Eideard

Welcome to Otter Creek

Hawaii prison officials said Tuesday that all of the state’s 168 female inmates at a privately run Kentucky prison will be removed by the end of September because of charges of sexual abuse by guards…

Otter Creek is run by the Corrections Corporation of America and is one of a spate of private, for-profit prisons, mainly in the South, that have been the focus of investigations over issues like abusive conditions and wrongful deaths. Because Eastern Kentucky is one of the poorest rural regions in the country, the prison was welcomed by local residents desperate for jobs.

Hawaii sent inmates to Kentucky to save money. Housing an inmate at the Women’s Community Correctional Center in Kailua, Hawaii, costs $86 a day, compared with $58.46 a day at the Kentucky prison, not including air travel.

Hawaii investigators found that at least five corrections officials at the prison, including a chaplain, had been charged with having sex with inmates in the last three years, and four were convicted. Three rape cases involving guards and Hawaii inmates were recently turned over to law enforcement authorities. The Kentucky State Police said another sexual assault case would go to a grand jury soon.

How to go, folks! You saved the state of Hawaii how much money?

Of course, that was before the lawsuits that should be rolling down the surf.

If I were to tell you that Apple’s app economy was worth more than $2.4 billion a year, you would laugh hysterically, shake your head and walk out of the room, yes? Surf on over to some other web site? But here I am telling you exactly that!

According to mobile advertising startup AdMob, there are some $200 million worth of applications sold in Apple’s iPhone store every month, or about $2.4 billion a year.

Just to put that in context, Apple says about 1.5 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store. In comparison, the Android marketplace brings in about $5 million a month or on a run rate to do $60 million in a year, AdMob says…

* Each month, Android and iPhone users download approximately 10 new apps, while iPod touch owners download an average of 18…

* Nearly 50 percent of iPhone users and 40 percent of iPod touch users buy at least one app every month vs. 19 percent of Android-based phone owners…

The biggest takeaway from this data: People are happy spending money on apps for their smartphones, especially after they’ve had a chance to try them for free.

I don’t post much Geek Industry Business reporting. Sites like Om’s already do a terrific job and have a ton of traffic.

Har!

Time Warner Cable has signed up at least seven large media companies for a test that will offer television programs on the Internet to paying subscribers…says the Wall Street Journal.

Networks participating in the trial are expected to include General Electric Co’s Syfy, Time Warner Inc’s TNT, Cablevision Systems Corp’s AMC and the British Broadcasting Corp’s BBC America, people told the paper.

Other companies that could be involved in the trial are CBS Corp, Discovery Communications Inc and Viacom Inc, the paper cited some of the people as saying.

The te$t involve$ TV show$ being made available on the Web to a limited number of home$, the paper said.

All right. Who went and told them about The Internet?

Researchers working with Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have found that post-traumatic stress disorder, the current most common mental disorder among veterans returning from service in the Middle East, is associated with an increased risk for thoughts of suicide.

Results of the study indicated that veterans who screened positive for PTSD were four times more likely to report suicide-related thoughts relative to veterans without the disorder.

The research, published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, establishes PTSD as a risk factor for thoughts of suicide in Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. This holds true, even after accounting for other psychiatric disorder diagnoses, such as substance abuse and depression. Veterans who screened positive for PTSD and two or more comorbid mental disorders were significantly more likely to experience thoughts of suicide relative to veterans with PTSD alone.

As many as forty-six percent of veterans in the study experienced suicidal thoughts or behaviors in the month prior to seeking care, and of those veterans, three percent reported an actual attempt within four months prior to seeking the care. Suicide-related thoughts and behaviors discovered in a returning veteran who has been diagnosed with PTSD, especially in the presence of other mental disorders, may suggest an increased risk for suicide.

I don’t know if you ever “get over” PTSD. My closest friend for most of my life provided his own therapy by becoming an activist against war. He was the most decorated soldier in WW2 from our home state. Had 16 months to think about it in a VA hospital after he came home on a stretcher.

I knew better.

Daylife/AP Photo use by permission

Few people hold a more uncomfortable place at the health care debate’s intersection between nuanced policy and cable-ready political rhetoric than President Obama’s special health care adviser, Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel.

Largely quoting his past writings out of context this summer, Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, labeled Dr. Emanuel a “deadly doctor” who believes health care should be “reserved for the nondisabled” — a false assertion that Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, repeated on the House floor…

In fact, Dr. Emanuel has written more than a million words on health care, some of which form the philosophical underpinnings of the Obama administration plan and some of which have enough free-market elements to win grudging respect from some conservative opponents.

The debate over Dr. Emanuel shows how subtle philosophical arguments that have long bedeviled bioethicists are being condensed, oversimplified and distorted in the griddle-hot health care debate. His writings grapple with some of the most complex issues of medical ethics, like who should get the kidney transplant, the younger patient or the one who is older and sicker..?

“He is a serious oncologist and bioethicist, so the kinds of charges that have been raised against him are particularly inappropriate,” said Gail R. Wilensky, a Republican and senior White House health care adviser under the first President George Bush who criticizes Mr. Obama’s plan as being too reliant on the federal government…

Dr. Emanuel’s argument — that young adults should take priority in vying for limited health resources because they will get more years of life from them — is a fairly mainstream if unpleasant approach to a problem with only bad choices, ethicists and doctors of varying persuasions say.

“These kinds of dilemmas go on every day in clinical practice,” said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a physician and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group. “There’s a very big leap to say his contemplations about how doctors contend with these issues extends to saying he believes government should take on these issues.”

