Barbara Hewson, from Swansea, south Wales, suffered injuries including a blood clot in her chest, torn leg muscles and acute sciatica and remains in pain two years on.

The obese passenger had only been able to fit into her seat by raising the arm rest, which meant her body parts weighed down on Mrs Hewson.

Posted by GeeTee at October 21, 2002 03:27 PM | TrackBack 0

Because the risk is new, it is also uncertain. As Mr Viscusi points out, people tend to overestimate unknown risks. Economists call this %uFFD2risk-ambiguity aversion%uFFD3. And in this case the main source of information for Washingtonians is the blanket, sometimes hysterical coverage from television and newspapers, which tends to exaggerate the perceived risk further. Everyone knows the number of murders. Few know how many people live in the affected area, or the murder rate.

Posted by GeeTee at October 21, 2002 02:56 PM | TrackBack 0

...one return flight from the United Kingdom to Florida produces, per passenger, as much CO2 as a year's driving by the average British motorist, according to environmental campaign groups.

Posted by GeeTee at October 21, 2002 02:26 PM | TrackBack 0

You're a designer and you know how to sketch to get your ideas across -- quickly. Now you can be even better. Use the power of the new integrated paint and sketch functionality in StudioTools combined with the high-resolution display of a Cintiq tablet.

Posted by GeeTee at October 21, 2002 02:24 PM | TrackBack 0

It is becoming a serious problem, he said, because fewer Canadians care about politics. He said increasing corruption and examples of patronage mean fewer people vote in federal elections.

Posted by GeeTee at October 21, 2002 01:16 PM | TrackBack 0

What might surprise you is that AI and computer science experts like Dr Randy Goebel, of the University of Alberta, and Dr. Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto, don't entirely dismiss this idea. They do, however, see some potential problems. Dr. Hinton points out that a key to Artificial Intelligence is computers that can learn, and we're still just scratching the surface of this problem. Dr. Goebel raises the perhaps more fundamental issue that there's both technologically and philosophically no way to prove that a mind transferred into a computer has retained what makes it truly human.

Posted by GeeTee at October 21, 2002 12:56 PM | TrackBack 0

Moments after the amnesty decree was read on state television Sunday morning, the authorities threw open the gates of the country's most notorious prison, the high-security Abu Gharib complex on the outskirts of Baghdad, allowing several thousand dazed and scruffy men to walk out of their cramped cells and into a throng of cheering and wailing relatives who had surrounded the vast penitentiary.

Posted by GeeTee at October 21, 2002 12:54 PM | TrackBack 0