Eideard

 
Irish leprechauns, tea-sipping Britons, Australian ABBA impersonators and the oldest yoga teacher on the planet were just some of the people setting world records Thursday.

More than 300,000 people around the world took part in the seventh annual Guinness World Records Day, in which a number of records have already been confirmed.

They included the largest cream tea party (334 participants) in Essex, England; the largest gathering of people dressed as leprechauns (262 participants) in Dublin; the oldest yoga teacher (91 years old) and the largest hula hoop workout (221 children) both in Florida…

In keeping with the national theme, 262 members of the public in Dublin got into leprechaun costume to break the record previously set in the United States.

“We believe that a record for leprechauns belongs to its native soil and we’re really pleased to bring it back to Ireland,” Derek Mooney from Ireland’s RTE Radio One said…

On the other side of the globe, Australia got involved in the record-breaking action as 368 children in Melbourne transformed into “dancing queens” to set a new record for largest gathering of ABBA impersonators.

Other record attempts Thursday included the most people whistling in Switzerland, the world’s largest Zumba class in the Netherlands, the largest 3D painting in London, the most arrows caught by hand in two minutes — blindfolded — in Germany, the largest rice cracker in Japan, the largest speed-dating event in China and the largest coloring book in Nigeria.

My kind of creative folks. With a sense of humor. Always pleased to see that Guinness feels the same.

Of the approximately 2.8 million death reports the Social Security Administration receives per year, about 14,000 — or one in every 200 deaths — are incorrectly entered into its Death Master File, which contains the Social Security numbers, names, birth dates, death dates, zip codes and last-known residences of more than 87 million deceased Americans. That averages out to 38 life-altering mistakes a day…

“Erroneous death entries can lead to benefit termination, cause severe financial hardship and distress to affected individuals, and result in the publication of living individuals’ [personal identifying information] in the [Death Master File],” the Inspector General said in its most recent evaluation of the database…

“It is unfortunate, but some of the death data that we post to our records … proves to be wrong and we correct it as soon as possible,” said administration spokesman Mark Hinkle. “Usually the error was inadvertently caused because of a human typing error when death information was entered into a computer system.”

This inaccurate information is then sold to the public, as well as to banks and credit bureaus. Those who are declared dead not only lose their ability to apply for credit or receive benefits, but they are also at a high risk for identity theft now that all of their personally-identifying information has been made public…

RTFA. One serious anecdotal tale, a fair piece of commentary – and suggestions on what to do if and when this ever happens to you.

The USPS changed us to an expansion zip code a number of years back – one that did not previously exist. It took over two years before we finally stopped being refused in the middle of an online or telephone purchase because company records said our zip code didn’t exist. We then had to offer our old zip – and hope that UPS or FedEx or the USPS would catch the wrong delivery address and eventually get our purchase to us.

An audit of New Jersey state computers to be sold at public auction found that the vast majority of the machines’ hard drives had not been erased.

A report just released…said officials had discovered computers containing child-abuse reports, health records, Social Security numbers, and a state judge’s confidential memoranda and tax returns….

State rules require agencies to erase data from decommissioned computers before sending them to other agencies or to be auctioned to the public. The computers examined in the audit came from courts, the Department of Health and Senior Services, the Office of Administrative Law, and the Department of Children and Families.

Here’s the part I really love -

Employees from an unidentified state agency told auditors that they were reluctant to sweep the hard drives because the necessary equipment was noisy and they feared the magnetic fields it generated…

The audit followed the discovery in 2007 that employees at the warehouse where computers were stored before auction were selling parts as scrap and rigging the auctions. Five employees were charged; four have pleaded guilty and were fired.

It is unclear how many computers moved through the warehouse. The comptroller’s office said it could identify 2,357 pieces of equipment, including desktop computers, laptops, and other items, that were distributed to other agencies. But it could not say how much equipment the warehouse had auctioned.

“That’s part of the problem. The record-keeping is very poor to nonexistent,” said Pete McAleer, spokesman for the office.

The other part of the problem is employees who fail to do their job for some of the dumbest reasons possible.

Thanks, Helen

One of the world’s leading tea-producing nations, Sri Lanka, has just become the scene for a new world record – the largest cup of tea.

