As the 401(k) dwindles, we?re happy to hear at least some of our retirement plans are still achievable.
Bloomberg reports this week that Wal-Mart is moving its greeters away from the lobbies of its stores. But, don?t fret, it?s not the end of the "Hello" as you enter your next SuperCenter.
The greeters will simply be setting up shop about 10 feet inside the stores, where they can help more customers.
?They?re still greeting customers, that?s what they are there for. As customers enter they will still have to pass by,? company spokesperson Ashley Hardie said.
The move will allow greeters to take more questions from customers already in the store and direct shoppers to shorter checkout lines if they?re available.
Wal-Mart started using greeters in the early 1980s after company founder Sam Walton encountered one in a Louisiana store and decided to the whole chain needed more hospitality.
In light of their new responsibilities, greeters?will no longer be required to corral carts or mark returned merchandise as customers enter the store, Hardie said.
The company stopped using overnight greeters in stores open late last year.?
TOKYO (Reuters) ? Canon Inc forecast weaker-than-expected earnings growth for 2012, citing worries over a slowing global economy and a strong yen that are likely to weigh on the export-dependent camera and printer maker's profits.
The company also posted a slightly better-than-forecast 14 percent rise in fourth-quarter operating profit on Monday .
Like other Japanese exporters, Canon, which makes 80 percent of its revenue overseas, has been buffeted by the strong yen and the floods in Thailand, but it has emphasized it plans to counter these challenges by cutting costs and increasing automation.
"Owing to the historically high valuation of the yen combined with the effects of the earthquake and floods, all of Canon's businesses faced extremely demanding conditions throughout the year," the company said in a statement.
Canon's operating profit for October-December was 94.6 billion yen ($1.23 billion), compared with 82.8 billion yen in the same quarter of the previous year. Consensus expectations were for a 92.4 billion yen profit, based on the average of five estimates from analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Operating profit for the full year to December was 378.1 billion yen, down from 387.5 billion yen in the previous year but beating the average of 20 analyst forecasts for a profit of 372 billion yen.
It forecast a full-year operating profit of 390 billion yen for the current year to December 2012, compared with expectations of a 470 billion yen profit based on the average of 20 estimates by analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Canon, which competes with Xerox in printers and Nikon and Sony Corp in cameras, aims to sell 9.2 million interchangeable lens cameras and 22 million compact cameras in the year to December, compared with 7.2 million and 18.7 million, respectively, last year.
Its shares have fallen about 18 percent since the start of last year, slightly worse than the benchmark Nikkei average's 14 percent drop.
Xerox lowered its outlook for 2012 this month, on expectations that the debt crisis in Europe would hurt its business.
(Reporting by Isabel Reynolds; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Chris Gallagher)
Did you feel that magnetic breeze? Solar weather trackers say a "pulse" in the solar wind of electrically charged particles swept past monitoring satellites today, in the wake of last Friday's X-class solar flare and coronal mass ejection. But the main force of the blast was not pointing toward Earth, and thus no big impact on our planet's magnetic field is expected.
"Another effect of Friday's eruption, a solar radiation storm, continues its leisurely decay and is nearing the end of the event," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Solar Weather Prediction Center reported on its website.
The most significant effect of the past week's solar storming has been an upswing in spectacular pictures of the northern lights, as seen from Scandinavia and other high-latitude locales. Swedish photographer Peter Rosen got some great pictures over the weekend.
"I live in Abisko, next to the Aurora Sky Station ? a great place to see northern lights," Rosen told me in an email. "The Aurora Sky Station has become a very nice tourist attraction. ... I was there last Saturday and almost 100 people from all over the world were on the mountain. We had a great aurora from 9 p.m. to 12:30 due to another geomagnetic storm."
For more of the latest and greatest pictures of the northern lights, check out the selection on Rosen's website, Rosenmedia.se, as well as on SpaceWeather.com. Stay tuned for further auroral updates as the sun's 11-year activity cycle heads toward an expected peak in 2013.
More auroral glories:
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.
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A team led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute has discovered key elements of a strategy commonly used by tumor cells to survive when they spread to distant organs. The finding could lead to drugs that could inhibit this metastasis in patients with tumors.
A cell that breaks away from the primary tumor and finds itself in the alien environment of the bloodstream or a new organ, normally is destroyed by a process known as apoptosis. But tumor cells that express high levels of a certain surface protein are protected from apoptosis, greatly enhancing their ability to colonize distant organs. How this protein blocks apoptosis and promotes metastasis has been a mystery?until now.
"What we found in this study is that it's not the increased expression of the protein per se that protects a tumor cell, but, rather, the cleavage of this protein by proteolytic enzymes," said Scripps Research Professor James P. Quigley. "This cleavage triggers a signaling cascade in the tumor cell that blocks apoptosis." Quigley is the principal investigator for the study, which was recently published online before print by the journal Oncogene.
"We think that a reasonable strategy for inhibiting metastasis would be to try to prevent the cleavage of this surface protein using antibodies or small-molecule drugs that bind to the cleavage site of the protein," said Elena I. Deryugina, a staff scientist in Quigley's laboratory and corresponding author of the manuscript.
A Protein Linked to Poor Outcomes
The cell-surface protein at the center of this research is known as CUB Domain Containing Protein 1 (CDCP1). In 2003, a postdoctoral fellow in Quigley's laboratory, John D. Hooper, discovered and co-named CDCP1 as a "Subtractive Immunization Metastasis Antigen," also finding that it is highly expressed on the surfaces of metastasis-prone human tumor cells.
Quigley's laboratory and others soon found additional evidence that CDCP1 plays a major role in enabling metastasis. Clinical studies reported CDCP1 on multiple tumor types and linked its presence to worse outcomes for patients. Deryugina and Quigley reported in 2009 that CDCP1, when expressed in tumor-like cells, strongly promotes their ability to colonize new tissues and that unique monoclonal antibodies to CDCP1, generated in Quigley's lab, significantly block CDCP1-induced tumor colonization. Hooper, who now leads a laboratory at the Mater Medical Research Institute in Brisbane, Australia, reported in a cell culture study in 2010 that most of the CDCP1 protein on the cell membrane could be cleaved by serine proteases. This cleavage event seems to lead to the biochemical activation of the internal fragment of CDCP1 by a process called tyrosine phosphorylation, in this case involving the cancer-linked protein Src.
