symptoms 5.sym.00300 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquir. People diagnosed with major depression display many of the same brain changes when their condition improves whether in response to antidepressant drug treatment or to a type of psychotherapy, two preliminary investigations find.

If confirmed in further work, these results will highlight common brain regions through which various medications and talk therapies fight the melancholy, apathy, and hopeless feelings of major depression.

Both new reports appear in the July Archives of General Psychiatry.

�This is pioneering work,� says psychiatrist Wayne C. Drevets of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md. �There's been little research on psychotherapy's effects on the brains of depressed people.�

In Drevets' view, the new data also point to some neural differences in recipients of psychotherapy and antidepressant drugs. http://louis_j_sheehan_esquire.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog

The first study, led by psychiatrist Arthur L. Brody of the University of California, Los Angeles Medical School, included 24 depressed adults who hadn't previously received treatment and 16 adults with no psychiatric diagnosis. Volunteers underwent positron emission tomography upon entering the study and then 12 weeks later. These scans measured glucose use�an indirect sign of neural activity�in various brain areas.

Depressed participants chose the form of treatment that they preferred. The day after the initial brain scan, 10 depressed volunteers began treatment with an antidepressant drug, paroxetine. This medication enhances the activity of serotonin, a chemical messenger in the brain.

During the week after the first scan, the remaining 14 depressed individuals attended the first of 12 psychotherapy sessions. This therapy focused on ways to improve relationships with friends and family.http://louis_j_sheehan_esquire.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog

Compared with nondepressed adults, depressed individuals began the study showing increased activity in parts of three brain areas�the prefrontal cortex, the caudate, and the thalamus. Activity markedly declined in these regions following either course of depression treatment.

Earlier studies had linked antidepressants' effects to activity surges in the same prefrontal regions (SN: 5/15/99, p. 308). However, that work examined hospitalized patients whose emotional unresponsiveness and slowed movements may have greatly lowered prefrontal activity, Brody's team says.

Data in the new study also show that psychotherapy, but not medication, heralded activity increases on the left side of the insula, Drevets remarks. This brain area helps to regulate sad feelings and, when particularly revved up, dampens symptoms of depression, he notes.

The strongest evidence for a shared brain response to psychotherapy and medication was an activity decline in a part of the caudate that regulates motor activity, Drevets holds. It's unclear why caudate activity eased up as symptoms of depression lifted, he says.

The second study, led by psychiatrist Stephen D. Martin of Cherry Knowle Hospital in Sunderland, England, found activity increases in the basal ganglia�which are also involved in movement�following 6 weeks of either antidepressant use or psychotherapy. Increased activity in brain areas involved in emotion showed up after only the psychotherapy.

Martin's team had studied 28 depressed adults, most of whom the researchers had randomly assigned to a treatment. However, the study didn't include people free of psychiatric disorders. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

sleep 0.004 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquir. You need to be well-rested and alert to catch criminals and uphold the law. However, many of the public servants charged with these duties suffer from insomnia and other serious sleep problems, according to a new study.

Among big-city police officers, about half go without a good night's sleep because of myriad everyday pressures at work, say psychiatrist Thomas C. Neylan of the VA Medical Center in San Francisco and his colleagues. Job strains for the men and women in blue include frequently conflicting demands by police supervisors, judges, attorneys, reporters, and the general public. http://www.theenvironmentsite.org/forum/members/louis-j-sheehan-esquire.html - vmessage171

In contrast, life-threatening and violent encounters in the line of duty exert little influence on the overall amount and quality of sleep experienced by police officers, Neylan's team reports in the March/April Psychosomatic Medicine. Still, nightmares occur more often among those who have faced on-the-job traumas, such as getting injured and witnessing deaths.

"It's the hassles of police officers' everyday work environment that are related to their high rates of disturbed sleep," Neylan says.

There's plenty of reason to be concerned about a potentially large contingent of sleep-deprived police officers, he adds. Other research has linked stress-related sleep problems to weakened resistance to disease and declines in concentration and motor skills.

Neylan and his coworkers recruited 733 male and female officers from police departments in New York City and Oakland and San Jose, Calif. The study also included 330 men and women from the same cities whose jobs didn't include police, emergency, or security work. Most volunteers in both groups were 30 to 40 years old and married. About three-quarters of the police officers and one-quarter of the others regularly shifted between day and night work schedules.

Study participants completed questionnaires on the quality of their sleep in the past month and the stress they faced at work. They also described any psychiatric symptoms they had experienced and traumatic events they had encountered on and off the job. http://www.theenvironmentsite.org/forum/members/louis-j-sheehan-esquire.html - vmessage171

Compared with the other group, police officers reported much worse sleep quality and an average of about 30 fewer minutes of sleep per night. http://www.theenvironmentsite.org/forum/members/louis-j-sheehan-esquire.html - vmessage171

Nearly half the police officers reported symptoms of insomnia or other sleep problems. These findings held regardless of whether police officers worked variable schedules or strictly day shifts, Neylan says.

In the comparison group, severe sleep disturbances affected about one-third of people who worked variable schedules and one-fourth of those who worked days.

Police officers with symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder or other psychiatric ailments cited more than their share of sleep disturbances, Neylan notes. After the researchers accounted for this factor, however, the high levels of routine daily stress at work reported by police officers still showed a strong link to disturbed sleep.

Fatigue among police officers has received increasing attention in the past few years among law-enforcement administrators. The new findings emphasize that sleep represents a critical health issue for police departments, especially given the added stresses that have emerged since last year's terrorist attacks, remarks psychiatrist Charles F. Reynolds III of the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh.

"Sleep disturbances may provide a link between chronic job stress and increased rates of suicide, depression, and other psychiatric disorders among police officers," Reynolds says. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

ice 6.ice.328 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. In May the U.S. Department of the Interior classified polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Documented declines in sea ice and anticipation of massive melting that threatens the bears’ habitat prompted the action. http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/

Although there is wide consensus that global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions is speeding up the depletion of Arctic sea ice, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne stressed that the Act’s purview does not extend to regulating gases related to the problem. Instead the new classification will be used to strengthen already existing regulations concerning the killing of polar bears and the importing of related products to the United States. http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/ It will, for instance, make it illegal for sports hunters to bring trophies into the United States. Such hunters have in the past spent thousands of dollars to have native guides take them on polar bear hunts, a practice that may fall out of favor in light of the new classification. “It’s doubtful,” says Valerie Fellows, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “that many hunters will want to pay that much money if they can’t bring their trophy home with them.” http://louis5j5sheehan5esquire.wordpress.com/

Polar bears are just one of a number of Alaskan marine animals listed as threatened or endangered by the Department of the Interior. Others include the albatross, the leatherback sea turtle, the northern sea otter, the Steller sea lion, and the humpback whale. It also concerns some ecologists that the narwhal, the strange, arctic whale whose long spiral tusk may have inspired the unicorn myth, faces similar habitat threats.

air 3.air.00023 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Global warming predicted for the coming decades may decrease heating bills in some parts of the United States. Ironically, the extra electricity needed for air conditioning could result in increased emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis3J3Sheehan/

The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, which traps heat at Earth's surface, has been on the rise for more than 150 years, largely because of the burning of fossil fuels. Some computer simulations suggest that by the end of this century, the global average temperature could be as much as 3.4°C higher than it is now, says David J. Erickson III, a climate modeler at the Oak Ridge (Tenn.) National Laboratory. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis3J3Sheehan/

To look at the near-term effects of such global changes in the United States, Erickson and his colleagues ran computer predictions of regional climate changes, population changes, and the patterns of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.

Their model suggests that between 2003 and 2025, energy use in northeastern states will drop because of warmer winters but increase in the South and West with increased air conditioning. Overall energy use for the country during this period would be about 1 percent less than consumption in a no-warming scenario, but carbon dioxide emissions would increase about a half a percent.

The boost in the greenhouse gas would result from air conditioners running on electricity primarily from coal-fired power plants, a power source that's less efficient than sources used to heat most buildings. The team reports its results in an upcoming Geophysical Research Letters. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

radon 33.rad.220 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Measuring radon with testing kits that sit in a house for just a few days can yield misleadingly low values in summer, a new study finds.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO

Alabama maintains a statewide database of 36,000 domestic measurements of radon, a radioactive gas emitted by rocks in soil. Although these data revealed some geographical hot spots, radon readings in such areas were often unexpectedly low if testing had occurred in summer.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO

To investigate a possible seasonal bias, James L. McNees of the Alabama Department of Public Health in Montgomery and Susan H. Roberts of the Alabama Radon Education Program at Auburn University offered free radon-test kits to state residents whose homes had recently undergone summer testing.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.INFO

Of the 186 homes resampled in winter, 63 percent exhibited higher radon values than they had in summer. Indeed, 27 percent of these homes revealed air concentrations more than five times the 4-picocuries-per-liter federal guideline for taking remedial action. The researchers report their findings in the July Health Physics.

The Environmental Protection Agency recommends measuring radon over an entire year. However, because many people test for radon only when they put their homes on the market, several-day testing has become common.

McNees and Roberts suspect that the summer-radon effect traces to fairly constant temperatures in air-conditioned homes. Normally, they say, temperature differentials would prompt warmer air to rise into the attic, drawing radon-laden air into the home from the soil below it.

down 44.dow.3330 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Day three of the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting offered news about Down syndrome and sleep cycles

Melatonin and moonlight

Moonlight may interrupt astronauts’ sleep cycles by messing with their melatonin, a new study shows.

Sleep cycles are regulated by the type and amount of light that people encounter. When a person goes to sleep, the hormone melatonin circulates through the body to maintain a drowsy state. But if a light comes on, the body’s melatonin levels drop, causing the person to wake up. http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us




Astronauts are notoriously bad sleepers, says Benjamin Warfield of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. They average just four to six hours of sleep a night when they’re on a mission and amass a huge sleep deficit. But no one knew how moonlight might be affecting this chronic lack of sleep.

To figure it out, the researchers built a piece of equipment they call the Moonlight Machine — a complicated series of lights, mirrors, lenses, and filters — to mimic light conditions on the moon. Subjects sat inside the Moonlight Machine between 2 and 3:30 a.m., a time when melatonin levels in the body are normally high. The researchers found that melatonin levels were diminished after moonlight exposure. The team’s next step is to repeat the experiments at all points during the night. Ultimately, Warfield would like to design visors and window blocks that could regulate the amount of moonlight for astronauts. “We’re really excited to see where this goes,” says Warfield. The team plans to begin studying how the lighting conditions on Mars might affect the human sleep cycle. http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us




These kinds of studies aren’t just important for sweetening astronauts’ dreams. Understanding how different kinds of light influence the body could lead to new ways to treat diseases like seasonal affective disorder and insomnia. Astronauts have a lot of problems to deal with, but a lack of sleep should not be one of them, says Warfield. — Laura Sanders

Four genes possible culprits for early Alzheimer’s in people with Down syndrome

Four genes may help explain why people with Down syndrome are particularly at risk for Alzheimer’s disease, new research has shown. Down syndrome is a genetic disease caused by inheriting an extra copy of chromosome 21. People who have the disease are likely to get Alzheimer’s — a debilitating brain disease that normally affects only the elderly — in their 30s and 40s.

In the 1920s, the life expectancy of a person with Down syndrome was around nine years, says Ralf Schmid of Duke University in Durham, N.C., author of the new study. But today, improved healthcare allows many more people with Down syndrome to survive into middle age. Doctors examining these older patients saw that many of them were succumbing to the debilitating effects of Alzheimer’s at much earlier ages than regular patients. “It’s well established that the majority of Down syndrome kids will get Alzheimer’s,” says Schmid. http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us




A critical region of chromosome 21 is known to be responsible for Down syndrome because, when a third copy of the chromosome is present, its genes produce proteins at excessive levels. Schmid and his colleagues added genes from that region to rat neurons. Four of those genes caused early death of the neurons, suggesting that those genes may be responsible for the early neurodegeneration of Alzheimer’s in Down syndrome patients. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

stars 883.sta.44 Louis J. Sheehan

Brittle stars may end up with less star power as greenhouse gases change ocean chemistry.

As human activity increases concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air, ocean chemistry is changing, says Hannah L. Wood of Plymouth Marine Laboratory in England. The pH of seawater, now around 8.1, is dipping closer to the acidic side, changing the supplies of various forms of carbon that sea creatures like corals and brittle stars need to form the hard parts of their bodies. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com/

In a lab test, the pink brittle star Amphiura filiformis still managed to capture the carbon and calcium it needs to regenerate arms in lowered pH water, Wood says. “That’s against the trend” of earlier predictions, she says. Biologists had expected trouble for calcifying marine life as seawater pH declines.

“There’s a trade-off,” Wood says. The brittle star’s new arms grew with extra calcification but also had less muscle. In water adjusted to pH 7.7, which a gloomy scenario predicts for the oceans as soon as 2100, the brittle star arms had one-fifth to one-quarter of their usual brawn. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.wordpress.com/

In the modified seawater, brittle stars nearly doubled their oxygen use. “It’s the equivalent of us breathing heavily,” Wood says.

“The main message is we need to look beyond calcification,” she says. The study will appear in an upcoming Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“The most significant aspect here, I think, is that the increased calcification rates may come at a cost to other processes,” says Gretchen Hofmann of the University of California, Santa Barbara. “We need to look more deeply into an organism’s physiology to really get the whole picture.”

77665

In the Amazon rainforests of Brazil, scientists have discovered a peculiar new species of ant. The insect has no eyes. Its body is pale. And its fanglike mouthparts are longer than the rest of its head.

If you happened to cross paths with the bizarre ant, you might imagine that it belongs on another planet. Even its name — Martialis heureka — playfully suggests that it came from Mars.

But Martialis heureka lives on Earth. And the creepy-crawly discovery is forcing researchers to rethink what they know about the history of ants on our planet.

Ancient insectScientists looked at the ant's genes to find out where it fits in the ant family tree. They showed that the odd ant may come from the earliest branch of the ant family that still has living members.C. Rabeling, M. Verhaagh

Christian Rabeling, from the University of Texas at Austin, discovered the new species amid the fallen leaves of the rainforest. But he did more than just notice how weird the ant looks. He also analyzed its genetic material, or DNA.

Comparing DNA among species can give scientists insights into family trees: The more DNA two species share in common, the more closely related they are, and the more recently they split off from a common ancestor.

