The one-day workshop, which teaches students how to stuff dead mice and pose them up as if they were humans, is becoming a popular pastime in New York.

White-haired mice styled in tutus and polka dot hair bows; their spindly paws strumming miniature guitars - even reading the New York Times - were photographed in Ms Jeiven's class

An educator and tattoo artist, [Sue Jeiven] begins the four-hour lesson handing out the lifeless little creatures, having sucked out their blood with a syringe beforehand. A statement on the class website warns only feeder mice are used for the arts and crafts session.

But strange or morbid as it might seem to some, anthropomorphic taxidermy – the practice of mounting and displaying taxidermied animals as if they were humans or engaged in human activities – has a long and storied history, beginning with the most privileged classes.

It was a popular art form during the Victorian and Edwardian eras; the best known practitioner of the art form being British taxidermist Walter Potter, whose works included The Kitten Wedding and The Kitten Tea Party, which the mind immediately wants to imagine.

--"Is this the most bizarre art project ever? Taxidermy class teaches students how to stuff dead mice and pose them up 'as if they were humans'" Jennifer Madison, The Daily Mail

For anyone looking for that extra-authentic flavour to their fireplace display, Susan Jeiven's anthropomorphic taxidermy class might just the class you're looking for.

At the Morbid Academy, as Jeiven calls it, about 20 students learn to transform the bodies of dead white mice into human-like pantomimes. In one example, a white mouse holds a miniature classical guitar. In another, a mouse wearing a pink bow on its head reads a tiny facsimile of the New York Times.

--"Would you buy or make dead mouse art?" Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News

There are mice and men and, thanks to a macabre hobby, there are also mice that look like men.

Bent over tables in a room in an industrial corner of Brooklyn, about 20 New Yorkers use scalpels to slice into dead white mice, the first step in the animals’ unlikely journey toward an afterlife spent in human poses and dolls’ clothing.

Anthropomorphic taxidermy is an art form that became hugely popular in Britain in the 19th century, with Queen Victoria herself a fan. Now, as with many odd activities, it has found new life in Brooklyn.

“It’s a little immortality,” instructor Susan Jeiven, 40, explains at the start of her latest sold-out class.

--"Morbid Anatomy 101: Macabre hobby gives dead animals new life" Sebastian Smith, Ottawa Citizen

Congratulations to Sue Jeiven--our amazing anthropomorphic taxidermy teacher--for the recent flurry of international press surrounding her oft-sold out class excerpted above. You can read the whole Daily Mail article--from which all of the images and first excerpt above are drawn--by clicking here, the CBC News article by clicking here, and the Ottawa Citizen article by clicking here.

I am also very pleased to announce that we just added five new classes to our roster, and four of those still have vacancies. If you are interested in learning more--or better yet, signing up for one of Sue's incredible classes--click here. To find out more about the "Morbid Academy" Sue refers to (we call it The Morbid Anatomy Art Academy), click here. To watch a short video about Sue and her work, click here.

All images from the Daily Mail Article; ©AFP/Getty Images.

Source:
http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

One by one, the Linkhorne Middle School students pushed through the narrow entryway of what looked like a blue igloo, into the domes inner chamber.

The school played host Tuesday to a Dome Theater Mobile Planetarium, rented from Kramer Entertainment, Inc. with funds from the schools 21st Century Community Learning Centers grant.

During the school day, 442 students got a chance to watch educational films projected on the arched ceiling of the 9 foot tall and 13 feet wide inflatable structure. Subjects ranged from extreme weather to a look inside the human body.

I like that it was spontaneous, said sixth-grader Jaden Sneed, after watching Night of the Titanic.

You didnt know what was going to happen.

Sneed and members of GiGi Sweeneys math class crowded in with other students for the showing.

More than 30 sixth-graders fit inside the dome, sitting cross-legged with notebooks ready. Some oohed and aahed as the camera panned across the ship, a myriad windows glowing atop darkened waters.

Sweeney asked her students to listen with their math ears and note any math-related topics covered in the film, which examined the science behind the tragedy.

For example, student AAniyah Crews appreciated discovering the fatal iceberg was 7/8 underwater a fraction, she said, just like theyve been studying.

In addition to the school day showings, about 80 students and family members signed up for a Tuesday evening event, featuring the film Passport to the Galaxy.

Visit link:
Dome gives students glimpse of anatomy, Titanic disaster

In the first season of the hit MTV show back in 2009, we saw her hit on The Situation and Ronnie. She also had a nice beach makeout session with Russ, a guy she met at a bar who turned out to be a spy for JWoww's boyfriend.

With that in mind, let's take a little trip down memory lane...

April 2010: Snooki calls it quits with boyfriend Emillio Masella just two months after meeting on Facebook.

August 2010: A romance with Jeff Miranda doesn't last long, but he tries winning her back by asking her to marry him on the cover of a magazine. She rejects him by tweeting that she's single.

September 2010: TMI! Snookers reveals on the show that she and Vinny hooked up, gushing that he was so well-endowed, it was like "putting a watermelon in a pinhole."

October 2010: Snooki and Jionni start dating. She tweets a pic of breakfast Jionni made for herpickle pancakes! No wonder she tweeted that she will "marry him" one day.

January 2011: During an appearance on The Tonight Show, Snook reveals Jionni coaches youth wrestling and is in school to become a gym teacher.

August 4, 2011: Season four of Jersey Shore kicks off with The Situation claiming he and Snookers hooked up when they were shooting in Italy. She insists "nothing happened."

PHOTOS: Remember when Jersey Shore first hit Hollywood?

Read more from the original source:
Snooki & Jionni: Anatomy of a Jersey Shore Romance...and Pregnancy!

The special investigative squad of the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office is investigating the alleged coverup of massive investment losses by Olympus Corp. following the arrests in mid-February of three of its former executives and four former securities firms employees.

It is hoped that investigators will put together a total picture of the scandal by going beyond what the third-party investigatory committee commissioned by Olympus uncovered.

In its report made public in early December, the third-party committee said Olympus began making speculative investments with financial assets in 1985 and that unrealized losses reached nearly 100 billion in the last part of the 1990s.

As of 2003, it had hidden 117.7 billion in losses by employing an elaborate loss separation scheme. The panel said that if the costs paid by Olympus to manage the schemes are taken into account, losses would amount to 134.8 billion.

The former Olympus executives taken into custody are former Chairman and President Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, former auditor Hideo Yamada and former Executive Vice President Hisashi Mori. The four former securities firms employees are suspected of having advised the Olympus management on the loss coverup scheme.

