Pattaya Rag Facebook girls of the week - 29th May

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Ciara's 5th Album Anticipation

Everyone is talking about what Ciara will do next for her 5th studio album. After announcing she was in the studio working on a new album friends (Producers & Writers) have contacted Ciara to help her get her career back where it needs to be. Check Out The Anticipation Below:





Make-Up Artist Spills The Means On Some New Music:

Preparing to shoot Justin Timberlake and Ciara for the front Cover of Spin Magazine. Lick it up.@BennyHancock What is the Ciara & JT cover shoot based on? A subject line or topic? Cause that seems kinda random lol.@Dale__23 there new single.

At a show in Washington DC last week, Ciara officially announced that she is preparing her 5th studio album. Fans at the show tweeted details:

CIARA JUST ANNOUNCED A NEW RECORD! imma upload the video tomorrow so ya'll can hear for ya'll selves, but i am NOT the only one that heard it! = ). Oh before I leave, Ci did announce that she was putting together a record!!!!!! LMAO, she said it after the "Ride" performance, I believe guys, I don't know much, she just announced it briefly!

Ciara Speaks Briefly On New Album:
Ciara has also OFFICIALLY parted ways with JIVE. It has been speculated that her new label will announced soon and it's also rumored that she's going to UNIVERSAL.

Ciara: "I've tried to be a team player with the label only to have compromised what I truly believed and was not given the right opportunity to promote and inform my fans of the release of this album. I have so much of me as an artist I still want to give to the world and my fans. A release would allow me to go be creative with people who care and understand me as an artist."

Ciara has been in the studio recording with long-time friend/producer Polow Da Don. The mastermind behind one of Ciara's biggest records production, "Promise".

Polow Da Don: IN THE LAB VIBIN TO SEX THERAPY(PROMISE PT2) WITH @Ciara .... THAT'S A VIBE RIGHT THERE!!!! "There is only one @PolowDaDon " -Ciara ...tis is TRUE! Wish everyone could see the Magic unraveling in his room right now  

 Producer RICO LOVE says he wants to work with Ciara on her new album.

 Rico Love: wanna do Ciara's next album. I promise that it would be dope. #TTLO

Super Producer Rodney Jerkins discusses his meeting with Ciara regarding her next album.

New Pix: Teairra Mari At That Point Album Packaging (Rumor)

Rumor has it that this is the official album packaging for Teairra Mari's shelved album At That Point. This picture was featured on the website of a photographer that does most of Teairra Mari's photoshoots. He shot all of her mixtape covers as well. There is no word if this is indeed the album packaging. The tracklisting is different and the only records that we are familiar with is the single Sponsor Feat. Gucci Mane & Soulja Boy Tell Em'. Some people are saying that this was a rough copy of the actual album publishing. The tracklisting does not include Hunt 4 U Feat. Pleasure P. but a record that does feat. Pleasure which fans are thinking is That Hunt 4 U Is being renamed Searching For Ya. #TeamTeairra has not heard about any of these records. 1 last thing non of the singles from At That Point are on it and we already have the final tracklisting for At That Point. Who Knows... More Info As It Unfolds


Thanx: Creat1ve
             Tyran Reed.com

New Pix: Ciara's Wildlife In South Africa

Ciara who is currently on tour in africa with producer Timbaland & rapper Lil Kim took some time off to share some pics from her safari: 

Riding on a Safari in South Africa! this is Surreal! This was something I always dreamed of!

Summer Uniform: Greek goddess

My sweets, do you have a favorite summer outfit? I'm excited to announce a new series on Cup of Jo, where I'll feature photos of stylish friends and show how to put together the look (mostly because I want to copy them myself!).

First up: My friend Kendra Smoot always looks gorgeous, but I especially love this ensemble (above) she wore on vacation in Greece. Relaxed, easy and beautiful, don't you think?

Here's how to get the look:
Polka-dot scarf: The Hill-Side, $50.
Round sunglasses: Halogen, $68.
Gray tee: LNA, $48.
Boyfriend shorts: Victoria's Secret, $44.50.
Gladiator sandals: Juicy Couture, $151, or Steve Madden, $42.
Pink nail polish: Essie, $8.

