Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts

Monday, July 20, 2015

Solving the Brutal Murder of a Prominent Orthopedic Surgeon and World Renowned Expert in Cancer Research

Dr. Mary Stults Sherman and the apartment building she was found murdered
Prominent orthopedic surgeon and world renowned expert in cancer research,  Dr. Mary Sherman (left) was brutally murdered on July 21, 1964 (the same day the Warren Commission started taking testimony on Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities in New Orleans) in her apartment building on St. Charles Avenue, in New Orleans. This 'assassination' remains officially unsolved--maybe because of the memo from J Edgar Hoover telling SAC-NO (Special Agent-in-charge of the New Orleans FBI office) that no active FBI investigation was to be conducted into the Mary Sherman murder--but there are some investigators and authors, in particular, Edward T. Haslam, author of Dr. Mary’s Monkey: How the Unsolved Murder of a Doctor, a Secret Laboratory in New Orleans and Cancer-Causing Monkey Viruses are Linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK Assassination and Emerging Global Epidemics, and Mary, Ferrie and the Monkey Virus: Story of an Underground Medical Laboratory, who discovered the truth regarding this very strange murder and, believe it or not, the assassination of John F. Kennedy is closely intertwined. 

Dr. Sherman was stabbed in the heart, liver, arm, leg, and stomach, and her right arm and rib cage were completely incinerated, totally disintegrated, yet the hair on her head remained untouched. The incinerated body parts supposedly occurred due to a small mattress fire, but the investigators determined that the massive burns inflicted upon her could not have occurred in her apartment.  Of course, the details of her missing arm and ribs were not released to the public.  Moreover, the wound to the heart hemorrhaged but the wound to the liver did not, indicating that she was alive at the time of the heart wound but already dead by the time the wound to the liver was inflicted.

Who? What? Why?



A little more history on the subject:

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Saturday, November 23, 2013

Talk About False Advertising: Just Say No to no!no!

While the FDA is busy attacking legitimate companies like Blue Diamond for making truthful claims about walnuts, based on hard science, companies like PhotoMedex-Radiancy [PHMD], manufacturer of no!no! Hair Removal System engages in an extraordinarily heavy campaign of national television and Internet advertising to promote the sale of this product, making false claims, supposedly supported by science and research in order to rob decent people of their time and money.

As Radiancy documents submitted in court show, Radiancy deliberately engaged in a massive advertising campaign based on bogus claims lacking any scientific basis, including knowingly false claims that the no!no! "provides an effect similar to what lasers accomplish in the dermatologist office"; produces "laser-like results"; is "like laser and IPL [intense pulsed light] treatments, the heat gradually disrupts the hair growth cycle." Mimicking medical laser claims, Radiancy claimed that the no!no! Hair provided "up to 94% reduction in hair re-growth", allowed users to "get rid of unwanted hair and keep it gone" and "have a life of freedom from hair." As Radiancy admitted in papers filed with the court shortly before the settlement, it has dropped all such claims as a result of Tria's lawsuit.
In these hard-to-avoid infomercials, the aforementioned company declares that no!no! not only slows down hair regrowth, it actually helps keep it from growing back. It asserts that the use of their product results in “up to 94% less hair regrowth with no pain, no mess, no stress,” when it's an outright lie. Not only that, according to thousands of customer complaints, they refuse to honor their 60-day return policy unless the customer has the wherewithal to devote all of their time and effort to the refund, or the customer threatens with legal action.

Now, the manufacturer has not submitted these so-called "studies" about the use and efficacy of its product to the FDA and despite the fact that these blatantly unsupported claims are designed to mislead and deceive consumers into buying this expensive and ineffective, and even potentially dangerous product, the FDA ignores them.

In fact, a blinded, controlled, prospective clinical study by the Department of Ophthalmology, Dermatology, Otolaryngology, out of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, found that the no!no! Hair Removal System is no more effective than shaving with a razor.
CONCLUSIONS: Relative to shaving, the hot-wire (no!no!) device does not produce lessened hair density, decreased hair re-growth rate, greater duration of effect, nor induce changes in hair thickness and color. We conclude that the hot-wire device does not offer any benefit as compared to shaving.

