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Sep. 1st, 2010 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
5 Worries Parents Should Drop
Fried Beer. Just... fried beer.
Fried Beer. Just... fried beer.
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<i><a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/08/30/129531631/5-worries-parents-should-drop-and-5-they-should?sc=fb&cc=fp">5 Worries Parents Should Drop</a>
<a href="http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-friedfood_26met.ART.State.Edition2.357c6b1.html">Fried Beer. Just... fried beer.</a>
<a href="http://slatest.slate.com/id/2265696/?wpisrc=newsletter"Apparently corpses are used for crash tests. I had no idea. And I... didn't really want to, either.</a>
<a href="http://www.patspapers.com/story_stack/item/man_rides_lawnmower_across_country/">Some guy rode a lawnmower across the country</a>
<a href="http://www.accessatlanta.com/atlanta-events/lilburn-fanzine-publisher-helped-601199.html">An article on fanzines</a>
<a href="http://rasjacobson.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/kids-throwing-money-away/">And here's a post on kids throwing money away.</a>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/nyregion/01darius.html">Darius McCollum has stolen a bus now</a></i>
<lj-cut>Even his mother was not surprised.
Darius McCollum, the New Yorker with the notorious habit of taking city subways for joy rides, was arrested on Tuesday while sitting at the wheel of a stolen Trailways bus, the police said. There were no passengers on the bus.
Over the last three decades, Mr. McCollum has accumulated about two dozen transit-related arrests, starting in 1981, when he drove the E train to the World Trade Center at the age of 15.
Mr. McCollum, now 45, was most recently arrested in 2008 after trying to pass himself off as a subway worker, the police said. His 27th arrest came on Tuesday.
A law enforcement official said that a Trailways bus had been reported stolen from a maintenance garage in Hoboken, N.J., at 7 a.m. on Tuesday. The bus was tracked via global positioning satellite to the vicinity of Archer Avenue and Merrick Boulevard in Queens.
Anne M. Noonan, vice president of marketing and traffic for Adirondack Trailways, said Mr. McCollum was not on a specific company route.
“That is how we knew it was out of position,” she said. “It wasn’t where it normally would be.”
Police officers of the 103rd Precinct stopped the 45-foot-long bus as it was heading north on a ramp of the Van Wyck Expressway. Mr. McCollum surrendered without incident, the police said.
Mr. McCollum’s mother, Elizabeth, 84, said that she had not spoken to her son in months. In previous interviews, Ms. McCollum said her son had Asperger’s syndrome and had a lifelong obsession with trains.
“You’re always doing a story about him,” she said from her home in Winston-Salem, N.C., noting that another reporter had also called.
Asked for further comment, she said, “I’m never surprised.”
Mr. McCollum told the police he lived in a four-story walk-up on West 128th Street in Harlem. Residents there said he was homeless but sometimes stayed in the building.
Although Mr. McCollum has often impersonated transit personnel, he was not wearing a uniform when he was arrested on Tuesday; Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said Mr. McCollum was wearing a blue shirt, black pants and brown shoes.
He told police detectives that he had driven the bus from Hoboken to Kennedy Airport, and then drove around Jamaica, Queens. He did not pick up or discharge any passengers during his ride. The bus has been returned to Trailways, the police said.
Mr. McCollum was charged with grand larceny auto and possession of stolen property, the police said.
Ms. Noonan said the company had no knowledge or warning of Mr. McCollum’s habits.
“We are not familiar with this gentleman at all,” she said. “I’m reading a little bit more about him. He seems to favor trains over buses.” </lj-cut>
<i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/nyregion/01mosque.html">Teens Charged in Harassment at Mosque</i></a>
<lj-cut>A group of teenagers in western New York has been accused of harassing members of a mosque by yelling obscenities and insults during evening prayers for Ramadan, sideswiping a worshiper with a vehicle and firing a shotgun outside, the authorities said Tuesday.
The teenagers were cornered by members of the mosque, who held them for the police. They were charged with disrupting a religious service, a misdemeanor.
The obscenities episode occurred Monday and the shooting last Friday, both outside the World Sufi Foundation mosque in Carlton, N.Y., the authorities said. They said a 17-year-old fired the shotgun; no one was hit.
“We have had occasions in the past,” said Joseph V. Cardone, the district attorney in Orleans County, “and it seems every three or four years we have some kids drive by the mosque and make comments and that sort of thing. We’ve had minor incidents, but nothing of this magnitude in the past.”
The episodes occurred amid rancor over plans to build an Islamic community center and mosque two blocks from ground zero in Manhattan. The plans have prompted protests and a heated debate among politicians and commentators. It was unclear whether the episodes in Carlton, which is about 40 miles northeast of Buffalo, were related to that controversy.
At about 11 p.m. on Monday, the teenagers in Carlton were at “some type of gathering,” Mr. Cardone said, when one of them suggested going to harass people at the “cult house” — what they called the mosque.
The teenagers got in a Chevrolet Blazer and drove in front of the mosque, beeping the horn and yelling, said Scott D. Hess, the county sheriff. Mr. Cardone could not immediately say if the teenagers yelled anti-Muslim statements, and he said it had not yet been determined whether their actions would be classified as a hate crime.
At one point, a worshiper, David Bell, went outside the mosque to see if he could spot the vehicle. “It came at him and brushed up against him,” said Mr. Cardone, who added that Mr. Bell had been treated for cuts and contusions at a hospital and released.
Bilal Huzair, an imam at the mosque, said that the teenagers had yelled anti-Muslim statements and that congregants had become concerned about the possibility of violence after hearing the shotgun discharge.
When a worshiper drove past a nearby boat launch on Lake Ontario after the episode Monday night and spotted the teenagers, congregants headed over in three cars, dialing 911 as they drove, Mr. Huzair said.
They cornered the teenagers, who Mr. Huzair said were in two trucks, at the boat launch, holding them for 40 minutes until the police arrived. “For us it was extremely frightening,” Mr. Huzair said. “We had cornered people who had just fired at us and run us over.”
