Will your credit card become unreadable if it’s exposed to magnets? In a previous story, we said yes, but many of you begged to differ. Seeing that, we took the challenge of clearing things up once and for all.

The result: With the help of a junkyard magnet, a garden–variety refrigerator magnet and a professor with a vast knowledge of magnetics, we were proved right –– eventually.

A highly charged debate ensued after our “How to destroy a credit card” was published in September of 2009. Folks started weighing in on whether magnets –– especially those of the refrigerator persuasion –– actually had the power to strip a stripe. “Running a magnet across the strip will do nothing,” said one commenter on our video at YouTube.com. Others chimed in with their own experiences with credit cards and magnets.

So we put our cards to the test against a barrage of different magnets, even heading to the junkyard to swipe stripes with some serious electromagnetic forces.

But before we get to the results, let’s take a step back.

The Mystery of the Stripe

Credit card magnetic stripes carry more than just your precious financial data; they carry some mystery, too.
The stripe you see on the back of your card is a collection of magnetic particles –– each a very small magnet about 20 millionths of an inch long. It’s a commonly held belief that exposure of these particles to an external magnet can scramble the information and make the card unreadable.

That’s the theory. But does it really happen? We sought to find out.

Magnets on a Mission

Our experiment began with three different magnets of various strengths:

• A generic refrigerator magnet, similar to the one that’s probably holding up your kid’s artwork in your kitchen.

• A slightly more powerful magnet, which is capable of holding up to 72 pounds.

• A junkyard magnet, which can hold about 7,000 pounds and is also just plain fun to watch in action.

You never know when you’ll just happen to be waving your credit card around in a junkyard.

We swiped three separate cards –– all were tested and functioning properly before the experiment, by the way –– with one of these types of magnets; then took them to a local retailer who ran each card through a credit card machine to test which ones were still readable and which ones weren’t.

Once all preparations were in place, it was time for the big reveal.

Up first was the card exposed to the fridge magnet. It turned out that it was still readable by a credit card machine. The second, larger magnet was not, despite multiple swipes. Could we have been on the way to the major scientific breakthrough we’d been hoping for?

Not so fast. It was time to put the third card, the one exposed to the junkyard magnet, to the test –– and surprisingly, the card was still readable. It had survived the most powerful magnet in our arsenal.

This caused considerable confusion. Our initial assumption was that the strength of the magnet would play a role in the demagnetization process. Thus, a wimpy refrigerator magnet wouldn’t have the data–destruction powers of a gigantic junkyard magnet.

We were wrong.

Puzzled, we turned to an expert for answers.

Calling In the Expert

Totally stumped by the fact that just one out of three magnets (the one of medium strength) had rendered a card unreadable, we sought out the guidance of A. Dean Sherry, a chemistry professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Sherry is also associate director of the Rogers Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Center and a radiology professor at the university’s Southwestern Medical Center. In other words, he’s got plenty of magnetic experience for our purposes.

He heard us out and politely corrected our assumption about the relationship between the strength of the magnet and its power over the data on the stripe. “The field strength isn’t all that important,” he said. “Even the refrigerator magnet should work eventually.”

So what was the deciding factor? Exposure time.

“It is well known that magnets will wipe out information on credit card stripes,” Sherry said. “However, it doesn’t always happen after one exposure. It may take several exposures for the card to be deactivated, but it will happen eventually.”

Huh. So armed with that information, we decided to replicate the experiment with the refrigerator magnet. We left the magnet exposed to the credit card stripe for several minutes and took a few more swipes for good measure.
Then we took it back to the store and … success. The card’s stripe had been demagnetized.

Not the Only Way to Destroy a Card

The safest, most practical way to destroy your credit card, however, is to cut it into tiny pieces using a shredder or a pair of scissors.

For an extra level of protection (or if you just want to replicate our very cool experiment), you can use a magnet on the stripe. Just be sure to expose it for a significant amount of time –– that goes for heavy–duty junkyard magnets, too.

Two of the oldest people in the world have died on the same day.

Mary Josephine Ray, who was certified as the oldest person living in the United States, died Sunday at age 114 years, 294 days. She died at a nursing home in Westmoreland but was active until about two weeks before her death, her granddaughter Katherine Ray said.