A giant red mug was filled with 1,000 gallons of water, 141lb of tea, 1,929lb of malted milk powder and 353lb of sugar.

It was almost three times the size of the previous record, set last year.

The tea was later driven around the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, and handed out to locals in small plastic cups.

The tea came from Sri Lanka’s famed estates, and was brewed for hours in 44-gallon (200l) urns in a way that is popular in South Asia – with sugar and malted milk power, says the BBC’s Charles Haviland in Colombo.

The mixture was then slowly pumped into the mug – which had a capacity of about 32,000 normal cups – until it was full, he adds.

A representative from Guinness World Records certified the feat.

Now, I have to fix myself a cuppa. A little smaller.

George Wincapaw thought he was getting some strange requests from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

The 63-year-old Vietnam War veteran had had several heart attacks since leaving the Navy, submitting enough paperwork on them to amass a two-volume file at the Veterans Benefits Administration office. But in response to his most recent claim, submitted earlier this year, the office was requesting copies of medical records Wincapaw had already submitted.

Curious, he traveled from his home in Oconomowoc to the VA regional offices in Milwaukee to look at his medical file. What he found shocked him.

He wasn’t providing duplicates. Dozens of his medical records were missing.

Then the public contact representative with whom he was reviewing his file broke the news: An employee had been fired from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Wincapaw’s representative agency, for destroying veterans’ records.

An official with the state VFW, which handles thousands of such cases a year, told Public Investigator the employee had shredded nearly all its veterans files – no one knows how many – after making a unilateral decision to go “paperless…”

Steve Lawrence, speaking for the group, admitted that Lee Guerrero, who represented veterans on their claims, was fired in August 2009 for shredding all of their claimant files in the VFW service office.

He did not keep electronic copies of the documents, either…

“He just thought going paperless meant getting rid of the files  . . . It cost him his job as soon as we found out about it,” Lawrence said.

RTFA. Explains other stuff you may find interesting as well.

Dumbest part? Employees who complained about what Guerrero was doing – were told to shut up. They weren’t high enough up the food chain to get anyone to listen to them.

The BlackBerry — renown for the security of its messaging — doesn’t offer 100 percent protection from eavesdropping. At least not in the United States. Law enforcement officials said they can tap into emails and other conversations made using the device, made by Research in Motion, as long as they have proper court orders.

RIM’s willingness to grant authorities access to the messages of its clients is a hot-button issue. The United Arab Emirates claims it does not have the same kind of surveillance rights to BlackBerry messages as officials in the United States. It has threatened to clamp down on some services unless they get more access…

“The ability to tap communications is a part of surveillance and intelligence and law enforcement all over the world,” said Mark Rasch, former head of the computer crimes unit at the U.S. Department of Justice.

RIM is in an unusual position of having to deal with government requests to monitor its clients because it is the only smartphone maker who manages the traffic of messages sent using its equipment. Other smartphone makers — including Apple Inc, Nokia, HTC and Motorola Corp — leave the work of managing data to the wireless carrier or the customer…

Rasch said that RIM may feel uncomfortable granting such access to officials in UAE. There may be concern authorities could abuse that access, he said.

“You reach a point where a company feels uncomfortable from the client perspective with what a government is asking them,” Rasch said. “It may be a function of what they are being asked to do, or it may be a function of which government is asking.”

U.S. rules that govern wire-tapping are designed to avoid abuse of power.

Har! I suppose Reuters had to include the paper description of U.S. avoidance of abuse of power.

In practice, abuse of power is perfectly OK [1] if no one finds out about it; [2] the government has enough tame judges who will overrule any objections; and [3] Congress will make the abuse legal if citizens complain about the abuse.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest physics experiment, has broken its own particle beam energy record. On Friday morning, the machine created two beams of protons, each with an energy of 3.5 trillion electron volts.

The effort breaks the prior record, set by the LHC in December, of just over a trillion electron volts in each beam.

The LHC will now aim to smash those two beams together, hoping to create new particles that give insight into the most fundamental workings of physics…

Since coming back online, the machine has exhibited performance that was “remarkable”, according to Cern director general Rolf Heuer.

In an announcement of the 3.5 TeV result, he congratulated the LHC team and stressed the cutting-edge nature of its work. “We must not lose sight of the fact that the LHC is new, and it wasn’t bought off the shelf,” he wrote.