RTFA. Decide your own opinion based on fact rather than the distortions and lies still part of right-wing Republican culture.

I include the proviso “right-wing” though, frankly, I believe that’s all that remains under the populist pup tent.

Planting time in a Buenos Aires backyard
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The supreme court in Argentina has ruled that it is unconstitutional to punish people for using marijuana for personal consumption. The decision follows a case of five young men who were arrested with a few marijuana cigarettes in their pockets.

The Argentine court ruled that: “Each adult is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state.”

Supreme Court President Ricardo Lorenzetti said private behaviour was legal, “as long as it doesn’t constitute clear danger. The state cannot establish morality“…

Argentina’s move follows rulings by several other countries across the region, including Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia.

The aim of such moves is to enable police to focus their efforts on the big criminals in the drugs trade rather than dealing with petty cases, says our correspondent, Candace Piette.

But it also marks a shift a dramatic regional shift to the decades-old US-backed policy of running repressive military-style wars on the drug trade, she adds.

Another chunk of South America makes a political and legal decision – independent of the “morality” of the United States.

One of India’s leading environmental crusaders is planning to launch the country’s first Green party.

After his success in forcing old and polluting vehicles off the streets of the eastern city of Calcutta, Subhas Dutta says the time has come to set up a political party to protect the country’s environment.

“Many like me who fight for environment protection have realised we need a full fledged party in India. Our movements are localised and it is not enough to operate as pressure groups or just fight legal battles,” Mr Dutta says.

He is due to visit the United Kingdom next month to meet the leaders of the Green Party there.

“We are also in touch with the Green Party of Germany, we want to understand how the Green parties operate in Europe before we launch a Green Party of India…

Mr Dutta says he was also in touch with leading environmentalists in India. “This networking takes some time so that we have a truly national party, but we are more or less through with this,” he said.

The task of building a truly national movement in India has to be a daunting task regardless of the issue or issues. The land is so large and diverse, the divisions within any sector or region are divided by enormous measures of education and income, culture and history.

I wish him well.

The foods that we share, the meals that bind us together, have a code that we all implicitly understand. We know that the starter precedes the main course, followed by the dessert. We know that a wedding demands a cake-shaped centrepiece – whether crafted from dried fruit, butter and sugar, a heap of profiteroles, or layers of jellies. We know that a bowl of chicken soup, prepared for us when we are ill, is offered with a hope for better health.

But beyond these meals lies a secret realm of food, a universe of individual, often bizarre dishes, eaten by the light of the fridge, or tucked up in bed, or pacing back and forth across the kitchen. These are the meals that we eat when no one else is watching – meals that shrug off all convention and compromise. Now, in a new book by Deborah Madison and Patrick McFarlin, What We Eat When We Eat Alone, these secret, often sensationally strange meals, are made public.

The book has its origins in some trips that Madison, a cookbook writer, and McFarlin, her painter husband, took with a group of food experts. The party had been brought together for a thinktank project and, as an icebreaker, McFarlin started asking what they ate in private. “Some answers were funny,” says Madison. “Some were strange…”

The couple continued the project together, and their discoveries were often outlandish. There was the person who enjoyed eating bread soaked in margarita mix; one who fried up leftover spaghetti with Swiss cheese; another who poured sardine juice over cottage cheese; another who took a slice of bread, flattened it, covered it with butter and sugar, then froze it briefly. Apparently this tastes a bit like a cookie. Which raises the question – why not just buy a cookie? And wouldn’t that margarita mix have tasted better as a drink..?

RTFA. A few bits good for a chuckle – especially when you recognize yourself.

That may include a fried egg and provolone sandwich with mayonnaise and strawberry jam.

Faced with the threat of a booming population going hungry in a warming world, there is quiet confidence among many researchers that technology can provide solutions, reports the BBC’s environment correspondent, David Shukman.

The warning of a “perfect storm” is partly intended to focus attention on the positive role that science can play – and to galvanise politicians to support it.

There is a glimpse of that potential at the Rothamsted plant research centre in Hertfordshire, where 160 years of experiments have repeatedly boosted the key feature of crops – their yield.

BBC correspondents explore the forecast by UK chief scientist John Beddington, of a “perfect storm” of food, water and energy shortages in 2030. They also consider what scientists and members of the public can do to help avert a crisis…

Read the rest of this entry »

This fire resulted from lousy connection of an aftermarket Li-ion battery

The world’s largest pilots union said Tuesday it wants bulk shipments of lithium batteries and products containing the batteries immediately banned from passenger and cargo planes because they can start a fire.

The Federal Aviation Administration said it is not prepared to take emergency action on the issue.

In seeking a federal ban, the Air Line Pilots Association pointed to three incidents since June in which lithium battery shipments apparently caused fires aboard U.S. planes…

The union emphasized that it is not seeking a ban on passengers carrying electronic devices containing lithium batteries onto planes, such as laptop computers, cell phones, and cameras. Instead, the union’s concern is with cargo containing multiple batteries, either loose or inside products.

He noted that Douglass told a House panel this spring that the safety administration is working on new regulations for the shipment of lithium batteries. However, he said that if the government doesn’t act quickly, the union will ask Congress to step in.

Depending upon how votes the issue is worth, Congress may complete hearings on the topic in time for the 2012 elections.

George Kerchner, executive director of The Rechargeable Battery Association, said…the shipments cited by the pilots union probably didn’t conform to existing hazardous materials regulations and suggested the Transportation Department step up enforcement of those regulations.

Enforce regulations? Good grief.