“She just enjoyed life. She never thought of dying at all,” Katherine Ray said. “She was planning for her birthday party.”

Ray died just hours before Daisey Bailey, who was 113 years, 342 days, said L. Stephen Coles, a director of the Gerontology Research Group, which tracks and studies old people and certifies those 110 or older, called supercentenarians.

“It’s very rare that two of our supercentenarians die on the same day,” Coles said.

Bailey, who was born March 30, 1896, died in Detroit, he said. She had suffered from dementia, said her family, which claimed she was born in 1895.

Ray, even with her recent decline, managed an interview with a reporter last week, her granddaughter said.

Ray was the oldest person in the United States and the second-oldest in the world, the Gerontology Research Group said. She also was recorded as the oldest person ever to live in New Hampshire.

The oldest living American is now Neva Morris, of Ames, Iowa, at age 114 years, 216 days. The oldest person in the world is Japan’s Kama Chinen at age 114 years, 301 days.

Ray was born May 17, 1895, in Bloomfield, Prince Edward Island, Canada. She moved to the United States at age 3.

She lived for 60 years in Anson, Maine. She lived in Florida, Massachusetts and elsewhere in New Hampshire before she moved to Westmoreland in 2002 to be near her children.

Ray’s husband, Walter Ray, died in 1967. Survivors include two sons, eight grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren.

Morris, the Iowa woman now believed to be the oldest U.S. resident, lives at a care center. Only one of her four children, a son in Sioux City, is still alive.

“She has some hearing deficiencies and a visual deficiency, but mentally she is quite alert and will respond when she feels like it and isn’t too tired,” said her 90-year-old son-in-law, Tom Wickersham, who lives in the same care center.

Wickersham said he visits his mother-in-law — who plays bingo and enjoys singing “You Are My Sunshine” — nearly every day.

Medical researchers have gained a significant insight into how the virus that causes AIDS hides in the body as it dodges medicines that are designed to kill it off. Scientists at the University of Michigan have found that a reservoir of dormant cells in bone marrow serves as a holding cell, from which the virus can roar back into action as soon as the drugs are gone.

The scientists say the research opens the door to a new field of study that could eventually reduce the drug burden on HIV patients, as Ashley Hall reports.

ASHLEY HALL: With the help of combinations of different drugs, doctors have been able to reduce the amount of HIV in the blood of patients to almost nothing. But when the patient stops taking the drugs, the virus springs straight back into action.

KATHLEEN COLLINS: There was good reason to believe that this was due to the virus being able to hide out in so-called reservoirs in a very stable form and it is sitting there poised to reactivate so that when drugs are stopped and the virus can spread again, the virus can rebound.

ASHLEY HALL: Dr Kathleen Collins is an associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, and the lead author of a study that’s been published today in the journal Nature Medicine.

KATHLEEN COLLINS: We looked in the bone marrow which people hadn’t really closely looked at before.

ASHLEY HALL: And what did you find when you looked at the bone marrow?

KATHLEEN COLLINS: Well, what we found that there was evidence that HIV in fact, does infect the bone marrow progenitor cells or parent cells that are the source of all of the different blood lineages in the body and moreover that HIV can take on a latent form and so we were able to detect the presence of virus ending cells even after patients had been on therapy for years.

ASHLEY HALL: It’s not the first time scientists have found reservoirs of the virus in the body. They’ve already found HIV hiding out in blood cells called macrophages and in the immune cells known as memory T-cells. But scientists believed there was at least one more major reservoir of the virus in the body and Dr Collins’ team thought just maybe that was bone marrow.

KATHLEEN COLLINS: Initially we were very surprised. Certainly it wasn’t well understood that HIV had the capacity to affect these cells.

ASHLEY HALL: So is this the major reservoir that you are talking about, do you think?

KATHLEEN COLLINS: It could be. There is a lot of questions that remain to be answered.

ASHLEY HALL: And finding the answers won’t be easy but Kathleen Collins says the search will be worthwhile.

KATHLEEN COLLINS: The drugs are really effective at reducing mortality. They’ve decreased it by about 90 per cent but only a small minority of people who need drugs worldwide are getting these drugs and if we could turn lifelong therapy into therapy for a couple of years even, we would be able to spread the resources out further and help more people who are infected.