Olympus enjoys a 70 percent share of the global market for endoscopes and can be proud of its technological prowess. Despite the scandal, it managed to maintain its listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. But because it is a famous Japanese manufacturer, its responsibility is all the more greater. It should realize that the scandal has not only tarnished its image but also caused suspicion over Japan's corporate governance.

The public prosecutors office decided to place criminal responsibility not only on the former executives but also on the company itself. Olympus is facing a potential fine of up to 700 million. It is also facing shareholder lawsuits.

The company's wrongdoing came to light on Oct. 14 after it abruptly fired then President and CEO Michael C. Woodford, who is reported to have pointed out highly unusual advisory fees the company paid in acquiring a British medical equipment maker. It is suspected that Olympus inflated costs for the acquisition of the British firm and three other Japanese companies to mask its investment losses.

It is hoped that investigators will trace in detail the methods Olympus employed to hide its losses and falsify its financial reports.

Continue reading here:
Anatomy of a coverup

One man's selflessness started an amazing chain-reaction that changed, and saved, a number of lives

If you've ever been hospitalized, you've been in my shoes.

Last fall I underwent neck surgery for degenerative disc disease that had resulted in several herniated discs, nerve damage and a compressed spine. The surgery was a success but some of the bills were baffling!

There were piles of paper, but not many details about what exactly I was being charged for. It turned out that in my case, a line by line, itemized bill was not automatically sent to me. I had to request one from Piedmont Hospital. Customer Service Manager Joe Ware explained why. "Generally we don't do that regarding inpatient care and neither do other hospitals because they can be very large, they can go up to 25, 30 or 40 pages," he said.

As Ware indicated, sending out only brief summaries is common practice among hospitals. We used Piedmont as an example only because that's where I underwent surgery and had access to the bills.

Once I got my itemized bill, the grand total was a little over$66,013.40!That was for a one night stay and a four level vertebrae fusion surgery. The charges included $22 for one sleeping pill, $427 for one dissecting tool, and $32,000 for four titanium plates and ten screws.

I brought it to Todd Hill, a fee based patient advocate who helps people decipher their medical bills. "The screws in your procedure were billed at $605 a piece for a total of $6050 dollars. We've seen those in our past research for $25 or $30," he said. "In this case, the markup is tremendous," he added.

Tremendous, perhaps but not illegal and not particularly unusual. The non profit consumer group,Georgia Watch conducted the Hospital Accountability Project in 2009 and found that in Georgia, hospitals mark up prices by an average of 300 percent. It says Piedmont Hospital is within that average. Other hospitals in Georgia mark up bills as high as 700 percent, or as low as 200. Ware said the inflated prices cover other costs like nurses and quality control, and also help pay for uninsured patients who end up not paying their bills.

Insurance companies, however, are given a hefty discount. Ware said insurers pre-negotiate those discounts in confidentialcontracts with health care providers. Consumers are billed full retail but due to their volume, insurance companies get a sale price.

For example, on my $66,000 bill, the hospital gave the insurance company a discount, (which is called an allowance) of $28,765. The insurance company paid a total of $33,499 and I paid $3748.

See the original post here:
Anatomy of a Hospital Bill: Who Pays Full Price?

ANATOMY OF A MURDER (1959). A Molotov cocktail of a movie when it first appeared in 1959, Anatomy of a Murder was so controversial that audiences were taken aback by both its frank language and unexpected ambiguities, and Mayor Richard Daley even went so far as to prohibit it from playing in Chicago. The picture ended up not needing the Windy City: It proved to be a box office smash across the rest of the country, as moviegoers lined up to hear A-list actors utter such previously taboo screen words as "rape," "slut," "bitch," "intercourse," "panties" and (love this one) "spermatogenesis." Director-producer Otto Preminger, no stranger to ruffling moral-watchdog feathers, never succumbs to the sleaziness inherent in the material, instead turning out a highly intelligent and tightly controlled drama that still ranks as one of the all-time great courtroom procedurals. An excellent James Stewart stars as "humble country lawyer" Paul Biegler, who agrees to defend an army officer (Ben Gazzara) accused of murdering the bar owner he claims raped his wife (Lee Remick). At his side is his alcoholic friend and fellow lawyer (Arthur O'Connell), while helping out the prosecution is the slick assistant state attorney general (George C. Scott, making his mark in only his second year in films). And refereeing is the quick-witted — and often exasperated — Judge Weaver; in a casting stunt that works, he's played by Joseph N. Welch, the army lawyer who shot to national fame for his takedown of the despicable Senator Joseph McCarthy ("Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"). Although the film failed to win any Oscars, it did manage to land seven nominations, including Best Picture, Actor (Stewart) and Supporting Actor (both O'Connell and Scott).

DVD extras include newsreel footage from the set; a new interview with Otto Preminger biographer Foster Hirsch; a new interview with critic Gary Giddins about Duke Ellington's score for the film; a look at the relationship between Preminger and the legendary graphic designer Saul Bass with Bass biographer Pat Kirkham; and excerpts of a 1967 episode of Firing Line, featuring a discussion between Preminger and William F. Buckley Jr.

Movie: ****

JACK AND JILL (2011). In the cesspool of cinema known as the Adam Sandler Oeuvre. Jack and Jill certainly ranks near the very bottom; it's stupid and infantile, of course, but it's also lazy and contemptuous, a clear sign that Sandler and director Dennis Dugan (his seventh Sandler film; stop him before he kills again!) aren't even trying anymore, safe in the knowledge that audiences will emulate Divine in John Waters' Pink Flamingos and chow down on whatever dog doo is presented to him. Here, the stench is particularly potent, as this story about an obnoxious ad man (Sandler) and his whiny, overbearing sister (Sandler in drag) is a nonstop parade of scatological bits, prominent product placements, faux-hip cameos (Johnny Depp, welcome to the halls of whoredom), wink-wink chauvinism, racism and xenophobia, icky incest gags, annoying voices (not just Sandler as Jill but also the made-up language spoken by the siblings), and the usual small roles for Sandler's beer buddies (including, groan, David Spade in drag). Al Pacino co-stars as himself, inexplicably smitten with Jill; he provides the film's only two or three chuckles (especially a line about the Oscars), but even long before the sequence in which he raps about doughnuts, it's clear that he's become an ever bigger sellout than Robert De Niro. Now that's saying something.

Blu-ray extras include deleted scenes; a blooper reel; a piece on the cameos spotted throughout the film; and a featurette on Sandler's man-to-woman transformation.

