Good Afternoon All,
Sorry no time to write today, I'm running late this morning here in Seoul. I have only 40 minutes left to get ready for work and eat. YIPES! But I hope you enjoy today's posts anyway, and see you tomorrow!
Top 5:
1. Kamikaze Pic Prompts Friendship (NY Post)
2. 3 Baby Storks Born in Wild in 2nd Year of Natural Hatching (Japan Today)
3. Brains Are Hardwired to Act According to the Golden Rule (Science Daily)
4. Sheltering Addicted Homeless Would Save Millions: B.C. Report (CBC Canada)
5. WA Child's Message in a Bottle Ends Up in Alaska 21 Years Later (Seattle Times)
Honorable Mention:
1. US-Afghan Forces Kill Insurgents (BBC)
2. New T-shirts Offer Protection Against Knives (Daily Yomiuri Online)
Unpublishable:
Marines See a Safer Iraq http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_OUTSIDE_THE_WIRE?SITE=DCUSN&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
This is a very good, albeit copywrited, article about how much this area of Iraq has calmed down. This area used to be a hotbed for insurgency and violence. The Marines featured in this article, however have been hit only 3 times during their stay, and none of those hits have caused loss of life. This is a far improvement from a few years ago when IEDs and deaths by IEDs were more common.
Today's Top 5:
1. Kamikaze Pic Prompts Friendship
http://www.nypost.com/seven/03232008/news/regionalnews/kamikaze_pic_prompts_friendship_103155.htmBy C.J. SULLIVAN
March 23, 2008 -- A World War II photo of a kamikaze attack has brought two heroes together, giving one a new lease on life and the other much-needed inspiration.
Anthony Paolicelli, 82, who served on the USS Essex, and FDNY Lt. Gary Jacobson, whose grandpa also served aboard, were being treated at Hudson Valley Hospital when they discovered their link, the Nov. 25, 1944, plane attack on the ship.
"I didn't think anyone had a camera, never mind that they were able to catch the plane crashing into the deck," Paolicelli said of the deadly attack.
He learned otherwise at the rehab facility, where he was being treated for numbness in his hand and the fireman was recovering from injuries from a September fire in Queens.
Jacobson noticed Paolicelli's Essex baseball cap there.
"My uncle had told me stories and had pictures of my grandfather, Anthony Joseph Kammerer, who was on the USS Essex," Jacobson said. "He had found old photos of the attack on the Essex in a used bookstore."
Jacobson brought the photos in for the old man to see.
Paolicelli said, "I felt like Gary gave me back my youth."
His hand healed soon after.
Jacobson remains in rehab, but said, "The one good thing about that fire was I met Tony."
2. 3 Baby Storks Born in Wild in 2nd Year of Natural Hatching http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/431883
Sunday, March 23, 2008 at 06:00 EST
KOBE — Three baby oriental white storks have recently been born in the wild, marking the second such hatching of stork eggs following one last May, the Hyogo Prefectural Homeland for the Oriental White Stork in the city of Toyooka said Saturday. The offspring were produced by a 7-year-old male and 9-year-old female released into the wild in 2006, according to the breeding farm. The same pair produced a female baby last spring, which was the first hatching of a stork egg in the wild for 43 years. Japan's last group of wild storks lived in Toyooka. In 1971, they were taken into captivity, but the last bird died in 1986.
3. Brains Are Hardwired To Act According To The Golden Rule
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080321131055.htm
ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2008) —
Wesley Autrey, a black construction worker, a Navy veteran and 55-year-old father of two, didn’t know the young man standing beside him. But when he had a seizure on the subway platform and toppled onto the tracks, Autrey jumped down after him and shielded him with his body as a train bore down on them. Autrey could have died, so why did he put his life on the line — literally — to save this complete stranger?
Social cognition Donald Pfaff, the author of the new book The Neuroscience of Fair Play: Why We (Usually) Follow the Golden Rule, thinks he has the answer. Our brains, he says, are hardwired to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Individual acts of aggression and evil occur when this circuitry jams.