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Thursday, January 21, 2010

Search, Seek and Find Links

Academic Info - maintains more than 25,000 academic sources, including annotated subject directories and digital collections from academic groups, libraries, and museums. There are also a lot of ads on this site; try not to be distracted from the real content.

About us - offers descriptions of various Web sites, relying on its users to flesh out its content.

Complete Planet - the deep web directory. Find information that cannot be accessed by surface Web search engines in this directory of more than 70,000 specialized search tools and databases.

Directory of Open Access Journals - provides free access to full-text online journals. Allowing you to search by title or by subject

Go To Web 20 - is a directory of Web 2.0 sites. Go2Web20.net allows you to filter your results by tags and sort them alphabetically or by date.

How to search the web - teaches you how to find anything you are looking for on the Web, and will direct you to more Web sites to help you in any search. It will make you a smarter searcher, whatever you are looking for.

Infomine - compiled by various libraries, is a good resource for university-level research. It has links to databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, articles, researcher directories, and more.

ixquick - is the most comprehensive engine there is; it searches and compiles results from 12 of the most popular search engines on the Web. It's also the most private web search. ixquick does not log your ip or make a record of your searches.

Kw Map
- Keyword map for the whole internet.

Library Internet's Index - In January 2010, the website "ipl2: information you can trust" was launched, merging the collections of resources from the Internet Public Library (IPL) and the Librarians' Internet Index (LII) websites. The site is hosted by Drexel University's College of Information Science & Technology, and a consortium of colleges and universities with programs in information science are involved in developing and maintaining the ipl2.

Lycos -

Online Education Database - has "The Ultimate Guide to the Invisible Web." This guide tells you what the invisible Web is, why it exists, how to make a site "visible," and how to search for sites on the invisible Web. The guide also provides a useful list of invisible Web search tools, organized by category.

Public Library of Law - offers a free searchable database of case law, statutes, regulations, court rules, constitutions, and legal forms.

Searchzooka - Never type the same search twice! SEARCHzooka provides a one-stop organizing/bookmarking tool for all your advanced Internet searches. By saving your commonly-used searches, you can save time and effort by launching searches at the click of a button rather than typing and retyping the same searches.

Seek Logo - 200,000 images available for viewing and downloading.

Sweet Search - A search engine for students

Whonu
is one of the very first semantic Web search engines available. It offers over 300 search sources and a smart interface that contextualizes what you enter. Information is double partitioned by file type and source. The variety of options might be a bit intimidating, but for power research, whonu looks like one of the most promising search tools available, with an effort made to present structured meaning. Killer feature — saved query history using a row of dots.

Topix
- Easily narrow the search to a certain time period.

WWW Virtual Library - is the oldest catalogue of the Web, started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of HTML and of the Web itself, in 1991 at CERN in Geneva. Unlike commercial catalogues, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert; even though it isn't the biggest index of the Web, the VL pages are widely recognized as being amongst the highest-quality guides to particular sections of the Web.

Yabigo - Search results in three columns: Google, Bing and Yahoo

Zuula - allows you to search across multiple platforms by putting them all in one location. After entering your search term, you'll be given a typical-looking results page. What makes it unique is that by clicking the tabs listed across the top of the page, you'll be given the results for your search term on each of the search engines listed. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Gigablast, Exalead, Alexa, Accoona, and Mojeek are all in one place.

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Thursday, September 24, 2009

Shutting Down the Pain Gate Before it Shuts You Down

Dr. Rollin Gallagher, Director of the Center for Pain Medicine, Research and Policy and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of Pain Medicine at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center currently studies the treatment of pain in injured troops on the battlefield.
Pain management is no different on the battlefield today than it was during the Civil War…an injection of Morphine which provides short-term relief but does not do anything to prevent the pain from continuing long-term.

