Eideard

Mid-year is when lots of new laws seem to kick-in throughout the Industrial West. That includes silly as often as useful. It appears Italy is attempting to corner the market on not-very-useful:

“Castles made of sand slips into the sea – eventually”

Bans on kissing while driving a car, feeding stray cats and building sandcastles are among a rash of new laws Italians say threaten to turn the country into the ultimate nanny state.

More than 150 “public security” laws have been introduced since Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, granted extra powers to local councils to help them crack down on crime and anti-social behaviour.

In the latest episode in the fight to maintain “public decorum”, Vigevano, a town near Milan, this week slapped fines of €160 each on a young couple who dared to sit on the steps of a local monument.

“It was really hot, so we just sat down for a moment,” said Giada Carnevale, 24. “The only other alternative in the piazza is to go to a bar but there they charge you €5 just for a drink. We were just chatting – we weren’t eating or drinking or smoking.”

But the town’s mayor justified the fine, saying the council spent precious time and money each month cleaning up after idlers on the steps.

Passionate Italians caught kissing in a moving car in the town of Eboli, south of Naples, face a €500 fine.

The coastal town of Eraclea, near Venice, prohibits the building of sandcastles on the beaches because they can “obstruct the passage” of people strolling along the strand…

On the island of Capri, wearing noisy wooden clogs is banned.

In Bergamo, you can be fined €333 for feeding the pigeons, while Venice punishes the same offence with a €500 penalty. The town of Cesena on the Adriatic Coast extends the ban to feeding feral cats.

The Italian press has slammed what they claim is a return to the bureaucratic straightjacket of the Mussolini era.

The chuckle for me has been the erratic attempt by rightwingers to characterize nanny state laws and political correctness as a leftwing phenomenon.

While both sides of the aisle have their petty adherents to PC, the lead in “moral rearmament” has been a steady theme of rightwing politics for centuries. Especially with dependence on fundamentalist religion.

Scientists in the US claim to have used a bone marrow transplant to cure mental illness in a study that could have profound implications for patients with psychiatric problems.

Bone marrow transplants are routinely used to treat leukaemia and other life-threatening diseases, but have never been used to treat mental health problems.

The team, led by a Nobel prizewinning geneticist, found that experimental transplants in mice cured them of a disorder in which they groom themselves so excessively they develop bare patches of skin. The condition is similar to a disorder in which people pull their hair out, called trichotillomania.

“A lot of people are going to find it amazing,” said Mario Capecchi at the University of Utah, who won the Nobel prize for medicine in 2007 for his work on mouse genetics. “That’s the surprise: bone marrow can correct a behavioural defect.”

The team said their work is the first to reveal a direct link between a psychiatric disorder and faulty immune cells, which grow in bone marrow before moving to the brain to protect nerve cells from damage.

Capecchi said the condition the animals develop is comparable to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and could shed fresh light on the roots of the disorder. Other illnesses including depression, schizophrenia and autism might also be linked to problems with the immune system, he added…

“This is immensely important and incredibly exciting. It’s definitely something people will want to follow up,” said Douglas Blackwood, professor of psychiatric genetics at Edinburgh University. “Current treatments for these kinds of conditions are not incredibly effective and there’s a massive need for alternatives.”

Other researchers were more cautious about the work. Paul Salkovskis, clinical director of the Maudsley Hospital Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma in London, said it was impossible to draw strong conclusions about the role of the immune system in human mental illnesses from the study. “Excessive grooming in mice is not a good model for obsessive-compulsive disorder in humans, a condition that can be treated effectively with cognitive behavioural therapy,” he said.

RTFA. The analyses parallel my first reactions – in that I wondered if the behavior related to allergies and immune systems?

Dogs can develop a behavioral reaction to allergies that looks like OCD, compulsively licking their forelegs and paws. While humans – well, humans make the definition.

Vets who saved a female stork, shot by hunters in Croatia, thought her days were numbered – but reckoned without the devotion of her mate.

The vets knew the female, which they called Malena, would never fly again but put her back on her nest thinking she would not survive the winter.

When her partner, named Rodan, flew south with their young they expected that she would eventually die and certainly never mate again.

