Jog

Holding

Here I am in ED holding. They are filling us up now with patients.

Zoe at Easter

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Originally uploaded by jstonernusa

AIG-maybe they should have been allowed to collapse.

This is why I think the bailout will not work as expected. These guys just don't get it. The average American gets to enjoy a lower living wage than 10 years ago, higher health insurance premiums with shittier coverage while these greedy assholes spend over 400K on spa treatments. This is with the tax payers money mind you. You can't afford to put gas in the car and these jerk-offs are pampering themselves. This is sick.


From CNN.com October 10, 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Days after it got a federal bailout, American International Group Inc. spent $440,000 on a posh California retreat for its executives, complete with spa treatments, banquets and golf outings, according to lawmakers investigating the company's meltdown.


Robert Willumstad, former CEO of AIG, testifies before the U.S. House in Washington on Tuesday.

AIG sent its executives to the coastal St. Regis resort south of Los Angeles, California, even as the company tapped into an $85 billion loan from the government it needed to stave off bankruptcy.

The resort tab included $23,380 worth of spa treatments for AIG employees, according to invoices the resort turned over to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The retreat didn't include anyone from the financial products division that nearly drove AIG under, but lawmakers still were enraged over thousands of dollars spent on outing for executives of AIG's main U.S. life insurance subsidiary.

"Average Americans are suffering economically. They're losing their jobs, their homes and their health insurance," the committee's chairman, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, scolded the company during a lengthy opening statement at a hearing Tuesday.

"Yet less than one week after the taxpayers rescued AIG, company executives could be found wining and dining at one of the most exclusive resorts in the nation."

Former AIG CEO Robert Willumstad, who lost his job a day after the Federal Reserve put up the $85 billion on Sept. 16, said he was not familiar with the conference and would not have gone along with it.

"It seems very inappropriate," Willumstad said in response to questioning from Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland.

"Those executives should be fired," Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama said at a debate with Sen. John McCain on Tuesday, referring to the retreat participants. Obama also said AIG should give the Treasury $440,000 to cover the costs of the retreat.

But Eric Dinallo, superintendent of the New York State Insurance Department, said he could see the value of such a retreat under the circumstances.

"Having been at large global companies and knowing what condition AIG was in ... the absolute worst thing that could have happened" would have been for employees and underwriters in its life insurance subsidiary to flee the company.

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"I do agree there is some profligate spending there, but the concept of bringing all the major employees together ... to ensure that the $85 billion could be as greatly as possible paid back would have been not a crazy corporate decision," Dinallo told the House committee.

The hearing disclosed that AIG executives hid the full range of its risky financial products from auditors as losses mounted, according to documents released by the committee, which is examining the chain of events that forced the government to bail out the conglomerate.

The panel sharply criticized AIG's former top executives, who cast blame on each other for the company's financial woes.

"You have cost my constituents and the taxpayers of this country $85 billion and run into the ground one of the most respected insurance companies in the history of our country," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-New York. "You were just gambling billions, possibly trillions of dollars."

AIG, crippled by huge losses linked to mortgage defaults, was forced last month to accept the $85 billion government loan that gives the U.S. the right to an 80 percent stake in the company.

Oakland...I avoid it like the plague. If I want to get shot I would just go to Iraq.

(09-29) 19:08 PDT -- The Casillas family did everything they could, took every precaution they could think of to keep their boy - their only boy - safe from the violence in their Oakland neighborhood.

IMAGES


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CHIP JOHNSON

Readers add their Dellums gripes 09.26.08
It's time for Oakland to give Dellums the boot 09.22.08
Oakland police measure needs good leadership 09.19.08
More Chip Johnson »
But it wasn't enough.

The violence that Leopoldo and Linda Casillas recognized, and feared, came without rhyme or reason or warning and snatched the very life of Marco Casillas, a 19-year old man without gang affiliations, a drug problem or a criminal record.

In Oakland's gang-infested neighborhoods, simply being identified as a male teenager or young adult can get you killed.

By all accounts, including the findings of Oakland detectives investigating his death, Casillas had done nothing to evoke such violence. He didn't run with a gang or affiliate himself with any group, and took great pride in just being himself, family members said.

That provides little comfort in the Casillas home in the Fruitvale neighborhood, where the young man's parents sat on the couch in their home Monday and sorted through memories and emotions and prepared to bury their youngest child.

According to police, Marco Casillas was walking a dog with his 19-year-old girlfriend Sept. 20 in the 4000 block of Santa Rita Street when someone opened fire on them about 10:45 p.m.

The girl's mother knew something was terribly wrong when the dog came back to the house alone with blood on its fur. Casillas and his girlfriend were found lying on the sidewalk.

He died at Highland Hospital within half an hour of the assault, becoming the city's 103rd homicide victim this year. His girlfriend, whose name was withheld, was seriously wounded but survived.

In the part of Oakland where they live, the Casillas family has watched with great concern as violence has ratcheted up over the years. They were aware of the dangers and took special precautions with their son because of it.

For years, right up until his death, Marco's parents had gone the extra mile to ensure their son's future.

His father walked with him to the Fruitvale BART station every day to see him off to Heald Technical College in Hayward and picked him up when he came home.

Leopoldo Casillas waited for his son at recreational activities - they even went to the barber shop together. He drove Marco to work at a pizza shop in Alameda and picked him up when his shift was over.

On the night he was shot, Linda Casillas said her son was planning to have dinner at his girlfriend's house and watch a movie. He assured her he was not going out.

His father speaks broken English, but it's difficult for him to speak of his son's death in any language.

"Mal," the Spanish word for bad, was about all he could get out Monday.