This new method of pain management Dr. Rollin Gallagher is studying not only stops the pain but it also prevents neural pathways of pain to be created, therefore addressing the chronic permanent pain many times associated with injury. This method works by placing a catheter right next to the nerves that transmit the pain information from the area of injury to the brain -- the soldier pushes a button that continuously dribbles medicine right on that nerve to paralyze the specific nerve connected to the place of injury. This new method of pain management prevents the pain signal from getting into the spinal cord where it makes those changes in the neural pathways leading to chronic severe nerve pain.
How pain works?
When injured, a signal immediately goes from the injured tissue into the nerves to your spinal cord and then it is relayed through a set of relay stations in your spinal cord to two parts of your brain, one part of the brains says it’s in my left arm and it’s bad or not so bad and the other part of the brain says this hurts and I hate it...the suffering part.
Then the brain sends a message back down to the spinal cord or the descending control mechanism that say this is really important or this is not so important.
Then you have a reaction around the tissue involved in the injury and have inflammatory cells getting activated and the inflammatory process.
Then either healing begins, if the area is stabilized or if it’s a disease process or a disease process that interferes with healing or continue to do something to activate the injury then healing won’t begin. The longer the pain goes untreated such as the actual stimulus doesn’t heal up properly then your going to have changes in the mechanics of the muscles involved in the area of injury that will continue to send signals from the periphery.
More importantly you may have changes in the spinal cord and brain that then permanently activate the pain causing Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome, where just moving, blowing on the area actually activates the pain system. In addition, from not using the area the person gets bone absorption, contractures (a shortening or distortion of muscular or connective tissue due to spasm, scar, or paralysis of the antagonist of the contracting muscle) and other problems that create new neural pathways of pain.
Studies are suggesting that early exposure (babies or children) to pain that is not controlled actually enables an overgrowth of the pain neuron system in the spinal cord so there may be people who are more reactive to the same level of stimulus based on what happened to them earlier on in life.

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Sunday, April 20, 2008

U.S. Economy at a Glance


The Association for University Business and Economic Research (AUBER) provides an interactive map that makes it possible to locate economic research agencies in every state and in addition, includes a searchable database where you can find publications available from the various research agencies.

The United States Small Business Association, a source for small business statistics provides a link to the economic profiles of each state and how they fared and contributed to the economics of their state.

Business.gov provides an interactive map where you can find links to State regulations and local governments.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis provides interactive tables, charts and graphs to research regional economics.

The U.S. Department of Labor offers the Bureau of Labor Statistics which provides interactive maps and a look at the US economy at a glance.

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Monday, April 07, 2008

How To Research An Unknown Online Retailer

From the Consumerist:

  • Do they have a toll free customer service number and published hours of operation?
  • Do they take credit cards? It is no guarantee of quality if they do, but it is one step up. I think you should generally avoid any place that only takes Western Union money transfers.
  • Do they have a security/hacker prevention or testing certificate?
  • Does the checkout process use an encrypted HTTPS page?
  • Are the company Privacy and About pages blank, or do they look like they are from a default template for an online shopping cart that was just set up the day before?
  • Search Google for the store name and words like "scam" and "customer service." It is not a good thing if all the entries are for people asking if a site is a scam in Yahoo Answers.
  • [www.google.com]
    [answers.yahoo.com]
    [wiki.answers.com]
  • Check the Whois to see what the website registration looks like. It is not a good sign if it was just registered last week. It should not look like someone is trying to hide the fact that they are running a business out of their parents basement.
  • [www.geektools.com]
  • Check the Traceroute to see what network it is running on. It should match the WhoIs info to some extent.
  • [www.opus1.com]
  • Check if the company has a yellow pages listing and street address. If you have a phone number, a company with a street address is a lot more reassuring. Check the address on Google Maps to see if it is a vacant lot or an address in a housing tract.
  • [www.411.com]
  • See if the site has a warning listed on McAfee SiteAdvisor.
  • [www.siteadvisor.com]
  • Check fraud and scam report sites. Some of them also list sites that have allegedly scammed other people.
  • [edsbandwagon.com]
    [www.fraudbureau.com]
    [www.ripoffreport.com]
    [www.scambusters.com]
    [www.scamclub.com]
    [www.cybercrime.gov]
    [www.fraud.org]
  • Beware of "Online Review" sites. Some are little more than a site for scammers to post fake positive reviews, and the owners to make money on banner ads. Here are some you can trust:
  • [www.epinions.com]
    [reviews.pricegrabber.com]
    [www.bizrate.com]
    [www.resellerratings.com]
  • BBB online. Lots of places do not have entries because they are small and treat their customers well enough to not get a complaint.
  • [search.bbb.org]

Read more...