The teenagers were taken into custody and also “acknowledged their involvement” in the Friday night episode, Mr. Cardone said.
The five teenagers, Mark Vendetti and Tim Weader, both 17, and Dylan Phillips, Jeff Donahue and Anthony Ogden, all 18, who are all from Holley, N.Y., are scheduled to appear in court in Carlton on Friday, the police said.
Mr. Vendetti, who is accused of firing the shotgun, was also charged with criminal possession of a weapon and faces up to four years in prison if convicted, Mr. Cardone said.
Asked about the motive, Mr. Cardone said the teenagers used “very poor judgment.”
“It’s just kids doing stupid things,” he said, “but it got more serious when they ran into a member of the mosque and they discharged a weapon. And we are taking it seriously.”
Mr. Huzair said that the mosque, which opened in 1974, had a generally good relationship with the community, but that harassment episodes had happened on several nights this Ramadan.
“The difficulty that we have is that we have difficulty in getting police officers to act more hastily in apprehending suspects,” he said. </lj-cut>
<i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/science/31bedbug.html">They Crawl, They Bite, They Baffle Scientists</i></a>
<lj-cut>Don’t be too quick to dismiss the common bedbug as merely a pestiferous six-legged blood-sucker.
Think of it, rather, as Cimex lectularius, international arthropod of mystery.
In comparison to other insects that bite man, or even only walk across man’s food, nibble man’s crops or bite man’s farm animals, very little is known about the creature whose Latin name means — go figure — “bug of the bed.” Only a handful of entomologists specialize in it, and until recently it has been low on the government’s research agenda because it does not transmit disease. Most study grants come from the pesticide industry and ask only one question: What kills it?
But now that it’s The Bug That Ate New York, Not to Mention Other Shocked American Cities, that may change.
This month, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a joint statement on bedbug control. It was not, however, a declaration of war nor a plan of action. It was an acknowledgment that the problem is big, a reminder that federal agencies mostly give advice, plus some advice: try a mix of vacuuming, crevice-sealing, heat and chemicals to kill the things.
It also noted, twice, that bedbug research “has been very limited over the past several decades.”
Ask any expert why the bugs disappeared for 40 years, why they came roaring back in the late 1990s, even why they do not spread disease, and you hear one answer: “Good question.”
“The first time I saw one that wasn’t dated 1957 and mounted on a microscope slide was in 2001,” said Dini M. Miller, a Virginia Tech cockroach expert who has added bedbugs to her repertoire.
The bugs have probably been biting our ancestors since they moved from trees to caves. The bugs are “nest parasites” that fed on bats and cave birds like swallows before man moved in.
That makes their disease-free status even more baffling.
(The bites itch, and can cause anaphylactic shock in rare cases, and dust containing feces and molted shells has triggered asthma attacks, but these are all allergic reactions, not disease.)
Bats are sources of rabies, Ebola, SARS and Nipah virus. And other biting bugs are disease carriers — mosquitoes for malaria and West Nile, ticks for Lyme and babesiosis, lice for typhus, fleas for plague, tsetse flies for sleeping sickness, kissing bugs for Chagas. Even nonbiting bugs like houseflies and cockroaches transmit disease by carrying bacteria on their feet or in their feces or vomit.
But bedbugs, despite the ick factor, are clean.
Actually it is safer to say that no one has proved they aren’t, said Jerome Goddard, a Mississippi State entomologist.
But not for lack of trying. South African researchers have fed them blood with the AIDS virus, but the virus died. They have shown that bugs can retain hepatitis B virus for weeks, but when they bite chimpanzees, the infection does not take. Brazilian researchers have come closest, getting bedbugs to transfer the Chagas parasite from a wild mouse to lab mice.
“Someday, somebody may come along with a better experiment,” Dr. Goddard said.
That lingering uncertainty has led to one change in lab practice. The classic bedbug strain that all newly caught bugs are compared against is a colony originally from Fort Dix, N.J., that a researcher kept alive for 30 years by letting it feed on him.
But Stephen A. Kells, a University of Minnesota entomologist, said he “prefers not to play with that risk.”
He feeds his bugs expired blood-bank blood through parafilm, which he describes as “waxy Saran Wrap.”
Coby Schal of North Carolina State said he formerly used condoms filled with rabbit blood, but switched to parafilm because his condom budget raised eyebrows with university auditors.
Why the bugs disappeared for so long and exploded so fast after they reappeared is another question. The conventional answer — that DDT was banned — is inadequate. After all, mosquitoes, roaches and other insects rebounded long ago.
Much has to do with the bugs’ habits. Before central heating arrived in the early 1900s, they died back in winter. People who frequently restuffed their mattresses or dismantled their beds to pour on boiling water — easier for those with servants — suffered less, said the bedbug historian Michael F. Potter of the University of Kentucky.
Early remedies were risky: igniting gunpowder on mattresses or soaking them with gasoline, fumigating buildings with burning sulfur or cyanide gas. (The best-known brand was Zyklon B, which later became infamous at Auschwitz.)
Success finally arrived in the 1950s as the bugs were hit first with DDT and then with malathion, diazinon, lindane, chlordane and dichlorovos, as resistance to each developed. In those days, mattresses were sprayed, DDT dust was sprinkled into the sheets, nurseries were lined with DDT-impregnated wallpaper.
In North America and Western Europe, “the slate was virtually wiped clean,” said Dr. Potter, who has surveyed pest-control experts in 43 countries. In South America, the Middle East and Africa, populations fell but never vanished.
The bugs also persisted on domestic poultry farms and in a few human habitations.
One theory is that domestic bedbugs surged after pest control companies stopped spraying for cockroaches in the 1980s and switched to poisoned baits, which bedbugs do not eat.
But the prevailing theory is that new bugs were introduced from overseas, because the ones found in cities now are resistant to different insecticides from those used on poultry or cockroaches.
Exactly where they came from is a mystery. Dr. Schal is now building a “world bedbug collection” and hopes to produce a global map of variations in their genes, which might answer the question.
