncommon to find retired L.I.R.R. employees, sometimes dozens of them, golfing there. A few even walk the course. Yet this is not your typical retiree outing. http://majestic-12-louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blogspot.com These golfers are considered disabled. At an age when most people still work, they get a pension and tens of thousands of dollars in annual disability payments — a sum roughly equal to the base salary of their old jobs. Even the golf is free, courtesy of New York State taxpayers. With incentives like these, occupational disabilities at the L.I.R.R. have become a full-blown epidemic. Virtually every career employee — as many as 97 percent in one recent year — applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement, a computer analysis of federal records by The New York Times has found. Since 2000, those records show, about a quarter of a billion dollars in federal disability money has gone to former L.I.R.R. employees, including about 2,000 who retired during that time. The L.I.R.R.’s disability rate suggests it is one of the nation’s most dangerous places to work. Yet in four of the last five years, the railroad has won national awards for improving worker safety. “Short of the gulag, I can’t imagine any work force that would have a so-to-speak 90 percent disability attrition rate,” said Glenn Scammel, long one of Capitol Hill’s top experts on railroads. “That defies both logic and experience.” Said Dr. J. Mark Melhorn, co-editor of a book on occupational disability published by the American Medical Association: “No one has a rate that high — that just doesn’t happen.” And it is not just engineers, conductors or track workers seeking disability payments. Dozens of retired white-collar managers are doing it as well, including the former deputy general counsel, employment manager, claims manager and director of government and community affairs. In fact, two formerly influential figures at the L.I.R.R. — a married couple, one from management and one from labor — are retired and drawing about $280,000 annually in combined disability and pension payments, according to estimates based on public records. Railroad officials say that as far as they know, most of the disabled workers were able-bodied until their early retirement, and only then filed papers seeking occupational disability payments. “How is it that somebody is occupationally disabled the day after he retires when he wasn’t occupationally disabled the day before he retired?” asked Gary Dellaverson, chief financial officer for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the railroad’s parent. The answer, according to government records and dozens of interviews, stems from a combination of factors, including highly unusual L.I.R.R. contracts that allow longtime workers to retire with a pension as early as age 50, federal rules that let railroad retirees claim disability for jobs they no longer hold, and an obscure federal agency called the Railroad Retirement Board that almost never says no to a disability claim. The federal agency pays the disability claims, but losing so many workers to early retirement costs the L.I.R.R. money — in overtime, training of replacements and early pension payments. At the same time, passengers could soon face another fare increase and the transportation authority is seeking more taxpayer support, already half a billion dollars a year, to close a huge budget gap. Union contracts also inflate operating costs through arcane work rules, some dating back to the 1920s, which pad employee paychecks, boosting pension and disability payments in turn. “There are maybe nine different ways to show up at work and get two days’ pay without doing anything extra,” Michael J. Quinn, general chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen at the L.I.R.R., said in an interview. These work rules made it possible for eight senior train engineers to earn from $215,000 to $277,000 in 2006. Younger workers earn much less, and income in the top tier was lower in 2007. Since medical records are private, individual cases could not be examined, and there is little doubt that some of the retirees receiving disability payments actually have debilitating conditions. Still, the L.I.R.R.’s disability rate in recent years has been three to four times that of the average railroad, and is particularly striking when compared with the number of disabilities at Metro-North, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority subsidiary that serves commuters north of New York City. Their work forces are of similar size and composition. Employees perform roughly the same tasks: operating trains, punching tickets and maintaining tracks. And yet in one area — debilitating illness and injury — the difference is so vast as to almost defy medical explanation. One example: disabilities resulting from arthritis and rheumatism. From 2001 through 2007, Metro-North had 32 cases, compared with 753 at the L.I.R.R. In one year, Metro-North had just 2 cases. The