Movie: *

THE RUM DIARY (2011). Johnny Depp has long worshipped at the altar of Hunter S. Thompson, so perhaps it's this idolatry that prevents him from acknowledging that The Rum Diary, an adaptation of a 1959 Thompson novel that wasn't even discovered until 1998 (reportedly by Depp himself), is a crushing mediocrity. As he did in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the actor again plays a fictionalized version of the influential journalist — here, he's pre-gonzo Paul Kemp, a mild-mannered writer whose stint at a struggling American newspaper in Puerto Rico allows him to eventually discover his fire, his passion, and his desire to stick it to the "bastards." Unfortunately, fire and passion are just two of the elements missing from this arid, disjointed effort, which isn't presented as a shaggy-dog story so much as a flea-bitten one. Kemp's interactions with a cheery capitalist (Aaron Eckhart) and his beauteous fiancee (Amber Heard) are rarely believable, while Giovanni Ribisi delivers one of his typically twitchy — and typically awful — turns as one of Kemp's confidantes. Ribisi's histrionics aside, The Rum Diary is unbearably sedate — a Prozac picture when a touch of reefer madness would have helped.

Blu-ray extras include a behind-the-scenes piece and the featurette The Rum Diary Back-Story.

Movie: *1/2

TAKE SHELTER (2011). Winner of two awards at last year's Cannes Film Festival yet shut out of the Oscar race, Take Shelter takes place in a spacious, wide-open Midwestern region but feels constrictive and claustrophobic at every turn. That's the intent of writer-director Jeff Nichols, who largely leaves it up to viewers to decide whether his film is a metaphor for the feelings of paranoia, persecution and dread that grip this nation in modern times or merely a story about a man who might be mentally unbalanced. Curtis (an excellent Michael Shannon), a blue-collar worker blessed with a loving wife (Jessica Chastain) and daughter (Tova Stewart), starts having dreadful dreams in which he's attacked by those closest to him (his spouse, his best friend, his dog) in the middle of a nasty storm. These nocturnal nightmares are soon joined by daytime hallucinations, and Curtis has to decide whether he's turning into a paranoid schizophrenic like his institutionalized mother (Kathy Baker) or whether he's having premonitions involving the end of the world. No one knows for sure — least of all the viewers — and while the story is such that Nichols could have ended it in a haze of ambiguity, he boldly elects to commit to a particular outcome. I of course won't reveal any particulars, so let's just say that Rod Serling would have been proud.

Blu-ray extras include audio commentary by Nichols and Shannon; a behind-the-scenes featurette; deleted scenes; and a Q&A session with Shannon and co-star Shea Wigham.

Movie: ***

UNFORGIVEN (1992). The great Orson Welles once stated that Clint Eastwood was the most underrated filmmaker in America, and the sobering footnote is that the Citizen Kane auteur passed away in 1985, well before Eastwood began to be taken seriously as an artist by most critics and moviegoers. Even though he had directed 15 pictures over a two-decade span (including such attention-getters as The Outlaw Josey Wales and White Hunter Black Heart), it wasn't until he helmed Unforgiven that he moved into the front ranks of modern cinema's finest practitioners. Working from a powerhouse screenplay by David Webb Peoples (Blade Runner) that originally bore the unfortunate title The Cut-Whore Killings, the actor-director-producer crafted a superb motion picture that served as a fitting final chapter in his impressive Western canon. Eastwood stars as William Munny, a reformed outlaw and grieving widower who agrees to take a shot at the reward money being offered for killing two ruffian
s who facially disfigured a prostitute in the town of Big Whiskey. Munny embarks on the mission alongside his former partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) and the upstart Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett), and he eventually finds himself heading toward a brutal confrontation with Big Whiskey's sadistic sheriff, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman). This unflinching drama definitively strips the West of its idealized romanticism and presents it as a savage hellhole in which there are no clear-cut heroes or villains, only morally ambiguous survivalists. Nominated for nine Academy Awards (including bids for Eastwood's performance, Peoples' original script and Jack N. Green's alternately gorgeous and gritty cinematography), this earned four: Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Hackman) and Film Editing.

Blu-ray extras include audio commentary by film critic and Eastwood biographer Richard Schickel; a quartet of behind-the-scenes pieces; and a 1959 episode of the James Garner TV series Maverick, featuring Eastwood in a guest appearance as a rowdy cowboy.

Movie: ****

See the original post:
Anatomy of a Murder, Jack and Jill among new home entertainment titles

WATERLOO, Iowa --- Lawrenzo Apollos Harris was just trying to get home.

The 19-year-old was in Cedar Rapids, and home --- Chicago --- was 250 miles away.

He didn't have any money, he would later tell officers, and he was on foot.

As a result of the ensuing journey on Nov. 16, Harris may not find his way home for seven years.

Authorities say he stole a Saturn Ion and led Iowa State Patrol troopers and Black Hawk deputies on a chase that topped 100 mph before he crashed in Waterloo.

Thursday, Harris pleaded guilty part way through his trial after a judge reduced eluding and assault charges to misdemeanors. Only a theft charge remained at the felony level.

"At one point it was over 110 miles per hour, I believe it was 112," Trooper Tyrel Williamson told jurors during the trial last week.

Williamson was headed to Independence for SWAT team training when he heard radio chatter about the high-speed pursuit working its way up Interstate 380 from the Linn County line. He was to the north on U.S. Highway 20 but steered down 380 to head off the chase with a rolling roadblock. The technique involves boxing in a fleeing vehicle, slowing down and forcing the car and driver to the shoulder.

But Williamson said the vehicle was going too fast as it came up behind him, and he abandoned the plan.

"He was going to go right through my vehicle. I pulled over and let him pass," Williamson said.

Deputy Jeremy Jolley pulled onto I-380/Highway 20 at Evansdale and began moving westbound traffic to the side to make way for the coming pursuit. The Ion zipped past Jolley, who then became the lead squad car.

At the I-380/Highway 218 interchange, another patrol car had set up Stop Stick anti-tire devices.

"They are foam triangles inside a bag, and embedded in the triangles are spikes, hollow spikes," Jolley testified.

The Ion ran over the sticks and began to spin out of control, ending up in the grass median.

Jolley's car pulled over to the shoulder near the Ion.

But the Ion began to drive out of the median, and officers said Harris aimed for the squad car's door in attempt to ram it.

Behind Jolley, Williamson was still rolling and saw the Ion. He said he feared the impact would kill or injure the deputy.

"I came alongside the deputy's car," Williamson told jurors. "I pushed it (the Ion) clear of the driver's door."

The Ion missed the door and struck the deputy's front quarter panel.

Harris jumped out and ran, Williamson tackled him in some trees at the bottom of the embankment. When Harris tried to push the trooper away, Williamson struck him in the face.

Williamson told jurors that because he was headed to training, he didn't have his usual duty belt with handcuffs. So he had to punch Harris every time he tried to push away, and that continued until other officers with handcuffs arrived.

