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How to Destroy a Bank

By way of Yves Smith, we come across Eddie Braverman's (a blogging pseudonym) advice on how to take out a major bank (Warning: the link is to an article in Playboy (really); half-naked women in the sidebar are probably not work safe): Step one: Give the plan a recognizable name. Like many ex-commodities brokers, Eddie appreciates action. A few months after he published his plan, he told me about it from the security of a Parisian café: "You could call it Tank-a-Bank or Flashrun or Bankbusters. Give it a name that tells people they're signing up for direct action, with one bank chosen to…

From the Archives: Here comes everybody by Clay Shirky

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, is from May 28, 2008. I have also read Shirky's Cognitive Surplus and mostly like it quite a lot. A review is still brewing for that one and I…

New study finds link between mass job losses and teen suicide behaviors

Previous research has documented a link between downturns in the economy and suicide among adults. But how do those downturns ripple throughout families and communities, and in particular, how do massive job losses affect the mental health of teens? A new study has found that, sadly, many teens are not immune to the stress of a struggling economy. Published online last week in the American Journal of Public Health, researchers found that increases in statewide job losses are associated with heightened suicide-related behaviors among adolescent girls and black teens. Specifically, the study…

Interpreting OSHA's on-line data

Last fall, Mr. Rosaulino Montano, 46, a worker on my campus at the George Washington University, died when he fell seven stories while installing windows on a new $75 million residence hall.  Mr. Montano was an employee of Engineered Construction Products,  and because his work-related death occurred at my place of employment, I was particularly interested in tracking the OSHA investigation until the case was closed.  I wondered whether there was a "controlling employer," such as a general contractor or even if my employer, GWU, and whether they had some responsibility for safety at…

Hell yes: Komodo dragons!!!

Without doubt, one of the coolest living animals on the planet is the Komodo dragon Varanus komodoensis, a giant flesh-eating lizard that kills water buffalo, eats children, harbours noxious oral bacteria and is impervious to bullets (ok, I made that last bit up)... Unknown to western science until 1912 (when it was 'discovered' by J. K. H. van Steyn van Hensbroek, and described in the same year by P. A. Ouwens), it reaches a maximum authenticated length of 3.5 m and can weigh about 250 kg (Steel 1996). In contrast to most other monitors, its legs and tail become proportionally short and…

Beware the spinal trap

(Note: this is the infamous article on chiropractic that got Simon Singh sued. It is being reposted all over the web today by multiple blogs and online magazines.) Some practitioners claim it is a cure-all, but the research suggests chiropractic therapy has mixed results - and can even be lethal, says Simon Singh. You might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that "99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae". In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal…

MuscleMaster.com "voluntarily" recalls 17 steroid-laden dietary supplements

It seems that bodybuilding supplement makers are challenging erectile dysfunction supplement makers to see who can recall the greatest number of products adulterated with undeclared, unapproved drugs. In this case, an internet retailer of the following supplements has issued a voluntary recall of the following supplements sold between June 1, 2009 and November 17, 2009. The recall follows an FDA warning letter on detection of undeclared, synthetic anabolic steroids in these products: Advanced Muscle Science Dienedrone, 60 caps Advanced Muscle Science Liquidrone, 60 ml Anabolic Formulation M1…

Sizzle? Call for Papers on Documentary Film and Its Impacts

Director Randy Olson's Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy has already shaped the agenda and framed the discussion among scientists and the science media, a key impact of a successful documentary film. I haven't had a chance to weigh in yet on the blog debate that has been raging over Sizzle. Needless to say, it's already one of the most talked about science-related documentaries of the year, even though very few people have actually even seen it. I will be writing a column about the film for Skeptical Inquirer Online, so stay tuned. In the meantime, here's something that will likely interest…

Networked Science: Who's It Good For?