L.I.R.R. had 118. For certain diseases of the musculoskeletal system, like a herniated disc, Metro-North had 49 cases. The L.I.R.R. had 850. No one at the two railroads, at the transportation authority or at the Railroad Retirement Board could explain these gaping differences, nor were they even aware of them. “I’ve not seen that until you just showed it to me,” Michael S. Schwartz, the retirement board’s chairman, said in an interview this summer. The board focuses on individual claims, not specific railroads, Mr. Schwartz, said, but added, “We want to make sure that anything we do here is done correctly.” The L.I.R.R. president, Helena E. Williams, called the data compiled by The Times “alarming” and has asked the inspectors general of the retirement board and the transportation authority to investigate. Dr. Melhorn, who has studied disabilities, said the numbers alone were a cause for concern, “in particular if there seems to be a limited number of physicians who are providing this disability impairment.” Work-related injuries and illnesses do not explain the high disability rate. From 2005 through 2007, the L.I.R.R. had 2.91 per 200,000 working hours, compared with 2.98 for New Jersey Transit, 3.13 for Metro-North, 9.42 for PATH and 12.91 for Philadelphia’s transit system, according to an analysis of federal records. The L.I.R.R.’s record also raises questions about why the Railroad Retirement Board approves nearly 100 percent of disability requests from all the nation’s railroads. The board is funded through taxes on railroads and their workers, but Social Security had to contribute $3.6 billion last year to cover expenses. “Everyone in America is going to contribute to that,” said Rick Lifto, assistant vice president of general claims for B.N.S.F., a large freight railroad. B.N.S.F.’s disability rate is lower than the L.I.R.R.’s, but even so, Mr. Lifto said, disabilities still cost his company millions of dollars. John Britt Jr., a former engineer, is an example of someone who benefited not only from the work rules, but also from disability payments. In his last year on the job, during which he earned more than any other engineer, Mr. Britt’s paycheck swelled with $58,853 for tasks that had violated the normal work rules of his union contract, including $2,309 for running diesel and electric trains on the same shift and $3,354 for working through his regular meal period, government records show. He also got $40,553 for overtime, $41,594 for a vacation buyout and $47,337 for a sick leave buyout. For the year, Mr. Britt received $277,075 — five times his base salary and $100,000 more than the highest-paid engineer at Metro-North. Then, after retiring at age 56 in 2006, he was classified as disabled by the Railroad Retirement Board. In fact, the 12 highest paid L.I.R.R. engineers in 2006 — most earning over $200,000 — are now retired and receiving disability payments, records show. And so are the top-earning conductors, three of whom had incomes over $190,000. Mr. Britt could not be reached for comment, but a woman responding to a note left at his listed residence said, “Our family has no comment.” The L.I.R.R. president, Ms. Williams, who has been on the job a little more than a year, says she recognizes the need to fix the railroad’s problems. The transportation authority’s inspector general has praised her willingness to quickly address deficiencies once they are identified. She has taken steps to help curb overtime, and the railroad’s on-time record has never been better. But many problems are beyond her control. Without the political support needed to weather a strike, management has been unwilling to press for the removal of costly work rules, according to former management and union officials. The railroad also has no authority to intervene in federal disability cases. Changes in the railroad’s contract have made it more difficult for many employees to retire early, although it is still possible for them to receive a regular pension at age 55, and 1,100 long-term employees were still working under the old provisions at the end of 2007. If the transportation authority needed any expertise on disabilities, it could have turned to a former board member and union official, Joseph Rutigliano, who became occupationally disabled after retiring in late 1999 at age 52. Mr. Rutigliano said in an interview that he “crushed” his back in a fall at home and eventually could no longer work as a conductor, where his duties included walking through trains taking tickets and repeatedly climbing in and out of railroad cars. “I needed to use my legs and my back every day,” he said. “It meets the criteria for what the railroad retirement system says prevents you from performing your railroad occupation.” If Mr. Rutigliano’s condition kept him from working, it did not stop him from golfing. He was a regular this summer at Sunken Meadow, often walking the course twice a week. As a disabled worker, he played free. A Puzzling Discrepancy About five years ago, L.I.R.R. officials say, they