“stone-tool-inflicted marks on bones found during recent survey work in Dikika, Ethiopia, a research area close to Gona and Bouri. On the basis of low-power microscopic and environmental scanning electron microscope observations, these bones show unambiguous stone-tool cut marks for flesh removal and percussion marks for marrow access.”
Butchered by early humans or eaten by crocodiles? Image: David DeGusta
Given that the said rib fragment, DIK-55-2, came from a prehistoric lacustrine site. These markings could have been produced by crocodiles. Crocs, if you aren’t aware of (ahem editors and publishing group) are very abundant in the Rift Valley — both currently and prehistorically. On top of that, crocs like to eat meat and scavenge. Yes its true, they are carnivores. Australopithecines were at most ominivores, with wide based teeth useful in grinding tubers and nuts. Crocs have more meat shearing, bone crushing teeth than 3.39 million year old stone tools, which there are none of at the moment.
Given that there really isn’t an archaeological record for Australopithecine tools, I’ll take a gander and say crocs like to eat meat and scavenge more effectively than A. afarensis could make and use said tools to butcher a large ungulate. They have been on this Earth for roughly 197 million years more than hominins have and they are really good at what they do… Again, probably better than a species of hominins who did not live in the Stone Age. It is just as likely (if not more) that the markings were produced by crocodiles just given the ecological context.
Personally I don’t see much of a difference. I agree that stone tools marks are more V shaped, while croc teeth are more pitted/rounded. But take this into light: tool use, especially butchery, is a very human behavioral trait. In their search to attribute this human behavior to a primitive hominin species who roamed 800,000 years earlier, to the era of Australopithecus afarensis, without considering another possible explanation, the authors and editors of Nature were somewhat foolish.
Many paleoanthropologists are in this mad rush to claim their precious find is the most human of hominins, so as to etch their name into the textbooks in rewriting human evolution, that they sometimes forget about doing thorough comparative science. And many publications are in this mad rush to publish the most human of findings, that they sometimes forget about thoroughly editing scientific works. Think that could be the case? I sure do… Why should we settle on secondary evidence for Australopithecine stone tools when none have been found yet, and when another possibility hasn’t been extensively exhausted?
McPherron, S., Alemseged, Z., Marean, C., Wynn, J., Reed, D., Geraads, D., Bobe, R., & Béarat, H. (2010). Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia Nature, 466 (7308), 857-860 DOI: 10.1038/nature09248
Earlier this week, I saw a friend reading this article, and considering SciAm has proven to be a bastion of intellectual stimulation and unbiased discussion, I decided to share it with you. Since the publication of the Neandertal draft genome in May, the concept of reorganizing the human family tree to include Neandertals as a subspecies is not particularly new in the world of paleoanthropology. I wonder why, though, did SciAm decide to publish this discussion now?
Anyways, if you want a synopsis of the thesis of the article, read this excerpt:
“Thus it is?revealing the identity of my example?that we must reclassify Homo neanderthalensis as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies of Homo sapiens. A comprehensive and technically sophisticated study published in the May 7 issue of Science, ?A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome,? by Max Planck Institute evolutionary anthropologists Richard E. Green, Svante Pääbo and 54 of their colleagues, demonstrates that ?between 1 and 4% of the ge nomes of people in Eurasia are derived from Neandertals? and that ?Neandertals are on average closer to individuals in Eurasia than to individuals in Africa.? In fact, the authors note, ?a striking observation is that Neandertals are as closely related to a Chinese and Papuan individual as to a French individual…. Thus, the gene flow between Neandertals and modern humans that we detect most likely occurred before the divergence of Europeans, East Asians, and Papuans.? In other words, our anatomically hirsute cousins are actually our genetic brothers.”
I did a real life facepalm when I came upon Shermer’s argument for including them as a subspecies,
“I always suspected that Neandertals and anatomically modern humans interbred, based on a simple observation: humans are the most sexual of all the primates, willing and able to do it just about anywhere, anytime, with anyone (and even with other species…).”
You have to be a paid subscriber to read the rest of article, so I can’t really know if he’s totally serious about his argument or not. Considering he goes on supporting his argument citing the book of human sexual behavior, the Kinsey Reports, I’m afraid that he actually is pretty confident his argument is legit. Sigh.
If this is true, this is a sad state of affairs for scientific publications; when reporters decide to serve up asinine explanations to scientific phenomenon. I am of the opinion that Shermer, nor any reporter, has the position to give reasons to why evolution occurred a certain way. Shermer could have spent his article discussing the differences between anatomy and material culture between the Neandertals and humans, and how the genetic lines of evidence, both mtDNA and nuclear DNA intersect and diverge from those.
He could have synthesized many different schools of thought on Neandertal ancestry and modern human evolution, but he chose to focus on something taboo. Sex certainly sells, I guess even for SciAm… But the thought that modern-ish humans reproduced with Neandertals is certainly not something unthinkable. So why focus on it?
A team of paleoanthropologists report in PLoS One analyzed the skulls of several dozen 11,000 year old Paleoamericans and compared them to the skulls of more than 300 1,000 year old Amerindians. They concluded that based on the morphology, there were two distinct waves of colonizers from Asia.
11,000 Year Old Lagoa Santa Brazil Paleoamerican Skull
While we know from a couple geneticstudies there are at least two, if not 3 or more waves of colonizers, the morphological evidence is now beginning to make a lot more sense along with the genetic evidence. There’s some concern why the authors didn’t have more North American and Asian samples for comparison, but that’s almost always a critique in any anatomical study.
Two comments in the Science Now news article are particularly entertaining regarding this topic:
“Very interesting–don’t tell some of the tribes in california–they won’t be able to handle real information like this.”
“Exactly. It sounds like the Amerindians stole the land from the Paleoindians? I guess they should pay restitution, right?”
Hubbe, M., Neves, W., & Harvati, K. (2010). Testing Evolutionary and Dispersion Scenarios for the Settlement of the New World PLoS ONE, 5 (6) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0011105
Recent archaeological find in Koobi Fora, Kenya suggests that our early ancestors might have dined on “seafood” to compensate for the energy needed for the expansion of the brain. The excavated site dates 1.95 million years ago, which predates Homo erectus, reveals distinct faunal remains (some with evidence of butchery) and Oldowan artifacts. Detailed in latest PNASedition, archaeologist David Braun and his team found an assemblage of bones from terrestrial and aquatic animals such as fishes, turtles and even crocodiles along with stone fragments (Oldowan tools) that are thought to be used to cut these animals with.
Photograph and scanning electron microscope image of a reptile bone scored by cuts. Image from PNAS.
?These aquatic foods are really important sources of the long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids and docosahexaenoic acid that are so critical to human brain growth,? said co-author and paleoanthropologist Dr. Richmond. ?Finding these foods in the diets of our early ancestors suggests they may have helped to lift constraints on brain size and fuel the evolution of a larger brain.?
Braun posits that if these early hominins indeed ate these terrestrial and aquatic animals (fishes, turtles and crocodiles), then they would have ingested enough calories and fatty acids needed for the expansion of the brain without having to scavenge for animal remains. Braun thinks that these small-bodied hominins would have avoided the dangerous risk of confronting with larger scavengers.
I just love saying, “Another Homo in the family”! Anyways, it seems like a new species of Homo has been identified from a partial skull found in Sterkfontein Caves, near Johannesburg by anthropologist Dr. Darren Curnoe from University of New South Wales (School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences) and paleoanthropologist Dr. Phillip Tobias. This specimen, known only by its museum catalog name Stw 53, was found in 1977 and had largely been ignored until Dr. Curnoe restored and reconstructed the skull with Dr. Tobias. They had initially concluded that Stw 53 is a Homo habilis but after years of examination and comparing it with other fossils, they are both confident that Stw 53 is a new species and named it Homo gautengensis.
Side by side comparison. Stw 53 (Homo gautengensis), (left) and KNM ER 1813 (Homo habilis), (right). H. gautengensis photo by Dr. Darren Curnoe and H. habilis photo from Wikipedia.
Dr. Curnoe believe that H. gautengensis predates H. habilis, making it the earliest Homo in our family tree so far. H. gautengensis walked upright in southern Africa about two million years ago until 600,000 years ago. Fully grown, it stood about 3 feet tall (just over 1 meter tall) and weigh about 110 lbs (about 50 kilograms). It has relatively large molars and premolars, which suggest that its diet consist large of plant matter and requires a lot of chewing. There were stone tools found near Stw 53, described as “fairly primitive” by Dr. Curnoe. They are also thought to have the knowledge of fire, perhaps using it to obtain and/or prepare food. Stw 53 was found in the same caves with Australopithecus africanus and Australopithecus robustus (or Paranthropus robustus). However, Dr. Curnoe does not believe that H. gautengensis gave rise to Homo sapiens.
Almost every biological anthropology text-book I’ve ever looked at has described the adaptations of human populations to the environments they occupy. Examples they give are the short stalky Inuit adapted to conserving heat in cold environments, the long lanky East African nomads adapted to far distant travels, and the barrel chested Peruvian and Tibetans living in low oxygen environments.
Highland Tibet
Little discussion, beyond correlating ecology and physical observation, is given to these. Actually I lie, the physiology of the barrel chested high altitude occupants is given a couple of sentences as well as an elevated oxygen binding capacity without concentrating their blood.
A paper published in Science several days ago tackles this latter issue. A group of scientists looked for unique alleles among Tibet highlanders and discovered 10 unique oxygen-processing alleles. I don’t have full access to the publication, so can’t tell if these genes encode for completely different functioning proteins or are differentially regulated at high altitudes.
All I can derive is that these genes seem to prevent polycythemia, edematous swelling of the lungs and brain, and hypertension of the pulmonary vasculature, which are all complications of high altitude living. Two of these genes are EGLN1 and PPARA. PPARA is a peroxisome proliferation proteins that also is a leukotriene antagonist. That is interesting because in obstructive conditions like asthama, leukotrienes induce vasospasm and bronchconstriction. EGLN1 is also has an interesting role,
“it is a protein encoded by this gene catalyzes the post-translational formation of 4-hydroxyproline in hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF) alpha proteins. HIF is a transcriptional complex that plays a central role in mammalian oxygen homeostasis.”
These two genes were significantlyassociated with the decreased hemoglobin phenotype that is uniqueto this highland population.
Simonson TS, Yang Y, Huff CD, Yun H, Qin G, Witherspoon DJ, Bai Z, Lorenzo FR, Xing J, Jorde LB, Prchal JT, & Ge R (2010). Genetic Evidence for High-Altitude Adaptation in Tibet. Science (New York, N.Y.) PMID: 20466884
Every time big anthropology news has come out in the last year or so, I’m too busy and drowned under the sea of books and notes for my upcoming exams to immerse myself in it. This happened with Ardipithecus last fall, and now with the draft of the Neandertal genome coming out tomorrow, I can’t help but feel a bit left out. The complete mitochondrial Neandertal genome was released a little under 2 years ago… and now because of high throughput sequencing technology, the draft genome is now complete.
The comparison of 3 Neandertal samples to 5 modern human genomes showed that Neandertal genome is closer to some populations of modern humans than others
About 10 loci had distinctly non-African hallmarks
There’s an attributable 1-4% Neandertal ancestry to non-African modern human populations
There’s a lot more behind this all than I really have time for, unfortunately. So be sure to check out Razib, John Hawks, etc. for all the goodies.
From Nobel Intent comes news of a discovery in the Mendelian genetics of Mirror Movements, a condition that causes people to involuntarily move both sides of their body when they intended to only move one.
Aside from being medically relevant, interesting on a population genetics level, and involved an Iranian family, it also caught my eye because about 3 weeks ago we covered the implications of DCC (deleted in colon cancer gene, I know — very clever!) mutations in my pathology course. DCC mutations are found in the sequence of events that lead up to a special type of familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP), known as Gardner syndromes. These colon cancers occurs primarily on the left or descending colon. The morphology of FAP cancers lead to a napkin ring like constriction of the colon that present as alternating bouts of diarrhea and constipation. What makes them unique from other FAPs is that they have present with extracolonic manifestation, like bone cancers.
The DCC gene is on the long arm of chromosome 18. I know that it is a cell surface protein responsible for cell-to-cell and cell-to-matrix adhesion. Normally when cells proliferate, they squeeze up on each other and DCC works via contact inhibition to signal a stop in proliferation because conditions are getting too cramped. Therefore, if DCC is deleted, contact inhibition is lost and cell loses ability to proliferate, yielding a dysplastic growth.
Genbank classifies this gene as one that encodes for a netrin 1 receptor, which I did not know before I read this post. I find this really interesting in the relevance of DCC to Mirror Movements. Dr. John Nicholls,of SISSA in Trieste, Italy, the dude for neurodevelopment, guest lectured my neuroscience course during my second term of medical school last year. I remember him describing netrins as a class of axon guiding proteins that functioned during growth and development. The hallmark experiment I remember him citing was the Oster, et al., 2004, where ganglion cell axon pathfinding in the retina and optic nerve was guided by netrin signals.
It seems that in Mirror Movements, the mutation in DCC prevents it from helping,
“nerve cells on one side of the spinal cord to stay on that side as they extend processes up and down the developing spine…. Because the protein is malformed, the body develops neural connections that route one-sided connections to both sides, producing the mirrored activity.”
I don’t have access to Science unfortunately to research the demographics of the particular SNP they discovered… So I can’t tell you of the gene frequencies… But if anyone does have access to the paper, and doesn’t emailing me, I’ll be very grateful. I love these sorts of discoveries where I learn something new and integrate what I’ve learned the past year and half of medical school!
Srour M, Rivière JB, Pham JM, Dubé MP, Girard S, Morin S, Dion PA, Asselin G, Rochefort D, Hince P, Diab S, Sharafaddinzadeh N, Chouinard S, Théoret H, Charron F, & Rouleau GA (2010). Mutations in DCC cause congenital mirror movements. Science (New York, N.Y.), 328 (5978) PMID: 20431009
I haven’t bothered to translate this page, but I’ve stumbled across a collection of 56 family portraits from East Asia that I wanted to share with you. The images give us a quick glimpse of all the different cultures and ethnicities that make up the far East, along with the lat/long of where these people are found. Check it out.
Lee Berger’s son, Matthew, found the ~1.9 million year old hominin remains of female adult and a juvenile male in cave deposits at Malapa, South Africa. The remains have been analyzed and been published in Science today, and so far this finding is the big fossil hominid of 2010. The skull of the juvenile is the cover image for this week’s issue of Science.
Australopithecus sediba on the cover of Science
Today’s paleoanthropology new is what was eluded to by a commenter last month. I talked to some colleagues about what the commenter could have been referring to back then, and they told me Berger’s gonna be releasing his findings on UW88-50. I didn’t report on it then because of several reasons, one of which was time constraints but also because I really didn’t have much information on the fossils. There’s a lot more press out today about it and while, I don’t have much time to digest it all, I figured I’ll at least share it with you in case you’ve been living under a rock.
The remains have been given a new species classification, Australopithecus sediba and are probably descendants of Australopithecus africanus. Like every other new fossil hominin species, there’s an array of archaic and modern features. The small teeth, projecting nose, very advanced pelvis, along with the long legs are the more modern features. The archaic features are the long arms and small brain case. What is special about Australopithecus sediba is that the hominin fossil record is pretty sparse around 1.9 million years ago and this fossil helps fill that gap.
Berger, L., de Ruiter, D., Churchill, S., Schmid, P., Carlson, K., Dirks, P., & Kibii, J. (2010). Australopithecus sediba: A New Species of Homo-Like Australopith from South Africa Science, 328 (5975), 195-204 DOI: 10.1126/science.1184944
Dirks, P., Kibii, J., Kuhn, B., Steininger, C., Churchill, S., Kramers, J., Pickering, R., Farber, D., Meriaux, A., Herries, A., King, G., & Berger, L. (2010). Geological Setting and Age of Australopithecus sediba from Southern Africa Science, 328 (5975), 205-208 DOI: 10.1126/science.1184950
Connoisseur of scaled rounded rectangles, bubbles, and triangles, David McCandless of Information is Beautiful talks data visualization in recently posted TED talk (below). He explains how information design can help us get through information glut on the Web and how simple charts can show patterns that we never would have seen otherwise. He uses his own works and collaborations as evidence.
Right around the 8-minute mark, David makes an interesting point about learning design. He explains that he started as a programmer, and then was a writer for about twenty years, but only recently started designing. He picked up the skills on his own. David argues that he's not unique, and that actually, everyone (like you) can do stuff like this too, because we've all been exposed to so much information that we have a sense of what makes it understandable.
That sounds about right. Obviously, a formal design education is going to help, but a lot of the skills you learn come from practice and experience.
With the proper resources to help you with foundations such as software, code, and basic principles, you open up a whole bunch of different paths that you can explore on your own.
A test which could stop women labouring for hours in the hope of a "normal" birth only to end up with a Caesarean section has been developed in Sweden.
You and I know it as the Luther Burger, but now Krispy Kreme is selling cheeseburgers made with their distinctively sweet donuts in place of the bun at state fairs. For $5, you get one Krispy Keme cheeseburger that contains over a thousand calories!
Krispy Kreme chocolate-covered bacon can even be added to top it off for $1 extra. Thus far the reviews for this new burger have been positive. The fair vendors know that the attendees like to try different food and are not usually counting fat grams or calories.
The instant heart attack was created by Nathan Morrissey of Machine Head restaurant. It was, apparently, an attempt to surpass last year's fair delicacy, chocolate-covered bacon on a stick. They both sound pretty scary.
It's not a true Luther burger unless it contains bacon, but chocolate-covered bacon? That may be going just too far! Link
Grieving families are being forced to wait years for inquests into the death of their loved ones because of continuing delays to reforms of the coroners' service, a BBC investigation finds.
Garry Newlove's death at the hands of a group of teenagers shocked Britain. Three years on, two of the women closest to the case are fighting very different battles
One Friday night, in August 2007, 47-year-old Garry Newlove came out of his house, in Warrington, to remonstrate with youths, after one of his daughters had told him a neighbour's garden was being vandalised. He was attacked and, two days later, died from a head injury. The killing attracted vast media coverage; it emerged the youths had been drinking heavily and Newlove's death was seen as evidence of what David Cameron, then leader of the Conservative party in opposition, described as "broken Britain". Five local teenagers were charged with the murder of the father of three, and stood trial three months later. Three of them ? Adam Swellings, Stephen Sorton and Jordan Cunliffe ? were found guilty of murder.
Two other youths were cleared. Swellings was ordered to serve a minimum of 17 years, Sorton 15 years, while Cunliffe, 15 at the time of the killing, was given a 12-year sentence.
Following the killing and the trial, Newlove's widow, Helen, began to campaign against the antisocial behaviour and drinking culture she blamed for her husband's death. She set up a charity, Newlove Warrington, aimed at making the Cheshire town a safer and better place by improving facilities for children, through education and life skills. Earlier this year, she launched the National Licensed Trade Association, with the target of introducing a responsible drinking culture in the UK. As a result of her work with Newlove Warrington, she last year won the Cheshire Woman of the Year award for her "outstanding personal courage and contribution to her community".
Her campaigning brought her to the attention of politicians, including Cameron, who met her on a visit to the north-west in the run-up to the election. In May, it was announced that the 48-year-old was to be given a peerage, and in June she took her seat in the Lords as Baroness Newlove of Warrington. Last Wednesday, she stood alongside Theresa May when the home secretary announced that asbos would be replaced by "simpler sanctions, easier to obtain and enforce".
"Asbos haven't worked because they became a medal of honour for the people they are meant to deter, the ferals on the street," the home secretary said in an interview with ITN.
Three years since her husband was killed, Newlove's rage against the three convicted youths is unrelenting. Newlove, who supports capital punishment ? she told reporters in 2008 that the UK should have the death penalty ? believes the trio convicted of killing her husband should never be released from prison.
Less than a 10-minute walk from the Newloves' house, another woman is engaged in a crusade, also sparked by the death of Garry Newlove. Janet is the mother of Jordan Cunliffe, now serving his time in a young offender institution.
Since his arrest, Cunliffe has maintained his innocence, saying that although present, he did not participate in the attack on Newlove. Despite submitting evidence that new witnesses had come forward ? and a claim that the trial judge had misdirected the jury ? last week Cunliffe was denied the right to appeal against his conviction.
His defence at the trial centred on whether Cunliffe could have seen and thereby been able to encourage the crime. For years, he has suffered from acute keratoconus, an eye condition. A medical report produced at the trial stated: "He is eligible to be registered as a blind person and is unable to perform any tasks for which vision is necessary." The report was accepted by the prosecution and read to the jury.
At the time of the killing, Janet Cunliffe was living in Wigan with her partner and two sons, but has now returned to her Warrington home, saying she and her family have "nothing to hide". She says she has no doubt her son is innocent of the crime that shocked a nation. Although she concedes that Cunliffe was no angel ? he had a caution for shoplifting ? she cannot associate him with the thug-laden headlines the case created.
Swellings, Sorton and Cunliffe were tried under a 300-year-old law the police have successfully re-employed in the last decade to fight gang violence. The principle of this "joint enterprise" or "common purpose" doctrine is that when two or more people assault or murder, even those who do not physically participate or strike the fatal blow but lend encouragement to the crime are as guilty as the main perpetrator and will receive similar punishment. It is deemed sufficient enough for another party to realise that the primary perpetrator might kill with intent or intend to cause grievous bodily harm.
Although press reports of the killing of Garry Newlove described the gang as "kicking him like a football", at the trial the jury heard he had died from a single blow and there were no other significant injuries to his body. There seems little dispute, from the evidence, that the fatal blow, or kick, had been landed by Sorton.
Cunliffe admitted being at the crime scene, but claimed he had been lagging behind the main group of teenagers, apparently around 15-strong. His mother says her son had travelled from Wigan to Warrington that day to go fishing and meet with friends. He missed the last train home and got permission from her to stay at the Warrington home the family still retained.
A significant issue at trial was the prosecution's claim that a similar confrontation ? though unreported at the time ? had taken place between the youths and another Warrington man a week before Newlove's death. It was alleged that Cunliffe was involved in that fracas and the allegation allowed the prosecution to claim that Cunliffe knew his friends were capable of violence ? which fits the common purpose criteria.
Cunliffe said he was not in Warrington on the day of the earlier attack, a claim backed up by his mother and another witness. Since the trial, two further witnesses have emerged to say Cunliffe was in Wigan, not Warrington, on that day. Cunliffe's lawyers sought leave to appeal against his conviction but, last week, three judges decided the grounds were not sufficient to challenge the conviction.
His case raises further questions about the application of the common purpose law. Lord Phillips, former lord chief justice, is on record describing it as "unfair", and last year a BBC Panorama investigation questioned the safety of Cunliffe's conviction on the basis of the law.
Next month, Janet Cunliffe will launch a campaign, Common Purpose, aimed at fighting for those wrongly convicted by the misuse of the law. Writer Jimmy McGovern has agreed to be the campaign's patron.
Although bound together by tragic circumstances, it is unlikely that Helen Newlove and Janet Cunliffe will ever find common ground. Newlove describes Jordan Cunliffe as a murderer. "Would you stand there watching somebody else kicking and punching? Would you actually think that was right to watch even if you didn't do the act? They were all as guilty as the person doing the act," she said.
Janet Cunliffe says "watching" somebody else kicking and punching is exactly what her son could not have done because of his eye condition. She says the fight to prove her son's innocence will continue.
Voices in the wake of loss
Some of those bereaved by violent, unlawful deaths take up the cudgel against those responsible for their loss. In 2000, Sara Payne's eight-year-old daughter, Sarah, was murdered by a known paedophile, Roy Whiting. Payne has led a successful campaign to persuade the government to allow controlled access to the sex offenders register.
A different perspective is offered by Ann Whelan, whose son Michael Hickey was convicted of the murder of 13-year-old Carl Bridgewater, in 1978. Hickey, 16 at the time, and three other men were sentenced to life for the shooting. Whelan fought for 19 years to have her son's conviction overturned. Hickey and two other men (another died in prison) were released by the court of appeal in 1997.
British designer Tamsin van Essen has created ceramic cups that appear to have been colonized by various bacteria. Pictured above is streptococcus. No matter how thirsty I was I couldn't be convinced to drink from that vessel .
The raw clay for these cups was contaminated with various 'foreign' materials, to mimic the growth and multiplication of bacterial colonies. Bringing the microscopic to the macroscopic level, the contamination spread in an uncontrollable way during firing.
The article titled "It's Not A Market, It's An HFT 'Crop Circle' Crime Scene" [zerohedge.com] describes some recently discovered but irrefutable evidence of "quote stuffing" on the US stock market, a manipulative technique (similar to DDOS) that High Frequency Trading (HFT) systems use to try to overpower each other.
Around the time of the spectacular May 6 Flash Crash, the stock market anomaly during which about $1 trillion market value temporarily evaporated, it seems thousands of cancelled quotes reappeared, about each second and with a definitive periodicity and regularity. For instance, on July 12, over 56,000 quotes appeared in less than 10 seconds, all with same ask price, while the ask size increased or decreased by 1 until almost 40,000.
Next to some obvious non-ethical motives, there is actually an aesthetic side to these algorithmic commands: I could not stop myself admiring the data graphs that are presented as proof (and if you like them too, you can find some more at the bottom of the page here). One can only hope the programmers behind these operations will not augment their operations with some clever randomness patterns...
Inquiry into death of patient through overdose given by GP on first shift in UK finds two previous cases of same mistake
The official NHS inquiry into the death of a patient through an overdose given by a German locum GP on his first shift in Britain has revealed that two other doctors flying in from Germany had been involved in incidents of overdoses with the same drug while working for the same company the year before.
The revelation that three doctors from the same country made similar mistakes, although not fatal in the cases of the other two, will heighten concerns about EU rules governing free movement of labour that medical regulators say jeopardises patient safety.
The NHS watchdog, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), said lessons "must resonate across the health service" after finding the now defunct out-of-hours provider Take Care Now (TCN) guilty of systemic failings.
These included "potentially unsafe" staffing levels, including on occasion one nurse being the only clinical cover for 70 miles.
The watchdog also criticised NHS bodies for whom TCN ran services, saying they failed to adequately check its performance and did not share information on poorly performing doctors.
The CQC recognised that rules were tightened by the then Labour government following the death of 70-year-old David Gray in Manea, Oxfordshire, from a tenfold overdose of the painkiller diamorphine, administered by Daniel Ubani in February 2008.
But it also warned Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, that radical changes he is planning for the NHS, including giving far more power to GPs, must reflect the lessons arising from TCN's failures - that competency of overseas doctors must be properly tested, serious medical incidents investigated and quality of care closely monitored.
Ubani has been struck off the General Medical Council register of doctors in the UK, although he continues to practice in Germany.
A coroner has also ruled that Gray's death amounted to unlawful killing.
The CQC report found that TCN had not acted on a previous national safety warning over the administration of drugs. Neither had the two previous cases involving overdoses of diamorphine been reported as serious untoward incidents as they should have been. The doctors who administered them had, like Ubani, been trained and practised in Germany where the drug was not routinely used. Although the Guardian has reported these two incidents in neighbouring Suffolk before, the German connection of those responsible had not previously been revealed.
TCN did not change the way the drug was stored and used until after Gray's death.
The way Ubani was hired for TCN shifts, through a recruitment agency and without proper checks on his competence has already caused widespread protests, with the government and the GMC pressing for an urgent review of the way professional qualifications are recognised in the internal jobs market. But the Ubani case has also revealed serious flaws in which local NHS trusts check competence and language skills too.
TCN operated out-of-hours services for NHS trusts in Cambridgeshire, Worcestershire, Suffolk, Great Yarmouth and Waveney, and with the ambulance service in south-west Essex. It began losing contracts in the wake of the Ubani affair and was then taken over by Harmoni, a larger private provider.
The CQC surveyed local GPs and found that half of them thought TCN's ability to provide clinical care in people's homes was "poor" or "very poor". Its report also said out-of-hours service was a low priority for trusts, "refelcting the national position at the time". The two strategic health authorities, in eastern England and west Midlands, also did not pay sufficient attention to evening and weekend care.
Dame Jo Williams, the commission's chairman, said that TCN had not only ignored "explicit warnings" about diamorphine, but "it failed to address deep-rooted problems across its entire out-of-hours service".
She said that "the lessons of its failure must resonate across the health service. Around 7 million people contact GP out-of-hours services every year - the provider, the primary care trusts and individual clinicians all have a responsibility to ensure its services are as safe as possible.
"We hope the family of Mr Gray will take some comfort in knowing that his tragic death has brought about significant change in the way out-of-hours services are delivered and monitored."
Stand-up comedian Juston McKinney has a hilarious rap song out about fatherhood. You might want to watch it outside of the presence of little ears. There is some adult content that you might not want to have to explain just yet.
? Patient support group applauds Guardian report ? Bristol babies scandal seen as precedent for review
The families of patients who died after vascular surgery at a hospital with an exceptionally high death rate could be entitled to an investigation, according to an independent patient-support organisation.
Peter Walsh, chief executive of Action against Medical Accidents (Avma), made his comments following an investigation by the Guardian that revealed wide disparities in death rates across hospitals offering vascular surgery. The data, which was not in the public domain, was extracted from 116 trusts through freedom of information requests.
Some hospitals had higher numbers of deaths than expected. The average mortality rate in abdominal aortic aneurysm surgery in England was 4% in the years 2006-08. However, 10 trusts had death rates higher than 10%, and one, Scarborough, had four deaths in 14 operations ? a death rate of 29%. Recognising that mortality was too high ? and the frequency of operations too low to ensure that surgeons kept their skills ? it stopped offering the procedure.
Walsh said that complaints to hospitals were supposed to be registered within a year. But in the case of a family that had previously had doubts and had now found out about the death rates, there ought to be flexibility. "It wouldn't appear to be unreasonable to say, 'I'm not sure about my father's death and this has now come to light ? would you look into it and let me know?'" he said. The publicity surrounding the Bristol babies scandal ? where death rates were far higher than at other hospitals ? caused families to come forward years after their babies died.
Now that Scarborough is known to have had such a high death rate, "I think it would be reasonable to expect them [the hospital] to review these cases," Walsh added. Avma is campaigning for a "legal duty of candour" to force hospitals to be open with patients and their families when treatment goes wrong.
The Guardian investigation found that doctors did not always collect good data about their performance, and even when they did, it was not published. The health secretary, Andrew Lansley, said he wanted to see information in the public domain.