ASHLEY HALL: It’s likely to be a long time before this new research is translated into a cure for HIV.

KERSTEN KOELSCH: We’ve been working for almost a decade now in the search of hiding places for HIV and this is one piece in the puzzle but I think for patients that are already infected with HIV, it will not mean any significant change in the immediate or midterm future.

ASHLEY HALL: Dr Kersten Koelsch works with the National Centre for HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research at the University of New South Wales.

KERSTEN KOELSCH: If you look at it a bit more closely, it is always the same type of cells that are infected with HIV and those are white blood cells which are a significant part of our immune system.

ASHLEY HALL: Is it possible to eradicate all white blood cells?

KERSTEN KOELSCH: No. It is definitely not possible to eradicate all white cells because they are an essential part of the human immune system but what we hope once we have identified the subsets, that we can design targeted therapy to specifically address, so to speak, those cells.

Cruise ships are among the safest vessels built, experts say

The terrifying moments on board the Louis Majesty, a cruise ship hit by 26-foot waves off northeast Spain, may be prompting second thoughts among travelers considering a vacation at sea. Two passengers were killed and 14 people were injured when water violently crashed through the windows of some of the ship’s public areas this week.

Experts said waves like those that struck the Louis Majesty are extremely rare and should be of little concern to the average cruise ship passenger.

“Cruise lines are operating on a weekly basis, they’re always at sea and there’s a very, very, very low frequency of these incidents happening,” said Cmdr. Buddy Reams, the chief of the Coast Guard’s Cruise Ship National Center of Expertise.

“We have a really rigorous safety protocol that we go through for each of the cruise ships that operate [in the U.S.] and it’s primarily because they’re carrying so many passengers.”

Several industry insiders weighed in on common questions travelers may be asking about the safety of cruising after this week’s incident.

How likely would it be for a cruise ship to encounter a wave that might tip it over?

Not very likely. In fact, Richard Burke, professor and chairman of engineering at the Maritime College of the State University of New York, said he would be as worried about it as an asteroid hitting the Earth.

“Encountering a storm at sea and having the ship moving around and possibly getting seasick, those things happen. But we’re talking about waves of extraordinary magnitude that are very, very rare,” Burke said.

The chances of a “Poseidon Adventure” disaster happening on a modern ship are virtually nonexistent, said Harry Bolton, captain of the training ship “Golden Bear” at the California Maritime Academy.

The only way that it could happen is if the ship were in extreme weather and positioned sideways to a 70- to 100-foot wave that would have the potential of rolling it over, Bolton said.

“I guarantee you’re never going to be in those kinds of waves anyway,” he said. “[Cruise ships] avoid bad weather like the plague. They don’t want the passengers in peril, they don’t want to risk any injury or accidents.”

How far can a cruise ship lean over to one side and still recover?

Pretty far, though most passengers will likely never experience the extreme.

Cruise ships can list a lot so they can withstand heavy waves, said Teijo Niemela, editor and publisher of the “Cruise Business Review,” which follows cruise ship design.

In extreme cases, a ship can actually list 60 degrees and recover, Burke said. (An angle of 90 degrees would be the ship lying on its side.)

“If you’ve ever been on a ship that’s listing 20 degrees, you almost can’t walk on the ship. Walking up a 20 degree slope is like mountain climbing,” Burke said.

“So if a ship heels more than that, your real problem is that you’re going to get thrown off your feet and a lot of equipment and furniture is going to break loose and go flying around. So the possibility of injury is very high when that happens. But the ship should right itself without any problem.”

The biggest roll Burke has ever experienced during his time at sea was 45 degrees, he said. “I really don’t want to go through that again.”

Cruise ships seem to be getting bigger and taller. Does that affect their stability?

It may appear that cruise ships are top heavy visually, but naval architects design them in such a way that all of the heavy liquids, machinery and the main engine are positioned very low, Burke said. So the ship’s center of gravity is also low even though it looks like the structure goes up high.

Modern cruise ships also have very intricate anti-heeling systems, Bolton said.