At trial, the defense didn't give opening statements or put on any evidence. Public Defender Tomas Rodriguez argued that the charges of felony eluding and assault while participating in a felony weren't warranted because they required another felony to be taking place.

Harris had, in effect gotten away with the Ion after taking it from a Cedar Rapids home, Rodriguez argued. The chase happened after the theft was completed, and officers who began chasing Harris were merely trying to stop him for speeding and didn't know the car was stolen.

Judge David Staudt sided with the defense and lowered the eluding and assault charges to misdemeanors. Harris then pleaded guilty to the second-degree theft, which is a felony, for taking the car, and the two misdemeanors.

Sentencing will be at a later date. Harris faces up to seven years of prison.

Here is the original post:
VIDEO: Anatomy of a high-speed chase

By David Walker

© Andrew Lichtenstein

Lichtenstein impressed jurors with his fresh look at U.S. history. Above: Women at the bus stop where Rosa Parks began her famous 1955 ride.

This past November, New York City-based photographer Andrew Lichtenstein won the 2012 Aftermath Project Grant for his project called “American Memory.” It is a series of landscape photographs of sites around the U.S. where historic struggles for civil rights, labor rights and Native American rights took place decades ago, so obvious signs of those struggles have long faded.

The $20,000 Aftermath Project Grant is intended to support photo projects about the after effects of war. Most of the six grants awarded previously were for projects exploring the open, visible wounds of recent conflicts and ethnic strife outside the U.S.

Lichtenstein thought his entry would be a long shot, so he contacted Aftermath Project founder Sara Terry to ask if it was too much of a stretch. She encouraged him to apply. Lichtenstein also notes, “The big problem with this story is trying to capture what doesn’t exist there anymore. It’s hard to photograph the absence of [an event].”

Terry, who was one of the three jurors, says awarding the grant to Lichtenstein was “an exhilarating way to expand the conversation about the aftermath [of conflict]. That’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.” The grant isn’t just for documentary projects, she explains. “From the beginning I’ve encouraged conceptual and fine-art photographers to apply.”

Terry says jurors first screened applications for the quality of the images. That winnowed 183 applications down to about 30, she says. From there, judges started to consider the merits of the written proposals.

“Andrew’s proposal wasn’t a great big statement. It was simply stated: If we don’t address our wounds, the scars don’t heal. And then he listed places he was looking [to photograph],” Terry says.

Lichtenstein told PDN that the historic sites he’s been photographing “are of particular interest to me because of my view of the struggle for justice and equality in this country. I’m not saying America is an awful place built on genocide. I’m trying to say it’s a country like any other, which is actually a radical idea if you look at what some people want to pass off as American history. There’s this idea that this nation is [exceptional] and great for its ability to foster freedom and equality. I want to stop and say, ‘Which history are you looking at?’”

He says he explained that idea in clear, direct terms on the application. “I do not know ‘grant speak’; I don’t write it, I don’t want to write it, I don’t understand it. People should just say what they mean, rather than hide it in terms of elite conversation,” he asserts. “I want it to be as accessible and honest as possible a description of what I believe the work to be about.”

Lichtenstein says that because he started the project two years ago, it was easier to write about it with clarity. “So I knew what the issues were about. It’s still a healthy process to put it on paper, and explain it to other people,” he says.

“What brought his application to the top was the degree of imagination,” says juror (and VII Photo agency director) Stephen Mayes. “His concept is new—it’s a very fresh look at American history. He’s filtering that through current social and political situations.”

Mayes continues, “The presentation was clearly written with an introduction that said he was looking for places where past and present intersect, followed by succinct bullet points saying exactly what he was talking about, and then pictures to show it.” Because the locations he photographs show no obvious signs of their historical significance, Lichtenstein’s images depend upon captions for context. But the jurors had no problem with that. “I subscribe to the idea that all pictures need some context. If that comes in form of words, that’s fine,” Mayes says.

“There were other proposals that were much more philosophical, that were compelling,” Mayes notes. “But even if the proposal is theoretical and philosophical, it still has to be clear about what the applicant intends to do and how.”

The one image that crystallized Lichtenstein’s proposal for the jurors shows three Southern women in antebellum costumes, sitting on a bench at the bus stop where Rosa Parks began her famous bus ride in 1955, launching the civil rights movement. “That image is amazing. It said so much, and got our attention right away,” says Terry.

Juror Anne Wilkes Tucker, who is photography curator of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, observes: “Lots of people have tried to find pictures that make you understand the complications of [chosen] locations. The picture of the three women on the bench does that. I’m presuming he didn’t stage it. It’s pretty perfect.”

That Lichtenstein already had strong images for his proposed project gave him an advantage over those who applied on the strength of images from past projects. Even if those images were very good, Tucker notes, “We [jurors] just don’t know that they can translate what they’re proposing to do into pictures.”

Tucker says finalists for the grant weren’t necessarily skilled writers, “But the ideas were there [in the application]. They knew what they were going to do, how it was going to relate to the theme proposed, what was possible to do and [their idea] was focused enough ... You have to know what’s a manageable project” and convey that in the application—with words and pictures.

Mayes says some proposals were eliminated “because they lacked that clarity. [We’re awarding] a chunk of money—we need to know it is going to be spent with real effect.”

The four other finalists for the grant were Christopher Capozziello, with a project about the Ku Klux Klan; Michelle Frankfurter, with a project about emigration to the U.S. in the aftermath of the Central American civil wars of the 1980s; Simon Thorpe, with a conceptual project about Sahrawi soldiers who fought for their land in the Western Sahara; and Michael Zumstein, with a project about national reconciliation in Ivory Coast after the 2010 elections there.

Lichtenstein says he’s applied for only a few grants out of necessity; editorial assignment work is no longer reliable enough as a source of income. Applying for grants, he says, “is a tremendous amount of work, and there’s no kill fee. If you don’t get it, that’s two weeks gone. The plus side is that it really helps you think about the issues of your project and put together an edit, and articulate what you’re saying in your photos.”

His advice to others applying for grants: “Look at the grant carefully to see if your work is appropriate for it,” he says. “The second thing is, there’s nothing you can say or do to make up for not having the pictures. It’s fundamentally about the work.”

Related Articles:

Picture Story: Untangling the Afghanistan Tragedy
Bringing Documentary Photography To a Grassroots Audience
How to Pitch a Crowd for Project Funding
 

Excerpt from:
Anatomy of a Successful Grant Application

Security firm Imperva has published a detailed analysis of an attack by Anonymous on one of its customers, providing new insight into how the hacktivist group operates, and highlighting the need for better application layer security.

