Eideard

 
The Brazilian Rogério Ceni converted a free kick to become the first goalkeeper to score 100 career goals, helping São Paulo defeat their arch-rivals Corinthians 2-1 in the process.

Thanks to The Fiver

When Jacob Barnett first learned about the Schrödinger equation for quantum mechanics, he could hardly contain himself. For three straight days, his little brain buzzed with mathematical functions.

From within his 12-year-old, mildly autistic mind, there gradually flowed long strings of pluses, minuses, funky letters and upside-down triangles — a tapestry of complicated symbols that few can understand.

He grabbed his pencil and filled every sheet of paper before grabbing a marker and filling up a dry erase board that hangs in his bedroom. With a single-minded obsession, he kept on, eventually marking up every window in the home…

Entirely normal for Jacob, a child prodigy who used to crunch his cereal while calculating the volume of the cereal box in his head…

Elementary school couldn’t keep Jacob interested. And courses at IUPUI have only served to awaken a sleeping giant.

Just a few weeks shy of his 13th birthday, Jake, as he’s often called, is starting to move beyond the level of what his professors can teach.

In fact, his work is so strong and his ideas so original that he’s being courted by a top-notch East Coast research center. IUPUI is interested in him moving from the classroom into a funded researcher’s position.

“We have told him that after this semester . . . enough of the book work. You are here to do some science,” said IUPUI physics Professor John Ross, who vows to help find some grant funding to support Jake and his work…

This is not what Jake’s parents expected from a child whose first few years were spent in silence.

“Oh my gosh, when he was 2, my fear was that he would never be in our world at all,” said Kristine Barnett, 36, Jake’s mother.

“He would not talk to anyone. He would not even look at us.”

RTFA. A delight. Not just for the tale of young Jacob; but, how his parents adapted and learned, experimented with freeing his latent abilities – sometimes regardless of the directions suggested by professional help more inclined to find the right box to put him into.

Great family story from all sides. And a young person I look forward to seeing in a larger picture someday.

Thanks, Mr. Fusion

Willie Nelson’s latest pot bust could be settled for a song and $100, a west Texas prosecutor said.

“You can bet your ass I’m not going to be mean to Willie Nelson,” Hudspeth County Attorney C.R. “Kit” Bramblett told CNN Monday, confirming his plea recommendation.

Nelson, a treasured icon in the Lone Star state, was charged with marijuana possession after U.S. Border Patrol agents searched his tour bus on a Hudspeth County, Texas highway near the U.S.-Mexico border, about 85 miles southeast of El Paso last November.

No court date is set, but Bramblett said he would recommend a plea deal for Nelson that includes the legendary country artist singing his 1975 hit “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” The courtroom performance would serve as his community service, he said…

Pot smoking on Nelson’s bus is no secret, Bramblett said. “They got a song out that says ‘I’ll Never Smoke Weed With Willie Again…’”

The final decision, though, will be in the hands of Judge Becky Dean-Walker, who seemed irritated by media reports Monday concerning the proposed plea deal. [She obviously thinks the War on Drugs means more to the world than Willie]…

Bramblett joked that while Nelson was initially charged with possession of six ounces of pot, which would put the case out of his jurisdiction, he and the sheriff smoked or threw out enough to bring it into his jurisdiction.

I have to wonder if the plea bargain would have been the same for another darker-colored Texan – like, say, Lightning Hopkins?

Xie Sanxiu, a poor migrant textile worker, was showered with money and sympathy after internet users heard how she had been forced to withdraw her daughter from Guangzhou Children’s Hospital because of a lack of funds.

The case became an online cause célèbre after a chat room user calling himself “Rich Son of Guangzhou” taunted the desperate mother, offering to pay her money for her daughter’s treatment for retinoblastoma, a form of eye-cancer, if she would humiliate herself…

“If you can kneel and crawl on the road for a thousand metres, I will immediately give you 20,000 yuan.”