Rabeling’s DNA analysis of Martialis heureka showed that the species is only distantly related to other ant species. It is so distant, in fact, that it belongs in a separate subfamily — a broader grouping than a species or even a genus. The last time scientists found a new subfamily of living ants was in 1923, say the discoverers.

The DNA analysis also suggests that Martialis heureka appeared on Earth earlier than any other ant living here today. And observations suggest that the ant lives underground: Paleness and blindness are two major clues.

Some of the other oldest known ant species also live underground. So now, scientists are trying to figure out whether ants first evolved underground, or if they evolved above ground and then went under.http://Louissheehan.BraveDiary.com

Corrie Moreau, an ant specialist at the Field Museum in Chicago, saw a picture of the new creature. “It’s an incredibly bizarre-looking ant … which for ant biologists is really exciting,” she says. A few other ant species have at least one of Martialis heureka’s weird features, she says. But none share them all.

So far, Rabeling has collected only one ant from the new species. Finding more specimens, he hopes, will help us better understand the science and history of ants on Earth.

सोलर-powered

http://louis-j-sheehan.नेट। In an experiment that tested technology that could one day be used to transmit solar energy from satellites to Earth, researchers beamed solar energy from one Hawaiian island to another, across a distance of 92 miles. The $1 million experiment was sponsored by the Discovery Channel, which aired an episode about the technology on its Project Earth show on Friday.

The experiment was intended as a proof of concept for an ambitious proposal that calls for huge arrays of solar panels to orbit the Earth, collecting pristine solar radiation, free from the day/night cycles, weather and atmospheric effects that limit solar radiation down on the ground. The energy collected will be “beamed” down to power stations on the surface, either by microwave (or an alternative system, by laser) — and then distributed as normal power across the grid [Discovery Channel]. Backers of this space-based solar technology say the potential benefits are enormous; the non-profit National Space Society says that the sun puts out billions of times more energy than our planet’s population uses.

This experiment, however, operated on a very small scale. Although the amount of power sent, 20 watts, is barely enough to power a small compact fluorescent light bulb, and most of it was lost in transmission, the system was limited by the budget not the physics [Wired News]. The experiment’s leader, former NASA executive and physicist John Mankins, said that if they had been able to afford more solar panels and better receivers they could have boosted efficiency considerably.

Solar-powered satellites won’t just be appearing on TV; both the U.S. military and the Japanese space agency are working on projects of their own. [T]he Air Force Academy recently announced plans for a small demonstration satellite that would beam down a meager, but still significant, 0।1 watts of solar power. “Our vision is to build the world’s first-ever space-based solar power system to light a single bulb on Earth and in so doing light the path for business to follow,” said Col. Michael “Coyote” Smith of the Air Force. [Meanwhile, Japan’s] goal is to launch a geostationary satellite by 2030 that could supply 500,000 homes on Earth with a gigawatt of power. http://louis-j-sheehan.net

condom

Uganda has shown remarkable progress against HIV, the AIDS virus, according to an analysis of health data. Since the early 1990s, HIV cases in Uganda have dropped by more than two-thirds, a decline not seen in neighboring countries. For example, the HIV-infection rate among Ugandan men drafted into the military fell from nearly 19 percent in 1991 to 4 percent in 2002.

Condom use in Uganda increased somewhat during the 1990s, but not faster than it did in nearby countries. Uganda's gains in the fight against AIDS are more likely due to an initiative started in the 1980s by public health officials, who sounded a clear warning about HIV that alerted people to the risks of casual sex, researchers say in the April 30 Science. The message reached the community level through local networks of chiefs, churches, and even musicians, says epidemiologist Daniel Low-Beer of the University of Cambridge in England, a coauthor of the study.

The resulting change in people's sexual behaviors in Uganda is now evident.

Between 1989 and 1995, Uganda experienced a three-fifths decline in people reporting casual sexual partnerships. Also, the proportion of unmarried women who reported having sex dropped from 53 percent to 16 percent.

murals

Tiny magnetic particles found in the pigments of some ancient Mexican murals record the direction of Earth's magnetic field when the paint dried, a phenomenon that could help archaeologists determine the age of frescoes throughout Mexico and Central America। http://louis-j-sheehan.com

The red pigments in murals painted by the artists of pre-Columbian civilizations in the New World often contain bits of magnetite, an iron oxide mineral, says Avto Goguitchaichvili of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City। When the paints were wet, those particles were free to rotate and align themselves with Earth's magnetic field, becoming locked in that position as the paints dried. http://louis-j-sheehan.com

Goguitchaichvili and his colleagues analyzed 28 paint samples from murals of known ages at four temples near Mexico City. Data from these murals, which were painted between A.D. 200 to A.D. 1200, reveal the slow changes of orientation of Earth's magnetic field over that period. That knowledge, in turn, permits the age of other murals to be deduced from the alignment of their magnetite particles. The scientists describe their findings in the June 28 Geophysical Research Letters.

The paint-analysis technique may provide an inexpensive alternative to other methods of determining the age of archaeological sites, such as radiometric dating of artifacts. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

grief

Severe grief may be a unique mental disorder, according to a new psychiatric study. People who exhibit prolonged, debilitating grief after a loved one's death often improve markedly upon receiving a novel type of psychotherapy that focuses on finding ways to adjust to the loss, says a team led by psychiatrist Katherine Shear of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

Current psychiatric diagnoses don't include what these investigators refer to as complicated grief. In Shear's view, this condition becomes apparent 6 months or more after the death of a loved one. Symptoms consist of disbelief regarding the death, anger and bitterness over the death, intense yearning for the deceased, and intrusive thoughts about how the loved one died.Louis J. Sheehan

The researchers developed a form of psychotherapy for complicated grief that calls for repeatedly confronting one's negative reactions to a loss as well as identifying and working toward personal goals. This treatment offers better, faster help for complicated grief symptoms than does a standard form of psychotherapy that targets grief-related depression and social problems, Shear and her coworkers report in the June 1 Journal of the American Medical Association.http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

The investigators randomly assigned 95 adults with complicated grief symptoms to one or the other of the two treatments। After 16 sessions, half of the patients receiving the new treatment showed substantial improvement, compared with only one-quarter of those getting standard psychotherapy. Signs of improvement, such as articulating new goals, typically appeared after four sessions of the new treatment and after eight sessions of standard psychotherapy. Louis J. Sheehan

patients

Preliminary evidence indicates that people can quell either temporary or chronic physical pain by learning to use their minds to reduce activity in a key brain area.

Brain-imaging technology now enables individuals to use mental exercises to control a neural region that contributes to pain perception, say neuroscientist Sean C। Mackey of Stanford University and his colleagues। http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

Both healthy volunteers and chronic-pain patients "learned to control their brains and, through that, their pain," Mackey holds। "However, significantly more testing must be done before this can be considered a treatment for chronic pain।" http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US

The new findings appear in the Dec. 20 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mackey's team studied 32 healthy volunteers, ages 18 to 37. First, each volunteer reported when an adjustable heat pulse applied to a leg produced pain that he or she rated as 7 out of 10, with 10 being equivalent to "the worst pain imaginable." Brain imaging of participants, using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, showed that this level of pain was accompanied by pronounced blood flow—a sign of intense neural activity—in an area called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex.

Eight of the volunteers then underwent brain training. Each reclined in an fMRI machine that visually displayed activity changes in the person's rostral anterior cingulate cortex. A virtual flame dimmed as activity fell and brightened as activity surged.

While watching this display for 39 minutes, participants tried various mental strategies both to increase and to decrease their brain activity during brief periods of heat-pulse application. The experimenters suggested tactics such as focusing attention away from the pain.

By the end of the training session, the volunteers had learned to raise or lower activity in the critical brain area, the researchers say. The eight volunteers rated pain much higher during robust anterior cingulate cortex activation than during periods of lesser activity in that region.

No such brain-related pain effects occurred for the remaining 24 participants, who were instructed to change their brain activity when they were outside the fMRI machine or in the machine but receiving no feedback, when they received feedback from brain areas unrelated to pain, or when they viewed someone else's pain-related brain activity.

Next, eight chronic-pain patients completed anterior-cingulate-cortex training. Afterward, each reported much less pain—often less than half as much as usual—while he or she mentally quelled the region's activity.

Another four chronic-pain patients used physiological feedback—so-called biofeedback—to learn to control their heart rate, skin conductance, and breathing. None succeeded in lessening pain.

Neuroscientist Gary H. Duncan of the University of Montreal calls the new study "a landmark contribution of brain imaging to pain research." It demonstrates that self-control over activity in a specific brain region is possible, paving the way for explorations of neural function far beyond the treatment of chronic pain, he says.

chimpanzee

Working along a riverbank in a West African rain forest, researchers have uncovered remnants from a chimpanzee stone age that started at least 4,300 years ago। The finds constitute the only evidence yet detected of prehistoric ape behavior।http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com

Most of the more than 200 stone artifacts found at three sites in Taï National Park, Ivory Coast, were used by prehistoric chimps to crack open nuts, say archaeologist Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary in Alberta and his colleagues। The animals placed nuts on the flat surface of one rock and smashed the tough shells with another rock। http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com

"I'd predict that this type of simple bashing technology goes back to a common ancestor of chimps and humans around 6 million years ago," Mercader says.

His team presents its findings in the Feb. 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers excavated a cluster of three sites in 2001 and 2003. Most of the stone artifacts came from one location, known as Noulo. Radiocarbon measurements of burned wood in the soil produced the age estimate for the finds.

To see whether the artifacts could be distinguished as implements, Mercader and two of his coauthors, both well-recognized specialists in Stone Age tools, assessed a group of 90 stones, not knowing beforehand their origins: the West African sites, a 5,000-year-old human occupation in Canada, or a location in the Canadian Rockies where the stones had been modified only by geological forces. In almost all cases, the three examiners identified just the stones from the first two groups as being intentionally modified.

Turning to the full set of specimens from the three West African sites, the scientists concluded that most represent instances of one stone being hammered forcefully against another. Those rocks weighed from 1 kilogram to 9 kilograms (2.2 to 19.8 pounds).

The team also judged that people had apparently struck flakes off 28 of the stones. People probably visited the frequently flooded riverbank sites sporadically, Mercader posits.

Other clues suggest that chimps, rather than people, had used the unflaked stones, For instance, large, heavy hammering stones at Noulo look like those that chimps at a nearby site use to crack nuts (SN: 3/30/02, p। 195: http://www।sciencenews.org/articles/20020330/fob2.asp). Both the old and modern sets of artifacts contain small pits and hollow depressions produced by bashing rocks together, as well as distinctive edge and corner damage. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com

Finally, starch grains extracted from 31 stones at the West African sites came predominantly from nuts typically eaten only by chimps, according to Mercader's team. People living in that part of the rain forest mainly subsist on tubers, plants, and fruits. The sites yielded none of the pounding and grinding tools favored by foragers and farmers.

The new finds precede the emergence of farming villages in that part of Africa. Mercader notes that it's possible that chimps imitated simple stone-tool practices of human foragers. Still, he suspects that the rock-bashing activity originated deep in prehistory.

Archaeologist Alison S. Brooks of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., agrees: "There is no reason why future work should not reveal evidence of even older chimpanzee sites." Starch grains last well over 100,000 years, Brooks notes.

Although the new data make "a fairly solid case" for prehistoric nut cracking by chimps, the animals probably invented this stone-tool technique on their own rather than inheriting it from a common human-chimp ancestor, remarks archaeologist John J. Shea of the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

view

We all order in the same way, no matter what language we speak। That neat trick occurs in the course of daily affairs, not in an Esperanto-only restaurant। People nonverbally represent all kinds of events in a consistent order that corresponds to subject-object-verb, even if they speak a language such as English that uses a different ordering scheme, a new study finds। http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire।blogspot।com http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com

The findings challenge the more than 60-year-old idea that a person’s native language orchestrates the way he or she thinks about the world. Instead, a universal, nonverbal preference for ordering events in a particular way exists apart from language, propose psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago and her colleagues.

“This order is found in the earliest stages of newly evolving sign languages and may reflect a natural disposition that humans exploit when creating language anew,” Goldin-Meadow says.

The new study makes a good case for a common, unspoken approach to representing sequences of events, remarks psychologist Larissa Samuelson of the University of Iowa in Iowa City. But it’s unclear whether this natural sequencing format results from hardwired brain features or emerges early in life as the brain develops, Samuelson notes.

She suspects that a shared attribute of still-unfolding brains in children at least partly shapes language structure. “An important step is to see whether young children show the same natural sequence for event representations that adults do,” Samuelson says.

Goldin-Meadow’s team studied 20 Turkish speakers in Istanbul, 20 Mandarin Chinese speakers in Beijing, 20 English speakers in Chicago and 20 Spanish speakers in Madrid. Participants came from universities in each city.

In one task, half the speakers of each language described 36 brief vignettes shown on a computer screen, first in words and then using only hand gestures. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.कॉम Vignettes included a girl waving to an unseen person, a duck walking to a wheelbarrow, a woman twisting a knob and a girl giving a flower to a man.

Verbal descriptions followed language-specific word sequencing, the researchers report in the July 8 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. English, Spanish and Chinese speakers used a subject-verb-object sequence, such as saying “the woman twists the knob.” Turkish speakers used a subject-object-verb sequence, saying the equivalent of “the woman the knob twists.”

Most languages worldwide employ one or the other of these ordering formats, although exceptions exist, Goldin-Meadow notes.

Yet all participants, regardless of language, produced gestures first for an actor, then for an object and finally for an action in portraying vignettes. After watching a woman twisting a knob, all volunteers nonverbally communicated a sequence of events corresponding to “woman knob twists.”

In another task, the remaining half of the speakers of each language reconstructed the same 36 vignettes by stacking sets of three transparent pictures one at a time onto a peg to form a single image. The final image looked the same regardless of the order in which transparencies were stacked, such as a woman on the left, a knob on the right and a circular-shaped arrow in the middle denoting a twisting motion.

Speakers of all languages almost always stacked images in the same order. Participants typically chose the drawing of a woman first, followed by the drawing of a knob and finally the drawing of a circular arrow, again reflecting a subject-object-verb preference.

Intriguingly, a subject-object-verb arrangement also characterizes a sign language that arose over the past 70 years in an isolated Bedouin community in Israel. As a result of a genetic condition, that community has a high incidence of deafness that develops in early childhood.