But their predictions were proved wrong after the Vokic family where she had a nest helped to feed her through the long winter months and she survived.

And – even more amazingly – Rodan has returned every year to mate with his partner and rear another clutch of chicks.

Every year Rodan flies 13,000 kilometres to South Africa to spend winter in the warm and then the same distance back again to be back with his injured love.

I always find these tales interesting, though I can’t speak to storks. Squirrels I can speak to.

If you look real carefully, you can see the camera.

Fifty house cats were given collar cameras that took a photo every 15 minutes. The results put a digital dent in some human theories about catnapping.

Based on the photos, about 22 percent of the cats’ time was spent looking out of windows, 12 percent was used to interact with other family pets and 8 percent was spent climbing on chairs or kitty condos. Just 6 percent of their hours were spent sleeping.

“What surprised me was how active the cats were. I believed my three cats were sleeping during the day,” said Jill Villarreal, an animal behavior scientist who collected the data for Nestle Purina PetCare’s Friskies brand of cat food.

Try telling that to a Republican/Libertarian/No-responsibility Neocon.

Basic actions taken by everyday people can yield fast savings at low cost, according to MSU Professor Thomas Dietz and colleagues.

Cutting consumer energy waste is a good place to start, said Dietz, a professor of sociology and environmental science and policy at MSU. Household energy consumption accounts for 38 percent of carbon emissions in the United States and 8 percent of world emissions, he said.

Activities such as home weatherization, routine vehicle maintenance and opting for the clothesline instead of the dryer could cut total U.S. carbon emissions by 5 percent over just five years and 7.4 percent in 10 years, Dietz said. That’s the equivalent of France’s total carbon output, or of total emissions by the U.S. petroleum refining, steel and aluminum industries…

“We can make great progress with the technologies we already have if we pay attention to behavior – how people use the technologies they already have.”

Dietz and collaborators…didn’t base their estimates on a best-case consumer behavior scenario. Instead, they used the best available information to calculate how many families could reasonably be expected to take such measures if they were provided information, offered financial assistance and could interact with others doing so…

“I’ve seen many analyses that make wild assumptions about how hard or how easy it is to get people to change their behavior, without any basis in science,” he said. “Our analysis is based on science. We look at what has been feasible in bringing about changes in energy consumption behavior…”

“We know from a lot of research that most people, companies and governments are most likely to change behavior when they see their peers change. So someone will weatherize their houses when they see others do it, and governments are most likely to develop policies when they see other governments doing it.”

Now, the example up top is what Professor Dietz is talking about. What follows on – is that the nutball response to this involved Republicans dragging one or another conservative motorhead who said Obama is wrong – it ain’t 3-4% oil consumption reduction, it’s only 3-4% increase in gas mileage!

Point still remains that conservatives used to be conservationists – not copouts.

E-mailing now comes so naturally to us that we can do it in our sleep — at least in the exceptional case. An article soon appearing in the journal Sleep Medicine, details the experience of a sleepwalker, showing we can send messages even when we seem to be sound asleep.

Such e-mailing interests neurologists who specialize in sleep science. After all, it poses a challenge to the accepted notion that sleepwalking is confined to activities involving gross motor movements, with minimal cognitive activity. Until now, we have been able to take comfort in our understanding of our own sleepwalking as an impersonal phenomenon. Whether it is eating junk food, rearranging furniture or even driving a car, the body carries out the action, seemingly on its own, while the mind slumbers, blissfully unaware.

Legal doctrine is based on this same notion. Sleepwalkers have been acquitted of criminal felony charges by basing their defense on the concept of “noninsane automatism.”

E-mailing while sleeping, however, upturns the previous understanding of the mind as essentially quiescent, absolved of a participating role. The Sleep Medicine article describes one woman’s e-mailing while sleeping as the first reported case of “complex nonviolent cognitive behavior.” It involved not just composing messages, but also navigating past two separate levels of password security to reach the e-mail software.

