TomorrowYesterday

Monitors Don’t Stop Patients From Waking — Newsday.com
Patients say it feels like being trapped in a corpse: They awake during surgery, unable to move or scream. Some remember hearing their surgeons talk, and a few recall feeling intense pain.
Some experts have said special brain-wave monitors were the best way to prevent anesthesia awareness. Now, in a big setback for efforts to prevent it, the first large, independent test of the monitors shows they are no better than older technology.
Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis compared two groups of about 1,000 patients each, all deemed at high risk of waking up during surgery because of health conditions, medication or other factors.
One group used the leading brain-monitoring system, which uses electrodes on the forehead to measure brain waves and software to calculate likelihood of consciousness. The other used an older device that analyzes exhaled anesthetic gas.

scary

Cutback Cuisine – WSJ.com
Restaurants have long engineered menus to allow the bigger profits from pastas and vegetable side orders to subsidize such loss leaders as rib-eye steaks. But rising prices have prompted a furious new round of behind-the-scenes shuffling. San Francisco’s Slanted Door is known for its rack of lamb. On many days, chef and owner Charles Phan offers a more-profitable lamb sirloin stir-fry instead, shaving his food costs by a third. It is a temporary fix that draws some complaints. “Everyone wants that rack,” he says.
At Le Cirque in New York, diners can choose from four pasta dishes, up from two a year ago. “Pasta’s a great item for reducing food costs,” says co-owner Mauro Maccioni. He estimates that he is paying 5% more for the food his restaurant prepares, including big increases for truffles and butter. He touts as good values his new pasta dishes, which include a chestnut-flour pappardelle with wild mushrooms and a veal ragu.

whoa

Getting Going – WSJ.com
Adults show the same tendency. In a study that appeared in the March 2006 Journal of Consumer Research, Prof. Nayakankuppam and his co-authors, Arul Mishra and Himanshu Mishra, found that people were less inclined to spend if they had, say, a $50 bill rather than 10 $5 bills.

Classic

Bronze plaques may mark where homeless died
Hollywood has its star Walk of Fame, but San Francisco could soon have a Walk of Shame – complete with human-shaped bronze sidewalk plaques marking where the city’s homeless have died on the streets.
The Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a resolution last week urging the Department of Public Works to approve a privately funded plan to install “commemorative bronze sidewalk plaques” in the districts of Supervisors Chris Daly and Ross Mirkarimi, both champions of the city’s homeless.
However, it doesn’t seem many of the supes bothered to read the resolution before voting “yes.”
Mirkarimi, for example, was listed as co-sponsor – but he knew little about the project when we contacted him after the vote, and he referred us to Daly’s office.
Daly did not return calls or a written request for comment, although his staff confirmed he had met with the memorial’s organizer.

only in sf

Meatpacker in Cow-Abuse Scandal May Shut as Congress Turns Up Heat – WSJ.com
For the 2004-05 school year, the government named Hallmark/Westland the school lunch program’s Supplier of the Year. But the company began to unravel in late January, when a video made by an investigator from the Humane Society of the U.S. came to light.
The video showed workers at the plant trying to make sick or injured cattle stand up with electrical-shock devices, forklifts and high-pressure water hoses. Cattle that can’t walk or stand on their own are generally banned from the nation’s food supply. Such “downer” cows can be sources of mad-cow disease, which can cause a rare but fatal brain disorder in humans.
The video “just astounded us,” Mr. Magidow said Friday. “Our jaws dropped….We thought this place was sparkling perfect.”

classic

$140k in cash stolen from Tyson chair – Yahoo! News
A college student was arrested in the theft of a briefcase containing more than $140,000 from the home of the chairman of meat processing giant Tyson Foods Inc., police said.
ADVERTISEMENT
Ryan Silvey, 19, was arrested in Olathe, Kan., by the FBI Fugitive Task Force, the Johnson Police Department said. He was taken back to Arkansas to answer a theft charge and was being held in lieu of $50,000 bond Saturday at the Washington County jail.
The briefcase was stolen during a party thrown by John Tyson’s daughter at the family’s home in Johnson around Dec. 27 without his knowledge or consent, police said. Silvey and another friend were uninvited guests who acted suspicious while looking around the house, police said.

and no one wondered why the Chair of Tyson had $140k in cash in a briefcase?