"What was missing was evidence in live animals that connected CDCP1 biochemically to the blocking of apoptosis and successful metastasis," said Deryugina.
In the new study, Deryugina and her colleagues in the Quigley laboratory, including first author Berta Casar, a postdoctoral fellow, set out to find such evidence.
In Pursuit of Evidence
Hooper supplied the Scripps Research scientists with transformed human embryonic kidney (HEK) cells, which don't naturally express CDCP1, but were forced to express the gene for CDCP1. Casar and Deryugina injected these CDCP1-expressing HEK cells into chick embryos, and found that the CDCP1 proteins on these HEK cells began to be cleaved by resident enzymes to the shorter form. After 96 hours, the proteins were no longer detectable in their full-size, pre-cleaved form. The CDCP1-expressing HEK cells were four times as likely to survive in the chick embryos than were control CDCP1-negative HEK cells. The same results were obtained with HEK cells that express a mutant, non-cleavable form of the CDCP1 protein.
The Scripps Research team then did experiments in live animals with human prostate cancer cells naturally expressing CDCP1 to show that the cleavage of CDCP1 by a serine protease enzyme is the key event that promotes tumor cell survival. "When we blocked CDCP1 cleavage using our unique anti-CDCP1 antibodies, or added a compound that selectively inhibits serine protease enzymes, CDCP1 was not cleaved, and the CDCP1-expressing cancer cells lost almost all their ability to colonize the tissues of chick embryos," said Casar.
Casar and Deryugina also confirmed that in live animals CDCP1's cleavage leads to the biochemical activation of its internal fragment by tyrosine phosphorylation involving the cancer-linked proteins Src and PKC?. This was followed by the downstream activation of the anti-apoptosis protein Akt and the inhibition of apoptosis-mediating enzymes. The team verified these results with a variety of experimental setups, including tests of tumor-cell lung colonization in mice and tests in which Src signaling was blocked with the anti-Src drug Dasatinib.
Another key experiment by Scripps Research scientists indicated that plasmin, a blood-clot-thinning serine protease, is the principal cleaver of CDCP1 in metastasizing tumor cells. In mice that lack plasmin's precursor molecule, plasminogen, CDCP1-bearing tumor cells showed an absence of CDCP1 cleavage and lost nearly all their ability to survive in lung tissue.
Toward a Promising Strategy
Breakaway tumor cells commonly travel to distant organs via the bloodstream, so their use of an abundant bloodstream enzyme such as plasmin as a survival booster makes sense. "Plasmin has long been linked to cancer," Quigley said. "Unfortunately, it has such an important function in thinning blood clots that using plasmin-inhibiting drugs in cancer patients might do more harm than good."
"Blocking the cleavage of CDCP1 using antibodies or other CDCP1-binding molecules seems to be a more promising strategy," said Deryugina. She and Casar are investigating.
###
Scripps Research Institute: http://www.scripps.edu
Thanks to Scripps Research Institute for this article.
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ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2012) ? Memories in our brains are maintained by connections between neurons called "synapses." But how do these synapses stay strong and keep memories alive for decades? Neuroscientists at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have discovered a major clue from a study in fruit flies: Hardy, self-copying clusters or oligomers of a synapse protein are an essential ingredient for the formation of long-term memory.
The finding supports a surprising new theory about memory, and may have a profound impact on explaining other oligomer-linked functions and diseases in the brain, including Alzheimer's disease and prion diseases.
"Self-sustaining populations of oligomers located at synapses may be the key to the long-term synaptic changes that underlie memory; in fact, our finding hints that oligomers play a wider role in the brain than has been thought," says Kausik Si, Ph.D., an associate investigator at the Stowers Institute, and senior author of the new study, which is published in the January 27, 2012 online issue of the journal Cell.
Si's investigations in this area began nearly a decade ago during his doctoral research in the Columbia University laboratory of Nobel-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel. He found that in the sea slug Aplysia californica, which has long been favored by neuroscientists for memory experiments because of its large, easily-studied neurons, a synapse-maintenance protein known as CPEB (Cytoplasmic Polyadenylation Element Binding protein) has an unexpected property.
A portion of the structure is self-complementary and -- much like empty egg cartons -- can easily stack up with other copies of itself. CPEB thus exists in neurons partly in the form of oligomers, which increase in number when neuronal synapses strengthen. These oligomers have a hardy resistance to ordinary solvents, and within neurons may be much more stable than single-copy "monomers" of CPEB. They also seem to actively sustain their population by serving as templates for the formation of new oligomers from free monomers in the vicinity.
CPEB-like proteins exist in all animals, and in brain cells they play a key role in maintaining the production of other synapse-strengthening proteins. Studies by Si and others in the past few years have hinted that CPEB's tendency to oligomerize is not merely incidental, but is indeed essential to its ability to stabilize longer-term memory. "What we've lacked till now are experiments showing this conclusively," Si says.
In the new study, Si and his colleagues examined a Drosophila fruit fly CPEB protein known as Orb2. Like its counterpart in Aplysia, it forms oligomers within neurons. "We found that these Orb2 oligomers become more numerous in neurons whose synapses are stimulated, and that this increase in oligomers happens near synapses," says lead author Amitabha Majumdar, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher in Si's lab.
The key was to show that the disruption of Orb2 oligomerization on its own impairs Orb2's function in stabilizing memory. Majumdar was able to do this by generating an Orb2 mutant that lacks the normal ability to oligomerize yet maintains a near-normal concentration in neurons. Fruit flies carrying this mutant form of Orb2 lost their ability to form long-term memories. "For the first 24 hours after a memory-forming stimulus, the memory was there, but by 48 hours it was gone, whereas in flies with normal Orb2 the memory persisted," Majumdar says.
Si and his team are now following up with experiments to determine for how long Orb2 oligomers are needed to keep a memory alive. "We suspect that they need to be continuously present, because they are self-sustaining in a way that Orb2 monomers are not," says Si.
