Eideard

In a survey of hair professionals, some reported that they look at customers’ face, scalp and neck for suspicious skin lesions, according to a report in the October issue of Archives of Dermatology…

Elizabeth E. Bailey, M.D…and colleagues conducted a survey of 304 hair professionals from 17 salons in a single chain in the greater Houston area…which included questions on the frequency with which they observed their customers’ scalp, neck and face for abnormal moles during the previous month.

Of the 203 respondents, 69 percent reported being “somewhat” or “very likely” to give customers a skin cancer information pamphlet during an appointment; 49 percent reported they were “very” or “extremely” interested in participating in a skin cancer education program; and 25 percent share general health information with customers “often” or “always.” Most respondents (71.9 percent) also reported they had not received a course on skin cancer but a modest number were educating their customers and observing for suspicious lesions.

When answering questions about observing suspicious skin lesions during the previous month, 73 participants (37.1 percent) reported looking at more than 50 percent of their customers’ scalps; 56 (28.8 percent) reported looking at more than 50 percent of their customers’ necks; and 30 (15.3 percent) reported looking at more than 50 percent of their customers’ faces. Additionally, 58 percent of participants reported they had recommended at least once that a customer see a health professional for an abnormal mole…

“In conclusion, this study provides evidence that hair professionals are currently acting as lay health advisors for skin cancer detection and prevention and are willing to become more involved in skin cancer education in the salon,” the authors write.

“Future research should focus on creating a program that provides hair professionals with expert training and effective health communication tools to become confident and skilled lay skin cancer educators.”

Many medical professionals don’t realize the benefits of adding those few seconds of examination for a problem which only continues to increase in a population which spends more and more time outdoors. I may holler about sedentary Americans; but, a significant and expanding minority is getting off their rusty dusty and exercising outdoors in some manner or other. Michelle Obama’s advocacy for children is starting to have an effect.

It became clear his detection rate exceeded “normal” stats and he was among the first to press for expanded exams.

The worst defeat for Manchester United since the founding of the English Premier League in 1992. Listless, mediocre defending, few shots taken at goal much less into the goal – while Manchester City played a professional, workmanlike match throughout.

There will be plenty of professional coverage of the match by those writers paid to do so. I recommend the GUARDIAN UNLIMITED for that task. The result was just so stunning I had to make mention, had to record this at my personal blog.

Sir Alex’ strategy can’t sufficiently motivate a team that doesn’t reach its own standard. Roberto Mancini can take credit for bringing together an international aggregation into a real team.

Mario Balotelli [center] celebrates with teammates after scoring the first goal of the match
Daylife/Reuters Picture used by permission

Humans were hunting large mammals in North America about 800 years earlier than previously thought, new analysis of a controversial mastodon specimen – with what appears to be a spear tip in its rib – seems to confirm.

The find suggests humans were hunting mastodons using tools made from bone about a thousand years before the start of the “Clovis culture”, reputedly the first human culture in North America. Other evidence points to mammoth hunting using stone tools around this time, but the notion of pre-Clovis hunting has remained highly controversial.

The mastodon was found in 1977 by a farmer called Emanuel Manis. He contacted archaeologist Carl Gustafson, who excavated the skeleton and noticed a pointed object embedded in its rib. Gustafson took a fuzzy x-ray and interpreted the object as a projectile point made of bone or antler.

By dating organic matter around the fossil, he estimated that it was about 14,000 years old. Other archaeologists challenged Gustafson’s dates and his interpretation of the fragment as a man-made point.

Decades later Professor Michael Waters from Texas A&M University contacted him about re-examining the specimen using modern technology. His analysis was published on Thursday in the journal Science…

Waters analysed collagen protein from the mastodon’s rib and tusks to confirm that the animal died about 13,800 years ago, almost exactly as Gustafson predicted…

Two other sites in Wisconsin appear to show people were hunting woolly mammoths and using stone tools between 14,200 and 14,800 years ago. The Manis specimen suggests they also hunted mastodons and used bone tools.

Together, the three sites provide strong evidence for pre-Clovis hunting. “They’re incontrovertible,” said Waters. “Clearly, people were hunting mammoths and mastodons again and again, playing a part in their ultimate demise…”

Waters does not credit alternative hypotheses. “Ludicrous what-if stories are being made up to explain something people don’t want to believe,” he said. “We took the specimen to a bone pathologist, showed him the CT scans, and asked if there was any way it could be an internal injury. He said absolutely not…”

Archaeologists can be as inflexible as politicians. Facts transmute into ideology and even when the ideology is disproven by new facts, advancements in analyzing evidence, those who are committed to their original understanding find it difficult to move on.

Thanks, Ursarodinia

More than 200 Indian girls whose names mean “unwanted” in Hindi have been given a fresh start at a mass renaming ceremony in Maharashtra state. They had been called Nakusha by parents who would have preferred sons.