Do you have a summer uniform? xo

(Photo by Akira Ruiz)

Vaccines Cause Autism, Until You Look At The Data

According to a much-discussed new paper, vaccines may cause autism after all: A Positive Association found between Autism Prevalence and Childhood Vaccination uptake across the U.S. Population.

The author is Gayle DeLong, who "teaches international finance at Baruch College, City University of New York", according to her profile as a board member of anti-vaccine group SafeMinds. She correlated rates of coverage of the government recommended full set of vaccines in the 51 US states including Washington D.C., with registered rates of autism in those states six years later.

Uh-oh - there was a correlation between vaccination in two year kids, and the rate of autism in the state six years later, when those kids were eight. As the abstract says:

The higher the proportion of children receiving recommended vaccinations, the higher was the prevalence of AUT... The results suggest that although mercury has been removed from many vaccines, other culprits may link vaccines to autism. Further study into the relationship between vaccines and autism is warranted.

Sounds rather scary. Until you look at the data, helpfully provided in the paper. First up, here's the scatterplot of all of the vaccination rates and all of the autism-six-years-later rates:

There's more than 51 data points as you can see: there's actually 355 because each state had seven different datapoints (1995 vaccines vs 2001 autism though to 2001 vs 2007). This scatterplot shows no correlation. You can tell just from looking at it, but the correlation coefficient confirms this, as it's a tiny r 0.012 (from a possible range of 0 to 1).

To be fair, that's a very noisy measure, because each state has unique characteristics, so the effect of vaccines will be diluted. However, it's still a useful sanity check, and shows that there can't be a major effect, otherwise it would be too big to get diluted.

To get around this I next looked at the change in the rates of vaccination from one year to the next, and correlated that with the corresponding change in future rates of autism, within each state. A "change" of 1 means no change, 0.5 means it halved and 2 means it doubled, etc.

Zilch. Correlation coeffiencent r is 0.034.

Maybe the changes year-to-year were too small? So I checked the changes between the last year, and the first year.

This made the changes bigger, because more tends to change over six years than in just one. And, to be fair, this does produces a slightly stronger vaccine-autism effect... but it's still tiny. The correlation coefficient here, r, is 0.18 which means that vaccination changes accounts for 3% of the variability in autism changes (r^2 = 0.034.) The p value is 0.20, statistically insignificant.

My conclusion is that this dataset shows no evidence of any association. The author nonetheless found one. How? By doing some statistical wizardry.

The statistical model used took into consideration the unique characteristics of each state. For example, each state had a unique mixture of pollution, which may have affected the prevalence of autism, yet such an effect was not included in this study. A fixed-effects, within-group panel regression (Hall and Cummins 2005) controlled for these unique yet undefined characteristics by deriving a different starting point (intercept) for each state.

The 51 different intercepts - one for each state - reflected the base level of autism or speech disorders occurring in that state that were not explained by the other independent variables (vaccination rates, income, or ethnicity). The model then produced a single relationship between the independent variables and the prevalence of autism or speech disorders.

OK, that's all very fancy, but when the raw data shows zilch and you can only find a signal by "controlling for" stuff, alarm bells start ringing. Given sufficient statistical analysis you can make any data say anything you want.

If the author had given details of the methods, and explained why she chose to control for the variables she did, and not others, that might be different. But she didn't. Nor did she justify only looking at the effects six years later, when five or seven or ten would be just as sensible... and so on.

(Note: whenever I've said "autism", that's my shorthand for autism + SLI, which is what the paper looked at; autism alone data are not presented. Note also that by "vaccination %" I mean "% who got the full vaccine schedule"; the other kids may have got vaccines, just not all of them.)

Delong G (2011). A Positive Association found between Autism Prevalence and Childhood Vaccination uptake across the U.S. Population. Journal of toxicology and environmental health. Part A, 74 (14), 903-16 PMID: 21623535

I'm Back!