wanted to know more about why some employees were retiring and then filing for occupational disability. Because the L.I.R.R. had made progress in reducing workplace accidents, railroad managers wondered if something was amiss, so they contacted the Railroad Retirement Board. But L.I.R.R. officials said the retirement board assured them that the number of disabilities among former L.I.R.R. workers “was typical of railroads industrywide.” Nothing more happened, officials said, until several months ago, when they were contacted by The Times and shown numbers far exceeding the industry average. “We have been asked by newspaper reporters to explain why the L.I.R.R. has a high number of retirees who receive a disability annuity,” Ms. Williams said on July 15 in a letter to Mr. Schwartz of the retirement board. In a letter late last month to the retirement board’s inspector general, Ms. Williams expressed specific concerns about why so many retirees were citing the same two disease categories. “I find the high rate of R.R.B. disability awards in these categories alarming,” she wrote, asking the inspectors general from the retirement board and the transportation authority to look into the matter. Barry L. Kluger, inspector general for the authority, said, “The numbers and the cost I think do merit the kind of review that’s going on at this time.” Ms. Williams said the railroad also examined its own disability program, which, unlike the retirement board’s, handles disability claims from current employees. The figures looked nothing alike. The number last year, she said: zero. “So, the question I have is, ‘What is the medical criteria used?’ ” Ms. Williams said in an interview, referring to the retirement board. “How are they evaluating the standards for an occupational disability?” Outside the insular world of railroads, little is known about the Railroad Retirement Board. With headquarters not in Washington, but in an old insurance building in Chicago, the board is overseen by three presidential appointees: one from labor, one from management and one representing consumers. The board, created in the 1930s, performs many of the same functions as Social Security, but for rail workers only. Both offer disability programs, but the similarities end there. A worker must be incapable of any gainful employment to be classified as disabled by Social Security. But rail workers can get disability payments even if they can perform other jobs — just not their regular railroad jobs. This provision, enacted in 1946, was based on the view that rail workers had especially hazardous jobs involving skills not easily transferred to other occupations. To document their occupational disability, rail workers can choose their own doctors who provide the board with detailed medical evaluations, usually including M.R.I. test results. Workers must also describe in full the physical demands of their rail jobs. L.I.R.R. officials say they have little interaction with the retirement board. “We do not have any representation on the board,” Ms. Williams said. “We are not asked for any medical evidence. We are not participants in any way. This is something employees do after they leave employment.” Cathleen Quinn, who runs the Long Island office of the retirement board, said her office gets “mainly orthopedic disabilities — herniated discs, bad knees.” L.I.R.R. employees favor certain doctors, and their disability applications are sometimes so similar as to be almost interchangeable, said one Long Island resident who has seen dozens of those applications. That person said that M.R.I.’s merely document physiological changes that commonly affect people over the age of 50. “I’ve never heard of anybody not finding something,” said the person, who did not wish to be identified for fear of angering friends who are getting disability payments. Dr. Robert K. McLellan, section chief for occupational and environmental medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, said M.R.I.’s alone were not enough to determine whether someone was incapacitated. “As we get older, we accumulate all kinds of abnormalities on M.R.I.’s,” Dr. McLellan said. “You can’t use an M.R.I. to say, ‘This person must have really bad back pain and therefore must be disabled.’ It is extremely common to have disc bulge and disc degeneration and disc herniation and have no symptoms whatsoever.” He said most people with a herniated disc recover within 6 to 12 weeks “without any intervention except time.” To account for those who might regain their ability to work, Social Security requires medical re-evaluations for the disabled, said Mark Lassiter, a Social Security spokesman. The Railroad Retirement Board has no such provision for an occupational disability and does not require any rehabilitation therapy. In all, the retirement board is far more generous in handing out disabilities than the Social Security Administration, which says it rejects roughly 45 percent of its applicants for total disability. The railroad board rejects only 2 percent of those seeking occupational disability, a lower threshold than total disability. “You have to say to yourself, ‘Why is Railroad Retirement Board so different?’ ” Ms. Williams said. Martin J. Dickman, the retirement board’s inspector general, acknowledged in an interview that the retirement board’s rejection rate was “almost nonexistent,” but he added: “If Congress wants to change the statute and raise the threshold, that’s up to Congress. That’s not up to us to do.” Mr. Lifto, the B.N.S.F. claims official, said he was so concerned about the board’s generosity that he and representatives of other freight railroads went to Chicago a couple of years ago to see how the retirement board decided disability cases. He said he couldn’t recall finding a single applicant who had been rejected on medical grounds — only for incorrect or incomplete paperwork. Railroad management’s concerns got support from an internal retirement board audit in 2000 that found serious shortcomings in the disability program. A copy of that report, obtained by The Times, stated that medical files did not justify all the disabilities awarded. “This number could be as high as 10 to 20 percent of the cases reviewed,” according to the report, by two physician auditors. The audit also found that disability decisions were “largely made on the medical disease being present rather than an understanding of the functional limitations created by that disease.” The report also suggested that applications were overstating job demands. In a follow-up audit submitted in June of this year, one of the auditors, Dr. Natalie P. Hartenbaum, a management representative, found the problem had not been resolved. “Dr. Hartenbaum did not feel that the medical opinions rendered sufficiently took into account the actual work performed,” the audit stated. A second doctor representing labor found fewer faults than Dr. Hartenbaum. Although railroad work is not as difficult or as dangerous as in years past, it does require physical activity that can strain the body. Engineers have to climb ladders. Conductors are on their feet for hours. Charles Anderson, a former L.I.R.R. engineer, said a shoulder injury unrelated to work made it hard for him to climb up and down on the train. “I was doing it with one arm,” Mr. Anderson said. “The thing that really made me retire is I fell and I was by myself.” Mr. Rutigliano, the former transportation authority board member, said injured workers are seeking only what the law provides. “The doctors don’t lie,” he said. “They got X-rays, M.R.I.’s. They have bad backs. They have hearing disabilities.” Steven A. Bartholow, general counsel for the retirement board, said workers for the most part would not give up well-paying jobs unless there was a good reason. “I think most of the people who apply for occupational disability annuities are in fact occupationally disabled,” Mr. Bartholow said. “They are hurting.” Unusual Rules If L.I.R.R. workers are hurting, it is also true that they have an added financial incentive to seek disability. Unlike other rail workers, they have a contract that allows them to get an early pension, which they can then supplement with disability payments. L.I.R.R. employees hired before 1988 with 20 years of service can start drawing on that pension at age 50. In fact, most workers start filing for disability in their 50s, records show. With monthly disability payments averaging about $3,000 a month, plus pension, retirees can earn their base salary and sometimes more until they reach normal retirement age. “When you’re 50, you’re still active,” said Tom Prendergast, a former L.I.R.R. president who is now running a transit system in Canada. “You like to work on your house, go out on your boat, travel, whatever.” In each year since 2000, between 93 percent and 97 percent of employees over 50 who retired with 20 years of service also received disability payments. Four years ago, the transportation authority’s inspector general cautioned that occupational disabilities could have financial implications for the L.I.R.R.’s pension plan, which it found to be “extremely” underfunded. “An added incentive for employees to take their pensions is the ease with which they can qualify for occupational disability,” the inspector general said in a 2004 report. The railroad for a variety of reasons had to triple its annual contributions to the pension fund to $94 million in 2004 from $32 million in 2000. There are other benefits to being a disabled L.I.R.R. employee. Those deemed to be so severely incapacitated that they cannot hold any job — not just their regular railroad job — also get health care through Medicare, as well as special tax breaks. Nearly half of L.I.R.R. workers classified as occupationally disabled are later reclassified by the retirement board as totally disabled, records show. http://majestic-12-louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blogspot.com And then there is the free golf. Debbie Keville, an official with the state’s Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, explained