Diane Rhoten writes in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education about the concept of networked science. The Manhattan Project, she says, brought us the era of Big Science: ambitious projects, organized in a "top-down, hierarchical, vertical" manner, requiring lots of cash, fancy equipment, dedicated facilities, and a long-term outlook. Next we got Team Science, fueled mostly by the life sciences. Big Science was shaped by instrumentation - what kind we do with this nifty supercollider? - while Team Science is "tailored to the parameters of the specific investigation" - hey, let's…

Focusing on how little time you have left can make you happier

Jim and Nora each attended summer camps that they enjoyed tremendously this past summer. When we picked up Nora from her camp, she was completely exhausted. Why? She and her new friends had only gotten 30 minutes of pretend sleep the night before. This was to fool their counselors before sneaking into a pre-determined room for a vigil during their precious last few hours together. Jim, it turned out, had stayed up all night his last night too, but without the pretense of tricking the counselors, who had by that time pretty much given up on enforcing a curfew. Despite their exhaustion, we…

An Inconvenient Assessment

Folks: The latest issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now on newsstands, and online you can also read, in PDF, my cover story. Entitled "An Inconvenient Assessment," it's about the biggest Bush administration climate science scandal that you've never heard of. Let me repaste the opening paragraphs to get you into the story: Global warming is definitely happening. That's the easy part. But it's no cinch to dramatize the phenomenon, or to personalize it. As scientists repeatedly caution, climate change can't be cited as the direct cause of any individual weather event, no matter…

"Yes, but what do you *do*?" A new response.

I've been spending the past week or two trying to get my groove on with respect to work. I scared myself quite badly with how overwhelmed I got at the end of last semester, and how quickly. I vowed to myself not to let myself get sucked into such unhealthy patterns, and then beat myself up over and over because of how often I tell myself not to get sucked in, and then how I get totally sucked in again. However. It is a new year. So I have another chance to start over. And am apparently trying to do so publicly, as what else would a blogger do? Besides, I don't want to give anyone the…

Some resources on implicit bias

Some of the comments to this post brought up the topic of implicit gender bias, and I thought the time might be ripe for a couple of pointers on the subject. Although I'm changing the context a little (from ethics training to search committees), the comments on reducing bias remain the same. The first is that, in general, but with considerable caveats,* BOTH women and men are biased against women's applications, papers and such. The issue of gender bias is NOT just a problem of men being biased against women. In fact, let's be clear - in all of these stories about gender, there are some…

The sound of dots moving: A new form of synaesthesia

SYNAESTHESIA is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory pathway evokes sensations in another sensory modality. This may occur because of abnormal connections between the brain's sensory systems, or because the flow of information between those systems is not inhibited as usual. First described in the 1880s by Francis Galton, synaesthesia is known to exist in several different forms. Galton described "persons who almost invariably think of numerals in visual imagery". This form, now known as grapheme-colour synaesthesia, was experienced by the physicist Richard Feynman,…

Ignorance Leads to Pictograph Destruction

I'd planned to spend the day discussing ancient rock art, but this isn't how I wanted to start. Earlier this month in Fruita, Colorado (located on the I-70 corridor on the western slope) a group of graduating high school seniors took a can of spray paint and marked their legacy on a couple of rocks outside of town. Kids will be kids, right? The trouble is, they weren't the first to leave a legacy on those rocks. Someone else had left their mark there, about a thousand years before. Petroglyphs and pictograms, left by a people known collectively as the Fremont Culture, are scattered across…

Scholarly legitimacy

I had the honor to participate in a futurist exercise by ALA's Association for Library Collections and Technical Services. The short essays they solicited have been placed online; they are well worth perusal. I wish the discussants at ALA's Midwinter gathering a pleasant and stimulating exchange. With ALCTS's permission, I include my own entry here as well, as it is (at least in part) relevant to this blog's theme. A distinguished-looking white-haired gentleman raised his hand politely after my talk. "Libraries," he said, in a grave and judicious voice, "are known and valued for their…

Yoink!

Today got off to a pretty bad start, so I'm experiencing a bit of blogger's block. In lieu of anything original, I liked Janet's questions about science blogs so much that I've decided to steal them and put up my own answers. John has done the same, and I expect others to soon follow suit. (Abel has now joined in, as has Greg.) 1. Why do you consider this blog a science blog? I didn't initially set out with the goal of creating a science blog; it emerged as an outpouring of what I've been learning about and trying to understand about evolution. Some of what I write involves new papers,…

Is Matt Entenza really from outstate Minnesota? No, he is not.