“It literally blasts water from one side of the ship to the other side so that you can take a ship that might be rolling 20 degrees and you turn on the anti-heeling system and it’ll knock that thing right down to a 5 degree roll. It’s incredible,” Bolton said.

Niemela, who has sailed on the huge new cruise ship Oasis of the Seas a couple of times, said it’s very difficult to feel any kind of movement on board.

If there is a tsunami warning, like the one last week around Hawaii, is a cruise ship in danger?

Not unless the ship is still docked in port. A tsunami would go by entirely unnoticed on the open sea, Burke said. But if the ship were still at port, an arriving tsunami would be devastating.

How are passengers notified if there’s an emergency at sea?

Before a ship leaves port, the crew holds a fire and boat drill for the passengers. They sound the signals that would call people to their lifeboat stations if there is an emergency so everybody gets to hear the sirens before the ship leaves, Burke said. They’re very loud and they’re located throughout the ship.

“It’s really important if you take a cruise that you participate in the drill and you do see where your lifeboat station is and you know how to get there,” Burke said.

25 things you didn’t know about Ellen DeGeneres. Straight from the horse’s mouth :

1. I lived in my car for a short time. 

2. The only reason I am not a professional ice skater is that I am not a good ice skater.

3. I want to live without regrets.

4. I am always early.

5. I’ve never had any dance training.

6. I’m married to the second luckiest woman on the planet. And she’s married to the first!

7. I only learned to text last year. LOL.

8. I used to sell vacuum cleaners.

9. I love to move. I’ve lived in five houses over the past seven years.

10. I played tennis in high school.

11. I have an older brother.

12. My first car was a hand-me-down from my mother: a bright-yellow Vega.

13. I can control Anderson Cooper’s thoughts with my mind. Usually I think, Anderson, wear a tight T-shirt.

14. I love reality TV. For someone who’s never been interested in a bachelor, I am fascinated.

15. I listen to Eckhart Tolle CDs when I’m driving. I wish he was the voice of my navigation system.

16. I only make left turns.

17. I’m fluent in Na’vi.

18. I sometimes use my poker face in backgammon. But I have a completely different go fish face.

19. I’ve been running the L.A. marathon for five years. Someday I’m gonna finish it.

20. I didn’t go to no college.

21. I love watches. And no matter where I am, I keep my watch set to the Mountain Time Zone.

22. I don’t eat meat, and I don’t drink anything with the word nog in it.

23. If I buy one pair of shoes from Payless, my next will be free.

24. I’ve named the fish in my pond. (They are Charlotte, Hermit, Almost Pretty — Pretty passed away and we got another that’s not quite as pretty but similar – Sarah Jessica Parker, Anyway, Prince,Michael Jackson, Phil, Linda, Patch, Bubbles and Bubbles’ stand-in.)

25. If there’s anything else you want to know about me, Google me.

bad economic times

Greece’s economy is about the same size as that of Massachusetts. The Mediterranean nation ranks 63rd among buyers of U.S. exports. Athens is 5,139 miles from Washington.

But despite this literal and figurative distance, the Greek debt crisis has created a new set of risks for the U.S. economy — remote risks, perhaps, but real nonetheless.

Economic policymakers and many private analysts see a danger that the Greek troubles will lead to the next wave of turmoil for the global economy. Investors are pouring money into government debt around the world, viewing it as a safe investment in an uncertain time. That has helped keep interest rates very low in most large countries, fueling the global economic recovery.

But any default or near-default by Greece could lead investors to question those assumptions, raising doubts that the debts of other nations, including Spain and Italy, and even Britain and the United States, are safe.

As investors perceive a greater risk, they would demand higher interest rates on their loans, causing rates to rise and choking economic growth. Mortgage rates would rise, for example, and it would become more expensive for businesses to borrow money to expand.

The fear among some analysts is that just as subprime mortgage loans — representing a minuscule portion of the global financial landscape — triggered a massive crisis back in 2007, so could Greece cause problems for much bigger, and apparently more stable, nations around the world.

A taste of Thailand

One of the lessons of the global financial meltdown is that crises tend to evolve in unpredictable ways. That was also the experience in the late 1990s, when market concerns about Thailand’s foreign debt led investors to question the finances of several other East Asian nations, resulting in the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98.

