Cranberry juice is apparently very good at prevent urinary tract infection, particularly in women. There have been a few studies approaching it from different angles but, disappointingly, the studies all use different types of cranberry product, different doses and dosing techniques but despite all this the message seems to be pretty clear. Cranberries prevent urinary tract infections kicking in.

Before we can consider how this occurs its important to define what we are talking about. Urinary tract infections or UTIs are generally caused by a strain of Escherichia coli called Uropathogenic E. coli (UPEC) and it gets there by moving from the colon…ew. For this reason men rarely have to worry about them while they can be a chronic problem for women around the world, however the insertion of urinary catheters is a major risk factor for both genders. Clinical symptoms include burning sensation during urination and cloudy urine but these are only really evident once the bacteria have ascended the urethra into the bladder causing urethritis and cystitis respectively. If you want to feel real pain however let the little bastards work their way into your kidneys where kidney infection (or pyelonephritis) results in the above symptoms plus back pain and fever and the possibility of systemic spread.

{ Disease Prone | Continue reading }

Medieval Venice was a trading empire, one of the busiest ports of the late medieval world. As a hub of commerce waves of plague visited and revisited Venice in 1348, 1462, 1485, 1506, 1575-1577, and 1630-1632 with the last two producing mortality rates around 30% of the population.

As we all know, Venice has a land problem, or rather a lack of land problem. Thriving economies draw large populations and burial space becomes difficult to come by. Adding the plague on top and we have the perfect conditions for the discovery of mass plague burials.

{ Detecting pathogens in medieval Venice | Contagions | Continue reading }

photo { Grave of Peggy Guggenheim and her dogs in Venice | i took the photo | Starting in late December 1937, Peggy Guggenheim and Samuel Beckett had a brief affair. | And: Of everything she did in her life, she said discovering Pollock was “by far the most honourable achievement.” But Pollock was rarely invited to her outrageous bashes “as he drank so much and did unpleasant things on such occasions.” He once urinated into a fireplace. }

{ Sandro Botticelli, Primavera, ca. 1482 | Enlarge/Zoom | There are 500 identified plant species depicted in the painting, with about 190 different flowers. Of the 190 different species of flowers depicted, at least 130 have been specifically named. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

I am doing tolerably well here; I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson), and the children, Milly, Jane and Grundy, go to school and are learning well; the teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday-School, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated; sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Col. Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to was, to call you master. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free-papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department at Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly–and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, esq, Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. (…)

P.S.—Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

{ Letter from Jourdan Anderson to His Former Master, 1865 | Continue reading | PDF }

It has become harder to escape feeling like a tourist. Part of this is because cities are becoming more indistinguishable. In his essay “The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction” philosopher Boris Groys notes how the local distinctions that once made foreign destinations exotic — the architectural or culinary peculiarities, the unique monuments, the cultural idiosyncrasies — have all become exportable signifiers, rapidly transmissible around the globe. This dissemination of local ideas, Groys argues, establishes a worldwide uniform city in places that were once distinct.

{ The New Inquiry | Continue reading }

image { Olivier Laric, Versions, 2010 }

bonus (1:04 mark):

We often remember things by relying on the overall gist of an event—for example, instead of storing every detail about our last birthday, we tend to remember abstract things like “I had a fun party” or “I was in a grumpy mood because I felt old.”

This strategy allows us to remember more things about an event, but there’s one major drawback: by storing memories based on gist, we actually change how we remember the event. This happens because we are biased to remember things that are consistent with our overall summary of the event. So if we remember the birthday party was “super fun” overall, we’ll exaggerate how we remember the details—the average chocolate cake is now “insanely good”, and the 10 friends who were there becomes a “huge crowd.” (…)

As it turns out, gist changes the way we remember an event after just one second.

{ I on Psych | Continue reading }

photo { Noah Kalina }

At the start of the new documentary Orgasm Inc., we meet Charletta, a sixtysomething woman who says she cannot reach orgasm. Well, she takes that back: She can. Just not at the same time as her husband. Not like they do in the movies. “Not like normal women,” she insists. She’s so convinced something’s wrong that she joins a clinical trial for the Orgasmatron – an electrical device implanted in the spine to induce climax.