Goldin-Meadow has found deaf children elsewhere in the world who have never heard anyone talk have developed sign languages that follow a consistent object-verb order, though the placement of subject remains unclear. She plans to investigate whether these deaf youngsters display a preference for subject-object-verb sequences. She also wants to examine how these children order transparencies to describe events that they’ve seen.

In the meantime, the University of Chicago researcher suggests that it’s easier to think about distinct entities, as opposed to actions. This leads people to highlight those involved in an action before focusing on the nature of the action. Given a particularly close association between objects and actions, action sequences are at least initially represented as subject-object-verb, in her view.

As a language community grows and its speech becomes more complex, the subject-object-verb format sometimes changes for still unclear reasons, Goldin-Meadow speculates.

hydrogen

With substantial investments, hydrogen could become a competitive fuel within 15 years, but the fastest way to reduce carbon emissions from vehicles will be to pursue a wider “portfolio” of new technologies, a panel of experts asserts। http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

Once hydrogen becomes competitive, it could virtually displace gasoline by mid-century, and related carbon dioxide emissions in the United States would be down to 20 percent of current levels, says the National Research Council study, released on July 17। “You could potentially, in the best case, eliminate all oil from http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de U.S. transportation, and most of the carbon dioxide emissions,” said Michael P. Ramage, who was the executive vice president of ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Co. and chaired the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council panel. He spoke during a press briefing announcing the study.

Meanwhile, for the next 15 to 20 years, hydrogen will have little impact on reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. Until then, the panel says, carbon-dioxide emissions should be kept in check by a multi-pronged approach, which would include hybrid cars, biofuels, and increased fuel efficiency of gasoline-powered vehicles.

Carbon dioxide is a major contributor to the greenhouse effect, which scientists say is the main cause of global warming. Hydrogen-fueled cars only emit water vapor, although some carbon dioxide may be released in the energy-intensive process of producing the hydrogen fuel.

The NRC study focused on cars, light trucks, and SUVs, which together account for about 20 percent of America’s carbon dioxide emissions, according to NAS. It responded to a congressional mandate to determine whether switching from gasoline to hydrogen would be technically and financially feasible on a national scale.

The 17 experts — from private organizations and research institutions — compared the costs and carbon emissions involved with the use of different technologies, including hydrogen fuel cells, biofuels such as ethanol, and simply improving the efficiency of gasoline-powered vehicles.

Hydrogen would be most efficient when used in fuel cells, which extract energy via a chemical reaction rather than by combustion. But fuel cells are still very expensive and distributing hydrogen to consumers would require new infrastructure. Consequently, a large-scale transition to hydrogen will require help from the federal government. “There needs to be durable, substantial, sustainable government effort to make this happen,” Ramage said.

At the same time, economies of scale and technological improvements are likely to bring the cost of fuel cells down. In 10 years, the hydrogen vehicles will be commercially available, if still expensive. At that stage, the government would need to step in with subsidies. By 2023, the study concluded, hydrogen-burning fuel cells will compete with internal combustion engines.

The panel’s scenario is admittedly optimistic. It assumes that the government will invest $55 billion between now and 2023, and that private industry will invest $145 billion over the same time period. It also assumes that the government will impose a tax on carbon dioxide, which would encourage low-emission production of hydrogen for the fuel cells.

englishman

May 31, Tuesday. No special matters in Cabinet. Mr. Seward sent me on Saturday a correspondence between himself and Lord Lyons and the Treasury Department relative to a large amount of cotton which was purchased a few months since in Georgia by one John Mulholland, an Englishman, who desires to bring it out, or, if he could not do that, to have it protected. The Secretary of State wrote the Secretary of the Treasury for views. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.comThe Treasury thought the proposition to bring it out inadmissible, but when our military lines were so extended as to include this cotton the agents of the Treasury would give it the same care as the property of loyal citizens; thinks it would be well to advise the Navy and War Departments to instruct their officers. Hence the communication to me.

I decline giving any such instructions, and so have written Mr। Seward, considering it illegal as well as inexpedient, telling him it would be a precedent for transferring all the products of the South into foreign hands to pay for munitions of war which we should be bound to protect। None but Englishmen would have the presumption to make such a request. It is entitled to no respect or consideration. Not unlikely it is cotton of the Rebel government covered up. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com

influenced

http://louis-j-sheehan.कॉम Other variations include so-called "mass-hypnosis," in which crowds are simultaneously influenced, and autosuggestion in which subjects persuade themselves। However, these phenomena are unlike those typically associated with the classical phenomena of hypnosis. http://louis-j-sheehan.com

Although we can speak of a "history of hypnosis" prior to the 19th century, it should be clear that the word itself is the invention of 19th century Scottish physician James Braid. It is not clear if what is discussed as hypnosis prior to the 19th century in histories of hypnosis is in actual fact what we mean today by "hypnosis."

During the Middle Ages and early modern period, hypnosis began to be better understood by physicians such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina).

supreme

The U।S. Supreme Court Thursday, in a 5-4 ruling, for the first time in U.S. history declared the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution contains a specific right to individual gun ownership and rejected Washington, D.C., handgun restrictions, which were the strictest in the nation. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

"There seems to us no doubt on the basis of both text and history that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the 64-page majority ruling. "This meaning is strongly confirmed by the historical background of the Second Amendment."

The ruling significantly restricts the ability of D.C. to tightly control gun ownership and flatly rejects its existing gun laws, enacted in 1976 as the strictest gun control law in the country.

"The Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns," Justice Scalia said, adding the Constitution bars an absolute handgun ban.

But the Supreme Court majority fully rejected an absolute bar of individual handgun ownership and invalidated regulations requiring that all guns -- handguns, rifles and shotguns -- be dismantled and outfitted with a trigger lock.

"We hold that the District's ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense," the majority held.

Justice Scalia's opinion, which thoroughly discusses the legal history of gun ownership going back to the 1600s, said the individual right to own firearms is limited. "Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited," Justice Scalia wrote. "Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places."

The majority said laws barring guns in schools and government buildings and laws placing "conditions and qualifications" on the commercial sale of arms are valid.

The issue split the court along conservative and liberal ideological lines, with Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in the majority. Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and David Souter dissented.

Justice Stevens, reading from the bench, took point-by-point issue with the sweeping holdings contained in the majority opinion. "There is no indication that the framers of the amendment intended to enshrine the common-law right of self-defense in the Constitution," Stevens wrote in his dissent.http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

The Supreme Court had not ruled directly on the Second Amendment in almost 70 years. It also, over time, has offered little guidance on the extent to which the amendment covers individual gun ownership for self-defense, hunting and recreational shooting.

The D.C. law, on the books since 1976, bans handguns, bars concealed weapons possession and requires shotguns and rifles to be registered and then kept unloaded and disassembled or locked.http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

The law was challenged by six D.C. residents who said they wanted to legally possess handguns in their homes for self-protection. A U.S. District Court threw out the challenge, but a panel of the Washington-based U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived one of the claims and ruled a special police officer, the now-retired Dick Heller, was wrongly denied a handgun permit.

The decision affirms a lower court ruling that reached a similar conclusion based on the Second Amendment.

The case is D.C. v. Heller, 07-290.

Court Strikes Down 'Millionaire's Amendment'

The court by a 5-4 vote invalidated a federal campaign finance law that attempts to blunt the advantage wealthy self-financed candidates have in a congressional election.

The justices, splitting along ideological lines, said the so-called millionaire's amendment, part of 2002 campaign finance reforms, violates free speech rights guaranteed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

"The unprecedented step of imposing different contribution and coordinated party expenditure limits on candidates vying for the same seat is antithetical to the First Amendment," Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion.

The decision reverses a lower-court holding that had allowed the campaign-finance restriction.

Under the provision, the opponent of a wealthy candidate can solicit larger individual contributions and receive unlimited funding from party coffers when the wealthy congressional candidate spends more than $350,000 of his own money. The law raises the individual contribution limit to $6,900 from $2,300 and requires a self-financed candidate to file reports every time he spends $10,000 or more.

The case grew out of a self-financed bid by Jack Davis, who spent $1.2 million of his own funds in a 2004 race against Rep. Thomas Reynolds (R., N.Y.). Mr. Davis lost the campaign and was fined $251,000 for failing to report that he had surpassed the millionaire amendment's threshold.

Mr. Davis sued the FEC over the law in 2006, claiming it violates the First Amendment because it gives his opponent an advantage of knowing his strategy.

The FEC has argued that the provision doesn't restrict the wealthier candidate's speech because it doesn't limit how much he can spend but simply gives an opponent access to more campaign resources.

Mr. Davis is running for the same U.S. House position; Reynolds has retired.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas voted with Alito in the majority. Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer dissented on the court's primary holding.

The case is Davis v. Federal Elections Commission, 07-320.

Court Calls for Review of Western Power Contracts

Justices asked federal courts and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to take another look at the terms of long-term wholesale energy contracts several Western utilities signed during the 2000-2001 energy crisis.

In a 5-2 opinion, the high court said FERC acted within its authority to, in a balanced analysis, determine reasonable wholesale power rates but made mistakes in its regulatory review. The opinion also faults court analysis by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, deciding the appeals court ruling didn't adequately protect the power contracts from alteration.

Under the ruling both the Ninth Circuit and FERC must review how conclusions were reached but the opinion does not suggest that the power contracts at issue in the case should be changed.

The case involves the terms of numerous power contracts purchased by utilities in California, Nevada and Washington state when energy markets were in turmoil. The decision will prolong uncertainty over contracts between the utilities and power sellers, including the power marketing unit of Morgan Stanley, a unit of Allegheny Energy Inc. and other energy companies that were sued over power contract terms.

At issue in the appeals were long-term agreements that provided power at prices set during chaos in the spot electricity markets. After the crisis subsided, the utilities decided the contracts were set at unreasonably high prices that violated federal law. But the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees electricity prices, declined to order changes in the contracts.

Justice Antonin Scalia, in the majority opinion, said FERC must engage in a thorough review when it oversees wholesale power contracts. "Balancing the short-term and long-term interests of consumers entails difficult judgment calls, and to the extent FERC actually engages in this balancing, its reasoned determination is entitled to deference," Justice Scalia wrote. "But FERC cannot abdicate its statutory responsibility to ensure just and reasonable rates through the expedient of a heavy-handed presumption."

Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Ruth Bader Ginsburg voted in the majority. Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter dissented. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Stephen Breyer, who both have significant stock portfolios, were recused from the case.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco in December 2006 ordered FERC to reconsider its decision to leave the power contracts intact and suggested guidelines the agency should use in doing so.

The two appeals before the high court cover only a small amount of the refunds being sought by utility districts. But the ruling will also affect a separate case where the California Public Utilities Commission is seeking $1.4 billion in refunds from Sempra Energy.

The cases are Morgan Stanley Capital Group v. Snohomish County Washington Public Utility District No. 1, 06-1457, and American Electric Power Service Corp. v. Snohomish County Washington Public Utility District No. 1, 06-1462

oddysey

On April 16, 1178 B.C. a total eclipse blotted out the sun at high noon; astronomers know that much for certain. The other events of that day are considerably less definite, but researchers say the date may also figure large in Homer’s Odyssey, the epic tale of Odysseus’s journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. http://louis-j-sheehan.usUsing astronomical clues from the text, researchers say that Homer may have indicated that the day of the eclipse was also the day that Odysseus finally reached home–arriving just in time to slaughter his wife’s persistent suitors.

While the researchers believe they’ve arrived at the proper date for Odysseus’s homecoming in the Odyssey, they don’t claim to have proven that all the events in the epic are real; it is, after all, packed with gods, monsters, and magic. But researcher Marcelo Magnasco says his findings could at least demonstrate Homer’s astronomical erudition. “Under the assumption that our work turns out to be correct, it adds to the evidence that he knew what he was talking about,” Magnasco said. “It still does not prove the historicity of the return of Odysseus,” he said. “It only proves that Homer knew about certain astronomical phenomena that happened much before his time” [AP].

Researchers looked for references to constellations and planetary positions in the text, and tried to make them match up with known astronomical patterns of past centuries. As they report in the forthcoming issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [subscription required], they found references to the positions of Mercury and Venus during the final months of Odysseus’s journey, as well as a description of two constellations, Pleiades and Bootes, being both visible at sunset. Magnasco and his coauthor, Constantino Baikouzis, says these conditions all existed in the early spring of 1178 B.C.http://louis-j-sheehan.us

The evidence that Odysseus’s homecoming occurred on the day of the eclipse is somewhat circumstantial. The researchers note that there are references to a new moon on the day of Odysseus’s return, which is a precursor for a solar eclipse. But the poem contains no direct reference to an eclipse on the day when Odysseus returned to his faithful wife, Penelope, and struck down the suitors.

Instead, there’s a literary flourish that could be interpreted as a reference to the sun’s disappearance. As the suitors are sitting down for their noontime meal, the goddess Athena “confounds their minds” so that they start laughing uncontrollably and see their food spattered with blood. Then the seer Theoclymenus prophesies their death and passage to Hades, ending with the phrase: “The Sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world.” The Greek historian Plutarch interpreted this as signifying a total solar eclipse, and many others have agreed [Los Angeles Times].