The team's research also suggests some intriguing possibilities for other areas of neuroscience. This study revealed that Orb2 proteins in the Drosophila nervous system come in a rare, highly oligomerization-prone form (Orb2A) and a much more common, much less oligomerization-prone form (Orb2B). "The rare form seems to be the one that is regulated, and it seems to act like a seed for the initial oligomerization, which pulls in copies of the more abundant form," Si says. "This may turn out to be a basic pattern for functional oligomers."
The findings may help scientists understand disease-causing oligomers too. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's disease, as well as prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, all involve the spread in the brain of apparently toxic oligomers of various proteins. One such protein, strongly implicated in Alzheimer's disease, is amyloid beta; like Orb2 it comes in two forms, the highly oligomerizing amyloid-beta-42 and the relatively inert amyloid-beta-40. Si's work hints at the possibility that oligomer-linked diseases are relatively common in the brain because the brain evolved to be relatively hospitable to CPEB proteins and other functional oligomers, and thus has fewer mechanisms for keeping rogue oligomers under control.
Other researchers who contributed to the work include Wanda Col?n Cesario, Erica White-Grindely, Huoqin Jian, Fangzhen Ren, Mohammed 'Repon' Khan, Liying Li, Edward Man-Lik Choi, Kasthuri Kannan, Feng Li, Jay Unruh and Brian Slaughter at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri.
The research was supported by the Searle Foundation, the March of Dimes Basil O'Connor Starter Award, the Klingenstein Foundation and the McKnight Foundation.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Stowers Institute for Medical Research, via Newswise.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
Amitabha Majumdar, Wanda Col?n Cesario, Erica White-Grindley, Huoqing Jiang, Fengzhen Ren, Mohammed ?Repon? Khan, Liying Li, Edward Man-Lik Choi, Kasthuri Kannan, Fengli Guo et al. Critical Role of Amyloid-like Oligomers of Drosophila Orb2 in the Persistence of Memory. Cell, 26 January 2012 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2012.01.004
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Computer meltdown? No backup? Well, at least your tunes are safe. Google Music just gained a new feature that lets you to download your entire library including purchased songs. A simple click in the Music Manager is all it takes to restore your entire collection -- or just your purchased music -- from the cloud. In addition, the web interface now allows you to select and copy multiple tracks to your device of choice. While there are no limitations when using the Music Manager, purchased items are restricted to two downloads each via the web interface. So next time your system crashes go right ahead -- rev up that broadband and fill up those hard drives.
SALT LAKE CITY ? Comedian and "30 Rock" cast member Tracy Morgan is back at work in New York after a brief hospitalization in Utah.
Morgan's publicist, Lewis Kay, says Morgan appreciates fans' concern. The actor was hospitalized Sunday while attending the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, where the elevation is 7,000 feet.
Kay says Morgan suffered from exhaustion and altitude. Morgan also has diabetes.
Kay says no drugs or alcohol were found in Morgan's system.
Recordings of 911 calls made on the night he collapsed, and obtained by The Associated Press, indicate Morgan passed out at the Blue Iguana restaurant.
One caller says he didn't know if the actor had been drinking, but said he was unconscious. An ambulance later took him to a nearby hospital. He was released a day later.
___
AP Writer Jennifer Dobner contributed to this report.
ScienceDaily (Jan. 26, 2012) ? A solution to the difficult issue of harvesting algae for use as a biofuel has been developed using microbubble technology pioneered at the University of Sheffield. The technique builds on previous research in which microbubbles were used to improve the way algae is cultivated.
Algae produce an oil which can be processed to create a useful biofuel. Biofuels, made from plant material, are considered an important alternative to fossil fuels and algae, in particular, has the potential to be a very efficient biofuel producer. Until now, however, there has been no cost-effective method of harvesting and removing the water from the algae for it to be processed effectively.
Now, a team led by Professor Will Zimmerman in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Sheffield, believe they have solved the problem. They have developed an inexpensive way of producing microbubbles that can float algae particles to the surface of the water, making harvesting easier, and saving biofuel-producing companies time and money.
The research is set to be published in Biotechnology and Bioengineering on 26 January 2012.
Professor Zimmerman and his team won the Moulton Medal, from the Institute of Chemical Engineers, for their earlier work which used the microbubble technology to improve algae production methods, allowing producers to grow crops more rapidly and more densely.
"We thought we had solved the major barrier to biofuel companies processing algae to use as fuel when we used microbubbles to grow the algae more densely," explains Professor Zimmerman.
"It turned out, however, that algae biofuels still couldn?t be produced economically, because of the difficulty in harvesting and dewatering the algae. We had to develop a solution to this problem and once again, microbubbles provided a solution."
Microbubbles have been used for flotation before: water purification companies use the process to float out impurities, but it hasn?t been done in this context, partly because previous methods have been very expensive.
The system developed by Professor Zimmerman?s team uses up to 1000 times less energy to produce the microbubbles and, in addition, the cost of installing the Sheffield microbubble system is predicted to be much less than existing flotation systems.
The next step in the project is to develop a pilot plant to test the system at an industrial scale. Professor Zimmerman is already working with Tata Steel at their site in Scunthorpe using CO2 from their flue-gas stacks and plans to continue this partnership to test the new system.
Dr. Bruce Adderley, Manager Climate Change Breakthrough Technology, said, "Professor Zimmerman?s microbubble-based technologies are exactly the kind of step-change innovations that we are seeking as a means to address our emissions in the longer term, and we are delighted to have the opportunity to extend our relationship with Will and his team in the next phase of this pioneering research."
The research was supported by the University of Sheffield?s Knowledge Transfer Account, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. It was also supported by the Royal Society Innovation Award 2010, and the Concept Fund of Yorkshire Forward.
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James Hanotu, HC Hemaka Bandulasena, William B Zimmerman. Microflotation performance for algal separation. Biotechnology and Bioengineering, 2012; DOI: 10.1002/bit.24449
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Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
With a little help from our ancient friendsPublic release date: 25-Jan-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Cameron david_cameron@hms.harvard.edu 617-432-0441 Harvard Medical School
A new study of hunter-gatherers suggests social networks sparked evolution of cooperation
Boston, MA (January 25, 2012)Ancient humans may not have had the luxury of updating their Facebook status, but social networks were nevertheless an essential component of their lives, a new study suggests.