Produced over 10 years by Vermont filmmaker Liz Canner, Orgasm Inc. is an indictment of the medicalization of female sexuality and the quest to develop and market medical solutions for a class of disorder called female sexual dysfunction, or FSD. The film targets, for instance, an alarming, though ultimately flawed, study cited by drug companies claiming that as many as 43 percent of American women suffer from FSD – a ready-made pharmaceutical market if ever there was one.

Canner uses Charletta and others as evidence of the ridiculous – even dangerous – lengths women have gone to feel “normal.” She argues that FSD doesn’t exist, at least not in the physiological sense, but rather was manufactured by “Big Pharma” to convince us we have a problem that only its pricey drugs and technologies can fix. (…)

Many doctors specializing in female sexuality argue that women are indeed candidates for FSD drugs. “The pharmaceutical industry did not create distressing sexual problems for women,” says Dr. Jan Shifren, director of the Vincent Menopause Program at Massachusetts General Hospital. She says the percentage of women who experience such difficulties hovers around 12. Not Big Pharma’s 43, but not insignificant, either. “That doesn’t mean we need to treat women exclusively with pills,” she adds. “The answer is somewhere in between.”

{ The Boston Globe | Continue reading }

A concept is not at all something that is a given. Moreover, a concept is not the same thing as thought: one can very well think without concepts, and everyone who does not do philosophy still thinks, I believe, but does not think through concepts–if you accept the idea of a concept as the product of an activity or an original creation.


I would say that the concept is a system of singularities appropriated from a thought flow. A philosopher is someone who invents concepts. Is he an intellectual? No, in my opinion. (…)

Philosophy arises with the action that consists of creating concepts. For me, there are as many creations in the invention of a concept as in the creation by a great painter or musician.

{ Gilles Deleuze, Cours de Vincennes on Leibniz | Continue reading }

Science is not always about success. Most research projects are unsuccessful stories producing ambiguous or ‘null’-results that don’t lead to unambiguous conclusion. Nevertheless this ‘failed’ research provides useful and valuable information for fellow scientists. Currently only research projects with positive results and clear conclusions have the chance to get published in scientific journals. Due to these publication practices a lot information is lost for the scientific community and additionally scientists find themselves in the dilemma of having to overinterpret data.

We have set out to change this. With the Journal of Unsolved Questions (JUnQ) we provide a means to gather ‘null’-result research  and open problems.

{ JUnQ.info | Continue reading }

For decades Richard Beckman was among those responsible for turning magazines such as Vanity Fair, GQ, and Vogue into cash machines for Condé Nast, which publishes those titles and a long list of others. (…)

With Prometheus, Beckman is trying to repeat his success within the least glamorous sector of publishing—trade magazines—at a time when print has practically been given up for dead in some quarters. Not only is $70 million of other people’s money at stake; so, it seems, is Beckman’s reputation and the sense that he can be a successful visionary on his own.

After Prometheus bought The Hollywood Reporter, paid circulation of the daily was reported by BPA Worldwide to be just over 12,000. Since relaunching it as a weekly, Beckman says circulation is 72,000, but he refuses to disclose the breakdown of paid vs. free subscriptions. These 72,000 people—the influencers—are pretty much the best 72,000 people any advertiser could dream of reaching, he says. While most of Beckman’s energy has been focused on The Hollywood Reporter thus far, he hopes to apply his approach to Prometheus’s other publications as well. (…)

The New York Post has just printed a story declaring that investors in Beckman’s one-year-old company, Prometheus Global Media, which owns The Hollywood Reporter, Adweek, Billboard, and other trade magazines, are scrambling to get out of their investment. For a man trying to reinvent an Old Media business, the last thing you want to read is that when your company forked over $70 million for eight publications in 2009, it “overpaid.”