According to The New York Times, the target in question was the Vatican, although Imperva has declined to confirm the identity of the organisation.

The attack, which did not adversely affect the site or compromise any user data, consisted of three distinct phases:

Related Articles on Techworld The first, described as “recruitment and communication” involved drumming up support using social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, to suggest and justify an attack. The second, dubbed “reconnaissance and application layer attacks,” involved a small number of professional hackers, using common vulnerability assessment tools to probe for security holes and launch application attacks, like SQL injection, to attempt to steal data from the targets. When these data breach attempts failed, the skilled hackers elicited help from so-called “laypeople” to carry out a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

According to Amichai Shulman, co-founder and CTO of Imperva, the attack by Anonymous mimics the approach used by for-profit hackers. The group of 10 to 15 professional hackers used off-the-shelf tools such as Havij, Acunetix and Nikto to check for vulnerabilities and attempt SQL injection attacks.

Shulman said it was clear that these were professional hackers, as they had knowledge of the hacking tools and also took care to disguise their identities using anonymity services.

When the hackers failed to find any vulnerabilities, the DDoS attack was carried out using a custom-built tool that allows users to attack sites with mobile browsers. Unlike more traditional network layer DDoS attacks, this targeted the application layer, with the aim of eating up server resources.

Anonymous created a web page containing a Javascript that iterates endlessly, as long as the page is open in the browser. This type of attack is commonly referred to as Mobile LOIC (low orbit ion cannon). All it took for a layperson to participate in the attack was for them to browse to the specific web page and leave it open.

Shulman said that if an organisation’s threat landscape includes Anonymous, then it should install application layer security as well as DDoS protection, because that had been the hackers' first choice. However, the real motivation for implementing this kind of security should be financial protection.

“If you look at what Anonymous has done in the past couple of years, it has been more of a nuisance than anything else,” he said. “However, Anonymous are using the same tools that financially-motivated criminal hackers are using, and this is what organisations should be worried about.”

Imperva constantly monitors some 40 customer applications, and Shulman claims that an application attack is launched once every two or three minutes. “This is a far greater threat than Anonymous hacking a website to make a political point,” he said.

Shulman added that, while most of Anonymous's attacks have targeted fairly small organisations using LOIC or Mobile LOIC attacks, occasionally the group launches a massive attack against an internet giant like American Express or the FBI.

“In Operation Payback they were using botnets,” said Shulman. “This kind of operation cannot be volunteer-based. It requires a very different tools. It requires horsepower, funding and planning. So who is behind it? And why are they taking the trouble to do it? That is still a mystery.”

He said that financial hackers are also increasingly launching SQL injection attacks using botnets, which is a much larger scale of problem, because it allows attackers to scale up much faster.

Imperva compiled the “Anatomy of an Anonymous Attack” report based on data from its Application Defense Center (ADC). A copy of the report can be downloaded here.

The rest is here:
'Anatomy of an Anonymous Attack' laid bare by Imperva

Los Angeles-based artist, painter, and jewelry designer Jennifer Korsen, created this beautiful series of paper hearts detailing a multitude of loves.

These are just a few of the many hearts Jennifer has created.  Be sure and check out the rest on her portfolio site, humansmakeart.com and on her Facebook!

Source:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/streetanatomy/OQuC

Portugal-based graphic artist, Márcio Martins experiments with anatomy and design in these pieces that burst with light and energy.

View all of Márcio’s work on his Behance portfolio!

Source:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/streetanatomy/OQuC

I have never wanted a tattoo until this very moment.  These are just a few of the many gorgeous tattoos by São Paulo-based artist Gregorio Marangoni.  His style is so detailed and I love the tone he achieves with what looks like stippling on skin. The work speaks for itself and I urge you to take a look through all the tattoos on his site, blog.gregoriomarangoni.com!

[spotted by Rei Quinto]

Source:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/streetanatomy/OQuC

Musaeum Clausum (the hidden library) is a fake catalogue of a collection that contained books, pictures, and artefacts. Such collections (and their elaborate indices) were a common phenomenon from about 1500 to 1700 and after. Gentlemen and the nobility collected as a matter of polite engagement with knowledge and as a way of displaying wealth and learning; savants made arrays of plants, animals, and minerals as museums or ‘thesauruses’ of the natural world to record and organise their findings; imperial and monarchical collections were princely in their glamour, rarity, and sheer expenditure: these might contain natural-historical specimens but also trinkets and souvenirs from far-flung places, curiosities of nature and art, and historically significant items. For example, taxidermically preserved basilisks shared room with a thorn from Christ’s crown and feathered headdresses and weapons belonging to native American tribes. Browne takes these traditions of assemblage and makes a catalogue of marvellous things that have disappeared...

Read the whole fascinating article about fake catalogues of fictional collections--a common trope, as the article explains, from around 1500 to 1700--on the Public Domain Review website by clicking here.

Image: Engraving from the Dell'Historia Naturale (1599) showing Naples apothecary Ferrante Imperato's cabinet of curiosities, the first pictorial representation of such a collection.

Source:
http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

A group of forensic anthropologists have completed a meticulous analysis of a set of real human anatomy displays from 19C Italy. Using CT scans and other chemical analysis, the group determined that, some 200 years ago, anatomist Giovan Battista Rini "petrified" the corpses with a mercury and other heavy metals. He injected some tinctures and used others as baths. The eyes are fake. Basically, Rini was modern medicine's first "Body Worlds" guy.--The Terrifying Body Worlds Mummy Heads of 19C Italy, Gakwer

Ok. So although this Gawker story has a MAJOR inaccuracy--Giovan Battista Rini was hardly "medicine's first 'Body Worlds' guy;" that honor would surely go to Honoré Fragonard and his incredible Anatomical Ecorchés from the 18th century--its still nice to see anatomical preparations discussed and pictured in the mainstream media. Read more about the recent CT scan analysis on preparations from the 19th century collection of anatomist Giovan Battista Rini pictured above here and here. Images by Dario Piombino-Mascali, EURAC, and Clinical Anatomy/Wiley via National Geographic article; click here to see more.

Thanks to my buddy Ken for sending this my way.

Source:
http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

In January 1982, a white South Carolina widow named Dorothy Edwards — “seventy-six years old but could have passed for fifty-six, a petite five foot three, size 6,” not rich but certainly “well-off” — was found dead in the closet of her bedroom in Greenwood, a small town a little more than an hour’s drive west of Columbia, the state capital. The crime shocked the town, not merely because it happened but because it was exceptionally bloody. As a forensic pathologist testified in the murder trial that followed soon after, she had “thirty-three wounds on her chest, abdomen, and back,” 13 of her ribs had been broken, and “altogether, there were fifty-two wounds, most of them no more than a third of an inch deep.” Many of the wounds had been inflicted before Edwards’s death.

