Mahawil

updated, still with chox-mix goodness

The latest version [as far as I know] of Merritt Clifton's list of selected dog attacks has been posted here, at Scribd, by someone who sucks at Photoshop.The chox mix is still listed, along with the buff mastiff, the Dauschund, the East Highland Terrier and the Weimaeaner. The Australian cattle dog, the Australian blue heeler, the Blue heeler and the Queensland heeler are still listed as separate breeds.One big change: the Analysis section of the report has been removed. And in his brief introduction, Clifton adds a paragraph defending his numbers. Click for big:Seriously, I could beat my head on rocks. Merritt Clifton has no idea how many dog attacks there are each year by any given breed. No one does. The last time I checked, not one state kept track of dog attacks by breed. We do know that over 6,000 people were hospitalized as a result of dog attacks in the US in one year: From the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: “Of an estimated 333,700 patients treated for dog bites in emergency departments (EDs) in 1994, approximately 6,000 were hospitalized.”For the record, Clifton's latest report states that "Pit bulls, Rottweilers, Presa Canarios, and their mixes" were responsible for a total of 1894 attacks "doing bodily harm" in the US and Canada from 1982 to 2008. Clifton still lumps every sort of mixed breed with "purebreds" [while stating that "only attacks by dogs of clearly identified breed type or ancestry are included"]. This approach has no basis in science or anything else.Related — I think:Law enforcement officials classified the dog in the Jan. 3 attack as a pit bull, boxer and black lab mix.One magazine editor simplified this classification of dog.“It’s a mongrel basically,” Wash.-based Animal People editor Merritt Clifton said.He also said insurance representatives and dog wardens will often classify the dog by what type of dog it looks like. This classification has little to do with genetics, he said, because often shelter operators are simply attempting to determine the risk the dog will fight with other dogs.Though some might label pit bulls as aggressive, Clifton said pit bulls are often reactive because of the fact they were originally trained to hunt rats on ships. However, because of their size and their inability to pull large amounts of cargo from ships, they were not considered apt for either job and instead began being bred for dogfighting on the docks.This rat-killing, he said, has made them more reactive.He also talked about the head-shaking mechanism pit bulls would use to kill the rat, which in bites causes the tearing of skin, causing more damage than other dog bites. However, he said this can be combated by pushing the arm or other appendage further into the dog’s mouth, which will force a release. [Source]Inconceivable. Really. Big hat tip to the most excellent Caveat for the link to that, er... fascinating article.

Maternal depression linked to disturbed sleep in their infants

Kelly Wagner A study published in the journal SLEEP suggests that babies born to mothers with depression are more likely to suffer from significant sleep disturbances at 2 weeks postpartum that continue until 6 months of age. Findings of the study are of particular importance, as sleep disturbances in infancy may result in increased risk for developing early-onset depression in childhood. Results indicate that infants born to mothers with depression had significant sleep disturbances compared to low-risk infants; the high-risk group had an hour longer nocturnal sleep latency, shorter sleep episodes and lower sleep efficiency than infants who were born to mothers without depression. Although average sleep time in a 24 hours did not differ by risk group at eight two or four weeks, nocturnal total sleep time was 97 minutes longer in the low-risk group at both recording periods. High-risk infants also had significantly more daytime sleep episodes of a shorter average duration. Previous studies have found that levels of cortisol, a hormone that is associated with stress, is increased during pregnancy and after delivery in depressed mothers, indicating that the mother's hormone level may affect the infant's sleep. According to the lead author, Roseanne Armitage, PhD, director of the Sleep and Chronophysiology Laboratory at the University Of Michigan Depression Center, while maternal depression does have a negative effect on infants' sleep, the damage may be reversible. "We do think that we could develop a behavioral and environmental intervention to improve entrainment of sleep and circadian rhythms in the high risk infants," said Armitage. "However, whether it is maternal hormones that "cause" the sleep problems in infants is not yet known. It could genetic, hormonal, or both. Regardless of the cause, they may still be modifiable since brain regulation is very plastic and responsive in childhood." The study involved 18 healthy full term infants, half of whom were male. Seven infants were born to women with no personal or family history of depression and 11 were born to women diagnosed with depression or with elevated levels of depression symptoms. Five women were experiencing a Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) episode during the beginning of the study. Infants who were born to mothers who has past or present MDD according to the DSM-IV or who scored high for postnatal depression were placed in a high-risk group for depression; all other infants were considered to be low-risk. Both the mother and infants' sleep was measured with light and motion sensor actigraphy over the course of seven consecutive days at two-weeks postpartum and monthly thereafter for six months. Mothers were also asked to complete daily sleep/wake diaries. Mothers were recruited during the last trimester of pregnancy through perinatal mood disorders or obstetrics clinics at the University of Michigan. Authors state that findings of this study claim that future work should attempt to determine if sleep in infancy is modifiable and to define the optimal conditions for entrainment of sleep to the nocturnal period. According to previous studies, untreated infant sleep problems can become chronic, with implications for the mental health and well-being of both the child and the mother. The difficulties of mothers who are already vulnerable to anxiety and depression will be exacerbated if they also are deprived of sleep. Armitage R, Heather Flynn H, Hoffmann R, et al. Early Developmental Changes in Sleep in Infants: The Impact of Maternal Depression. SLEEP 2009 May;32(5):693-696