He's heartbroken, but remaining strong for his wife and daughters. Whenever Leopoldo Casillas began to talk about his son, his voice trailed off to silence, his head fell and he stared straight ahead - his wife and daughters, sensing his grief, quietly cried for him.

"They were friends," said Rebecca Navarro said of her father and step-brother.

Navarro contacted the offices of Mayor Ron Dellums and Ignacio De La Fuente, the Oakland City Council member who represents the Fruitvale district, to tell them how the horrific violence in the city they are supposed to lead had just claimed one of the good guys - her younger brother.

She never heard back from anyone.

Last year, her mother called 911 when she saw a man on a bike holding a gun to the head of another man right outside her home. A dispatcher asked if she was mistaken. "Are they friends?" "Are they just playing?"

Suffice it to say the family doesn't have a lot of confidence in the ability of the Oakland Police Department to maintain neighborhood safety and the shooting death of their son less than 10 blocks from home only served to confirm it.

Their son had big plans and big dreams but Oakland's most lawless neighborhoods are places where dreams and dreamers are all too often left to die.

Marco planned to graduate from the technical college in December, find a full-time job and help his mom and dad finally move out of the crime-ridden neighborhood.

He and his mother, a janitor for the UC system, planned to pool their finances and move the family out of Oakland in January. They were looking in Livermore. Leopoldo Casillas has two surgically repaired shoulders and no longer works.

Mother and son planned to buy a car that would get them both to a BART station - and into the central cities because as a new driver he wasn't comfortable traveling on Interstates 580 or 880.

The family is still looking to leave Oakland behind them, but the tragedy has jolted them from such daily tasks.

"We went looking for houses in Castro Valley on Sunday, but I can't find my balance right now," said Marco's mother.

funny SNL Video Sarah Palin

Jesus in the Ultrasound? Is that what the amniotic sac is called these days?

Woman claims face of Jesus can be seen leaning next to the baby in 3D ultrasound picture. The couple claims they are not religious fanatics. I see a baby with its hand curled. Just because something looks like one thing doesn't mean it is. Funny Jesus would pick the white pop culture version of himself (even though he supposedly lived in the middle east).

NICO

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Originally uploaded by jstonernusa

Running the Sahara

Check out the trailer for this new Documentary coming out about three runners (a Canadian, an American, and a Taiwanese) that ran across the Sahara desert. The doctor that is shown on the trailer is Jeff Peterson from Stanford who I work with quite often. Pretty cool accomplishment for these guys to say the least. By the way Ray, the Canadian is married to a Newfoundlander. You are never more than 6 degrees of separation from a Newfoundlander. Check it out.

The Strangers

Some believe the new movie The Strangers is inspired by these true events. Either way this is bone chilling. Maybe bringing a gun (something 380 caliber and up) with you when you go to a cabin in a remote area is not a bad idea. The following happened 140 miles north of Sacramento 20 years ago and the case is cold with no suspects. Also a very similar incident occurred 20 years later in Idaho. In both cases the toddlers were spared for some unknown reason.