The study's findings describe elements of social network structures that may have been present early in human history, suggesting how our ancestors may have formed ties with both kin and non-kin based on shared attributes, including the tendency to cooperate. According to the paper, social networks likely contributed to the evolution of cooperation.
"The astonishing thing is that ancient human social networks so very much resemble what we see today," said Nicholas Christakis, professor of medical sociology and medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of sociology in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and senior author on the study. "From the time we were around campfires and had words floating through the air, to today when we have digital packets floating through the ether, we've made networks of basically the same kind."
"We found that what modern people are doing with online social networks is what we've always donenot just before Facebook, but before agriculture," said study co-author James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California, San Diego, who, with Christakis, has authored a number of seminal studies of human social networks.
The findings will be published January 26 in Nature.
Roots of altruism
The natural world, red in tooth and claw, has a gentle side. While individuals compete fiercely to ensure the proliferation of their progeny, a few animals, including humans, also cooperate and act altruistically. Researchers have wondered if human social networks are a product of modern lifestyles, or if they could have emerged under the kind of conditions that our distant ancestors faced. This question has been challenging for classic evolutionary theory to explain neatly.
For cooperation to arise, an altruistic act, like sharing food with a non-relative, must have a net benefit for the sharers. Otherwise, purely self-serving individuals would outcompete and eventually replace the selfless. All theoretical explanations for the evolution of cooperationkin selection, reciprocal altruism, group selectionrely on the existence of some system that allows cooperators to group together with other individuals who tend to share.
"If you can get cooperators to cluster together in social space, cooperation can evolve," said Coren Apicella, a post-doctoral research fellow in Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and first author on the paper. "Social networks allow this to happen."
While it is not possible to quiz our distant ancestors about their friendships or habits of sharing and collaborating, a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Cambridge have characterized the structure of social networks among the Hadza, an ethnic group in the Lake Eyasi region of Tanzania, one of the last surviving groups of hunter gathers. (There are less than 1,000 Hadza left who live in the traditional way).
Getting connected
The Hadza lifestyle predates the invention of agriculture. The Hadza eat a wide range of wild foods, foraging for tubers, nuts, and fruit and hunting a great variety of animals, including flamingos, shrews, and giraffes. Honey is one of their favorite foods, known by half a dozen different names in Hadzane, their primary language.
Apicella took the lead in collecting the data for the study, interviewing 205 adult Hadza over the course two months, measuring their tendency to cooperate and mapping their friendships.
Apicella, Fowler and Christakis designed the study and experiments, working with Frank Marlowe, lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Cambridge, and author of the only book-length ethnography on the Hadza in English.
Collecting the data was not easy. The nomadic Hadza roam over 4,000 rugged square kilometers. Apicella and her research assistants travelled the region by Land Cruiser battling mud-drenched trailsat one point forcing her and her colleagues to pave the ground with felled treesand, on an earlier trip, even fleeing a horde of marauding elephants.
In order to construct a social network, Apicella and her colleagues took a dual approach. First, they asked Hadza adults to identify individuals they would prefer to live with in their next encampment. Second, they gave each adult three straws of honey and were told they could give these straws as gifts to anyone in their camp. This generated 1,263 campmate ties and 426 gift ties.
In a separate activity, the researchers measured levels of cooperation by giving the Hadza additional honey straws that they could either keep for themselves or donate to the group.
When the networks were mapped and analyzed, the researchers found that co-operators and non-cooperators formed distinct clusters.
The researchers also measured the connectedness of people with similar height, age, handgrip strength, etc., and other characteristics, such as food preference. They also analyzed the transitivity of friendshipthe likelihood that one's friends are friends with one another, and other network properties.
The structure and dynamics of the Hadza hunter-gatherer social networks were essentially indistinguishable from existing social network data drawn from modern communities.
"We turned the data over lots of different ways," said Fowler. "We looked at over a dozen measures that social network analysts use to compare networks and pretty much, the Hadza are just like us."
"Human beings are unusual among species in the extent to which we form long-term, non-reproductive unions with other members of our species," said Christakis. "In other words, not only do we have sex, but we also have friends."
Previous work by Christakis and Fowler, who are coauthors of the book "Connected," has shown that our experience of the world depends on where we find ourselves within social networks. Particular studies have found that networks influence a surprising variety of lifestyle and health factors, such as how prone you are to obesity, smoking cessation, and even happiness.
For the researchers, the Hadza offer strong new evidence that social networks are a truly ancient, perhaps integral part of the human story.
###
This research was funded by the National Institute on Aging and by the Science of Generosity Initiative of the University of Notre Dame.
Written by Jake Miller
Citation:
Nature, Jan. 26, 2012
"Social Networks and Cooperation in Hunter-Gatherers" by Coren L. Apicella, et al.
Additional contact:
Inga Kiderra, University of California, San Diego
ikiderra@ucsd.edu
858-822-0661
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With a little help from our ancient friendsPublic release date: 25-Jan-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Cameron david_cameron@hms.harvard.edu 617-432-0441 Harvard Medical School
A new study of hunter-gatherers suggests social networks sparked evolution of cooperation
Boston, MA (January 25, 2012)Ancient humans may not have had the luxury of updating their Facebook status, but social networks were nevertheless an essential component of their lives, a new study suggests.
The study's findings describe elements of social network structures that may have been present early in human history, suggesting how our ancestors may have formed ties with both kin and non-kin based on shared attributes, including the tendency to cooperate. According to the paper, social networks likely contributed to the evolution of cooperation.
"The astonishing thing is that ancient human social networks so very much resemble what we see today," said Nicholas Christakis, professor of medical sociology and medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of sociology in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and senior author on the study. "From the time we were around campfires and had words floating through the air, to today when we have digital packets floating through the ether, we've made networks of basically the same kind."
