Posted by Mike on December 5, 2009 under 1. Info Collection | 
Ecographica: Prehistoric Guinea Pigs from Egypt: ”
Ecographica
Evolution, Ecology & Ethology
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JOHNNY
I’m a naturalist with an unnatural ardor for the study of evolution, ecology and ethology.
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If you’d like to contribute an essay, article or other post to the blogosphere, but don’t want the hassle of maintaining your own site, send it to the email address listed on Johnny’s profile. If it’s relevant to evolution, ecology or ethology and reasonably comprehensible – it can be posted here!
BlogCatalog
Darwin Online
Research Blogging
Wetland Plant of the Week #35
Quantifying Research Quality using Article Level Metrics
How to report in vitro cancer studies: maitake mushroom extract doesn’t ‘fight cancer’
Whither 2009 H1N1?
Pollutants in our water: where do they come from?
BlogRoll
WEIT
Guardian: 50 books that defined the noughties
46 “
(Via .)
Posted by Mike on October 26, 2009 under 1. Info Collection |
Two Beans, one dollar and a homeless guy: “
It was the sort of scene I can’t walk past: A muttly looking dog, a white-bearded homeless guy and a handmade cardboard sign offering: ‘Dog Tricks 1$.’
On the sidewalk along Franklin Street — the main drag in Chapel Hill — Mark Williams, after offering me some room on his bench, said he and his dog, Two Beans, have been homeless for about a year. ‘Work’s kind of slow now’ in the construction /handyman/odd jobs field, he explained.
The dog trick — Two Beans knows only one — helps rake in enough money for meals.
I’d gone to Chapel Hill for a meeting of the Board of Advisers of the University of North Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, an esteemed panel on which I still serve, despite having left my most recent newspaper job a year ago, and despite – other than doing some revisions on the book I left the business to write, and writing this website — being unemployed.
Twice a year at UNC, members of the board gather to hear what the school is up to in terms of research, fund-raising and curriculum changes, which are coming pretty fast and furious nowadays as the industry, facing declining profits, continues to try to pull new tricks out of its hat, or in some cases get a whole new hat.
This meeting was a special one because it’s the journalism school’s 100 birthday — a benchmark the university’s basketball program also hit this year. That’s pretty old, but there are older journalism schools, I learned during the festivities, such as the highly respected one at the University of Missouri, which was the nation’s first.
Getting ready to pick up my dog Ace (who I’d dropped off for a bath during the meeting) and leave town, I was walking down Franklin Street. Doing that always triggers memories of my days as a student. Thirty-four years ago, I was getting ready to graduate with my degree in journalism, and I was sending job applications to newspapers across the country. I used the seventy-some rejection letters I got then to wallpaper my room.
It dawned on me that, today, I’m in sort of the same situation – job hunting, getting a few rejections, and much more often getting no response at all. At least in the good old days they sent you a form letter. Today, many companies often don’t even bother to acknowledge receipt of your application. While students are still finding jobs, the journalism job market — like journalism — seems tighter, shallower and meaner than ever.
So bleak, in fact, that when I saw Mark Williams’ sign, I ever so briefly considered getting my own piece of cardboard, picking up my dog and setting up shop on the next bench down, offering higher-priced, upscale dog tricks (the Starbucks approach) for $5 to cover gas for my trip home.
Two Beans’ trick requires a dollar bill. Having only a $10, I asked Williams if that would work. He pocketed the ten dollar bill and pulled from his other pocket a crumpled one dollar bill. ‘Now go back in that alley and hide it somewhere, and Two Beans will find it.’
I wedged the bill behind a drainpipe, about waist high, and sure enough, Two Beans, when I called, came around the corner sniffed around, pulled it out, and brought it dutfifully to his master.
Williams got the dog from a friend, shortly before he began a stretch of life on the streets. He named him Two Beans, he said, because the dog — a golden retriever-Rhodesian ridgeback mix, he suspects — is not neutered. Williams said police don’t give him any trouble about his street business. ‘They’d rather me do this than just be panhandling like these other guys,’ he said.
In addition to providing some income — as much as $70 a day when there’s a home football game – Two Beans makes life on the streets ‘a little less miserable,’ Williams said. He said teaching Two Beans the trick cost him $3, because the dog ate the first three dollar bills
As we sat and talked, Williams, originally from Greenville, N.C., revealed that he once wrote a book about dog training. It was only 20 pages and, so it wouldn’t cost him much to mail it out, weighed only an ounce. ‘It was basically plagiarized, and not very good.’ He took out an ad in the National Enquirer, offering the mini-book for sale for $3. He says he only sold two copies, one to a customer in Virginia Beach, another to a customer in Acapulco — making him, he joked, an ‘international author.’
When he learned I was a former newspaper reporter, Williams revealed that his family was in journalism as well: His grandfather, Walter Williams, founded the journalism school at the University of Missouri.
‘That’s the nation’s first journalism school,’ I said.
‘Yup,’ he answered.
Coincidentally, I’d also recently applied for a job there, in my continuing quest to sniff out writing/teaching/multi-media positions. I received an emailed rejection, one of at least a dozen so far.
I don’t print out my emailed rejections. They don’t have the cool logos on them that I once found decorative enough to serve as wall art. I think I also take them a little more personally, now that I have experience and credentials. So I won’t be using them as wallpaper — either the kind you put on your wall, or the kind on your computer.
Instead, I’ll keep plugging along, like Williams, and waiting for the better times I keep hearing are ahead.
Until then … dog trick, anyone?
“
(Via ohmidog!.)
Posted by Mike on October 13, 2009 under 1. Info Collection |
Sick American dogs get first shot at cancer drugs: “Pet dogs that develop cancer can now receive experimental anti-cancer drugs before they become available for humans
“
(Via New Scientist - Online News.)
Posted by Mike on August 11, 2009 under 1. Info Collection |
Dogs’ Intelligence On A Par With 2-Year-Old Humans, Renowned Canine Researcher Says: “Although you wouldn’t want one to balance your checkbook, dogs can count. They can also understand more than 150 words and intentionally deceive other dogs and people to get treats, according to psychologist and leading canine researcher Stanley Coren, PhD, of the University of British Columbia. He spoke Saturday on the topic ‘How Dogs Think’ at the American Psychological Association’s 117th Annual Convention.”
(Via Veterinary News From Medical News Today.)
Posted by Mike on August 7, 2009 under 1. Info Collection |
Confirming Aesop - rooks use stones to raise the level of water in a pitcher [Not Exactly Rocket Science]: “
Aesop’s fable ‘The Crow and the Pitcher‘ has been confirmed in a wonderful experiment. In the classic tale, a thirsty crow uses stones to raise the level of water in a pitcher until it rises within reach of its beak. This is no mere fiction - rooks, close relatives of crows, have the brains to actually do this.
The aptly named Chris Bird, along with Nathan Emery, gave four captive rooks (Cook, Fry, Connelly and Monroe) a chance to reach a small worm floating in a cylinder of water, with nothing but a small pile of stones sitting on the side. All of them solved the task, and Cook and Fry succeeded on their first attempt. They were savvy about the stones too, using exactly the right number to bring the water within reach and preferring larger stones over smaller ones.
The accomplishments of Bird’s rooks are even more impressive when you consider that rooks are not natural tool-users. Many of the corvids - crows, ravens and the like - are avid tool-users and the skills of the New Caledonian crow are rapidly becoming the stuff of popular science legend. But rooks are different - even though they too excel in laboratory tests (as Bird and Emery have previously shown), they hardly ever use tools in the wild. Rather than any special tool-using adaptations, their skills must stem from the sort of general intelligence that great apes are thought to possess.
More so than other members of the family, rooks are extremely opportunistic feeders, relying on a varied menu of seeds, insects, dead meat and rubbish. With such catholic tastes, food is never far from their beaks and they may have little need for specialised tricks involving tools. The same might be true for capuchin monkeys, which happily brandish tools in a lab but only ever use them in the wild when food is scarce. As Aesop’s fable moralised, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention.’
Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…
“
(Via ScienceBlogs: Life Science.)
Posted by Mike on June 25, 2009 under 1. Info Collection |
The miracle of the falling cat: “
A cat fell from the 26th floor in New York. What happened to the kitten? Nothing.
Source.
The name of the cat is Lucky. Of course, with a name like that, it was no surprise that a miracle saved him. According to the owner:
‘That’s the thing about Lucky Miraculous,’ HOSTETLER told ‘GMA.’ ‘He has been [lucky] since we got him.’ Source
NOT!
If the cat was really lucky, would it fall from the window? Does every miracle requires something bad happening before?
Actually, the cat would be more lucky if he had dropped the 7th floor and survived. Why?
Based on the records of cat falls, the rule ‘the higher, the worse’ is not true. Moreover, a cat survived a 32 floors fall in the concrete, something like 450 feet, and only spent two days of observation and got a chipped tooth. Here is the figure everyone wants to see:
Source: Nature.
DISCLAIMER, nobody was throwing kittens out the window to calculate
the damage, these number are simply records of veterinary care
emergencies.
The majority of cats (90%) in this study survived (omitting the ones euthanatized by owners unable to afford treatment). The most common traumas of those who died were shock and thoracic injuries. The figure above shows that the frequency of injuries increase with the height but, instead of continuing and stabilizing at 100%, as would have happened if we were talking about people, it starts to fall! Cats suffer worst fates when they fall between the sixth and eighth floor.
Not all animals need to be afraid of gravity! Indeed, the vast majority of them, in number and diversity, do not. The damage suffered by cats that fall from different heights depends on two factors: the force that results from the animal’s mass and acceleration (gravity)’ F = Mxa and the area where the force is distributed F/A. Here lies the difference.
The larger the animal, the heavier it is, but the area it occupies does not increase proportionately. The size determines the weight of the animal, so the force it exerts when it falls increases in three dimensions, cubic. But the surface of the animal increases in two dimensions, a square relation. The greater the surface/volume ratio, the more air resistance the animal does and smaller is the final speed during his fall. Just think of a aluminum sheet dropping open or mashed.This means that ants, beetles, spiders and mice also do not need to worry about the height they fall. A fall of 1 foot or 20 thousand feet does not matter for them, since the final speed in fall is low and they distribute the impact in a relatively larger area. Meanwhile, any little fall for an elephant is dangerous.
When a cat falls, its terminal velocity (maximum speed in the fall) is about 60 mph, and the impact is distributed among the 4 limbs because the effective gyroscope that allows cats to turn during the fall and land almost always on feet, the vestibular system - hence the difference between a cat and a dog falling. Humans reach a terminal velocity of 120 mph and usually land on their head or legs, which means a more lethal fall, with more internal bleeding and head injuries.
When cats begin to fall, they stretch the limbs and increase their tension. When the height is greater, as in the case of higher floors, the cat has enough time to relax and let their limbs stay horizontally, increasing its surface, reducing the terminal velocity and distributing better the impact. By flexing the legs, they absorb the impact, as a spring. One of the most common injuries in cat drops is broken jaw, because the body relax as a whole and lets the jaw hit the floor.
Through their climbers history, the evolution of cats explains their nine lives. They need no miracle for that.
Source:
Diamond, J. (1988). Why cats have nine lives Nature, 332 (6165), 586-587 DOI: 10.1038/332586a0 Read the comments on this post……
“
(Via Research Blogging - Biology - English.)
Posted by Mike on June 23, 2009 under 1. Info Collection |
MRSA Transmission Between Dogs/Cats And Humans: An Increasing Problem: “MRSA infections that are transmitted between dogs/cats and their human handlers, and vice-versa, are increasing-with infections of the skin, soft-tissue, and surgical infections the most common. This and other bite-related and septic syndromes caused by cats and dogs are discussed in a Review in the July edition of The Lancet Infectious Diseases, written by Dr Richard Oehler, University of South Florida College of Medicine, Tampa, FL, USA, and colleagues.”
(Via Veterinary News From Medical News Today.)
Posted by Mike on June 19, 2009 under 1. Info Collection |
Cat Origins [Greg Laden's Blog]: “
Through the filter of time … a repost that may still be interesting to you from two years ago.
The NYT is running a piece discussing the domestication of the cat.
I love watching wild cats. It is fairly easy to see them in the Kalahari, where the population of cats is almost certainly untouched by genetics of any domesticated form. Despite the kitty-osity shown in the photograph provided with the NYT article, the actual wild cats show themselves to be very different than the domesticated ones. They don’t look the same, they don’t act the same, they don’t have the same overall pattern of affect we see in domestic cats.
You look at them, they look at you, and you think ‘holy crap, if that cat was the size of a large dog, I’d be dead right now…’
Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…
“
(Via ScienceBlogs: Life Science.)
Posted by Mike on June 16, 2009 under 1. Info Collection |
Guilty Or Not Guilty?: “
A recent study purported to show that dogs do not feel guilt but that so-called guilt is a product of their anthropomorphic imaginations.The dogs were put in a room with their owners and told not to eat a tasty treat.The owners then left the room. Some of the dogs were then offered the treat by one of the researchersbefore the owner returned to the room. The owner was then misinformed as to whether their dog had committed theoffense. Apparently, there was verylittle connection between the dogs’ guilty look and the disappearance of thetreats. This study proves that dogowners (people in general) see what they believe to be true as opposed to whatis actually going on. It isanother example of the so-called placebo effect.
read more
“
(Via The Dog Blog.)