(Knopf) - ’Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong’ by Raymond Bonner

As subsequent events made all too plain, the police of Greenwood and the state agents brought in to assist them often displayed the competence of Keystone Kops and the racial sensitivity of the Ku Klux Klan, but they certainly moved with dispatch. Within hours of the discovery of the body, they arrested a black handyman named Edward Lee Elmore, a few days shy of his 33rd birthday. He had done occasional jobs for Edwards, and police claimed to have found his fingerprints in her house. He was known as “a steady, trustworthy handyman,” though his IQ “was measured at 61, which psychologists classify as within the range of ‘mild mental retardation.’” Many of his customers were well-to-do whites such as Edwards, and they liked him: “He was polite, deferential, sweet-natured — in a word, he was ‘servile,’ as blacks were supposed to be.”

He was also unlucky: not only unlucky to be black in a part of South Carolina that still revered the Confederacy and conducted public affairs accordingly; not only to be a resident of a state that “has been executing criminals as long as it has existed, as a colony and a state,” often with gusto; not only to have been the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time; not only to have been arrested in a town where law enforcement officials — police, state investigators and prosecutors alike — were far more interested in a speedy trial with a predictable outcome than in the unbiased administration of justice. As Raymond Bonner writes in this taut account of his trial and its long aftermath, the story is much more than at first it seems to be:

“In many ways, Elmore’s is a garden-variety death penalty case: a young black male of limited intelligence convicted of murdering a white person after a trial in which his lawyers’ performance was so poor that it could barely be called a defense. But the case is also exceptional, and not just because it involved ‘sex, violence, and racism,’ as one of Mrs. Edwards’s neighbors put it, convinced that this was the only reason reporters were interested. Elmore’s story raises nearly all the issues that mark the debate about capital punishment: race, mental retardation, bad trial lawyers, prosecutorial misconduct, ‘snitch’ testimony, DNA testing, a claim of innocence.”

Here is the original post:
“Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong” by Raymond Bonner

If you thought we said goodbye to Rose Ridge -- the facility where Meredith Grey’s Alzheimer’s-stricken mother Ellis Grey lived before she died rather early in the series -- you were sadly mistaken. No, unfortunately, the latest new episode of Grey’s Anatomy, “If Only You Were Lonely,” took us back there last night, as Richard Webber explored options for how to care for his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife Adele. The whole thing was -- in a word -- heartbreaking to watch. Rose Ridge is not the kind of place where you want to return.

The whole sequence began when cameras turned to a sleeping Richard, who woke to the sound of a smoke alarm going off. He ran to the kitchen of his house, where a skillet on the stove was flaming. It was clear from the outset: Adele, in her affected state, had somehow forgotten about the skillet and caused the accident, which saw Richard suffer burns on his arm while trying to put it out. “Adele, are you okay honey?” he asked her, but she only looked completely bewildered.

As seems to be the case whenever one of the Webbers is hurt or sick, Meredith took care of Richard when he came into Seattle Grace after the accident. His faux daughter recommended that he check out Rose Ridge. Her concern ran deep: “Any deeper,” Meredith said to Webber, “and this burn could have retired you from surgery.” Rather reluctantly, Richard took Adele to look at the place. I just about crumbled when the guy giving them a tour of the facility -- we saw the exact pair of chairs that Meredith and her mother Ellis used to sit and chat, all those years ago -- excitedly offered to show the Webbers the gym. “We just added a piloxing class.” Yes, piloxing, apparently a mash-up of Pilates and boxing -- that was supposed to be a selling point for the place. As if that would make the fact that Adele was suffering from a debilitating disease somehow bearable. But the line did exactly what it was supposed to do: make me feel like grabbing Adele, wrapping her in my arms, and running home -- or really anywhere else -- with her.

That, in fact, is just what Richard wanted to do, too, especially after Adele's confusion about why they were there continued. “It’s nice, but it’s too small for us,” she told Richard. “You’re a doctor. You said you could afford a house. We couldn’t possibly start a family here. Richard, where would the nursery go?” The pain in Richard’s face was palpable as he said to her, “You’re right, honey. It’s too small. I said I’d get you a house. Let’s go.”

Richard seemed determined to take care of Adele himself. “Rose Ridge is not the answer.” But Meredith told him: “You think you can handle this, but you can’t.” Richard volleyed back to Meredith with more heartbreaking words: “I made vows to Adele, vows that I have broken time and again…. The least I can do is honor her in sickness. She stays home, and if necessary, so do I.” But then, Adele had another tantrum with a caretaker in her home, which found her also questioning who Richard was. “Don’t hurt me!” he yelled at her. “I’m your husband, Richard! I’m your husband!”

The final scenes we saw with the Webbers really brought the whole situation to a head, and it became clear that we’ll -- very tragically -- be seeing a whole lot more of Rose Ridge as Adele's disease progresses. “I have Alzheimer’s, don’t I?” Adele said, as she realized that she’s the one that caused the burns on Richard’s arm. “Yes, sweetheart, you do," he told her. And then Adele again: “Rose Ridge does seem like a nice place. We went there this morning, didn’t we? I think it’s best that I would go live there.” And this is the part where you see your heart fall out of your chest.

NEXT: More on Adele's Alzheimer's

See the rest here:
'Grey's Anatomy' recap: Return to Rose Ridge

When I was in Los Angeles last week, I had a really fascinating conversation with my friend (and former Observatory presenter) Paul Koudounaris, author of the beautiful and essential book The Empire of Death: A Cultural History of Ossuaries and Charnel Houses. I asked him to do a guest post on the topic of our conversation--a series of relatively unknown preparatory paintings for Géricault's Raft of the Medusa that were based on human remains checked out, library like, from the illustrious Paris Morgue; following is Paul's writeup; really fascinating stuff!

Despite being among the finest early nineteenth-century macabre-themed paintings, Théodore Géricault’s various versions of still lifes with human body parts have remained little known and commented upon. Géricault is best remembered as a pioneering French Romantic and the auteur of the massive Raft of the Medusa [see bottom image]—an over-life-sized painting of the survivors of a shipwreck which had been a tabloid sensation in France in the 1810s. While Géricault’s public personae was that of a hard-living, chaotic, and tempestuous personality, as an artist he maintained an often obsessive dedication. The ship known as the Medusa sank in June of 1816, and Géricault soon began preparatory studies for his painted version, including interviews with survivors, and the construction of a scale model of the raft on which they escaped.

