38-year-old Cynthia Hunter of Florida was jailed for 50 days when police found a vial containing a yellow substance in her purse. She said it was cat urine for her son's science experiment, but she was locked up for 50 days until the lab results confirmed that the substance was indeed cat urine.

200710162220 Cynthia Hunter was arrested in August accused of stealing at a Brandon Wal-Mart.

The 38-year-old mother was charged with possession of a controlled substance after deputies found a vial in her purse that a field test suggested was meth.

Whatever happened to Innocent until proven guilty...

Includes the definition of

* Technofetishists who believe that people are just there to enter data and that everyone wants to spend their lives in virtual chat rooms.
* New age fluffy bunnies who believe that technology is the spawn of Satan and that everyone should hug at the beginning of a meeting.

Goldman in $3bn bail-out of fund Goldman Sachs is to use $2bn of its own money to bail out its Global Equity Opportunities hedge fund in an embarrassing admission that its highly regarded computerised funds malfunctioned last week.

The investment bank has raised a further $1bn from outside investors to support the $3.6bn GEO fund, which lost about $1.5bn when computer models failed to predict market turbulence.

Bad computer model. Bad model.

To the modelers (and Goldman Sachs) and the rest of the world please read
"Fooled by Randomness">
The Black Swan

Does this mean people have to give their bonuses back ?

Science Daily — Seeing is doing -- at least it is when mirror neurons are working normally. But in autistic individuals, say researchers from the University of California, San Diego, the brain circuits that enable people to perceive and understand the actions of others do not behave in the usual way.

So is it becoming more common or more commonly diagnosed

No Daddy we're not ALL going to the zoo. Two pieces of the jigsaw are missing.

Who's that Ben.

Mammy and Daire.

So there you have it analogical reasoning and the poetic mind of a 3 year old. It really took me by surprise and delight. What was really interesting was his ability to contextualise it . When we were driving in his Granny's car without his Granny the piece of the jigsaw that was missing was Granny.

Cloudy apple juice is healthier than clear, containing almost double the antioxidants which protect against heart disease and cancer.

You can be too clear

Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study, Author, Disturbing the Universe

HAR1 ( Human Accelerated Region 1) As a New Tool Leading Us Toward a Deep Understanding of Human Nature

I am generally optimistic because our human heritage seems to have equipped us very well for dealing with challenges, from ice-ages and cave-bears to diseases and over-population. The whole species did cooperate to eliminate small-pox, and the women of Mexico did reduce their average family size from seven to two and a half in fifty years. Science has helped us to understand challenges and also to defeat them.

I am especially optimistic just now because of a seminal discovery that was made recently by comparing genomes of different species. David Haussler and his colleagues at UC Santa Cruz discovered a small patch of DNA which they call HAR1, short for Human Accelerated Region 1. This patch appears to be strictly conserved in the genomes of mouse, rat, chicken and chimpanzee, which means that it must have been performing an essential function that was unchanged for about three hundred million years from the last common ancestor of birds and mammals until today.

But the same patch appears grossly modified with eighteen mutations in the human genome, which means that it must have changed its function in the last six million years from the common ancestor of chimps and humans to modern humans. Somehow, that little patch of DNA expresses an essential difference between humans and other mammals. We know two other significant facts about HAR1. First, it does not code for a protein but codes for RNA. Second, the RNA for which it codes is active in the cortex of the human embryonic brain during the second trimester of pregnancy. It is likely that the rapid evolution of HAR1 has something to do with the rapid evolution of the human brain during the last six million years.

I am optimistic because I see the discovery of HAR1 as a seminal event in the history of science, marking the beginning of a new understanding of human evolution and human nature. I see it as a big step toward the fulfillment of the dream described in 1929 by Desmond Bernal, one of the pioneers of molecular biology, in his little book, "The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul". Bernal saw science as our best tool for defeating the three enemies. The World means floods and famines and climate changes. The Flesh means diseases and senile infirmities. The Devil means the dark irrational passions that lead otherwise rational beings into strife and destruction. I am optimistic because I see HAR1 as a new tool leading us toward a deep understanding of human nature and toward the ultimate defeat of our last enemy.

The State of Analytics

" We know exactly where one cow with mad-cow-disease is located among the millions and millions of cows in America, but we haven't a clue as to where thousands of Illegal immigrants and terrorists are located." - Anon

Any one know the slick analytical tools Department of Agriculture uses?

The phrase that springs to mind is "yeah right"

One steps into this series not expecting the achievement of Dune, an unfairly high standard, but a good read with maybe some flashes of Dune's complexity of character, plot, and philosophy. The first book of this trilogy, the Butlerian Jihad, failed in the latter two areas but the plot was a good enough read to overcome those flaws. The second book was a step backward, with the same weak characterization, but this time not balanced by a strongly told story. The Battle of Corrin, unfortunately, continues the downward trend

And if comparisons are odious they become even more odious when following the Historian with this. Almost like following a good fillet steak with the wrapping from a Big Mac.

Achievement of the year last year. Getting to this level of simplicity on a system we designed. It was a sweet victory.

In other words, very little can be said with certainty. Any definition that finishes with the ominous "This may not be a single entity" suggests we really don't understand much about the associated experiences.

So why does the argument over schizophrenia persist?

Mainly because the medical and legal systems are far more comfortable with cut-and-dry "you have it or you don't" conditions than ones in which you might have a bit of this and a bit of that.

This is often due to the fact that the medical and legal systems have to make cut and dry decisions. To treat or not to treat, to detain or not to detain, and so on. These decisions become a lot easier when the supporting information is as simple as possible.

It also becomes a lot easier to market treatments for specific disorders. In fact, in many countries, drugs can only be licensed for specific disorders.

So, no diagnosis means that there's no way of getting drugs licensed. This is why pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in supporting the concept of schizophrenia.

In other words, the usefulness of the diagnosis of schizophrenia rests not only upon the supporting medical research, but also on its social function

Madness Explained reviewed here covers this in great detail.

which concludes with a metaphoric description of various mental health professionals

Madness is like being at the wheel of a car that you don't know how to drive on the streets of an unfamiliar city. A psychologist is someone who will look under the bonnet to show you how the bits and pieces seem to connect. A psychotherapist is someone who can point out the traffic jams but may also lose you down a dark narrow street where you end up in a ditch. Psychiatrists are like those men in tow trucks. They can fill the tank with chemicals, they can pull you out of the ditch and sometimes the conversation in the cab on the way home can be surprisingly enjoyable. And they love to turn on those flashing lights...

Madness Explained is a very interesting book. Well worth a read and cast our digital desires in an interesting light.