(06-10) 04:00 PDT Keddie, Plumas County -- It had been more than a year since she ran screaming from the inexplicable, dark things she saw there, yet Ashley Conte still shivered as she stood in front of the battered little house.
"Anyone with any brains will never set foot in there again," she said, mustering all the conviction her 16 years would allow. "You can never change what happened inside. The house should just be ripped down."
She wrenched her gaze from the twilight shadows creeping onto the boarded up windows. "It's haunted," she whispered. "Everybody knows it. Rip it down."
Whether the terrors Ashley and others say they saw inside Cabin #28 of the Keddie Resort -- chairs and bodies floating mid-air, carvings disappearing from walls -- were figments or genuine spooks is up for grabs. But what took place 20 years ago this spring is not.
Back then, a mother, her two children and a teenage friend were butchered here in a one-night frenzy so off-the-charts savage that to this day cops don't like to step inside the house.
The murders ruined this northern Sierra mountain resort, a 3,205-foot- elevation enclave so popular people used to drive hundreds of miles just to eat at its log-walled lodge. In short order, appalled tourists began staying away in droves. And even now -- spirits or not -- the specter of the killings continues to keep this pretty resort empty.
"It's spooky, a real ghost town," said Scott Lawson, director of the Plumas County Museum in nearby Quincy. "Nobody goes there, really. And I doubt anyone will until they find out who killed all those people.
"But that," he said, eyes going wide, "is the whodunnit of the century around here."
Twenty years ago, Keddie Resort was in the latest of many heydays dating from its founding in 1910, a placid getaway where you could rent one of 33 rustic cabins or a room in the hand-crafted, two-story lodge. The streams had great trout fishing, and pine-studded trails beckoned all around.
The Keddie Lodge restaurant was packed most every night with customers who came from as far as San Francisco to dine on barbecued bear ribs, sherry- basted racoon steaks -- all shot locally -- and fine wines.
"It was always a special, pretty place to go, a real draw," said Lawson.
Then came April 11, 1981.
Sometime between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. that day, 15-year-old John Sharp and his buddy, 17-year-old Dana Wingate, were seen hitchhiking from Quincy to Keddie Cabin #28. John had been living there for months with his 36-year-old mother, Glenna Sharp -- and once the two boys walked through the door, police say, the horror began.
A pair of killers either went in with the boys or were waiting with Glenna Sharp, and they tied up all three with duct tape and electrical wire. Soon after, John's 13-year-old sister, Tina, showed up and was bound, too.
What followed was a night of torture.
By the time the killers left 10 hours later, they had used steak knives and a claw hammer to such effect that the victims were barely recognizable.
"Whoever did this stabbed the victims so violently they bent one knife totally double from the force," said Sheriff's Patrol Commander Rod DeCrona. "They stabbed and pounded on everything in sight -- the walls, the people, the furniture. Everything."
He shuddered at the memory of first walking into the murder scene. "There was blood sprayed absolutely everywhere," DeCrona said. "You knew right away we were involved with a psychopath."
The carnage was only discovered the next morning by John's 14-year-old sister, Sheila, who had been at a sleepover next door. To the enduring surprise of police, nobody outside the charnel house had heard a thing.
And the mystery only deepened: Not only was the body of Tina, most likely killed at the scene, missing -- but three near-toddlers sleeping in one bedroom had been amazingly left untouched.
Tina's severed head was found three years later by a bottle-digger, 50 miles downhill at a waterfall. One of the children in the bedroom -- two were Sharp brothers, the other a play-pal -- remembered enough so police could make a sketch of two killers, but the boy was so young the picture's accuracy is considered questionable.
Thousands of leads and suspects have been picked over since then by deputies, the FBI and state investigators -- but nothing panned out, DeCrona said. A timeline of the case dominates three walls of the sheriff's office, tips still come in, and DNA samples were sent to the state crime lab just two months ago, but nobody's holding his breath.
"Usually in a crime like this, the killers get sloppy and leave more behind, " said DeCrona, sighing. "I wish it were that simple. We have no motive, no suspects."
Dana's father, Gary Wingate, thinks there were so many police agencies involved that they "stumbled over each other and fouled up the case." But he tries not to stew about it. He never even calls the Sharp family -- who declined requests through intermediaries to be interviewed.
"Nobody has the faintest idea who killed my son, so I long ago had to let this thing go or it would eat me alive," said Wingate, who lives near Quincy. "I don't think about it, I don't go to that ghost town and I have no idea if ghosts exist there.
"But I do know this. There is evil in this world, and evil was in that house that night."
Ashley Conte and her neighbors think the evil is still there.
People began to shun the resort after the killings, and within a year it was empty. The owners put Keddie up for sale in 1984 for $1.8 million -- and nobody bit.
Over the next decade or so, it rotted into a refuge for squatters and hobos,
and the county condemned most of the buildings. But in the past few years longtime owner Gary Mollath has gone on a furious restoration campaign that has the old resort looking pretty much as it did in 1981 -- sans people.
He's rented out a couple of the best cabins, and says he hopes to rehab the rest enough to reopen in a year.
But first there is Cabin #28 -- dubbed "The Murder House" by locals -- to contend with.
The condemned building's yellow-and-white paint is flaking, doors are nailed shut and most windows are covered with plywood. Bums and kids -- including Ashley, Mollath's stepdaughter -- have often broken in for kicks, but by several accounts they all flee in a hurry.
Ashley said that aside from seeing murky forms and rocking chairs in the house, she once saw a pitchfork and the word "no" carved in the kitchen door. "When we went back a half-hour later, the words and the pitchfork were gone," she said.
Other locals, including 22-year-old Forest Jones, said they heard moans, doors slamming and footsteps when the house was obviously deserted.
Others don't buy all the spooky stuff.
"I hate it when people call this a ghost town," said Lynn Seavy, 46, who lives next to The Murder House. "Keddie is a nice, peaceful place where you can hear the wind in the trees. I wish people would get over what happened."
Mollath's solution is just as his step-daughter suggests.
"That house has been such a negative point for so long that I intend to tear it down and put a park there," Mollath said. "Then I'm going to open this place back up and cater to groups -- with people traveling closer to home now, I think the timing will be just right.
"I want people to come and say, 'Wow!' when we start up again. Not be scared."
Before he flings open the gates, though, he'd better do more than just raze The Murder House, maintains Annette Martin, a psychic in Campbell who advises police throughout the nation on murder cases.
The trouble in Keddie, she said, is that because the mayhem was so abhorrent, the victims's ghosts are probably in shock and don't know they are dead. So even if their house is demolished, "they'll still be there, hanging out."
"We often find this type of poltergeist activity in cases like this, especially if people were chopped up," said Martin. "My guess is that the 'no' the girl saw was the victims still trying to say 'no' to their killers. There is unresolved business there."
The only way to cleanse the area of spirits, she said, is to have someone spiritual perform a healing ceremony after the house is gone.
"Otherwise, whatever is in its place will be haunted," Martin said. "And it will stay haunted."

Laying down floor

Baby & Pregnancy Countdown Ticker

I am a Apple freak

Yeah!!! Now if I wanted to I could move back to Canada and not pine away for my iPhone. Seriously I could not live without this thing. It is the coolest easiest to use phone on the market.

As a side note, once you buy a macbook, iMac, etc (I have both) and you figure out MAC OS X, you will be amazed at the genius behind it all and what it can do. Computers running on windows will never satisfy you again. If you are as obsessed as me you will even buy AAPL stock!

Wolf Hunt

Alaska allows this brutal practice of killing wolves and in a recent move of Bushness, the Federal government took wolves off the endangered species list just recently. This will put the species in great risk in all states as some governors have publicly said they will not stop until the wolf is eradicated. It is hard to argue with that kind of unreason.

One must pause and give these people the benefit of the doubt I guess since a good portion of people wouldn't be able to tell you what DNA is I guess it would be a leap to expect them to understand the concept of an ecosystem. Wolves strengthen the herd, by killing the sick and weak.

Hunters tend to complain when hunting actually involves hunting and the animals don't just walk up to them with a "shoot me" sign posted around their necks. The fact is global warming in many parts of the US especially around Yellowstone has led to poor grass conditions and thus a poor food source for Elk. Rather than acknowledge this however many hunters who don't want to feel guilty about driving a hummer blame Hollywoods biggest villian the wolf instead.

