Medary.com

Sioux Falls Argus Leader:  Northwest flight cancellations anger customers

Passengers were caught off-guard today after Northwest cancelled flights in and out of Sioux Falls today.

For travelers like Cindy Burton, who is stuck in Minneapolis from Tennessee, the cancelled flight could mean never seeing her son again, said Burton’s sister, Arla Stueckrath of Milan, Minn.

Burton’s son has been in critical condition at Avera McKennan Hospital since Saturday, Stueckrath said.

“It’s insane,” said Charmaine Petersen, Burton’s sister-in-law as she waited in the Sioux Falls airport. “When she booked the flight, Northwest knew it was an emergency.”

The earliest flight Burton was promised was at 2:15 p.m. Tuesday, Petersen said.
Mike Marnach, executive director of the Sioux Falls Regional Airport Authority said he believes the cancellations will only last through today.

Cancellations were attributed to a number of things from no crew being available to construction being done on the runway in Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport, according the Sioux Falls airport’s Web site.

According to the NWA flights were still on schedule for Tuesday.

“All they can say is ‘Sorry,’” Stueckrath said. “I don’t care if they’re sorry or not.”

Petersen said she would never fly Northwest Airlines again.

That's going to be a pretty common reaction if Northwest keeps this up.

The holy grail of the Babylon 5 science fiction universe, organic technology referred to technology that was grown, not manufactured.  (Yes, the "holy grail" reference was intended, B5-heads.)

Well, here we go, a couple of centuries ahead of schedule (Air Force press release):

Air Force Funds Research on Self-Healing Materials

By Maria Callier Air Force Office of Scientific Research Public Affairs (Quantech)

Arlington, Va., July 30th, 2007 - A research team at the University of Illinois, funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, is creating new, cutting-edge structural microvascular materials which will have repetitive, self-healing capabilities as well as self-cooling behavior.

Professor Scott White and his colleagues are developing a technique for fabricating three-dimensional microvascular networks inspired by human skins or plant leaves.

"By using the networks to carry the healing agent, the study demonstrated that the performance of self-healing materials can be further improved by incorporating a circulatory system and continuously transporting an unlimited supply of healing agent, significantly extending the lifetime of the material," explained B.L. Lee, program manager for AFOSR's Mechanics of Multifunctional Materials and Microsystems. "This is a very exciting event and an important beginning for new technology."

The Air Force will benefit from the research because these materials have multifunctional behavior in an integrated system and will provide capabilities that have never been achieved before.

The research team continues to face challenges as it moves forward.

"We are developing new healing and protection schemes for our healing components that will provide the level of environmental stability that is needed," said Mr. White. "We are also pursuing research targeted towards fabrication methods to build large, structural parts using robotic techniques."

The team plans to design and build optimized microvascular networks for highly efficient and structural materials that can heal repeatedly with no loss in performance as damage accumulates.

"We are also targeting the integration of two types of functionality in a single material system - healing and cooling," said Mr. White. "In this case, the fluids that are circulated within the material will do double duty by providing the building blocks for structural healing as well as a conduit for extracting thermal energy and cooling the parent material."

By funding self-healing materials research, AFOSR continues to expand the horizon of scientific knowledge. AFOSR is part of Air Force Materiel Command's Air Force Research Laboratory.

Front page article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

Time Warner Cable Inc. and Cablevision Systems Corp. are refusing to carry the NFL Network, launched in 2003, on the league's terms. Charter Communications Inc., whose controlling shareholder owns the Seattle Seahawks, stopped carrying the network in late 2005 because of a contract dispute. Comcast Corp., the country's largest cable operator, yanked the NFL Network out of millions of homes after a bitter battle. The NFL tried to stop Comcast by suing, but lost. The case is now on appeal.

At the heart of the debate: how much pro football is enough for America's already robustly served TV fans. The NFL, which has long been able to command top dollar by packaging its games myriad ways, says viewers are still insatiable. But after years of budgetary woes caused by the skyrocketing cost of football, cable executives say they -- and viewers -- have had enough. Die-hard football fans can now watch as many as 16 regular-season games a week via broadcast, cable and satellite operators.

I'm not sure that it's a good thing for us lowly consumers for sports leagues (and, parenthetically, content-producers of any type in our media age) to exclusively own their distribution media.

On a related thought:  Are the people who were outraged about Rush Limbaugh's brief stint as an NFL studio analyst for ESPN lining up to protest Keith Olbermann's upcoming gig on NBC's Sunday night football programming?  Just wondering . . .

Just never you mind why.  (heh heh heh)

NCAA puts a moratorium on new members of Division I:

The Division I Board of Directors has enacted a four-year moratorium on permitting institutions to begin the process of joining the division – an action that among other things will prevent a school from moving from another division into Division I or moving between its subdivisions until August 2011.

Although the division recently enacted new Football Bowl Subdivision criteria and established procedural steps to become a Division I member, standards for Division I institutional and conference membership were not reviewed.