[Updated: Letter to the Editor, Worthington Daily Globe.] This is a followup on my earlier post (see "How do you say “Surprise” in Norwegian? The word is “Entenza.” I am not making that up" also reposted here) on Matt Entenza’s bid for the DFL (Democratic Party) Primary candidacy for Minnesota State Auditor. Entenza claims he is from Greater Minnesota, and thus, would do a better job representing the interests of Greater Minnesotans. This implies that highly acclaimed sitting State Auditor and candidate for re-election Rebecca Otto is not doing well in this area. In fact, she is doing very…

Tiptoeing into Type Theory

When Cantor's set theory - what we now call naive set theory - was shown to have problems in the form of Russell's paradox, there were many different attempts to salvage the theory. In addition to the axiomatic approaches that we've looked at (ZFC and NBG), there were attempts by changing the basis of set theory - discarding sets in favor of something similar, but with restrictions that avoid the problems of naive set theory. Today, I'm going to talk about an example of the latter approach, called type theory. Type theory is a very different approach from what we've seen before, and…

The Future of Cities

Liz Borkowski of The Pump Handle and I are doing a series this week on the future of urbanization. Given that just about half the world's population now lives in cities, and that almost all projected demographic growth (we will come back to whether the UN's projections on this subject are realistic in a post later this week) will occur in cities, the realities - and future - of urban life are important discussions. Like Liz, I love cities. That may seem strange to people who know that I live out in a rural area, since many rural-dwellers don't enjoy the bustle and noise of urban life, but…

Women in science--and ramblings thereof

So, Chad posted a link to this post last week. As a woman in science myself, I have to say I don't 100% buy this argument: Most people go to work primarily in order to earn a paycheck. Workers prefer a higher salary to a lower salary. Jobs in science pay far less than jobs in the professions and business held by women of similar ability. A lot of men are irrational, romantic, stubborn, and unwilling to admit that they've made a big mistake. With Occam's Razor, we should not need to bring in the FBI to solve the mystery of why there are more men than women who have chosen to stick with the…

On the Seventh Day God Rocked: Do not miss this.

I just watched a movie that made me ROFLMAOOL about fifty times. Maybe a hundred times. You'll not want to miss this... ~-~-~-~-~-~ There are a lot of reasons that I love my friend Ana, and I fully admit that one of them is that she give me things now and then that make me happy. Like cookies. And hysterically funny movies on DVD. And more cookies. But enough with the cookies. Lets talk about the DVD. On a recent religious holiday, Ana gave me a copy of "... and on the 7th day, God Rocked." Yesterday, I finally got around to watching it. It turns out that this film is a…

Just the facts, ma'am.

Mythbusters, factcheck.org, and Snopes have become sources of a special kind of truth for people around the world. Dedicated to undoing legend and independently analyzing political or other rhetoric, these and other sites, as well as various news segments and print media spots, are to be commended for their efforts to turn down the BS meter, which all agree has been running on high ever since the old days, when there was no BS at all. (Which, of course, is an urban myth.) However, what you may not know is that these sites are not necessarily politically neutral, can be quite biased (in non-…

7 Questions with... Andrew Thaler

Here at The Thoughtful Animal, we are conducting series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or why animal research is important? Think you might want to do some animal research of your own someday? This is the interview series for you. Andrew Thaler (twitter, blog) is pursuing a doctorate in the marine biology at the Duke University Marine Lab. He is especially interested in population genetics in hydrothermal vent communities. He is…

Reframing framing

Jason objects to the claim that science is badly framed. He offers several examples in which he feels that: it is the pleasantness of the message, not the slickness of the marketing, that is relevant. That's the fatal flaw in the argument [by Nisbet, Mooney, etc.]. The problem isn't ineffective framing, it's having a message most people find unappealing. But there are other problems as well. Which is to say, the problem is ineffective framing. Framing isn't about slickness. That's a misframing of framing. (Yes, I've now made myself sick of the term.) Framing is about finding a message…