As with all particle accelerators, the LHC will be periodically shut down for maintenance, but LHC officials recently decided to significantly lengthen the shutdown period. This is in part because the machine takes so long to reach and return from the low temperatures required for its experiments.

But the shutdown scheduled for late 2010 will also address the joints between the machine’s superconducting magnets, which must be strengthened before the LHC can run at even higher energies…

“It takes time, but as we’ve seen this week, patience pays dividends.”

Bravo!

Still no sign of angels dancing on pinheads.

The FBI violated the law in collecting thousands of U.S. telephone records during the Bush administration, according to a report just published.

Citing internal memos and interviews, the Washington Post reported that the FBI invoked nonexistent terrorism emergencies or persuaded phone companies to provide information. The report said the result was more than 2,000 illegally gathered records between 2002 and 2006…

FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni said FBI Director Robert Mueller did not know about the requests until after the inspector general’s investigation had begun.

Caproni told the Post that the bureau will await the inspector general’s report before deciding whether disciplinary action is warranted.

In my life’s experience, this is nothing new. The first major class action suit I was in – along with 2000 other people – was against a city police department, the phone company for collaborating, and the FBI for leading illegal wiretapping.

Cripes, they even tapped Joe Liebermann’s phone. How’s that for dull?

Virginia Hernandez Lopez admitted to knocking back two shots of tequila with Sprite chasers on an August night in Julian, Calif., a couple of years ago. But she said she was not drunk when her Ford Explorer collided with an oncoming Toyota pickup truck later that night, killing its driver.

In May, a California state appeals court affirmed Ms. Lopez’s conviction for vehicular manslaughter. Her blood-alcohol level two hours after the accident was, according to a report presented to the jury, just over the legal limit of .08 percent.

But the appeals court reconsidered the case after a decision in June from the United States Supreme Court that prohibited prosecutors from introducing crime lab reports without testimony from the analysts who prepared them.

The appeals court reversed Ms. Lopez’s conviction, saying prosecutors had violated her constitutional right to confront witnesses against her by failing to put the analyst who prepared the blood-alcohol report on the stand.

But now, in an unusual move, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on Jan. 11 in a new case that raises questions about how lower courts may carry out its six-month-old precedent. Many state attorneys general and prosecutors are hoping the court will overrule its decision in the earlier case, Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, before it can take root, saying it is a costly, disruptive and dangerous misstep.

“Already data and anecdotal evidence are demonstrating an overwhelming negative impact,” a friend-of-the-court brief submitted by 26 attorneys general last month said. The decision, they said, “is already proving unworkable.”

RTFA. Prosecutors and defense lawyers have the world of differences on the question – as you might presume.

The article doesn’t mention what Ms. Lopez had to say about the constitutional rights of Allan Wolowsky, the driver she killed.

Robert Gates, Barack Obama, Eric Shinseki
Daylife/Getty Images

That last part may sound pretty dull; but, for veterans, it’s the beginning of the end to a bureaucratic impasse in place for decades. I recall being in a VA waiting room with my best mate when he decided to arrive in his WW2 uniform, medals, press-cuttings and all – to embarrass the hacks in charge into admitting that he qualified for care.

President Obama announced plans on Thursday to computerize the medical records of veterans into a unified system, a move that is expected to ease the now-cumbersome process that results in confusion, lost records and bureaucratic delays.

Medical information will flow directly from the military to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ health care system. At present, veterans must hand carry their medical records to Veterans Affairs’ facilities once they leave active-duty service. The Veterans Affairs system has a backlog of 800,000 disability claims, which means that veterans typically wait six months for decisions on their cases…

And you had to do it all over again when you changed facilities.

“We have a sacred trust with those who wear the uniform of the United States of America, a commitment that begins with enlistment and must never end,” Mr. Obama said. “But we know that for too long we’ve fallen short of meeting that commitment. Too many wounded warriors go without the care that they need.”

Mr. Obama also voiced support for a measure that would allow Congress to approve the money for veterans’ medical care one year in advance. Congress has been routinely late in passing the bill that finances the Department of Veterans Affairs, a delay that hampers medical care for veterans and makes planning difficult.

Overdue.