06-05-08 - How now Balthazar? What news from Verona?
Baby emu could have been omelette
A woman from East Sussex who bought an emu egg sold as a novelty food item on a farm on the Isle of Wight has managed to hatch a chick from it.
Gillian Stone, from Bexhill, who breeds chickens, brought home three large green emu eggs from a holiday and put them in an incubator in her kitchen.
Two turned out to be infertile, but after 52 days little Osborne hatched.
He needed to be hand fed at first, but at nine days old he is now thriving and Ms Stone is hoping to get him a mate.
"We decided to risk putting the eggs in the incubator and, after a little bit of help Osborne arrived," she said.
"He was destined to be an omelette [but] now he's an emu."
Osborne will grow to over 6ft tall and will soon move from Ms Stone's home to her smallholding nearby.
Family friend Jenny Cosham said nothing Ms Stone did surprised her.
"She turns up with all sorts of things," she said.
"We've had chicks, we've had lambs, we've had all sorts - there was even a duck in the shower once."
* http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/sussex/7436852.stm Just in case you thought a baby emu wasn't cute there's a sweet video to prove you wrong. Full of wobbly baby emu walking and pecking about. This lady is the farming British version of what I could be if given the oppertunity. My great Aunt Virgie in Texas raised Emus for a bit...she made little art pieces out of their ginormous eggs. Pretty bitchin' actually.
Mobile phones expose human habits
The whereabouts of more than 100,000 mobile phone users have been tracked in an attempt to build a comprehensive picture of human movements.
The study concludes that humans are creatures of habit, mostly visiting the same few spots time and time again.
Most people also move less than 10km on a regular basis, according to the study published in the journal Nature.
The results could be used to help prevent outbreaks of disease or forecast traffic, the scientists said.
"It would be wonderful if every [mobile] carrier could give universities access to their data because it's so rich," said Dr Marta Gonzalez of Northeastern University, Boston, US, and one of the authors of the paper.
Dr William Webb, head of research and development at the UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, agreed that mobile phone data was still underexploited.
"This is just the tip of the iceberg," he told BBC News.
Money search
Researchers have previously attempted to map human activity using GPS or surveys, but it is expensive.
One innovative approach tracked the movement of dollar bills in an attempt to reconstruct human movements.
The study used data from the website wheresgeorge.com, which allows anyone to track a dollar bill as it circulates through the economy. The site has so far tracked nearly 130 million notes.
Studies such as this suggested that humans wander in an apparently random fashion, similar to a so-called "Levy flight" pattern displayed by many foraging animals.
However, Dr Gonzalez and her team do not believe this approach gives a complete picture of people's movements.
"The bills pass from one person to another so they can't measure individual behaviour," she explained.
The new work tracked 100,000 individuals selected randomly from a sample of more than six million phone users in a European country.
Each time a participant made or received a call or text message, the location of the mobile base station relaying the data was recorded.
The researchers said they were "not at liberty" to disclose where the information had been collected and said steps had been taken to guarantee the participants' anonymity.
For example, individual phone numbers were disguised as 26 digit security codes.
"Furthermore, we only know the coordinates of the tower routing the communication, hence a user's location is not known within a tower's service area," they wrote.
Each tower serves an area of approximately 3 sq km.
Information was collected for six months. But, according to the researchers, a person's pattern of movement could be seen in just three.
Model behaviour
"The vast majority of people move around over a very short distance - around five to 10km," explained Professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, another member of the team.
"Then there were a few that moved a couple of hundred kilometres on a regular basis."
The results showed that most people's movements follow a precise mathematical relationship - known as a power law.
"That was the first surprise," he told BBC News.
The second surprise, he said, was that the patterns of people's movements, over short and long distances, were very similar: people tend to return to the same few places over and over again.
"Why is this good news?" he asked. "If I were to build a model of how everyone moves in society and they were not similar then it would require six billion different models - each person would require a different description."
Now, modellers had a basic rule book to follow, he said.
"This intrinsic similarity between individuals is very exciting and it has practical applications," said Professor Barabasi.