Hundreds of people committed to fighting gender discrimination attended the ceremony in rural Satara district.

Statistics show a continuing preference for boys in India. The gender imbalance has widened every decade since independence in 1947…

Female foeticide remains common in India, although sex-selective abortion based on ultrasound scans is illegal. Sons are still seen by many as wage-earners for the future.

Satara, where the ceremony took place, has one of the country’s lowest female populations, with 880 females to every 1,000 males, says the BBC’s Zubair Ahmed…

The 285 girls at the ceremony ranged in age from one to 20…

There is a comparable constant in all theocratic societies. Discrimination, social division along parameters which haven’t a damned thing to do with reality, potential character. Foolishness.

When Teresa Culpepper called Atlanta police to report her car stolen, the last thing she expected was to land behind bars for 53 days in a case of mistaken identity.

Mistaken for a woman of the same first name who was wanted on a battery charge, Culpepper is now trying to return her life to normal after the ordeal cost her home and her car. Her attorney said none of it would have happened if police had followed basic procedures…

Culpepper’s saga started August 21, whe she called police to report that her car was stolen, attorney Ashleigh Merchant said. An officer took information from her, but never filed a report. Shortly after, police dispatchers called out a bulletin, alerting officers to look out for a woman named Teresa Gilbert who was suspected of aggravated battery.

Police returned to Culpepper’s house and arrested her. And the differences between the two women didn’t stop at their last names, Merchant said.

“The birth dates didn’t match. The addresses were different. The description didn’t match. Other than the name Teresa, nothing matched,” Merchant said. “All they had to do was show a picture of Teresa to the victim and none of this would have happened…”

Weeks later…the battery victim came forward in court and cleared Culpepper’s name. Released on October 12, Culpepper found herself homeless and her car in the impound lot.

“After investigating this matter thoroughly and discussing it carefully with the Atlanta Police Department, we have concluded that the wrong person was arrested,” District Attorney Paul Howard Jr. said in a written statement to CNN affiliate WSB. “The fact that both of the women in question had the same first name and lived in the same police beat led the officer to believe Ms. Culpepper was responsible … Unfortunately, the officer never presented a picture or any form of identification to the victim.”

Culpepper is seeking legal action against the Atlanta police, Merchant said.

“It is scary, really,” Merchant said. “Because it is not like Teresa is an uncommon name. It makes you feel that it could have happened to anybody.”

Well, at least anybody who is Black and named Teresa – in Atlanta.

Infant moose, born on the front lawn, in downtown Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada

Thanks, Cinaedh

Last month President Obama finally unveiled a serious economic stimulus plan — far short of what I’d like to see, but a step in the right direction. Republicans, predictably, have blocked it. But the new plan, combined with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, seems to have shifted the national conversation. We are, suddenly, focused on what we should have been talking about all along: jobs.

So what is the G.O.P. jobs plan? The answer, in large part, is to allow more pollution. So what you need to know is that weakening environmental regulations would do little to create jobs and would make us both poorer and sicker…

Do you really need that explained to you? Are you as delusional as the Republican Party?

The important thing to understand is that the case for pollution control isn’t based on some kind of aesthetic distaste for industrial society. Pollution does real, measurable damage, especially to human health.

And policy makers should take that damage into account. We need more politicians like the courageous governor who supported environmental controls on a coal-fired power plant, despite warnings that the plant might be closed, because “I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people.”

Actually, that was Mitt Romney, back in 2003 — the same politician who now demands that we use more coal.

How big are these damages? A new study by researchers at Yale and Middlebury College brings together data from a variety of sources to put a dollar value on the environmental damage various industries inflict. The estimates are far from comprehensive, since they only consider air pollution…

For it turns out that there are a number of industries inflicting environmental damage that’s worth more than the sum of the wages they pay and the profits they earn — which means, in effect, that they destroy value rather than create it. High on the list, by the way, is coal-fired electricity generation, which the Mitt Romney-that-was used to stand up to.

As the study’s authors say, finding that an industry inflicts large environmental damage compared with its apparent economic return doesn’t necessarily mean that the industry should be shut down. What it means, instead, is that “the regulated levels of emissions from the industry are too high.” That is, environmental regulations aren’t strict enough.

Republicans ignore studies like that, the overwhelming body of industrial environment studies, BTW. Why start letting facts get in the way of profits for their largest contributors? Mining, power production industries are among the largest contributors to congressional Republicans. Simple-minded politicians who live the country-club life.

Their families, their kids are OK, Jack. The rest of us can go scramble for clean air and clean water whether we can afford it or not. There hasn’t been a Republican in office that I can recall fighting against pollution since that era before Ronald Reagan. Someone like that certainly wouldn’t be supported by today’s RNC or the KoolAid Party.

