New York gives homeless people a one-way ticket to leave city

New York has found a novel, if expensive, way of dealing with its overcrowded shelters – buying one-way tickets for homeless families to leave the city.

Under the initiative, by the administration of the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, hundreds of families have been given plane, rail, and bus tickets and even petrol vouchers to leave the city. One homeless family of five was given $6,332 (nearly £4,000) worth of travel costs to Paris, according to the New York Times.

The city justifies such costs because it argues the alternative is more expensive. It costs New York’s taxpayers $36,000 to put up a homeless family in a night shelter for a year.

Full Article

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Moviegoers often blink in unison

Worried you’ll blink and miss a crucial piece of the action? Then you can relax. While watching a film, we subconsciously control the timing of blinks to make sure we don’t miss anything important. And because we tend to watch films in a similar way, moviegoers often blink in unison, researchers find.

The flow of visual information to the brain is halted by up to 450 milliseconds with every blink, and we lose up to 6 seconds of information every minute, says Tamani Nakano at the University of Tokyo in Japan. This means moviegoers who sit through a 150-minute film have their eyes shut for up to 15 minutes.

Nakano and colleagues worked out how we cope with such extreme information loss. They monitored the eye blinks of volunteers as they watched a clip of a silent comedy with a strong narrative, or a movie of an aquarium with no narrative, or listened to an audio book with a narrative, but not a visual one.
Hidden pattern

Using the timing of those blinks as a reference, the researchers then played the volunteers the same clip again and measured whether the eye blinks occurred at the same time as the reference blinks.

Full New Scientist Article

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Bag of Randomness

saved-by-the-bell-cast-finally-reunited

  • WifeGeeding’s trip to her ocularist went fairly well.  She can’t get fitted for a new prosthesis yet, so her old one had to be modified, but she still has some swelling, so we will have to make a return trip.
  • When we got home yesterday, I wasn’t feeling very well, I was afraid it was all because I deleted that email from yesterday.  Whew.
  • During WifeGeeding’s recovery, she listened and I watched an old episode of the Family Feud on the Game Show Network.  It brought back a lot of memories.
  • WifeGeeding’s friend that was with us asked an interesting question, she wondered how many of those people are still alive.
  • If I recall correctly, it use to come on at 6:30 PM on KDFW back in the day.
  • Watching as an adult, Richard Dawson was kinda of pervert-creepy.
  • If you are wondering, he’s still alive, I just looked it up.  And if it’s on the Internet, then it has to be true, right?
  • On the show we watched, one of the contestants gave him a Bible with his name on it.  The other contestant gave him a t-shirt of the college he taught at.
  • The last movie/TV related thing he did was the Schwarzenegger movie The Running Man which was about reality TV gone haywire.  In a lot of ways, the movie was ahead of it’s time.  When it was made, there really wasn’t such a thing as “reality TV.”
  • Did you know that Richard Dawson actually guest hosted The Tonight Show a couple of times?  I didn’t.
  • The second host, Ray Combs, committed suicide.  I remember hearing that and always thought he was a happy guy.  The Wikipedia entry states that he hung himself in a psychiatric ward, and the family relied on a $25,000 donation from Johnny Carson to bury him.
  • Sorry for the downer, but I thought that was interesting.
  • I like the beginning of the Family Feud, how the families would somewhat posed.
  • That whole set design was crazy.  Carpet was everywhere, and I wasn’t a fan of that dull orange background or the big lightbulbs all over the place.  But I thought they did have a pretty baby blue.
  • I never liked the embroidered look of the family name.
  • The scoreboard, or whatever you call it, was super large, wasn’t it?
  • When it rotated, it always stuck far out, and I thought it might fall out.
  • I did like the yellow on black text.
  • The last part of the show was always my favorite part, because you got to see the audience.  Better yet, you got a glimpse of what you don’t see on TV.
  • I remember the credits ending with, “A Mark Goodson television production.”
  • When it was time to reveal the missed survey answers, I always got a kick out of the audience saying the answers all unison.
  • I got a kick out of the bell sound that you heard when a contestant got an answer right.
  • A friend and I once was so taken with the whole survey notion . . . “out of 100 people surveyed . . .”  that we actually called 100 random numbers from the Mineral Wells phonebook and asked what they liked more, Coke or Pepsi.  Silly us, but about the 20th call Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew started to pop up in our questions.
  • Surprisingly, I don’t recall any adults getting mad at us or even hanging up.  Most were pretty friendly and talkative.
  • I once interviewed for a learning facilitator position in which I had to give a 15-20 presentation and was told to make it creative and interactive.  It was all Family Feud based.  I would have got the job, except that due to budget constraints it was pulled, so I was told.
  • The next time you hear a celebrity rumor, check out GossipCop.com – it will help you gauge if it’s true or not.
  • I’ve never been fan of the Bachelor or Bachelorette, and I was shocked at her reaction after Anderson Cooper (guest hosting for Regis) asked her how many guys she slept with on the show.  Granted, not the best question, but she when you go on a show and mug down with man after man wearing almost nothing, what do you expect.
  • The latest cover of People has the cast of Saved By the Bell sans Dustin Diamond.  I wonder what that’s all about?
  • When I first heard the whole Henry Gates and Cambridge police officer incident never did I think that the person who made the 911 call was doing anything racist, but she sure seems to be defending herself.
  • There’s some tension over a tree house in University Park.  If you live in University Park, you don’t need to build a tree house, you can actually afford to buy your kid a real house.
  • With all the rain, my yard is making a comeback.
  • 106.5 The Wolf is a radio station out in Kansas City, and morning DJ Darren Wilhite was nice enough to mention BoN on the air, twice.  Watch out Bob Sturm, Darren may just be the #1 DJ of BoN.  If you are interested in listening to the audio, you should be able to listen to it below.  If not, click here.  And if you are ever in Kansas City, be sure to tune in to his radio show.
[audio:bag_of_nothingKC.mp3]
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