For example, Professor John Cleland of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Disease (LSHTM) said the study could be of use to people monitoring the spread of contagious diseases.
"Avian flu is the obvious one," he told BBC News. "When an outbreak of mammalian infectious airborne disease hits us, the movement of people is of critical concern."
Dr Gonzalez said that traffic planners had also expressed an interest in the study.
Sensor overload
Although the scale of the latest study is unprecedented, it is not the first time that mobile phone technology has been used to track people's movements.
Scientists at MIT have used mobile phones to help construct a real-time model of traffic in Rome, whilst Microsoft researchers working on Project Lachesis are examining the possibility of mining mobile data to help commuters pick the optimum route to work, for example.
Location data is increasingly used by forensic scientists to identify the movements of criminal suspects.
For example, the technique was used by Italian police to capture Hussain Osman, one of four men jailed for the failed suicide bombings in London on 21 July.
Commercial products also exist, allowing parents to track children or for friends to receive alerts when they are in a similar location.
These types of services and projects will continue to grow, Dr Webb believes, as researchers and businesses find new ways to use the mobile phone networks.
"There are so many sensors that you could conceivably attach to a phone that you could do all kinds of monitoring activities with," he said.
For example, Nokia have put forward an idea to attach sensors to phones that could report back on air quality. The project would allow a large location-specific database to be built very quickly.
Ofcom is also planning to use mobiles to collect data about the quality of wi-fi connections around the UK.
"I am sure there will be tens if not hundreds of these ideas emerging over the next few years," said Dr Webb.
*"Tens if not hundreds of these ideas..." and most of them creepy. While I find this particular study interesting, I am freaked out by the notion of just how trackable the average person has become. Not that it's any huge surprise or anything. Alisha and I were just talking about 8 year olds with cell phones and the social ramifications of such. The argument of course being that it's not just creepy and weird that it's becoming "normal" for children Ravens age to have their own phones but that it's a saftey issue as well. If someone turns up missing the parents have the ability to track them through their phones...but the spy vs saftey thing still gets me going really. Like when I'm felt up at the airport by random security-I'd rather be, you know...NOT molested. The conspiracy theorist in me is upset about black boxes in our vehicles and tracking units in our phones. Damn. Double damn.
Peru to protect isolated tribes
Authorities in Peru are to take measures to protect some of the last indigenous tribes to have avoided contact with the outside world.
They have promised to stop loggers encroaching on their land near the Brazilian border.
The announcement comes after photographs of an isolated tribe taken near the border with Peru were circulated around the world.
The unknown group of native Amazonians were armed with bows and arrows.
The images were taken by the Brazilian government from the air, and showed some members of the tribe - their bodies painted red and black - firing arrows at a photographer in an aeroplane.
The Brazilian government say they took the photos to prove that dozens of isolated tribes live in the region, on both sides of the border.
Although anthropologists were not able to name the tribe it is believed that they had travelled a short distance from neighbouring Peru.
Authorities in Peru's Amazon state of Madre de Dios now say they will stop illegal loggers who travel deep into the forest in search of tropical hardwoods.
They are often the first people to encounter the tribes.
Marco Tulio Valverde, an adviser to the regional government, said: "We haven't determined if there are three different groups or only one, nomadic, which has been displaced.
"They only hunt, gather and fish, they don't farm, but they know fire."
Sickness risk
According to Survival International, a group that supports tribal people around the world, there are an estimated 500 isolated indigenous people in the region.
Survival International's director, Stephen Corry, said: "This is a positive first step from the Peruvian government, but it must act fast.
"It must stop the logging, remove the loggers and any other invaders from the uncontacted Indians' land, and ensure that no-one else enters in the future."
Apart from the possibility of violent confrontations, encounters with outsiders are often fatal because the isolated people lack the antibodies to protect themselves from a common cold or the flu.
The Peruvian government has also sent a team to the jungle to determine whether or not the photographed tribe had been displaced from Peru by loggers.
According to the BBC's Dan Collyns, the government has been reluctant to set aside new areas of land for uncontacted tribes, and some officials have even denied the existence of such tribes, but there are signs of a changing attitude.
*It's sort of comforting to know that there are still tribes and bands of people on this planet that know little to nothing about the rest of the world pluged in like pod people all around them. On the other hand, it's infinatly strange to read what we write about them...Not to say that the human species are not animals. We clearly are-reacting in much the same ways in study after study. Ruled by biology and what have you; yet at the same time, being a member of this arrogant species it still makes me faulter a bit to read such scientifically based articles on the discovery of new peoples. I actually read but didn't post the original article on this which was slightly more heavy handed in discription. I'm not even sure which side I'm on as to how to report these things-but it's interesting to say the least...
Great-grandad's new life in Australia
Starting over Down Under is a dream for many. As records detailing millions of Britons who left for Australia go online, one woman recounts how she finally solved the century-old mystery of her missing ancestor.
Although they were thousands of miles away, the young men who had left Victorian England for New South Wales were always in their family's thoughts.
A letter from Isobel Jenkins' great-granduncle George to his extended family in County Durham became a treasured family heirloom, as did his log of the arduous journey to Sydney in 1877.
He, his wife and children had left their mining community to start afresh in the colony, hoping to earn enough in the pits to buy their own land and build a house.
The journey log reveals George's sense of wonder - he remarks on seeing flying fish - tempered with details of children dying on board.
His letter home of March 1878 details how the family were laid low by a fever that lasted for weeks, but that the hoped-for four-roomed house was almost complete.
"We are living rite out in the bush nothing but trees all around us and for thousands of miles ahead of us and there is any amount of wild animals running about. Only the other week there was a snake coming into the house and took three of us to kill him - he was about four feet long," he wrote.
George and his brother James were among millions of settlers who left Britain in search of a better life in Australia, and whose names and details are now in an online archive by pay-to-view genealogy site Ancestry.
Included are three million "free settlers" - 2.2 million of them British - who arrived in New South Wales.
The company estimates that one in four Britons alive today have direct ancestors, or their siblings, who made the journey to the other side of the world.
Family mystery
Another member of Isobel Jenkins' family who left for the colony was her great-grandfather, also called George, who went out in 1886.
He intended to send for his young family once he became established near Sydney. After an initial letter in which he joked that the family in Durham would not recognise him as he had put on weight, nothing more was heard from him.
"This was a mystery that hung over my childhood and a mystery that had hung over the family for 100 years or more," says Isobel, a retired history teacher from Leeds.
Over the course of 10 years, she searched newly available records, including censuses and lists of ships' passengers and corresponded by e-mail with distant relatives to find out his fate.
Her hard work paid off when she discovered that he had in fact married and started another family, moving to Western Australia in a gold rush.
For 68-year-old Isobel it was a triumph and a relief to have solved the mystery while her mother was still alive. "We thought that he had either died or he had married. My mother was delighted to find out the solution."
*And we act like running away from your family is a new plague on society...really we're just easier to track.
A marriage of modesty and style
"Frumpy" clothing for Muslim women have inspired a Leicester designer aiming to fill a gap in the market.
Sophia Kara, 35, from Leicester said she steered away from the traditional clothing because she was "always so scared of wearing this black frumpy garment".
After her marriage, when she decided to adopt dressing modestly as part of her life, she began designing her own garments that appealed to her aesthetic nature.
"I thought, oh my god I cannot wear this because this is not me. It just was not my identity at all," she said.
"That is why I started designing - something that suited me, that I was more confident in."
Now those designs, made by her Imaan Collections label, are being sold in US, and her international clientele stretches from France, Germany and the Netherlands to South Africa and Canada.
She said she was inspired to provide a new look that "fuses western fashion with modesty".
Mrs Kara's online business is the result of her fascination with fashion as a child.
"I remember cutting fabrics and making my own clothes with my mother's help when I was about nine or 10 years old," she said.
She honed her skills through short courses that required home study and apprenticeships with designers, and opened her own business in March 2006.
Apart from casual garments and seasonal collections, her designs include a selection of corporate wear for the large number of professional customers - working women who want a marriage of smart with modesty in their outfits.
Mrs Kara designs "modern Islamic clothing for Muslim women", "contemporary clothing" that "fuses western fashion - the cuts, colours, fabrics" with "the modesty for Islamic attire - more voluminous fits, lower hemlines, smaller necklines".
Modern jilbab
While dark colours are still the more popular variety, younger women are becoming braver in the colour choice, especially when they go on holiday, she said.
All that was available for women when she was younger were the black jilbabs, the full length loose garments that cover the body, and the accompanying black headscarves.
"I brought the jilbab into the new era," she said.
Her designs also include hijabs (headscarves) and other garments.
It was the experience of seeing a young woman in a Leicester supermarket wearing her creation that pleased Mrs Kara the most.
"It was exactly that customer I had in mind, that would be wearing my garment," she said.
There are other designers who are catching on to the trend - one in London and another in the US - but Mrs Kara said they are few and far between.
After six years of "modernising the jilbab", her company Imaan Collections has notched up several successes, including a recent showing at Illinois.
Mrs Kara's target customer is young, trendy and fashionable but wants to retain her modesty.
In fact, some of them are not even Muslim, she said, but women who want to "hide their lumps and bumps".
Sun's rays 'caused freak blaze'
Rays of sunlight reflected by a mirror caused a fire at a Herefordshire house, fire service chiefs said.
Officials said they believed the fire was down to a mirror which had been in direct sunlight in the bathroom of the house in Much Birch.
They said it reflected the light on to the curtains, causing them to overheat and set on fire.
It was put out by a visitor to the house. However, fire chiefs said the blaze could have easily spread.
They have now warned people to check where they put mirrors inside their homes.
*Sometimes the world really does just have it out for you...
Pig's head nailed to Asian centre
A pig's head has been nailed to the door of a former Methodist chapel which is being converted into an Asian community centre.
Police are treating the incident at Quenchwell, near Carnon Downs, Cornwall, as a racist attack.
The pig's head is the latest incident at the centre, which has been daubed with graffiti, including the words Leave Now, over the past two weeks.
Muslim owner Tipo Choudhury said he was "saddened and shocked" by the attacks.
Plans continue
Mr Choudhury, who has some Indian restaurants in Cornwall, said the centre would not be just about religion, but would enable people to celebrate their faith and culture.
"I think they have misunderstood the intentions behind the centre," he said, adding that it would not be a mosque.
The community centre group was made up of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Christians.
He said the plans for the community centre would continue, but the situation was being assessed daily.
Insp Mark Richards of Devon and Cornwall Police said: "The graffiti is offensive not only to Asians, Asian religions, but also to Christians and Cornish nationalists whose name is taken in vain.
"It is totally out of order."
*How sad and ridiculous from every angle. The need for him to counter with the fact that this is not a mosque...
Red faces over 'blah' drug answer
The Scottish Government has been left red-faced after it responded to a Conservative query about drug finds in prisons by saying: "Blah".
It came in a published response to a written question submitted by Scottish Conservative leader Annabel Goldie.
The gaffe was put down to an administrative error and only occurred in the version sent to journalists.
Issuing a Homer Simpson-style response, a spokesman for the Scottish Conservatives said: "D'oh".
Ms Goldie had asked the government how many drug finds there had been in each Scottish prison over the last five years, broken down by type.
The answer - issued in the name of Enterprise Minister Jim Mather and not the justice department - simply stated: "Blah."
*As unprofessional as this certainly is, there's still a level of comfort to be taken in the truly human responce from government officials. Sure, politions are suppose to be composed and articulate but sometimes all you really feel like saying is "blah". Why pussy foot around it?
Efforts continue to trap squirrel
The first grey squirrel to be officially reported in the Highlands has still to be caught.
Conservation project See Red Highland have been trying to trap the animal.
The BBC Scotland News website broke the story in April of experts' suspicions it arrived in Inverness on the back of a lorry carrying hay or straw bales.
The Highlands are deemed to be a stronghold for native reds, free of the risk of competition for food and a disease carried by greys.
See Red Highland said the Inverness grey was spotted again on 27 May.
Traps set for it are being checked daily.
Appeal over bikini pics acquittal
A solicitor cleared of voyeurism after filming a woman in a Belfast changing area, said he would be "raging" if anyone took footage of his girlfriend.
The Appeal Court was hearing a challenge to 32-year-old Richie MacRitchie's acquittal.
He admitted using a mobile phone to film the girl in a unisex area of Falls Leisure Centre in October 2006.
He was cleared of voyeurism as the girl was wearing a bikini at the time. Judgement was reserved in the appeal.
Mr MacRitchie, who practices in Belfast and lives at Ardmullan, Omeath, County Louth, denied recording a private act for sexual gratification.
Although Resident Magistrate Fiona Bagnall said she was satisfied the prosecution had made out a case that the images were recorded for sexual gratification, she held that the woman was not engaged in a private act according to the Sexual Offences Act.
Her ruling last year was based on an acceptance that the woman was wearing a bikini at the time she was filmed.
However, lawyers challenging the decision said the woman claimed a fifth attempt was made to film her after she changed into underpants.
Gerald Simpson QC, for the prosecution, said recordings were made four times without the woman's knowledge while she was wearing a bikini.
"There was then apparently a fifth occasion when she had changed into her pants when she saw the camera," Mr Simpson said.
"There was no image recorded on that occasion, presumably because she knocked the camera away."
Parts of the woman's statement were also read out to the court.
"I reached down for my socks, and as I reached down I saw a person holding a black Samsung-style of mobile phone," she said.
"The phone and his hand were inside my cubicle."
During police interviews, Mr MacRitchie said he had made two or three recordings, each for "only a couple of seconds", the court heard.
He said he didn't know why it had happened, adding: "I wasn't thinking clearly at all, I just stuck it under."
Mr MacRitchie accepted it was a foolish act and stressed he was in a relationship, according to the interview notes.
He also said: "Of course if it was my fiance or my wee girl I would be raging."
A panel of judges, headed by Lord Chief Justice Sir Brian Kerr, is considering their ruling in the appeal.
*And here would be that biology arguement I was making earlier. I mean, Duh dumb ass-you would obviously be all kinds of pissed if this was your fiance or child...thinking with your nether regions. Not surprising, yet entirely irritating to say the least.
Cuttlefish spot target prey early
It's a bit like something out of the famous sci-fi horror movie Alien.
Before they have even hatched, cuttlefish embryos can peer out of their eggs and spot potential prey.
It is the first time any animal has been shown to learn visual images before they are born.
Ludovic Dickel and his colleagues at the University of Caen Basse-Normandy, France, made the discovery by placing crabs alongside cuttlefish eggs in a series of laboratory tanks.
Those embryos exposed to crabs preferred them as prey later in life, the scientists report in the journal Animal Behaviour.
The young embryos must be able to see through their translucent egg case, the scientists believe, and learn which animals are worth hunting even before they have hatched.
"This is the first time there is evidence of visual learning by embryos," said Dr Dickel.
Visual cues
Embryos are known to able to pick up chemical and auditory cues - unborn gulls, for example, learn to recognise the alarm calls of their parents whilst still in the egg, while salmon and frog embryos can learn the chemical signatures of the surrounding water before they hatch.
But until now, no one has looked at whether unborn animals can also learn visual images. Dickel and his team decided to study embryos of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a relatively advanced ocean-going mollusc closely related to squid and octopus.
They harvested wild eggs, and placed them in tanks filled with sea water.
Crabs, a common prey of adult cuttlefish, were also placed into the tanks, but enclosed in separate compartments. Crucially, the compartment sides were made of clear glass, so the crabs were in plain view of the eggs.
But the embryos could not smell or hear the crabs. Once the cuttlefish embryos hatched, they were instantly moved, to ensure they could not glimpse the crabs, and were not exposed to any other prey until they were seven days old.
They were then set free in a lab tank full crabs and shrimp, another cuttlefish delicacy.
'Window of genius'
Remarkably, cuttlefish embryos not exposed to crabs preferred to hunt shrimp once they were born.
But those embryos exposed to crabs much preferred to hunt crabs after hatching. And the clearer the view of the crabs they were given, the greater their taste for it.
Dickel says that his team has recently discovered that extremely young cuttlefish have very good memories and are capable of astonishing feats of learning, despite their young age and tiny, immature brains.
But this "window of genius", as he puts it, appears to open even before hatching.
Usually, cuttlefish eggs lie in an envelope full of black ink. But this clears as the embryos grow older, leaving them growing within translucent eggs.
These unborn cuttlefish also have fully developed eyes. That leads the researchers to conclude that the cuttlefish embryos must peer through their eggs, and learn to recognise their prey, a behaviour which will help give them a head-start in life.
It is less likely that birds, reptiles and, particularly, mammals - including humans - could recognise visual images in the womb.
But the cuttlefish discovery helps reinforce the idea that some animals at least can begin to learn before they are born.
*This adds an amazing point to the nature vs nurture debate...It never ceases to amaze me. Science can be totally bitchin.
How to solve the British maths problem?
The British are uniquely happy to admit being bad at maths, says a report. Why is that and how can attitudes change?
Imagine a famous television presenter joking that they couldn't read.
It's an unlikely scenario, such would be their embarrassment, yet no such reservations exist for mathematics, with self-confessed innumerates popping up regularly.
"I've always been rubbish at maths" is usually accompanied by a cheeky grin. The subtext is "I'm no boffin."
A report this week by think-tank Reform laments the drop in numbers of people taking maths A-level, at an estimated cost to the economy of £9bn.
A maths A-level puts on average an extra £10,000 a year on a salary, says Reform, yet it is acceptable to say that you can't do maths.
Despite - for want of a better word - countless campaigns in recent years, and role models such as Johnny Ball and Carol Vorderman fighting numeracy's corner, people still need to be persuaded about the merits of mathematics.
This can't-do attitude has even afflicted scientists, says Alan Stevens of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, and formerly a mathematician at Rolls Royce.
"Even engineers sometimes say they're no good at maths. The general public I hear saying it, and particularly journalists on television tend to say it - newsreaders saying they've always been rubbish at it - as if they're proud of it.
"This makes it seem even more acceptable and projects the wrong image, the image that maths is indeed an ivory tower which is dull and boring and of no interest or use to intelligent people. That's the wrong image."
It's not a recent development because it was the same when he was a teenager, he says, but is more evident on TV now. And while other subjects such as IT may have an equally geeky image at school, that indifference is not carried into adulthood.
Marcus du Sautoy, maths professor at Oxford University and presenter of BBC Four's Mind Games, says he can't understand the pride there is in being bad at maths.
"It's bizarre why people are prepared to admit that because it's an admission that you can't think logically. Maths is more than just arithmetic.
"I would rather do business with someone who admits they're good at maths.
"You don't get that in the Far East. In Korea or China they're really proud of being good at maths because they know the future of their economies depend on it, their finances depend on it."
He ascribes it to cultural factors and a failure of the education system and the media to put the case for valuing maths.
"But it's changing. There's a cultural shift in the adult world. There are films featuring maths, such as 21, and Ridley Scott's Numb3rs is doing for maths what CSI did for forensic science.
"People say they love doing sudoku, so it's changing but we're fighting a climate of people who have been undersold with maths."
Mobile phones, the internet, Playstations and Google all depend on maths, he says - if people realised that, then they wouldn't poke fun at it so easily.
Family influence
Seven years ago John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders and a former maths teacher, publicly bemoaned the fact there were Lord Mayors who proudly said they couldn't do maths.
He thinks nothing has changed since then and believes the problem starts in schools where pupils wrongly believe maths is too difficult.
"I think people see maths in a different light to English language. They see it as being hard but it's no harder than other subjects. This attitude makes teaching maths a more difficult job.
"You can teach it in a very engaging way but if parents and grandparents say how difficult they found maths, it takes a long time to turn these things around."
But creative lessons can get results, according to maths teacher Jonathan Heeley, who has won awards for his work with 11 to 16-year-olds at Rawthorpe High School in Huddersfield.
When he began there six years ago, the school was in trouble and there was a culture in which talented pupils preferred to fail for fear of being labelled swots. But in the past three years, he has helped to raise the GCSE pass rate from 12% to nearly 50%.