Mrs Xie performed the shaming walk, with her sick child wrapped in a blanket in her arms, telling local journalists: “Regardless of wind or rain, I must go. As long as I can save my baby, I’m willing to do anything. I hope ‘Rich Son of Guangzhou’ you will honour your promise…”

Sympathy turned to anger, however, after investigations showed that “Rich Son of Guangzhou” didn’t really exist, but was an alias of Shi Jinquan, a content moderator for Tianya.cn, one of China’s best-known discussion forums that had hosted the original plea for help from Mrs Xie.

Mr Shi was fired from his job for the subterfuge, after it emerged that he had coached Mrs Xie in how to reply to questions from media and public, and even advised her to start her ‘walk’ from outside the offices of the leading local newspaper.

The story has sparked an ethical debate in China about whether the online moderator’s noble ends justified his duplicitous means, but Mr Shi remained unrepentant. “You can say the means were not noble and people are angry, but I’m only trying to help,” he told state broadcaster China Central Television.

Mrs Xie said that she had gone along with the plan out of desperation after managing to raise just 400 yuan (£38) after months of begging for online donations…”I’m not a great mother, as the media reported. I’m just a poor mother, a mother who told lies. I was just trying to save my daughter.

The public reaction veered from anger at the deception, to equal anger that a mother should be driven to such lengths to get treatment for her child.

Most recent reports from China describe continued and growing support for Mrs. Xie – and contempt for Shi.

I think he should come to the West and get a job on Fleet Street or Madison Avenue. Lying, misleading is an honorable profession among the dishonorable.

The opposition Socialist Party comprehensively won French local elections on Sunday as the far-right National Front surged, between them pressuring President Nicolas Sarkozy a year before he faces the electorate.

With most votes counted in the second round of polls to elect ‘cantonal’ councils in half of France, the left had 49.9 percent against 35.9 percent for the ruling conservative UMP, according to Interior Ministry figures.

Socialist Party head Martine Aubry said she welcomed the results “with humility” given the low turnout and a strong showing for the anti-immigrant National Front.

The National Front, which has surged in opinion polls under new leader Marine Le Pen, scored 11 percent even though it put up candidates in only a minority of departments. In some areas it scored as much as 40 percent.

Despite a low turnout of around 46 percent, the polls will be seen as the last big test of sentiment before the April 2012 election, set to pit the unpopular Sarkozy against left-wing rivals growing in strength and a surging far right…

The prospect that Sarkozy might not even make it into a runoff has caused alarm and disarray in the UMP.

Anyone think the “ethics of Sarkozy’s UMP will prove different from their kissing cousins in the Republican Party? Their response to bigotry and racism will be to embrace the National Front with open arms.

Hugs and kisses all round for the 19th Century.

Within months after the Bush administration relaxed limits on domestic-intelligence gathering in late 2008, the F.B.I. assessed thousands of people and groups in search of evidence that they might be criminals or terrorists, a newly disclosed Justice Department document shows.

In a vast majority of those cases, F.B.I. agents did not find suspicious information that could justify more intensive investigations. The New York Times obtained the data, which the F.B.I. had tried to keep secret, after filing a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act…

The statistics shed new light on the F.B.I.’s activities in the post-Sept. 11 era, as the bureau’s focus has shifted from investigating crimes to trying to detect and disrupt potential criminal and terrorist activity.

It is not clear, though, whether any charges resulted from the inquiries. And because the F.B.I. provided no comparable figures for a period before the rules change, it is impossible to determine whether the numbers represent an increase in investigations.

Still, privacy advocates contend that the large number of assessments that turned up no sign of wrongdoing show that the rules adopted by the Bush administration have created too low a threshold for starting an inquiry. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has left those rules in place.

Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that the volume of fruitless assessments showed that the Obama administration should tighten the rules.

“These are investigations against completely innocent people that are now bound up within the F.B.I.’s intelligence system forever,” Mr. German said. “Is that the best way for the F.B.I. to use its resources?”