“Greece is like Thailand in 1997 and like subprime in the summer of 2007,” said Robert H. Dugger, a managing partner at Hanover Investment Group, a financial consulting firm.

Such contagion has not yet spread from Greece, and forecasters generally view this prospect as a “tail risk” — a danger that’s unlikely to arise but that would be nasty if it did. Financial market participants seem confident that Greece’s problems will be confined to Greece and perhaps a few other European nations with particularly ugly public finances.

Washington policymakers, their private concern notwithstanding, have said publicly only that they are monitoring the situation and are confident that European authorities will be responsible for any bailout.

So far, the episode has made it cheaper for the U.S. government to borrow, as investors have moved money into dollars — and Treasury bonds in particular — to try to reduce exposure to developments in Europe. The federal government could borrow money for 10 years at 3.6 percent on Thursday based on bond yields, very low by any historical standard and down from 3.84 percent at the beginning of the year.

And finally, there was good news Thursday even for Greece, which successfully sold 5 billion euros, about $6.8 billion, of 10-year debt, suggesting that global investors expect Athens to steer its finances into line.

VERY soon now, whatever suspense remains in this Oscar season will be over. Bullock or Streep? “Avatar” or “Hurt Locker”? All will be revealed. Will you be watching?

Worst movies

Or, at least, that’s the hope — something that might reverse the erosion of ratings that has plagued the Oscar show in recent years. Always a step or two behind the times, the broadcast has lately seemed to wobble on the edge of obsolescence. Really, who watches television like that anymore?

It is an axiom nowadays that the broadcast networks, with their traditional ability to manufacture cultural events with the power to corral public attention and advertising money, are dinosaurs unaware of their own impending extinction. And like old-fashioned real-time, living-room television viewing, theatrical distribution (what most of us call moviegoing) has been on the cultural endangered-species list for some time. Thanks to our wall-mounted flat screens and their portable analogues, we can stream and download at our own convenience, make our own snacks, program our own repertory and pause when the need arises. So why would any of us need to buy a ticket and fight with a stranger for access to a cup holder?

But these weary beasts, rather than slipping quietly into extinction, are still roaring loudly and trampling a lot of real estate, even as the swift new creatures that are supposed to kill them off evolve and proliferate with startling rapidity. The Oscars this year are interesting precisely because they crystallize this paradox.

They arrive during a season when large-scale, unique television events are attracting enormous audiences. The Super Bowl was the most widely watched broadcast ever, and this years’ Winter Olympics and even the Grammy Awards drew larger audiences than their predecessors. Apparently people will still watch television.

And also go to the movies, which is not exactly news; 2009 was a hard recessionary year all around, but it was a flush time at the box office, as grosses broke the record set a few years earlier. Throughout these years of digitally inspired anxiety, in fact, audiences have kept on buying tickets. The pattern thrown into relief even before the coming of “Avatar” involves the concentration of more and more revenue in a small number of hugely remunerative releases. Which is to say, the big movies keep getting bigger.

And for the moment “Avatar” is the biggest of all, a juggernaut that makes the word blockbuster sound quaint. While the film’s success does not necessarily set a template for the future — or represent a break with the past — its combination of technological innovation and global reach reveals the scale on which Hollywood can now operate. By the time it opened in December, “Avatar” was the movie that everyone in the world had to see, as soon as possible, and it held on to that status week after week.

The replication of that enormous, international and sustained impact will be the job of the major studios in the near future, which in itself is nothing new. An “Avatar”-derived set of expectations is already taking shape. From now on more and more movies — starting with animation but quickly expanding to action — will be in 3-D, which in principle enhances the moviegoing experience and in practice allows exhibitors to charge a premium for tickets. And the devising of fantasy realms that welcome not only children and gamers but also everyone else as well will continue to be where the most of the money is spent.

This consolidation of resources has already begun to affect the supply of medium-budget movies with serious themes and respected actors in the leading roles, the kind of pictures that have dominated most of the Oscar races this past decade. One frequently offered explanation for the loss of audience has been the Academy’s habit of overlooking big commercial hits and nominating these relatively low-grossing “art house” movies. An apotheosis of sorts came two years ago, when the big Oscar duel was between “There Will Be Blood” and “No Country for Old Men,” standouts in a best picture field that had, by most estimates, the lowest aggregate box office gross ever. The ratings followed suit.

