Melissa Garzon, a sophomore majoring in criminology, said she was upset when she heard of the changes. [...] “I wish this was something we had a vote on,” she said. “All you see are plants all around campus so it will look pretty and parents will want to send their kids to USF. But we don’t need more plants and more flowers — we actually use the Library. ... I feel like our tuition should be paying for the Library, not the pretty flowers around campus.” The Oracle 27 August 2013
Campus beautification projects have abounded left, right and center, and while those funds couldn’t directly be used toward other areas, perhaps unused funds could have been carried forward. The Oracle 27 August 2013
Mr. Johnson’s wife, Nancy, was a trim, exercising, vegetable- and fiber-chomping nonsmoker in her early 40s when she felt a lump in her groin. It proved to be a metastasis from a malevolent form of uterine cancer, one whose cells are atypically aggressive and prone to spreading. Her situation and her terrible prognosis reminded Mr. Johnson of nothing more than his New Mexico backyard, with headstrong wildflowers blooming where they choose and intractable weeds exploding by night. A man may plan a garden, but nature has different patterns in mind, patterns so intricate and orderly in their chaotic way that scientists now understand cancers to be collections of cells as complex and ambitious as any healthy organ. The extraordinary determination of those cells wins Mr. Johnson’s grudging admiration: “Cancer cells are those that rebel against their fate — they hope for so much more.” The New York Times 27 August 2013
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Friday, August 9, 2013
Telling
"An Indian village on the Missouri River in 1750 must have been a lively place. Barking dogs running between large earth-covered houses; children playing on the roofs; women making pots and chatting by the doorways; a party of men returning from a hunting expedition laden with bison meat—all contribute to a picture of confusion, sound, and motion. The same village in 1965 is a silent cluster of dim green rings of grass on the brown prairie, the only sound that of the wind, the only motion and life that of a tumbledweed rolling across the low mounds and depressions, and of a hawk circling high in the sky. The people are gone, and the only things which attest to their former presence are fragments of the objects which they made and used, buried in the collapsed remains of their dwellings. If you had gone into this village after all the people had left, but before any deterioration had begun, understanding what had taken place there would be difficult enough. [...] Add to the porblem the factor of disintegration over a period of two centuries, and the magnitude of the archaeologist's task becomes painfully clear."—James Deetz Invitation to Arhaeology 1967 (page 8)
"Kimmerle said she's not certain how long the process [of exhuming bodies buried at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida]—which includes forensic examination, identification and DNA testing in some cases — will take. "Our goal is to identify every individual," she said. "That's probably not possible, but we're going to try. Those not identified will be reinterred at the location." Florida CFO Jeff Atwater said he hopes the Legislature, which already approved spending $190,000 on USF's project, will continue to fund it until all the remains are reunited with families. "This is a historic day," said Robert Straley, 66, of Clearwater. "We finally found an administration with the guts to go back in time to help the boys who couldn't help themselves."—Ben Montgomery Tampa Bay Times "Cabinet agrees to let USF researchers exhume bodies at Dozier" 6 August 2013 (link)
"[Your housecleaner knows more about you] than you think. I see the piles of bills marked “past due” and know you’re having money problems. I find drugs and condom wrappers in kids’ bedrooms. And I can tell who’s unfaithful because the cheaters always start hiding laundry."—Jennifer Steil Reader's Digest "13+ Things Your Housecleaner Won’t Tell You" (slide 25)
"Kimmerle said she's not certain how long the process [of exhuming bodies buried at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida]—which includes forensic examination, identification and DNA testing in some cases — will take. "Our goal is to identify every individual," she said. "That's probably not possible, but we're going to try. Those not identified will be reinterred at the location." Florida CFO Jeff Atwater said he hopes the Legislature, which already approved spending $190,000 on USF's project, will continue to fund it until all the remains are reunited with families. "This is a historic day," said Robert Straley, 66, of Clearwater. "We finally found an administration with the guts to go back in time to help the boys who couldn't help themselves."—Ben Montgomery Tampa Bay Times "Cabinet agrees to let USF researchers exhume bodies at Dozier" 6 August 2013 (link)