The patient suffered from severe insomnia and was taking zolpidem, which is marketed under various brand names, the best known of which is Ambien. She decided on her own to increase her daily dose to 15 milligrams, from the 10 milligrams prescribed by her doctor, to counteract what she perceived as diminished efficacy of the drug over time.

Later, she received a call from a friend, asking about a strange e-mail message that the patient had sent the caller the previous night. She had no memory of having done so. When the patient checked the computer and looked at a folder containing her sent messages, she discovered that three that had gone out within eight minutes the previous night while she was asleep, all with unusual capitalization, punctuation and language. “!HELP ME P-LEEEEESE” was the subject of one message, an invitation for “dinner & drinks,” and the message also implored the recipient to “come TOMORROW AND SORT THIS HELL HOLE Out!!!!!!”

Are they certain she wasn’t sleeping in her office. I get emails like that every day.

Anti-social behaviour has become a familiar activity in some towns and cities across the UK. Now there’s a new weapon in the fight against it called Smart CCTV.

Portsmouth City Council is the first, and so far only, local authority in the UK to try out the new system.

It’s a computer programme that has been integrated into the city’s existing network of 152 cameras and has been programmed to spot unusual behaviour in places and at times when it’s not expected.

Ray Stead runs the CCTV operation for Portsmouth City Council. He said: “With the total number of CCTV cameras that we have, 152, the operators cannot see all of those cameras or monitor them live. “So this software programme will actually help the operators become more effective.”

The Smart CCTV technology is on trial in Portsmouth but if it proves successful, other UK cities could set up similar systems.

C’mon, we’re still lacking RFID tags, folks. Tag everyone. Be certain we’re all tucked in at night.

Just leave the government alone to steal whatever they like.

Daylife/Getty Images

Fewer than 1% of airline passengers singled out at airports for suspicious behavior are arrested, Transportation Security Administration figures show, raising complaints that too many innocent people are stopped.

A TSA program launched in early 2006 that looks for terrorists using a controversial surveillance method has led to more than 160,000 people in airports receiving scrutiny, such as a pat-down search or a brief interview. That has resulted in 1,266 arrests, often on charges of carrying drugs or fake IDs.

In other words, the result of harassing passengers is a number of arrests that sounds to me like something less than what you’d find at a picnic grove on the average Saturday afternoon.

The TSA program trains screeners to become “behavior detection officers” who patrol terminals and checkpoints looking for travelers who act oddly or appear to answer questions suspiciously.

“That’s an awful lot of people being pulled aside and inconvenienced,” said Carnegie Mellon scientist Stephen Fienberg, who studied the TSA program and other counterterrorism efforts. “I think it’s a sham. We have no evidence it works.”

The TSA has not publicly said if it has caught a terrorist through the program.

What specious crap! Of course, the TSA will say the program is “effective” even as it’s shown to be useless.

Bing never needed a rulebook…

The chancellor of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati has announced the diocese has released an update of its Decree on Child Protection, first published as the Decree on Child Abuse in 1993…a 52-page document that lists the child protective policies, procedures and recommendations for all parishes and institutions under the archdiocese.

“This decree seeks to protect, enhance and, in some cases, restore the trust that our faith calls for between the church and the children and adolescents entrusted to their care,” said the Rev. Daniel E. Pilarczyk, archbishop of Cincinnati.

Highlights of the decree include:

• An extensive list of behaviors that are prohibited, as well as those that are appropriate (handshakes, “high fives,” etc.)

• A policy that clerics, employees and regular volunteers use prudence when communicating with a child. Specifically, any suggestive or inappropriate manipulative communications are forbidden.

The last one should be all you need.

We all know where this comes from; but, 52-pages of instructions is bloody ridiculous!

Nine British women were facing prostitution charges after being arrested at the weekend for taking part in an oral sex competition in the Greek holiday island of Zakynthos, say police.

Six British and six Greek men, including two bar owners, were also charged in the incident, which took place at Laganas beach in the south of the Ionian island, which lies off the west coast of mainland Greece.

The women, who came to the popular resort on holiday, had been paid to take part in the competition, which was video recorded and was to be posted on the Internet, police said.

The men were charged with encouraging obscene behavior.

Do we know any men who don’t encourage obscene behavior?