At the same time, Géricault also became increasingly interested in the naturalistic rendering of distressed anatomy, and started making frequent trips to morgues—in particular, that of the Hospital Beaujon in Paris. Initially these trips were intended simply to sketch body parts, but Géricault eventually found beauty in the severed limbs and heads he was studying, and began rendering them as subjects in their own right. At the time, there were programs in local morgues to lend human remains to art students for anatomical study—something like a lending library of body parts. Géricault would take them home to study them as they went through states of decomposition. He was known to stash various heads, arms, and legs under his bed—or alternately store them on his roof—so he could continue to render them in increasingly putrid states and in various angles. The upper torso in the so-called Head of a Guillotined Man in the Art Institute of Chicago (the title is misleading—the head is not guillotined) is one of those which is recognizable from multiple paintings, and is believed to be a thief who died in the insane asylum of Bicêtre; Géricault painted this head from multiple viewpoints over the two week period he kept it in his studio. In particular, the artist seems to have been fascinated by the subtle gradations of color body parts attained as they rotted.

He delighted in playing the morbid tones of putrefying flesh against a warm chiaroscuro which fades into a dark background and seems timeless and quiet, giving these anatomical fragments a presence that is almost iconic. Géricault made frequent jokes about the reaction of his neighbors to this kind of study—not surprisingly, they were displeased, especially with the smell emanating from his studio. Most of these paintings date to the later half of the 1810s. They were apparently entirely for the artist’s own edification—they were not sold to collectors, and most remained in his studio when he died at the age of 32 in 1824, and were offered as lots in his estate sale.

Perhaps the reason that Géricault’s still lifes with body parts have so frequently been overlooked is that they seem to defy interpretation, or lack any kind of editorial intent on the part of the artist. In that sense, they have always seemed perverse. Other, contemporary Romantic artists won great fame for their macabre scenes, but those scenes provide a context to guide the viewer’s reaction. In the Disasters of War by Goya, for example, severed body parts are placed within a moralizing relationship of cause and effect—war produces casualties, and the viewer is invited to disapprove of war itself as futile and barbaric. In various versions of the painting Nightmare by Henri Fuseli, macabre motifs such as demons are menacing, implying the threat of paralysis and loss of free will. But Géricault’s version of the macabre lacks this kind of interpretive framework—he presents his dismembered remains to the viewer simply as collections of objects, nothing more. His insistence on depriving his body parts of any identifiable context has ensured that they remain elusive, and thus marginalized in the history of art. But it is this same lack of context which has preserved them as unique objects of beauty.

To find out more about Paul's work, you can visit his website by clicking here; you can purchase a copy of his book (highly recommended!) from the Morbid Anatomy Giftshop by clicking here. Paul will also be participating in this years's iteration of The Congress for Curious People at The Coney Island Museum, so stay tuned for more on that!

Source:
http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

S8E16: One element Grey's Anatomy prides itself on is its ability to make the audience deeply feel for its characters. Grey's won't let us sit idly by, not feeling the emotional pull of each and every character. We've grown to know and love them on their journey as both doctors and regular people, so when they hurt, we hurt as well -- a fact made abundantly clear in this episode.

Normally Shonda Rhimes draws our attention to the younger couples: Callie/Arizona, Mark/Lexie, Cristina/Owen, and of course Meredith/Derek. These pairings have become the major focal point for most of the show's romantic stories, however, this episode temporarily shifted the primary focus away from them and onto Richard and Adele, whose story has thus far been more of a subplot. But with Adele's Alzheimer's worsening, Richard soon realizes he must face one of the toughest decisions any spouse ever has to make. It's a heart-wrenching topic to undertake, however, Grey's handles it will the delicacy and care it deserves, making us root for their happy ending just as much as we have for Meredith and her McDreamy. You might want to have tissues on hand.

"Ever seen a baby that weighs less than a pound?" - Alex
"No because babies that weigh less than 16 ounces don't survive." - Lexie
Lexie joins Arizona and Alex in pediatrics for the day in the hopes of getting a break from Derek's "lost cause" brain patients. However, she finds that everything isn't all pacifiers and cute baby noises in peds when she's assigned to work with Alex on the intern, Morgan's, premature son. The baby is dangerously small and in constant need of observation, which causes Morgan's boyfriend (and the baby's father) to give up based on all the negative odds. He suggests that maybe the baby just wasn't meant to be born, which ends in Morgan kicking him out of her life. And good riddance too, since it looks like things could be heating up with Morgan and Alex somewhere down the line. Now that he's back to being the sweet, adorable Karev we all know and love, it will be easy to get onboard with this pairing. It's about time Alex was shown some love.

"This is sexual harassment - you know that, right?" - April
"I like to think of that as sexual encouragement." - Mark
When an espresso machine explodes in a coffee shop, Meredith and Cristina are assigned to Devin: the victim of the explosion who's hopelessly in love with the coffee shop's barista. However, it turns out she doesn't feel the same way about him, a fact that Cristina makes him aware of in the bluntest way possible. And while this would normally seem like just another insensitive Cristina thing to do, it's very reflective of just how much she's hurting over the whole Owen ordeal. Throughout the episode, she's overcome with the fear that Owen is cheating on her, which quickly grows into an obsession. She, like Devin, can't bear the thought of being forgotten -- something that the old Cristina would have never cared about. This preoccupation shows how much her character has changed since meeting Owen. But as for whether suspicions are actually true, the truth remains unclear. Although, if this distance and lack of communication continues, it could very well be possible.

Meanwhile, Avery accidentally snaps at his patient thanks to his obsession with studying for the boards. This prompts Mark to offer some sage advice: get laid. He even tells April that she and Avery could become something a little more than just study buddies -- an idea she doesn't exactly get too thrilled about. And although this doesn't initially seem like a pivotal plot point, it reveals a significant piece of intel. After Mark tries and tries to pimp Avery out, he confides to Mark that he just can't be with someone right now. And even though he doesn't come out and say it, Mark takes it to mean that he's still in love with Lexie. And since Mark probably still has feelings for Lexie too, that could mean trouble for their newfound bromance. Let's hope not.

"I have Alzheimer's, don't I?" - Adele
Then we come to the most significant story line of the entire episode. After Adele accidentally starts a fire in the kitchen, Richard considers moving her to an assisted living facility. But when they go visit, Adele comments that it's too small for the both of them, especially if they want to start a family. Of course, this is an example of one of her Alzheimer's episodes - in that moment she believes they're a young couple just starting out. Overcome with sadness, Richard changes his mind and immediately takes her home.