I'm back. After spending the last week in sunny Crete it's back to business. I am probably exaggerating when I say sunny however. In the week we were away out of the 7 days, we had two days sunshine, 5 days torrential rain, one earthquake ( well a 20 second tremor), one volcanic eruption in Iceland, one on the island (well a few puffs of smoke I'm told) and thunder and lightning like I have never seen......
 So if you asked me did I enjoy my holiday you may think my response will be obvious, but to tell you the truth I had a brilliant time. The company was good, my wife and daughter provided the entertainment, the food was great (if you like spaghetti ) and I'm a firm believer in your holiday is what you make it and make it we did. So it's now back to the daily grind and back to the real world!

Summer love.

The weather in New York is hot and sunny, and it finally feels like summer. Where do you live, and what's the weather like? Have you pulled out your shorts and sunscreen yet? xo

(Photo credits unknown, via Erin Dermody)

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New Music: Teairra Mari-Now Or Never (Mixtape)

1. Dj Scream (Intro)

2.U A Freak

3.Make Love

4.Wait

5.The Truth

6.Say Bye

7.Not In Love

8.Say Ohh

9.Till U Cry

10.Shower

11.Pum Pum Shorts (Remix)

12.Dj Scream (Outro)

Download Now

Lunch at La Lot

There were several Vietnamese restaurants in Kuching but none survived long enough to ease my craving for Vietnamese food lately. When I chanced upon a Vietnamese restaurant at the Pavilion in Kuala Lumpur a while ago, I settled in for lunch.

The Lemongrass Ginger Tea looks like a thirst quencher, so I ordered one. It was a very cooling drink. I liked it.

Lemongrass Ginger Tea (RM8.90)

Whenever I think of Vietnamese food, the rice-paper rolls and Pho, will come to my mind. So, these were the things I had at La Lot. The Fresh Summer Rolls were filled with shrimps and garden vegetables, and the peanut sauce that came with it was quite good.

Fresh Summer Rolls (RM16.90)

There were mant choices of Pho, some with clear soup and some with spicy soup. I opted for the Hanoi Beef Noodles with clear soup because that what I remembered of Pho.

Hanoi Beef Noodles (RM19.90)

A closer look at the Hanoi Beef Noodles with the basil leaves and bean sprouts in

What should I say about the food quality? Well, good but not top notch. The Vietnamese restaurants in Kuching used to serve food to the same standard as La Lot, but at a much cheaper price. Too bad that they ain't existing anymore.

Do Antidepressants Work? The Internet Says...

..."yes and no". A while back I blogged about some researchers who analysed internet discussions of antidepressants to work out what users thought about them. Now a new paper's just come out, doing much the same thing but focussed on a single comment thread: Miracle Drug, Poison, or Placebo.

Back in 2008, MSNBC ran this article, prompted by the recent publication of the famous Kirsch paper. The article itself was short but the ensuing discussion in the comments rapidly grew to epic proportions. By the end of it there were a total of 1,629 posts by a total of over 1,200 people.

In the new paper, author Michael Montagne presents an analysis of the thread. He read through all of the postings and focussed on the ones written by people who had personally taken antidepressants. After excluding obvious spammers and other undesirables (see the picture...), there were still 960 antidepressant users who wrote 1,231 posts.

He first looked to see how many people thought antidepressants were "miracle drugs, poisons, or placebos", which was the title of the original article. However, only a handful of people used those terms in their comments. Almost everyone agreed that antidepressants were not just placebos.

Users employed a range of metaphors to describe the experience. 45 people described them as "livesaving" and 8 said they were a "Godsend". But 21 accused them of turning them into "a zombie".

Down at the bottom of the list were some more unique phrases that only one person used such as "Unleashes a 100 blind monkeys in your brain with instructions to rewire", "Uberpositive girl" and "Robot-zombie wrapped in 4 inches of insulation". That last one could be quite a good horror movie actually.