"[Your housecleaner knows more about you] than you think. I see the piles of bills marked “past due” and know you’re having money problems. I find drugs and condom wrappers in kids’ bedrooms. And I can tell who’s unfaithful because the cheaters always start hiding laundry."—Jennifer Steil Reader's Digest "13+ Things Your Housecleaner Won’t Tell You" (slide 25)
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Head-fake
"Why does exercise have so little impact on weight loss for so many people? The answer is almost certainly, as a number of the new studies say, “multifactorial,” and one of the most reverberant and bizarre of those multiple factors is that, as a species, we're astonishingly efficient at clawing back lost calories, or, in scientific parlance, compensating. “People's systems are pretty good at recognizing when they have entered negative energy balance and doing something about it,” Dr. Ravussin says, “which usually involves regaining weight.” Compensation can take many forms, but in the context of exercise and avoirdupois, none is more devious than what has been called “non-volitional exercise-induced inactivity.” People relying on exercise to burn calories sometimes, without deliberate intent, begin moving less during the rest of the day. They grow more sedentary. They sit when they once might have stood or walked around the house. A similar dynamic occurs when you reduce food intake. The body tries hard to maintain its weight."—Gretchen Reynolds The First 20 Minutes (link)
“The message of our work is really simple,” although perhaps not agreeable to hear, Dr. Melanson says. “You don’t get any freebie calories.” Exercise, or at least moderate exercise, doesn’t rev up your metabolism and turn you into a fat-burning furnace for the rest of the day. The extra calorie burning ends with e exercise session. So if you follow up your workout with a Mars bar, you likely will have replenished the calories you just burned (and possibly then some). “It all comes down to energy balance,” says Dr. Melanson—or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning two hundred or three hundred calories” in a typical thirty-minute exercise session, he points out. “You replace that with one cookie.”—Gretchen Reynolds The First 20 Minutes (link)
"Should you choose not to warm up at all, you will be in fine company. Jack LaLanne famously scoffed at the idea of pre- exercising. “Warming up is the biggest bunch of horseshit I've ever heard in my life,” he once told an interviewer. “Fifteen minutes to warm up! Does a lion warm up when he’s hungry? ‘Uh-oh, here comes an antelope. Better warm up.’ No! He just goes out and eats the sucker.”—Gretchen Reynolds The First 20 Minutes (link)
“The message of our work is really simple,” although perhaps not agreeable to hear, Dr. Melanson says. “You don’t get any freebie calories.” Exercise, or at least moderate exercise, doesn’t rev up your metabolism and turn you into a fat-burning furnace for the rest of the day. The extra calorie burning ends with e exercise session. So if you follow up your workout with a Mars bar, you likely will have replenished the calories you just burned (and possibly then some). “It all comes down to energy balance,” says Dr. Melanson—or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning two hundred or three hundred calories” in a typical thirty-minute exercise session, he points out. “You replace that with one cookie.”—Gretchen Reynolds The First 20 Minutes (link)
"Should you choose not to warm up at all, you will be in fine company. Jack LaLanne famously scoffed at the idea of pre- exercising. “Warming up is the biggest bunch of horseshit I've ever heard in my life,” he once told an interviewer. “Fifteen minutes to warm up! Does a lion warm up when he’s hungry? ‘Uh-oh, here comes an antelope. Better warm up.’ No! He just goes out and eats the sucker.”—Gretchen Reynolds The First 20 Minutes (link)
Monday, August 5, 2013
Justice
"No arrest was made in the case, even though authorities knew who set the fire. Out of fear and shame, some family members of the deceased refused to claim the ashes of their 'loved' ones. On the issue of identifying the victims, Major Henry Morris, a detective with the New Orleans Police Department said, 'We don't even know these papers belonged to the people we found them on. Some thieves hung out there, and you know this was a queer bar.' Churches were either silent or subtly suggested the victims deserved what they got, most refused the use of their facilities for a memorial service."—Daily Mail "Scandal of the New Orleans firebomb attack that killed 32: Forty years after […] officials finally apologize for their inaction" 22 June 2013 (link) via Le Show