Trying to reconcile ancient literature with historical fact is a risky proposition, and even the researchers advise taking their hypothesis with a grain of salt. “The notion that the passage could refer not just to an allegorical eclipse used by the poet for literary effect but actually to a specific historical one,” they agreed, “seems unlikely because it would entail the transmission through oral tradition of information about an eclipse occurring maybe five centuries before the poem was cast in the form we know today” [The New York Times]. Homer is thought to have put the legends of Odysseus into poetry around 850 B.C.http://louis-j-sheehan.us

erhard

Erhard's First Ministry (16 October 1963 - 26 October 1965)

* Ludwig Erhard (CDU) - Chancellor
* Erich Mende (FDP) - Vice Chancellor and Minister of All-German Affairs
* Gerhard Schröder (CDU) - Minister of Foreign Affairs
* Kai-Uwe von Hassel (CDU) - Minister of Defense
* Hermann Höcherl (CSU) - Minister of the Interior
* Rolf Dahlgrün (FDP) - Minister of Finance http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
* Ewald Bucher (FDP) - Minister of Justice
* Kurt Schmücker (CDU) - Minister of Economics
* Theodor Blank (CDU) - Minister of Labour and Social Affairs
* Werner Schwarz (CDU) - Minister of Food, Agriculture, and Forestry
* Hans-Christoph Seebohm (CDU) - Minister of Transport
* Paul Lücke (CDU) - Minister of Construction
* Bruno Heck (CDU) - Minister of Family and Youth
* Elisabeth Schwarzhaupt (CDU) - Minister of Health
* Hans Lenz (FDP) - Minister of Scientific Research
* Walter Scheel (FDP) - Minister of Economic Cooperation
* Heinrich Krone (CDU) - Minister of Special Tasks
* Richard Stücklen (CSU) - Minister of Posts and Communications
* Ernst Lemmer (CDU) - Minister of Displaced Persons, Refugees, and War Victims
* Alois Niederalt (CSU) - Minister of Bundesrat and State Affairs
* Werner Dollinger (CSU) - Minister of Federal Treasure http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de

Changes

* 16 June 1964 - Ludger Westrick (CDU) succeeds Krone as Minister of Special Tasks.
* 1 April 1965 - Karl Weber (CDU) succeeds Bucher as Minister of Justice.

[edit] Erhard's Second Ministry (26 October 1965 - 1 December 1966)

* Ludwig Erhard (CDU) - Chancellor
* Erich Mende (FDP) - Vice Chancellor and Minister of All-German Affairs
* Gerhard Schröder (CDU) - Minister of Foreign Affairs
* Kai-Uwe von Hassel (CDU) - Minister of Defense
* Paul Lücke (CDU) - Minister of the Interior
* Rolf Dahlgrün (FDP) - Minister of Finance
* Richard Jaeger (CSU) - Minister of Justice
* Kurt Schmücker (CDU) - Minister of Economics
* Hans Katzer (CDU) - Minister of Labour and Social Affairs
* Hermann Höcherl (CSU) - Minister of Food, Agriculture, and Forestry
* Hans-Christoph Seebohm (CDU) - Minister of Transport
* Ewald Bucher (FDP) - Minister of Construction
* Bruno Heck (CDU) - Minister of Family and Youth
* Elisabeth Schwarzhaupt (CDU) - Minister of Health
* Gerhard Stoltenberg (CDU) - Minister of Scientific Research
* Walter Scheel (FDP) - Minister of Economic Cooperation
* Richard Stücklen (CSU) - Minister of Posts and Communications
* Johann Baptist Gradl (CDU) - Minister of Displaced Persons, Refugees, and War Victims http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
* Alois Niederalt (CSU) - Minister of Bundesrat and State Affairs
* Werner Dollinger (CSU) - Minister of Federal Treasure

Changes

* 28 October 1966 - Hans-Christoph Seebohm (CDU) succeeds Mende as Vice Chancellor, remaining also Minister of Transport. Rainer Barzel (CDU) succeeds Mende as Minister of All-German Affairs. The other FDP ministers, Dahlgrün and Scheel, also resign.
* 8 November 1966 - Kurt Schmücker succeeds Dahlgrün as Minister of Finance. Werner Dollinger (CSU) succeeds Scheel as Minister of Economic Cooperation, remaining also Minister of Federal Treasure.
erhard

piero Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

Lorenzo married twice.http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

Lorenzo first married Clarice Orsini by proxy on February 7, 1469. She was a daughter of Giacomo Orsini, Lord of Monterotondo and Bracciano by his wife and cousin Maddalena Orsini. They had nine children:

* Lucrezia de' Medici (August 4, 1470 - November, 1553). She married Giacomo Salviati. Their daughter Francesca Salviati was mother to Pope Leo XI.
* Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici (February 15, 1471 - December 28, 1503).
* Twins born in March, 1472. Died shortly after birth.
* Maddalena de' Medici (July 25, 1473 - December, 1528). Married Franceschetto Cybo, an illegitimate son of Pope Innocent VIII.
* Pope Leo X (born Giovanni de' Medici; December 11, 1475 - December 1, 1521).
* Luisa de' Medici (1477 - 1488). She was betrothed to her cousin Giovanni de' Medici il Popolano.
* Contessina de' Medici (1478 - 1515). Married Piero Ridolfi.
* Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Nemours (March 12, 1479 - March 17, 1516). http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com

After Clarice's death, he married Philippina (Philippa) of Savoy, daughter of Philip II, Duke of Savoy. The couple had no children.[citation needed]

Two of his sons later became powerful popes. His second son, Giovanni, became Pope Leo X, and his adopted son Giulio (who was the illegitimate son of his slain brother Giuliano) became Pope Clement VII.

His first son and his political heir, Piero 'the Unfortunate', squandered his father's patrimony and brought down his father's dynasty in Florence. Another Medici, his brother Giovanni, restored it, but it was only made wholly secure again on the accession of a distant relative from a branch line of the family, Cosimo I de' Medici.

Technorati Profile

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Sparta

Technorati Profile

Geissler 88822 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 23

Ernst Geissler (3 August 1915, Chemnitz, Germany - 3 June 1989, Huntsville, Alabama) was a German aerospace engineer. After World War II, he came to the United States in 16 November 1945 as part of Operation Paperclip. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz





Geissler became director of the Aeroballistics Division at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in 1960.

Geissler was the recipient of the The NASA Certificate of Appreciation in 1973.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Astronautical Society Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

artifacts Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Starweb is a play-by-mail game of strategy and diplomacy invented in 1976 by Rick Loomis. The game has won a number of awards over the years (including the 1984 Charles S. Roberts Award for Best Play-by-Mail Game,[1] the 2000 and 2003 Origins Awards for Best Play-by-Mail Game,[2][3] and the 1997 Origins Award for Best Ongoing Play-by-Mail Game[4]), and is likely the longest lived play-by-mail game that started life in that medium. It remains a popular game at Flying Buffalo.[citation needed]

Played for points, Starweb is primarily a hidden movement wargame, but also includes elements of a role-playing game. Six different types of players (Empire Builder, Merchant, Berserker, Apostle, Pirate, and Artifact Collector) gain points in different ways; nevertheless, most victories come from taking something away from somebody else.

Players write down their orders using an arcane command language, which is then entered into the Starweb computer program and the orders calculated simultaneously. The results are then printed and mailed back to the players. In recent years the system has moved to e-mail. Scoring rules differ based on the character class. The game ends when any player reaches a score determined (but not revealed to the players) at the beginning of the game.

One interesting concept in the game is the idea of "artifacts", a number of which are randomly scattered around the game map during setup. The artifacts have certain point values for each class, but the Artifact Collector gains considerably more points for holding collections of them in a single place. One of the artifacts, The Black Box, has a random effect which is not revealed to the players.

Starweb uses the term "Berserker" with permission of Fred Saberhagen, Saberhagen returned the favor by using a fictionalized Starweb game as a backdrop for his novel Octagon (1981).

In 1999 Pyramid magazine named Starweb as one of the Millennium's Best Games. Editor Scott Haring said "Starweb is the king of [play-by-mail games] -- the industry's most popular and longest running. ... Beautifully balanced, with a design so well-polished it gleams."[5]

[edit]

on top

The federal agency planning a new $130 million courthouse in Harrisburg has spent $197,000 to sell the community on its plans.

In comparison, that agency, the U.S. General Services Administration, spent less than one-fourth as much for economic research on potential sites for the courthouse, according to records under a Freedom of Information Act request.

The spending for public relations and communications consultants is seen as a drop in the bucket in view of the overall project. But public affairs experts and local leaders wonder what the GSA got for its money.

The agency defended the spending -- which it acknowledged as out of the ordinary -- because of its poor standing within the community. The agency continues to battle local officials over the proposed courthouse site.

"They're more concerned about their public image than they are the right thing," said U.S. Rep. Tim Holden, D-Schuylkill County, who called the public relations spending a waste of money.

"It is outrageous and unacceptable that a government agency would try to win the court of public opinion by hiring consultants," he said.

"It's a courthouse, for God's sake," said Chris Kelley Cimko, a public relations expert and senior vice president of FD Dittus Communications.

"Typically, GSA, local pols and city administrations know what to say and how to say it," Cimko said, adding that it "is not exactly rocket science."

Mayor Stephen R. Reed, Holden and other local lawmakers want the new courthouse at Sixth and Reily streets to spur development in that area. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
After two attempts to build at other sites failed because of community opposition, the GSA wants to rebuild at the site of the existing Ronald Reagan Federal Building and Courthouse on Third and Walnut streets.

The GSA might have been forced to use outside help because its own communications department has been cut, Cimko said.

"They don't have people on staff that are the experts, so why not go out and hire," said Beverly Cigler, a public policy and administration professor at Penn State.

"It's fairly obvious that GSA had a big problem" coping with angry lawmakers and local officials, Cigler said.

In a statement, the GSA said it usually has good relationships in communities.

"The intensity of the Harrisburg community's response to our site proposals led us to believe that we needed additional support to communicate our objectives and rationale for decisions," the agency said. "Because of the public relations assistance, GSA has learned many things regarding the Harrisburg community and has modified the ways we provide information to the public."

The GSA has paid $197,000 to three firms: Xenophon Strategies, based in Washington, D.C.; Burson-Marsteller, a public relations firm; and the Neiman Group, based in Harrisburg.

Neiman was hired as a subcontractor by Gensler, the architectural firm coordinating the project. Gensler has been paid more than $686,000.

Xenophon and Neiman have ties to former Gov. Tom Ridge and Pennsylvania Republican political circles. Neiman President Tim Reeves was Ridge's communications director. Steve Aaron, the Neiman account executive working on behalf of the GSA, worked in the Ridge administration press office.

Called about Neiman's work, Aaron referred questions to the GSA.

David Fuscus, Xenophon's founder, CEO and president, was a deputy chief of staff to Ridge and later worked for him at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Many Xenophon staffers have Ridge administration ties.

Xenophon is no longer working on the courthouse project. Burson-Marsteller, which was paid $5,000 a month as a retainer, is not currently working on the project, according to the GSA. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx

Neiman started out working for $2,500 a month, but its monthly retainer was raised to $5,000.

Hiring Neiman or another local firm made sense because of the hostile community response, Cimko said. But she questioned the need for all three firms.

In response to questions submitted in writing, the agency said the outside consultants "provided GSA with a better understanding of the Harrisburg community and provided recommendations on the best ways to communicate with various stakeholders."

"By becoming more accessible to the media and proactive in our communications, the public has received regular updates and has learned more about the project," the agency said.

Community leaders questioned the value of spending that taxpayer money. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/


They said the agency and its representatives failed to substantively engage the community and its leaders, and often ignored their opinions.

Reginald A. Guy Jr., a member of the Right Site Harrisburg Coalition, which backs the Sixth and Reily location, called the GSA's community outreach efforts inadequate.

"To my knowledge, the agency has held no evening public meetings or engaged any African-American professionals to survey African-American views," he said.

Local leaders and congressional aides said the GSA's arrogant attitude toward local opinion worsened already strained relations.

Holden said he sees why the GSA hired architectural and engineering consultants, but questioned the need for communications assistance.

"Can't they make the arguments themselves?" he said.









When Diane Kovach read the letter from Procter & Gamble, her heart sank.

"I got sick to my stomach, honestly," the Palmyra-area resident said. "I never anticipated my name being a problem with a bigger company. I never in a million years would have anticipated something like that."

The problem? Kovach started an in-home business less than two years ago, making cloth diapers and selling them online. She needed a domain name, and "Pampered Bunz" seemed appropriate.

As the business took off, she applied to trademark the name, but Procter & Gamble, maker of Pampers disposable diapers, got a whiff of it.

"We are concerned that your client's use and registration of the mark Pampered Bunz may infringe P&G's established intellectual property rights in its famous Pampers trademark," stated the April 25 letter to Kovach's lawyer. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/



P&G told Kovach to withdraw her trademark application and stop using the word "Pampered."

"I never made the connection, and until now, nobody I talked to made it, either," Kovach said. "For heaven's sake, they're reusable."

Kovach started her business when other mothers asked for the cloth diapers she made for her son in various fabrics. She said she gets up to 40 orders a month from customers who typically buy about 24 diapers -- a two-day supply -- at a time. Prices range from $13 to $19.50.

At first, Kovach said, she wanted to fight Procter & Gamble, the Cincinnati-based personal and home products giant. But her lawyer, Norman Lehrer of Cherry Hill, N.J., told her a fight could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"Not only am I not going to do that to my family with the time it would take, but I'm a work-at-home mom," she said. "I really don't have the resources."

Kovach and her husband, a third-shift mechanic for Pepperidge Farm, have a 4-year-old daughter and a 17-month-old son.

Reusable versus disposable is not the legal issue in question, Lehrer said.

"Would the ordinary consumer be confused or deceived into believing there was some relationship between the two?" he asked. Kovach would have had to finance a survey costing anywhere from $10,000 to $100,000 to prove that consumers didn't assume a link between Pampers and Pampered Bunz, Lehrer said.

Procter & Gamble's corporate communications office did not return calls for comment.

Before Kovach agrees to stop using the Pampered Bunz name, Lehrer is negotiating with P&G on issues that he would not specify. Kovach is doing some rebranding of her own, carefully researching a new name for her business.

She has recovered from her initial shock -- "overwhelmed" was her word for it -- and said she understands P&G's perspective. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx


"They're an established company," she said. "They've worked really hard for their name, and I can appreciate that, working really hard for a good name."


A poorly run Pentagon program for providing workman's compensation for civilian employees in Iraq and Afghanistan has allowed defense contractors and insurance companies to gouge American taxpayers, a House committee said Thursday.

Insurance companies alone have collected nearly $600 million in excessive profits over the past five years, says a Democratic staff report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, but the Defense Department refuses to adjust its approach for managing the program.

According to the committee, the Pentagon allows its contractors to negotiate their own insurance contracts. By contrast, the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development and the Army Corps of Engineers have all selected a single insurance carrier to provide the insurance at fixed rates.

"What makes the situation even worse is the people this program is supposed to benefit — the injured employees working for contractors — have to fight the insurance companies to get their benefits," committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said at a hearing Thursday. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
"Delays and denials in paying claims are the rule."

KBR Inc., one of the largest defense contractors in Iraq, paid the insurance giant AIG $284 million for medical and disability coverage under the Defense Base Act, a reference to the federal law mandating the insurance. Due to the way KBR's contract is structured, this premium, along with an $8 million markup for KBR, gets billed to the taxpayer.