The studio subsidiaries that released those two pictures, Paramount Vantage and Miramax (owned, for now, by Disney), have all but ceased to exist, following Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse (Warner Brothers’ short-lived specialty labels) into oblivion. And the occasional forays of the parent studios into nonblockbuster, grown-up entertainment — earnest, sophisticated genre fare like “Michael Clayton,” which 40 years ago would have been a safely commercial play rather than an awards-season gamble — are likely to grow rarer.

Some of this is the fault of the Oscars themselves, which have represented the best chance these films had to find an audience beyond the art houses. Capitalizing on that chance, however, proved ferociously competitive and often ruinously expensive. Contenders flooded into theaters in October and November, hoping for critical support and decent numbers in major markets. Quite a few fell by the wayside, while the survivors spent more and more on publicity campaigns that pushed their break-even point further and further down the road. And a curious economic reality emerged, wherein a $20 million drama seemed like a greater risk than a $100 million action spectacle.

But big movies will never be the whole story. The 10-film best picture list, while it was created in part to ensure the presence of hits, also makes room for more smaller-scale, artistically ambitious movies than before. And one of these, “The Hurt Locker,” has emerged as the main rival to “Avatar” — and even, in the view of some handicappers, the favorite.

Surgery on blocked neck arteries has long been considered the best procedure for preventing a stroke. Now a large North American study has found that a less invasive approach may be just as safe and effective, but other researchers are not so sure.

The new findings, released Friday at a medical meeting in San Antonio, have the potential to make the less invasive procedure — inserting a small tube called a stent in the carotid artery — a more appealing option for many patients.

Yet just a day earlier, European investigators reported dismal results from another international trial involving carotid stents, published online Thursday by the British medical journal The Lancet.

In that study, patients treated with stents suffered almost double the rate of complications as those treated surgically, leading the British researchers to conclude that surgical treatment of carotid blockages, called endarterectomy, remains the treatment of choice.

The disparate findings — which could help determine whether Medicare expands coverage to cover the stent procedure — left scientists trying to explain why two fairly similar clinical trials came to such starkly different conclusions.

“We had outstanding results, and our study, we think, is representative of these treatments in the United States and Canada,” said Dr. Thomas G. Brott, director for research at theMayo Clinic campus in Jacksonville, Fla., and lead author of the North American study, called Crest (for Carotid Revascularization Endarterectomy versus Stenting Trial). “Prior to the Crest trial, we really did not have the best evidence, but these results indicate that we have two very safe and effective methods to prevent stroke.”

Though there are differences in risk between the two procedures and individual variations, he said, “the results from stenting are very comparable to those for carotid surgery.”

But Dr. Martin M. Brown, chief investigator for the European trial, the International Carotid Stenting Study, said that although differences in the groups studied might explain the disparate results, “nobody has really shown stenting is better than surgery, so why choose a stent?”

He added, “Even if Crest shows little difference between the two, there are three other trials that suggest surgery is safer.”

Strokes are the third leading cause of death in the United States and a major cause of disability among adults. Each year, almost 800,000 Americans suffer a stroke, and more than 140,000 die.

Although many patients take drugs like statins and blood pressure medicine to reduce their risk of stroke, surgical treatment of severe blockages in the carotid artery has been shown to be more effective than medical therapy alone in preventing ischemic strokes caused by a buildup of plaque in the arteries.

The Crest trial, sponsored by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke with additional financing from the stent maker Abbott Vascular, is one of the largest randomized clinical trials to study the two major procedures used to open blocked neck arteries and restore blood flow to the brain.

It included 2,502 patients at more than 100 hospitals in the United States and Canada, who were randomly assigned to receive either surgery or stenting over a period of nine years. Most of the patients had an artery blockage greater than 70 percent. The trial included patients who had suffered a stroke or a ministroke and those who were asymptomatic.

The death rate in the trial was very low, but risks varied depending on the procedure. Within the first month after the procedure, 4.1 percent of stent patients had suffered a stroke, compared with 2.3 percent of the surgery patients. But surgery patients were at higher risk for heart attack, with 2.3 percent suffering a heart attack in the first 30 days compared with 1.1 percent of stent patients. Strokes had a higher impact on the patient’s quality of life, the study reported.