The moratorium, which is effective immediately, does not affect 20 institutions that already have entered the seven-year Division I provisional-membership process for new NCAA members or the five-year process to move from Division II -- including institutions that currently are officially exploring Division I membership.

The moratorium also prevents institutions in Divisions II and III from seeking reclassification of a specific sport into Division I under multidivision-classification legislation, and prevents a new single-sport or multisport conference from achieving Division I membership until the moratorium ends.

Hat tip:  Terry Vandrovec's Sioux Falls Argus Leader Sports blog.

Merchants in Venice (hey, wouldn't that be a good title for a play?) have a system, according to this article from the UK's Telegraph (via BoingBoing):

Tourists who do not want to be ripped off in Venice were advised yesterday to drop their brutish behaviour and try to learn a bit of the local lingo.

A "significant proportion" of the city's bars and restaurants are now operating two or even three price lists: one for tourists, another for locals, and a third for "sympathetic" tourists who make more effort than the usual grunted demands.

"There are different pricing levels," said Franco Conte, the head of the Venetian branch of Codacons, the Italian consumer rights group.

"If you are Italian, a croissant and a cappuccino costs €3.50 (£2.40)," he said. "If you speak another language, it costs €7.

"In restaurants, a pizza and a drink for two people costs between €20 to €25 for locals, perhaps cheaper for Venetians - but €50 to €60 if you are forestieri." In Italy, the word forestieri applies to all strangers, who are said to be "from the forest".

Maria Tosi, who runs a tobacconist, said tourists could do simple things to try to get a better price such as saying hello when entering a shop or restaurant, or learning a few words of Venetian dialect.

"It really offends us when they walk in, make their demands and walk out," she said. "We Venetians spend all our time being polite to each other."

But the Telegraph article notes that the shopkeepers don't have it all their own way:

(Venice tourist authority head) Mr Renato observed that many tourists now bought their sandwiches and drinks in local supermarkets.

Buon giorno, y'all . . .

US public sees news media as biased, inaccurate, uncaring:  poll

More than half of Americans say US news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and don't care about the people they report on, a poll published Thursday showed.

And poll respondents who use the Internet as their main source of news -- roughly one quarter of all Americans -- were even harsher with their criticism, the poll conducted by the Pew Research Center said.

More than two-thirds of the Internet users said they felt that news organizations don't care about the people they report on; 59 percent said their reporting was inaccurate; and 64 percent they were politically biased.

Here's the detail.  Some highlights:

The internet news audience – roughly a quarter of all Americans – tends to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole. People who rely on the internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance. As many as 38% of those who rely mostly on the internet for news say they have an unfavorable opinion of cable news networks such as CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, compared with 25% of the public overall, and just 17% of television news viewers.

The internet news audience is particularly likely to criticize news organizations for their lack of empathy, their failure to "stand up for America," and political bias. Roughly two-thirds (68%) of those who get most of their news from the internet say that news organizations do not care about the people they report on, and 53% believe that news organizations are too critical of America. By comparison, smaller percentages of the general public fault the press for not caring about people they report on (53%), and being too critical of America (43%).
. . .
Across every major news source, Democrats offer more favorable assessments than do independents or Republicans. The partisan divide is smallest when it comes to local TV news, which 83% of Democrats rate favorably along with 76% of Republicans. The differences are greatest for major national newspapers, such as the New York Times and Washington Post. Fully 79% of Democrats rate these newspapers favorably compared with just 41% of Republicans, based on those able to rate them.

Journalism has a problem.  Continuing to loudly proclaim "But we aren't biased, really, it's our audience that's biased!" isn't going to solve the problem.  Only when journalism as an industry comes to grips with their fundamental biases and prejudices will they begin to recover their trade's reputation.

Second case reported in Kansas City.

West Nile in Wikipedia:

WNV has three different effects on humans. The first is an asymptomatic infection; the second is a mild febrile syndrome termed West Nile Fever;[1] the third is a neuroinvasive disease termed West Nile meningitis or encephalitis.[2] In infected individuals the ratio between the three states is roughly 110:30:1.[3]

The second, febrile stage has an incubation period of 3-8 days followed by fever, headache, chills, diaphoresis, weakness, lymphadenopathy, and drowsiness. Occasionally there is a short-lived truncal rash and some patients experience gastrointestinal symptoms including nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, or diarrhea. All symptoms are resolved within 7-10 days, although fatigue can last for some weeks and lymphadenopathy can take up to two months to resolve.

The more dangerous encephalitis is characterized by similar early symptoms but also a decreased level of consciousness, sometimes approaching near-coma. Deep tendon reflexes are hyperactive at first, later diminished. There are also extrapyramidal disorders. Recovery is marked by a long convalescence with fatigue.

