Andrew Hogan, a leading Tasmanian optometrist and education director of the Optometrists Association of Tasmania, is warning that the fashionable emo haircuts and hairstyles – you know, the ones with long lopsided fringes that sweep or hang across one eye – can cause long-term damage to eyesight. Children and teenagers are particularly at risk.

Although the trendy styles are extremely popular and many people find them to be unique and stylish, any cut or style that obstructs your vision with your hair can result in amblyopia, commonly known as lazy eye.

Hogan explained, “If a young emo chap has a fringe covering one eye all the time, that eye won’t see a lot of detail,” he said. “And if it happens from a young age, that eye can become amblyotic.”

While birth to seven-years-old is typically the age when visual development is most vulnerable, new research indicates that vision can still be affected at later stages, including into the teenage years.

And the longer you wear the hairstyle obstructing your vision, the weaker you are making that eye, and the higher the potential risk.

In addition to the concerns of damage to their eyesight, others are expressing concern that the hairstyles can cause postural problems as well, due to the constant tilting of the head to accommodate for the small window of sight.

Despite the health warnings though, it’s hard to imagine the potential dangers associated with the cuts to make any difference whatsoever. A generation that’s concerned with expressing their personality and emotion through such dramatic personal style is unlikely to be deterred by the seemingly unimportant matter of future complications.

Most tweens and teenagers don’t think that far ahead, and if they do, they just assume it won’t happen to them. Remember, this is the age when youth feel nothing applies to them and they’re invincible. Hopefully they won’t have to pay for that short-term thinking with their vision and posture.

If I had to guess though, I’d probably say that in about 10 years we’ll see a lot of lazy-eyed former emos walking around.

(Via The Mercury)

Trendy Haircuts May Cause Lazy Eye In Youngsters. More at Buzz Patrol

What exactly is a boomtown? Generally speaking, it’s an area where jobs are plentiful and high paying, usually with a higher demand than there are workers to fill the positions, but resources and housing are scarce.

It’s a town like Williston, North Dakota.

Williston is one of many Bakken area towns that is currently thriving from what many have called the largest oil boom in recent North American history.

In the middle of the grips of a recession, a stagnant economy and a poor job market with high unemployment and underemployment rates across much of the country, towns like Williston and others around the Bakken oil deposits offer hope and opportunity to many. So much so, in fact, that people are arriving to Williston in droves, and they’re being hired up as fast as they can get there.

But why Williston and surrounding areas? What’s so special about this region of North Dakota and Montana?

According to a piece that ran last October in Advertising Age:

The current boom, which got going in 2007, is fueled by advances in technology that allow companies to tap a hard-to-get layer of oil encased in rock two miles below the surface known as the “Bakken” formation, which runs from western North Dakota into portions of Montana and Canada. In 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated the region contains up to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, recoverable oil, which the agency characterized as the largest continuous oil accumulation it ever assessed. To get to it, companies don’t drill straight down, but horizontally below the surface, while using hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in which water, sand and chemicals are pumped to free the petroleum from the rock.

Critics say the process — which is being used across the U.S. to unearth oil and natural gas — destroys the environment, potentially contaminating groundwater. The industry has fought back hard against the charges, with the American Petroleum Institute recently hiring Omnicom’s Fleishman-Hillard to create an ad campaign to extend its “Energy from the Shale” informational effort, which is aimed at assuring citizens that fracking “can, and has been done, safely and responsibly.”

Towns like Williston have had such an influx of men seeking high wages with the oil companies that hotels offer no vacancies, an apartment or rental housing is hard to come by, homes and property for sale are snatched at inflated prices as soon as they’re available on the market, and even a spot to park an RV or trailer can cost up to $100 a night.

Makeshift housing developments, often built by the oil companies, called “man camps” have sprouted up all across the area to help provide a place for workers to stay. The situation is further complicated by a recently proposed RV ban that would leave many, already struggling to find adequate living arrangements, with nowhere else to go.

The amount of people that have journeyed to the Bakkens industry communities in search of their fortunes has so overwhelmed the area that despite the lack of housing there is a high-demand for many retail and service jobs to cater to the masses as well. Since most of the migrants are men that come without their families to work at the oil wells, many of these other jobs remain unfilled. The need for employees far outweighing the number of available workers, typical low-wage positions in retail, waitressing, and fast food offer sign-on bonuses and wages far higher than elsewhere in the country. Many places will higher you immediately as soon as you walk in the door.