Amazing video

Minds of their Own
Animals are smarter than you think.
FROM NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE PUBLISHED MARCH 2008

By Virginia Morell
In 1977 Irene Pepperberg, a recent graduate of Harvard University, did something very bold. At a time when animals still were considered automatons, she set out to find what was on another creature's mind by talking to it. She brought a one-year-old African gray parrot she named Alex into her lab to teach him to reproduce the sounds of the English language. "I thought if he learned to communicate, I could ask him questions about how he sees the world."

When Pepperberg began her dialogue with Alex, who died last September at the age of 31, many scientists believed animals were incapable of any thought. They were simply machines, robots programmed to react to stimuli but lacking the ability to think or feel. Any pet owner would disagree. We see the love in our dogs' eyes and know that, of course, Spot has thoughts and emotions. But such claims remain highly controversial. Gut instinct is not science, and it is all too easy to project human thoughts and feelings onto another creature. How, then, does a scientist prove that an animal is capable of thinking—that it is able to acquire information about the world and act on it?

"That's why I started my studies with Alex," Pepperberg said. They were seated—she at her desk, he on top of his cage—in her lab, a windowless room about the size of a boxcar, at Brandeis University. Newspapers lined the floor; baskets of bright toys were stacked on the shelves. They were clearly a team—and because of their work, the notion that animals can think is no longer so fanciful.

Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others' motives, imitating others, and being creative. Bit by bit, in ingenious experiments, researchers have documented these talents in other species, gradually chipping away at what we thought made human beings distinctive while offering a glimpse of where our own abilities came from. Scrub jays know that other jays are thieves and that stashed food can spoil; sheep can recognize faces; chimpanzees use a variety of tools to probe termite mounds and even use weapons to hunt small mammals; dolphins can imitate human postures; the archerfish, which stuns insects with a sudden blast of water, can learn how to aim its squirt simply by watching an experienced fish perform the task. And Alex the parrot turned out to be a surprisingly good talker.

Thirty years after the Alex studies began, Pepperberg and a changing collection of assistants were still giving him English lessons. The humans, along with two younger parrots, also served as Alex's flock, providing the social input all parrots crave. Like any flock, this one—as small as it was—had its share of drama. Alex dominated his fellow parrots, acted huffy at times around Pepperberg, tolerated the other female humans, and fell to pieces over a male assistant who dropped by for a visit. ("If you were a man," Pepperberg said, after noting Alex's aloofness toward me, "he'd be on your shoulder in a second, barfing cashews in your ear.")

Pepperberg bought Alex in a Chicago pet store. She let the store's assistant pick him out because she didn't want other scientists saying later that she'd deliberately chosen an especially smart bird for her work. Given that Alex's brain was the size of a shelled walnut, most researchers thought Pepperberg's interspecies communication study would be futile.

"Some people actually called me crazy for trying this," she said. "Scientists thought that chimpanzees were better subjects, although, of course, chimps can't speak."

Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas have been taught to use sign language and symbols to communicate with us, often with impressive results. The bonobo Kanzi, for instance, carries his symbol-communication board with him so he can "talk" to his human researchers, and he has invented combinations of symbols to express his thoughts. Nevertheless, this is not the same thing as having an animal look up at you, open his mouth, and speak.

Pepperberg walked to the back of the room, where Alex sat on top of his cage preening his pearl gray feathers. He stopped at her approach and opened his beak.

"Want grape," Alex said.

"He hasn't had his breakfast yet," Pepperberg explained, "so he's a little put out."

Alex returned to preening, while an assistant prepared a bowl of grapes, green beans, apple and banana slices, and corn on the cob.

Under Pepperberg's patient tutelage, Alex learned how to use his vocal tract to imitate almost one hundred English words, including the sounds for all of these foods, although he calls an apple a "banerry."

"Apples taste a little bit like bananas to him, and they look a little bit like cherries, so Alex made up that word for them," Pepperberg said.

Alex could count to six and was learning the sounds for seven and eight.

"I'm sure he already knows both numbers," Pepperberg said. "He'll probably be able to count to ten, but he's still learning to say the words. It takes far more time to teach him certain sounds than I ever imagined."

After breakfast, Alex preened again, keeping an eye on the flock. Every so often, he leaned forward and opened his beak: "Ssse ... won."

"That's good, Alex," Pepperberg said. "Seven. The number is seven."

"Ssse ... won! Se ... won!"

"He's practicing," she explained. "That's how he learns. He's thinking about how to say that word, how to use his vocal tract to make the correct sound."

It sounded a bit mad, the idea of a bird having lessons to practice, and willingly doing it. But after listening to and watching Alex, it was difficult to argue with Pepperberg's explanation for his behaviors. She wasn't handing him treats for the repetitious work or rapping him on the claws to make him say the sounds.

"He has to hear the words over and over before he can correctly imitate them," Pepperberg said, after pronouncing "seven" for Alex a good dozen times in a row. "I'm not trying to see if Alex can learn a human language," she added. "That's never been the point. My plan always was to use his imitative skills to get a better understanding of avian cognition."

In other words, because Alex was able to produce a close approximation of the sounds of some English words, Pepperberg could ask him questions about a bird's basic understanding of the world. She couldn't ask him what he was thinking about, but she could ask him about his knowledge of numbers, shapes, and colors. To demonstrate, Pepperberg carried Alex on her arm to a tall wooden perch in the middle of the room. She then retrieved a green key and a small green cup from a basket on a shelf. She held up the two items to Alex's eye.

"What's same?" she asked.