“If it’s really true that all religions have this ethical principle, across continents and across centuries, then it is more likely to have a hardwired scientific basis than if it was just a neighborhood custom,” says Pfaff, whose laboratory at Rockefeller University studies various hormones and brain signals that influence positive social behavior.
In his book, Pfaff proposes a theory that explains, in a parsimonious way, how people manage to behave well when they do, and under what conditions they deviate from good behavior. He describes how memories of fear, as well as various brain hormones, can play a vital role in whether people choose to act ethically or violently toward others. One’s behavior is a balance, he says, between “prosocial” and “antisocial” traits — a balance shaped by early life experiences.
“You have some people who are prosocial, who face the world with a smile and are uniformly nice to other people,” says Pfaff. “Others face the world with a snarl and are routinely aggressive and thoughtless. Most of us are a balance — we are able to treat each other almost all the time in a civil and thoughtful way.” But nobody’s perfect, he adds. “Even those in the prosocial group have cheated on their taxes.”
Donald W. Pfaff, Ph.D., is professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology and Behavior at The Rockefeller University, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At Rockefeller, where he has studied the brain and behavior for more than 30 years, he discovered the brain-cell targets for steroid hormones and proved that these chemicals, among others, could elicit specific behaviors when reaching the right brain areas.
4. Sheltering Addicted Homeless Would Save Millions: B.C. Report
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2008/03/23/bc-homeless-study.html
Last Updated: Sunday, March 23, 2008 3:50 PM ET
The Canadian Press
Providing shelter for the homeless with severe addictions and mental illness throughout British Columbia could save taxpayers millions of dollars, a new study says.
The report, issued by Simon Fraser University, pinpoints addiction as the most prevalent mental health problem among the homeless.
Providing non-housing services for such people currently costs taxpayers more than $55,000 a year per person, the paper says, adding that providing adequate housing and supports could reduce that figure to $37,000.
The researchers say the plan's overall "cost avoidance" would be about $211 million annually.
The problem is not confined to big cities, the report noted, but was also found in 28 smaller B.C. communities studied by researchers.
The report calls for better integration between municipalities and inter-ministry service providers.
Only 7,700 beds are available for the at-risk population, the report says, while approximately 130,000 people in B.C. deal with severe addictions and/or mental illness.
The study comes two months after Vancouver police reported that half the calls they get in some areas of the city are related to mentally ill people.
5. WA Child's Message in a Bottle Ends Up in Alaska 21 Years Later http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004301051_apwstmessageinabottle.html
By DONNA GORDON BLANKINSHIP
Associated Press Writer
Merle Brandell and his black lab Slapsey were beachcombing along the Bering Sea when he spied a plastic bottle among the Japanese glass floats he often finds along the shore of his tiny Alaskan fishing village.
He walked over and saw an envelope tucked inside. After slicing the bottle open, Brandell found a message from an elementary school student in a suburb of Seattle. The fact that the letter traveled 1,735 miles without any help from the U.S. postal service is unusual, but that's only the beginning of the mystery.
About 21 years passed between the time Emily Hwaung put the message in a soda bottle and Merle Brandell picked it up on the beach.
"This letter is part of our science project to study oceans and learn about people in distant lands," she wrote. "Please send the date and location of the bottle with your address. I will send you my picture and tell you when and where the bottle was placed in the ocean. Your friend, Emily Hwaung."
Brandell, 34, a bear hunting guide and manager of a local water plant, said many of the 70-plus residents of Nelson Lagoon were intrigued by his find. Beachcombing is a popular activity in remote western Alaska. Among the recent discoveries was a sail boat that washed onto shore last October.
"It's kind of a sport. It keeps us occupied. It's one of the pleasures of living here," Brandell said of the village reachable only by plane or boat that is too small to have its own store.
He had no idea just how unusual his find was until he tried to track down the sender: a fourth grader from the North City School in the Shoreline School District.