Experts say they’ve heard blame pinned on many foreign ethnic groups and on historic events from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Persian Gulf war to the spread of mosquito nets in Africa. Every theory has holes, and many are simply racist.
(For example, Dr. Potter said, he has heard Mexicans blamed, but Mexican pest control companies he contacted said they rarely see the bugs except in the homes of people returning from the United States, often with scavenged furniture.)
Pest-control companies say hotels, especially airport business hotels and resorts attracting foreign tourists, had the first outbreaks, said both Dr. Potter and Richard Cooper, a pest-control specialist.
Whatever the source, the future is grim, experts agreed.
Many pesticides don’t work, and some that do are banned — though whether people should fear the bug or the bug-killer more is open to debate.
“I’d like to take some of these groups and lock them in an apartment building full of bugs and see what they say then,” Dr. Potter said of environmentalists.
Treatment, including dismantling furniture and ripping up rugs, is expensive. Rather than actively hunting for bugs, hotels and landlords often deny having them.
Many people are not alert enough. (Both Mr. Cooper and Dr. Goddard said they routinely pull apart beds and even headboards when they check into hotels. Dr. Goddard keeps his luggage in the bathroom. Mr. Cooper heat-treats his when he gets home.)
Some people overreact, even developing delusional parasitosis, the illusion that bugs are crawling on them.
“People call me all the time, losing their minds, like it’s a curse from God,” Dr. Miller said.
The reasonable course, Dr. Goddard said, is to recognize that we are, in effect, back in the 1920s “Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite” era. People should be aware, but not panicky.
However, he added, “I don’t even know what to say about them being in theaters. That’s kind of spooky.”
Well, he was asked — can you feel them bite?
“No,” he said. “If I put them on my arm and close my eyes, I never feel them. But I once got my children to put them on my face, and I did. Maybe there are more nerve endings.”
Why in the world, he was asked, would he ask kids to do that?
“Oh, you know,” he said. “Bug people are crazy.” </lj-cut><i>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/us/31mosque.html">Incidents at Mosque in Tennessee Spread Fear</i></a>
<lj-cut> After a suspected arson and reports of gunshots at an Islamic center in Tennessee over the weekend, nearby mosques have hired security guards, installed surveillance cameras and requested the presence of federal agents at prayer services.
Muslim leaders in central Tennessee say that frightened worshipers are observing Ramadan in private and that some Muslim parents are wary of sending their children to school after a large fire on Saturday that destroyed property at the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. Federal authorities suspect that the fire was arson.
The Islamic center has attracted national attention recently because its planned expansion into a larger building in some ways parallels a controversial proposal to build an Islamic center two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York.
The Murfreesboro center, which has existed for nearly 30 years, suddenly found itself on front pages of newspapers this month and on “The Daily Show.” It became a hot topic in the local Congressional race, with one Republican candidate accusing the center of fostering terrorism and trying to link it to the militant Palestinian group Hamas.
Then, on Saturday, the police say, someone set fire to construction equipment at the site where the Islamic center is planning to move, destroying an earthmover and three other pieces of machinery. And on Sunday, as CNN was filming a news segment about the controversy, someone fired at least five shots near the property.
“We are very concerned about our safety,” said Essam Fathy, head of the center’s planning committee. “Whatever it takes, I’m not going to allow anybody to do something like this again.”
No people were injured in either incident. The cases are being investigated by the police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
In a statement on the center’s Web site, a spokeswoman called the fire an “arson attack” and an “atrocious act of terrorism.”
In Nashville, 30 miles northwest, local imams met with representatives of the United States attorney’s office on Monday to discuss the risk of further anti-Islamic violence. Several mosques have requested police surveillance, they said, especially with the end of Ramadan this year nearly coinciding with the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“We’re worried that these attacks could spill over into Nashville,” said Mwafaq Mohammed, president of the Salahadeen Islamic Center there. “We don’t want people to misunderstand what we’re celebrating around Sept. 11. It would be better to take precautionary measures.”
Another mosque, the Islamic Center of Nashville, has installed indoor and outdoor surveillance cameras, hired round-the-clock security guards and requested that F.B.I. agents be on site during worship services, according to the imam, Mohamed Ahmed.
“Whoever did this, they are terrorists,” Mr. Ahmed said. “What’s the difference between them and Al Qaeda?”
But in other parts of Tennessee, including Chattanooga, Knoxville and Memphis, Muslim leaders reported that they had experienced no hostility and saw no reason to increase security.</lj-cut>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/health/31global.html"><i>Monkeypox is on the rise</i></a>
<lj-cut>The world’s victory over smallpox has had an unfortunate consequence: monkeypox cases are surging in tropical Africa.
The disease is related to smallpox, though usually less serious, although in rare cases, it too can kill, blind or scar victims. Also, it is much less likely to jump between people, though new evidence from Africa suggests human-to-human transmission is more common than was previously thought.
In a study published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, the Kinshasa School of Public Health and elsewhere, who surveyed nine rural Congo health districts, concluded that monkeypox was 20 times as common there as it was 30 years ago, when smallpox vaccination was discontinued.
The typical victim was a boy aged 10 to 14; boys in villages hunt monkeys and rodents, many of which can carry the pox.
Smallpox vaccine is 80 percent effective at preventing monkeypox, so in the 1970s, health authorities debated continuing to use it in some jungle areas. But the vaccine has its own risks, so they did not.
In 2003, more than 90 Americans caught monkeypox from pet prairie dogs, who got it from Gambian pouched rats imported by a pet store. No one died, but the government banned imports of African rodents.
“Our study is a great warning bell that we will see more pox viruses emerging in humans,” said Anne W. Rimoin, the study’s lead author.</lj-cut><i>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/technology/30adstalk.html">Retargeting ads follow you to other sites</i></a>
<lj-cut>The shoes that Julie Matlin recently saw on Zappos.com were kind of cute, or so she thought. But Ms. Matlin wasn’t ready to buy and left the site.
Then the shoes started to follow her everywhere she went online. An ad for those very shoes showed up on the blog TechCrunch. It popped up again on several other blogs and on Twitpic. It was as if Zappos had unleashed a persistent salesman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes,” said Ms. Matlin, a mother of two from Montreal. “It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it’s a little creepy, especially if you don’t know what’s going on.”
People have grown accustomed to being tracked online and shown ads for categories of products they have shown interest in, be it tennis or bank loans.
Increasingly, however, the ads tailored to them are for specific products that they have perused online. While the technique, which the ad industry calls personalized retargeting or remarketing, is not new, it is becoming more pervasive as companies like Google and Microsoft have entered the field. And retargeting has reached a level of precision that is leaving consumers with the palpable feeling that they are being watched as they roam the virtual aisles of online stores.
More retailers like Art.com, B&H Photo, Diapers.com, eBags.com and the Discovery Channel store use these kinds of ads. Nordstrom says it is considering using them, and retargeting is becoming increasingly common with marketers in the travel, real estate and financial services industries. The ads often appear on popular sites like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace or Realtor.com.
In the digital advertising business, this form of highly personalized marketing is being hailed as the latest breakthrough because it tries to show consumers the right ad at the right time. “The overwhelming response has been positive,” said Aaron Magness, senior director for brand marketing and business development at Zappos, a unit of Amazon.com. The parent company declined to say whether it also uses the ads.
Others, though, find it disturbing. When a recent Advertising Age column noted the phenomenon, several readers chimed in to voice their displeasure.
Bad as it was to be stalked by shoes, Ms. Matlin said that she felt even worse when she was hounded recently by ads for a dieting service she had used online. “They are still following me around, and it makes me feel fat,” she said.
With more consumers queasy about intrusions into their privacy, the technique is raising anew the threat of industry regulation. “Retargeting has helped turn on a light bulb for consumers,” said Jeff Chester, a privacy advocate and executive director of the Washington-based Center for Digital Democracy. “It illustrates that there is a commercial surveillance system in place online that is sweeping in scope and raises privacy and civil liberties issues, too.”
Retargeting, however, relies on a form of online tracking that has been around for years and is not particularly intrusive. Retargeting programs typically use small text files called cookies that are exchanged when a Web browser visits a site. Cookies are used by virtually all commercial Web sites for various purposes, including advertising, keeping users signed in and customizing content.
In remarketing, when a person visits an e-commerce site and looks at say, an Etienne Aigner Athena satchel on eBags.com, a cookie is placed into that person’s browser, linking it with the handbag. When that person, or someone using the same computer, visits another site, the advertising system creates an ad for that very purse.
Mr. Magness, of Zappos, said that consumers may be unnerved because they may feel that they are being tracked from site to site as they browse the Web. To reassure consumers, Zappos, which is using the ads to peddle items like shoes, handbags and women’s underwear, displays a message inside the banner ads that reads, “Why am I seeing these ads?” When users click on it, they are taken to the Web site of Criteo, the advertising technology company behind the Zappos ads, where the ads are explained.
While users are given the choice to opt out, few do once they understand how the ads are selected for them, said Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, the chief executive of Criteo.
But some advertising and media experts said that explaining the technology behind the ads might not allay the fears of many consumers who worry about being tracked or who simply fear that someone they share a computer with will see what items they have browsed.
“When you begin to give people a sense of how this is happening, they really don’t like it,” said Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, who has conducted consumer surveys about online advertising. Professor Turow, who studies digital media and recently testified at a Senate committee hearing on digital advertising, said he had a visceral negative reaction to the ads, even though he understands the technologies behind them.
“It seemed so bold,” Professor Turow said. “I was not pleased, frankly.”
While start-ups like Criteo and TellApart are among the most active remarketers, the technique has also been embraced by online advertising giants.
Google began testing this technique in 2009, calling it remarketing to connote the idea of customized messages like special offers or discounts being sent to users. In March, the company made the service available to all advertisers on its AdWords network.
For Google, remarketing is a more specific form of behavioral targeting, the practice under which a person who has visited NBA.com, for instance, may be tagged as a basketball fan and later will be shown ads for related merchandise.
Behavioral targeting has been hotly debated in Washington, and lawmakers are considering various proposals to regulate it. During the recent Senate hearing, Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, said she found the technique troubling. “I understand that advertising supports the Internet, but I am a little spooked out,” Ms. McCaskill said of behavioral targeting. “This is creepy.”
When Advertising Age, the advertising industry publication, tackled the subject of remarketing recently, the writer Michael Learmonth described being stalked by a pair of pants he had considered buying on Zappos.
“As tracking gets more and more crass and obvious, consumers will rightfully become more concerned about it,” he wrote. “If the industry is truly worried about a federally mandated ‘do not track’ list akin to ‘do not call’ for the Internet, they’re not really showing it.”
Some advertising executives agree that highly personalized remarketing not only goes too far but also is unnecessary.
“I don’t think that exposing all this detailed information you have about the customer is necessary,” said Alan Pearlstein, chief executive of Cross Pixel Media, a digital marketing agency. Mr. Pearlstein says he supports retargeting, but with more subtle ads that, for instance, could offer consumers a discount coupon if they return to an online store. “What is the benefit of freaking customers out?” </lj-cut>
<a href="http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-friedfood_26met.ART.State.Edition2.357c6b1.html">Fried Beer. Just... fried beer.</a>
<a href="http://slatest.slate.com/id/2265696/?wpisrc=newsletter"Apparently corpses are used for crash tests. I had no idea. And I... didn't really want to, either.</a>
<a href="http://www.patspapers.com/story_stack/item/man_rides_lawnmower_across_country/">Some guy rode a lawnmower across the country</a>
<a href="http://www.accessatlanta.com/atlanta-events/lilburn-fanzine-publisher-helped-601199.html">An article on fanzines</a>
<a href="http://rasjacobson.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/kids-throwing-money-away/">And here's a post on kids throwing money away.</a>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/nyregion/01darius.html">Darius McCollum has stolen a bus now</a></i>
<lj-cut>Even his mother was not surprised.
Darius McCollum, the New Yorker with the notorious habit of taking city subways for joy rides, was arrested on Tuesday while sitting at the wheel of a stolen Trailways bus, the police said. There were no passengers on the bus.
Over the last three decades, Mr. McCollum has accumulated about two dozen transit-related arrests, starting in 1981, when he drove the E train to the World Trade Center at the age of 15.
Mr. McCollum, now 45, was most recently arrested in 2008 after trying to pass himself off as a subway worker, the police said. His 27th arrest came on Tuesday.
A law enforcement official said that a Trailways bus had been reported stolen from a maintenance garage in Hoboken, N.J., at 7 a.m. on Tuesday. The bus was tracked via global positioning satellite to the vicinity of Archer Avenue and Merrick Boulevard in Queens.
Anne M. Noonan, vice president of marketing and traffic for Adirondack Trailways, said Mr. McCollum was not on a specific company route.
“That is how we knew it was out of position,” she said. “It wasn’t where it normally would be.”
Police officers of the 103rd Precinct stopped the 45-foot-long bus as it was heading north on a ramp of the Van Wyck Expressway. Mr. McCollum surrendered without incident, the police said.
Mr. McCollum’s mother, Elizabeth, 84, said that she had not spoken to her son in months. In previous interviews, Ms. McCollum said her son had Asperger’s syndrome and had a lifelong obsession with trains.
“You’re always doing a story about him,” she said from her home in Winston-Salem, N.C., noting that another reporter had also called.
Asked for further comment, she said, “I’m never surprised.”
Mr. McCollum told the police he lived in a four-story walk-up on West 128th Street in Harlem. Residents there said he was homeless but sometimes stayed in the building.
Although Mr. McCollum has often impersonated transit personnel, he was not wearing a uniform when he was arrested on Tuesday; Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said Mr. McCollum was wearing a blue shirt, black pants and brown shoes.
He told police detectives that he had driven the bus from Hoboken to Kennedy Airport, and then drove around Jamaica, Queens. He did not pick up or discharge any passengers during his ride. The bus has been returned to Trailways, the police said.
Mr. McCollum was charged with grand larceny auto and possession of stolen property, the police said.
Ms. Noonan said the company had no knowledge or warning of Mr. McCollum’s habits.
“We are not familiar with this gentleman at all,” she said. “I’m reading a little bit more about him. He seems to favor trains over buses.” </lj-cut>
<i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/nyregion/01mosque.html">Teens Charged in Harassment at Mosque</i></a>
<lj-cut>A group of teenagers in western New York has been accused of harassing members of a mosque by yelling obscenities and insults during evening prayers for Ramadan, sideswiping a worshiper with a vehicle and firing a shotgun outside, the authorities said Tuesday.
The teenagers were cornered by members of the mosque, who held them for the police. They were charged with disrupting a religious service, a misdemeanor.
The obscenities episode occurred Monday and the shooting last Friday, both outside the World Sufi Foundation mosque in Carlton, N.Y., the authorities said. They said a 17-year-old fired the shotgun; no one was hit.
“We have had occasions in the past,” said Joseph V. Cardone, the district attorney in Orleans County, “and it seems every three or four years we have some kids drive by the mosque and make comments and that sort of thing. We’ve had minor incidents, but nothing of this magnitude in the past.”
The episodes occurred amid rancor over plans to build an Islamic community center and mosque two blocks from ground zero in Manhattan. The plans have prompted protests and a heated debate among politicians and commentators. It was unclear whether the episodes in Carlton, which is about 40 miles northeast of Buffalo, were related to that controversy.
At about 11 p.m. on Monday, the teenagers in Carlton were at “some type of gathering,” Mr. Cardone said, when one of them suggested going to harass people at the “cult house” — what they called the mosque.
The teenagers got in a Chevrolet Blazer and drove in front of the mosque, beeping the horn and yelling, said Scott D. Hess, the county sheriff. Mr. Cardone could not immediately say if the teenagers yelled anti-Muslim statements, and he said it had not yet been determined whether their actions would be classified as a hate crime.
At one point, a worshiper, David Bell, went outside the mosque to see if he could spot the vehicle. “It came at him and brushed up against him,” said Mr. Cardone, who added that Mr. Bell had been treated for cuts and contusions at a hospital and released.
Bilal Huzair, an imam at the mosque, said that the teenagers had yelled anti-Muslim statements and that congregants had become concerned about the possibility of violence after hearing the shotgun discharge.
When a worshiper drove past a nearby boat launch on Lake Ontario after the episode Monday night and spotted the teenagers, congregants headed over in three cars, dialing 911 as they drove, Mr. Huzair said.
They cornered the teenagers, who Mr. Huzair said were in two trucks, at the boat launch, holding them for 40 minutes until the police arrived. “For us it was extremely frightening,” Mr. Huzair said. “We had cornered people who had just fired at us and run us over.”
The teenagers were taken into custody and also “acknowledged their involvement” in the Friday night episode, Mr. Cardone said.
The five teenagers, Mark Vendetti and Tim Weader, both 17, and Dylan Phillips, Jeff Donahue and Anthony Ogden, all 18, who are all from Holley, N.Y., are scheduled to appear in court in Carlton on Friday, the police said.
Mr. Vendetti, who is accused of firing the shotgun, was also charged with criminal possession of a weapon and faces up to four years in prison if convicted, Mr. Cardone said.
Asked about the motive, Mr. Cardone said the teenagers used “very poor judgment.”
“It’s just kids doing stupid things,” he said, “but it got more serious when they ran into a member of the mosque and they discharged a weapon. And we are taking it seriously.”
Mr. Huzair said that the mosque, which opened in 1974, had a generally good relationship with the community, but that harassment episodes had happened on several nights this Ramadan.
“The difficulty that we have is that we have difficulty in getting police officers to act more hastily in apprehending suspects,” he said. </lj-cut>
<i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/science/31bedbug.html">They Crawl, They Bite, They Baffle Scientists</i></a>
<lj-cut>Don’t be too quick to dismiss the common bedbug as merely a pestiferous six-legged blood-sucker.
Think of it, rather, as Cimex lectularius, international arthropod of mystery.
In comparison to other insects that bite man, or even only walk across man’s food, nibble man’s crops or bite man’s farm animals, very little is known about the creature whose Latin name means — go figure — “bug of the bed.” Only a handful of entomologists specialize in it, and until recently it has been low on the government’s research agenda because it does not transmit disease. Most study grants come from the pesticide industry and ask only one question: What kills it?
But now that it’s The Bug That Ate New York, Not to Mention Other Shocked American Cities, that may change.
This month, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a joint statement on bedbug control. It was not, however, a declaration of war nor a plan of action. It was an acknowledgment that the problem is big, a reminder that federal agencies mostly give advice, plus some advice: try a mix of vacuuming, crevice-sealing, heat and chemicals to kill the things.
It also noted, twice, that bedbug research “has been very limited over the past several decades.”
Ask any expert why the bugs disappeared for 40 years, why they came roaring back in the late 1990s, even why they do not spread disease, and you hear one answer: “Good question.”
“The first time I saw one that wasn’t dated 1957 and mounted on a microscope slide was in 2001,” said Dini M. Miller, a Virginia Tech cockroach expert who has added bedbugs to her repertoire.
The bugs have probably been biting our ancestors since they moved from trees to caves. The bugs are “nest parasites” that fed on bats and cave birds like swallows before man moved in.
That makes their disease-free status even more baffling.
(The bites itch, and can cause anaphylactic shock in rare cases, and dust containing feces and molted shells has triggered asthma attacks, but these are all allergic reactions, not disease.)
Bats are sources of rabies, Ebola, SARS and Nipah virus. And other biting bugs are disease carriers — mosquitoes for malaria and West Nile, ticks for Lyme and babesiosis, lice for typhus, fleas for plague, tsetse flies for sleeping sickness, kissing bugs for Chagas. Even nonbiting bugs like houseflies and cockroaches transmit disease by carrying bacteria on their feet or in their feces or vomit.
But bedbugs, despite the ick factor, are clean.
Actually it is safer to say that no one has proved they aren’t, said Jerome Goddard, a Mississippi State entomologist.
But not for lack of trying. South African researchers have fed them blood with the AIDS virus, but the virus died. They have shown that bugs can retain hepatitis B virus for weeks, but when they bite chimpanzees, the infection does not take. Brazilian researchers have come closest, getting bedbugs to transfer the Chagas parasite from a wild mouse to lab mice.
“Someday, somebody may come along with a better experiment,” Dr. Goddard said.
That lingering uncertainty has led to one change in lab practice. The classic bedbug strain that all newly caught bugs are compared against is a colony originally from Fort Dix, N.J., that a researcher kept alive for 30 years by letting it feed on him.
But Stephen A. Kells, a University of Minnesota entomologist, said he “prefers not to play with that risk.”
He feeds his bugs expired blood-bank blood through parafilm, which he describes as “waxy Saran Wrap.”
Coby Schal of North Carolina State said he formerly used condoms filled with rabbit blood, but switched to parafilm because his condom budget raised eyebrows with university auditors.
Why the bugs disappeared for so long and exploded so fast after they reappeared is another question. The conventional answer — that DDT was banned — is inadequate. After all, mosquitoes, roaches and other insects rebounded long ago.
Much has to do with the bugs’ habits. Before central heating arrived in the early 1900s, they died back in winter. People who frequently restuffed their mattresses or dismantled their beds to pour on boiling water — easier for those with servants — suffered less, said the bedbug historian Michael F. Potter of the University of Kentucky.
Early remedies were risky: igniting gunpowder on mattresses or soaking them with gasoline, fumigating buildings with burning sulfur or cyanide gas. (The best-known brand was Zyklon B, which later became infamous at Auschwitz.)
Success finally arrived in the 1950s as the bugs were hit first with DDT and then with malathion, diazinon, lindane, chlordane and dichlorovos, as resistance to each developed. In those days, mattresses were sprayed, DDT dust was sprinkled into the sheets, nurseries were lined with DDT-impregnated wallpaper.
In North America and Western Europe, “the slate was virtually wiped clean,” said Dr. Potter, who has surveyed pest-control experts in 43 countries. In South America, the Middle East and Africa, populations fell but never vanished.
The bugs also persisted on domestic poultry farms and in a few human habitations.
One theory is that domestic bedbugs surged after pest control companies stopped spraying for cockroaches in the 1980s and switched to poisoned baits, which bedbugs do not eat.
But the prevailing theory is that new bugs were introduced from overseas, because the ones found in cities now are resistant to different insecticides from those used on poultry or cockroaches.
Exactly where they came from is a mystery. Dr. Schal is now building a “world bedbug collection” and hopes to produce a global map of variations in their genes, which might answer the question.
Experts say they’ve heard blame pinned on many foreign ethnic groups and on historic events from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Persian Gulf war to the spread of mosquito nets in Africa. Every theory has holes, and many are simply racist.
(For example, Dr. Potter said, he has heard Mexicans blamed, but Mexican pest control companies he contacted said they rarely see the bugs except in the homes of people returning from the United States, often with scavenged furniture.)
Pest-control companies say hotels, especially airport business hotels and resorts attracting foreign tourists, had the first outbreaks, said both Dr. Potter and Richard Cooper, a pest-control specialist.
Whatever the source, the future is grim, experts agreed.
Many pesticides don’t work, and some that do are banned — though whether people should fear the bug or the bug-killer more is open to debate.
“I’d like to take some of these groups and lock them in an apartment building full of bugs and see what they say then,” Dr. Potter said of environmentalists.
