Texas officials charged with protecting the environment and public health have for years made arbitrary subtractions to the measured levels of radiation delivered by water utilities across the state, according to a series of investigative reports out of Houston.

Those subtractions, based on the test results’ margin of error, made all the difference for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ): without the reduction, demonstrated levels of dangerous radiation would have been in excess of federal limits for years.

This was being done in direct contravention of an order by the US Environmental Protection Agency, which told state regulators in 2000 to stop subtracting the margin of error.

The findings are part of an investigation by Houston CBS affiliate KHOU.

Confronted by reporter Mark Greenblatt, TCEQ staffer Linda Brookins claimed that the radiation was ‘natural’ and people shouldn’t be concerned. She also refused to read on camera the EPA’s order to stop subtracting margins of error from radiation test results.

KHOU called it ‘Texas math,’ in part two of its ongoing series.

Thanks to the TCEQ’s under-reporting of radioactive content, one particular water provider in Harris County was able to skirt needed maintenance for years, even though uncensored tests showed radiation was almost always above legal […]

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Maricopa County officials believe the discovery of a duplicate payroll log and database hidden in a secure computer system at the Sheriff’s Office could reveal the extent of alleged misspending in Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s agency.

The sheriff’s employee database operated parallel to a county-run system, recording a different set of sheriff’s staff assignments and payments than official records provided to county auditors. County officials say the system has existed since the early part of the decade, but they learned of it only recently through paperwork produced in a case alleging racial profiling against the Sheriff’s Office.

Details of the sheriff’s employee database and steps taken to investigate will be outlined to county supervisors at a hearing this morning.

The supervisors plan to subpoena 20 to 30 people to testify in the future about the hidden database, which is housed in a computer system at the center of a costly legal battle between Arpaio and the supervisors.

County administrators believe the Sheriff’s Office intentionally misappropriated as much as $80 million designated for jail operations over five years to pay employees working in patrol, human-smuggling operations and investigative units. Those employees should have been paid with other funds, but county officials suspect the Sheriff’s Office tried […]

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Private banks will sharply expand headcount in coming years to capitalize on the growing number of wealthy individuals in Asia, dismissing concerns that aggressive hiring is out of sync with a tentative recovery in revenues.

Hiring sprees this year have taken some firms beyond their pre-crisis staffing levels, as banks believe growth in Asia, and robust revenues elsewhere, will support the expansion.

Citi for instance plans to add between 100 and 200 senior staff to its private bank over the next few years, Dena Brumpton, chief operating officer at its private bank, told Reuters.

‘We see a lot of growth coming from Asia. But there will be selective hiring pockets in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and U.S. regions, too,’ she said in an interview.

The hires come on top of the 130 managing directors the bank added during the last 12 months.

The wealth of Asia Pacific-based individuals with investable assets of $1 million or more outranked Europe for the first time at the end of 2009, according to the widely quoted Capgemini Merrill-Lynch 2010 World Wealth Report.

Faced with tougher capital requirements in the wake of the credit crisis and mixed prospects for earnings, many investment banks are expanding their private banking […]

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects’ thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.

The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described this week in the journal Science.

‘A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,’ Killingsworth and Gilbert write. ‘The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.’

Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what isn’t going on around them: contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Indeed, mind-wandering appears to be the human brain’s default mode of operation.

To track this behavior, Killingsworth developed an iPhone web app that contacted 2,250 volunteers at random intervals to ask how happy they were, what they were currently doing, and whether they were thinking about their current activity or about something else that was pleasant, […]

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Was it the evolution of the hand, or of the brain, that enabled prehistoric toolmakers to make the leap from simple flakes of rock to a sophisticated hand axe?

A new study finds that the ability to plan complex tasks was key. The research, published today in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, is the first to use a cyber data glove to precisely measure the hand movements of stone tool making, and compare the results to brain activation.

‘Making a hand axe appears to require higher-order cognition in a part of the brain commonly known as Broca’s area,

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