Without hesitation, Alex's beak opened: "Co-lor."

"What's different?" Pepperberg asked.

"Shape," Alex said. His voice had the digitized sound of a cartoon character. Since parrots lack lips (another reason it was difficult for Alex to pronounce some sounds, such as ba), the words seemed to come from the air around him, as if a ventriloquist were speaking. But the words—and what can only be called the thoughts—were entirely his.

For the next 20 minutes, Alex ran through his tests, distinguishing colors, shapes, sizes, and materials (wool versus wood versus metal). He did some simple arithmetic, such as counting the yellow toy blocks among a pile of mixed hues.

And, then, as if to offer final proof of the mind inside his bird's brain, Alex spoke up. "Talk clearly!" he commanded, when one of the younger birds Pepperberg was also teaching mispronounced the word green. "Talk clearly!"

"Don't be a smart aleck," Pepperberg said, shaking her head at him. "He knows all this, and he gets bored, so he interrupts the others, or he gives the wrong answer just to be obstinate. At this stage, he's like a teenage son; he's moody, and I'm never sure what he'll do."

"Wanna go tree," Alex said in a tiny voice.

Alex had lived his entire life in captivity, but he knew that beyond the lab's door, there was a hallway and a tall window framing a leafy elm tree. He liked to see the tree, so Pepperberg put her hand out for him to climb aboard. She walked him down the hall into the tree's green light.

"Good boy! Good birdie," Alex said, bobbing on her hand.

"Yes, you're a good boy. You're a good birdie." And she kissed his feathered head.

He was a good birdie until the end, and Pepperberg was happy to report that when he died he had finally mastered "seven."

Many of Alex's cognitive skills, such as his ability to understand the concepts of same and different, are generally ascribed only to higher mammals, particularly primates. But parrots, like great apes (and humans), live a long time in complex societies. And like primates, these birds must keep track of the dynamics of changing relationships and environments.

"They need to be able to distinguish colors to know when a fruit is ripe or unripe," Pepperberg noted. "They need to categorize things—what's edible, what isn't—and to know the shapes of predators. And it helps to have a concept of numbers if you need to keep track of your flock, and to know who's single and who's paired up. For a long-lived bird, you can't do all of this with instinct; cognition must be involved."

Being able mentally to divide the world into simple abstract categories would seem a valuable skill for many organisms. Is that ability, then, part of the evolutionary drive that led to human intelligence?

Charles Darwin, who attempted to explain how human intelligence developed, extended his theory of evolution to the human brain: Like the rest of our physiology, intelligence must have evolved from simpler organisms, since all animals face the same general challenges of life. They need to find mates, food, and a path through the woods, sea, or sky—tasks that Darwin argued require problem-solving and categorizing abilities. Indeed, Darwin went so far as to suggest that earthworms are cognitive beings because, based on his close observations, they have to make judgments about the kinds of leafy matter they use to block their tunnels. He hadn't expected to find thinking invertebrates and remarked that the hint of earthworm intelligence "has surprised me more than anything else in regard to worms."

To Darwin, the earthworm discovery demonstrated that degrees of intelligence could be found throughout the animal kingdom. But the Darwinian approach to animal intelligence was cast aside in the early 20th century, when researchers decided that field observations were simply "anecdotes," usually tainted by anthropomorphism. In an effort to be more rigorous, many embraced behaviorism, which regarded animals as little more than machines, and focused their studies on the laboratory white rat—since one "machine" would behave like any other.

But if animals are simply machines, how can the appearance of human intelligence be explained? Without Darwin's evolutionary perspective, the greater cognitive skills of people did not make sense biologically. Slowly the pendulum has swung away from the animal-as-machine model and back toward Darwin. A whole range of animal studies now suggest that the roots of cognition are deep, widespread, and highly malleable.

Just how easily new mental skills can evolve is perhaps best illustrated by dogs. Most owners talk to their dogs and expect them to understand. But this canine talent wasn't fully appreciated until a border collie named Rico appeared on a German TV game show in 2001. Rico knew the names of some 200 toys and acquired the names of new ones with ease.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig heard about Rico and arranged a meeting with him and his owners. That led to a scientific report revealing Rico's uncanny language ability: He could learn and remember words as quickly as a toddler. Other scientists had shown that two-year-old children—who acquire around ten new words a day—have an innate set of principles that guides this task. The ability is seen as one of the key building blocks in language acquisition. The Max Planck scientists suspect that the same principles guide Rico's word learning, and that the technique he uses for learning words is identical to that of humans.

To find more examples, the scientists read all the letters from hundreds of people claiming that their dogs had Rico's talent. In fact, only two—both border collies—had comparable skills. One of them—the researchers call her Betsy—has a vocabulary of more than 300 words.

"Even our closest relatives, the great apes, can't do what Betsy can do—hear a word only once or twice and know that the acoustic pattern stands for something," said Juliane Kaminski, a cognitive psychologist who worked with Rico and is now studying Betsy. She and her colleague Sebastian Tempelmann had come to Betsy's home in Vienna to give her a fresh battery of tests. Kaminski petted Betsy, while Tempelmann set up a video camera.

"Dogs' understanding of human forms of communication is something new that has evolved," Kaminski said, "something that's developed in them because of their long association with humans." Although Kaminski has not yet tested wolves, she doubts they have this language skill. "Maybe these collies are especially good at it because they're working dogs and highly motivated, and in their traditional herding jobs, they must listen very closely to their owners."

Scientists think that dogs were domesticated about 15,000 years ago, a relatively short time in which to evolve language skills. But how similar are these skills to those of humans? For abstract thinking, we employ symbols, letting one thing stand for another. Kaminski and Tempelmann were testing whether dogs can do this too.

Betsy's owner—whose pseudonym is Schaefer—summoned Betsy, who obediently stretched out at Schaefer's feet, eyes fixed on her face. Whenever Schaefer spoke, Betsy attentively cocked her head from side to side.

Kaminski handed Schaefer a stack of color photographs and asked her to choose one. Each image depicted a dog's toy against a white background—toys Betsy had never seen before. They weren't actual toys; they were only images of toys. Could Betsy connect a two-dimensional picture to a three-dimensional object?

Schaefer held up a picture of a fuzzy, rainbow-colored Frisbee and urged Betsy to find it. Betsy studied the photograph and Schaefer's face, then ran into the kitchen, where the Frisbee was placed among three other toys and photographs of each toy. Betsy brought either the Frisbee or the photograph of the Frisbee to Schaefer every time.

"It wouldn't have been wrong if she'd just brought the photograph," Kaminski said. "But I think Betsy can use a picture, without a name, to find an object. Still, it will take many more tests to prove this."

Even then, Kaminski is unsure that other scientists will ever accept her discovery because Betsy's abstract skill, as minor as it may seem to us, may tread all too closely to human thinking.

Still, we remain the inventive species. No other animal has built skyscrapers, written sonnets, or made a computer. Yet animal researchers say that creativity, like other forms of intelligence, did not simply spring from nothingness. It, too, has evolved.

"People were surprised to discover that chimpanzees make tools," said Alex Kacelnik, a behavioral ecologist at Oxford University, referring to the straws and sticks chimpanzees shape to pull termites from their nests. "But people also thought, 'Well, they share our ancestry—of course they're smart.' Now we're finding these kinds of exceptional behaviors in some species of birds. But we don't have a recently shared ancestry with birds. Their evolutionary history is very different; our last common ancestor with all birds was a reptile that lived over 300 million years ago.

"This is not trivial," Kacelnik continued. "It means that evolution can invent similar forms of advanced intelligence more than once—that it's not something reserved only for primates or mammals."

Kacelnik and his colleagues are studying one of these smart species, the New Caledonian crow, which lives in the forests of that Pacific island. New Caledonian crows are among the most skilled of tool-making and tool-using birds, forming probes and hooks from sticks and leaf stems to poke into the crowns of the palm trees, where fat grubs hide. Since these birds, like chimpanzees, make and use tools, researchers can look for similarities in the evolutionary processes that shaped their brains. Something about the environments of both species favored the evolution of tool-making neural powers.

But is their use of tools rigid and limited, or can they be inventive? Do they have what researchers call mental flexibility? Chimpanzees certainly do. In the wild, a chimpanzee may use four sticks of different sizes to extract the honey from a bee's nest. And in captivity, they can figure out how to position several boxes so they can retrieve a banana hanging from a rope.

Answering that question for New Caledonian crows—extremely shy birds—wasn't easy. Even after years of observing them in the wild, researchers couldn't determine if the birds' ability was innate, or if they learned to make and use their tools by watching one another. If it was a genetically inherited skill, could they, like the chimps, use their talent in different, creative ways?

To find out, Kacelnik and his students brought 23 crows of varying ages (all but one caught in the wild) to the aviary in his Oxford lab and let them mate. Four hatchlings were raised in captivity, and all were carefully kept away from the adults, so they had no opportunity to be taught about tools. Yet soon after they fledged, all picked up sticks to probe busily into cracks and shaped different materials into tools. "So we know that at least the bases of tool use are inherited," Kacelnik said. "And now the question is, what else can they do with tools?"

Plenty. In his office, Kacelnik played a video of a test he'd done with one of the wild-caught crows, Betty, who had died recently from an infection. In the film, Betty flies into a room. She's a glossy-black bird with a crow's bright, inquisitive eyes, and she immediately spies the test before her: a glass tube with a tiny basket lodged in its center. The basket holds a bit of meat. The scientists had placed two pieces of wire in the room. One was bent into a hook, the other was straight. They figured Betty would choose the hook to lift the basket by its handle.

But experiments don't always go according to plan. Another crow had stolen the hook before Betty could find it. Betty is undeterred. She looks at the meat in the basket, then spots the straight piece of wire. She picks it up with her beak, pushes one end into a crack in the floor, and uses her beak to bend the other end into a hook. Thus armed, she lifts the basket out of the tube.

"This was the first time Betty had ever seen a piece of wire like this," Kacelnik said. "But she knew she could use it to make a hook and exactly where she needed to bend it to make the size she needed."

They gave Betty other tests, each requiring a slightly different solution, such as making a hook out of a flat piece of aluminum rather than a wire. Each time, Betty invented a new tool and solved the problem. "It means she had a mental representation of what it was she wanted to make. Now that," Kacelnik said, "is a major kind of cognitive sophistication."

This is the larger lesson of animal cognition research: It humbles us. We are not alone in our ability to invent or plan or to contemplate ourselves—or even to plot and lie.

Deceptive acts require a complicated form of thinking, since you must be able to attribute intentions to the other person and predict that person's behavior. One school of thought argues that human intelligence evolved partly because of the pressure of living in a complex society of calculating beings. Chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, and bonobos share this capacity with us. In the wild, primatologists have seen apes hide food from the alpha male or have sex behind his back.

Birds, too, can cheat. Laboratory studies show that western scrub jays can know another bird's intentions and act on that knowledge. A jay that has stolen food itself, for example, knows that if another jay watches it hide a nut, there's a chance the nut will be stolen. So the first jay will return to move the nut when the other jay is gone.