Treatment, including dismantling furniture and ripping up rugs, is expensive. Rather than actively hunting for bugs, hotels and landlords often deny having them.
Many people are not alert enough. (Both Mr. Cooper and Dr. Goddard said they routinely pull apart beds and even headboards when they check into hotels. Dr. Goddard keeps his luggage in the bathroom. Mr. Cooper heat-treats his when he gets home.)
Some people overreact, even developing delusional parasitosis, the illusion that bugs are crawling on them.
“People call me all the time, losing their minds, like it’s a curse from God,” Dr. Miller said.
The reasonable course, Dr. Goddard said, is to recognize that we are, in effect, back in the 1920s “Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite” era. People should be aware, but not panicky.
However, he added, “I don’t even know what to say about them being in theaters. That’s kind of spooky.”
Well, he was asked — can you feel them bite?
“No,” he said. “If I put them on my arm and close my eyes, I never feel them. But I once got my children to put them on my face, and I did. Maybe there are more nerve endings.”
Why in the world, he was asked, would he ask kids to do that?
“Oh, you know,” he said. “Bug people are crazy.” </lj-cut><i>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/us/31mosque.html">Incidents at Mosque in Tennessee Spread Fear</i></a>
<lj-cut> After a suspected arson and reports of gunshots at an Islamic center in Tennessee over the weekend, nearby mosques have hired security guards, installed surveillance cameras and requested the presence of federal agents at prayer services.
Muslim leaders in central Tennessee say that frightened worshipers are observing Ramadan in private and that some Muslim parents are wary of sending their children to school after a large fire on Saturday that destroyed property at the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. Federal authorities suspect that the fire was arson.
The Islamic center has attracted national attention recently because its planned expansion into a larger building in some ways parallels a controversial proposal to build an Islamic center two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York.
The Murfreesboro center, which has existed for nearly 30 years, suddenly found itself on front pages of newspapers this month and on “The Daily Show.” It became a hot topic in the local Congressional race, with one Republican candidate accusing the center of fostering terrorism and trying to link it to the militant Palestinian group Hamas.
Then, on Saturday, the police say, someone set fire to construction equipment at the site where the Islamic center is planning to move, destroying an earthmover and three other pieces of machinery. And on Sunday, as CNN was filming a news segment about the controversy, someone fired at least five shots near the property.
“We are very concerned about our safety,” said Essam Fathy, head of the center’s planning committee. “Whatever it takes, I’m not going to allow anybody to do something like this again.”
No people were injured in either incident. The cases are being investigated by the police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
In a statement on the center’s Web site, a spokeswoman called the fire an “arson attack” and an “atrocious act of terrorism.”
In Nashville, 30 miles northwest, local imams met with representatives of the United States attorney’s office on Monday to discuss the risk of further anti-Islamic violence. Several mosques have requested police surveillance, they said, especially with the end of Ramadan this year nearly coinciding with the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“We’re worried that these attacks could spill over into Nashville,” said Mwafaq Mohammed, president of the Salahadeen Islamic Center there. “We don’t want people to misunderstand what we’re celebrating around Sept. 11. It would be better to take precautionary measures.”
Another mosque, the Islamic Center of Nashville, has installed indoor and outdoor surveillance cameras, hired round-the-clock security guards and requested that F.B.I. agents be on site during worship services, according to the imam, Mohamed Ahmed.
“Whoever did this, they are terrorists,” Mr. Ahmed said. “What’s the difference between them and Al Qaeda?”
But in other parts of Tennessee, including Chattanooga, Knoxville and Memphis, Muslim leaders reported that they had experienced no hostility and saw no reason to increase security.</lj-cut>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/health/31global.html"><i>Monkeypox is on the rise</i></a>
<lj-cut>The world’s victory over smallpox has had an unfortunate consequence: monkeypox cases are surging in tropical Africa.
The disease is related to smallpox, though usually less serious, although in rare cases, it too can kill, blind or scar victims. Also, it is much less likely to jump between people, though new evidence from Africa suggests human-to-human transmission is more common than was previously thought.
In a study published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, the Kinshasa School of Public Health and elsewhere, who surveyed nine rural Congo health districts, concluded that monkeypox was 20 times as common there as it was 30 years ago, when smallpox vaccination was discontinued.
The typical victim was a boy aged 10 to 14; boys in villages hunt monkeys and rodents, many of which can carry the pox.
Smallpox vaccine is 80 percent effective at preventing monkeypox, so in the 1970s, health authorities debated continuing to use it in some jungle areas. But the vaccine has its own risks, so they did not.
In 2003, more than 90 Americans caught monkeypox from pet prairie dogs, who got it from Gambian pouched rats imported by a pet store. No one died, but the government banned imports of African rodents.
“Our study is a great warning bell that we will see more pox viruses emerging in humans,” said Anne W. Rimoin, the study’s lead author.</lj-cut><i>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/technology/30adstalk.html">Retargeting ads follow you to other sites</i></a>
<lj-cut>The shoes that Julie Matlin recently saw on Zappos.com were kind of cute, or so she thought. But Ms. Matlin wasn’t ready to buy and left the site.
Then the shoes started to follow her everywhere she went online. An ad for those very shoes showed up on the blog TechCrunch. It popped up again on several other blogs and on Twitpic. It was as if Zappos had unleashed a persistent salesman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes,” said Ms. Matlin, a mother of two from Montreal. “It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it’s a little creepy, especially if you don’t know what’s going on.”
People have grown accustomed to being tracked online and shown ads for categories of products they have shown interest in, be it tennis or bank loans.
Increasingly, however, the ads tailored to them are for specific products that they have perused online. While the technique, which the ad industry calls personalized retargeting or remarketing, is not new, it is becoming more pervasive as companies like Google and Microsoft have entered the field. And retargeting has reached a level of precision that is leaving consumers with the palpable feeling that they are being watched as they roam the virtual aisles of online stores.