Such promises of guaranteed, high paying work in the middle of a recession that is still rocking the rest of the country only further draws more and more hopeful job-seekers to an already overwhelmed area.

And it’s not only the men working in the oil wells that are raking in the big cash, reports of local strippers raking in $2,000 a night from the lonely men of the area has drawn attention from dancers not just around the country, but around the world. It’s hard to imagine a small town in the middle of nowhere where an exotic dancer can earn two to three times as much as a top performer in Las Vegas, but it’s true.

In a recent exclusive by Hollywood Interrupted, we follow one reporter’s journey to Williston, and his down to earth observations about the impact the the “boom” has had on the town and it’s residents. The story features talks with strippers, oil industry workers, locals and newly arrived job seekers, and offers a surprisingly honest look at the phenomenon.

With the influx of workers, so too has come a rise in crime, both violent and drug related, previously unheard of in this once small town, much to the dismay of many long time residents.

So the question remains: is it worth it? The promises of quick money and easy-to-be-had jobs do not come without a price. In the end we wonder if such boomtowns are truly a blessing or a bane. The answer, unfortunately, remains to be seen.

North Dakota Boomtowns – Thriving Job Market In The Middle Of Recession. More at Buzz Patrol

Flickr user reway2007 took this photo of her rabbits using a Cannon EOS 5D Mark III.

The photo entitled ‘Family Dinner’ was taken at ISO 1600 in raw. Converted in Adobe DNG Convertor. Imported in Lightroom 4.

Happy Easter to all Buzz Patrol readers.

Photo: ‘Family Dinner.’

Happy Easter. More at Buzz Patrol

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has just told the world that it is about to begin the process of uploading approximately 80,000 documents that relate to the late genius Albert Einstein.

These documents do not just include his scientific musings and discoveries, but will also include a number of personal documents; letters he wrote and received, diaries, his schedules – absolutely everything they have on the great man will be put up on the Einstein Archives Online. I’m wondering if they had post-it notes back in his day – because I’m damn sure his ones would be pretty interesting!

But eager Einsteinites on their quest for knowledge should not get too excited just yet however– the university have warned that this mammoth task might take them awhile.

The uploading and digitizing is likely to take them the best part of this year to complete, although certain documents are already in place. Einstein Archives Online

Good News For Einstein Fans – He’s Online!. More at Buzz Patrol

The US Military’s treatment of Bradley Manning, 24, the soldier accused of being the WikiLeaks source, was cruel and inhuman, according to the UN special rapporteur on torture.

Manning, was arrested in May 2010, at the Forward Operating Base Hammer near Baghdad, he was charged with numerous criminal counts, after it was believed that he was one of the people behind the leak of several state secrets to WikiLeaks.

The treatment Manning has received from the US Military, where is was commonly believed he was held for long periods of time in solitary confinement, has angered human rights activists around the world, and the Bradley Manning Support Network has been campaigning tirelessly for fair treatment for the 24-year-old data analyst.

Manning was kept in solitary confinement for 11 months, often for 23 hours a day and was often forced to strip naked at night. He is currently being detained at a facility in Virginia where he makes frequent pre-trial appearances at Fort Meade in Maryland. He will appear before a court martial later in the year.

It is widely believed that the US subjected Manning to these conditions and has held him so long without trial in an attempt to get him to release names and information about others involved in the leaking of information to WikiLeaks.

One of the 22 charges that Manning is facing is ‘aiding the enemy by indirect means’, and if convicted of this, he could be sentenced to the death penalty or life imprisonment. In April 2011, a petition calling on President Obama to end his isolation and torture, collected over half a million signatures. His supporters argue that no one was directly harmed by the information leaked and yet he has spent the best part of two years in detention without trial.

This latest report, by Juan Mendez who runs the UN office that probes incidents of alleged torture across the globe, is likely to further anger campaigners and activists, who believe his treatment is unconstitutional and contravenes numerous international laws on the treatment of prisoners.

Mendez, who investigated Manning’s case for 14 months, was involved in a strategic chess-like battle between US authorities whilst conducting his investigation.