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Great Web Resources

Education Portal is a portal to career information, school reviews, education news and all the information you will ever need on undergraduate degrees, graduate degrees, career education and online degree programs. You will find information on college degrees worth the most money, online bachelors degree programs and a list of the schools that offer them as well as a a list of colleges and universities that offer free courses online.

NELLCO, a non-profit corporation, is a consortium of 100 institutions designed to enhance the research and educational opportunities at law libraries and is composed of academic (ABA accredited), private non-profit, and government law libraries which span 33 states across the United States, and 7 international affiliate members from Canada and the U.K. The Consortium provides a mechanism for resource sharing and mutual benefit between law libraries.
U.S. Law and Legal Research, part of the NELLCO network presents a general outline of the fundamental sources of U.S. law and demonstrates free and fee-based electronic resources frequently used for legal research.

The Wall Street Journal Online offers Developments, makes sense of the housing slowdown with news, tips and analysis.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) offers a new web resource to help employers and workers address workplace concerns associated with Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)

Enterprise Surveys allows you to create your own customized tables and graphs for precisely the indicators, countries/groups, stratificaton (categorizing the data by firm size, sector, ownership, exporter), and statistics (average, count, standard deviation, minimum, maximum) that you are interested in for your own reports.

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Friday, September 07, 2007

One Death a Tragedy...One Million a Statistic...

I had an immediate visceral reaction to "little Mary" a 12-year-old Ugandan girl whose lips were cut off by rebel fighters, and no visceral reaction to the 4 million killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Of course, I know that killing 4 million people is so heinous, it's beyond words but apparently it's beyond feeling as well, at least in my case.

Psychological research, reported by Professor Paul Slovic in the March edition of Foreign Policy, suggests we respond most to just one example of suffering. Big numbers don't move us and in fact, the higher the number of people involved in a crisis, the less likely we are to "feel" for each additional death.

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Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Two-handed Complex Gesturing Indicates Complex Thinking?


 Gesturing can free up cognitive effort for the task at hand, therefore numerous gestures may help a person to think more clearly.

Supposedly, engaging both hands above the waist is an example of a complex hand gesturing that reflects complex thinking and gives the listener confidence in the speaker. You will notice many politicians gesturing as in the photos I've posted.

Analysis on Bush vs Gore's repertoire of gesturing examined how their gesturing differed qualitatively and quantitatively. This analysis concluded that Bush, while gesturing more, had little variation in his gesture repertoire, and overall made similar, often tense, flat gestures regardless of the type of verbal expressions they accompanied, whereas Gore, by contrast, had a variety of gesture types...this variety in gesture forms could reflect a range of different kinds of thinking, and possibly be connected to Gore’s more complex discourse structure and I would think thinking process.

Research on gesture has proven useful in studying reasoning processes that are not revealed verbally. In addition, it may be able to tell us how in individual is thinking and reasoning while speaking.

Body-language experts often train the people who make the decisions regarding who is hired in companies that two-handed gesturing is something to look for when interviewing a potential employee... a good thing to keep in mind if you have any interviews coming up.

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Thursday, December 07, 2006

The More Whites Try to Appear Color Blind The More Unfriendly They Are.

New research shows that whites often avoid using race to describe other people, particularly in interactions with blacks. However further research reveals that such efforts to appear colorblind and unprejudiced are associated with less-friendly nonverbal behaviors.

"Many whites seem to think that appearing colorblind -- avoiding race during social interaction -- is a good way to appear unbiased," said Samuel R. Sommers, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University. "Despite that perception that colorblindness may make a positive impression on others, our data suggests that it often backfires."

In one study, researchers examined whites' reluctance to admit to their ability to categorize others on the basis of race. This study tested how fast whites categorized people in photos using different characteristics, including race, and compared that data with whites' estimates of how quickly they would be able to make those categorizations. A second study examined the consequences of whites' reluctance to identify other people according to their race.

The studies appear in the current issue of "Psychological Science" (Volume 17, Number 11). Sommers co-authored the paper with Evan P. Apfelbaum, a Ph.D. candidate at Tufts, as well as Michael I. Norton from Harvard Business School and additional researchers at Tufts and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Claiming color blindness

In the first study, 57 white participants completed either a "sorting task" or a "hypothetical task." With the sorting task, participants sorted 24 photos of black and white volunteers according to seven characteristics: race, gender, age, color of the background in the photo, hair color, facial expression, and facial hair. In the hypothetical task, participants were asked to estimate how quickly they would categorize using each of the seven characteristics if they were to perform the sorting task.