More retailers like Art.com, B&H Photo, Diapers.com, eBags.com and the Discovery Channel store use these kinds of ads. Nordstrom says it is considering using them, and retargeting is becoming increasingly common with marketers in the travel, real estate and financial services industries. The ads often appear on popular sites like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace or Realtor.com.
In the digital advertising business, this form of highly personalized marketing is being hailed as the latest breakthrough because it tries to show consumers the right ad at the right time. “The overwhelming response has been positive,” said Aaron Magness, senior director for brand marketing and business development at Zappos, a unit of Amazon.com. The parent company declined to say whether it also uses the ads.
Others, though, find it disturbing. When a recent Advertising Age column noted the phenomenon, several readers chimed in to voice their displeasure.
Bad as it was to be stalked by shoes, Ms. Matlin said that she felt even worse when she was hounded recently by ads for a dieting service she had used online. “They are still following me around, and it makes me feel fat,” she said.
With more consumers queasy about intrusions into their privacy, the technique is raising anew the threat of industry regulation. “Retargeting has helped turn on a light bulb for consumers,” said Jeff Chester, a privacy advocate and executive director of the Washington-based Center for Digital Democracy. “It illustrates that there is a commercial surveillance system in place online that is sweeping in scope and raises privacy and civil liberties issues, too.”
Retargeting, however, relies on a form of online tracking that has been around for years and is not particularly intrusive. Retargeting programs typically use small text files called cookies that are exchanged when a Web browser visits a site. Cookies are used by virtually all commercial Web sites for various purposes, including advertising, keeping users signed in and customizing content.
In remarketing, when a person visits an e-commerce site and looks at say, an Etienne Aigner Athena satchel on eBags.com, a cookie is placed into that person’s browser, linking it with the handbag. When that person, or someone using the same computer, visits another site, the advertising system creates an ad for that very purse.
Mr. Magness, of Zappos, said that consumers may be unnerved because they may feel that they are being tracked from site to site as they browse the Web. To reassure consumers, Zappos, which is using the ads to peddle items like shoes, handbags and women’s underwear, displays a message inside the banner ads that reads, “Why am I seeing these ads?” When users click on it, they are taken to the Web site of Criteo, the advertising technology company behind the Zappos ads, where the ads are explained.
While users are given the choice to opt out, few do once they understand how the ads are selected for them, said Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, the chief executive of Criteo.
But some advertising and media experts said that explaining the technology behind the ads might not allay the fears of many consumers who worry about being tracked or who simply fear that someone they share a computer with will see what items they have browsed.
“When you begin to give people a sense of how this is happening, they really don’t like it,” said Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, who has conducted consumer surveys about online advertising. Professor Turow, who studies digital media and recently testified at a Senate committee hearing on digital advertising, said he had a visceral negative reaction to the ads, even though he understands the technologies behind them.
“It seemed so bold,” Professor Turow said. “I was not pleased, frankly.”
While start-ups like Criteo and TellApart are among the most active remarketers, the technique has also been embraced by online advertising giants.
Google began testing this technique in 2009, calling it remarketing to connote the idea of customized messages like special offers or discounts being sent to users. In March, the company made the service available to all advertisers on its AdWords network.
For Google, remarketing is a more specific form of behavioral targeting, the practice under which a person who has visited NBA.com, for instance, may be tagged as a basketball fan and later will be shown ads for related merchandise.
Behavioral targeting has been hotly debated in Washington, and lawmakers are considering various proposals to regulate it. During the recent Senate hearing, Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, said she found the technique troubling. “I understand that advertising supports the Internet, but I am a little spooked out,” Ms. McCaskill said of behavioral targeting. “This is creepy.”
When Advertising Age, the advertising industry publication, tackled the subject of remarketing recently, the writer Michael Learmonth described being stalked by a pair of pants he had considered buying on Zappos.
“As tracking gets more and more crass and obvious, consumers will rightfully become more concerned about it,” he wrote. “If the industry is truly worried about a federally mandated ‘do not track’ list akin to ‘do not call’ for the Internet, they’re not really showing it.”
Some advertising executives agree that highly personalized remarketing not only goes too far but also is unnecessary.
“I don’t think that exposing all this detailed information you have about the customer is necessary,” said Alan Pearlstein, chief executive of Cross Pixel Media, a digital marketing agency. Mr. Pearlstein says he supports retargeting, but with more subtle ads that, for instance, could offer consumers a discount coupon if they return to an online store. “What is the benefit of freaking customers out?” </lj-cut>
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-09-01 06:15 pm (UTC)When my father was growing up, he remembers having meals at restaurants that cost less than a dollar.
That's inflation for you. Nowadays I'm not sure the cheapest you can see a movie, but it's going to be several dollars. The last time I wanted to buy a toy in a machine it was 75 cents. Pay phones are at least 50 cents, probably more.
So, that handful of chnage is worth a whole lot les than it was. Pennies are pointless. Pennies are more work than they are worth. And I mean that quite literally both in terms of creation cost, but also in that change that gets brought home sometimes gets scattered, then it requires dusting or clean up or both. I'm doing more than one penny's worth of work for that penny. We should drop pennies entirely and round everything to the nearest five cent mark.
Nickels are of some tiny value. Dimes are of some tiny value. Quarters are okay and I feel generally worth dealing with. And if you use a coin operated laundry then quarters are vital. Of course, a lot of machines that used to take change now take bills or take cards. And a lot of machines that used to take any change you had other than pennies (again, pennies are awful you can't even use them as money in many situations and if you use them in bulk you annoy people) now only take quarters.
This wasn't a problem when my parents grew up. All of the currency was accepted as currency when they grew up. But now pennies often aren't usable and sometimes nickels and dimes aren't either.
Small amounts still add up, but it takes a lot more of them. I think a far better alternative to trying to get kids to save their change is to get stores to add a box for charity on the counter. Let unwanted change go into that. Also, the have a penny leave a penny need a penny take a penny containers are good too, and we could add some for other change. That would allow customers to need to be given less change while costing the store nothing. And neither of those would require us to view kids as spoiled.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-02 06:59 am (UTC)