A Curious Statistical Anomaly

This isn’t really new information for many people but I thought in view of this new YouTube video that others might like to see what goes on in the U.S. Library of Congress to preserve our written history.

I visited the Library of Congress shortly after the Reading Room and other parts of the library were renovated several years ago. It’s a beautiful place. The tour was wonderful. My husband and I were two of four Americans in a tour group of about 20 people. I don’t know if the numbers have changed much over the years. A friend who works there doubts it. It seems many people from other countries put visiting the U.S. Library of Congress on the list of interesting stops when visiting the US. However, American’s visiting Washington, DC don’t seem to have the same list of priorities.

Wonder why? Hope you enjoy a pick at American’s premier library.

I was sent the link to this YouTube video yesterday and just loved the sentiment and the music. Originally published on YouTube on September 17th, 2009 it is a beautiful tribute by Melodysheep (John).

Here’s what he says about this piece:

A musical tribute to two great men of science. Carl Sagan and his cosmologist companion Stephen Hawking present: A Glorious Dawn – Cosmos remixed. Almost all samples and footage taken from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Stephen Hawking’s Universe series.

If you click on “more info” in the upper right-hand area with the links the words are listed so if you have a problem hearing the lyrics you can check the actual wording out.

Enjoy. I did. I miss Sagan’s simple explanations of complex topics and his apparent joy in science.

First off, I found this Breast Cancer Awareness PSA hilarious.  But it’s raising eyebrows everywhere and there are many who feel it is too sexy to be on TV and sends the wrong message.  I want you to watch it and see for yourself:

It’s about time the giggle factor be used to heighten awareness. Let’s face it breasts are used to sell everything from cars to computers to guns to sailboats–if it’s for sale they drape a scantily clad women over it. Sex sells as the saying goes and sex is personified in boobs. I’ve never been able to understand how we manage to get so caught up in two lumps of fatty tissue that also contain milk ducts–but it’s that societal emphasis on the breasts that keep many people from touching their own breast to learn how they feel so they can recognize changes in the tissue. It’s fear of losing a breast that cause some women to ignore lumps and pretend everything is fine when they know deep down it is not fine.

I’m a breast cancer survivor.  My mother had breast cancer and so did my uncle.  My mother is also a survivor, but my uncle died of complications of the treatment for his breast cancer. It’s not just women who get breast cancer but it’s women that the awareness ads and Breasat Cancer Awareness Month focuses on.

Each year 182,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer.  Each year 20,000 women die of breast cancer.  The key is to recognize the symptoms and get treatment early.  For women that means breast self-exams and regular mammograms or MRIs.

Breast cancer in men is something most men don’t want to talk about but you can learn about symptoms, causes, and risks. While breast cancer is rare in men, it does happen so if you’re male and have a lump in your breast area, get it checked out. The survival rates for men are similar to the survival rates in women with breast cancer in the same stage. The problem is that since breast cancer is so rare in men, when it is found it’s usually fairly advanced — when in doubt check it out.

I don’t want anyone to die of breast cancer. It’s treatable when found early and the survival rates are rising each year. Educate yourself about your family history of breast cancer. Be aware of your own body and the changes that occur as you age — what’s natural and what doesn’t seem right. If you have doubts ask your doctor if this is a normal change in tissue or should it be checked out.

Meanwhile, I still find this PSA hilariously funny. I hope it does make young people aware of the danger their boobs could be in if they don’t do self-exams, see their doctor regularly, and have mammograms at the proscribed intervals.

Do you think this type of public service announcement is helpful or harmful? Would you remember it?

Imagine my surprise when I bumped into this item when scanning through some science sites this morning.   I checked out the website at http://beagle.vpro.nl/#/ where you need to click on the language you prefer to read. I watched the trailer promo there and then moved on to the YouTube Beagle Channel. The website will have the 35 episode after they air on Dutch television.

Even though the voyage started on September 13th (that’s at least what I gather from the promo) you can still catch up and follow along as they retrace the five year voyage in one year on the Clipper Stad Amsterdam. It will be very interesting to follow along and see how the past and the present mesh and what that might mean for the future.

Guess I’ll go dust off my copy of Origins of the Species — oh, wait it isn’t dusty, I’ve also got an electronic copy (available from several online sources including Gutenberg. There’s also a Facebook page and Twitter coverage.