"We found that what modern people are doing with online social networks is what we've always donenot just before Facebook, but before agriculture," said study co-author James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California, San Diego, who, with Christakis, has authored a number of seminal studies of human social networks.
The findings will be published January 26 in Nature.
Roots of altruism
The natural world, red in tooth and claw, has a gentle side. While individuals compete fiercely to ensure the proliferation of their progeny, a few animals, including humans, also cooperate and act altruistically. Researchers have wondered if human social networks are a product of modern lifestyles, or if they could have emerged under the kind of conditions that our distant ancestors faced. This question has been challenging for classic evolutionary theory to explain neatly.
For cooperation to arise, an altruistic act, like sharing food with a non-relative, must have a net benefit for the sharers. Otherwise, purely self-serving individuals would outcompete and eventually replace the selfless. All theoretical explanations for the evolution of cooperationkin selection, reciprocal altruism, group selectionrely on the existence of some system that allows cooperators to group together with other individuals who tend to share.
"If you can get cooperators to cluster together in social space, cooperation can evolve," said Coren Apicella, a post-doctoral research fellow in Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and first author on the paper. "Social networks allow this to happen."
While it is not possible to quiz our distant ancestors about their friendships or habits of sharing and collaborating, a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Cambridge have characterized the structure of social networks among the Hadza, an ethnic group in the Lake Eyasi region of Tanzania, one of the last surviving groups of hunter gathers. (There are less than 1,000 Hadza left who live in the traditional way).
Getting connected
The Hadza lifestyle predates the invention of agriculture. The Hadza eat a wide range of wild foods, foraging for tubers, nuts, and fruit and hunting a great variety of animals, including flamingos, shrews, and giraffes. Honey is one of their favorite foods, known by half a dozen different names in Hadzane, their primary language.
Apicella took the lead in collecting the data for the study, interviewing 205 adult Hadza over the course two months, measuring their tendency to cooperate and mapping their friendships.
Apicella, Fowler and Christakis designed the study and experiments, working with Frank Marlowe, lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology of the University of Cambridge, and author of the only book-length ethnography on the Hadza in English.
Collecting the data was not easy. The nomadic Hadza roam over 4,000 rugged square kilometers. Apicella and her research assistants travelled the region by Land Cruiser battling mud-drenched trailsat one point forcing her and her colleagues to pave the ground with felled treesand, on an earlier trip, even fleeing a horde of marauding elephants.
In order to construct a social network, Apicella and her colleagues took a dual approach. First, they asked Hadza adults to identify individuals they would prefer to live with in their next encampment. Second, they gave each adult three straws of honey and were told they could give these straws as gifts to anyone in their camp. This generated 1,263 campmate ties and 426 gift ties.
In a separate activity, the researchers measured levels of cooperation by giving the Hadza additional honey straws that they could either keep for themselves or donate to the group.
When the networks were mapped and analyzed, the researchers found that co-operators and non-cooperators formed distinct clusters.
The researchers also measured the connectedness of people with similar height, age, handgrip strength, etc., and other characteristics, such as food preference. They also analyzed the transitivity of friendshipthe likelihood that one's friends are friends with one another, and other network properties.
The structure and dynamics of the Hadza hunter-gatherer social networks were essentially indistinguishable from existing social network data drawn from modern communities.
"We turned the data over lots of different ways," said Fowler. "We looked at over a dozen measures that social network analysts use to compare networks and pretty much, the Hadza are just like us."
"Human beings are unusual among species in the extent to which we form long-term, non-reproductive unions with other members of our species," said Christakis. "In other words, not only do we have sex, but we also have friends."
Previous work by Christakis and Fowler, who are coauthors of the book "Connected," has shown that our experience of the world depends on where we find ourselves within social networks. Particular studies have found that networks influence a surprising variety of lifestyle and health factors, such as how prone you are to obesity, smoking cessation, and even happiness.
For the researchers, the Hadza offer strong new evidence that social networks are a truly ancient, perhaps integral part of the human story.
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This research was funded by the National Institute on Aging and by the Science of Generosity Initiative of the University of Notre Dame.
Written by Jake Miller
Citation:
Nature, Jan. 26, 2012
"Social Networks and Cooperation in Hunter-Gatherers" by Coren L. Apicella, et al.
Additional contact:
Inga Kiderra, University of California, San Diego
ikiderra@ucsd.edu
858-822-0661
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Have you ever gotten a random DM from someone you weren't following, pleading you to click through a blind link for McDonald's Gift Cards—but instead of a gift card, there's only a website laden with Trojans and malware? Well, Twitter just a company that could put an end to all those shenanigans. More »
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) ? The family of Brandon Tartikoff -- the youngest programming chief in NBC history -- has donated the late television and film executive's collection of correspondence and effects to the University of Southern California, the school said Monday.
George Lucas, a USC alumnus and benefactor, had urged Tartikoff's widow, Lilly Tartikoff, to make the donation. Lilly Tartikoff will officially present the documents to Lucas in a USC School of Cinematic Arts ceremony in the fall.
"We are very grateful to Lilly Tartikoff for this unique and generous gift," Lucas said in a statement. "It is a staggering collection for students of television and popular culture, providing rare insight into the mind and achievements of arguably one of the most prominent and influential creative executives in television history."
The collection includes more than 4,000 pieces of correspondence that Tartikoff sent and received between 1979 and 1992.
According to USC, the letters pertain "to programming and project evaluations during his storied reign at NBC, as well as personal correspondences, such as letters of congratulations to then new morning show host David Letterman."
The letters have been unavailable to the public since Tartikoff died in 1997 from Hodgkin's Disease.
"Brandon would be delighted to know that his papers were being made available to SCA students," Lilly Tartikoff said in a statement. "He was in many ways a teacher himself, and loved sharing his experiences in this business with others coming up the ranks."
Tartikoff brought NBC from the No. 3 to the No. 1 network and is credited for the original concepts and blueprints of "The Cosby Show," "Miami Vice," "The Golden Girls," "The A-Team" and "Hill Street Blues."