In the end, after numerous letters sent back and forth from the Pentagon, was denied permission by the US military to meet with Manning unsupervised, even though he made several attempts to do so. According to the UN, this lack of privacy is a violation of human rights procedures, and is considered unacceptable by the UN special rapporteur.

Quoted in The Guardian article about his investigation into Manning’s case, Mendez said;

I conclude that the 11 months under conditions of solitary confinement (regardless of the name given to his regime by the prison authorities) constitutes at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture. If the effects in regards to pain and suffering inflicted on Manning were more severe, they could constitute torture.

The special rapporteur concludes that imposing seriously punitive conditions of detention on someone who has not been found guilty of any crime is a violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of his presumption of innocence.

The US Military have argued that they kept Manning in solitary confinement on a ‘prevention of harm watch’ although Mendez was not impressed with this justification, as he feel that they did not offer any details or information with regards to what harm they were trying to prevent.

Mendez told the Guardian that he was unable to come to a definitive conclusion as to if Manning had been tortured or not, because his requests to meet him in private had been rejected.

US Guilty Of Cruel and Inhuman Treatment. More at Buzz Patrol

So Google are making some dramatic changes to their privacy policy that will come into action on March 1st 2012. The tech savvy amongst you will probably already know this and the chances are you are already up in arms about it. The less competent, part-time web trawlers out there however, might be hearing about it for the first time now as articles pop up all over the place with instructions on how to stop your internet search history from being recorded!

Basically the gist of what will be happening from March 1st is that Google is now going to “combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services.”

They will combine your web history with all of Google’s other products including Google+, Calendar, YouTube, Blogger and many more, these had previously been kept separate before. Their reasoning behind making these changes is to make your internet usage more efficient. By combining this information, they believe that they will be able to bring up more effective search options, adverts and suggestions to improve your overall internet experience and make it all the more relevant to you!

The sensitive nature of one’s web history however, is what is making these new privacy changes controversial and the hottest net talk topic at the moment. Your internet searches and the sites you visit can reveal lots of information that you might not be so keen on everyone knowing about; your sexual orientation, religion, health concerns, location, marital status, age, to name but a few!

For those of you who do not want this information combined and stored by Google, there is a way around it, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organisation set up to defend people’s digital rights, posts these instructions….

1. Sign into your Google account

2. Go to https://www.google.com/history

3. Click “remove all Web History.”

4… Click “ok.”

Note that removing your Web History also pauses it. Web History will remain off until you enable it again.’

The EFF also state:

‘With Web History enabled, Google will keep these records indefinitely; with it disabled, they will be partially anonymized after 18 months, and certain kinds of uses, including sending you customized search results, will be prevented. If you want to do more to reduce the records Google keeps, the advice in EFF’s Six Tips to Protect Your Search Privacy white paper remains relevant.’

They also suggest doing this across your various different Google accounts, and add that this does not stop the data being stored by Google internally, and that it can be sought from law enforcement officials. It is also worth noting, that once the new privacy policy comes into play, you cannot opt out unless you leave Google completely. So if you want to keep your web search history separate from your Gmail and YouTube accounts, you better do it before March 1st.

It’s all very Big Brother (not the reality TV show) and these new changes really will mean the end of internet anonymity. According to an article on Tech News Daily, the ‘Center For Digital Democracy’ has issued a complaint against Google’s policy change to the Federal Trade Commission, who have the power to impose daily fines of thousands of dollars, should they find Google guilty of breaching regulations.

Reminds me of a passage I read in Ben Elton’s book Stark; set in the future, at a time where we have almost destroyed the world’s natural resources and mother nature is trying to get the human race back by trying to annihilate us, computer hacking and accessing other people’s data is so prevalent and such a problem that people had to revert back to writing top secret documents down by hand and keeping them on their person… after all, you can’t hack into a pen and paper!

Via EFF – How to Remove Your Google Search History Before Google’s New Privacy Policy Takes Effect

Got Any Secrets You Want To Keep From Google??. More at Buzz Patrol

This is my unofficial, generic term for people who have anything to do with banks and generally whose sole purpose for being on this planet is to try and rob you blind. I don’t, however, mean every poor sod who has ever worked in a bank, or the lower level employees who have little to do with how the upper echelons of bank society make the rules!

The featured tale for my whinge this week comes from the experiences a close friend of mine has been through recently, she didn’t really want the entire interweb knowing the gore-tastic details of her financial pickle but wanted me to vent her story under a pseudonym, so for all intents and purposes she can be called Matilda.

So our Matilda had a bit of a bad year, she had to take a pay cut at work due to unforeseen credit-crunch-related circumstances, the tenant in the house she bought a few years ago wasn’t paying his rent… He was self-employed, done himself a mischief at work, and therefore had no income for about 5 months. She didn’t want to throw him out, because, well I suppose it’s because she’s not a cold-hearted bitch, but she just couldn’t keep up on the mortgage repayments without his contribution.

So, that’s how she managed to fall into arrears of about 9 grand on her mortgage. I should also point out that Matilda is not really a fan of opening ‘boring-looking’ letters and doesn’t particularly like answering telephone calls from numbers that are not on her contacts list. These, well, let’s just call them character-traits, probably contributed to the reasons why she fell so far behind and was not really aware of it until it was almost too late.

When she did go through stockpile of boring letters, she knew she was in it deep! The mortgage company had put a repossession order on the property and set a court date for a few months time. It also turns out that her last two payments had gone astray…

What?? I hear you yell, how could two payments totaling nearly 3 grand, go astray? Well let me tell you first off, these payments were not disguised as the worn-out tennis ball that got lost under the couch in 1985 never to be seen again. Nor were they genetically modified to go by unnoticed in a KFC Bargain Bucket only to be eaten by some unassuming, but hungry guy. What had in fact happened was that the dipshit that took the money over the counter at the bank entered the roll number of the mortgage incorrectly.

You will be pleased to hear that these payments have since been recovered from the intergalactic bank-land black hole, and been put where they should have been put in the first bloody place!

I suppose she is slightly to blame for not keeping a keener eye on her already askew financial affairs, but needless to say, this pissed her off a wee bit. For if it hadn’t been for this mistake, the mortgage lender would have seen that she was making efforts to reduce the arrears and would probably not have issued the repossession order!

But what really got Matilda’s goat gruff, was the fact that those blaggards at the solicitors who the mortgage lender passed the case onto, kept piling stupid little charges onto her account.
Every time they write you a letter to tell you you’re elbow-deep in a poo-like substance, they decide to charge you for the pleasure of sending you a shitty piece of paper that any chump could have written. Then they charge you more for being in arrears so your debt gets even bigger. I suppose I understand why they do it, but the humanitarian in me wants to scream at them and be like – Jeez talk about kicking her repeatedly in her girl-goolies while she’s down!!

I’m probably too idealistic for my own damn good, but sometimes I wish they’d just have a heart. If they really must, why can’t they just make up some trumped up charges and stick them on the account of someone who has money. Leave us penniless paupers alone, we haven’t got enough to pay the damn thing as it is.

We hardly need to be paying some trainee solicitor £150 quid, to write a letter about as complicated as this, ‘Dear Poor Bastard, You are £—- in arrears, Please pay or be homeless. P.S we have charged you £150 quids for the pleasure of writing these 33 words to you. Have a Nice Day.’ Oh and we have also paid a poncy courier to hand-deliver this letter, and it was printed on the MOST expensive paper we could find, so now you owe us another £35’!!!

It’s just nonsensical to me. It is frustrating and unfair! But then, I suppose that’s life, and you’ve just got to learn the hard way that banks and mortgage lenders really weren’t put on this earth to do the little guy any favours!

PS with a little help from her parents and some hard saving, Matilda should be able to pay off the arrears in time to stop them foreclosing on her property and leave her sitting in the street, outside the house she used to own, with her Sports Direct rucksack, burning the stockpile of expensive letters to keep herself warm at night!

Bank People. More at Buzz Patrol

Don’t worry though, this isn’t just a place for an angry bint to share her anguish in an obscure cathartic web-rant…The whole aim of my game is to try my hardest to make you laugh!

I’ve always found raving about my grievances to my friends and family has always brought about a chuckle or two, and I’m really hoping that this will do the same for you!
Warning: I may swear and I WILL exaggerate for effect!

First World Problems. More at Buzz Patrol