Punch Drunk

Worried about your pub? Well if it is owned by Punch Taverns, maybe you ought to be. The Punch Group owes its bankers £4.6 billion pounds, secured against its estate of 8,300 pubs. Now when it gets to huge amounts of zeros, I get a bit confused, but it seems to me that is an average debt of £554,000 per pub. No wonder they are screwing their publicans and selling pubs as fast as they can. Not that it will do them any good. As the London Evening Standard remarked the other day "The group has bought back £318 million of debt for a bargain £200 million in the past six months. At 60p in the pound, that either shows investors think the company is doomed, or that they are so strapped for cash they are happy to take what they can get."How did all this arise I hear you ask, when at the beer orders, most pubs were owned by brewers and more or less debt free? Well, when the pub companies were set up, each pub was mortgaged to pay the breweries for the pubs they had to divest. When pub companies subsequently merged or were taken over, a little bit more was added to the mortgage, with the surplus being trousered by those that sold them. Repeat quite a few times, until we get where we are today. A massive bloody debt that is being paid by the PubCos tenants - and, of course, by their customers. This couldn't go on for ever. Something would happen to stop it. Well a few things have. All at once. They are running out of mugs to take their leases, people aren't visiting pubs and the estate isn't worth what it used to be.If Punch goes bust, there will be a fire sale of pubs at realistic prices. These pubs then, unburdened by huge debt, might just start to make money again.The market says the group is worth £237 million. Latest figures indicate they "only" own 7371 pubs, so the debt per pub is actually worse.

Face It, Cats Don’t Like You

I often liken cats and the general feline species to a cheerleader I once knew in junior high school who often gave you this sarcastic look that either meant she hated you or wanted you to go away. Thats because, lets face it, cats dont like you. And when I say you it means all of you. Because while we all think the cats we cherish are just funny or quirky or aloof; the reality is theyre just putting up with us until the mother ship arrives and they can finally tell us all what they really think. Talk to the cat lovers and they will write off what I like to call the catitutde to a bunch of human traits that cats dont even have. Cats are adorably-egotistical, some will say. Cats are lovable balls of fur and fury, others have said. Cats love their owners, but are very protective in the company of strangers&thus their constant scratching and hissing. Face it, cats dont like any of us. People joke that cats could be from another planet and Im not altogether convinced they arent. Landing here on Earth during Egyptian times, they quickly assimilated themselves and became (what the History books claim) the most beloved pets of the Egyptian times. Evidenced, by of course, all those pictographs that prominently featured cats wearing classic Egyptian head garb. I know people who liken cats in Egypt to Jerry Lewis in France. (KnowwhatImean?) Dogs are dopey and lovable. Theyre also kind of stupid. But, dont we (as a culture) love dopey stupid people? Dont we embrace the stupid? Look at the covers of mainstream magazines and tell me who were following around (cough, Britney, cough) and then tell me we dont love our stupid folks. Same goes for the dogs  with a vocabulary that doesnt exceed that of a two year old child, we can pretty much love our dogs and not worry about them reprogramming the alarm code for our home and then accidentally (ahem) calling the police on us. Cats? Not so much. You often hear the stories of cats dialing 911. Of cats saving their owners from an untimely death. Of cats smartly and quickly dealing with tragic and dangerous situations. My dog sleeps in his own poop. Bring up a list of all the other pets we have, from guinea pigs and mice to birds and fish&and throw a cat in there for good measure. And at the end of the day when you look at the entire list&its like looking at a list of countries like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, France, Italy and Iraq. Can you guess which animal is like Iraq? Cough, cat, cough. The cat lovers and naysayers will defend cats to the bitter end. They will recount the stories of love and cuddling and scratch posts. They will say, Well if cats dont like me then why would they save me in dangerous and life-threatening situations? The cat avoiders will respond to that by saying that cats are just keeping us all alive so that someday we can become their slaves, much like the Egyptians. Maybe 2012 is what theyre waiting for. But I dont have time for conspiracy theories and alien jokes. I dont have time for any of it because I have come to accept the fact that cats just dont like me. Or you. Or anyone. Theyre pretending they like us just so they can use us until they no longer need us. Like that junior high school cheerleader. A hex on you, mlady.

