Linkday Thursday

• Prawns kill: Benihana shrimp toss cited in death
• Dogs Keep Dying: Many Owners Unaware Of Toxic Dog Food: aflatoxin was found in a batch of Diamond brand dog food. Aflatoxin poisoning damages the liver and can kill within a couple of days. The distribution of the "bad food" is more widespread than thought and rather than a dozen dogs, possibly a hundred or more have been killed since some time in the fall. Cornell Vet College is tracking the problem on its news page.
• Via Science Daily: keeping weight off is harder than losing it. Researchers at Columbia University have show[n] that body weight is regulated by coordinate metabolic, neuroendocrine, and autonomic systems that act to actually restore fat mass in individuals attempting to maintain their slim new figure. The authors suggest that our bodies interpret the weight-reduced state as one of relative deficiency in the hormone leptin.
• Here's something new...spatial data mining. Driven by the need to determine how many people walk by a given billboard in a period of time to determine fair pricing, researchers in Germany developed a method of spatial datamining which compares company's databases of customer information with and filtered by a database of geographic information and traffic volume. Via Science Daily: Calculating people passing by. All thanks to the technique of spatial data mining, as developed and put into practice by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems AIS. It involves the use of a set of calculation methods that allow large volumes of data, such as the customer databases held by major companies, to be systematically searched and filtered according to geographical criteria. My interpretation: think of it as web traffic statistics for the real world.
• Taking A Taxi Could Increase Your Exposure To Pollution: Researchers have discovered that your level of exposure to pollution can vary according to what method of transport you use, with travelling by taxis resulting in the highest levels of exposure and walking the least. (Also: BBC, MSN/Reuters, Imperial College)
• Sleep can leave you as groggy as booze. Study measures sleep inertia...how long it lasts and the cognitive impact. For a short period, at least, the effects of sleep inertia may be as bad or worse than being legally drunk,
• Diabetes and Its Awful Toll Quietly Emerge as a Crisis

Dow Jones loses a few customers

Unlike apparently 99.9% of the web, I have no problem paying for an online subscription to something like the WSJ. Apparently, though, the WSJ included a subscription to Barron's online for awhile but since January 8, 2006 has separated the two. That is, if you subscribed last year to both online, you now have to get a new subscription to Barron's online. I actually have no idea whether or not Barron's was included in my last renewal. It's not on my radar. I'm actually reading the WSJ so little these days I'm considering cancelling both of my online and paper edition subscriptions. Anyway, here's the better story: The Big Picture: Dow Jones pulls a fast one . . .