RTFA for the sort of details we have come to expect from our government – whether that government is Republican or Democrat. Padding out the spy bureaucracy may enable bigger budgets; but, I doubt if there is any bona fide proof of increased security or safety.

If anything, diminishing capacity of terror organizations around the world is doing more to protect American citizens than FBI agents responding to anonymous phone calls about someone secretly wearing a turban in his bathroom at night.

Swedish authorities say they are looking for relatives of a man who might have lain dead in his apartment for over three years with no one noticing.

The elderly man’s body was found when a broadband technician showed up to do an installation in the apartment building, the Swedish news agency TT reported.

It wasn’t known when the man died, but investigators said food in his refrigerator was dated early 2008. His advanced degree of decomposition indicated he had been dead about three years, investigators said…

The man’s pension was automatically deposited in his account and his bills were paid by automatic debits.

“It is very tragic,” said Asa Johannesson of the Flemingsberg police…

“He lived alone, but there are relatives. But they obviously had no contact,” Johannesson said.

Police said there was no indication of a crime having been committed.

My kind of family. A hermit – and people who don’t get along with hermits.

The managers of Madonna’s charity in Malawi have been ousted after they squandered $3.8m on a school that will never be built…The damning audit came as Raising Malawi confirmed that it has scrapped plans for a $15m elite academy for girls.

The charity’s executive director, Philippe van den Bossche, the partner of Madonna’s former personal trainer, left in October after criticism of his management style and spending at the school, according to the New York Times.

“These included what auditors described as outlandish expenditures on salaries, cars, office space and golf course membership, free housing and a car and driver for the school’s director,” the paper said.

In a shakeup at the charity, the board of directors has been removed and replaced by a caretaker board that includes the 52-year-old singer and her manager, it added.

The abandonment of the Raising Malawi Academy for Girls – backed by prominent Hollywood figures and Madonna’s associates in Kabbalah – was announced in January. This caught the Malawian government by surprise and caused anger among villagers who had surrendered their homes to make way for a 117-acre construction site near the capital, Lilongwe…

Trevor Neilson, a founder of the group, said $3.8m had been spent on the unbuilt school, much of it on architects, salaries and two cars for employees who had not yet been appointed.

“Despite [this outlay], the project has not broken ground, there was no title to the land and there was, overall, a startling lack of accountability on the part of the management team in Malawi and the management team in the United States,” he was quoted as saying.

RTFA for a cautionary tale about trophy charities and celebrities who seem to need more attention than the “beneficiaries” of the charity.

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X-ray shows tiny particles of tungsten in breast tissue

Women participating in a study of patients with breast cancer have been inadvertently left with hundreds of tiny particles of the heavy metal tungsten in their breast tissue and chest muscles. The particles came from a device used during surgery. The device has since been recalled.

It is not known if the metal is dangerous to health because relatively little research has been done on its long-term effects in the body. But it shows up on mammograms, and may make them difficult to read, an especially troubling effect for women who have already had breast cancer and worry about recurrences. (The particles resemble calcium deposits, which can indicate cancer.)

About 30 women have been affected, according to the manufacturer of the device that caused the problem, the Axxent FlexiShield Mini. The women are in a quandary. At least one, fearing that the tungsten could cause cancer or another illness, is trying to decide whether to get rid of the particles by having her breast and its underlying tissue removed in a radical and disfiguring operation…

The episode casts doubt on the safeguards for people who participate in medical research and on the Food and Drug Administration’s ability to protect the public from flawed medical devices…

Karen Riley, FDA spokeswoman, said the 510(k) process was used to avoid “reinventing the wheel” for products that were essentially the same as others that had already passed muster with the agency.

RTFA as a cautionary tale. An accepted procedure for passing medical devices as safe – and has a fine track record – failed a number of women. They are left with years of wondering just what medical issues may follow the tests of the Flexishield.

Sebastian Vettel, the reigning world champion in Formula One wins the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne. Not a bad start to the new season.