{ BusinessWeek | Continue reading }

{ William Anastasi, Nine Polaroid Portraits of a Mirror, 1967 | One more }

“Red, ‘bloodshot’ eyes are prominent in medical diagnoses and in folk culture”, said lead author Dr. Robert R. Provine from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “We wanted to know if they influence the everyday behaviour and attitudes of those who view them, and if they trigger perceptions of attractiveness.”

Research published in Ethology finds that people with bloodshot eyes are considered sadder, unhealthier and less attractive than people whose eye whites are untinted, a cue which is uniquely human. (…)

“Standards of beauty vary across cultures, however, youth and healthiness are always in fashion because they are associated with reproductive fitness,” said Provine. “Traits such as long, lustrous hair and smooth or scar-free skin are cues of youth and offer the beholder a partial record of health.

Now clear eye whites join these traits as a universal standard for the perception of beauty and a cue of health and reproductive fitness. Given this discovery, eye drops that ‘get the red out’ can be considered beauty aids.”

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

A new exciting paper in the forthcoming Journal of Consumer Psychology makes the case that money should buy us happiness, but most people aren’t spending it right. On the edge of psychology and economics, Profs. Daniel Gilbert, Elizabeth Dunn and Timothy Wilson lay out eight principles of spending efficiently, including:

1) Buy more experiences and fewer objects.
2) Don’t worry about insurance.
3) The frequency of happy events matters more than their intensity.


{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

photo { Pieter Hugo }

The process of development is an astounding journey from simplicity to complexity. You start with a single cell, the fertilized egg, and you end up with a complete multicellular organism, made up of tissues that self-organize from many individual cells of different types. The question of how cells know who to be and where to go has many layers to it, starting with the question of how you lay down the basic body plan (head here, tail there, which side is left and where does the heart go?) and continuing on down to microscopic structures, with questions such as how and where to form the small tubes that will allow blood to permeate through apparently solid tissues. This kind of self-organizing behavior is deeply interesting to robotics researchers (who would love to copy it) and tissue engineers (who would like to manipulate it).

A recent paper (Parsa et al. 2011. Uncovering the behaviors of individual cells within a multicellular microvascular community) takes a close look at self-organization on the micro level. (…)

Despite the tremendous variability in the paths followed by individual cells, the authors hoped to find patterns in their data that might provide insight into how the network forms. And luckily, the patterns were there to find. Using a clustering algorithm, they identified groups of cells that behaved similarly to each other with respect to specific sets of behavioral parameters. For example, looking at the pattern of how the area of a cell grows and shrinks allowed the authors to define three major clusters of cells that accounted for about 2/3 of the cells in their study. In the same way, they could define subsets of cells that moved through the gel in similar ways. Although these clusters are rather broadly defined, they seem to be telling us something important about differences between the cells in the different subsets; the subset of cells that spread early (with areas showing a peak at 60 or 120 minutes) are more likely to end up as connection points in the network, while the cells that spread late (300 minutes) tend to end up as branches between the connection points.

{ It takes 30 | Continue reading }

photo { Charlie Engman }

How Your Username May Betray You

By creating a distinctive username—and reusing it on multiple websites—you may be giving online marketers and scammers a simple way to track you. Four researchers from the French National Institute of Computer Science (INRIA) studied over 10 million usernames—collected from public Google profiles, eBay accounts, and several other sources. They found that about half of the usernames used on one site could be linked to another online profile, potentially allowing marketers and scammers to build a more complex picture of the users.

{ Technology Review | Continue reading }

In philosophy of mind, a “cerebroscope” is a fictitious device, a brain–computer interface in today’s language, which reads out the content of somebody’s brain. An autocerebroscope is a device applied to one’s own brain. You would be able to see your own brain in action, observing the fleeting bioelectric activity of all its nerve cells and thus of your own conscious mind. There is a strange loopiness about this idea. The mind observing its own brain gives rise to the very mind observing this brain. How will this weirdness affect the brain? Neuroscience has answered this question more quickly than many thought possible.