"It was about making maths fun and making them learn without realising it and using different ways to engage them. We have very active lessons, very hands-on. No more text books, no more standing at the front. Instead we use creative ways to get them involved."
Street culture is employed to teach, so the class raps and sings formulas, uses Eminem to demonstrate pie charts and football league tables for arithmetic. Dice and coins help explain probability and statistics, while pieces of fruit substitute for "x" in algebra.
He says he has his pupils shouting down the corridors: "I love maths!"
But pure passion is not going to sway everyone, so there's another possible solution, which is to appeal to their wallets.
The UK is moving towards a maths economy in which those with numeric skills will prosper, says Elizabeth Truss, one of the authors of the Reform report.
"So much of modern banking is based on maths. In the 1980s it was about doing a deal, now it's about understanding risk. The whole financial services industry is underpinned by very high-level maths."
So if imaginative teaching doesn't inspire the British to get their sums right, maybe the lure of an extra 10 grand a year will.
*So now I feel the need to clarify. I do indeed blow at math and spelling for that matter, but not cause "that's what the cool kids are doing"...although I do find it interesting to think of the cool cultural inflection at having no head for numbers. I wish I was good at math. It's somewhat embarrasing that I'm not. Just so's you know...
Rectal surgeons using 'wrong op'
Claims that many rectal cancer patients receive an "inappropriate" operation have been rejected by surgeons.
Leeds University researchers said hospital data showed the APE operation, which leaves patients with a permanent colostomy, was being used too often.
In the journal Gut, they said introducing official targets would cut it further.
However, leading colorectal surgeons said it remained the best option for many - and targets would harm care.
Every year in the UK, approximately 13,000 people are diagnosed with rectal cancer, and 5,000 die from the disease.
Although radiotherapy and chemotherapy can be used to tackle it, the normal approach is to try to surgically remove the tumour and then repair, as far as possible, the tissues of the rectum and anus.
The research compares the rates of two types of operation used in rectal cancer, the abdominoperineal excision (APE), and anterior resection (AR).
The first of these involves the complete removal of the anal sphincter, which means that the patient will wear a colostomy bag permanently, while the second aims to keep this and hopefully allow a return to normal function at some point.
The choice of operation is dictated, to some degree, by the size of the cancer and its position on the rectum. The lower the tumour extends, the more likely it is that AR will be impossible.
Better survival
Recent evidence has suggested that the cancer is more likely to return in patients treated using APE compared with those treated using AR, and guidance from the Department of Health and the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has encouraged surgeons to consider AR in preference where possible.
The guidance suggests no more than 30% of rectal cancer operations should be APE.
The Leeds research looked at records of operations carried out in England between 1998 and 2004, and found that APE had declined from just over 30% of all operations to 23% over that period.
However, there were still parts of the country where rectal cancer patients were more likely to be treated using APE, with, in some trusts, the rate exceeding 50%.
Those living in deprived areas of the country were also more likely to receive an APE than those living in more affluent areas.
Patient choice
Professor David Forman, who led the research, said: "Should patients be able to look up the APE rate of their local trust before going there? I think they should.
"What this does is serve notice on the profession that there has been an unacceptable level of variation in the use of this operation, and by having clear targets and guidelines and publicly available statistics and audit will help patient choice."
However, the Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain and Ireland, which represents colorectal surgeons, said that the two procedures should not be seen as competing with each others.
It said that more emphasis should be placed on the future quality of life of patients, as AR operations did not always give satisfactory result, and could lead to long-term incontinence, and that surgeons and patients should be free to choose the right option without the pressure of official targets.
A spokesman said: "Simplistic extrapolation of the conclusions described in this paper to 'clinical targets' could disadvantage some patient groups."
*Why anyone would take this course of action with their ass with out a little due dilligence it totally and completely beyond me.
And now for something completely different:
schadenfreude ..SHOD-n-froy-duh.., noun:
A malicious satisfaction obtained from the misfortunes of others.
*Taken from dictionary.com's word of the day a while back. This should be added to the lexicon post haste.