The root of all anti-evolutionism

The Religious Landscape Survey has a lot of data various denominations. Recently I noticed something weird about Mormons; they are very anti-evolution, as well as anti-universalist in their views on salvation, according to this survey. These are notable views because Mormons don't have well established attitudes on evolution from on high (which is why Mitt Romney expressed anti-Creationist sentiments without any blowback during the 2007-2008 campaign), and, their religious tradition actually seems to have been influenced by American Universalism, and so an exclusive attitude toward salvation…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Tara Richerson

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Tara Richerson to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background…

Get ready for 2008: Year Of The Frog

It's hardly a secret that I've had a bit of a thing going for frogs and toads - anurans - during the latter part of 2007 (the anuran series has so far consisted of part I, part II, part III, part IV, part V, part VI, and part VII). While the whole exercise was a good excuse to learn a lot about one of the most fascinating, charismatic and bizarre tetrapod groups, the main reason for going down this road in the first place is the major conservation effort that's going to get underway next year.. or, tomorrow, if you're reading this on New Year's Eve. 2008 is, you see, the YEAR OF THE FROG: it…

Respectful Insolence rebooted

The day has finally arrived. The big changes hinted at and then announced have finally come to pass. Orac has finally rebooted and plugged his (its?) essence into ScienceBlogs.com. It almost didn't come to pass, thanks to a certain overreaction by my medical school. It also didn't help that, after an unbelievably mild January in the New York area, the one time that winter would finally reassert itself would, by sheer bad luck, fall on the very day that I was scheduled to fly home from a surgical meeting in San Diego. One plane cancellation and dire speculation about the weather did produce a…

Three reasons the Supreme Court should uphold ACA

With the Supreme Court hearing arguments for the next three days on the Affordable Care Act, many commentators, including Dahlia Lithwick appear to have so much contempt for the Roberts court that they believe the issue will likely be settled on politics rather than law. The first proposition is that the health care law is constitutional. The second is that the court could strike it down anyway. ... The law is a completely valid exercise of Congress' Commerce Clause power, and all the conservative longing for the good old days of the pre-New Deal courts won't put us back in those days as if…

Counting work-related injuries, disease and death among US workers: Part 1

While we're on vacation, we're re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on March 9, 2011. By Celeste Monforton "Death takes no holidays in industry and commerce," is how Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz described the toll of on-the-job death and disability for U.S. workers. The Secretary's remarks in 1968 were part of congressional hearings on legislation that ultimately established the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). He suggested that because most work-related fatalities and injuries happen one or two at a time, day in and day out…

Unfinished Business

The problem with scheduling something like last week's Ask a ScienceBlogger for a time when I'm out of town is that any interesting discussions that turn up in comments are sort of artificially shortened because I can't hold up my end of the conversation from a remote site. I do want to respond (below the fold) to a couple of points that were raised in the comments, though, mostly having to do with my skepticism about the Singularity. (Side note on literary matters: When I wrote dismissively that the Singularity is a silly idea, I didn't realize that I was going to spend the flight down to…

Where does the Trump Presidency stand a fortnight and a half in?

The most recent polling indicates that Donald Trump has a 43% approval and 53% disapproval rating. So he is not exactly loved by the American people, which is odd because he seems so lovable. And, he has told us that the American people love him. And his victory in the November election was unbelievably big league. But, that's how it is, according the scientific polling. Approval and favorability are apparently slightly different, but the pattern holds. The same polling tells us that the American people have a 45% favorable attitude about the president, which would be tremendous for any…

The Minnesota Recount

As a very hectic week settles down a bit, I can give you a little more information and perspective on the Minnesota US Senate Race recount. There are a number of misconceptions circulating about this process that I can dispel, and I have a pair of predictions for you: Taking the same exact data, we have the Democratic Party Line and the republican Party Line, wherein "line" means trend line on a graph. [Update: See this new analysis suggesting that the Republicans cheated] Let's start with the prediction. Given all the available data, we can now estimate what is going to happen as a…

Will vs. Grace - are people honest because they resist temptation or because they don't feel it?