While there were a small number of absolutely negative comments like "evil" and "Devil's drug", the most consistent theme in the metaphors was that of emotional numbing, with the idea that these drugs remove the symptoms by removing the ability to feel (see e.g. "zombie", "robot", "disconnected", "in a bubble", "band aid".) which seems rather ambivalent. However, only about 10% of the users used any metaphors at all, so take that with a pinch of salt.

Even more salt is required for this graph I made from the table showing the number of positive, negative and mixed judgements on each antidepressant. I've not shown the data from drugs like tricyclics where there were less than 20 total responses. It's interesting, though, that people tended to be more positive about specific drugs than they were when talking about "antidepressants" in general.

There were various other themes in the comments including an ongoing debate between people who said that depressed people ought to seek help from God (who tended to be non-users) vs those who disagreed (who tended to be users). Overall it's an interesting read, but I think it's one of those papers that's more interesting than it really deserves to be. At the end of the day, it's one comment thread on one article on one site.

Montagne M (2011). Miracle drug, poison, or placebo: patients' experiences with antidepressant medications as described in postings on an online message board. Substance use & misuse, 46 (7), 922-30 PMID: 21599508

Do Antidepressants Work? The Internet Says...

..."yes and no". A while back I blogged about some researchers who analysed internet discussions of antidepressants to work out what users thought about them. Now a new paper's just come out, doing much the same thing but focussed on a single comment thread: Miracle Drug, Poison, or Placebo.

Back in 2008, MSNBC ran this article, prompted by the recent publication of the famous Kirsch paper. The article itself was short but the ensuing discussion in the comments rapidly grew to epic proportions. By the end of it there were a total of 1,629 posts by a total of over 1,200 people.

In the new paper, author Michael Montagne presents an analysis of the thread. He read through all of the postings and focussed on the ones written by people who had personally taken antidepressants. After excluding obvious spammers and other undesirables (see the picture...), there were still 960 antidepressant users who wrote 1,231 posts.

He first looked to see how many people thought antidepressants were "miracle drugs, poisons, or placebos", which was the title of the original article. However, only a handful of people used those terms in their comments. Almost everyone agreed that antidepressants were not just placebos.

Users employed a range of metaphors to describe the experience. 45 people described them as "livesaving" and 8 said they were a "Godsend". But 21 accused them of turning them into "a zombie".

Down at the bottom of the list were some more unique phrases that only one person used such as "Unleashes a 100 blind monkeys in your brain with instructions to rewire", "Uberpositive girl" and "Robot-zombie wrapped in 4 inches of insulation". That last one could be quite a good horror movie actually.

While there were a small number of absolutely negative comments like "evil" and "Devil's drug", the most consistent theme in the metaphors was that of emotional numbing, with the idea that these drugs remove the symptoms by removing the ability to feel (see e.g. "zombie", "robot", "disconnected", "in a bubble", "band aid".) which seems rather ambivalent. However, only about 10% of the users used any metaphors at all, so take that with a pinch of salt.

Even more salt is required for this graph I made from the table showing the number of positive, negative and mixed judgements on each antidepressant. I've not shown the data from drugs like tricyclics where there were less than 20 total responses. It's interesting, though, that people tended to be more positive about specific drugs than they were when talking about "antidepressants" in general.

There were various other themes in the comments including an ongoing debate between people who said that depressed people ought to seek help from God (who tended to be non-users) vs those who disagreed (who tended to be users). Overall it's an interesting read, but I think it's one of those papers that's more interesting than it really deserves to be. At the end of the day, it's one comment thread on one article on one site.

Montagne M (2011). Miracle drug, poison, or placebo: patients' experiences with antidepressant medications as described in postings on an online message board. Substance use & misuse, 46 (7), 922-30 PMID: 21599508

Have a sexy weekend.

My lovelies, what are you doing this weekend? Alex and I went out for Japanese food tonight, and tomorrow we're throwing a birthday picnic for Toby! I also *finally* finished the Tina Fey book (yeah! only took me two months) and laughed out loud probably fifty times (when's the last time a book has made you do that?:) Hope you have a wonderful weekend, and meanwhile here are a few fun links from around the web...

