Arsenic and our fate
Sergio Dani, a scientist at Brazil's Medawar Institute for Medical and Environmental Research, explores the fate of human societies in a paper to be published in the journal Medical Hypotheses. He proposes that “gold, coal and oil account for not only the fate of human societies but also for the fate of mankind through the bodily accumulation of anthropogenic arsenic, an invisible weapon of mass extinction and evolutionary change.” He explains that the exploitation of these natural resources is causing the rise of arsenic concentrations in the biosphere and “humans are among the least arsenic-resistant organisms.”
Source: MSNBC.com
Cough, please
“Software being developed by American and Australian scientists will hopefully allow patients simply to cough into their [mobile] phone,” Tom Chivers reports in The Daily Telegraph, “and it will tell them whether they have cold, flu, pneumonia or other respiratory diseases. … Health workers can distinguish the different kinds of cough by sound. Now, it is claimed, the new software will do the same, and will save patients a trip to the [doctor's office] – or tell them when they are at risk of serious illness. … Healthy, voluntary coughs tend to be slightly louder than the involuntary coughs of an ill person. And after the initial explosive sound, there are subtleties like vibrating vocal cords and mucous that reveal information about what is happening in the patient's respiratory system.”
Appearances count
Paul Joegriner of Silver Spring, Md., “hasn't worked since March, 2008, when he was laid off from his $200,000 [U.S.]-a-year job as chief executive officer of a small bank. But you wouldn't know it by appearances,” Mary Pilon writes in The Wall Street Journal. “His wife, Marzena, shuttles their two young children to private school every morning. The family recently vacationed in Virginia Beach, Va., and likes to dine on porterhouse steaks. Since losing his job, Mr. Joegriner, 44 years old, has had several offers. He's turned each down in hopes of landing a position comparable to what he held before. … Mr. Joegriner is a member of what might be called the severance economy – unemployed Americans who use severance pay and savings to maintain their lifestyles. Many lost their jobs in 2007 and 2008, and thought they'd soon find work. Now, they're getting desperate.”
Middle-class theft
Shoplifting has surged to record levels in Britain, fuelled by the recession, according to a study. “The value of retail goods stolen rose 20 per cent to £4.88-billion [$8.5-billion] in the year to June, the Centre for Retail Research said. The U.K. had the highest amount in value of shoplifted goods in Europe and was third behind the U.S. and Japan globally, data from 1,069 retailers suggests. Checkpoint Systems, which commissioned the report, said there had been a rise in ‘middle-class' shoplifters. It said more people were now stealing goods simply to maintain their standard of living rather than to sell them on.”
Source: BBC News
A money lesson
In Wayne County, N.C., school administrators have squelched a middle school's cash-for-grades fundraiser, Associated Press reports. Rosewood Middle School in Goldsboro was offering 20 test points to students in exchange for a $20 donation. Rosewood principal Susie Shepherd said she had approved the idea after a parent advisory council presented it as a way to raise money. She rejected the view that extra points on two tests could make a difference in a final grade. Administrators said any donated money will be returned.
A computer lesson
“They are some of the most memorable and stirring words of the 20th century, but Churchill's speech exhorting the British to ‘fight on the beaches' would fail if submitted as a school essay and subjected to a proposed computerized marking system,” Nicola Woolcock reports in The Times of London. “The wartime leader had a style that was too repetitive, according to the computer being tested for the online marking of school qualifications. It rated Churchill as below average … Other authors, including Ernest Hemingway and William Golding, were also dismissed by the computer as not being up to standard in the American equivalent of an A-level English exam.” Graham Herbert, deputy head of Britain's Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors, said: “The computer was limited in its scope. It couldn't cope with metaphor and didn't understand the purpose of the speech.” He noted that some American children had “cracked the code” by learning to write in a style the computer recognized. This was called “schmoozing the computer.”
Thought du jour
“When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college – that my job was teaching people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, ‘You mean they forget?'”
– Howard Ikemoto