City Hospitals Reinvent Role of Emergency – New York Times
More recent hospital records from St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center on Manhattan’s West Side, for example, show that there were 105,000 visits to the emergency room last year, up from 59,000 in 1999. “I can’t foresee how we can keep up that pace,” said Dr. Dan E. Wiener, chairman of the hospital’s department of emergency medicine. “The overcrowding is just there — it’s the background noise of life. Some days things are O.K., it’s tolerable. Some days it’s over the top.”
Many New York hospitals are also contending with yet another new influx of patients who normally would have sought care at nearby hospitals that have closed, merged with other hospitals or will soon close. A state commission in 2006 ordered almost two dozen mergers or closings in an effort to shrink the state’s enormous hospital industry, because beds at some of them were going unused.
Other hospitals across the nation, sustaining big losses in their emergency rooms and depleting their charity care funding for the uninsured, have shut down their emergency rooms or even closed completely.

I’m surprised emergency rooms continue to exist. They don’t seem profitable at all… and isn’t that the benchmark for everything these days? I’m surprised they’re not all replaced with botox centers.

State high court OKs consumer suits over artificially colored salmon
The state Supreme Court breathed new life today into a consumer complaint about the chemically induced orange coloring of farm-raised salmon and ruled that private citizens can sue to enforce California’s food labeling laws.
The unanimous decision reinstated lawsuits filed in 2003 and 2004 that accused supermarket chains of misleading customers by failing to disclose on the labels that the fish had been fed chemicals to give their flesh the orange color of wild salmon.
Salmon raised in fish farms are naturally grayish but take on the orange hue of their free-swimming kin after consuming the chemicals canthaxanthin and astaxanthin. Those substances are also part of wild salmon’s natural diet, and the plaintiffs are not claiming that they are harmful to humans.
But the suits contended that the stores induced some customers to pay higher prices for salmon and led others to buy fish they normally would have shunned because of the artificial coloring.

yum

Electronic searches prompt protests – Washington Post- msnbc.com
Nabila Mango, a therapist and a U.S. citizen who has lived in the country since 1965, had just flown in from Jordan last December when, she said, she was detained at customs and her cellphone was taken from her purse. Her daughter, waiting outside San Francisco International Airport, tried repeatedly to call her during the hour and a half she was questioned. But after her phone was returned, Mango saw that records of her daughter’s calls had been erased.
A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. “This laptop doesn’t belong to me,” he remembers protesting. “It belongs to my company.” Eventually, he agreed to log on and stood by as the officer copied the Web sites he had visited, said the engineer, a U.S. citizen who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of calling attention to himself.

yipes

The World’s Hottest Chili – WSJ.com
The bhut jolokia chili pepper fires up the imagination, as well as the taste buds. The thumb-sized chilies are so potent they could be used in pepper spray, says the director of India’s Defense Research Lab, R.B. Srivastava. “I’ve been told the U.S. and Israel have considered it for antiriot material,” he says.
[Pepper photo]
Most admirers prefer eating them. The Indian pepper is the latest discovery by a fraternity of eaters who relish the sweaty, addictive pleasures of hot chilies.
The bhut jolokia pepper, which is farmed in the northeast part of the country, was plucked from obscurity last year when the Guinness Book of World Records declared it the world’s hottest. The standard measure for such things is the Scoville Heat Unit, or SHU, named after Wilbur Lincoln Scoville, a chemist who in 1912 developed a method of assessing the heat given off by capsaicin, the active ingredient in chili peppers. Jalape peppers measure about 5,000 SHUs. The bhut jolokia tops a million.
“When you eat it, it feels like dying,” touts one online retailer. Even packaging the stuff is a pain. “Our workers wear goggles, face masks, head cover and protective clothing,” says Ananta Saikia, whose firm is the pepper’s sole exporter. “They look like astronauts.” He and his wife have started shipping tons of dried bhut jolokia around the world, including Germany, England and the U.S. Annual sales, he says, are expected to jump 500% this year.

whoa