MONSTER-IN-LAW

DE-196-TLT LK,KOL


///////////////New Caregiver Here
by LadyOnAHarley
My mother passed over March 30, 2008. Before she did, she made me promise to take care of my father. So, I promised. He wound up in the hospital severly dehydrated. They wanted to put him in a nursing home because he lived alone and there was no one to care for him. I told them I was moving in to take care of him if they could just keep him a few more days allowing me time to move my stuff. I gave up my apartment, signed it over to my boyfriend, gave up my boyfriend, gave up my kids, and my life as I knew it and moved in.

He had colon surgery Oct 3rd. The surgeon said he got it all. So we just assumed he got all the cancer. When we went back to the doctor who did his colonoscopy, he said he doesn't understand why the surgeon always says that without explaining to his patients what he got all of. Well, what he did get all of was the mass that was blocking my father from going to the bathroom. What he failed to explain was the fact that the cancer had already spread before they removed it. He's in stage three. He also has Alzheimer's. He has bouts of violence, but, very rarely on the violence. He forgets he's in his own home and at times insists he's in someone else's home. He still does for him self, like going to the bathroom, fixing his own food at times, dressing him self. With all that he's good one day bad the next. Yesturday morning he came down stairs and said to me,"I don't understand it. I know this is my house but, I don't know how I got here." The other night, my night aide said he was looking for his brother under the couch cushins. He's been like this for the last four or five days. His mind is starting to come back and he'll be good for a while until the Alzheimer's kicks in again.


//////////////////BLF NT=The war against entropy
by s
A few days ago I picked up a copy of the latest issue of Spirituality & Health. There was an article by neuroscientist Peggy La Cerra about self, the evolutionary untiliy of our 'selves', and what self is neurologically. It was a most interesting article and I decided to followup with her related book, The Origin of Minds (with Roger Bingham). As it is out of print (2002) and a used copy is over $32.00 plus S&H, I located it in our local library.

When La Cerra was a younger lady, from a string of rather nasty personal events (at least 3 close deaths of family and friends, one after another), she found herself depressed. Being a student of neurological processes, she contemplated her current situation of depression and hit upon the answer. This immediately took her out of her depression and she began writing down her new theory. It resulted in a paper published in 1998 (I believe it was) and then the 2002 book.

La Cerra considered that all types of life are in a war again entropy. Any organism must expend less energy to acquire the energy (nourishment) to live, otherwise death occurs. This war against entropy is an evolutionary drive. What La Cerra saw originally, which she didn't write about in the first paper or the book, only making it public in the magazine article, was that her depression was a survival mechanism. Her own biology was shutting down to conserve energy, because the chain of circumstances she happened to find herself in, were overcoming her drive to acquire a surplus of energy necessary for survival. I find this idea immensely appealing, and most probably true.



/////////////////////AS=How To Sell More: Encourage Your Customers To Touch Everything
by Vito Rispo
or: How To Overcome Bias: Don’t Touch Anything For Sale Anywhere



According to a new Ohio State University study, merely touching a product in a store can make you willing to pay more for it. It’s been known for a while that consumers tend to feel ownership of goods even before they buy them, but this study is the first to examine that phenomenon in any depth. Researchers have shown that it can take as little as 30 seconds after first touching an object for a consumer to grow attached to it, even something as insignificant as a coffee mug.

The researchers ran a study where participants were shown a coffee mug, and were allowed to hold it either for 10 seconds or 30 seconds. Then they were then allowed to bid on the mug in either a closed (where bids could not be seen) or open (where they could be seen) auction, and all participants were told the retail price of the mug. It turns out that people who held the coffee mug longer seemed not only more compelled to outbid others in an auction, but they were also more willing to bid more than the retail price for that item. Read on for a detailed description of the study, and some suggestions on what this phenomenon means in practical terms:


//////////////////////Google Gmail Within Striking Distance Of Hotmail
by d
The growth of Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s Gmail service is accelerating and, if current trends continue, it could surpass Windows Live Hotmail by the end of this year.Between December 2007 and December 2008, Gmail's number of unique monthly visitors in the United States grew 43%, from …
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///////////////////Bill Gates just released mosquitos into the audience at TED and said, 'Not only poor people should experience this.'"

That was the post by Facebook's Senior Platform Manager Dave Morin on social networking site Twitter.

The event took place at the TED2009 (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference on Wednesday in Long Beach, Calif., where the Microsoft chairman was delivering a presentation about malaria education and eradication. Malaria is transmitted from person to person via mosquito bites.


/////////////////////DARWIN: THE RELUCTANT MATHEMATICIAN
Despite disliking mathematics, the great biologist inadvertently advanced statistics By Julie Rehmeyer Web edition : 2:16 pm Text Size
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COMMON TOADFLAXDarwin by chance noticed that the seeds from cross-fertilized Common Toadflax plants grew into bigger, stronger plants than the plants from self-fertilized seeds. The observation spurred further experiments.
For all his other talents, Charles Darwin wasn’t much of a mathematician. In his autobiography, he writes that he studied math as a young man but also remembers that “it was repugnant to me.” He dismissed complex mathematical arguments and wrote to a friend, “I have no faith in anything short of actual measurement and the Rule of Three,” where the “Rule of Three” was an extremely simple mathematical calculation.

But history played a joke on the great biologist: It made him a contributor to the development of statistics.


////////////////Early whales gave birth on land
by scinews@sciencenews.org (Science News)
Fossil finds help fill in gaps in the land-to-water transition



/////////////////Life expectancy up when cities clean the air
by scinews@sciencenews.org (Science News)
Study shows people live longer after fine-particulate air pollution reduced



///////////////////Most heritable surnames, like Y chromosomes, are passed from father
to son. These unique cultural markers of coancestry might therefore have a
genetic correlate in shared Y chromosome types among men sharing
surnames, although the link could be affected by mutation, multiple
foundation for names, nonpaternity, and genetic drift.



///////////////////verall the finding is that women with higher BMI (heavier for their height) tend to make less money than slimmer women.



/////////////////Central Africa is currently peopled by numerous sedentary agriculturalist populations neighboring the largest group of mobile hunter-gatherers, the Pygmies [1,2,3]. Although archeological remains attest to Homo sapiens' presence in the Congo Basin for at least 30,000 years, the demographic history of these groups, including divergence and admixture, remains widely unknown [4,5,6]. Moreover, it is still debated whether common history or convergent adaptation to a forest environment resulted in the short stature characterizing the pygmies [2,7]. We genotyped 604 individuals at 28 autosomal tetranucleotide microsatellite loci in 12 nonpygmy and 9 neighboring pygmy populations. We found a high level of genetic heterogeneity among Western Central African pygmies, as well as evidence of heterogeneous levels of asymmetrical gene flow from nonpygmies to pygmies, consistent with the variable sociocultural barriers against intermarriages. Using approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods [8], we compared several historical scenarios. The most likely points toward a unique ancestral pygmy population that diversified 2800 years ago, contemporarily with the Neolithic expansion of nonpygmy agriculturalists [9,10]. Our results show that recent isolation, genetic drift, and heterogeneous admixture enabled a rapid and substantial genetic differentiation among Western Central African pygmies. Such an admixture pattern is consistent with the various sociocultural behaviors related to intermariages between pygmies and nonpygmies.



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