The results for the sorting task showed that participants were quickest to categorize the photos by background color, then gender, then race. However, in the hypothetical task, participants estimated that the two slowest characteristics to determine would be race followed by age. Further research showed that blacks' speed at categorizing photos by race was comparable to whites' but their estimates of their ability to do this were more accurate than the estimates of white participants.

"Whites sometimes deny the ease with which they can categorize others by race," Sommers said. "And they'll even avoid using race as a simple descriptor of someone else."

Political correctness has surprising results


The second study examined some of the possible consequences of whites' reluctance to use race to differentiate people. Thirty white participants were randomly paired with a white or black partner who was in fact a "confederate" in the research project. The pair played a game in which one person asked questions to identify a target face in a set of photos. Questioners were told that their objective was to identify the photo the answerer was looking at by asking as few yes/no questions as possible.

The white participants, who all played the role of questioner, were given 32 photos of faces that varied by the same categories as those in the first study, including gender, background color and race. The "confederates" acted as answerers and were given a copy of the target photo. They answered yes or no questions until the questioner determined which of the 32 photos the answerer held.

The results showed that the questioner was less likely to mention race when the answerer was black (64 percent of the time) than when the answerer was white (93 percent of the time). This led to less-efficient performance times when white questioners were paired with black answerers because they asked more questions to identify the target photo.

In addition to slower performance, reluctance to differentiate by race was associated with less friendly nonverbal behaviors.

"When we showed independent coders video clips of questioners in the study without audio, they noted that the white participants who avoided talking about race with a black partner made less eye contact with their partners and appeared to be less friendly," Sommers said. "By their nonverbal behavior alone, the whites who are trying to appear colorblind to impress their black partners ironically come across as distant and unfriendly."

Read more...

Gendered Division of Labor Gave Modern Humans Advantage Over Neanderthals

Diversified social roles for men, women, and children may have given Homo sapiens an advantage over Neanderthals, says a new study in the December 2006 issue of Current Anthropology. The study argues that division of economic labor by sex and age emerged relatively recently in human evolutionary history and facilitated the spread of modern humans throughout Eurasia.

"The competitive advantage enjoyed by modern humans came not just from new weapons and devices but from the ways in which their economic lives were organized around the advantages of cooperation and complementary subsistence roles for men, women, and children," write Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner (University of Arizona).

Kuhn and Stiner note that the rich archaeological record for Neanderthal diets provides little direct evidence for a reliance on subsistence foods, such as milling stones to grind nuts and seeds. Instead, Neanderthals depended on large game, a high-stakes resource, to fuel their massive body mass and high caloric intake. This lack of food diversity and the presence of healed fractures on Neanderthal skeletons--attesting to a rough-and-tumble lifestyle--suggest that female and juvenile Neanderthals participated actively in the hunt by serving as game drivers, beating bushes or cutting off escape routes.

The Middle Paleolithic Neanderthal record also lacks the artifacts commonly used to make weather-resistant clothing or artificial shelters, such as bone needles. Thus, it was the emergence of "female" roles -- subsistence and skill-intensive craft -- that allowed H. sapiens in ecologically diverse tropical and sub-tropical regions to take advantage of other foods and live at higher population densities.

"Earlier hominins pursued more narrowly focused economies, with women's activities more closely aligned with those of men with respect to schedule and ranging patterns," write the authors. "It is impossible to argue that [Neanderthal] females and juveniles were fulfilling the same roles--or even an equally diverse suite of economic roles--as females and juveniles in recent hunter-gatherer groups," they add.

While some degree of niche specialization between adult male and females is documented for many large-mammal species, recent humans are remarkable for cooperative economies that combine pervasive sharing and complementary roles for individuals of different ages and sexes.

Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research on humankind, encompassing the full range of anthropological scholarship on human cultures and on the human and other primate species. Communicating across the subfields, the journal features papers in a wide variety of areas, including social, cultural, and physical anthropology as well as ethnology and ethnohistory, archaeology and prehistory, folklore, and linguistics.

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