Cute outfit.

A DIY chandelier?! Jenny, I bow down.

The raddest bubbles!!!

Raising a genderless baby? Fascinating...

Dating in Brooklyn. :)

Breastfeeding in public.

Mason jar meals.

Loving this blue shirt.

Great Lakes design. (Yeah, Michigan!)

Matchmaking with New York Magazine.

Chalkboard state maps.

How to make your own striped shirt.

Remember these funny thank-you notes? Well, now there's a book!

I just read a glowing review of the new movie Midnight in Paris. Have you seen it?

Plus, three Cup of Jo posts you might have missed:
* Summer love.
* Crumpled maps.
* Floating houses.

Have a great one. xo

New Pix: Ciara Twitpics

I want to see a Bergamasco puppy

Search: bergamasco puppy

Why: I am doing something for work. Did you guys know I started a new job? It's why I have been so lax about bloggin. Today, I'm checking for duplicate content on one of our sites, Puppy Dog Web. Things could be worse. On the Bergamasco breed page:

They are working dogs with a coat recognizable in any country. Their coats are unique to only a few breeds, in that their fur actually grows into long mats that eventually turn into "cords" that are twisted and rough. Bergamascos largely resemble that of a dirty mop in that their fur is gray or black, with a light coloring of fawn and white. Its flocked coat is considered to be hair, not fur, and thus non-allergenic

When does it get like that? And why?

Answer: Omg.

Look at those goddamn things. The name comes from the town Bergamo in the Italian Alps.

Source: Google Images

The More You Know: And some Puli puppies. I always thought these dogs looked gross / not inviting to pet, but I think I would really like to touch one of those little ones.

Greeting cards

These graphic greeting cards look just like old-school quilts.

(Via Design is Mine)

What did Thomas Edison due to an elephant?

Search: edison elephant

Why: When Rachel said someone spoiled The Usual Suspects for her, Jeff said:

I hope it wasn't me.

I recently spoiled Edison's Electrocuting an Elephant for the wife.



1903.

Don't tell him, but he just spoiled it for me, too.

Answer: He electrocuted it to death! Oh god...

BUT it turns out this was a very mean elephant who had already trampled to death 3 handlers (one of whom was trying to feed her a lit cigarette) and was scheduled to be euthanized. So it's OK then.

He did it as a demonstration about the dangers of alternating current, which Westinghouse and Tesla were touting. Edison had established direct current at the standard for electricity distribution and was living large off the patent royalties when these guys showed up.

Edison's aggressive campaign to discredit the new current took the macabre form of a series of animal electrocutions using AC (a killing process he referred to snidely as getting "Westinghoused"). Stray dogs and cats were the most easily obtained, but he also zapped a few cattle and horses.

So he found this elephant. A news report:

Topsy, the ill-tempered Coney Island elephant, was put to death in Luna Park, Coney Island, yesterday afternoon. The execution was witnessed by 1,500 or more curious persons, who went down to the island to see the end of the huge beast, to whom they had fed peanuts and cakes in summers that are gone. In order to make Topsy's execution quick and sure 460 grams of cyanide of potassium were fed to her in carrots. Then a hawser was put around her neck and one end attached to a donkey engine and the other to a post. Next wooden sandals lined with copper were attached to her feet. These electrodes were connected by copper wire with the Edison electric light plant and a current of 6,600 volts was sent through her body. The big beast died without a trumpet or a groan.

Yuck!

Is it weird that we have pictures of these guys? Or is it weirder that I don't think I had any idea what Thomas Edison looked like until right now?

Source: Wired.com, Railway Bridge

The More You Know: I was thinking the other day about how funny it is that my cat and dog just walk on and over me as though I'm not even there. I wish we had some giant animals to just walk and climb on all the time without being afraid they would bite me. Baby elephants climb like puppies.

Autistic Brains 'Genes Differ'

The BBC say:

The brains of people with autism are chemically different to those without autism, according to researchers. A study, published in the journal Nature, showed the unique characters of the frontal and temporal lobes had disappeared.