who qualifies for what is called an Access Pass, allowing the disabled free use of sports facilities in state parks: “You have to have a functional disability. By that, I mean a person has to have severe limitations — for example, with sight impairment, you have to have a high level of visual loss — you can’t have your better eye seeing fine. If you have to have an ambulatory aid — such as a cane — you need to have it at all times, not just some of the time. Mental retardation or developmental disability qualifies you.” Ms. Keville says her agency isn’t in the business of saying no to the truly disabled. “You’ve probably heard of blind and visually impaired golfers,” she said. “They’re out there.” Ms. Keville said the state could not investigate each and every case. “We have no way of knowing why or how they are disabled, just that the government says they are,” she said. Maximizing a Paycheck The size of a disability payment, as well as a pension, is determined partly by what an employee earns in the five years before retirement. Here again, the L.I.R.R.’s unique work rules give employees an edge. Take the case of Edward J. Koerber. On a spring evening in 2004, Mr. Koerber reported for his overnight shift as a train engineer at the Jamaica Storage Yard. By the end of his eight-hour shift, Mr. Koerber would earn four days’ pay for one day’s work, transportation authority records show. Assigned to the railyard that night, Koerber was instead sent to passenger service. Under union rules, this change entitled him to an extra day’s pay. Over the next few hours, he ended up operating both an electric engine and a diesel engine. These dual duties earned him a second day’s pay. Around 2 a.m., Mr. Koerber took an engine in for maintenance. With that came another day’s pay. These three contract violations resulted in penalty payments that totaled $718. He also earned, among other things, $157 for a few hours of overtime and $15 for not getting to eat during his normal lunch break. The L.I.R.R. was supposed to pay him $247 for his work that day. Instead, he ended up with $1,177. Shifts like this were not that unusual. Mr. Koerber pulled off seven others like it that year. Nor was he alone: L.I.R.R. engineers were paid four days’ wages for a single day of work on 30 occasions in 2004. These cases were documented in a 2006 report by the transportation authority’s inspector general, who also found more than 500 examples of engineers making three days’ wages in one day and nearly 150 examples of conductors doing the same. That year, Mr. Koerber earned $211,586, according to payroll data. But his compensation the next year was even more remarkable: $276,456. Only the president of the railroad earned more: $287,658. Soon after, Mr. Koerber retired from the L.I.R.R., and he ultimately took with him more than just a pension. In 2006, records show, he began receiving disability payments from the Railroad Retirement Board. In all, his retiree income is about $170,000 a year, according to estimates based on public records. Mr. Koerber, who is now 60, declined to comment. Metro-North operates differently. “We don’t have full-day penalty payments here,” says Jane Murawski, assistant director of labor relations at Metro-North. “It would never be that the person works their eight-hour shift and then they get another eight hours and another eight hours for other things. That doesn’t happen here.” Metro-North, formed in 1983 from the old Conrail commuter lines, largely inherited the work rules of its parent, which was mostly a freight railroad. But because the L.I.R.R. has always been primarily a commuter railroad, many existing labor agreements remained after the authority took it over in 1966. The disparity in pay between the two railroads is considerable. At the L.I.R.R, 107 nonmanagement workers earned more than $150,000 in 2006, compared with only a handful at Metro-North. “We have the best work rules in the industry nationwide — I would say worldwide,” said Mr. Quinn, the official with the Long Island chapter of the engineers union. “They’ve never been able to negotiate them away from us.” Struggle Over Work Rules Over the years, management has tried to chip away at those work rules. In the 1980s, L.I.R.R. officials became worried about losing so many veteran workers to early retirement, many of whom were quitting to take other jobs. So management made early retirement an issue during negotiations. The result: an 11-day strike. In the end, the rules were changed so that employees hired after 1987 had to reach age 55 and work 30 years before retiring on a normal pension. But that did not affect thousands of employees hired before 1988. And in time, it started to become apparent that second jobs were not necessary, not when it was so easy to be classified as occupationally disabled. During contract negotiations in 1994, management also tried to take a stand against work rule provisions that inflated earnings. But the political will to fight for these changes evaporated after workers went on strike, as they were legally entitled to do, unlike some other transit workers. “What’s lacking is leadership on the public side, people with strong beliefs and the courage to act on those beliefs,” said Louis Anemone, a former security director of the transportation authority. “There’s no stomach for it on the management level, and none of it on the political level.” There is a reason for that, Mr. Quinn says: “We move millions of people a week. And for this railroad to stop, people would be screaming. Politicians would have to answer questions: ‘What the hell is this? What are you doing?’ So they let us kind of co-exist.” But work rules and penalty payments, much like overtime, can be managed to reduce their financial impact — something that Ms. Williams, the railroad president, says she is trying to do. Over the years, the railroad has also made its share of serious mistakes. In 2006, the transportation authority inspector general found a 50 percent error rate when sampling sick-leave buyouts, a negotiated entitlement in which the railroad buys unused sick days. The buyouts cost the L.I.R.R. nearly $2 million in 2006. “The Long Island Rail Road has to confront its culture of lethargy and develop a proactive management structure,” Matthew D. Sansverie, the authority’s inspector general, wrote in a 2006 report. “The failure of staff and supervisors to question things that do not make sense must end.” Getting overtime costs under control has been a longstanding problem. “There continues to be lax controls over overtime and penalties earned by crews in the railyards,” authority investigators said in 2006. Early retirements by those seeking disability payments haven’t helped. “The railroad has experienced a substantial number of retirements in the last seven years,” said Ms. Williams. “It takes two years to train an engineer.” The L.I.R.R. has been successful under Ms. Williams in reducing overtime and some penalty payments, but eliminating those penalties is another matter. “We have not been successful in achieving that in collective bargaining,” she said. One penalty payment agreed to by management proved so embarrassing that the union was willing to give it up. In the 1980s, workers who maintained the track corridors got an extra two hours of pay if it rained. But because the agreement was poorly constructed, it opened the gates to abuse. The intent was to pay extra for work performed in the rain, but workers got paid even if it rained going to or from the work site. In one year, they got rain pay on 42 days when no rain fell, transportation authority investigators said in a 1989 report. One union official was quoted as saying that workers deserved the supplement “even if a bird flies over and urinates on them.” In one six-month period, rain pay cost the railroad $1.1 million. “Some of these things are ridiculous,” said Gerard P. Bringmann, general chairman of the Long Island Rail Road Commuter Council. “It makes absolutely no sense. Any company would go bankrupt that operates that way.” White-Collar Disabled If L.I.R.R. managers had decided in years past to investigate disabilities, they would not have had to look very far; most of them were retiring and getting disability payments, too. Records show that in one recent three-year period, more than 60 white-collar managers retired and were classified as disabled. Like union members, many managers can retire at age 50 or 55 with benefits. One such retiree was Janet Lewis, a former director of government and community affairs. Ms. Lewis declined to discuss the nature of her disability, saying it was a private matter. Her husband, Michael J. Canino, is also retired on disability. He is a former authority board member and chairman of the L.I.R.R. labor council, which represents all of the L.I.R.R. unions. Between their pensions and disability payments, Ms. Lewis and Mr. Canino take in about $280,000 annually, according to estimates based on public records. Mr. Canino could not be reached for comment. On two occasions Ms. Lewis said he was out of town, and he did not return a message left at his house. Walter Kueffner is one manager who didn’t say he was disabled, even though many others around him did. “People claimed they had back problems and carpal tunnel,” said Mr. Kueffner, a former auditor at the railroad. “I am sure some really did, but a lot of healthy people were doing it.” Disability awards were being handed out when he started at the railroad in 1968, and the numbers “got bigger as time went on,” he said. “They don’t reject too many for a disability, you know.” Mr. Kueffner said that while he’s not “a saint,” the thought of claiming disability never crossed his mind for one simple reason: “I didn’t have a disability,” he said. “I was doing a job that people do everywhere. I worked at a desk and I retired in good shape.” Louis J. Sheehan 4759815 2008-09-21 21:39:58 2008-09-21 21:39:58 open open working-on-the-railroad-0000199-5-louis-j-sheehan-4759815 publish 0 0 post 0 first Americans 0000180.113 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/09/11/first-americans-0000180-113-louis-j-sheehan-4713521/ Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:20:37 +0200 Beforethebigbang Louis J. Sheehan People first set foot in the Americas no earlier than about 18,000 years ago, according to an analysis of a newly identified gene variant on the Y chromosome. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com This evidence supports the longstanding archaeological theory that New World settlers crossed a land bridge from Asia to North America about 14,000 years ago, say geneticist Mark Seielstad of the Genome Institute of Singapore and his colleagues. The Y chromosome data generate a more precise estimate of colonization of the Americas than earlier DNA studies provided, the researchers contend. Some previous investigations�including analyses of genes in cells' mitochondria and nuclei�yielded settlement dates as early as 40,000 years ago. "[Our] discovery . . . places the DNA evidence more in line with archaeological data," Seielstad and his coworkers conclude in the September American Journal of Human Genetics. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com Their finding builds on a reconstruction of Y chromosome-based lineages worldwide that was published in 2000. Peter Underhill of Stanford University Medical School, a coauthor of the new study, led that analysis. Each Y lineage carries a distinctive set of gene alterations. Another team, directed by Michael F. Hammer of the University of Arizona in Tucson, analyzed a different set of international Y chromosome data in 2001 and largely confirmed the evolutionary tree proposed by Underhill's group. Both projects determined that two Y lineages reached the Americas from Asia before European colonists arrived. The newly discovered mutation�which now occurs in a substantial minority of men sampled throughout central Asia, India, and Siberia�appears to be a precursor of a closely related gene variant found only in Native American populations. Seielstad's group concludes that the mutation, dubbed M242, must have arisen in Asia before either of the Y lineages appeared in the New World. The mutation's spread and frequency in Asia suggest that it arose shortly before its New World relative did. The scientists have calculated an age of about 18,000 years for M242, based on estimates of the rate at which mutations occur on the Y chromosome and the average generation span for men. Hammer says that his own work is now confirming the M242 timeframe. "There may have been a single population containing both New World Y [lineages] that reached the Americas from Siberia between 17,000 and 18,000 years ago," he says. In a study slated to appear in Molecular Biology and Evolution, Hammer and his colleagues trace the origin of the two Native American Y chromosome lineages to a mountainous region of southern Siberia. The New World lineages emerged from there no more than 17,200 years ago, according to their calculations. That scenario fits with the view of many archaeologists, although they continue to disagree about where the first Americans came from and whether they arrived in a single migration (SN: 9/6/03, p. 150: http://www.sciencenews.org/20030906/fob8.asp). However, until geneticists study larger samples of Native Americans, Hammer doesn't rule out the possibility that Asian groups trekked to the Americas 30,000 years ago or even earlier. Louis J. Sheehan 4713521 2008-09-11 14:20:37 2008-09-11 14:20:37 open open first-americans-0000180-113-louis-j-sheehan-4713521 publish 0 0 post 0 louis j. sheehan stem 0000146.9 Louis J. Sheehan http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/09/09/stem-0000146-9-louis-j-sheehan-4705468/ Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:19:24 +0200 Beforethebigbang Louis J. Sheehan Stem cells’ powers of self-renewal, immortality and potential for medicine inspire those who study them. But progress toward understanding them has been slow — it took 20 years just to figure out how to grow embryonic stem cells in the laboratory. More recently, though, molecular techniques have enabled swift movement on two fronts. Researchers are starting to see how stem cells can replenish their numbers while giving rise to specialized cells. Others are learning how to turn adult skin cells into cells more like their embryonic ancestors. These advances offer hope that scientists will soon harness the capabilities of stem cells, at last fulfilling the cells’ promise. If you think the roadwork in your town is bad, that’s nothing compared with the traffic trouble inside a cell. DNA gets repaved with chemicals and proteins almost constantly, maintaining a DNA-protein-chemical infrastructure called chromatin. Chromatin construction helps determine whether a cell’s gene activation machinery can zip along like a car-pool van in the HOV lane or gets stuck in a bumper-to-bumper jam. And chromatin prevents cells from wandering off on the wrong developmental road, usually by turning off genes that misdirect cells. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.wordpress.com But some cells do things differently. Embryonic stem cells are not stuck in one lane with only one route available. These cells are perpetually poised at a fork in the road, with all options open. They retain the ability to become any type of cell in the body, a property called pluripotency. At the same time, embryonic stem cells have the ability to copy themselves indefinitely. Understanding how these cells accomplish those two feats — dividing indefinitely and choosing multiple identities — is a long-standing mystery of biology. When seeking the stem cells’ secrets, scientists have generally focused on finding the ingredients that confer pluripotency, with less concern for perpetual self-replication. But new research suggests that versatility and immortality are probably not separate traits. The key to making an embryonic stem cell, many researchers believe, lies in balancing the two. New research shows, for example, that dividing forever may be the natural state of a stem cell’s affairs. The cells keep renewing themselves until a signal arrives to differentiate, or transform into another cell type. Another study finds that a family of chemicals involved in choosing identity is also important in guiding cell division. And a network of hundreds of genes involved in pluripotency may also be involved in self-renewal, further research suggests. These and other studies are leading to deeper understandings of how embryonic stem cells accomplish their defining feats and are allowing scientists to better grasp the essence of stemness. Stem cell turn signals Researchers used to think that getting a stem cell to grow required hormones and growth factors, says Qi-Long Ying, a stem cell biologist at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles. But maybe cells simply keep dividing unless instructed otherwise. In fact, embryonic stem cells will keep making more stem cells unless they get a signal to develop into another type of cell, Ying and colleagues reported in the May 22 Nature. “Life is just self-renewal and differentiation,” Ying says. And stem cells are all about the interplay of those two processes. For instance, by ultimately signaling a cell to turn on certain genes, proteins that take part in a series of reactions called the MAP kinase pathway exert an important influence on differentiation. And MAP kinase and its associates are also required for cell division. At low concentrations, the MAP kinase proteins tell the cell to divide; high levels prompt development of the stem cells into other cell types. So to stay a stem cell, the cell needs to turn down, but not off, activity of the MAP kinase pathway, Ying says. He suspects that several other factors may also walk such a tightrope to maintain stemness. access SELF-STARTERPictured is an embryonic stem cell. Annie Cavanagh, Dave McCarthy Other work, reported by an international group of researchers online August 24 in Nature, shows that a large network of many genes is responsible for the pluripotency of embryonic stem cells. Circumstantial evidence suggests that the same set of gene and protein interactions are involved in the cells’ self-renewal, says study coauthor Franz-Josef Müller of the Center for Integrative Psychiatry in Kiel, Germany. “This is an active group of genes that are doing something together,” Müller says. “I’m pretty sure they’re not just suppressing differentiation signals.” But what exactly all the genes do is not clear. Many of the factors identified in the networking study circle around the DNA. Some, like the two “master” ingredients Oct3/4 and SOX2, are what scientists call transcription factors, proteins that direct gene activity. (Those two proteins, along with KLF4 and c-Myc, are the transcription factors used to reprogram skin cells into pluripotent stem cells.) Certain combinations of the A’s, C’s, G’s and T’s that make up the DNA alphabet form what amounts to a reserved parking sign for transcription factors. When the factors find a sign with their name on it, they latch on to the DNA and help to switch nearby genes on or off. At least that is what would happen if DNA were naked, the equivalent of an empty parking lot. But it’s not. The situation is far more complex, thanks to the chromatin infrastructure that guides the cells’ machinery for activating genes. During development, two groups of dueling proteins help direct gene activity. The Polycomb group shuts genes down; the trithorax group turns genes on. Both groups accomplish their task by pinning a chemical called a methyl group to one of DNA’s close associates, a protein known as histone H3. The Polycomb group attaches a methyl group to the protein building block lysine at position 27 in the chain of amino acids making up the histone. Trithorax proteins methylate a lysine as well, but at

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Monday, August 24, 2015

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