"Out of this amount, just $73 million actually goes to injured contractors, and AIG and KBR pocket over $100 million as profit," Waxman said.

In an e-mailed statement, AIG spokesman Chris Winans said the company is reviewing the staff report. But AIG is confident its coverage is accurately and fairly priced given the high risks to workers in war zones and the potential for sizable claims, Winans said.

All contractors doing work overseas for U.S. government agencies are required to insure their civilian employees, many of whom are handling dangerous jobs in hostile areas. Contractors get the coverage from private insurance companies, then they're reimbursed for what they spend. The insurance costs are included in the contract's overall price.

The Army Criminal Investigation Command has opened a probe into two companies working on Iraq reconstruction that have been accused of padding their profits by claiming reimbursements from the Corps of Engineers for insurance coverage they never purchased.

The probe of two Iraqi companies located in Tikrit — Sakar al-Fahal and al-Jubori — led the Corps of Engineers to scour its records for evidence of fraud by other contractors hired with billions of U.S. dollars to help rebuild Iraqi infrastructure devastated by the war.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., asked what the Corps of Engineers is doing to stop other companies from bilking the federal government for unpaid insurance coverage.

James Dalton, chief of engineering and construction for the Corps of Engineers, said contracting officers are trained to look for signs of fraud. The case involving the Iraqi companies, Dalton said, "was found through routine oversight of our contracts."

Waxman asked John Needham of the Government Accountability Office if U.S. taxpayers were getting the most for their money.

"It's not apparent they are," answered Needham, who added that the Defense Department has been unable to collect data on how much is spent on insurance for defense contracts. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx


Richard Ginman, a senior Pentagon acquisition official, said the Army Corps of Engineers' approach stems from a pilot program the Defense Department began in 2003 after contractors doing business in Iraq complained about the high cost of the mandatory coverage.

Rates for the Defense Base Act insurance had ballooned from $4 per $100 of employee salary to a ratio of $20 per $100 of compensation. It was especially tough for small companies to get the mandatory insurance, Ginman said.

Through the pilot program, Chicago-based Continental Insurance Company offered companies with Corps of Engineers contracts at lower fixed rates. A company with a construction contract, for example, would pay $7.25 for every $100 of payroll.

The Pentagon is still studying that program's results to determine if it makes sense to require all military branches and agencies to use it, Ginman said.

Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., said the pilot effort has already saved $19 million and he criticized the Defense Department for moving too slowly to make needed changes.

"The foot dragging seems to be contagious," Cooper said.

But Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., the committee's top Republican, said using a single insurance company may not be possible for the Defense Department. The military's obligations under the Defense Base Act, he said, dwarf those of other federal agencies. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/

"It's not clear that any insurance provider would be willing to underwrite (Defense Base Act) insurance for all DOD contractors, or that contractors would be willing to participate on those terms," Davis said.





The most surprising thing about Sue Simmons’s unbleeped blooper the other night is that anyone in this city even noticed.

You may have read about her unfortunate slip. Ms. Simmons, a news anchor on WNBC-TV, tried to get the attention of her longtime partner, Chuck Scarborough, by asking him, “What are you doing?”

Only she did not realize that they were live on the air. And she didn’t quite say “What are you doing?” She inserted two words between “what” and “are.” One of those words was “the.” Sorry to be coy about the other one, but it is not allowed to be printed here. Rules are rules. If you can’t figure out what it is, you have not been in New York very long — like less than four minutes.

Despite a certain amount of twitter over this incident, it seems that both the republic and Ms. Simmons will survive. “She’ll continue to be on the air,” said a WNBC spokeswoman, Susan Kiel.

The reality is that this vulgar word has been tossed about with such abandon in public for so many years that New Yorkers tend to tune it out. Its endless, and mindless, repetition left them numb long ago. By now, the word is no longer shocking, just tedious.

Through frequent use, “a word like this begins to be less of a curse word,” said Ricardo Otheguy, a sociolinguist at the City University of New York Graduate Center. “The more you use it, the less dirty it is.”

Then, too, he said, the city has so many people for whom English is a second language. The word may sound softer to them than it is. “Swearing in your own language feels like a really dirty thing to do,” Professor Otheguy said. “Swearing in somebody else’s language seems somehow less fraught.”

Add to that the fact that boundaries between public space and private are being erased. Cellphones contribute mightily to that, said another sociolinguist, John V. Singler of New York University. “The range of places where it’s O.K. to use that word has grown enormously,” Professor Singler said. By now, he said, “the real taboo words — and even these depend on who’s saying them — have to do much more with race.”

You routinely hear Wall Street suits use the word at high decibels in the subway. Police officers bounce it casually among one another, no matter who else is around to hear. Teenagers use it all the time. Some people walk around with the word screaming from their T-shirts — an insight, perhaps, into their capacity for self-degradation.

Vice President Dick Cheney invoked the word on the Senate floor, suggesting to Senator Patrick Leahy that he commit an impossible sexual act. Eliot Spitzer, the swaggering former governor, tried to be macho by using it to emphasize his self-image as a “steamroller.” http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx


Rarely do any of these people display a glimmer of the creativity shown by a fellow soldier in my Army days. The jeep he was driving broke down. Looking under the hood, he needed only four words to pronounce the vehicle beyond repair. The first was “the,” followed by the Simmons-Cheney-Spitzer word in its adjectival, noun and verb forms — in that order. It bordered on poetry.

There was nothing poetic this week in the repeated use of the word after the rapper Remy Ma was sentenced in Manhattan to eight years in prison for shooting a woman. Remy Ma’s boyfriend, a fellow performer with the nom de rap of Papoose, was outraged. Maybe he did not fully grasp that it is generally considered unacceptable to shoot people.

When told by court officers to vamoose, Papoose lost control. All along the courthouse corridors, he repeated that tiresome word. T. S. Eliot he wasn’t.

Some New Yorkers, though, are still capable of cringing. A shouting match between two taxi drivers — neither a native English speaker but both graced with a solid command of the familiar word — cost one of them dearly. As reported this week in The New York Post, he was deemed the aggressor, and fined $1,000 and suspended for 30 days by Matthew W. Daus, chairman of the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

Sure, driving a cab is stressful, Mr. Daus said, but decorum must be maintained, especially in a service industry that caters to tourists from places where that word may not be batted around casually. “Drivers are often the first and last face that visitors to our city see,” he said.

Official censure does only so much, though. No power could have prevented a loud argument some years ago between two street guys. Finally, one of them shouted at the other, “I’ve only got two words to say to you.”

Actually, he then said four words. Two of them were sandwiched between “shut” and “up.” You can easily guess what they were. The point is that this man truly thought he was using only two words. That’s a New Yorker.


Among the celluloid dream girls manufactured by Hollywood in the 1940s, Jennifer Jones occupies a celestial niche. Beginning with her first major feature, “The Song of Bernadette,” in which she played a saintly French peasant who has a vision of the Virgin Mary, the character she represented on the screen was a spiritually exalted being who kept part of herself in reserve. Even when Ms. Jones went notoriously down and dirty to play Pearl Chavez, a sex-crazed half-Indian woman in “Duel in the Sun,” right, you had the titillating sense of a lady playing a tramp. (The opposite could be said of Lana Turner in dignified upscale roles.) http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspx



These polarities are suggested by the title of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s retrospective of Ms. Jones’s movies, “Saint and Sinner: The Tempestuous Career of Jennifer Jones,” at the Walter Reade Theater. Even as she crawled through the dirt, you still had a sense of her as the abstract embodiment of ideal femininity, 1940s style: a beautiful, empathetic trophy who was fundamentally untouchable.

Her aura of exaltation is largely thanks to David O. Selznick, the producer who discovered her, fell in love with her and eventually married her; for most of her career he micromanaged every detail of her presentation. He liked to cast her as women from great literature: the title character of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”; Carrie Meeber in “Sister Carrie”; Catherine Barkley in the disastrous 1957 remake of “A Farewell to Arms” (not shown in the series); and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night.”

The retrospective begins on Friday afternoon with the 1952 melodrama “Ruby Gentry,” set in Southern bayou country, followed by the 1946 Ernst Lubitsch comedy, “Cluny Brown,” in which she played opposite Charles Boyer, and “Duel in the Sun,” Selznick’s pulpy attempt in 1946 to duplicate the success of “Gone With the Wind.”

But the most blatant attempt to present Ms. Jones as the essence of female perfection is “Portrait of Jennie,” a romantic 1948 ghost story in which her dead character, Jennie Appleton, materializes from the past to inspire a starving artist (Joseph Cotten) who feels compelled to paint her. Jennie is the face in the misty light.


Poor old Pythagoras is slipping away from us. He was always a shadowy figure in Western thought -- his followers were secretive and he himself wrote nothing, as far as we know. Even in his own time and place, the Greek cities of southern Italy in the seventh century B.C., Pythagoras was a kind of myth-magnet. Over time a large body of thought about him developed, though it was based on precious little evidence. Then, in the second half of the 20th century, Pythagoras became yet more mysterious.

In 1962, the Swiss scholar Walter Burkert -- using a close reading of earliest written accounts of what Pythagoras was supposed to have said to his followers -- published a monumental debunking of the Pythagorean tradition. Fellow scholars were persuaded that what little they thought they knew about Pythagoras was probably wrong.

Until then, it had been said that there were two sides to Pythagoras -- which is a little ironic, given his presumed association with triangles. He had a religious side as the miracle-working leader of a cult that believed in the transmigration of souls (that "the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird," as Shakespeare's Malvolio puts it in "Twelfth Night"). And Pythagoras had a "scientific" side: He was a pioneering mathematician and philosopher who regarded geometry and numbers as the keys to the universe's harmonious structure.

Only the first side emerged intact from Burkert's scrutiny. The picture of Pythagoras as a mathematician and philosopher was a "mistake," Burkert said, an error resulting largely from the eagerness of self-styled "Pythagoreans" in later centuries to attribute their work to the master himself.

It now seems that Pythagoras did not invent the notion of mathematical proof after all. (Bertrand Russell and Arthur Koestler thought he did, which is why they both proclaimed him the West's most influential thinker.) http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
http://louis7j7sheehan7esquire.blogspot.com/

Nor did he discover the theorem that bears his name -- that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. It was known a thousand years earlier in Mesopotamia. He may have noted a link between some harmonic intervals in the music of his time and certain simple numerical ratios. But there is no reason to think he was the first to do so.

Still, even if the old Greek magician himself did not have much to do with it, Pythagoreanism played a sometimes important role in Western science before Newton, especially in astronomy, as Kitty Ferguson illustrates in "The Music of Pythagoras," an engaging survey of the ideas that have been thought of as Pythagorean.

For example, Plato's "Timaeus," with its account of a creator fashioning the world out of basic geometrical shapes, reflected the ideas of Plato's friend Archytas of Tarentum, a mathematician who regarded himself as a Pythagorean. "Timaeus" was the basis for most cosmology in the West for the first 12 centuries of the Christian era.

In the early 17th century, the astronomy of Johannes Kepler was suffused with Pythagorean themes, including the Pythagorean "music of the spheres." In ancient times it was much discussed why this sound, allegedly made by the heavenly bodies as they whiz through space, cannot be heard by human ears. Aristotle wryly noted that humans cannot hear it because there is no such sound.

In general, Ms. Ferguson's theme is that Pythagoras himself is responsible for the notion that numbers reveal hidden patterns in nature and that this notion amounts to a fundamental principle in science. It is indeed likely that Pythagoras regarded simple numbers and ratios as the keys to the universe; this much survives the skeptical thrust of recent scholarship about him.

Ms. Ferguson is familiar with the scholarship, but it is not clear that she has grasped its significance. Pythagoras' interest in numbers was primarily mystical, with little scientific content. He was concerned more with numerological symbolism (four was justice, for example, and five was marriage) than with measuring things. And the hope that it is possible to provide a unified account of the universe, using quantitative tools, is fundamentally Greek rather than specifically Pythagorean. The idea is found, in crude forms, in Pythagoras' immediate predecessors, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/

Ms. Ferguson closes her book with a hurried meditation on the threats to the conception of an orderly universe that are allegedly posed by 20th-century math and science. Were the Pythagoreans -- or, we might as well say, the Greeks -- correct to assume that there are comprehensible patterns in the universe? Or has that turned out to be a false hope? Ms. Ferguson skips briskly through quantum mechanics, chaos theory, set theory and more, wondering whether they show, in their sometimes surprising and always complex claims, that the universe is not rational after all.

But each of these fields has added to our rational understanding of the world and has done so by means of mathematics. The universe may not be as simple as some early Greek mathematicians imagined it to be, but it is proving ever more comprehensible by the day.


We have all felt it -- the anxiety that comes when we walk (or are wheeled) through a hospital's doors or bring a relative to the emergency room. We all have our stories and gripes about a health-care system that may rank with the nation's air-travel industry as the greatest source of public complaint in America. And like it or not, each of us holds a stake in the current debate over how to improve the way we care for the sick in this country.

So it would seem a fine time to burrow into the inner workings of an American hospital, which is what Julie Salamon has done in "Hospital." Ms. Salamon, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, negotiated for no-strings-attached, year-long access to Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. As the book's subtitle suggests -- "Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God, and Diversity on Steroids" -- there's an awful lot going on there.

The hospital she chose is at once state-of-the-art and unwieldy, riven by feuds and inefficiency, a place that employs 5,700 people and admits more than 40,000 patients in a single year. It is, as Ms. Salamon puts it, "a demilitarized zone, where patients dragged in not just their wounds, fevers, and malfunctions, but their accents and customs, their immigration and insurance problems, their feelings about being outsiders." http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx




Those "accents and customs" are among the hospital's most distinguishing features. Founded a century ago to serve an Orthodox Jewish community, Maimonides now treats Haitians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Mexicans and many more nationalities. All told, Ms. Salamon reports, an astonishing 67 languages are heard (if not always understood) at the hospital. It must rank among the most polyglot patient populations anywhere. Says one first-year resident: "If you can get the translator down to the ER fast enough to figure out what the heck is going on, you can actually save a lot of lives here."