But as Adele's condition worsens, it slowly takes a toll on Richard's emotions. Eventually he breaks down crying at the dining room table, literally at a loss of for how to handle his wife's affliction. But then Adele enters the room, fully returned to her cognitive state of mind. She now realizes the extent of her condition and pleads with Richard to let her go to the assisted living facility. He tries to fight it, but she insists, not because she really wants to go, but because she knows it's the best thing for Richard. The fact that they're both trying so hard to do what's right for the other shows just how much love the two of them share. It's downright heartbreaking and proves that there are things even the finest medical surgeons can't prevent. It makes their characters excruciatingly real and truly added an extra layer of value to the relationship - and to the series itself.

What did you think of tonight's episode? Were you pleased to see the Adele-Richard story take center stage? Will a romance spark between Alex and Morgan? Is Avery going to let Lexie know his true feelings? Sound off in the comments or get at me on Twitter @KellyBean0415.

See the original post here:
'Grey's Anatomy' Recap: Richard Makes a Life-Altering Decision

Tom Blackwell  Feb 23, 2012 – 11:34 PM ET | Last Updated: Feb 23, 2012 11:39 PM ET

With dissection-ready cadavers in short supply and class sizes burgeoning, an Ottawa professor has come up with an unusual tool to teach the complexities of human anatomy: limericks.

Jacqueline Carnegie had students create the funny rhymes that incorporated anatomical concepts as part of her courses at the University of Ottawa, and suggests in a new study that writing body-part rhymes may have actually improved the amateur poets’ class performance.

Her idea adds to a cluster of creative study aids — including a Korean professor’s humorous comic strips and even folk songs — developed recently to make the age-old scientific discipline easier to grasp.

Limericks are a variation on mnemonics: groups of words, numbers or letters that help people remember complicated terms.

Ms. Carnegie said she now wants to gather the best of her students’ poems — including one about the gallbladder’s green and yellow bile — and print a booklet that students could use.

Anatomy, the study of the bodily structure, has long been a staple of medical training and other health-sciences education. While the subject once took up more than 800 hours of class and lab time for medical students, though, the volume of teaching even for trainee doctors has fallen dramatically in recent decades, according to a 2009 U.S. study.

Anatomical limericks
Created by Jacqueline Carnegie and her students

Three cheers for the pyloric sphincter, hurray!
It knows that acid beside cells should not stay,
So it opens just a mite,
Then closes up fast and tight,
Keeping damage to the duodenum at bay.

Atlas and Axis are King and Queen,
Thoracic and lumbar are in between,
The sacrum is next,
Your discs help you flex,
Your spinal column is curvy and lean.

Our gallbladder is the bile’s favourite place to hide,
Its green and yellow colour gives it a lot of pride,
Through the cystic duct it goes,
Past the ampula it flows,
Causing big droplets of fat to break up and divide.

The reasons include increased enrolment, more subjects to teach in the curriculum and less emphasis on basic science, Ms. Carnegie notes in her paper in the journal Anatomic Sciences Education. Human cadavers are also harder to obtain, and in higher demand for practising a variety of surgical and other procedures, as well as learning the body parts. While medical students still have at least some time dissecting real human corpses, students in other undergraduate programs no longer can observe anatomical facts in the flesh, said Ms. Carnegie.

With its odd-sounding vocabulary and complex systems, the topic has long been recognized as demanding. Somerset Maugham quotes a fictional anatomy teacher in his classic, 1915 novel Of Human Bondage as saying students would learn “many tedious things … which you will forget the moment you have passed your final examination.” One instructor at South Korea’s Ajou University School of Medicine has created scores of comic strips that wittily — and sometimes with a little sexual innuendo — explain anatomical concepts.

“It’s tough because it’s got a language of its own,” Ms. Carnegie said. “A lot of those names are long and complicated, a lot of them are derived from Latin.”

The five-line limerick is well-suited for retaining such facts because it places new information in a familiar context, uses rhyming to trigger recall and takes advantage of rhythm to promote long-term memory, she said. She had a total of just under 600 students over two years form into groups and come up with limericks, then assess each others’ poems for their educational value, literary skill and anatomical accuracy.

Average course marks for the minority of students who did none of the limerick work were significantly lower than those who did all the limerick-related tasks. Although it’s possible the students who did all the work are those who would have excelled anyway, Ms. Carnegie said she is convinced limericks helped the students better remember concepts.

That fits well with a modern educational approach that focuses less on rote, passive teaching of anatomy, and more on active learning by teams of students, said Dr. Wojciech Pawlina, anatomy-department chair at the Mayo Clinic college of medicine in Minnesota.

“You’re not at a table trying to memorize those strange names; you’re making something fun,” he said. “I don’t have anything against having fun in anatomy.”

National Post
• Email: tblackwell@nationalpost.com

Like this:

One blogger likes this post.

Originally posted here:
Facing a shortage of cadavers, professor turns to poetry to students anatomy

MORE: Once Upon a Time Bosses Dish on "Mad" Guest Stars, David and Mary Margaret's Future and More!

Rejecting Rose Ridge: We've been preparing ourselves for the worst kind of heartache since this storyline was introduced last season, and boy are Adele and Richard Webber (James Pickens Jr.) delivering. We cried when she almost burned the kitchen down. And we cried when they went to look at Rose Ridge nursing home, where Ellis Grey spent her final days. But really, it's not our fault that this Rose Ridge place is too reminiscent of the home in The Notebook for us to keep the tears at bay.

Honorable Distrust: Cristina didn't spend much time doctoring this week, instead she was stalking the very pretty nurse played by Summer Glau. Are we the only ones with a problem that Summer Glau guested and didn't even open her mouth? What is up with that? Anyway, it's far too easy to pass off Owen's (Kevin McKidd) angry and dismissive behavior towards Cristina as cheating. That would be the least of the Cristina-Owen problems. Is paranoia the second stage of separation? We didn't get definitive answers, but we think we're meant to be just as suspicious as Cristina.

Matchmaking Mark: Things for Mark (Eric Dane) are so black and white sometimes. Jackson (Jesse Williams) is stressed out, so Mark naturally thinks he needs to get laid. Mark's bro-dar (trademark pending) is seriously malfunctioning if he thinks Dr. Pretty Eyes can't find a girl on his own. But of course, just when we thought that pesky Mark-Lexie-Jackson triangle was dead and buried—however we do wonder how their romantic Valentine's dinner went—Mark realizes that Avery is still in love with Lexie (Chyler Leigh). Things are getting very complicated for this trio. Yes, yes we know Mark technically has a girlfriend, Julia. Leave us to our delusions.

MORE: Desperate Housewives Finale: Will the Show End With a Death?!

Read more:
Grey's Anatomy Redux: Summer Glau Delivers Drama, but Is Owen Really Cheating on Cristina?