"The pair was last seen by family on Dec. 16, when they left [Doris] Carter's house in a rural area north of Plant City. They were in [Kelly] Moriarty's car. Four days later, the car was found abandoned on State Road 62 in Parrish. It wasn't impounded until the next week. In the meantime, a leg washed ashore at 6990 Fourth St. S, pale and bent at the knee. It was cleanly cut at the thigh and the foot. Police speculated someone had gone to great lengths to dismember the body. […] On Jan. 27, the manager of the Bradenton apartment where Moriarty lived called Moriarty's emergency contact — her brother — because she hadn't paid rent or contacted the office in weeks. The brother and manager entered the apartment together. Nothing appeared disturbed, deputies said. But her brother found one thing odd: The Christmas tree was still up, and the gifts were under the tree, still wrapped. He filed a missing person's report with Bradenton police, and when officers visited Carter's family, they began to worry. On Jan. 28, Carter's daughter filed a missing person's report with the Hillsborough Sheriff's Office. […] "We loved and miss her tremendously," Moriarty's brother, Brenden, said in an email. He said the family hopes law enforcement officials across the Tampa Bay region work to find who is responsible for her death "and bring them to justice." His email did not discuss the pair's relationship."—Jessica Vander Velde Tampa Bay Times "Severed leg identified as missing Bradenton woman's" 27 March 2012 (link)
"For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. Although Nujood’s mother was unhappy, she did not protest. “In our country [Yemen] it’s the men who give the orders, and the women who follow them,” Nujood writes […] Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her. He soon began to beat her as well, the memoir says, and her new mother-in-law offered no sympathy. “Hit her even harder,” the mother-in-law would tell her son."—Nicholas Kristof New York Times "Divorced Before Puberty" 3 March 2010 (link)
"The pair was last seen by family on Dec. 16, when they left [Doris] Carter's house in a rural area north of Plant City. They were in [Kelly] Moriarty's car. Four days later, the car was found abandoned on State Road 62 in Parrish. It wasn't impounded until the next week. In the meantime, a leg washed ashore at 6990 Fourth St. S, pale and bent at the knee. It was cleanly cut at the thigh and the foot. Police speculated someone had gone to great lengths to dismember the body. […] On Jan. 27, the manager of the Bradenton apartment where Moriarty lived called Moriarty's emergency contact — her brother — because she hadn't paid rent or contacted the office in weeks. The brother and manager entered the apartment together. Nothing appeared disturbed, deputies said. But her brother found one thing odd: The Christmas tree was still up, and the gifts were under the tree, still wrapped. He filed a missing person's report with Bradenton police, and when officers visited Carter's family, they began to worry. On Jan. 28, Carter's daughter filed a missing person's report with the Hillsborough Sheriff's Office. […] "We loved and miss her tremendously," Moriarty's brother, Brenden, said in an email. He said the family hopes law enforcement officials across the Tampa Bay region work to find who is responsible for her death "and bring them to justice." His email did not discuss the pair's relationship."—Jessica Vander Velde Tampa Bay Times "Severed leg identified as missing Bradenton woman's" 27 March 2012 (link)
"For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. Although Nujood’s mother was unhappy, she did not protest. “In our country [Yemen] it’s the men who give the orders, and the women who follow them,” Nujood writes […] Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her. He soon began to beat her as well, the memoir says, and her new mother-in-law offered no sympathy. “Hit her even harder,” the mother-in-law would tell her son."—Nicholas Kristof New York Times "Divorced Before Puberty" 3 March 2010 (link)
Friday, August 2, 2013
Perception
"Like gambling, interacting on social media activates the part of the brain involved with rewards, Bengtson said. Just as gamblers get a rush of good feelings when they win, a social media junkie feels gratification when their Facebook posts get lots of "likes," when their Twitter followers multiply, and when their Instagram photos are big hits. The repeated, positive reinforcement can turn an occasional user into a constantly connected fanatic who neglects normal human contact. "The addiction may not be as destructive as alcohol or drugs, but it can be destructive to your personal relationships and in your professional life if it interferes with your job," said Kelli Burns, a mass communications professor and social media researcher at USF."—Irene Maher Tampa Bay Times"Social media can become an addiction, but you can break free" 25 July 2013 (link)