Okay, I’ve just got to let off some steam. I’ve been using computers for years. I’ve built them. I’ve coded the programs that run on them. I’ve been technical support. I’ve even taught classes on how to use them and how to use software on them. But it fries my cookies how many people who send email daily can’t seem to grasp the importance of having a good clear subject line.

Today, I got a document I was expecting, from someone working on a project with me. The subject line was so off the wall that I had clicked to move it to my junk folder before I noticed the email address of the sender and managed to pull it back and read it. The attachment was the document I was looking for. A bit less caffeine or attention and it would have hit the junk folder and I’d have deleted it forever. Until now I thought the problems I was having getting information from this person was because my ISP was blocking them or it was getting caught in my firewall. Who knew that this person couldn’t write a subject line along the lines of: Here’s the document on X. Granted I get spam like that but it would have been better than the line that was used.

We have a friend who either doesn’t enter a subject line at all or who says “hello”. Doesn’t this friend realize (even after being told) that I get about 40 similar emails every day from spammers and those my spam filter usually picks up automatically and puts them in the Junk folder. (Yes, I do check my Junk folder for email address of the usual suspects.)

I moderate a list that is supposed to have only two types of emails posted. To stay on the list they must participate and a program checks the posts against membership and the various subject lines, because anything that does not start with one of  the allowable subject lines, doesn’t count for participation. Guess what? Bet you can — many people can’t seem to do it. When I know they’re new to email and the internet, that’s one thing. But those who have been reminded repeatedly still mess up regularly. I won’t even go near the send-the-email-to-the-right-list rant.

What’s the big deal? I mean when you use snail mail you have to put on the receiver’s mailing address. You can’t just say, Sam Somebody, a street with a tree, East Coast. No, you have to be explicit about where you want your mail to go. It’s the same with email. You have to put the correct email address in the TO field. But if you want the person to actually look at it, the email should let them know, sort of, what the email is about. Our dinner plans for Friday. The proofs for the story. The document on X that you asked me for. Something to trigger the “I should read that circuit”.

When I get spam, and I get a lot, I scan for subject lines that might be valid and then check the address of the sender. If the address is valid, I’ll take a peek at the email (it’s already been scrubbed for viruses and such). If the subject lines is a non-starter, I may not even look at the sender.

I’m sure I’m not the only one fed up with the poor use such an important communications tool — the Subject Line. I’m just not sure why people don’t use it correctly to impart information. How can anyone get them to change? Maybe it’s just me. To some degree, I know it is because I’ve got a lot of tasks piled up and I’m still recovering from being ill so I’m low on energy. But, I had to vent.

And, yes. I’m actually interested in knowing if I’m the only person that gets bent out of shape about this topic. Let’s face it, I can’t cure the world’s ills until I manage to become Supreme Mugwump. So, I’ve decided to worry about the little things that just might be fixable. If not fixable, at least I can get it out of my system and move on to more important things, like the fact that no matter how many spoons I buy, there are never enough.

Today I ran across an article on IT World by Jennifer Kavur called “How much are you worth on the black market?” Kavur highlights some of the problems that are involved with Identity Theft and highlights Norton’s 2010 site where you can get your risk evaluated and a dollar amount for how much your identity would be worth and how much someone might pay to buy your identity.

The Norton Online Risk Calculator, unveiled within a microsite to coincide with the launch of Norton 2010, calculates your net worth on the black market by asking a few questions about your personal Internet use.

I decided to check out the risk calculator and went to the site and answered the questions. I’d be for sale for about $31 and my risk is very low. The reasons my risk is low include:

• I’m not famous or infamous
• I’ve got a collection of software that protects my machine from viruses, spyware, and other “bad” stuff.
• I turn off my javascript and only turn it on when I trust the site I go to — if I don’t trust it I live with only having partial access to the material on the site.
• If I think the site might be one set up for phishing, I don’t click on the link.
• I’ve got my browser and email programs to show me the link prior to clicking on it. If the link doesn’t match what I think a link to that site should look like I don’t click it — ever — no matter who sent the link to me.

I try to use safe computing/internet practices, but I’m not perfect. Someday, I’ll goof and get caught and I can only hope that I’ll manage to save my identity from being used maliciously and getting me, my finances, or my reputation in a mess.

While people may not read a paper on Identity Theft, they just might be willing to answer a few questions to see just how much at risk they may be. Then hopefully, they’ll act on that information to protect their data and their computer access. Keep yourself safe. Know the risks.