Researchers at Georgia Tech have worked up a proof-of-concept demonstration of using an iPhone 4′s accelerometer as a keylogger. After setting the iPhone near a computer keyboard, the device’s built-in accelerometer and gyroscope were able to decipher entire sentences “with up to 80 percent accuracy…”

Apps don’t currently ask for users’ permission for access to accelerometers and gyroscopes, which raises the remote possibility of iPhones or other accelerometer-equipped devices spying on keyboard inputs without users being the wiser…

The keylogger software works by detecting key pairs — detecting individual key presses turned out to be too difficult and unreliable — and by comparing paired accelerometer events against a built-in dictionary, the software can decipher keypresses with startling accuracy. Our own Mike Rose has coined “thump phreaking” to refer to this spying technique (after Van Eck phreaking, which uses CRT or LCD emissions to reconstruct the screen image) and it’s as apt a term as any for what this software does.

It must be mentioned that this is only a proof of concept and not an actual attack that’s out in the wild. The researchers themselves admit that this keylogger was difficult to build, and it’s easily defeated by something as simple as moving your iPhone more than three inches away from the keyboard.

OTOH, proof of concept almost inevitably leads to some demented script-kiddy trying it out on an unsuspecting innocent.

Boy Scouts of America leaders knew for years about incidents involving a Canadian pedophile who preyed on boys in the U.S. but failed to stop him as he moved back to Canada, where he continued his abuse. The organization sometimes even helped him go undetected by authorities, an investigation by CBC-TV’s The Fifth Estate and the Los Angeles Times has found.

Scouts Canada learned of his inappropriate behaviour in the 1980s and kicked him out, but nearly a decade passed before police charged him with crimes.

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Richard Turley was involved with the Scouts across California and British Columbia, molesting at least eight scouts…

When Turley was shown the 1979 confidential U.S. file created by the Scouts on him, however, he shook his head in amazement that officials had not contacted police…

“That probably would have put a stop to me years and years ago,” said Turley in an interview at an Alberta motel where he works as a manager and handyman…And yet I went back to the Scouts again and again as a leader and offended against the boys until they came forward…”

It was not until 1995 that police began their first large-scale investigation into Turley – 16 years after the Boy Scouts of America created a “perversion file” and nearly a decade after its Canadian counterpart put him on their “confidential list.”

In the end, it was not the Scouts organization that informed Saanich, B.C., police, but rather a suspicious girlfriend.

Turley was convicted in 1996 of sexually abusing four boys, three of whom were scouts, but later admitted to having at least a dozen victims…

Seattle-based lawyer Tim Kosnoff, who has viewed the U.S. “perversion files,” says historically the U.S. Boy Scouts “routinely” chose not to notify police when aware of child molesters, instead noting them in their own secret files.

The scouts in the US and Canada aren’t alone in this foolishness, of course. The leadership of any organization – civic, religious, sport or social – that decides that uncomfortable publicity might inhibit intake to their fiefdom and therefore they should keep crap behavior like this confidential is not just absurd, it’s criminal.

The victims of sexual predators haven’t much of a stake in the reputations of these groups. Just their own handicapped lives. RTFA for the long career of a pedophile who was barely slowed by lax officialdom even after being convicted of kidnapping. This may be old history. Doesn’t mean that folks don’t need to be reminded.

C’mon out to Santa Fe – lots of posh houses still unsold

American consumers and the federal government haven’t been able to bail out the sinking U.S. real estate market. Now wealthy Chinese, Canadians and other foreign buyers could get their chance.

Two U.S. senators have introduced a bill that would allow foreigners who spend at least $500,000 on residential property to obtain visas allowing them to live in the United States. The plan could be a boon to California, which has become a popular real estate market for foreigners, particularly those from China.

Nationwide, residential sales to foreigners and recent immigrants totaled $82 billion in the 12-month period ended March 31, up from $66 billion the previous year…California accounted for 12% of those sales, second only to Florida…

The program would come with several restrictions.

The purchase would have to be in cash, with no mortgage or home equity loan allowed. And the property would have to be bought for more than its most recent appraised value, Senator Schumer said.

The buyer would have to live in the home for at least 180 days each year, which would require paying U.S. income taxes on any foreign earnings. Buyers would no longer be eligible for the temporary visa if the property were sold…

The Visa Improvements to Stimulate International Tourism to the United States of America Act, or VISIT-USA Act, aims to do that by also making several other changes to visa policies.

Among them are allowing Chinese tourists to receive a five-year visa that permits multiple visits. They now must apply for a new visa every year. Canadians would be allowed to stay in the U.S. for more than 180 days without having to obtain a visa…

Senator Lee described it as a free-market way to boost demand in the real estate market after “big-government programs have failed to work.”

I’m not certain if Senator Lee speaks English as his first language back in Utah. Describing this program – the federal government clearing the way for foreign investment in American real estate – as a free market solution is laughable. But, then, as a Congressional Republican he’s probably used to Orwellian re-definition of words as a matter of practice.