No one answered the phone when Brandell called the school in December so he sent the school district a handwritten letter, which eventually ended up on the desk of district spokesman Craig Degginger.
After some searching, Degginger discovered Emily Hwaung is now a 30-year-old accountant named Emily Shih who now lives in Seattle. She was in the 4th grade during the 1986-87 school year at a school building that closed more than a year ago.
"I've been getting a kick out of it for a month now," Shih said during a recent interview.
She said she was flabbergasted by the news and immediately shared it with her Kirkland co-workers.
"I don't remember the project. It was so long ago. Elementary school is kind of foggy," Shih admitted.
The project may have been more memorable if each child had created her own message and personally dropped it in the water, but the letters from Carol Aguayo's fourth grade class were typed. The students only added their names and signed them, then a friend carried the bottles on his boat and dropped them in the ocean.
"It took away a little of the mystique," Shih said of the form letter.
She also was a little chagrined by the offer to mail a photo to whomever found the letter and by the environmental implications of dropping plastic bottles in the ocean, and noted that times have changed a lot in 21 years.
"I've had a good laugh about that with all my friends," Shih said.
As she was sharing her story with friends and co-workers, Shih realized how rare it was for a message in a bottle to arrive safely somewhere.
"Many of them had tried to do it themselves, but you never hear of one coming back. The odds are so low that you'll ever hear back from somebody," Shih said. "It was just kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing."
Brandell has a theory about how the bottle ended up on the shore of Nelson Lagoon and how the letter remained so readable after its 21 years in transit. Maybe the bottle didn't spend those years in the water. It might have blown his way quickly and then remained buried in the mud for years.
It was found among some Japanese floats that took a similar journey many years ago. They don't really wash ashore. They extrude out of the mud and into the hands of beachcombers, who sell them on eBay or craft jewelry out of them like Brandell's mother does.
Honorable Mentions:
1. US-Afghan Forces Kill Insurgents http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7310377.stm
The US troops called in air strikes to target the insurgents American forces in Afghanistan say more than a dozen insurgents have been killed in a joint US-Afghan operation in the southern province of Uruzgan. The forces say they were returning fire after coming under ambush.
In a separate incident, the US-led coalition force said two of its soldiers had died when their vehicle struck a mine in Kandahar province.
Violent attacks are multiplying in the south and east as the winter snows melt, says the BBC's Alastair Leithead.
'Weapons seized'
There is some confusion over the count of casualties from the clash in Uruzgan province, which neighbours Helmand in the restive south of the country.
Earlier, the Afghan defence ministry said "dozens" of enemy fighters had been killed, including the man commanding the group.
It said more than 40 weapons, including rockets and heavy machine gins, had been recovered following the operation.
But a statement from US forces said they were attacked by small arms fire and rocket propelled grenades, and that in a return of fire "more than a dozen" insurgents had been killed.
Uruzgan province is under the command of Dutch forces but has a strong American presence. The US troops, working under Operation Enduring Freedom and outside the remit of Nato, brought in air strikes to target the insurgents.
2. New T-shirts Offer Protection Against Knives
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20080323TDY02310.htm
The Yomiuri Shimbun
OSAKA--A uniform manufacturer in Chuo Ward, Osaka, has developed a T-shirt intended to provide protection against knives, following an increasing number of malicious crimes that have victimized children and late-night convenience store clerks.
The Nihon Uni company used slightly thick fibers that are more than three times as strong as cotton for the T-shirt. However, the product does not look like typical protective clothing.
The strength of the T-shirt made from ultrahigh molecular weight polyethylene fiber is equal to that of aramid fiber used in body armor. But the T-shirt is machine-washable because it is lightweight.
The T-shirt provides superior protection from slashing attacks, but its mesh fabric can be punctured by a sharp point.
The short-sleeved version of the T-shirt costs 19,000-52,000 yen, while the long-sleeved variety ranges from 22,000-59,000 yen. The products will go on sale in June through distributors.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment