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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/wyFeaIQi_wA/story01.htm
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Friday, November 25, 2011
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U.S. withdrawal from Iraq: Eight years worth of stuff (Reuters)
BAGHDAD (Reuters) ? At the peak of the United States' war in Iraq, the U.S. military had more than 170,000 troops, 500 bases replete with tents and toilets, kitchens and motor pools, and an airline that flew hundreds of times a day across the country.
Moving day has lasted more than a year.
The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq after nearly nine years of war is believed to be one of the largest removal jobs in history. At the start of the year logistics experts calculated there were nearly 3 million pieces of equipment to be moved, from airplanes, helicopters and tanks to laptops and lights.
"It is the largest move of military equipment we have done since World War Two," said Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Brooks, a U.S. military historian.
Soldiers, trucks and weaponry are streaming out of Iraq every day. From that peak of 170,000 troops, about 18,000 remain this week, with hundreds leaving daily. Virtually all will be gone before Christmas.
Since September 2010, around 2 million pieces of equipment have been redeployed, U.S. officials say, some back to the United States, others to Afghanistan or other locations.
By September 1, the clutter had been reduced to about 20,000 truckloads. This week, about 9,000 truckloads remained.
"It's not as glamorous as it was when you're out on patrol in a village, helping some young Iraqi, or building a school or capturing a terrorist. But it's historic," said Brigadier General Bradley Becker of the move out.
"Someday I truly believe that future military classes ... will study the logistics (of our) move out of Iraq."
PALACES EMPTIED
Closing down the Iraq war has meant shutting down the U.S. military bases, which numbered 505 at the peak and included everything from small desert fueling depots to massive installations where Americans have been entrenched for years.
The Victory Base complex in Baghdad, the heart of the war operation surrounded by 42 km (27 miles) of concrete blast walls and razor wire, once hosted 40,000 troops and more than 20,000 contractors. Balad, north of Baghdad, had 36,000 residents.
Victory was so big it had a reverse osmosis water plant that could generate 1.85 million gallons a day, an ice plant, a 50-megawatt power generating station, stadium-sized chow halls and a laundromat with 3,000 machines able to do 36,000 loads a day.
Now the generals have moved from Saddam's missile-damaged palaces, the war operations room has been cleared of computers and phones and the barber shops, DVD stores and restaurants like Burger King, Subway and Green Bean are fast disappearing.
AIR SERVICE WINDING DOWN
For years, in U.S. air terminals across Iraq, on flat-screen monitors or white boards, generals and soldiers, journalists and contractors watched for flight information to BIAP (Baghdad International Airport), Tikrit, Mosul or other destinations.
Between combat, medical evacuations and ferry service, the U.S. intra-Iraq airline flew scores of times every day.
At the peak in 2009, there more than 400 aircraft which flew daily, Brooks said.
"The MNC-I Aviation brigade averaged 157 missions a day. We had 28 helicopters devoted to just flying passengers around Iraq on scheduled flights."
Joint Base Balad, with two 11,000-foot runways, had 27,500 takeoffs and landings a month in 2006, second only to London's Heathrow, U.S. officials said.
THE WAY OUT
For months, a steady stream of tanks, troop carriers, artillery and other gear has flowed from remote bases to collection yards in Baghdad and elsewhere, and then out of the country, mostly to Kuwait.
One U.S. military officer said logistics experts had estimated there was $7.8 billion worth of "theater-provided equipment" -- the tanks, trucks, tables and chairs and other things the soldiers don't carry themselves -- to move.
On a single day, the dusty yard at Victory Base held 186 HumVees, 22 MRAPs, four M-1 Abrams tanks, eight Paladin Howitzer artillery systems, four Stryker fighting vehicles and scores of generators, lighting systems and other gear.
U.S. record-keepers itemize everything, including the equipment to be left behind. About a quarter of the gear, mainly HumVees, radios and weapons, was headed to Afghanistan.
At big bases like Victory, buildings, mess halls, offices, water treatment and electrical plants, Containerized Housing Units (CHUs), desks, tables and chairs, are being handed over to the Iraq government, and tons of equipment is being scrapped.
In many cases, the cost of moving something wasn't worth it. In others, the equipment wasn't worth it.
"A lot of the computers we've been using for the last eight years ... the guts are ripped out," said 1st Lieutenant Michael Saslo, logistics coordinator at the yard. "There's no point putting those on a convoy and risking a soldier's life for it."
By early November, nearly 4 million items worth $390 million had been given to Iraq, including 26,000 CHUs worth $124 million and 89,000 air conditioners worth $18.5 million. Logisticians said they had saved taxpayers $685 million in transport costs.
"We don't ship toilets," said one soldier.
The exception appeared to be Saddam Hussein's toilet, taken from the Victory Base cell where he was held for two years and destined for display in a U.S. military museum.
(Reporting by Jim Loney; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
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Thursday, November 24, 2011
Brain imaging, behavior research reveals physicians learn more by paying attention to failure
Brain imaging, behavior research reveals physicians learn more by paying attention to failure
Thursday, November 24, 2011When seeking a physician, you should look for one with experience. Right? Maybe not. Research on physicians' decision-making processes has revealed that those who pay attention to failures as well as successes become more adept at selecting the correct treatment.
"We found that all the physicians in the study included irrelevant criteria in their decisions," said Read Montague, Ph.D., director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, who led the study. "Notably, however, the most experienced doctors were the poorest learners."
The research is published in the Nov. 23 issue of PLoS One, the Public Library of Science open-access journal, in the article, "Neural correlates of effective learning in experienced medical decision-makers," by Jonathan Downar, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and Toronto Western Hospital; Meghana Bhatt, Ph.D., assistant research professor at Beckman Research Institute, the City of Hope Hospital, Duarte, Calif.; and Montague, who is also a professor of physics in the College of Science at Virginia Tech.
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the brain activity of 35 experienced physicians in a range of non-surgical specialties as they made decisions.
The doctors were instructed to select between two treatments for a series of simulated patients in an emergency room setting. "First they had a chance to learn by experience which of two medications worked better in a series of 64 simulated heart-attack patients, based on a simplified history with just six factors," said Bhatt.
Unknown to the test subjects, of the six factors, only one was actually relevant to the decision: diabetes status. One medication had a 75 percent success rate in patients with diabetes, but only a 25 percent success rate in patients without diabetes. The other had the opposite profile. The physicians had 10 seconds to select a treatment. Then they were briefly presented with an outcome of "SUCCESS: (heart attack) aborted" or "FAILURE: No response."
"After the training, we tested the physicians to see how often they were able to pick the better drug in a second series of 64 simulated patients," said Bhatt. "When we looked at their performance, the doctors separated into two distinct groups. One group learned very effectively from experience, and chose the better drug more than 75 percent of the time. The other group was terrible; they chose the better drug only at coin-flipping levels of accuracy, or half the time, and they also came up with inaccurate systems for deciding how to prescribe the medications, based on factors that didn't matter at all."
In fact, all the doctors reported including at least one of the five irrelevant factors, such as age or previous heart attack, in their decision process.
"The brain imaging showed us a clear difference in the mental processes of the two groups," said Montague. "The high performers activated their frontal lobes when things didn't go as expected and the treatments failed." Such activity showed that the doctors learned from their failures, he said. These physicians gradually improved their performance.
In contrast, the low performers activated their frontal lobes when things did go as expected, said Bhatt. "In other words, they succumbed to 'confirmation bias,' ignoring failures and learning only from the successful cases. Each success confirmed what the low performers falsely thought they already knew about which treatment was better." The researchers termed this counterproductive learning pattern "success-chasing."
"The problem with remembering successes and ignoring failures is that it doesn't leave us any way to abandon our faulty ideas. Instead, the ideas gain strength from each chance success, until they evolve into something like a superstition," said Downar.
The fMRI showed that a portion of the brain called the nucleus accumbens "showed significant anticipatory activation well before the outcome of the trial was revealed, and this anticipatory activation was significantly greater prior to successful outcomes," Montague said. "Based on the outcome of the training phase, we were actually able to predict results in the testing phase for each low-performing subject's final set of spurious treatment rules."
The authors state in the article that the formation of spurious beliefs is universal, such as an athlete's belief in a lucky hat. "But the good news is that physicians can probably be trained to think more like the high performers," said Downar. "I tell my students to remember three things: First, when you're trying to work out a diagnosis, remember to also ask the questions that would prove your hunches wrong. Second, when you think you have the answer, think again and go through the possible alternatives. Third, if the treatment isn't going as expected, don't just brush it off ? ask yourself what you could have missed."
"These findings underscore the dangers of disregarding past failures when making high-stakes decisions," said Montague. "'Success-chasing' not only can lead doctors to make flawed decisions in diagnosing and treating patients, but it can also distort the thinking of other high-stakes decision-makers, such as military and political strategists, stock market investors, and venture capitalists."
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Virginia Tech: http://www.vtnews.vt.edu
Thanks to Virginia Tech for this article.
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Moroccan elections challenged by voter mistrust (AP)
RABAT, Morocco ? It should be a moment of excitement: Moroccans are choosing a parliament in elections Friday prompted by the Arab Spring's clamor for freedom.
Yet there are few signs here that elections are even taking place.
Posters and raucous rallies for candidates are absent in the cities and instead there are just stark official banners urging citizens to "do their national duty" and "participate in the change the country is undergoing."
"The parties have presented the same people for the past 30 years, the least they could do is change their candidates," said Hassan Rafiq, a vegetable vendor in the capital Rabat, who said he didn't plan to vote.
Like elsewhere in the Arab world, Moroccans hit the streets in the first half of 2011 calling for more democracy, and King Mohammed VI responded by amending the constitution and bringing forward elections.
But since then the sense of change has dissipated.
The real challenge for these polls, in which an opposition Islamist party and a pro-palace coalition are expected to do well, will be if many people come out to vote in the face of a strident boycott campaign by democracy campaigners.
U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said that since Oct. 20 government has taken more than 100 activist in for questioning for advocating a boycott.
"Summoning scores of boycott activists in cities around the country to police stations for questioning amounts to a state policy of harassment," said Sarah Leah Whitson, the group's Mideast director in a statement Wednesday.
It's a sharp contrast to the electric atmosphere that characterized Tunisia's first free elections just last month.
"Moroccans feel that aside from the constitutional reform, nothing has really changed, meaning that the elections of 2011 will be a copy of the elections 2007 and that is what will probably keep the participation low," said Abdellah Baha, deputy secretary general of the Islamist Justice and Development Party.
The 2007 elections, the first with widespread international observation, had just 37 percent turnout, and some fear it could be even lower this time around.
A close U.S. ally and popular destination for European sunseekers, Morocco with its many political parties and regular elections was once the bright star in a region of dictatorships.
But all that has changed with the Arab uprisings that toppled dictators in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Now a political system that holds elections but leaves all powers in the hands of a hereditary king does not look so liberal.
"Morocco can no longer say it is the only one with pluralism or that it has the 'most,' (pluralistic)," said Jeffrey England, of the National Democratic Institute, a U.S.-based organization dedicated to furthering democracy.
Yet the Arab Spring has not left the country untouched, and Moroccans today do expect greater freedoms and reform. "Even if the system structure hasn't changed much, it has certainly changed the population's perceptions and expectations," said England, the institute's resident director in Morocco.
But even people who voted in July's referendum for a new constitution may not come out come out to vote in this week's elections because of widespread suspicions the referendum results were skewed, said Mounia Bennani-Chraibi, a Morocco expert at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.
The constitutional referendum passed with over 98 percent voting in favor, and a staggering 72 percent turnout, which most observers found hardly credible.
"There are people who have voted 'yes' for constitution and were then humiliated by the results, they regretted it and felt it was the same methods as before, and nothing has really changed," she said.
One new reform in these elections is that 90 seats have been added to the parliament, with 60 reserved for women, and another 30 for candidates under 40 years old.
But there's a pervasive sense that the murky electoral machine has been preserved intact.
The law organizing the parliamentary elections was passed in October with little discussion in wider society and preserves a complex system with disproportionate districts that favor rural voters and leaves a splintered parliament.
Larger parties often receive less seats than their proportion of the popular vote.
Traditionally, that has allowed the palace to pick one party to weld together a coalition of many small parties ? which then does the palace's bidding regardless of its ideological stripe.
Under the new constitution, the largest party must form the government, which could well be the Islamist party, known by its French initials PJD. But there's uncertainty over whether it can truly change anything.
Foreign Minister Taieb Fassi-Fihri dismissed any threat deriving from an Islamist party possibly leading the government.
"The parties will have to come together in coalitions, in fact some are already doing so, so I don't think there is much risk," he told French news channel France 24. "On the contrary, we have continuity with a change of face."
Moroccan political analyst Matti Monjib explained that the king "wants a government that doesn't govern too much," which could be a problem if any new coalition really tries to change things in the kingdom, such as the PJD's promised anti-corruption drive ? which might even target palace cronies.
Even with activists agitating against the vote and a middle class disillusioned with the process, Morocco's traditional voting machine will still be functioning on Friday.
In rural areas, notables will gather up peasants and bring them to polling stations and instruct them whom to vote for, while in the slums around the big cities, local power brokers will deliver the votes of the poor.
The traditional voting system could also buoy a coalition of eight pro-palace parties that could form the next government and ensure the king has a friendly prime minister carrying out his wishes.
But many see the status quo as dangerous for Morocco with an economy creaking from the amount of money the government has pumped into raising salaries and subsidies to keep people calm amid the Arab world turmoil.
"The palace must understand that it cannot continue like this, to guarantee the continuation of the monarchy it has to understand that it is no longer an authoritarian system, but a democratic one, there is no longer a choice," warned Bara of the PJD.
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Health Tip: Don't Take Too Many NSAIDs (HealthDay)
(HealthDay News) -- Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) have been around for years and are frequently the medication of choice to relieve pain and inflammation.
But taking too many of this type of drug, which includes aspirin, ibuprofen and naproxen, can lead to potential complications, including stomach bleeding or ulcer.
The American Gastroenterological Association says reasons for potential NSAID overdose include:
- Taking a subsequent dose too soon after taking the initial one.
- Taking more of the medication at one time than is recommended.
- Taking a higher dose over a 24-hour period than is recommended.
- Taking more than one NSAID-containing medication at a time
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Scorsese gets 3D right, adding depth to "Hugo" (Reuters)
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) ? Just when moviegoers were ready to give up on the 3D revival as a gimmick used primarily to justify higher ticket prices, master director Martin Scorsese comes along with "Hugo" to show how it should be done.
His brilliant family film employs 3D imaginatively, evocatively and judiciously, using it to add depth, both literal and metaphorical, enriching the story he is telling.
"Hugo," based on "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," a Caldecott Medal-winning, 2007 children's novel by Brian Selznick, is in many ways a love letter to the movies and film preservation, the latter a long-standing cause advocated by Scorsese.
Although it chronicles the adventures of Hugo (Asa Butterfield), an orphaned boy who lives in a Paris train station in the 1930s, the film is really about the power of movies to transform lives, allow escape and encompass our dreams.
Hugo is the son of a clock and machine repairman (Jude Law), who died, but not before imparting his love of both movies and all things mechanical to his son. Hugo now lives deep in the upper reaches of a Paris train station, where he secretly keeps its clocks running, attempts in his spare time to fix a metal, life-like looking automaton his father once rescued from a museum, and tries to avoid the clutches of the station's overzealous police inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen, in a highly amusing turn).
He is befriended by Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), a bookworm who longs for the sort of mystery and adventure in real life that she encounters in the pages of books. Hugo also begins apprenticing for her guardian (Ben Kingsley), an embittered old toy seller and repairman who has a small shop in the station.
The identity of this old man and his link to Hugo's father are at the heart of the story. Like any great children's tale, there are adult secrets to be learned, a mysterious key that will literally unlock the automaton as well as the identities of and connections between various characters, and perilous adventures aplenty.
Along the way, Scorsese pays tribute to trailblazing filmmakers and performers such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and, above all -- and without giving away too much -- French silent film pioneer Georges M?lies (1902's "A Trip to the Moon").
While "Hugo" works splendidly as family fare, offering an involving tale, thrills (the police inspector's fearsome dog racing straight at you via 3D) and humor, it is ardent cinephiles who will want to see the movie repeatedly as there are likely new film references, homages and allusions to be gleaned from every viewing.
Here's just one: Look for Scorsese himself in a cameo playing, appropriately, a photographer in the early 1900s who's taking a portrait of a famous filmmaker. In casting himself as both a historian and an artist, Scorsese perfectly sums up the duality of the vision that he brings to such vivid life in "Hugo."
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