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What a despicable thing to do to an animal just to make it tastier to eat.

The photos of tubes being put down the throats of ducks certainly look horrific, but animal rights activists have a tendency to over-dramatize things. From an article in Time magazine:

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1669732,00.html

The debate is centered on the practice of gavage, in which corn is force-fed to farm-raised ducks through a funnel down their throats. Some argue that gavage is inhumane, while others counter that the physiology of a duck is not the same as a human. "It seems terrible if you don't know that a duck's esophagus is lined with a very thick cuticle, if you don't realize that baby ducks are fed by their mother pushing her beak down the baby's throat," says Ariane Daguin, owner of D'Artagnan, the largest foie gras purveyor in the U.S. Recent studies by Dr. Daniel Guémené, a leading expert on the physiological effects of gavage, have shown that ducks with young in the wild were under more stress than the ducks being fed through gavage. And both The American Veterinary Medical Association's House of Delegates and the American Association of Avian Pathologists have concluded that foie is not a product of animal cruelty.

Also, here's an abstract of research by Guémené:

http://www.edpsciences.org/articles/animres/pdf/2001/02/faure.pdf

The debate on welfare issues related to the force feeding of ducks and geese involves understanding the reactions of the animals to the force feeding process. Two types of experiment were performed. Ducks and geese were trained to be fed in a pen 8 metres away from their rearing pen and were then force fed in the feeding pen. The hypothesis was that if force feeding caused aversion, the animals would not spontaneously go to the test pen. There were some signs of aversion in ducks, but not full avoidance, and there were no signs of aversion in geese. In another experiment, the flight distances of ducks from the person who performed the force feeding and from an unknown observer were measured. Ducks avoided the unknown person more than the force feeder. Their avoidance of the force feeder decreased during the force feeding period. There was no development of aversion to the force feeder during the force feeding process.

Found one.

guys, There's a lot of conspiracy mongering and mininformation being spread around about Galileo and the GPS systems and how they work. Here's three links that should help address this: Here's the link to NIST's time and freq. group. http://tf.nist.gov/timefreq/index.html Here's the link to the United States Naval Observatory site, which oversee's the GPS system (with airspace commant). http://www.usno.navy.mil/ And here's the link to the link farm of the ESA, or rather to the EU's overall scientific administrative body. http://www.edpsciences.org/index.cfm?niv1=useful_l inks For specific information about the Galileo project, search "ESA" "Galileo" and Technical specifications... I posted more specific links on the difference between the Galileo and US GPS systems elsewhere on slashdot, in particular regarding the encryption schemes and hard science related to each systems operations. Galileo relies on the L1 carrier freq. used by the US GPS system, but this carrier freq. is "public", and "degraded" by definition (the C/A, or Coarse Acquisiton, signal). This is NOT proprietary to the EU's Galileo system, and it's dishonest for the EU to sell it as such commercially. The dual and multi-channel navcom services that the EU claims it wants to commercially exploit are not designed independently of the L1 carrier signal that the US system offers to everyone (conditionally). Please, just check the sites above. Thanks, Grouchy

http://users.rowan.edu/~marchese/blr.html

> If they had something strange happen during an experiment they should have left it at that and write
> a paper called something like "Something strange happened during blah blah blah...", then describe in
> detail the setup of the experiment and the results, then wait for peer review

Have done:

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0963-0252/12/3/312

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?isn umber=27155&arnumber=1206739&count=18&index=5

http://www.edpsciences.org/10.1051/epjap:2004168

http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServ let?prog=normal&id=JAPIAU000096000006003095000001& idtype=cvips&gifs=yes

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleUR L&_udi=B6TGS-47C8N0P-B&_coverDate=12%2F19%2F2002&_ alid=308918281&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_qd=1&_c di=5262&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1 &_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=82d2cdf37641d3ec848f 070de1f6a1d2

You describe a model that is much more complicated than the models Mandelbrot are looking for. . There is no big science in these fluctuation models. The only trick is to fit all probability distributions to a power law.

Well, at least they didn't follow the same procedure that was used by france. Personal, I think we have an historic moment where the politicians actually got something right ... although most likely for the wrong reasons.

Actually, I found the "Europhys. Lett. 57, 677 (2002)" made it seem so scientific.

Link to Abstract

Abstract
A process for transferring energy from electron shells into nuclear excitation, NEET, has offered the promise for modulating nuclear properties at accessible levels of power. It had been proven recently by exciting a nuclear level of 197Au with synchrotron radiation, but measured couplings were far below theoretical objectives. Reported here is an extension of that approach for excitation to 178Hfm2 isomeric nuclei. Isomeric targets were irradiated with X-rays in the beamline BL01B1 at the synchrotron radiation source SPring-8. Energies were tuned from 9 to 13 keV. In this range an excitation branch attributed to NEET was found to have a probability of 0.002 relative to L-shell photoionization. The resulting emission of exoergic gamma-photons was observed from the target at a rate approaching the theoretical maximum.

The full article is available online from EDP, but it is a pay site.