Friday, February 5, 2016

Thursday, February 4, 2016

The Word is Out

Everybody Hates Ted . . . Cruz

This a quick read.

The more you know, the less you like/trust or want to have anything to do with him.

https://newrepublic.com/article/128808/everybody-hates-ted?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%202/4/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Another Damn Shame!

This is an excerpt from an interview with Bill Marler, a lawyer specializing in food-borne illness.

The story he tells below hits home because my nephew was one of the very young e coli victims, getting seriously ill after drinking Odwalla juice.

~~~~~~~~~~

You keep telling me that you have all these crazy stories—all these things I wouldn’t believe. Can you share one of them?

I actually have the perfect one, which I told at a recent conference, and really floored people.

Do you know the juice Odwalla? Well, the juice is made by a company in California, which has made all sorts of other juices, many of which have been unpasteurized, because it’s more natural. Anyway, they were kind of like Chipotle, in the sense that they had this aura of good and earthy and healthful. And they were growing very quickly. And they had an outbreak. It killed a kid in Colorado, and sickened dozens of others very seriously, and the company was very nearly brought to its knees. [The outbreak, which was linked to apple juice produced by Odwalla, happened twenty years ago].

If you look at how they handled the PR stuff, most PR people would say well, they handled it great. They took responsibility, they were upfront and honest about it, etc etc. What’s interesting though is that behind the scenes, on the legal side of the equation, I had gotten a phone call, which by itself isn’t uncommon. In these high profile cases, people tend to call me—former employees, former government officials, family members of people who have fallen ill, or unknown people giving me tips. But this one was different. It was a Saturday—I remember it well—and someone left me a voicemail telling me to make sure I get the U.S. Army documents regarding Odwalla. I was like 'what the heck, what the heck are they talking about?' So I decided to follow up on it, and reached out to the Army and got something like 100 pages of documents. Well, it turned out that the Army had been solicited to put Odwalla juice on Army PX’s, which sell goods, and, because of that, the Army had gone to do an inspection of a plant, looked around and wrote out a report. And heres what’s nuts: it had concluded that Odwalla’s juice was not fit for human consumption.

Wow.

It’s crazy, right? The Army had decided that Odwalla’s juice wasn’t fit for human consumption, and Odwalla knew this, and yet kept selling it anyway. When I got that document, it was pretty incredible. But then after the outbreak, we got to look at Odwalla’s documents, which included emails, and there were discussions amongst people at the company, months before the outbreak, about whether they should do end product testing—which is finished product testing—to see whether they had pathogens in their product, and the decision was made to not test, because if they tested there would be a body of data. One of my favorite emails said something like “once you create a body of data, it’s subpoenable.”

So, basically, they decided to protect themselves instead of their consumers?

Yes, essentially. Look, there are a lot of sad stories in my line of work. I’ve been in ICUs, where parents have had to pull the plug on their child. Someone commented on my article about the six things I don’t eat, saying that I must be some kind of freak, but when you see a child die from eating an undercooked hamburger, it does change your view of hamburgers. It just does. I am a lawyer, but I’m also a human.

That Odwalla story is one of the crazier stories I can think of, but there are many others, and there would be many fewer if the way we handled food safety here made more sense.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/02/why-a-top-food-safety-expert-doesnt-eat-oysters-and-always-orders-meat-well-done/?wpisrc=nl_rainbow

True Crime

From Now I Know -

D-N-Nay

In the fall of 1994, the United States was introduced to a new tool in the world of crime solving and prosecution -- DNA evidence. The O.J. Simpson trial had captured the nation’s (if not much of the world’s) attention, and a large part of the trial’s outcome hung on DNA. At the time, the use of DNA evidence was still emerging, and the science wasn’t well understood -- or trusted -- by juries. (In September of 1994, the New York Times explored the issue. It’s a fascinating, contemporaneously-written glimpse into the history of law and science.) Even though the DNA evidence found at the crime scene in Simpson’s case was, by contemporary standards, almost certainly enough to secure a conviction, well, that's not what happened.

But today, DNA evidence is almost always trusted and its findings dispositive. If a suspect’s DNA is found at a crime scene, he or she better have a good reason as to why. And on the flip side, the presence of someone else’s DNA (and the absence of the accused's) can be used to demonstrate that the accused didn’t commit a crime. (Here’s a list of convictions overturned because of later-processed DNA evidence. There are a lot.)