"It's some of the best evidence so far of experience projection in another species," said Nicky Clayton in her aviary lab at Cambridge University. "I would describe it as, 'I know that you know where I have hidden my stash of food, and if I were in your shoes I'd steal it, so I'm going to move my stash to a place you don't know about.' "

This study, by Clayton and her colleague Nathan Emery, is the first to show the kind of ecological pressures, such as the need to hide food for winter use, that would lead to the evolution of such mental abilities. Most provocatively, her research demonstrates that some birds possess what is often considered another uniquely human skill: the ability to recall a specific past event. Scrub jays, for example, seem to know how long ago they cached a particular kind of food, and they manage to retrieve it before it spoils.

Human cognitive psychologists call this kind of memory "episodic memory" and argue that it can exist only in a species that can mentally travel back in time. Despite Clayton's studies, some refuse to concede this ability to the jays. "Animals are stuck in time," explained Sara Shettleworth, a comparative psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, meaning that they don't distinguish among past, present, and future the way humans do. Since animals lack language, she said, they probably also lack "the extra layer of imagination and explanation" that provides the running mental narrative accompanying our actions.

Such skepticism is a challenge for Clayton. "We have good evidence that the jays remember the what, where, and when of specific caching events, which is the original definition of episodic memory. But now the goalposts have moved." It's a common complaint among animal researchers. Whenever they find a mental skill in a species that is reminiscent of a special human ability, the human cognition scientists change the definition. But the animal researchers may underestimate their power—it is their discoveries that compel the human side to shore up the divide.

"Sometimes the human cognitive psychologists can be so fixed on their definitions that they forget how fabulous these animal discoveries are," said Clive Wynne of the University of Florida, who has studied cognition in pigeons and marsupials. "We're glimpsing intelligence throughout the animal kingdom, which is what we should expect. It's a bush, not a single-trunk tree with a line leading only to us."

Some of the branches on that bush have led to such degrees of intelligence that we should blush for ever having thought any animal a mere machine.

In the late 1960s a cognitive psychologist named Louis Herman began investigating the cognitive abilities of bottlenose dolphins. Like humans, dolphins are highly social and cosmopolitan, living in subpolar to tropical environments worldwide; they're highly vocal; and they have special sensory skills, such as echolocation. By the 1980s Herman's cognitive studies were focused on a group of four young dolphins—Akeakamai, Phoenix, Elele, and Hiapo—at the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Hawaii. The dolphins were curious and playful, and they transferred their sociability to Herman and his students.

"In our work with the dolphins, we had a guiding philosophy," Herman says, "that we could bring out the full flower of their intellect, just as educators try to bring out the full potential of a human child. Dolphins have these big, highly complex brains. My thought was, 'OK, so you have this pretty brain. Let's see what you can do with it.' "

To communicate with the dolphins, Herman and his team invented a hand- and arm-signal language, complete with a simple grammar. For instance, a pumping motion of the closed fists meant "hoop," and both arms extended overhead (as in jumping jacks) meant "ball." A "come here" gesture with a single arm told them to "fetch." Responding to the request "hoop, ball, fetch," Akeakamai would push the ball to the hoop. But if the word order was changed to "ball, hoop, fetch," she would carry the hoop to the ball. Over time she could interpret more grammatically complex requests, such as "right, basket, left, Frisbee, in," asking that she put the Frisbee on her left in the basket on her right. Reversing "left" and "right" in the instruction would reverse Akeakamai's actions. Akeakamai could complete such requests the first time they were made, showing a deep understanding of the grammar of the language.

"They're a very vocal species," Herman adds. "Our studies showed that they could imitate arbitrary sounds that we broadcast into their tank, an ability that may be tied to their own need to communicate. I'm not saying they have a dolphin language. But they are capable of understanding the novel instructions that we convey to them in a tutored language; their brains have that ability.

"There are many things they could do that people have always doubted about animals. For example, they correctly interpreted, on the very first occasion, gestured instructions given by a person displayed on a TV screen behind an underwater window. They recognized that television images were representations of the real world that could be acted on in the same way as in the real world."

They readily imitated motor behaviors of their instructors too. If a trainer bent backward and lifted a leg, dolphin would turn on its back and lift its tail in the air. Although imitation was once regarded as a simpleminded skill, in recent years cognitive scientists have revealed that it's extremely difficult, requiring the imitator to form a mental image of the other person's body and pose, then adjust his own body parts into the same position—actions that imply an awareness of one's self.

"Here's Elele," Herman says, showing a film of her following a trainer's directions. "Surfboard, dorsal fin, touch." Instantly Elele swam to the board and, leaning to one side, gently laid her dorsal fin on it, an untrained behavior. The trainer stretched her arms straight up, signaling "Hooray!" and Elele leaped into the air, squeaking and clicking with delight.

"Elele just loved to be right," Herman said. "And she loved inventing things. We made up a sign for 'create,' which asked a dolphin to create its own behavior."

Dolphins often synchronize their movements in the wild, such as leaping and diving side by side, but scientists don't know what signal they use to stay so tightly coordinated. Herman thought he might be able to tease out the technique with his pupils. In the film, Akeakamai and Phoenix are asked to create a trick and do it together. The two dolphins swim away from the side of the pool, circle together underwater for about ten seconds, then leap out of the water, spinning clockwise on their long axis and squirting water from their mouths, every maneuver done at the same instant. "None of this was trained," Herman says, "and it looks to us absolutely mysterious. We don't know how they do it—or did it."