NEW YORK, Jan. 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Child's Play Communications, the award-winning public relations agency specializing in reaching moms, is thrilled to announce the addition of LeVar Burton's RRKidz to the agency's client roster. Child's Play will launch RRKidz, re-launch the company's much loved Reading Rainbow brand, promote the Reading Rainbow classic library of episodes (DVD and streaming) and announce the Reading Rainbow Kidz App, the first of RRKidz' many innovative products and services to debut starting in 2012.
Originally a TV series designed to inspire a love of reading among young children, the Peabody Award-winning Reading Rainbow ran for 26 years on PBS (1983-2009) and was co-produced and hosted by actor LeVar Burton. RRKidz, a trans-media entity bringing enrichment products to the children's digital space, is run by Burton, Co-Founder, entertainment veteran Mark Wolfe and CEO Asra Rasheed. RRKidz will bring Reading Rainbow to today's digitally connected children beginning with a reading and book discovery app initially launching for iPad in early 2012. Child's Play Communications will generate awareness for the return of Reading Rainbow and the Reading Rainbow Kidz app through an extensive traditional and social media campaign, kicked off with a major New York City event.
RRKidz' goal is to become not only the leader in digital publishing for children, but also a major, multi-platform, kids' educational and enrichment brand?- one that delights children while maintaining parents' devotion and trust. The company is located in Los Angeles, CA.
"As major Reading Rainbow fans, we can't wait to help introduce Reading Rainbow to a new generation of children, and re-introduce it to their parents, who grew up watching the show," said Stephanie Azzarone, president, Child's Play Communications. "Today's moms and dads will now have the opportunity to share those special memories and that feel-good Reading Rainbow experience with their own youngsters."
"Child's Play Communications, with its powerhouse experience in reaching moms and their children, is the ideal partner to help us re-launch Reading Rainbow and develop the RRKidz brand," said Wolfe. "We're looking forward to a very productive relationship with this innovative and exciting company."
Located in New York City, Child's Play Communications specializes in public relations, social media and word-of-mouth communications for products and services targeted to moms.
Child's Play Communications Child's Play Communications?specializes exclusively in public relations, social media and word-of-mouth communications for products and services targeted to moms. Based in New York City, the agency has launched an exciting array of proprietary services to engage this influential market through traditional media, online and in-person, including the award-winning Team Mom?, the agency's own network of mom review-bloggers. Recent company awards have included Bulldog's PR Innovation of the Year and Social Media Innovator of the Year. For additional information, please visit our Web site, our blog, like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.
RRKidz RRKidz?(www.RRKidz.com) provides an enriching interactive platform for children to discover and explore exceptional digital media content that is both educational and entertaining. Headquartered in Los Angeles with an office in San Francisco, RRKidz?holds global rights to the trusted Reading Rainbow brand through a partnership with series creator, WNED-TV, a premier PBS station, based in Buffalo, NY. The?Reading Rainbow Kidz?subscription app, designed to instill a lifelong love of reading, will be available via the iPad and select Android operating system devices.
The debate over legislation to stop online piracy revealed not only the threat that a new generation of consumers presents to the entertainment industry's traditional business model, but the equally shaky future of the way Congress currently conducts its business. The high tech, Internet-based companies that Hollywood most fears used their clout with America's most coveted customers, young Millennials, to stop a rush to pass the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and its Senate twin, Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA).
The success of the Wikipedia-led Internet blackout demonstrated the way Congress goes about its business is as susceptible as the entertainment industry's business model is to disruption from the energy and attitudes of a new, digitally native generation, Millennials (born 1982-2003). The film and television industry's foundation, built on the notion that content will triumph ?ber alles, was shown to be just as prone to destruction by the Napster virus as its cousin in the recording industry was a decade ago. It turns out that consumers like companies that distribute content, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, more than they like the companies who produce and package the content and insist on being paid for it.
But the fact that many in Congress suddenly abandoned their support of SOPA or PIPA in the face of this consumer revolt also sent a clear warning to those pushing the bills, using traditional methods of high-priced lobbying and closed-door decision making, that their way of doing business is equally in jeopardy. Wikipedia's blackout Facebook page was liked or shared around 1.2 million times on the Wednesday that the site was unavailable to potential visitors. A petition organized by Google in opposition gained over seven million signatures. When Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) announced on Facebook that he was withdrawing his support for PIPA, his action generated 4,700 likes. Between midnight and 4 p.m. on the day of the "blackout bomb", Twitter recorded over 2.4 million tweets on the subject. The Internet community's insistence on a more open decision making process forced the Congress to ultimately abandon its confrontational, large-contributor approach to the problem. If Congress actually learns a larger lesson from this experience and adopts a process that incorporates the Millennial Generation's desire for win-win solutions derived from bottom up participation designed to forge a consensus, it might finally reverse the continuing decline in popularity with their customers -- the American electorate.
Today, all national surveys show approval of Congress at historically low levels. Since the Republic was conceived, communication technologies have evolved to reduce the time and distance that separate Congress from the public, but most of Congress's procedures and practices have remained trapped in a time warp of its own traditions. Creating a new connection between citizens and their representatives by using Millennials' favorite technologies to build a more transparent, open and participatory legislative process is the essential first step in reversing this decline in Congress's credibility This alternative approach to the legislative process was actually utilized by Democrat Senator Ron Wyden (Oregon) and Republican U.S. Representative Darrell Issa (California) in drafting their alternative to SOPA/PIPA. The two lawmakers published a draft of their approach last year on the web at www.KeepTheWebOpen.com and asked for comments from interested parties. Based on the suggestions of those who visited the site, they proposed a bi-partisan alternative -- the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act, or OPEN Act -- that uses a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer to address the problem. It empowers the U.S. International Trade Commission to cut off the money supply of the several dozen foreign piracy sites that do most of the damage to content creators.
Although Internet companies and online activists liked both the process and the outcome, organizations such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) continued to insist that the danger presented by those sites to their business model is so great that they can't wait for the niceties of legalities and due process that the Wyden/Issa solution would involve. The fact that the entertainment industry's solution is perceived to be so threatening to the freedom of users of the Internet that it united libertarians on both the left and right in opposition to SOPA/PIPA has not dissuaded those wedded to the old ways of doing business in Congress that they need to change their tactics. Their stubbornness is reminiscent of the attempt by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to halt the proliferation of peer-to-peer music sharing sites by suing its teenage customers, before RIAA finally gave up and acquiesced in a new business model for the industry built around Apple's iPod.