In a world where the temptation to lie, deceive and cheat is both strong and profitable, what compels some people to choose the straight and narrow path? According to a new brain-scanning study, honest moral decisions depend more on the absence of temptation in the first place than on people wilfully resisting these lures. Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton and Harvard University came to this conclusion by using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain activity of people who were given a chance to lie. The volunteers were trying to predict the outcomes…

Some Thanksgiving recipes (part 1).

Having posted what I'm making for Thanksgiving, I am happy to accede to your requests for the recipes. Of course, I encourage you to violate the recipes at well (since that's how I was taught to cook). I'm posting these in two batches, so if you don't see the recipe you were looking for here, it will be posted in the next recipe post, which should be up by tonight. LINDA'S PICKLED PEARS 12 pears, pared, cored, and cut into quarters (d'anjou work well) 1.5 cups honey 4 cups cranberry juice 1 cup red or white wine vinegar 6 cinnamon sticks 1 tablespoon ground ginger 1 tablespoon ground cloves…

Candidate #1 for stupidest attack from a mercury maven ever

Those who still desperately cling to the concept that mercury in thimerosal in vaccines causes autism have been known to write some really stupid stuff trying to justify their position or attack someone else's rebuttal of the whole "hypothesis." This week has produced a bumper crop of such fallacy-laden "defenses" of the thimerosal gravy train--I mean, hypothesis--that two of them are worth a brief mention. Beware, though: The stupid, it burns. First up is a guy named Mike Wagnitz, who bills himself as having "over 20 years experience evaluating materials for toxic metals" and currently…

Sometimes good things happen: The antivaccine fringe suffers a setback in Congress

Well, it's done. The server migration should be finished. I was out and about last night giving a talk; so I'll only have time for a relatively brief post (for me, at least). Once again, things happen while I'm otherwise...indisposed. This time around, it's something that warms the cockles of what antivaccinationists perceive to be my pharma shill heart. Normally, it's considered bad form to openly express schadenfreude, but I do make at least one exception, and that's when bad things happen to antivaccinationist plans, particularly after they've been crowing about them for weeks. You might…

Science, Free Market and, Is Lakoff Scientific?

This is so old (December 03, 2004) and so long that I did not even bother to re-read it or check the the links. I am sure the commenters will draw attention to everything that is wrong in this post... First, here is some science, or really problems with science policy, or better still, some top-down nonsense: Two Must Reads http://www.chriscmooney.com/blog.asp?Id=1425 What women are supposed to want http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/what_women_are_supposed_to_want/ On the other hand, for some nice science, the new Tangled Bank is now online: http://penn.typepad.com/penn/2004/11/…

The Cleveland Clinic doubles down on its support for quackademic medicine disguised as "wellness"

I've been pretty hard on The Cleveland Clinic over the years, but justifiably so. After all, The Cleveland Clinic is one of the leading centers of quackademic medicine in the US; i.e., an academic medical center that studies and uses quackery as though it were legitimate medicine. Of course, this is a problem that is not in any way limited to The Cleveland Clinic. A decade ago, I tried to keep track of which academic medical centers had "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" programs that integrated quackery like acupuncture, chiropractic, naturopathy, reiki…

Who Will Grow Your Food? Part I: The Coming Demographic Crisis in Agriculture

Note: This is the beginning of a multi-part series on agricultural education, the farming demographic crisis and the question of who will grow our food - what the problems are, how we will find new farmers, how they will be trained. To me, this is one of the most urgent questions of our time. A quick, Jay Leno style quiz for the man and woman on the street. Who will grow your food in the coming decades? A. My friendly neighborhood agribusinessman will grow my food on a plantation the size of Wyoming using nearly enslaved non-white folks who are deported minutes after harvest. Or maybe…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: Breathe, breathe in the woo

As regular readers may have noticed, I was on vacation the last two Fridays in a row. To keep Your Friday Dose of Woo (YFDoW) going, I decided to resurrect a couple of posts from the old blog that would have made good installments of YFDoW installments, had YFDoW existed at the time when they were originally written. One thing I noticed upon coming back and approaching this first new YFDoW since getting back to work was that it seemed even harder than usual to settle on a specific topic this week. I looked back over some links that I had saved, but none of them fired me up enough to wade into…