He never will. Akeakamai and Phoenix and the two others died accidentally four years ago. Through these dolphins, he made some of the most extraordinary breakthroughs ever in understanding another species' mind—a species that even Herman describes as "alien," given its aquatic life and the fact that dolphins and primates diverged millions of years ago. "That kind of cognitive convergence suggests there must be some similar pressures selecting for intellect," Herman said. "We don't share their biology or ecology. That leaves social similarities—the need to establish relationships and alliances superimposed on a lengthy period of maternal care and longevity—as the likely common driving force."

"I loved our dolphins," Herman says, "as I'm sure you love your pets. But it was more than that, more than the love you have for a pet. The dolphins were our colleagues. That's the only word that fits. They were our partners in this research, guiding us into all the capabilities of their minds. When they died, it was like losing our children."

Herman pulled a photograph from his file. In it, he is in the pool with Phoenix, who rests her head on his shoulder. He is smiling and reaching back to embrace her. She is sleek and silvery with appealingly large eyes, and she looks to be smiling too, as dolphins always do. It's an image of love between two beings. In that pool, at least for that moment, there was clearly a meeting of the minds.

DSCN1235

DSCN1235
Originally uploaded by jstonernusa

Went to Lake Tahoe this past tuesday and stayed overnight. Went snowshoeing and took the dog. Check out flickr for my pics.

Fremont Older Open Space Preserve

Fremont Older Open Space Preserve is a 739-acre (2.99 km²) regional park located in Santa Clara County, California and operated by the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. The preserve contains about 9 miles (14.5 km) of hiking trails, nearly all of which are open to equestrians and 8 miles (13 km) of which are open to bicycles. The area has been owned by the district since 1975.
The preserve is named after San Francisco newspaper editor Fremont Older, a previous owner. Older and his wife, Cora, purchased the then-200 acre (0.8 km²) property for $10,000 in 1912. They built a house there in 1914, where the Olders lived until their deaths, Fremont in 1935 and Cora in 1968.
The house was condemned at the time the district purchased the property, and was to be demolished. However, in 1979, newspaper publisher Mort Levine lobbied the district to save the house. The district agreed to lease it to Levine for 25 years at $1 per year. Levine and his wife spent $350,000 and the next 12 years renovating the house, which is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is now their private residence, but is open to docent led tours each spring.
Also in the park is Hunter's Point, a 900 ft. (275 m) bald hilltop which is locally known for its sweeping views of the south Bay Area.

This area is really close to me and probably has some of the best views of the Souther Part of San Francisco Bay. Click here to see Photos.

Canadian Justice...

This is what is wrong with Canadian Justice, this guy from Iran kisses a woman's breast against her will in an elevator which he admits to doing but states that it was nothing serious. The crown recommends a three month sentence but the judge feels sorry for him and gives him only 2 months and counts the 42 days he has already served. He only has to spend another 18 days in jail. The defense was arguing that he should be acquitted because a conviction might hurt his academic career. Tough shit I say. I know this guy comes from a country where a woman who is raped is the one punished and put to death but I say to hell with multiculturalism in this case. Deport this sex offender!!! I can only see this guy later down the road when he is a professor at MUN and in a position of power, what will he do to the women then???? It is cases like this that really make me believe that in Canada the rights of the criminal supersede everyone elses. She should have just kicked him in the groin.


A St. John's university student has been sentenced to two months in jail after sexually assaulting a student in a campus elevator.

Farhood Azarsina, 25, had earlier pleaded guilty to a charge of sexual assault. He will spend another 18 days in jail, on top of time already served, a provincial court judge ruled Wednesday.

Farhood Azarsina, seen during a court appearance earlier this month, was sentenced Wednesday.
(CBC)
Azarsina pushed a woman's arms aside and then kissed one of her breasts in an incident at Memorial University's main campus last September.

At the time, Azarsina admitted to the incident, but said it was "nothing serious."

The Crown had asked for a three-month sentence, but judge David Orr decided on two months. Azarsina was credited with 42 days for the amount of time he had already spent in custody.

Brian Wentzell, the lawyer acting for Azarsina, a graduate engineering student from Iran, had argued for a discharge, on grounds that a conviction could hurt his client's academic career.

The victim in the case told the court earlier this month that she has trouble sleeping, and that the experience was devastating.

Vancouver Trip

Went to Vancouver on Friday the 18th after working the night before so we were dead tired. I got one hour sleep on the plane thanks to the lady next to me that was coughing up a damn lung. All I could see is my sick time going out the window so I ended up going to London Drugs to get some Cold-FX which is expensive.

The hotel was in an awesome location, right on Robson. It was called Blue Horizon, and although it is no Bellagio (Vegas), it is economical, clean, nice inside and close to everything for $100/night.

On Friday we went to Milestone's with Catherine and Margaret so that Marsha could have her beloved Bellini and then we headed to the hotel for some much needed sleep.

Saturday was a typical day in Vancouver, gray and raining. We spent most of the day shopping and at Pacific Center then went to a movie at Scotia Theater (Saw the Kite Runner and I thought it was really good).

Sunday we went to Mount Seymour and went tubing, yes tubing not snowboarding or skiing but tubing. It was fun, I have not done that since I was a kid so it was cool.

Finally we ended to day at a really cool Japenese restaurant on Robson. Then we took a nap and caught our flight at 0730 back to SFO.

See flickr for more photos.

Whats new with the iPhone???

Well Steve Jobs made a bunch of announcements this week at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco (I was working damn it). Here are some cool new features.

1. google maps can now figure out your location (not useing GPS but by triangulating cell phone towers).
2. You can now rearrange the icons on the phone and add your own web clippings.
3. You can now rent movies using the Wifi itunes store and watch them on your iphone. They expire in 30 days and once you start watching they expire in 24 hours.
4. You can now text more than one person at a time.

Pretty Cool