"A transparent NHS is a safer NHS," he said. "In the first speech I made as health secretary, I was clear about the need to devolve power to patients by providing meaningful information. Unleashing comparative data about standards and patient experience will drive up the quality of care, as the data begins to influence patient choice.
"This priority is reflected in our coalition commitment to publish detailed data about the performance of healthcare providers online, so everyone will know who is providing a good service and who is falling behind."
The data currently available about hospital outcomes is compiled by administrators, not the doctors treating patients, and is generally thought to be unreliable.
Sir Donald Irvine, the former president of the General Medical Council (GMC) and now chair of Picker Institute Europe, which represents patients' views, said: "The report shows just how vital it is that individual doctors, wherever possible, have accurate data on their clinical results. They need to know how well they are performing, compared with their colleagues, and patients need to know which doctors and clinical teams are likely to provide the best and safest care for them. That is the only basis for an informed choice of doctor."
He added: "It is a sad reflection on the NHS that it has taken a national newspaper to drag this information out of health organisations using freedom of information requests. Today only the cardiac surgeons, as a group, publish their standardised comparative results regularly, of their own free will. Full marks to them. They have shown what can be done, and what must be done by all in future."
Irvine urged the GMC to implement immediately its plan for revalidating doctors through a five-yearly performance check. "Through revalidation, the GMC could energise the development of high quality, appropriately standardised, doctor-specific performance data in healthcare across the NHS and private sector, to the benefit of patients everywhere. Such data is the basis of robust licensure and good clinical governance, on both of which safe patient care is so utterly dependant," he said.
People who are ill have to trust their doctors without thinking, he added. "The message from the Guardian report today is that the sooner the days of uninformed trust are over, the better."
Niall Dickson, chief executive of the GMC, said good information about what was happening was essential to a safe and effective healthcare system. "This is absolutely at the heart of the drive to improve quality," he said. Revalidation was "designed to help doctors in mainstream practice to have an opportunity to look at what data there is and find ways of improving on their practice".
He added: "I'm sure we are in the lower foothills in terms of gathering data and developing it."
Patients less likely to die in bigger hospitals, reveals exclusive Guardian investigation
Doctors in the NHS do not know how well they are performing and whether they are more likely than their colleagues to kill or cure their patients, because of a widespread failure to collect the information, a Guardian investigation reveals.
The results of a major exercise looking at one particular procedure ? vascular surgery ? show a massive variation in death rates among patients admitted for planned operations and reveal that some hospitals have unacceptably high mortality.
It demonstrates the case for the closure of small hospital units, which the government has put on hold. Death rates vary from less than one in 50 in some hospitals to more than one in 10 in others.
The investigation reveals the hollowness of patient choice, which the coalition, like Labour before it, has made the centrepiece of NHS policy. The data amassed by the Guardian from surgeons at 116 hospital trusts after an extensive freedom of information trawl is not publicly available ? and is at odds with what appears on the NHS Choices website, set up to help patients choose where to be treated.
The Guardian investigation focused on vascular surgery, where there is a significant risk of dying in planned operations, but the conclusions apply to every other branch of medicine ? with the exception of heart surgery, where doctors collect and publish their individual results. They embraced transparency following the Bristol babies scandal in the late 1990s, when doctors were struck off the medical register over the deaths of babies who underwent operations for heart defects that they might have survived at other hospitals.
The investigation reveals that:
? More than a decade on from Bristol, doctors are failing to collect and publish data that would tell them and their patients how well or badly they are doing and allow patients to chose a hospital where their risks are lowest.
? Death rates in planned vascular surgery for abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA ? to prevent a burst artery) vary from under 2% in some hospitals to at least 10% in 10 of them. More than 5,000 of the operations are carried out each year ? most of them planned admissions in which the patient decides where to go for surgery.
? Patients are less likely to die in the bigger, busier hospital units where surgical teams are more skilled because they do more of the operations. The results strongly suggest that smaller units should close. This presents a major challenge to the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, who has stopped all hospital reorganisation.
The most worrying death rates were at Scarborough hospital in Yorkshire, where 29% of patients scheduled in advance for AAA surgery died in the three-year period from 2006 to 2008. The national average was just over 4%. Scarborough says it has now stopped offering the operation.
Results for planned surgery at several other hospitals also gave cause for concern, including Gateshead on 12.9%, Hull on 9%, Pennine Acute Trust on 8.4% and Leeds on 7.1%. Gateshead and Hull blamed a high number of difficult cases, Pennine argued there had been an issue around the way transferred cases were recorded, which is now resolved. Leeds pointed out that it takes difficult cases and has brought its death rates steadily down.
Some leading surgeons believe that for best results, a hospital needs to carry out at least 50 AAA operations a year. Yet very many hospitals across the UK see less than 20 cases a year. Dartford and Gravesham had just five in three years, Mid-Staffordshire had nine and Scarborough had 14. Of the 116 hospitals that gave the Guardian data, 35 did fewer than 20 operations a year and 76 did fewer than 50.
The data also shows the UK lagging in Europe. The second Vascunet report, on vascular surgery across 10 European countries in 2008, found the average death rate was just 2.8%.
Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of the NHS and a former heart surgeon, who was involved in successful efforts to publish mortality data in cardiac surgery said: "Surgeons have a moral and professional duty to know what they are doing, how well they are doing it and to use that information to help them improve ? otherwise they have no right to be doing it at all." He intends to take steps to ensure that senior doctors personally take responsibility for the accuracy of data relating to their specialist area that is published by their trust ? whether in surgery, cancer care, diabetes or arthritis.
Peter Holt, clinical lecturer in vascular surgery at St George's Healthcare NHS Trust in London, who helped the Guardian analyse the results, said they demonstrated "significant variations in the death rates after planned and emergency aneurysm repair in England. These results support those that have been published in the medical literature since 2007. Variations in death rates do not equate to deficiencies in the quality of care received, but what is clear is that these results require further investigation, which must begin with confirming the accuracy of the data before hospitals are labelled as dangerous".
David Mitchell of the Vascular Society, which has been collecting mortality data on a voluntary basis from surgeons for several years but does not publish it, said they had embarked on a quality improvement programme, aimed at bringing the average death rate down to 3.5%.
Study shows death rate among emergency hospital admissions increases by 7% at the weekend
Patients admitted to hospital as an emergency at the weekend have a higher chance of dying than those who are brought in during the week, according to a study published today.
The death rate among emergency admissions increased by 7% at the weekend, according to a paper published in the journal Quality and Safety in Healthcare. The authors, from Dr Foster Intelligence and Imperial College, calculate that 3,369 more deaths occurred at the weekend in 2005/06 than would have been expected.
"This is more than the 3,201 killed in road accidents in Great Britain in 2006," they write, although they add: "We acknowledge that this is perhaps an unfair comparison, as it is likely that people dying on the roads are from a much younger age group and will be generally healthier compared with the population of people admitted as an emergency to hospital at the weekend."
Dr Paul Aylin, the senior author of the study, said this was clearly a significant number of people. "We need to get to the bottom of what this means.
"Staffing levels are often lower at weekends, with fewer senior medical staff around, and some specialist services are less available. We believe this may be contributing to the increase in mortality rates on Saturdays and Sundays but we would like to see more research.
"Hospitals have been reassessing the working hours and rotas of their doctors and, considering the impact that staff availability may be having on mortality rates, this is a timely reminder to hospitals that they must take care not to jeopardise the quality and standard of patient care available at weekends when devising new staffing rotas."
The researchers looked at administrative data on 215,054 deaths out of the 4.3 million emergency admissions in 163 hospital Trusts in 2005/6. They found that overall death rates were 5.2% for people admitted at weekends and 4.9% for those admitted on a weekday.
There were higher proportions of deaths at the weekend for patients with conditions including heart attacks, heart failure, stroke, some cancers and aortic aneurysms.
As well as lower staffing levels in hospitals, there may be a reduced service in specialist community and primary care services at the weekend, which the authors say may result in some terminally ill patients being admitted to hospital and dying there at the weekends.
Professor Derek Bell, another of the authors, said: "Clinicians and senior healthcare managers must begin to recognise and address these issues to improve patient care."
But the authors say more research is needed before any firm conclusions can be drawn about the reasons for the increased rate of deaths at the weekend.
British Medical Association concerned at lack of protection
The NHS does not do enough to help whistleblowers seeking to raise concerns about colleagues' behaviour, according to research in the British Medical Journal.
Among 118 hospital foundation trusts in England, 43 insist an employee raises their concerns internally before approaching an outside body, 22 warn they could face disciplinary action and 23 do not guarantee to respect the whistleblower's confidentiality, it found.
Dr Mark Porter, of the British Medical Association, said some doctors encountered problems when they spoke out, even though the right to expose problems was protected by law.
"We get very concerned about people who fall foul of these whistleblowing policies," said Porter. "People continue to raise problems with us and there are high-profile cases, some of which take place in organisations that have good policies."
Peter Gooderham, a law lecturer at Manchester University, said: "On whistleblowing, I think the NHS has failed badly over the past 10 years.".
An incident in Detroit raises several questions about street art. Renowned British graffiti artist Banksy visited a crumbling factory in the city and painted a wall.
Discovered last weekend, the stenciled work shows a forlorn boy holding a can of red paint next to the words ?I remember when all this was trees.? But by Tuesday, artists from the 555 Nonprofit Gallery and Studios, a feisty grassroots group, had excavated the 7-by-8-foot, 1,500-pound cinder block wall with a masonry saw and forklift and moved the piece to their grounds near the foot of the Ambassador Bridge in southwest Detroit.
The move ' a guerilla act on top of Banksy?s initial guerilla act ' has sparked an intense debate about the nature of graffiti art, including complicated questions of meaning, legality, value and ownership. Some say the work should be protected and preserved at all costs. Others say that no one had a right to move it ? and that the power and meaning of graffiti art is so intrinsic to its location that to relocate it is to kill it.
The gallery defends its action by pointing out that the artwork would have been destroyed soon along with the building. Others respond that Banksy may have intended for that to happen. And then there's the fact that the context gave the painting it meaning in the first place. One could say that while Banksy broke laws against trespassing and vandalism, the gallery is guilty of theft. The property owner hasn't said anything about it yet. No one yet knows who, if anyone, stands to profit from the incident. Link -via Metafilter
You and I know it as the 