It's not a bad summary, although it doesn't explain quite how interesting the new results are. Here's the paper, from a joint US/British team: Transcriptomic analysis of autistic brain reveals convergent molecular pathology

The authors took 19 brains from people with autism and 17 healthy ones. These came from people who donated their brains to science and then died. The study involved taking samples from three areas of the brain, the superior temporal gyrus, the prefrontal cortex, and the cerebellum. These are regions that have been implicated in autism, although to be honest, so has everywhere else in the brain.

They then looked at gene expression: mRNA levels. This measures the degree to which different genes are "activated" and being used to make proteins. Bear in mind that a gene itself could be completely normal, and yet be abnormally expressed: this was not a study of DNA mutations. So the BBC's headline is a bit misleading. The genes themselves were not the focus of this study.

Anyway, comparing the autistic and control brains, they found 444 genes that were statistically significantly either over- or under-expressed in the cerebral cortex samples from the autistic group. However, in the cerebellum, there were just 2 differences: so the cerebellum was ruled out from further analysis.

They then replicated the study in a different cortical area in 6 new cases and 5 new controls. They found extremely strong overlap with the original cohort, with the same genes being altered in the same direction in almost all cases. This makes me confident that there is something going on here. This scatterplot shows that almost all of the genes that were significantly different in the first batch were also different in same direction in the second one (although not always significantly, as you'd expect.)

However, the authors didn't stop there, and this is where it gets interesting. First, they used a pattern classification algorithm to try to distinguish patients and controls on the basis of gene expression. This is very much like the paper from last year showing that pattern classification could predict autism on the basis of brain structure.

Interestingly, the algorithm correctly " diagnosed" a case of autism who turned out to have a 15q duplication mutation. 15q duplication is a genetic disorder which causes autism, amongst other things, and it may explain up to 1% of cases of autism. This is only one case but it's important because it suggests that "15q autism" is not all that different to other kinds of autism on the neural level.

The authors then looked at what the over- and under- expressed genes actually were. They found that the "up" genes tended to be genes relating to immune and glial function, while the "down" genes tended to be involved in the formation and function of synapses between cells.

Very interestingly, one of the major clusters of genes , "M12", showed strong overlap with genes previously known to be expressed in a type of cell called PV+ GABA interneurons. In mouse models of autism, these are known to be deficient. M12 was underexpressed in autism, and it contains many genes which have previously been found to be mutated in some people with autism, such as CNTNAP2.

Another cluster, "M16", was overexpressed; it contains genes involved in immune and microglial function (microglia are specialized immune system cells inside the brain). However, M16 did not contain overrepresentation of suspected asd genes.

So this all points to something like this: autism is caused by disruption to the function of certain gene networks in the brain involved in synaptic function. This network is a delicate balance and it can be thrown off course by many different mutations and/or environmental factors.

There's no one gene for autism, but all of the genes for autism might be related, or rather, they might form a team that works together. If you want to look at it this way, you could say that autism is a bit like blindness. People can go blind for lots of different reasons: it could be damage to the surface of the eye, or the retina, or the optic nerve which carries information to the brain, or the brain itself. All of these parts depend on all the others to work, and if one of them goes wrong, the whole system suffers.

Also, whatever the abnormality in autism is, it seems to trigger a secondary change in the brain which is immune and/or glial related. By "secondary" I don't mean that it's less important. It might be what causes the symptoms of autism. But it's not the root cause (because if it were, mutations in this network would cause autism, and they don't seem to.)

This study raises many more questions than it answers, but in a good way. It certainly doesn't explain autism, but it's pointed the way towards more focussed research in the future - gene cluster M12.

Voineagu I, Wang X, Johnston P, Lowe JK, Tian Y, Horvath S, Mill J, Cantor RM, Blencowe BJ, & Geschwind DH (2011). Transcriptomic analysis of autistic brain reveals convergent molecular pathology. Nature PMID: 21614001