Data interchange problems come in all sizesW3C Q&A Weblog

I had a pretty small data interchange problem the other day: I just wanted to archive some play lists that I had compiled using various music player daemon (mpd) clients. The mpd server stores playlists as simple m3u files, i.e. line-oriented files with a path to the media file on each line. But that's too fragile for archive and interchange purposes. I had a similar problem a while back with iTunes playlists. In that episode, I chose hAudio, an HTML dialect in progress in the microformats community, as my target. Unfortunately, hAudio changed out from under me between when I started and when I finished. So this time, a simple search found the music ontology and I tried it with RDFa, which lets you use any RDF vocabulary in HTML*. I'm mostly pleased with the results: from A Song's Best Friend_ The Very Best Of John Denver [Disc 1] by John Denver Poems, Prayers And Promises from WOW Worship (orange) by Compilations Did you Feel the Mountains Tremble from Family Music Party by Trout Fishing In America Back When I Could Fly The album names come before the track names because I didn't read enough of the the RDFa primer when I was coding; RDFa includes @rev as well as @rel for reversing subject/object order. See an advogato episode on m3uin.py for details about the code. The Music Ontology was developed by a handful of people who staked out a claim in URI space (http://musicontology.org/...) and happily took comments from as big a review community as they could manage, but they had no obligation to get a really global consensus. The microformats process is intended to reach a global consensus so that staking out a claim in URI space is superfluous; it works well given certain initial conditions about how common the problem is and availability of pre-web designs to draw from. Perhaps playlists (and media syndication, as hAudio seems to be expanding in scope to hMedia) will eventually reach these conditions, but the music ontology already meets my needs, since I'm the sort who doesn't mind declaring my data vocabulary with URIs. My view of Web architecture is shaped by episodes such as this one. While giga-scale deployment is always impressive and definitely something we should design for, small scale deployment is just as important. The Web spread, initially, not because of global phenomena such as Wikipedia and Facebook but because you didn't need your manager's permission to try it out; you didn't even need a domain name; you could just run it on your LAN or even on just one machine with no server at all. In an Oct 2008 tech plenary session on web architecture, Henri Sivonen said: I see the Web as the public Web that people can access. The resources you can navigate publicly. I define Web as the information space accessible to the public via a browser. If a mobile operator operates behind walls, this is not part of the Web. I can't say that I agree with that perspective. I'm no great fan of walled gardens either, but freedom means freedom to do things we don't like as well as freedom to do things we do like. And architecture and policy should have a sort of church-and-state separation between them. Plus, data interchange happens not just at planetary scale, but also within mobile devices, across devices, and across communities and enterprises of all shapes and sizes. I've gone a little outside the scope of current standards; RDFa has only been specified for use in modular XHTML, with the application/xhtml+xml media type, so far. See also: Feb 2009: Palm webOS approach to HTML extensibility: x-mojo-* Aug 2008: The details of data in documents: GRDDL, profiles, and HTML5

Data interchange problems come in all sizesW3C Q&A Weblog

I had a pretty small data interchange problem the other day: I just wanted to archive some play lists that I had compiled using various music player daemon (mpd) clients. The mpd server stores playlists as simple m3u files, i.e. line-oriented files with a path to the media file on each line. But that's too fragile for archive and interchange purposes. I had a similar problem a while back with iTunes playlists. In that episode, I chose hAudio, an HTML dialect in progress in the microformats community, as my target. Unfortunately, hAudio changed out from under me between when I started and when I finished. So this time, a simple search found the music ontology and I tried it with RDFa, which lets you use any RDF vocabulary in HTML*. I'm mostly pleased with the results: from A Song's Best Friend_ The Very Best Of John Denver [Disc 1] by John Denver Poems, Prayers And Promises from WOW Worship (orange) by Compilations Did you Feel the Mountains Tremble from Family Music Party by Trout Fishing In America Back When I Could Fly The album names come before the track names because I didn't read enough of the the RDFa primer when I was coding; RDFa includes @rev as well as @rel for reversing subject/object order. See an advogato episode on m3uin.py for details about the code. The Music Ontology was developed by a handful of people who staked out a claim in URI space (http://musicontology.org/...) and happily took comments from as big a review community as they could manage, but they had no obligation to get a really global consensus. The microformats process is intended to reach a global consensus so that staking out a claim in URI space is superfluous; it works well given certain initial conditions about how common the problem is and availability of pre-web designs to draw from. Perhaps playlists (and media syndication, as hAudio seems to be expanding in scope to hMedia) will eventually reach these conditions, but the music ontology already meets my needs, since I'm the sort who doesn't mind declaring my data vocabulary with URIs. My view of Web architecture is shaped by episodes such as this one. While giga-scale deployment is always impressive and definitely something we should design for, small scale deployment is just as important. The Web spread, initially, not because of global phenomena such as Wikipedia and Facebook but because you didn't need your manager's permission to try it out; you didn't even need a domain name; you could just run it on your LAN or even on just one machine with no server at all. In an Oct 2008 tech plenary session on web architecture, Henri Sivonen said: I see the Web as the public Web that people can access. The resources you can navigate publicly. I define Web as the information space accessible to the public via a browser. If a mobile operator operates behind walls, this is not part of the Web. I can't say that I agree with that perspective. I'm no great fan of walled gardens either, but freedom means freedom to do things we don't like as well as freedom to do things we do like. And architecture and policy should have a sort of church-and-state separation between them. Plus, data interchange happens not just at planetary scale, but also within mobile devices, across devices, and across communities and enterprises of all shapes and sizes. I've gone a little outside the scope of current standards; RDFa has only been specified for use in modular XHTML, with the application/xhtml+xml media type, so far. See also: Feb 2009: Palm webOS approach to HTML extensibility: x-mojo-* Aug 2008: The details of data in documents: GRDDL, profiles, and HTML5