How do you protect your identity? Do you think you’re safe? What more could be done?

I must admit that I find the Mindset list from Beloit College to be fascinating. Each year I look forward to their list because it does help to explain some of the cultural problems in dealing with young people.

Their overview of the Class of 2013:

Members of the class of 2013 won’t be surprised when they can charge a latté on their cell phone and curl up in the corner to read a textbook on an electronic screen. The migration of once independent media—radio, TV, videos and CDs—to the computer has never amazed them. They have grown up in a politically correct universe in which multi-culturalism has been a given. It is a world organized around globalization, with McDonald’s everywhere on the planet. Carter and Reagan are as distant to them as Truman and Eisenhower were to their parents. Tattoos, once thought “lower class,” are, to them, quite chic. Everybody knows the news before the evening news comes on.

Some of my favorite:

# The Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables.
# They have never used a card catalog to find a book.
# The KGB has never officially existed.
# Text has always been hyper.
# Babies have always had a Social Security Number.
# They have never had to “shake down” an oral thermometer.
# Condoms have always been advertised on television.
# They have always been able to read books on an electronic screen.
# “Womyn” and “waitperson” have always been in the dictionary.
# Members of Congress have always had to keep their checkbooks balanced since the closing of the House Bank.
# There has always been a computer in the Oval Office.
# There has always been blue Jell-O.

Check out the full list at Beloit’s website. It really does explain why young people and us old foggies have problems communicating our basic understanding of the world is different in many cases.

Have you ever sat down to read a new novel and found hours later that it’s after midnight and you need to work tomorrow but what the heck, you need to finish this story? Well, that’s getting lost in a good book. Some people get so wrapped up in the story and the world between the covers of the book that the world in which they live just disappears for a while.

I remember when I was around 11 or so, my mother had to go out and left the pot roast cooking, and I was to check it every now and then and, if I could see the roast, add a bit of water. I’d done that before lots of time with her there and she was only going next door. But I was reading a book about a jungle and the main character was hiding from the bad guys in the fog in the jungle. Mom came home to a house full of smoke and a burnt pot roast. I realized that there was smoke or fog, but it was part of the story, so I just thought it was really real, I could even smell the burning campfire. Mom never let me forget that and I could never make her understand that I didn’t know the pot roast was burning because I was in the jungle a gazillion miles away.

Well, evidently, some scientists wondered if people who read text actually had physical reactions as they read as if they were doing what they were reading about. An article in New Science written by Andrea Thompson called “Why We Get Lost in a Book” explains the research study and some of their results. Evidently, if you read about throwing a ball or moving to a new area, the parts of the brain that would be activated if you were doing it for real also get activated, but to a lesser degree, if you’re reading about it.

Of course the study group was fairly small (28 people) and the reading material as described was bland and boring. I’m surprised they got any results at all, especially since there were 20 women and 8 men and the reading material was from a book called One Boy’s Day. Just the title makes me think of the fascinating activity of watching paint dry — wonder why?

But, at least it’s a beginning. They also found that some people have stronger reactions to reading than others — no surprise there. I might suggest that those with stronger MRI reactions found the material more interesting than those who didn’t, but that’s just me.

Reading is an activity that we all hope people will participate in. In this day and age, everyone needs a basic reading skill level in order to function. For some that’s enough but others spend their free time reading. There are non-readers, people who read for work and necessity and those that also read for pleasure. I often think that reading for pleasure is a nerd activity in a lot of ways, or at least I was always told it was because I preferred a book to sports or watching TV or just hanging out.

Now that we have the first “proof” that reading effect the various centers of the brain as if the activity we’re reading about was happening — what makes some people react more than others. Why do some people go on and become readers and some become extreme-readers and some just give it up and become non-readers (meaning they can read but don’t).

And will definitions of reading change as more and more of our material goes online. I know many people (including teens/students) who read constantly online but seldom crack a book — instead reading books online or on their cell phones or Kindles. For some reason, some researchers don’t consider that reading because it’s not on paper.

To me, reading is reading no matter whether the words are on paper, cereal box, sides of buses and building, street signs, ipods, Kindles, laptop or desktops. However, it’s nice to know that some of us really do get lost in good books — but we usually find our way out with new ideas, new experiences, and new knowledge.