It's time for Congressional leaders to use the learning experience of the SOPA/PIPA debate to throw off their generational blinders and find a way to concede power gracefully to a new generation with new ideas. To restore its credibility, Congress will have to use new tools to fully involve Millennials and older generations in the decision-making process. It should make a new bargain with the American people, built on an increased level of citizen participation in the process of governing, rather than upon the current trade of access and constituency service in return for campaign contributions.
Only when Congress embraces this new way of doing business will the legitimacy of the country's legislative process begin to be restored and Congress's approval ratings start to rise again. Until then the electoral fate of Senators and U.S. Representatives will be as uncertain and as subject to disruption as the future of the entertainment moguls they sought to please by backing SOPA/PIPA.
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Follow Michael Hais and Morley Winograd on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mikeandmorley
Newt Gingrich fired back against explosive allegations from his ex-wife by wrapping himself in family at an event South Carolina, a state where family values loom large.?
It?s lunchtime in Walterboro, S.C., and supporters are dining on hot barbecue. Newt and Callista Gingrich take the stage set up in an over-size garage, a ?Lowcountry Sportsmen for Newt? banner stretched wide across the wall behind them.
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Mr. Gingrich launches into introductions. First up, one of his ?senior debate coaches? ? grandson Robert Cushman, age 10. His other ?debate coach,? 12-year-old granddaughter Maggie, couldn?t be there. She had ballet.
Robert?s advice is ?to keep it shorter and clearer,? Gingrich says, his beaming grandson at his side. ?[Maggie?s] role is to make sure I smile often enough, because I?m too intense, apparently. So she counts my smiles at every debate.?
Also on stage were Gingrich?s daughter Jackie, his brother Randy, and sister Susan. This show of family support in the runup to South Carolina?s primary Saturday was no accident. ABC News was about to air its interview with Gingrich?s second ex-wife, who said he asked her for an ?open marriage? back in 1999. Gingrich was by then already long into an affair with Callista.
Thursday?s series of events ? the campaign appearance with family, followed by his aggressive attack on the media in the evening debate ? demonstrated the maxim, ?the best defense is a good offense.?
Add to the mix a dose of good fortune. Texas Gov. Rick Perry dropped out of the presidential race Thursday and threw his support to Gingrich. Governor Perry acknowledged Gingrich?s personal history in his remarks.
?Newt is not perfect, but who among us is?? Perry said. ?The fact is, there is forgiveness for those who seek God, and I believe in the power of redemption, for it is a central tenet of my own Christian faith.?
Gingrich may have made the best of a tough situation Thursday, perhaps well enough to take full advantage of Mitt Romney?s stumbles over his personal finances and beat him in the primary. After several days of hedging about when he will release his tax returns, Mr. Romney has gone from the clear front-runner in South Carolina polls to a close second behind Gingrich.
Still, South Carolina is heavily evangelical ? about 60 percent of GOP primary voters here self-identify as born-again Christian ? and for many in that community, Gingrich?s history of marital infidelity is hardly a selling point. Last weekend, a group of about 150 high-profile religious conservative leaders gathered in Houston endorsed Rick Santorum.
Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, right, campaigns at Whiteford's Restaurant, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012, in Laurens, S.C. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, right, campaigns at Whiteford's Restaurant, Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012, in Laurens, S.C. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, speaks at his South Carolina primary election night reception at the South Carolina State Fairgrounds in Columbia, S.C., Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012. Republican candidate Newt Gingrich stormed to an upset win in the South Carolina primary Saturday night. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
South Carolina's late-deciding voters pushed Newt Gingrich to victory, according to exit polls in the state. The former House speaker's strong performances in the debates leading up to the contest plus a conservative-leaning electorate led to a sizable win for Gingrich.
LATE DECIDERS: A majority of South Carolina Republican voters said they decided on a candidate in the last few days, and they favored Gingrich by a 22-point margin. Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney were about even for second among this group.
BROADLY CONSERVATIVE: About 7 in 10 voters in South Carolina said they tilt conservative on most political matters, according to exit polls. That group broke 45 percent for Gingrich to 24 percent for Romney and 19 percent for Santorum. Moderate and liberal voters split between Romney and Gingrich.
RELIGIOUS VOTERS: Almost two-thirds of voters in South Carolina said they are born again or evangelical Christians, and 26 percent said it was deeply important that a candidate share their religious views. Voters in both groups preferred Gingrich to Romney by wide margins.
SEEKING A WINNER: Forty-five percent of voters said the most important trait they sought in a candidate was the ability to beat President Barack Obama in November, and a majority of these voters backed Gingrich. That's a reversal from New Hampshire and Iowa, where voters prioritizing electability backed Romney. Just 38 percent said they would support Romney enthusiastically should he win the nomination.
READING THE RESUME: Two-thirds of South Carolina voters said they had a positive impression of Romney's background investing in and restructuring companies, and Romney held a slim, 40 to 36 percent edge over Gingrich among those voters. However, he carried just 3 percent of the vote among those with a negative view of his time as a venture capitalist.
FACING ECONOMIC CHALLENGES: The share of South Carolina GOP voters who said they are falling behind financially has nearly doubled since 2008, and economic worries are pervasive. Almost 8 in 10 voters said they were very worried about the future of the nation's economy, and 31 percent said someone in their household had lost a job since the start of Obama's term. These voters and those who called the economy their top issue tilted toward Gingrich.
RATING THE GOVERNOR: Two-thirds of South Carolina voters said they approved of Gov. Nikki Haley, who endorsed Romney and campaigned with him throughout the state. Her popularity failed to help Romney, however, as those who approve of her performance in office voted 42 percent for Gingrich to 30 percent for Romney.
