It is a winter habitation option that few would hesitate over: the Siberian tundra or the glorious Gloucestershire wetlands. But flocks of Bewick’s swans appear to have plumped for the former, prompting fears that their great migration might never be seen again. Concerns have been raised by the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust centre at Slimbridge where hundreds of the swans would normally have arrived and be settling for the winter months after a summer in Siberia. None has been sighted, leading conservationists to suggest that climate change has made the Arctic so warm that they are happy to stay put. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) said that if temperatures continued to rise the birds might lose their ‘collective memory’ of their winter home, denying Britain’s birdwatchers one of the year’s most impressive sights. About 8,100 swans usually winter in Britain. The majority, about 6,000, go to East Anglia, about 300 head for Slimbridge and others are seen on the Severn estuary, the Nene Washes, Cambridgeshire, and Martin Mere in Lancashire. The swans were due at Slimbridge on October 21, although they have been late before. In 1969 they did not return until […]
Hate crimes against gays increased in 2007, up 6% from 2006 even though the overall number of hate crimes dropped slightly, the FBI reported Monday. There were 7,624 hate crimes reported in 2007, down 1% from 2006. Crimes based on sexual orientation - 1,265 in 2007 - have been rising since 2005. A hate crime is one motivated by bias against a person’s race, religion, sexual orientation or other status. ‘Until we make laws that make it clear these attacks are not OK, the nation will continue to be scarred,’ says Neil Giuliano, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. In 19 states, hate crime laws don’t cover sexual orientation. Other changes in 2007: ¢ Race-related incidents, 51% of the reported hate crimes, fell 3%. ¢ Incidents against Latinos increased for the fourth year, from 426 in 2003 to 595. ¢ Bias incidents against Asians increased by 4% from 181 to 188. ¢ Crimes against Muslims declined 26% to 115 incidents, considerably down from 481 in 2001. Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University, says that drop shows the effect of 9/11 waning. Latinos and Asians, he says, are likely […]
Most individuals’ preferences regarding life-sustaining treatment do not appear to change over a three-year period, regardless of declines in physical and mental health, according to a report in the October 27 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Individuals who say they want aggressive care and those without advance directives are most likely to change their end-of-life wishes over time. ‘Efforts to improve the experience of patients and families at the end of life must incorporate patient perspectives,’ the authors write as background information in the article. ‘Advance directives are one strategy through which patient preferences can be elicited and recorded, to be invoked at a time when the patient may not be able to make decisions directing care.’ However, they note, preferences for life-sustaining treatment given in one state of health may not reflect the choices patients would make if their health status changed. Marsha N. Wittink, M.D., M.B.E., of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, and colleagues assessed end-of-life preferences in 818 physicians (average age 69) who graduated from medical school at Johns Hopkins University between 1948 and 1964. Participants completed questionnaires about their health status and their end-of-life preferences […]
NEW YORK — Circulation at the nation’s daily newspapers is falling faster than anticipated this year as readers continue their migration to the Internet and papers narrow their distribution to cut costs. The development, which compounds the fiscal challenge of plummeting advertising revenue, was revealed Monday when the Audit Bureau of Circulations released sales totals reported by newspapers for April through September. Combined weekday circulation of all 507 papers that reported circulation totals this year and last averaged 38,165,848 in the six months ending in September, 4.6 percent below 40,022,356 a year earlier. The aggregate drop was only 2.6 percent in the September 2007 period, compared with September 2006. Sunday circulation fell faster than daily – 4.8 percent, to 43,631,646 at the 571 papers with comparable totals. A year ago, Sunday circulation fell 3.5 percent. Daily circulation at 16 of the 25 largest papers fell more than 5 percent in the latest period. Circulation has been dropping at newspapers for decades, a trend sped up by readers shifting to the Internet. Newspapers also have lost advertising in recent years because of the Internet, and that decline accelerated this summer as the weak economy prompted advertisers […]
A team of Johns Hopkins University neuroscientists has discovered patterns of brain activity that may underlie our remarkable ability to see and understand the three-dimensional structure of objects. Computers can beat us at math and chess, but humans are the experts at object vision. (That’s why some Web sites use object recognition tasks as part of their authentication of human users.) It seems trivial to us to describe a teapot as having a C-shaped handle on one side, an S-shaped spout on the other and a disk-shaped lid on top. But sifting this three-dimensional information from the constantly changing, two-dimensional images coming in through our eyes is one of the most difficult tasks the brain performs. Even sophisticated computer vision systems have never been able to accomplish the same feat using two-dimensional camera images. The Johns Hopkins research suggests that higher-level visual regions of the brain represent objects as spatial configurations of surface fragments, something like a structural drawing. Individual neurons are tuned to respond to surface fragment substructures. For instance, one neuron from the study responded to the combination of a forward-facing ridge near the front and an upward-facing concavity near the top. Multiple neurons with different […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
