Rocky collected money for the Mafia. A typical bagman, he was immersed in the material world of fast cars, quick cash and getting ahead by butting heads. Quantifying the Phenomenon: Prof. Bruce Greyson developed this scale to measure the depth of an individual’s near-death experience. One day, he was shot in the chest and left for dead on the street. He survived, though, and lived to tell of an experience that changed his life. ‘He described a blissful, typical near-death experience-seeing the light, communicating with a deity and seeing deceased relatives,’ says Bruce Greyson, a U.Va.-trained psychiatrist who interviewed Rocky after the shooting. ‘He came back with typical near-death aftereffects. He felt that cooperation and love were the important things, and that competition and material goods were irrelevant.’ That change in attitude didn’t sit well with Rocky’s Mafia friends, but they let him leave the family circle. It was his girlfriend who screamed bloody murder when he changed careers and started helping delinquent children and victims of spousal abuse. ‘She was just disgusted with him because, as she put it, he no longer cared for things of substance, meaning money and jewelry and […]
One of the world’s most prestigious health journals has lashed a fast-growing trend in the United States and Britain for ‘designer vaginas,’ the tabloid term for cosmetic surgery to the female genitalia. The fashion is being driven by commercial and media pressures that exploit women’s insecurities and is fraught with unknowns, including a risk to sexual arousal, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) says. Known as elective genitoplasty, the surgery usually entails shortening or changing the shape of the outer lips, or labia, but may also include reduction in the hood of skin covering the clitoris or shortening the vagina itself. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the practice is spreading fast in the United States as well as in Britain, but the picture is unclear, the BMJ says. Not only is there a disturbing lack of data about the phenomenon, there has been negligible assessment about surgical after-effects — and almost zero reflexion as to whether a labial ‘problem’ exists in the first place, the BMJ says angrily. In 2004-5, 800 ‘labial reductions’ were conducted by Britain’s state-run National Health Service (NHS), more than a doubling of the figure of six years earlier. Other operations were carried […]
In the race for ever thinner displays for TVs, cell phones and other gadgets, Sony may have developed one to beat them all – a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full-colour video. Sony Corporation posted video of the new 2.5 inch display on its’ web page. In the video, a hand squeezes the 0.3 millimetre (0.01 inch)-thick display, which shows color video of a bicyclist stuntman, a picturesque lake and other images. Sony has developed a razor-thin display that bends like paper while showing full-colour video Sony will present the research and video at an academic symposium in Long Beach, California, for the Society for Information Display this week, the Japanese electronics and entertainment company said. The display combines Sony’s organic thin film transistor, or TFT, technology, which is required to make flexible displays, with another kind of technology called organic electroluminescent display, it said. The latter technology is not as widespread for gadgets as the two main display technologies now on the market – liquid crystal displays and plasma display panels. Although flat-panel TVs are getting slimmer, a display that’s so thin it bends in a human hand marks […]
NEW YORK — It has been a wild and in some cases wacky season for network TV, culminating in a hunt for millions of missing viewers that is so complicated that it’s worthy of its own episode of ‘CSI.’ On the surface, it is status quo — CBS extended its winning streak in total viewers to five years, while ‘American Idol’-powered Fox bagged a third consecutive season victory among adults 18-49. But underneath, a sea change has been brewing. ‘I think we’ll look back and see 2007 as the watershed when all the things we talked about — viewing behavior and audience measurement of that behavior — all came together to start the new era,’ NBC research chief Alan Wurtzel said. ‘We’ve talked a lot about change and everything, but this is the first year we’ve seen it in a profound way.’ At the beginning of the season, Nielsen Media Research introduced ‘most current’ ratings, cuming the audiences that watch a show live as well as those that record it on a DVR and watch it up to seven days later. But even with those additional viewers counted this season, primetime television viewing dropped […]
As opponents from the right and left challenge an immigration bill before Congress, there is broad support among Americans - Democrats, Republicans and independents alike - for the major provisions in the legislation, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll. Taking a pragmatic view on a divisive issue, a large majority of Americans want to change the immigration laws to allow illegal immigrants to gain legal status and to create a new guest worker program to meet future labor demand, the poll found. At the same time, Americans have mixed feelings about whether the recent wave of immigration has been beneficial to the country, the survey found, and they are sharply divided over how open the United States should be to future immigrants. Half of all Americans say they are ready to transform the process for selecting new immigrants as proposed in the bill, giving priority to job skills and education levels over family ties to the United States, which have been the foundation of the immigration system for four decades. Point by point, large majorities expressed support for measures contained in the legislation that has been under debate since Monday in the Senate. […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
