The left-wing is crazy and the right-wing scares the shit out of me!

Allan's Perspective is NOT recommended for the politically correct, or the overly religious. Some people have opinions. Some people have convictions......... What we offer is PERSPECTIVE!




Tuesday 4 August 2015

Life has its ups and downs, eh!

Look kids, I'm getting really scared of using an escalator ......., at least in China!

Image result for escalator accident clipart(NEWSER) – Another day, another devastating escalator accident in China. An employee at Longemont Shopping Mall in Shanghai's Changning district had his foot and part of his leg amputated after becoming trapped in an escalator, according to the South China Morning Post. The worker, identified simply as Zhang, was cleaning the escalator with a mop when he reportedly stepped on it. The mall described the 35-year-old's action as an "improper" one, and said the mop's brush became "trapped inside the gap in the stairs, which caused cracks in the comb plate." Video of the incident shows the escalator's floor plate breaking away, and Zhang's left foot falling inside the moving staircase. A relative reportedly told local media, "The doctor said he had to amputate the [foot] to avoid the injuries from deteriorating."
Image result for escalator accident clipartThe accident is the fourth escalator tragedy in China in six days. As previously reported, Xiang Liujuan, 30, was killed last week when she similarly fell through an escalator floor plate at Anliang department store in Hubei province. A graphic video shows Xiang pushing her son to safety before she is sucked to her death. Days after that accident, a 1-year-old's arm was seriously injured after it became trapped in an escalator in Guangxi province, NBC News reports, and a 6-year-old was injured Saturday after his foot was caught in an escalator in Beijing. The incidents have led to escalator quality inspections in Shanghai and Hubei. (Workers reportedly warned the mother just before she was swallowed by the escalator.)

 http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/08/03/another-terrible-escalator-accident-rattles-china/31052495/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatoday-newstopstories


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The average person can remember a string of seven digits, and that's why telephone numbers (minus area code) are seven digits long!

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Did ya hear about the guy who wanted to pay ALL his employees $70K a year to fight income inequality?

Well, it's not working out as he expected!.


Image result for scrooge mcduckIt seemed like a great idea at the time: Pay every employee in your company at least $70,000. But as the New York Times reports, when Dan Price announced his grandiose plan, a whole host of problems quickly descended on his Gravity Payments credit card processing company. Two longtime employees, angry that newbies would make as much as veterans, quit; clients, fearing increased fees to pay for those salaries, fled; others flocked to sign up, overwhelming Price's resources and forcing him to hire a dozen new employees at his newly hefty salary level; accusations of socialist and communist leanings flew, from the likes of Rush Limbaugh; and Price's own brother sued him.
Image result for scrooge mcduck"Now the people who were just clocking in and out were making the same as me," says one of the employees who quit, despite getting a $9,000-a-year bump. "It shackles high performers to less motivated team members." And the bigger paycheck is stressing out even new workers. "Am I doing my job well enough to deserve this?" wonders one. But Price's decision has also seen a few ripples of good, notes the Times: Employees, feeling greater financial independence, have been able to afford new tires and start families, while one new Gravity client passed on his monthly savings to his own employees. Price doesn't know if the wave Gravity is riding will peter out, but seems nevertheless committed to fighting income inequality. "The cause has expanded," says Price. "Whether I like it or not, the stakes are higher."

 http://www.newser.com/story/210694/how-a-ceos-move-to-pay-all-at-least-70k-backfired.html

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Word out of Ottawa over the weekend is that a guy was arrested for committing "lewd acts" at ...., and on, the National War Memorial!

The only problem was that NOBODY would tell us what those lewd thing were, so after a whole bunch of investigating the 'Perspective Research Department' found out the guy was dry humping one of the statures.

Police say alcohol was involved [sic] ......,  and remember: "YA HEARD IT HERE FIRST!"

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O.K. kids, there might be a lot more to those "Planet of the Apes" movies than we imagined!

According to new research, bonobos -- our closest relatives in the animal kingdom -- might be able to give us an unprecedented peak at the evolution of human speech.
This particular species of great ape, scientists now say, uses sound to communicate in a way that's remarkably similar to a human infant. They may be the only other species which does so.
[Orangutan granted rights of personhood in Argentina]
Image result for ape clipartThe study, published Tuesday in the journal PeerJ, focuses on bonobo "peeps". Those are high pitched squeaks that the animals use to communicate with one another. But here's the cool part: Those peeps may sound simple, but they're actually closer to human speech than anything else in the animal kingdom.
The researchers say these peeps are a lot like the sounds infants make before they learn to talk (which are called protophones). Baby babble is distinguishable from your standard animal grunting because it doesn't vary acoustically based on the emotional context of the babbling. A baby babble is a baby babble, which stands out in an animal kingdom full of sounds that only come out in particular contexts, like aggression, alarm, attraction or pain.
[Scientists pinpoint a gene regulator that makes human brains bigger]
Image result for ape clipartBut bonobo babbling seems to work the same way. Under close examination of over 11 hours of recordings for each member of a bonobo community, researchers found that bonobos made these sounds in different contexts, requiring their fellow apes to read different meanings into acoustically identical vocalizations. The bonobos did have slightly different acoustic frequency for their very negative peeps -- ones related to distress and danger -- but used identical sounds for a wide range of neutral and positive circumstances.
That's a skill called structural flexibility, and they're the first non-human animals shown to have it.
This is generally considered an evolutionary precursor to speech as we know it, where a whole bunch of meaningless sounds are given meaning by social construct.
If so, we may have just pinpointed when our journey to unique speech in the animal kingdom really began: 6-10 million years ago, when our ancestry last converged with the great apes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/08/04/bonobo-ape-peeps-may-share-an-evolutionary-path-with-baby-talk/

 

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