Modeling antiviral resistance, XV: a few words about model assumptions

[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.] We have now gone through the entire paper on modeling the impact of antiviral resistance in an influenza control program, by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. Since a number of assumptions were made, we take some time to consider what effects they have on the model's results. In the…

Question for the academic types--interview requests

As y'all know, a frequent topic of conversation here is communicating science to the public. While many of us do it directly via sites such as this one, the bulk of science writing that the public will read is done by the pros--people writing for the magazines and newspapers, among other outlets. Often, their stories include interviews with research scientists. However, we're not always so easy to get in touch with, and we blow reporters off altogether--apparently, pretty frequently. On a listserv I subscribe to, there recently was a discussion amongst writers regarding how to get…

Black Lung: Dust Hasn't Settled on Deadly Disease

Louisville-Courier Journal reporters Laura Unger and Ralph Dunlop offer us the voices and faces of miners who are suffering from coal workers' pneumoconiosis.  Their special report, Black Lung: Dust Hasn't Settled on Deadly Disease, includes an on-line version which features five compelling videos featuring 40- and 50-year old coal miners who are now suffering with the disabling lung disease.  Mr. Danny Hall, 56, for example, who is still severely impaired despite receiving a lung transplant says "if I had to do over, I wouldn't ever go into coal mining." The reporters begin the series…

Green Sahara Cemeteries

I've been saving this picture for more than a year, not showing it to anyone or posting it anywhere online, not wanting to break the embargo: This was a picture I took of one of the fossils brought to SciFoo'07 by Paul Sereno and Gabrielle Lyon, together with the skull of Nigersaurus. Apparently, while digging for dinosaurs in Niger, Paul and the crew discovered an enormous and fascinating archaeological site - Gobero. They teamed up with anthropologists and archaeologists and spent two digging seasons analysing the site. The first results of this study are now finally published in my…

An unexpected challenge with teaching on-line

Three (or more) operating systems times three (or more) versions of software with bugs unique to one or systems (that I don't have) means too many systems for me to manage teaching. Thank the FSM they're not using Linux, too. (Let me see that would be Ubuntu Linux, RedHat Linux, Debian Linux, Yellow Dog Linux, Vine, Turbo, Slackware, etc.. It quickly gets to be too exponential.) Nope, sorry, three versions of Microsoft Office on three different operating systems are bad enough. This semester, I'm teaching an on-line for the first time ever. The subject isn't new to me. I've taught…

From the Archives: My theory of conferences

I couldn't agree more with Bonnie Swoger's sentiment that academic librarians need to stop going to library conferences, although I perhaps might not go that far. In any case, the last couple of weeks have been pretty fallow blogging weeks for me and I just can't seem to come up with any original commentary on the topic. Fortunately, I have an post from way back in June 2008 expressing many of the same sentiments, though probably neither as well nor as succinctly as Bonnie has. I'll also not that the post was excerpted in The Library Leadership Network. ============================== I saw…

Obesity, sexual orientation, and getting to a "healthy weight"

When a group of researchers supported by the HHS Office on Women's Health set about designing a weight-loss intervention for lesbian and bisexual (LB) women, they ran into a challenge: Many lesbian and bisexual women are averse to the idea of weight loss. Although LB women are more likely to be overweight or obese than their heterosexual counterparts, they are less likely to consider themselves overweight. The researchers conducted focus groups with LB women (some involving only overweight participants), and learned that participants often didn't prioritize weight loss, but did want to be…

Around the Blogosphere

One of the hallmarks of my business is that I spend an enormous amount of time waiting. As I sit in my office all day long, I don't really do all that much work, but the work I do is in five minute increments here and there. I print up docs and fax them off, then I have to wait for someone to fill them out and fax them back. I fax off a client's loan application and credit report to a lender, then I have to wait for them to send back a pre-approval. I go online and submit a loan, get it approved, call the client to let them know, then I have to wait for them to send me income documents. I…