"The tendency is to draw a circle around language, to herd neat sentences into the corral and wrangle out the parts of speech. But most problems with language, the problems that come up when you try to use it to communicate, aren’t about sentences and parts of speech. They have to do with wild herds of sentences, out on the open range. Don’t get me wrong. Had there been a shared grammar and dictionary in the midst of that passionate confrontation between Hispanics and police in Mount Pleasant, it couldn’t have hurt. But, as the meetings and arguments and newspaper articles since the riot make clear, the confrontation in Mount Pleasant was an encounter between different worlds of meaning, meaning that travels well beyond the dictionary, meaning that tells you who you are, whom you’re dealing with, the kind of situation you’re in, how life works and what’s important in it—meaning that ties language inside the circle, grammar and the dictionary, to the world outside. If you want to use language, if you want to communicate, language inside the circle isn’t enough. The circle is a lie. It’s like saying that if you can put rings on a piston, you can drive in traffic. To understand language, you have to understand that differences in language go well beyond what you find in the grammar and the dictionary. Otherwise, why would my Black and female colleagues and I have had trouble, even though we all spoke the “same” language?"—Michael Agar Language Shock: Understanding The Culture Of Conversation 1996 (link)
"This study finds that homicides with a white perpetrator and a black victim are ten times more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a black perpetrator and a white victim, and the gap is larger in states with Stand Your Ground laws. After accounting for a variety of factors, such as whether the victim and perpetrator were strangers, the gap is smaller, but still significant. Cases with a white perpetrator and a black victim are 281 percent more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a white perpetrator and white victim."—John Roman Urban Institute "Race, Justifiable Homicide, and Stand Your Ground Laws" 26 July 2013 (link)
"The tendency is to draw a circle around language, to herd neat sentences into the corral and wrangle out the parts of speech. But most problems with language, the problems that come up when you try to use it to communicate, aren’t about sentences and parts of speech. They have to do with wild herds of sentences, out on the open range. Don’t get me wrong. Had there been a shared grammar and dictionary in the midst of that passionate confrontation between Hispanics and police in Mount Pleasant, it couldn’t have hurt. But, as the meetings and arguments and newspaper articles since the riot make clear, the confrontation in Mount Pleasant was an encounter between different worlds of meaning, meaning that travels well beyond the dictionary, meaning that tells you who you are, whom you’re dealing with, the kind of situation you’re in, how life works and what’s important in it—meaning that ties language inside the circle, grammar and the dictionary, to the world outside. If you want to use language, if you want to communicate, language inside the circle isn’t enough. The circle is a lie. It’s like saying that if you can put rings on a piston, you can drive in traffic. To understand language, you have to understand that differences in language go well beyond what you find in the grammar and the dictionary. Otherwise, why would my Black and female colleagues and I have had trouble, even though we all spoke the “same” language?"—Michael Agar Language Shock: Understanding The Culture Of Conversation 1996 (link)
"This study finds that homicides with a white perpetrator and a black victim are ten times more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a black perpetrator and a white victim, and the gap is larger in states with Stand Your Ground laws. After accounting for a variety of factors, such as whether the victim and perpetrator were strangers, the gap is smaller, but still significant. Cases with a white perpetrator and a black victim are 281 percent more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a white perpetrator and white victim."—John Roman Urban Institute "Race, Justifiable Homicide, and Stand Your Ground Laws" 26 July 2013 (link)
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Innovation
"At 9:44 a.m. the M.I.T. police were called in; by 10:30 a.m., the Cambridge police were en route, and by 11 a.m., Michael Pickett, a Secret Service agent and expert on computer crime, was on the scene. On his recommendation, a surveillance camera was installed in the closet and a second laptop was connected to the network switch to track the traffic. […] Michael Sussmann, a Washington lawyer and a former federal prosecutor of computer crime, said that M.I.T. was the victim and that, without more information, it had to assume any hackers were “the Chinese, even though it’s a 16-year-old with acne.” Once the police were called in, the university could not back away from the investigation. “After there’s a referral, victims don’t have the opportunity to change their mind.”—Noam Cohen New York Times "How M.I.T. Ensnared a Hacker, Bucking a Freewheeling Culture" 20 January 2013 (link)
"MIT and the U.S. Secret Service conducted the video surveillance of the closet at MIT that discovered Swartz’s downloading. He was charged by the Middlesex County district attorney’s office with breaking and entering in the daytime. Lawyers familiar with the case have told me that it was anticipated that the state charge would be continued without a finding, with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner. Tragedy intervened when [federal prosecutor Cameron] Ortiz’s office took over the case to send “a message.”—Harvey A. Silverglate Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly "The Swartz suicide and the sick culture of the Justice Dept." 24 January 2013 (link)