More recent outbreaks have resulted in a deeper study of the disease and other, rarer, outcomes have been identified.The spinal cord may be infected, marked by anterior myelitis with or without encephalitis.[4] WNV-associated Guillain-Barré syndrome has been identified[5] and other rare effects include multifocal chorioretinitis (which has 100% specificity for identifying WNV infection in patients with possible WNV encephalitis)[6] hepatitis, myocarditis, nephritis, pancreatitis, and splenomegaly.[7][8][9]

The virus is transmitted through mosquito vectors, which bite and infect birds. The birds are amplifying hosts, developing sufficient viral levels to transmit the infection to other biting mosquitoes which go on to infect other birds (in the Western hemisphere the American Robin and the American Crow are the most common carriers) and also humans. The infected mosquito species vary according to geographical area; in the US Culex pipiens (Eastern US), Culex tarsalis (Midwest and West), and Culex quinquefasciatus (Southeast) are the main sources.[10]

In mammals the virus does not multiply as readily, and it is believed that mosquitoes biting infected mammals do not further transmit the virus,[11] making mammals so-called dead-end infections.

A 2004 paper in Science found that Culex pipiens mosquitoes existed in two populations in Europe, one which bites birds and one which bites humans. In North America 40% of Culex pipiens were found to be hybrids of the two types which bite both birds and humans, providing a vector for West Nile virus. This is thought to provide an explanation of why the West Nile disease has spread more quickly in North America than Europe.

It was initially believed that direct human-to-human transmission was only caused by occupational exposure,[12] or conjunctival exposure to infected blood.[13] The US outbreak revealed novel transmission methods, through blood transfusion,[14] organ transplant,[15] intrauterine exposure,[16] and breast feeding.[17] Since 2003 blood banks in the US routinely screen for the virus amongst their donors.[18] As a precautionary measure, the UK's National Blood Service runs a test for this disease in donors who donate within 28 days of a visit to the United States or Canada.

The more severe outcomes of WNV infection are clearly associated with advancing age[19] and a patient history of organ transplantation.[20] A genetic factor also appears to increase susceptibility to West Nile disease. A mutation of the gene CCR5 gives some protection against HIV but leads to more serious complications of WNV infection. Carriers of two mutated copies of CCR5 made up 4 to 4.5% of a sample of West Nile disease sufferers while the incidence of the gene in the general population is only 1%.[21][22]

There is no vaccine for humans. A vaccine for horses based on killed viruses exists; some zoos have given this vaccine to their birds, although its effectiveness there is unknown. Dogs and cats show few if any signs of infection. There have been no cases of direct canine-human or feline-human transmission, but these common pets may incubate the virus and pass it along through mosquitoes.[1]

For humans to escape infection the avoidance of mosquito is key[23] - remaining indoors at dawn and dusk, wearing light-colored clothing which protects arms and legs as well as trunk, using insect repellents on both skin and clothing (such as DEET, picaradin, or oil of lemon eucalyptus for skin and permethrin for clothes)[24] Treatment is purely supportive: analgesia for the pain of neurologic diseases; rehydration for nausea, vomiting, or diarrhea; encephalitis may also require airway protection and seizure management.

On August 19, 2006, the LA Times reported that the expected incidence rate of West Nile was dropping as the local population becomes exposed to the virus. "In countries like Egypt and Uganda, where West Nile was first detected, people became fully immune to the virus by the time they reached adulthood, federal health officials said." [2] However days later the CDC said that West Nile cases could reach a 3-year high because hot temperatures had allowed a larger brood of mosquitoes. [3] Reported cases in the U.S. in 2005 exceeded those in 2004 and cases in 2006 exceeded 2005s totals.

Maybe.

From Daily Tech:

My earlier column this week detailed the work of a volunteer team to assess problems with US temperature data used for climate modeling. One of these people is Steve McIntyre, who operates the site climateaudit.org. While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he noticed a strange discontinuity, or "jump" in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000. 

These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.

McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an "oversight" that would be fixed in the next data refresh.

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place.  1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.  Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events. 

The effect of the correction on global temperatures is minor (some 1-2% less warming than originally thought), but the effect on the US global warming propaganda machine could be huge.

Then again-- maybe not. I strongly suspect this story will receive little to no attention from the mainstream media.

Oopsie.  Paging Emily Latella.

via TigerHawk.

That's been the slogan of Medary.com since . . . well, since the very early days of the blog.  I've decided to take it a bit more seriously, by moving all of my previous posts into one of those four topics.  Since there have been over 1200 postings since the beginning, this will take a while.  But, here's the categories:

News:  Current events, politics, and stuff that happens that interests me enough to post it and/or comment upon it.

Sports:  Fairly obvious, I would think.  You know.  Sports?

Fun:  Oddities and curiosities, mostly.  Things I come across which bring a smile (perhaps twisted) to my face, and, I hope, yours too.

Life:  My personal adventures through this world of ours.  Travel stories (good and bad), close encounters with Real Life, bureaucracies, and other alien life forms, told in the first person.