Ms. Salamon had carte blanche to examine the place, "warts and all." And warts there are. Budgetary concerns hang over nearly everything that happens at Maimonides -- not a surprise, really, but it still jars to hear the hospital president bemoan the "f---ing surgery numbers," because those numbers are too low and hurting revenues. Cancer is seen as a "growth industry," the overburdened emergency room "a pot of gold." Patients must be discharged and newcomers admitted as expeditiously as possible -- again, an understandable desire, but a hospital vice president uses the unfortunate phrase "dead bed time." Ms. Salamon reports more serious problems: Blood donated specifically for one patient is mistakenly given to another, and we learn that -- even after recent improvements -- 20% of Maimonides' physicians still fail to practice "hand hygiene" -- i.e., wash their hands -- as often as they should.

Colorful characters abound. The emergency-room resident David Gregorius, Nebraska-raised, appears bewildered and overwhelmed at times but ever ready to improvise, going without food on intense shifts, picking up fragments of Mandarin and Russian to help understand his patients. As the end of his residency nears, Dr. Gregorius is a transformed, confident physician: "After I've dealt with Maimonides for a year, if you cut me loose in a little ER in Western Nebraska by myself, I'd be competent, actually."

A cancer patient called "Mr. Zen" (Ms. Salamon alters patients' names) spends his last eight months of life at Maimonides, stoic to the end, his care costing the hospital a million dollars in bills that are likely to go unpaid. The president and chief executive of Maimonides, Pam Brier, comes off as egotistical but also passionate about her work and tireless in her advocacy for the hospital -- so much so that when she learns that the Brooklyn borough president has been admitted with heart trouble, she tells the hospital board: "Who knows, that may be another advertisement." http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
The main character, as it were, is the hospital itself, where there is a constant struggle to care effectively for patients, lure top-flight physicians and coax reimbursements from insurance companies. The associate director of medical oncology voices a common lament: "All the things that are really good -- diabetes care, asthma care, taking good care of cancer patients -- you don't get paid for that . . . you get paid for radiating people, doing complicated surgery, giving them chemotherapy."

At Maimonides, "Hospital" will undoubtedly be a must-read, and the book will be of obvious interest to health-care professionals -- though some of Maimonides' problems are probably so well known to them, and others so peculiar to this one hospital, that they may prove less worthy of study. As for the rest of us, I am not so sure.

Ms. Salamon tells us many times that Maimonides is complex and chaotic and that it even has a "soul." But for long patches of her book, the narrative is dry and "soul" is absent from the page. In this respect "Hospital" disappoints. It would have been a great help had Ms. Salamon told us more about the patients admitted during her time there; apart from a wrenching chapter called "A Good Death," there are few stories about the patients themselves. "Hospital" is largely a book about physicians and administrators. While Ms. Salamon's immersive, you-are-there reporting brings the reader into offices and meetings, it might have been more compelling if she had reported more stories from the ER or OR. As it is, we hear ample discussion of how to revamp the emergency room, but we learn little about what patients actually experience there.

Still, "Hospital" is a solid piece of reportage. In the end, you come to admire the book's principal figures, as Ms. Salamon does, however flawed they might be. The physicians and administrators, she makes clear, "tried to remember -- against the odds posed by a greedy and corrupted health-care system and by institutional and human frailty -- that healing was the heart of the matter."

Mr. Nagorski, a senior producer at ABC News, is the author of "Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack."


Should a leader strive to be loved or feared? This question, famously posed by Machiavelli, lies at the heart of Joseph Nye's new book. Mr Nye, a former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and one-time chairman of America's National Intelligence Council, is best known for promoting the idea of “soft power”, based on persuasion and influence, as a counterpoint to “hard power”, based on coercion and force.

Having analysed the use of soft and hard power in politics and diplomacy in his previous books, he has now turned his attention to the relationship between power and leadership, in both the political and business spheres. http://louis-j-sheehan.de/

Machiavelli, he notes, concluded that “one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved.” In short, hard power is preferable to soft power. But modern leadership theorists have come to the opposite conclusion.

The context of leadership is changing, they observe, and the historical emphasis on hard power is becoming outdated. In modern companies and democracies, power is increasingly diffused and traditional hierarchies are being undermined, making soft power ever more important. But that does not mean coercion should now take a back seat to persuasion, Mr Nye argues. Instead, he advocates a synthesis of these two views. The conclusion of “The Powers to Lead”, his survey of the theory of leadership, is that a combination of hard and soft power, which he calls “smart power”, is the best approach.

The dominant theoretical model of leadership at the moment is, apparently, the “neocharismatic and transformational leadership paradigm”. Anyone allergic to management jargon will already be running for the exit, but Mr Nye has performed a valuable service in rounding up and summarising the various academic studies and theories of leadership into a single, slim volume. He examines different approaches to leadership, the morality of leadership and how the wider context can determine the effectiveness of a particular leader. There are plenty of anecdotes and examples, both historical and contemporary, political and corporate.

Alas, leadership is a slippery subject, and as he rehearses the pros and cons of various theories, even Mr Nye never quite nails the jelly to the wall. He is at his most interesting when discussing the moral aspects of leadership—in particular, the question of whether it is sometimes necessary for good leaders to lie—and he provides a helpful 12-point summary of his conclusions. A recurring theme is that as circumstances change, different sorts of leaders are required; a leader who thrives in one environment may struggle in another, and vice versa. Ultimately that is just a fancy way of saying that leadership offers no easy answers. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/Blog/Blogger.aspx



In 1964 NBC's “Today” show suddenly needed a new girl. The programme always had a glamorous “girl” to handle the weather and lighter stories, but the previous one was addicted to prescription drugs and the one before her had a drink problem. “Why not Barbara?” asked Hugh Downs, the show's host, referring to Barbara Walters, the programme's lone female writer. She wasn't beautiful or well known, but she knew the ropes and would “work cheap”.

“Well, like the ingénue in a corny movie, there I was: the patient and long overlooked understudy,” writes Ms Walters in her candid new memoir, “Audition”. Having toiled in the shadows for years, writing scripts and making coffee, she finally got her big on-air break. Don Hewitt, a TV producer, had assured her she would never make it because she had the wrong looks and couldn't pronounce her “r”s properly. Ms Walters duly avoided sentences with a lot of “r”s in them.

NBC's 13-week contract turned into 13 years at “Today” and nearly half a century in front of the camera, breaking gender barriers and securing interviews when other journalists were turned down. Her genial, empathetic style won fans and friends. “Barbara, are you hungry?” Fidel Castro asked after a marathon interview in Cuba before whipping up a sandwich. Anwar Sadat's grieving widow admitted, “you were the only one I was ever jealous of because Anwar liked you so much.” Ms Walters earned a reputation for finding something soft in her subjects. “Asking the right questions has always been less important than listening to the answers,” she explains.

She helped support her family (her father was an unlucky nightclub impresario), and she remains haunted by her impatience with her disabled sister. Her insecurities—some of them financial—pushed her to work harder. “Make no mistake: television is a demanding business...it is hell on your social and romantic life,” she writes. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx

Indeed, Ms Walters's entertaining tome, which picks up considerably after the first 75 pages, describes three failed marriages, many complicated love affairs (including with Alan Greenspan and Edward W. Brooke, a senator) and a tough stretch with her adopted daughter. But the author seems reconciled with her many memories, and proud of her stories. It is for good reason that she now owns a ring inscribed with the words, “I did that already”.








Mortgage craters, ropy disclosure, bloated costs, a newish boss desperately trying to stop the haemorrhaging amid calls for radical surgery, even a break-up. Citigroup? Aptly though this describes America's biggest bank, it could just as easily apply to its biggest insurer, American International Group (AIG).

AIG's place in the credit crunch's hall of shame is now assured thanks to its record $7.8 billion loss in the latest quarter, bringing the red ink over the past six months to $13 billion. The main culprit is its book of credit-default swaps, much of it tied to subprime mortgages, which has been written down by $20 billion. A chastened AIG has joined the rush for fresh capital.

Disgruntled shareholders have a flag-waver in Hank Greenberg, who ran AIG imperiously for 37 years before being booted out in 2005 amid an accounting probe. Still the biggest individual shareholder, the 83-year-old lashed out at his former fief this week, averring that it had suffered a “complete loss of credibility”.

There is restiveness within, too. Executives at International Lease Finance Corporation, the world's biggest buyer of commercial aircraft and part of AIG since 1990, are reportedly agitating for a spin-off. They worry that AIG's woes will drag down ILFC: its credit rating was cut along with its parent's following the latest loss.

Such huffing is a trifle disingenuous. ILFC has benefited from being under AIG's wing, for instance amid the turmoil for aviation after September 11th 2001. And most of the dodgy default swaps were written on Mr Greenberg's watch—indeed, AIG stopped selling them at the end of 2005, a few months after he had been replaced by Martin Sullivan, a former protégé.

But AIG has played its hand badly. It insisted until this year that it had $15 billion-20 billion of excess capital and that actual (as opposed to mark-to-market) losses were unlikely. It has since retreated from that position and modified its internal models (ie, made them less optimistic). But uncertainty still abounds. AIG estimates its ultimate derivatives losses will be up to $2.4 billion. Unnervingly, an independent assessor hired by AIG puts the potential cost as high as $11 billion. AIG thinks much of the current damage will be reversed, thanks to the vagaries of fair-value accounting. But why trust its judgment rather than the market's? And any such gains won't come at least until 2009, says Thomas Cholnoky of Goldman Sachs.

Softening insurance markets may compound AIG's woes. With pricing power ebbing and catastrophe pay-outs set to rise after an unusually calm couple of years, America's property and casualty industry—dominated by AIG and Berkshire Hathaway—seems to be entering another of its periodic downturns (see chart). Premium rates in casualty will fall by 10-15% this year, predicts Lockton, a broker.

With the bull run in stocks over, life insurance and annuities could suffer, too. And insurers face lower returns on investments in alternative assets, such as hedge funds and private equity. “Yellow lights are blinking all over the industry,” says Donald Light of Celent, a consultancy. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx

All of which means AIG faces a double whammy of credit-market missteps and a deteriorating core business. Time is not on the affable Mr Sullivan's side. At the annual meeting this week, the directors reiterated their support for him, though some have privately begun to express doubts. Who said insurance was dull?



EVERY ecosystem has a cast of characters playing similar roles. The bison, moose and elk of North America do much the same thing as antelope and wildebeest do on the African savannah. Jackals and hyenas are the scavengers of the land whereas vultures are the undisputed scavengers of the air. The same is even true of carnivores. Crocodiles, cheetahs, great white sharks and peregrine falcons all come at their prey with great speed, using a combination of momentum and strength to stun and kill. Now research has put up a surprising candidate to join this high-speed predatory club: the short-finned pilot whale.

Whales, like all mammals, have lungs and must rise to the surface once in a while to breathe. The problem for many whale species is that their sources of food are usually at depth, forcing them to hold their breath as they descend to feed. Researchers have long assumed that deep-diving whales conserve their oxygen supply by moving slowly, not more than 2 metres per second, during their long descents. But that is not the way of the short-finned pilot whale.

Natacha Aguilar of La Laguna University on the Spanish Canary Islands and her colleagues fitted special suction-cupped electronic tags to 23 short-finned pilot whales near Tenerife. The tags were designed by Mark Johnson of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to record whale sounds while monitoring both their depth and position. The aim of the study, which will appear in a forthcoming edition of Animal Ecology, was to understand the foraging strategies that the whales used in deep-water.

The tags revealed that the maximum depth and time of the whales' dives was 1,018 metres and 21 minutes, which was in line with expectations. However, during most dives below 540 metres during the day, the whales broke into a sprint of up to 9 metres per second, which in deep water is the cetacean equivalent of a world record. http://louis1j1sheehan.us/


During these sprints the tags also picked up sonar buzzes and clicks from the whales which are known to be associated with the capture of prey. So the whales were chasing something at high speed, like a cheetah would on land. The researchers are not sure what is being hunted, but they suspect that it is large and worth the exertion in terms of the number of calories it could provide. One possibility is that the prey are giant squid: a chase of Titanic proportions.








In this remote corner of the former Soviet Union, life has shrunk to the size of the basics: tomatoes; corn; apricot trees; baby goats.

That is what grows in the garden of Toktokan Tileberdaeva, a mother of six who has lived almost 40 years in this small village in Kyrgyzstan, a claw-shaped country covered in mountains that once formed part of the Soviet Union’s long border with China.

Like a settler on the frontier, she lives off the land, hauling water from a turquoise-colored river and washing her clothes in the same bucket she washes her grandchildren. Her pension, $33 a month, is enough to buy one giant sack of flour — bread for the month.

Life was not always like this. Before Communism fell and Kyrgyzstan became its own country, Ms. Tileberdaeva had a job in a toothbrush factory. Her husband, now deceased, worked building giant hydroelectric plants, and a bus came to take their children to school.

But after 1991 the factory closed, all public services stopped and an economic collapse tore painful holes in the lives of families here, turning them into immigrants in their own country. Their skills were no longer needed. Their past was a mistake. Louis J. Sheehan Esquire





“I really miss the Soviet Union,” she said, standing in a small blue trailer where she and her children sleep on soft rugs. “We lived well. I worked. I earned a salary.”

The Soviet Union collapsed almost 17 years ago, but for many on the outer edges of the empire it feels like yesterday. They enjoy reminiscing about the time when they were young and their factories were working full steam. Now the toothbrush factory stands empty with blank windows, a painful reminder of their lost past.

Change is coming. Engineers from China, Turkey and Iran, though not from Russia, have rebuilt the long ribbon of road that cuts through the mountains to connect the south of the country to the north. Ms. Tileberdaeva’s younger children are taught in Kyrgyz, not Russian. Goods and trade have begun to flow from China in the east, instead of from Russia in the west.

But none of that is any consolation to Ms. Tileberdaeva, who spends every waking hour scratching a living out of her land.

Sometimes her oldest daughter, a cafeteria worker in Bishkek, the country’s capital, sends her money. The rest comes from her goats and her garden.

Her life is solitary. She is content with the company of her children and grandchildren, and says she does not seek other adults for support or friendship.

Most people in this small town are drunks, she said. Chinese merchants, sullenly despised for their wealth and success, provide fleeting entertainment: Locals throw rocks at them when they drive by.

The past is not always something she wants to remember. Her husband stole her when she was 19, as she walked home from class at a technical college, a local custom that she feels is heartlessly unfair. She cried, kicking and screaming, as they reached his home. She tried — and failed — three times to escape.

