The girl in the window - St. Petersburg Times
PLANT CITY — The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child’s face in the window.
A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered.
Everyone knew a woman lived in the house with her boyfriend and two adult sons. But they had never seen a child there, had never noticed anyone playing in the overgrown yard.
The girl looked young, 5 or 6, and thin. Too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.
The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away.
A remarkable and haunting story.
Friday, August 8, 2008
Missing votes spark lawsuit Columbus Dispatch Politics
The touch-screen voting setup used in half of Ohio’s 88 counties doesn’t work properly, and the former Diebold Election Systems should pay as a result, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said in a court filing yesterday.
The move comes fewer than 90 days before Ohio voters go to the polls in an election that could decide the presidential race, but Brunner says safeguards will be in place by then in the affected counties to mitigate any risks.
“We will make the equipment work, but this is not something that Ohio should be satisfied with for the long term,” Brunner said. “Our goal is to have Ohio taxpayers compensated for this equipment that doesn’t function properly.”
Brunner is seeking punitive damages from Diebold, now Premier Election Solutions, after she said an investigation showed that votes in at least 11 counties were “dropped” in recent elections when memory cards were uploaded to computer servers.
Elections workers discovered the missing votes, but not until many hours later in most cases, Brunner said. The malfunction first was discovered in Butler County in April, she said.
Forty-four counties, including Licking and Fairfield in central Ohio, use Premier touch-screens. Franklin County uses touch-screens from a different manufacturer.
OK, Fairfield County here….
Premier filed a lawsuit against the state and Cuyahoga County in May seeking a ruling that it had satisfied the obligations of its state contract to provide touch-screen voting machines in the county, which replaced the equipment this year.
County officials responded by accusing the company of breach of contract, fraud and negligence, and Brunner filed a counterclaim against the company yesterday in Franklin County Common Pleas Court.
Brunner wants the court to find that Premier made false representations about its equipment and failed to live up to contractual obligations and warranties. Ohio spent millions of dollars in mostly federal funds to upgrade voting systems after problems with punch-card ballots in Florida in the 2000 presidential election.
Premier spokesman Chris Riggall said he hadn’t seen the court filing and couldn’t comment on it specifically.
But he said a conflict was identified involving the company’s software and virus-protection software.
Brilliant. Votes = viruses. Way to go, Ohio.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Win Points for McCain!
Spread John McCain’s official talking points around the Web — and you could win valuable prizes!That, in essence, is the McCain campaign’s pitch to supporters to join its new online effort, one that combines the features of “AstroTurf” campaigning with the sort of customer-loyalty programs offered by airlines, hotel chains, restaurants and the occasional daily newspaper.
On McCain’s Web site, visitors are invited to “Spread the Word” about the presumptive Republican nominee by sending campaign-supplied comments to blogs and Web sites under the visitor’s screen name. The site offers sample comments (”John McCain has a comprehensive economic plan . . .”) and a list of dozens of suggested destinations, conveniently broken down into “conservative,” “liberal,” “moderate” and “other” categories. Just cut and paste.
Activists and political operatives have used volunteers or paid staff to seed radio call-in shows or letters-to-the-editor pages for years, typically without disclosing the caller or letter writer’s connection to a candidate or cause. Like the fake grass for which the practice is named, such AstroTurf messages look as though they come from the grass roots but are ersatz.
McCain’s campaign has taken the same idea and given it an Internet-era twist. It also has taken the concept one step further.
People who sign up for McCain’s program receive reward points each time they place a favorable comment on one of the listed Web sites (subject to verification by McCain’s webmasters). The points can be traded for prizes, such as books autographed by McCain, preferred seating at campaign events, even a ride with the candidate on his bus, known as the Straight Talk Express, according to campaign spokesman Brian Rogers.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
How magicians control your mind - The Boston Globe
… The vanishing ball illusion is one of the most basic tricks a magician can learn: a ball is thrown repeatedly into the air and caught. Then, on the final throw, it disappears in midair. In fact, the magician has merely mimed the last throw, following the ball’s imagined upward trajectory with his eyes while keeping it hidden in his hand.
But if the technique is easily explained, the phenomenon itself is not. If done right, the trick actually makes observers see the ball rising into the air on the last toss and vanishing at its apex. As Rensink points out, this is something more powerful than merely getting someone to look in the wrong direction - it’s a demonstration of how easy it is to nudge the brain into the realm of actual hallucination. And cognitive scientists still don’t know exactly what’s causing it to happen.
And, at the most basic and immediate level:
“The main thing is knowing that you’ve got limitations,” says the cognitive researcher Daniel Simons. “Most people don’t understand the extent to which talking on a cellphone affects their driving.”
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Prescription Data Used To Assess Consumers
Health and life insurance companies have access to a powerful new tool for evaluating whether to cover individual consumers: a health “credit report” drawn from databases containing prescription drug records on more than 200 million Americans.
…
Traditionally, insurance companies have judged an applicant’s risk by gathering medical records from physicians’ offices. But the new tools offer the advantage of being “electronic, fast and cheap,” said Mark Franzen, managing director of Milliman IntelliScript, which provides consumers’ personal drug profiles to insurers.
…
The companies receive data only on individuals who are in clients in PBMs’ databases, generally excluding, say, people who pay for drugs in cash.
But seriously, we’re talking about the profits of the most profitable sector of the US economy. Is it so hard to foresee a time when paying cash for prescriptions is considered insurance fraud?
Monday, August 4, 2008