So to summarize: if your DNA is at the crime scene, you’re in trouble; if someone else’s is there and yours is not, you’re in pretty good shape.

Usually.

In January of 2009, a three-man jewel thief team pulled off a near-perfect crime. They broken into a Berlin department store named Kaufhaus des Westens and walked out with $6.8 million in goods. As TIME reported, the break-in was something straight out of a movie; “[the] masked, gloved thieves were caught on surveillance cameras sliding down ropes from the store's skylights, outsmarting its sophisticated security system” -- they couldn’t be identified on the security footage -- and their latex gloves hid their fingerprints.

But one of the three robbers made a small and almost fatal mistake: he left one of those latex gloves behind. Authorities were able to pull a bead of sweat from it, and from that, get a read on the alleged thief's DNA. Police ran the DNA through their database hoping to find a match. They didn’t find one.

They found two.

Specifically, they found Hassam and Abbas O. -- their last names, pursuant to German law, were not released. But something more important was: the fact that they are identical twins. The brothers, age 27 at the time of the jewel heist, both had criminal records (a history of theft and fraud), and were therefore both in the database. Authorities knew that one one of them had left the sweaty glove behind, and, in hopes of determining which brother was the guilty party, arrested both.

The police didn't get very far. Neither brother was willing to rat on the other -- and their lawyers did not want them held in custody indefinitely. So the brothers went to court, demanding they either be formally accused of the crime or released. ABC News reported on the court's finding: "From the evidence we have, we can deduce that at least one of the brothers took part in the crime, but it has not been possible to determine which one."

Unable to avoid the genetically-built-in "it wasn't me, it was him!" excuse, the court had no choice: the brothers were set free.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/152ac3eea600c617

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

More Proof

From Vox -

Most teachers are overlooking huge numbers of gifted black students

For high-achieving students, gifted education programs can have great benefits — more challenging coursework, smaller class sizes, and individualized attention. But not all students have equal access to gifted programs at school.

It turns out black students were about half as likely as white students to be placed in gifted programs, according to a national study released last month by researchers at Vanderbilt University. This might be due to the process of identifying which students are gifted, whether it's through testing, a subjective panel, or teacher referrals, which are where the discrepancy really sticks out.

The study also found that black teachers were three times more likely to recommend black students for gifted services than nonblack teachers.

But it's not simply a matter of black teachers being sympathetic. A 2015 paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, found that when a school district screened all its students for giftedness (rather than relying on teacher referrals), there was a 180 percent increase in the number of disadvantaged students who qualified.

So the problem may be with the process — and nationally, it's an inconsistent one. So how do you define a "gifted" child, and is one system more equitable than others?

The US Department of Education says gifted students show strong intellect, creativity, artistic capability, leadership skills, or strength in specific academic fields. Those guidelines say kids like this need "services or activities not ordinarily provided by the school in order to fully develop those capabilities."

Continue at:

http://www.vox.com/2016/2/3/10905466/gifted-black-students

100 Years of Beauty: Dominican Republic

Fathers With Daughters Can Relate

Tuesday, February 2, 2016

WOW!

H/T - Forrest

Political Cartoons

A couple of my favorites:

http://theweek.com/cartoons?sort=publish_date&page=4

Monday, February 1, 2016

Lance's Legacy: Another Cheater

From The Huffington Post -

Secret Motor Found On Cyclist's Bike At World Championships

"It's absolutely clear that there was technological fraud."

02/01/2016 02:37 am ET

YORICK JANSENS VIA GETTY IMAGES

The motor was discovered inside the frame of the bicycle being used by teen Femke Van den Driessche, pictured.

(Reuters) - Cycling was being forced to confront a new controversy on Sunday after the sport's head confirmed the first top-level case of "technological fraud" with a hidden motor being found on a Belgian cyclist's bike.

The motor was discovered inside the frame of the machine being used by teenagerFemke Van den Driessche at the world cyclo-cross championship in Zolder, Belgium, Bryan Cookson, the president of the International Cycling Union (UCI), said.

"It's absolutely clear that there was technological fraud. There was a concealed motor. I don't think there are any secrets about that," Cookson told a news conference.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/secret-motor-cyclist-bike-world-championships_us_56af087ce4b00b033aafa518