“I wanted to die,” she said looking at the remains of the first house she was brought to, also on the property, but now a grassy playground with walls but no roof.

Family life improved, but only a little. Her husband was a drinker, and was mean when drunk, sometimes throwing her and the children out of the house in a rage. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com/

He died in 2003 (the Soviet military sent him to clean up Chernobyl, and he was never quite the same when he returned), but she grimaced when asked if she had married again.

“If I had had a second one, he would have been the same,” she said.

Her current concern is a roof, not a man. On a snowy night in December, a pan on her small wood stove caught fire during dinner, setting the roof on fire. She fled through a window with the children, wading out into the snow in pajamas and running for help.

The winter was unusually snowy, but there was no money for a roof, so she and her family crammed into a donated trailer, a single dark room coated in quilts.

Things could be worse. Kyrgyzstan is relatively liberal compared with its authoritarian neighbors, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. A clean river flows through her backyard, and the soil is rich. Her goats recently had a litter. Their soft babies wobbled in spring grass.

She asked about America, as water for laundry heated on a hotplate. Did everyone live in a high-rise building? Was everyone rich? She watched as her small grandson, wearing a cast-off New York Yankees hat, teetered in, holding a tiny yellow flower.

“Our garden is free,” she said smiling. “The earth is good. That’s how I live.”

Then she invited visitors to tear pieces from a round, coarse loaf of bread. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/





Volunteers with the Capital Area Chris tian Church in Hamp den Twp. have been busy this week constructing the Adventure Zone Playground, the first playground of its kind on the West Shore and only the second in the Harrisburg area.

Don Hamilton, senior pastor at the church on Lamb's Gap Road, said volunteers have worked until after sundown each day. Hamilton said about 1,200 volunteers have participated.

"You don't have to be skilled. Anyone can work on this playground," Hamilton said of the community project.

Building stops Sunday, Hamilton said.

"This has been a very, very exciting week for us," Hamilton said.

"We've been planning this playground for a little over a year now, and it's coming to fruition."

Hamilton said the completed Adventure Zone Playground will be part of Adventure Park, a fully accessible 53-acre recreation area for children of all ages and abilities.

When complete, Adventure Park will include public rest rooms, parking and a pavilion for picnics.

"So any kid can play on this playground, and it's just going to be a beautiful, beautiful playground," Hamilton said.

Local nonprofits, organizations and people have provided $370,000, but Hamilton said $120,000 is still needed for special rubber flooring to make the playground entirely accessible.

The only other local all-accessible park is Possibility Place in Lower Paxton Twp., in the new George Park at Nyes Road and Heatherfield Way.

U.S. spent $197,000 to sell plan
GSA faced community resistance to sites




The highly publicized releases of "UFO files" from France and Britain provide more puzzling tales about anomalous aerial objects over the years. But the stories behind some of the most spectacular sightings in UFO history will come to light only when the Russian Ministry of Defense opens up its files. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/





Consider one of the most sensational UFO stories in Soviet history — a story that has been enshrined in world "ufology" as a classic that cannot be explained in any prosaic terms.

The tale of the Minsk UFO sighting can teach a lesson about the vigor of unidentified flying objects as a cultural phenomenon.

A passenger jet is flying north on Sept. 7, 1984, near Minsk, in present-day Belarus. Suddenly, at 4:10 a.m., the flight crew notices a glowing object out their forward right window. In the 10 minutes that follow, the object changes shape, zooms in on the aircraft, plays searchlights on the ground beneath it, and envelops the airliner in a mysterious ray of light that fatally injures one of the pilots. Other aircraft in the area, alerted by air traffic control operators who are watching the UFO on radar, also see it.

The incident figures prominently in "UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union," a 1992 book by Jacques Vallee, who was the real-life inspiration for the fictional ufologist in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

“No natural explanation [is] possible, given the evidence,” Vallee wrote.

A leading Russian UFO expert, Vladimir Azhazha, reported that as a result of the encounter the co-pilot “had a serious mental derangement — the encephalogram of his brain was not of an ‘earthly’ character, as he lost memory for long periods of time.”

This combination of perceptions from multiple witnesses and sensors, together with the serious physiological effects, makes for a dramatic event that on the face of it defies any earthly explanation. It was just as amazing that the official Soviet news media, long averse to discussing UFO subjects, disclosed the story in the first place. So it was no mystery that over the years that followed, the story was never actually checked out. It was only retold again and again. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire1.blogspot.com/

However much we are comfortable in entrusting our lives to airline pilots, a blind trust in their abilities as trained observers of aerial phenomena is sometimes a stretch. For a number of excellent and honorable reasons, pilots have often been known to overinterpret unusual visual phenomena, particularly when it comes to underestimating the distance from what look like other aircraft.

Think of it this way: You want the person at the front of the plane to be hair-trigger alert for visual cues to potential collisions, so avoidance maneuvers can be performed in time. The worst-case interpretation of perceptions is actually a plus.

So it’s no surprise that pilots have sent their planes into a dive to duck under a fireball meteor that was really 50 miles away, or have dodged a flaming falling satellite passing 60 miles overhead. Even celestial objects are misperceived by pilots more frequently than by any other category of witness, UFO investigator J. Allen Hynek concluded 30 years ago. Since the outcome of a false-negative assessment (that is, being closer than assumed) could be death, and the cost of a false positive (being much farther away) is mere embarrassment, the bias of these reactions makes perfect sense.

Was there anything else in the sky that morning that the Soviet pilots might have seen? This wasn’t an easy question, since the Moscow press reports neglected to give the exact date of the event, but I could figure it out by checking Aeroflot airline schedules.

It turned out that early risers in Sweden and Finland had also seen an astonishing apparition in the sky that morning. According to reports collected by Claus Svahn of UFO-Sweden, people called in accounts of seeing "a very strong globe of light," sometimes "with a skirt under it." The light's glow was reflected off the ground and lasted for several minutes. In Finland, a UFO research club's annual report later cataloged 15 similar sightings from that country.

The immediate disconnect that I found was that the Scandinavian witnesses were not looking southeast, toward Minsk and the nearby airliner with its terrified crew. Nor were they looking eastward, toward the top-secret Russian space base at Plesetsk, where launchings sparked UFO reports starting in the mid-1960s. They were looking to the northeast, across Karelia and perhaps farther. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com/


The direction of the apparition being seen simultaneously near Minsk provided another "look angle." If the vectors of the eyewitnesses are plotted on a map, they tend to converge out over the Barents Sea, far from land. This made the triggering mechanism for the sightings — assuming they were all of the same phenomenon — even more extraordinary.

Whatever the stimulus behind the 1984 Minsk airliner story turned out to be, I already knew that many famous Soviet UFO reports were connected with secret military aerospace activities that were misperceived by ordinary citizens. I’ve posted several decades of such research results on my Web site.

In 1967, waves of UFO reports from southern Russia and a temporary period of official permission for public discussion created a "perfect storm" of Soviet UFO enthusiasm. But it was short-lived — the topic was soon forbidden again, possibly because the government realized that what was being seen and publicized was actually a series of top-secret space-to-ground nuclear warhead tests, a weapon Moscow had just signed an international space treaty to outlaw.

Once the Plesetsk Cosmodrome (south of Arkhangelsk) began launching satellites in 1966, skywatchers throughout the northwestern Soviet Union began seeing vast glowing clouds and lights moving through the skies. These were officially non-existent rocket launchings. "Not ours!” the officials seemed to be saying. "Must be Martians."

Other space events that sparked UFO reports included orbital rocket firings timed to occur while in direct radio contact with the main Soviet tracking site in the Crimea. Such firings and the subsequent expanding clouds of jettisoned surplus fuel weren't confined to Soviet airspace. One particular category of Soviet communications satellites performed the maneuver over the Andes Mountains, subjecting the southern tip of South America to UFO panics every year or two for decades.

As the Soviet Union lurched toward collapse in the 1980s, its rigid control over the press decayed. This allowed local newspapers, especially in the area of the Plesetsk space base, to begin publishing eyewitness accounts of correctly identified rocket launchings. The newspapers sometimes printed detailed drawings of the shifting shapes of the light show caused by the sequence of rocket stage firings and equipment ejections.


Still, I wasn't willing to wave off the elaborate extra dimensions of the Minsk UFO case as mere misperception and exaggerated coincidences. Even though none of the most exciting stories, such as one pilot's death half a year later from cancer, could ever be traced to any original firsthand sources, they made for a compelling narrative. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/

Fortunately, the Soviet collapse provided the opening for the collapse of the UFO story. The May-June 1991 issue of the magazine Science in the USSR contained an article that reprised the story with one stunning addendum from the co-pilot’s flight log. He had sketched the apparition, minute by minute, as it changed shape out his side of the cockpit window, and 14 of the drawings were published for the first (and as far as I can tell, only) time.

The graphic sequence of bright light, rays, expanding halos, misty cloudiness, tadpole tail and sudden linear streamers may have looked bizarre to the magazine’s readers. But they looked very familiar to me.

I dug out the clippings from Arkhangelsk newspapers that had been mailed to me by an associate there. I looked up the other articles from recent Moscow science magazines that showed how beautiful these rocket launches looked. I also found the set of sketches made by a witness in Sweden of what was immediately recognized as a rocket launch. I laid the separate sketches out on a table.

They all clearly showed the same sequence of shape-shifting visions, as viewed from different angles to the rear of the object’s flight. The more recent accounts were of nighttime missile launches — and the impression was overwhelming that the Minsk UFO, as drawn in real time by one of the primary witnesses, looked and changed just like them.

Without the detailed minute-by-minute drawings, any claim for solving the case would have been tentative, and circumstantial at best. Even now, the case isn't quite closed. Until the Russians release the records for the test launch of a submarine-based missile — as we now know often happened from that region of the ocean, but without official acknowledgement — the answer to the mystery will remain technically unproven.

But the answer is strong enough to remind us of wider principles of investigating — and evaluating — similar stories from around the world: There are more potential prosaic stimuli out there than we usually expect. Precise times and locations and viewing directions are critical to an investigation. The temptation to fall into excitable overinterpretation is almost irresistible. Myriads of weird but meaningless coincidences can be combined to embellish a good story. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire2.blogspot.com/



The most important factors for cutting through the misperceptions would be having the good fortune to come across enough original evidence, and having enough time to make sense of that evidence. That’s one of the biggest lessons to be learned from the Minsk UFO case: As long as those factors are in short supply, it’s no mystery why there are so many amazing UFO stories — and so many enthusiasts willing to endorse them.



Erich Honecker,( 1912 – May 29, 1994) was a German Communist politician who led the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1971 until 1989.

After German re-unification, he first fled to the Soviet Union but was extradited by the new Russian government to Germany, where he was imprisoned and tried for high treason and crimes committed during the Cold War. However, as he was dying of cancer, he was released from prison. He died in exile in Chile about a year and a half later.

Honecker was born on Max-Braun-Straße in Neunkirchen, now Saarland, as the son of a politically militant coal miner, Wilhelm, who in 1905 had married Caroline Catharina Weidenhof. There were six children born to the family: Katharina (Käthe), Wilhelm (Willi, Hungary), Frieda, Erich, Gertrud (b. 1917; m. Hoppstädter), and Karl-Robert.

He joined the Young Communist League of Germany (KJVD), the youth section of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), in 1926 and joined the KPD itself in 1929. Between 1928 and 1930 he worked as a roofer, but did not finish his apprenticeship. Thereafter he was sent to Moscow to study at the International Lenin School and for the rest of his life remained a full-time politician.

He returned to Germany in 1931 and was arrested in 1935, two years after the Nazis had come to power. In 1937, he was sentenced to ten years for Communist activities and remained a prisoner until the end of World War II. At the end of the war, Honecker resumed activity in the party under leader Walter Ulbricht, and, in 1946, became one of the first members of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED), which was formed by the merger of the KPD and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Following the SED victory in the October 1946 elections, Honecker took his place amongst the SED leadership in the first postwar East German parliament, the German People's Congress (Deutscher Volkskongress). The German Democratic Republic was proclaimed on 7 October 1949 with the adoption of a new constitution, establishing a political system similar to that of the Soviet Union. Honecker was a candidate member for the secretariat of the Central Committee in 1950; by 1958, he had become a full member of the Politbüro.


In 1961, Honecker, as the Central Committee secretary for security matters, was in charge of the building of the Berlin Wall. In 1971, he initiated a political power struggle that led, with Soviet support, to himself becoming the new leader, replacing Walter Ulbricht as First Secretary of the SED Central Committee and as chairman of the National Defense Council. In 1976, he also became Chairman of the Council of State (Vorsitzender des Staatsrats der DDR) and thus the head of state.

Under Honecker's leadership, the GDR adopted a program of "consumer socialism," which resulted in a marked improvement in living standards—already the highest among the Eastern bloc countries. More attention was placed on the availability of consumer goods, and the construction of new housing was accelerated, with Honecker promising to "settle the housing problem as an issue of social relevance." Yet, despite improved living conditions, internal dissent was not tolerated. Around 125 East German citizens were killed during this period while trying to cross the border into West Berlin.

In foreign relations, Honecker renounced the objective of a unified Germany and adopted the "defensive" position of ideological Abgrenzung (demarcation). He combined loyalty to the USSR with flexibility toward détente, especially in relation to rapprochement with West Germany. In September 1987, he became the first East German head of state to visit West Germany. http://louis2j1sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/


In the late 1980s Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost and perestroika, reforms to liberalize communism. Honecker and the East German government, however, refused to implement similar reforms in the GDR, with Honecker reportedly telling Gorbachev: "We have done our perestroika, we have nothing to restructure." However, as the reform movement spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe, mass demonstrations against the East German government erupted, most prominently the 1989 Monday demonstrations in Leipzig. Faced with civil unrest, Honecker's Politbüro comrades colluded to replace him. The elderly and ill Honecker was forced to resign on 18 October 1989, and was replaced by Egon Krenz.


After the GDR was dissolved in October 1990, the Honeckers stayed with the family of the Lutheran pastor Uwe Holmer. Honecker then stayed in a Soviet military hospital near Berlin before later fleeing with Margot Honecker to Moscow, to avoid prosecution over charges of Cold War crimes. He was accused by the German government of involvement in the deaths of 192 East Germans who tried to leave the GDR. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Honecker took refuge in the Chilean embassy in Moscow, but was extradited by the Yeltsin administration to Germany in 1992. However, when the trial formally opened in early 1993, Honecker was released due to ill health and on 13 January of that year moved to Chile to live with his daughter Sonja, her Chilean husband Leo Yáñez, and their son Roberto. He died in exile of liver cancer in Santiago on 29 May 1994. His body was cremated and the remains are believed to be in the possession of his widow Margot.


Honecker married Edith Baumann in 1950 and divorced her in 1953. They had a daughter, Erika (b. 1950). In 1953 he married Margot Feist and they remained married until his death. They had a daughter, Sonja, born in 1952. Margot Honecker served for several years as the GDR Minister for People's Education.

Famous quotes

* "The Wall will be standing in 50 and even in 100 years, if the reasons for it are not removed." (Berlin, 19 January 1989)

(Original: "Die Mauer wird in 50 und auch in 100 Jahren noch bestehen bleiben, wenn die dazu vorhandenen Gründe noch nicht beseitigt sind")

* "Neither an ox nor a donkey is able to stop the progress of socialism."

(Original: "Den Sozialismus in seinem Lauf, halten weder Ochs' noch Esel auf", Berlin, 7 October 1989)

* "The future belongs to socialism" (Original: Die Zukunft gehört dem Sozialismus) (early 1980's)
Honecker's autobiography Aus meinem Leben is translated into English as From my life. New York : Pergamon, 1981. ISBN 0080245323 http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/









Andrei Gromyko was born into a peasant family in the Belarusian village of Starye Gromyki, near Gomel. He studied agriculture at the Minsk School of Agricultural Technology and graduated in 1936. Later he worked as an economist at the Institute of Economics in Moscow.

Gromyko entered the department of the foreign affairs in 1939 after Joseph Stalin's purges in the section responsible for the Americas. He was soon sent to the United States and worked in the Soviet embassy there until 1943, when he was appointed the Soviet ambassador to the United States. He played an important role in coordinating the wartime alliance between the two nations and was prominent at events such as the Yalta Conference. He became known as an expert negotiator. In the West, Mr. Gromyko received a nickname "Mr. Nyet" (Mr. No) or "Comrade Nyet" or "Grim Grom" for his obstinate negotiating style. He was removed from his Washington post on April 10, 1946 in order to be able to devote his full attention to UN matters.
Andrei Gromyko signing the Charter of the United Nations, 26 June 1945


In 1946 he became the Soviet Union's representative on the United Nations Security Council. He served briefly as the ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1952-1953 and then returned to the Soviet Union, where he served as foreign minister for 28 years. As Soviet foreign minister, Gromyko played a direct role in the Cuban Missile Crisis and met with U.S. President Kennedy during the crisis. Gromyko also helped negotiate arms limitations treaties, specifically the ABM Treaty, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, SALT I and II, and the INF and START agreements. During the Brezhnev years, he helped construct the policy of détente between the superpowers and was active in drawing up the non-aggression pact with West Germany.
Sculpture of Andrei Gromyko in Gomel, Belarus


Gromyko always believed in the superpower status of the Soviet Union and always promoted an idea that no important international agreement could be reached without its involvement.

Gromyko was minister of foreign affairs from 1957 until 1985, when he was replaced as foreign minister by Eduard Shevardnadze. Gromyko entered the Politburo in 1973, eventually becoming chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (i.e. head of state of the Soviet Union) in 1985. However, the position was largely ceremonial, and he was forced out three years later because of his conservative views during the Gorbachev era. Gromyko died in Moscow a year later. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/



He had a wife named Ludmila (died 2004) and a son named Anatoli (born 1932).






Doctors and politicians in search of the magic bullet to solve the so-called medical malpractice crisis have focused on a pie-in-the-sky solution that won’t fly politically or constitutionally – the $250,000 cap on pain and suffering. That would take a constitutional amendment, which requires something close to a political consensus. That political consensus will never happen due to the determined and effective opposition of the trial lawyers and most consumer organizations, and the difficulties inherent in passing any constitutional amendment at the state or federal level. What’s worse, the public, even if half-informed, would reject the concept, of a cap on damages. It is obviously unfair and off the wall.

In the process of primary focus on a solution that will never happen these interest groups are missing the more obvious, the more practical and the more immediate solutions that may produce bigger and quicker premium reductions. To find these solutions all the doctors and politicians would have to do is to read a memo dated February 28, 2002, entitled “Suggestions to Effect Immediate Premium Savings for Health Care Providers.” The memo was written by John H. Reed, then the Director of the Cat Fund (now an attorney in private practice in Sellingsgrove, Pennsylvania), and his Deputy Director, Robert W. Waeger.

Here are a few of their recommendations, which should be given immediate and serious consideration, but which have been ignored by doctors and politicians and legislators and by the insurance commissioner and the insurance industry (the latter two groups being in perpetual hibernation when it comes to new ideas or basic reforms of the present system).

LET STATE PROVIDE MEDICAL MALPRACTICE COVERAGE THROUGH CAT FUND. Now doctors have to go to commercial insurers for the first $500,000 of coverage (the excess over that $500,000 primary limit is now provided by the CAT Fund).

The commercial insurance companies don’t want to write the business. Fine. They should have no complaints when the state of Pennsylvania fills the vacuum. As the memo in question indicates, the Cat Fund could provide the first $500,000 coverage for 40 percent less than the commercial insurance industry. That would be possible, as the state through the Cat Fund, would have a lower expense ratio. They would not have to pay commissions to agents or support a major marketing structure. The Cat Fund would not have to earn and pay a profit to shareholders. It would not have to pay taxes. It would not have to support the corporate structure that goes with any commercial insurance operation. The CAT Fund pays out in claims 99 cents on the dollar of collected premiums; commercial insurers, in contrast, pay out 60 to 65 cents on the dollar in claims, with 35 to 40 cents going for marketing, commissions, profits, etc. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/


CUT REQUIREMENT OF $500,000 IN PRIMARY COVERAGE TO $200,000. Now each doctor must buy $500,000 in commercial insurance and the rest if sold by the state-operated CAT fund. If this $500,000 requirement were cut to $200,000, the Reed-Waeger Memo estimates premiums would be reduced by at least 25 to 35 percent. This would also increase the market for malpractice as commercial insurers would have to shoulder less risk, and that in turn would improve the competitive environment. It would also make it easier for doctors to use self-insurance, risk retention groups (RRGs), fronted captives and other alternatives to commercial insurance (see next reform on RRGs). This change could come about without adoption of the first recommended change.

PROMOTE USE OF RRGs. The Risk Retention Group is a self-insurance device, which involves doctors banding together in non-profit groups to self-insure their coverage. It is a min-insurance company. The reduction of the primary requirement from $500,000 to $200,000, as suggested above, would make this approach easier to undertake. Although not mentioned in the MEMO, Reed recommends that a solvency fund be created to cover RRGs for medical malpractice. This was a recommendation he did make in testifying before the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce on February 10, 2003. Now RRGs are not so covered, and this means that doctors would have a dangerous exposure if the RRG would go under. With commercial insurance companies, there is a solvency fund back-up and if this were extended to RRGs, they would become more popular and could make a larger contribution to the solution of any problems in obtaining reasonably priced medical malpractice insurance. The MEMO estimates that some specialists could cut their premiums by 60 to70 percent with RRGs.

COMPRESS RATE SCHEDULE. Now there is incredible variation in premiums between so-called high-risk specialists and lower-risk categories of doctors. Premiums are so tailored to each category of doctors that the insurance function of spreading risk does not work as effectively as it might. Compressing rate schedules means that the differences between the highest and lowest risk categories would be reduced, thus lowering the burden on the higher risk specialties and spreading risk more evenly. The Memo says, if the lowest risk groups paid $1,000 more, the higher risks groups could be cut by up to l/3rd.

CONCLUSION. The MEMO has a good summary of what these recommended changes might do: “What now seems to be a looming crisis can be averted. All of the above options … will immediately reduce malpractice premiums to health care providers. Most importantly, they can accomplish that result without taking money from taxpayers, without triggering the additional expense of borrowing, without burdening future generations of health care providers, and without having to bar the door of the courthouse to those individuals having legitimate claims.” http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx






When it comes to trade, chimps are far from venture capitalists. Our closest relatives almost always prefer a sure bet, according to a recent study, choosing value in hand over risk for higher returns. The finding brings us closer to understanding chimps’ trading habits and gives us precious insight into how trade, an essential cooperative behavior, works for humans.

To conduct the study, researchers started with two groups of chimps: one with little exposure to social and cognitive testing and no trading experience, and one with extensive bartering practice and language training. The scientists determined which food each chimp liked best. Then they assigned values to the foods. Finally, they taught the inexperienced chimps how to trade with tokens and food.

The results? When chimps possessing items of medium-high value, such as carrots, were offered high-value items, like grapes, they kept the lesser food. This tendency held true for both groups, despite different rearing histories, suggesting that their disinclination to barter is innate, says Sarah Brosnan of Georgia State University, the lead researcher in this study.

The chimps’ risk-averse behavior, Brosnan speculates, is attributable to a lack of language skills. “If one chimp could say to another, ‘OK, you crack nuts while I hunt meat, and then we’ll trade,’ they’d be able to specialize and have a developed economy,” Brosnan says. Because humans can specialize, she adds, we can generate surplus to purchase or barter for better foods from one another.

















There's no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers. Everybody has questions about them, and we aim to help. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx


Here are a few questions about computers I've received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

Q. I have moved from a PC to the iMac. In the Windows environment, I felt a need to run utilities to clean out the registry and defragment the hard disk frequently. Is this also needed on the iMac? If so, what programs are recommended?

A. The Mac operating system, called OS X Leopard, doesn't include a registry, which is a feature of Windows that holds information that programs need to operate properly. So there's no need to clean or maintain any registry on a Mac.

Mac hard disks, like those on Windows computers, can get fragmented -- a condition in which parts of files are so scattered around on the disk that the disk runs slowly. However, the operating system has some under-the-covers features that generally obviate the need to run a defragmentation utility. In fact, Apple, which calls defragmenting a disk "optimizing" it, flatly claims that "You probably won't need to optimize at all if you use Mac OS X." There are some Mac defragmentation utilities, but I don't believe you will need them unless you have large numbers of extremely large files and almost no free disk space.

Q. My son's computer frequently gets infected with adware, pop-ups. Recently it was hit with a continuing pop-up ad called VirusHeat that touted itself as a solution to the computer's problems. When I paid for VirusHeat, the problems went away. Is it legitimate?

A. According to numerous reports on the Web, including some from security companies, VirusHeat is a form of malicious or misleading software. It falls into a category that attempts to scare people into thinking their computers are badly infected, or exaggerates any problems you may have. This is a common tactic now used by creators of malware.

Some of these fake or misleading "security programs" may be designed merely to make you pay. Others may even be designed to install the very kinds of viruses, spyware or adware that they claim to fight. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/


Q. I have updated to a new PC. My data are on a floppy disc. There is no floppy disc drive on this new computer. How can I transfer my data?

A. For around $25, you can buy an external floppy disk drive that plugs into a new PC using its standard USB port. If you do so, and connect it to the new PC, you should be able to copy your data to the new computer's hard disk.


Ohio AG Marc Dann has resigned amid the scandal of a sexual harassment investigation in his office and his extramarital affair. Dann, 46, led the state on a 10-day odyssey, at first refusing to resign despite demands by Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland and others within his party, a growing number of investigations into conduct at his office, and the filing Tuesday of articles of impeachment against him. (Find past LB coverage of the Dann scandal here and here.)

Two Fridays ago, Dann admitted to a “romantic relationship” with a member of his staff, prompting Democratic leaders such as Governor Ted Strickland to call for his Dann’s head. But despite a letter that Strickland and others sent to Dann, arguing that he’d lost “even the most remote hope” of continuing to serve effectively as AG, Dann told his staff that he was optimistic about plans to stay in office despite an impeachment threat. “I think that there is a great chance that we can continue to do great work for the people of the state.”

The great work that Dann, who was elected to his first term in 2006, referred to may have been his crusade against ratings agencies and his pursuit of mortgage lenders and brokers for allegedly inflating home prices and contributing to the subprime crisis. Click here for a past WSJ profile of Dann, titled “The Mortgage Cop.”

But yesterday, when Ohio democrats sprung into action, filing articles of impeachment against Dann, he appeared to lose his mettle. What followed was 24 hours of speculation that Dann would resign.


How would you like to carry around your entire DVD collection on a single disk? That is the promise of a new holo–graphic digital storage technology being developed by General Electric and coming to a computer near you around 2012. Although not the first commercial holographic storage system—that honor goes to InPhase Technologies’ Tapestry™ 300r holographic drive—GE’s system could be the first one aimed at consumers. (InPhase’s holographic drives, which debuted last year, sell for $18,000 and target broadcasters who need to archive television programs.)

Holographic media can store huge amounts of data because information is encoded in layers throughout the entire disk, not just on a single reflective surface as in today’s optical media. In GE’s system, a single CD-size disk made of plastic will be able to store about 1 terabyte of data, equivalent to 110 typical movie DVDs. http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-jmbPCHg9dLPh1gHoZxLG.GpS
Louis J. Sheehan Esquire
This kind of capacity would make it possible to back up all your music, photos, home movies, and e-mails in one place; it would also allow for totally new, extremely data-intensive applications, such as Micro–soft’s MyLifeBits project, which aims to capture in digital form every–thing that happens in an individual’s life. Besides automatically archiving and indexing things like e-mails and text documents, the project includes a wearable camera that snaps a picture at least once every 30 seconds, creating a visual index of every day. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
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To store data holographically, a laser beam (1) is split in two (2). One half of the beam passes through an array of hundreds of thousands of gates (3). Each gate can be opened or closed to represent a binary 1 or 0. The gates either block or pass the beam, filtering it into a coded pattern, or signal. The other half of the beam, known as the reference beam, is bounced off a mirror (4), so that the reference beam and the signal beam encoded with digital information intersect somewhere within the plastic storage medium (5). Light waves from the two beams interfere with each other, imprinting into the plastic a hologram—a three-dimensional pattern. By varying the angle of the mirror, millions of holograms can be created in the same piece of plastic. To read data from storage, the reference beam alone is used to illuminate the hologram. The resulting image can be read by a sensor and converted back into 1s and 0s.