But first, a bit of background. Epileptic seizures—hypersynchronized, self-maintained neural discharges that can sometimes engulf the entire brain—are a common neurological disorder. These recurring and episodic brain spasms are kept in check with drugs that dampen excitation and boost inhibition in the underlying circuits. Medication does not always work, however. When a localized abnormality, such as scar tissue or developmental miswiring, is suspected of triggering the seizure, neurosurgeons may remove the offending tissue. (…)

Under Fried’s supervision, a group from my laboratory—Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, Gabriel Kreiman and Leila Reddy—discovered a remarkable set of neurons in the jungles of the medial temporal lobe, the source of many epileptic seizures. This region, deep inside the brain, which includes the hippocampus, turns visual and other sensory percepts into memories.

We enlisted the help of several epileptic patients. While they waited for their seizures, we showed them about 100 pictures of familiar people, animals, landmark buildings and objects. We hoped one or more of the photographs would prompt some of the monitored neurons to fire a burst of action potentials. Most of the time the search turned up empty-handed, although sometimes we would come upon neurons that responded to categories of objects, such as animals, outdoor scenes or faces in general. But a few neurons were much more discerning. One hippocampal neuron responded only to photos of actress Jennifer Aniston but not to pictures of other blonde women or actresses; moreover, the cell fired in response to seven very different pictures of Jennifer Aniston. (…)

Nobody is born with cells selective for Jennifer Aniston. (…) The networks in the medial temporal lobe recognize such repeating patterns and dedicate specific neurons to them. You have concept neurons that encode family members, pets, friends, co-workers, the politicians you watch on TV, your laptop, that painting you adore.

Conversely, you do not have concept cells for things you rarely encounter.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

I was in the middle of teaching the difference between knowledge and belief when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. It was a call from the dean of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas College of Liberal Arts.

The dean informed me that he was very sorry but, barring an unlikely immediate solution to the state’s financial crisis, the university had decided to eliminate the Philosophy Department, which I chair.

In July, I would be given a one-year terminal contract. After that, the university would fire me, along with all of my departmental colleagues, after twenty years of service.

{ The Boston Review | Continue reading }

In a closely-watched oral argument Monday at a federal courthouse in Washington, the core questions of the case read like scripts from a college philosophy exam: are isolated human genes and the subsequent comparisons of their sequences patentable? Can one company own a monopoly on such genes without violating the rights of others? They are multi-billion dollar questions, the judicially-sanctioned answers to which will have enormous ramifications for the worlds of medicine, science, law, business, politics and religion.

Even the name of the case at the U.S. Circuit Court for the Federal Circuit — Association of Molecular Pathology, et al. v United States Patent and Trademark Office, et al — oozes significance. The appeals court judges have been asked to determine whether seven existing patents covering two genes — BRCA1 and BRCA2 (a/k/a “Breast Cancer Susceptibility Genes 1 and 2″) — are valid under federal law or, instead, fall under statutory exceptions that preclude from patentability what the law identifies as ”products of nature.”

In other words, no one can patent a human being. Not yet anyway.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

painting { Jenny Saville, Plan, 1993 }

As of 2009 there were 3,020 museums in China, including 328 private museums (the American Association of Museums estimates 17,500 in the US). One hundred new museums are being added each year. In March the government made entry to museums of modern and contemporary art free. The torrid pace of museum development is part of a national drive to build cultural infrastructure and, as Cai Wu, the minister of culture, put it earlier this year in a published comment, “to establish a batch of world-famous cultural brands.”

“The next ten years should be a golden period for the development of every aspect of cultural industries in China,” said Ye Lang. “The country isn’t just satisfied with the economic achievements it had made,” the Xinhua news agency announced in January. “What it now needs is all-round cultural influence on an international scale.” The government backs these ambitions with a cultural outlay of $4.45bn in 2009, excluding construction costs.

{ The Art Newspaper | Continue reading }

photo { Mike Osborne }

{ Leo Fitzmaurice, Base (Baseball Ball Removed), 2010 }