"U.S Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz today defended her office’s prosecution of Reddit co-founder and Internet activist Aaron Swartz, expressing sympathy for his family and saying she is “terribly upset” she is being blamed for his suicide. […] “The evidence they had, the charges they brought, this case was fairly and appropriately and reasonably handled,” she added. […] Ortiz’s prosecution of Swartz has drawn harsh nationwide criticism, ranging from Internet freedom circles to Congress…"—John Zaremba and Matt Stout Boston Herald "Emotional Carmen Ortiz `terribly upset’ over Swartz suicide" 17 January 2013(link)
"MIT and the U.S. Secret Service conducted the video surveillance of the closet at MIT that discovered Swartz’s downloading. He was charged by the Middlesex County district attorney’s office with breaking and entering in the daytime. Lawyers familiar with the case have told me that it was anticipated that the state charge would be continued without a finding, with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner. Tragedy intervened when [federal prosecutor Cameron] Ortiz’s office took over the case to send “a message.”—Harvey A. Silverglate Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly "The Swartz suicide and the sick culture of the Justice Dept." 24 January 2013 (link)
"U.S Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz today defended her office’s prosecution of Reddit co-founder and Internet activist Aaron Swartz, expressing sympathy for his family and saying she is “terribly upset” she is being blamed for his suicide. […] “The evidence they had, the charges they brought, this case was fairly and appropriately and reasonably handled,” she added. […] Ortiz’s prosecution of Swartz has drawn harsh nationwide criticism, ranging from Internet freedom circles to Congress…"—John Zaremba and Matt Stout Boston Herald "Emotional Carmen Ortiz `terribly upset’ over Swartz suicide" 17 January 2013(link)
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Belch
"So now, “in the City
by the Bay," [San Francisco] if you want to roller skate naked down Castro Street wearing a phallic-symbol hat and snorting an eight-ball off a transgender hooker’s chest while underage kids run behind you handing out free heroin needles, condoms and coupons that’s your right as a free citizen of the United States. But if you want to put a Buzz Lightyear toy in the same box with a hamburger and fries and sell it, you’re outta line, mister!”—Jayson Lusk The Food Police 2013 (page 3)
"For reasons that scientists don't yet fully understand, people who spend time in high altitudes tend to shed weight. [Robert Roach, research director at the Colorado Center for Altitude Medicine and Physiology in Denver] cautions, "We're still shooting in the dark," but he and his colleagues are investigating whether subjecting people to the effects of high altitude by having them sleep in specialized tents at night, might lead to weight loss."—Amanda Onion ABC News "Could High Altitude Cure Obesity?" 7 January 2006 (link)
"To accept the respondents’ interpretation of the authority granted to the Board by the New York City Charter would leave its authority to define, create, mandate and enforce limited only by its own imagination. The fact that respondents interpret the Charter precisely to conclude same, tolls the bell on this regulation. The Portion Cap Rule, if upheld, would create an administrative Leviathan and violate the separation of powers doctrine. The Rule would not only violate the separation of powers doctrine, it would eviscerate it."—Hon. Milton A. Tingling New York Supreme Court "NY Coalition vs. NY Dept. of Health" 11 March 2012 (link)
"For reasons that scientists don't yet fully understand, people who spend time in high altitudes tend to shed weight. [Robert Roach, research director at the Colorado Center for Altitude Medicine and Physiology in Denver] cautions, "We're still shooting in the dark," but he and his colleagues are investigating whether subjecting people to the effects of high altitude by having them sleep in specialized tents at night, might lead to weight loss."—Amanda Onion ABC News "Could High Altitude Cure Obesity?" 7 January 2006 (link)
"To accept the respondents’ interpretation of the authority granted to the Board by the New York City Charter would leave its authority to define, create, mandate and enforce limited only by its own imagination. The fact that respondents interpret the Charter precisely to conclude same, tolls the bell on this regulation. The Portion Cap Rule, if upheld, would create an administrative Leviathan and violate the separation of powers doctrine. The Rule would not only violate the separation of powers doctrine, it would eviscerate it."—Hon. Milton A. Tingling New York Supreme Court "NY Coalition vs. NY Dept. of Health" 11 March 2012 (link)
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