These results are from an exit poll conducted for AP and the television networks by Edison Research as voters left their polling places at 35 randomly selected sites in South Carolina. The survey involved interviews with 2,381 Republican primary voters and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney campaigns at Charleston Area Convention Center in North Charleston, S.C., Friday, Jan. 20, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney campaigns at Charleston Area Convention Center in North Charleston, S.C., Friday, Jan. 20, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, accompanied by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, throws an apple out to the audience as he campaign at Harmon Tree Farm in Gilbert, S.C., Friday, Jan. 20, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) ? In what is organized labor's first major investment in the Republican presidential primary, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees is spending almost $1 million in Florida on a television ad attacking Mitt Romney's business career.
Romney and his allies have had the Florida airwaves to themselves for nearly a month as the rest of the political world focuses on South Carolina's Saturday primary.
The new ad links Romney's business career to that of Florida Gov. Rick Scott. "Corporate greed. Medicare fraud. Sound familiar?" the narrator asks as Romney appears on the screen next to Scott, also a Republican former businessman.
Facing similar attacks from his Republican rivals, Romney has been increasingly forced to defend his years at Bain Capital, a private equity company where the former Massachusetts governor accumulated his personal fortune.
"A number of the other candidates are already pummeling Romney in South Carolina," said AFSCME political director Larry Scanlon. "We just think it's very timely. The Florida voters are going to be tuning in."
Scanlon suggested that Florida represents the last best chance to stop Romney's march toward his party's presidential nomination. He's leading in Florida polls, although Saturday's contest in South Carolina could shift the dynamic if Romney stumbles.
AFSCME will be very active in the general election, Scanlon says, but he adds that the union will take a "wait and see" approach on whether to invest any more resources in the GOP primary.
"We have 25,000 members in Florida. We have 1.6 million members around the country who have a great stake in the election of the next president," he said. "We've always been big dogs in politics."
The Romney campaign lashed out at the union once news of the ad became public.
"President Obama and his union cronies will stop at nothing to distract from this president's failed record," said spokesman Ryan Williams.
This Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012, frame grab from a webcam put up by the Government Accountability Board shows Wisconsin state workers in Madison, Wis. processing about 1.9 million petition signatures to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker and six others from office. The webcam has attracted a following of political junkies, despite there being no sound and no indication of the specific tasks each person is performing. (AP Photo/Government Accountability Board)
This Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012, frame grab from a webcam put up by the Government Accountability Board shows Wisconsin state workers in Madison, Wis. processing about 1.9 million petition signatures to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker and six others from office. The webcam has attracted a following of political junkies, despite there being no sound and no indication of the specific tasks each person is performing. (AP Photo/Government Accountability Board)
MADISON, Wis. (AP) ? You know you live in a state consumed by politics when a webcam showing bureaucrats silently shuffling around a nondescript room feeding papers into a scanner attracts tens of thousands of viewers.
Such is the case in Wisconsin.
The cam (http://mirrors.5nines.com/stream/), featuring a live look at the guarded, secret location where petitions to recall Gov. Scott Walker and five other Republicans are being housed and processed, has its own account on Twitter and a growing cadre of followers who've attached nicknames to the workers, pointed out when people mug for the camera and generally mock the entire process.
Live sex shows, it ain't.
It isn't even as interesting as all those webcams that have drawn large followings in recent years to watch pandas give birth or baby eagles take flight.
But this is Wisconsin, after all, a state that's been at the center of the political universe since Walker was elected governor. He immediately turned the state upside down, taking on public sector unions and igniting a protest movement that led to the recall effort. On Tuesday, organizers said they turned in more than a 1.9 million signatures to recall Walker and the others, 3 tons of paper that would extend 66 miles if laid end to end.
And someone has got to deal with all that.
Enter the ultimate in blandly named bureaucratic bodies ? the Government Accountability Board ? which has the important job of overseeing Wisconsin's elections and determining whether recall elections can proceed.
Its task is to examine every signature and make sure that Mickey Mouses and Adolf Hitlers get caught and discarded, along with any Walker-hater who signed multiple times. But before that can happen, all 300,000 pages must be scanned in to computers.
The Government Accountability Board, or GAB as it's known in these parts, wants to be, well, accountable. So as the work proceeds at the secret location, it's letting the public eavesdrop through the webcam.
When it first got plugged in Tuesday night, the view was straight on at roughly waist level. Viewers got a chance to look at the back of the bald head of one worker and the scanner, presumably humming had there been sound, and the somewhat blank stare of the police officer sitting in the corner making sure security wasn't breached.
By Thursday, onlookers were treated to a new view of their government at work. This time the cam was positioned higher up, offering a bird's-eye view of eight computers and four folding tables arranged together where stacks of paper with post-it notes attached were picked up, moved, set back down, and moved again. All of the action takes place against a stark, white cinder block wall.
Political junkies couldn't get enough. They made observations on the Twitter account (at)recallcam.
Much of the debate focused on where in Madison the work was being done.
One tweeter posited it was Osama bin Laden's old compound.
Others comment on what the workers are wearing, noting more sweaters and scarves on a day when temperatures dipped near zero outside.
Still others came up with nicknames for the workers like "Sideburns," ''White Glasses" and "Flirty von Flirtenheimer."
Board spokesman Reid Magney, who has made cameo appearances on the cam, said at its busiest when it went online Wednesday around 400 people at the same time were watching it. By Thursday afternoon, after the tantalizing angle change, the webcam had logged 29,308 total visitors. The webcam is a first for GAB and is being provided free of charge to taxpayers by 5Nines.com of Madison, Magney said.
Magney, who acknowledged that watching the cam is as exciting as watching paint dry, was somewhat at a loss about its allure.
"People are interested in watching people do things, I guess," he said.
Part of the attraction is just how boring it is.
Alas, all good things must come to an end and some of the mystery will be revealed in coming days when the board provides more details about what each worker is doing and where the processing is happening.
"We've had some questions from the public like, 'What's the guy on the left doing?'" Magney said.
But for now, the mystery is fueling the snark, even though the business being conducted is serious and likely to be the subject of multiple lawsuits. And the end result of the work could result in Walker and the others standing for recall elections later this year.
And that will be a spectacle certain to attract far more attention than the webcam at the undisclosed, secure location.
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Public release date: 25-Jan-2012
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