Younger patients — those under 70 — had better results with stenting, while older patients had better results with surgery, the study found.

Long-term follow-up of patients, which was two and a half years on average but is continuing, found both groups at equal risk of suffering a stroke that should have been prevented by the procedure: 2 percent of those in the stent group compared with 2.4 percent of the surgical patients.

The European trial, which included 1,713 patients randomly assigned to either stent or endarterectomy, found that stent patients were at much higher risk of stroke, death or heart attack in the first 30 days after surgery, with 7.4 percent suffering one of these adverse events, compared with 4 percent of the surgery group.

Among the possible explanations offered for the disparities are that the European study included only symptomatic patients, who may have had more advanced disease, and that the North American trial carefully screened the doctors doing the stenting procedure, including only highly skilled physicians with a lot of experience.

Dr. Walter J. Koroshetz, deputy director of the institute that sponsored the North American trial, said the Crest trial was the first in which the results of stenting and surgery had been found to be equivalent — suggesting that the stent procedure had improved with time.

The most important message is that the overall death rate was extremely low, 0.6 percent, said one of the study’s principal investigators, Dr. Gary S. Roubin, the chairman of cardiovascular medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.

“What this trial has done overwhelmingly,” he said, “is shown that in North America, with the very skilled surgeons and physicians performing stenting, the outcomes were extremely safe.”

Google is in hot water in Europe once again over Street View map photos.

In a letter sent to the search giant this week, the European Union’s privacy watchdog told Google that it should warn towns and cities before it snaps photos for its online Street View maps. The EU also told the company that it should cut the time it keeps the original photos online from a year to six months.

In response, Google said it already posts updates on its Web site about the itinerary of its Street View cameras. The company also addressed privacy concerns, noting that the photos are all of public places and are typically several months to a couple of years old. In addition, the company blurs identifiable images, such as faces and license plates, and will remove a specific image if requested.

Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, responded Thursday to the EU’s request to shorten the time it keeps photos to six months with this statement:

We have done and will continue to engage with the Article 29 Working Party to demonstrate how we protect privacy in Street View and to explain our need to retain the unblurred imagery for a period of one year.The need to retain the unblurred images is legitimate and justified–to ensure the quality and accuracy of our maps, to improve our ability to rectify mistakes in blurring, as well as to use the data we have collected to build better maps products for our users. We have publicly committed to a retention period of 12 months from the date on which images are published on Street View, and this is the period which we will continue to meet globally.

Street View complements Google Maps by displaying photos of everything from famous landmarks to ordinary neighborhoods. Since its launch in the U.S. in 2007, Street View has come under fire in light of privacy concerns. Although it is legal to take pictures of public locations, the EU is alarmed that photographing people in public could infringe on laws governing personal privacy.

This isn’t the first time Street View has caught grief in Europe in particular. In spring 2008, an EU official expressed concerns about the project after Google first began shooting photos in European cities.

Last year, privacy watchdogs in the U.K. formally complained after its introduction there. And Greece voiced objections over Google taking photos of people, especially those in unflattering or potentially compromising situations. As a result, the company was forced to pull back on its Greek snapshots.

Overall, it’s been a rough week for Google in Europe. On Tuesday, the European Commission announced that it was opening an antitrust investigation into the company’s ranking of search results and advertising. Then on Wednesday, three executives from Google-owned YouTube were convicted by an Italian court over a video that showed students bullying a teen with autism.

The Spy

File under: “Extremely Creepy” — BoingBoing reports that a recent case filing in Robbins vs. Lower Merion School District, a Pennsylvania school, is a class action suit on behalf of students with school-issued laptops whose webcams have been used to watch the students and their families at home.

It was discovered that the laptops issued by the high school contained software allowing administrators to covertly activate the on-board webcam. The plaintiff, Blake J. Robbins, was disciplined by the school for “improper behavior in his home.” The evidence of said impropriety was brought forth by the school vice principal, who displayed a photo of Robbins taken by the laptop’s webcam.

TechDirt indicates a recent episode of PBS Frontline that contains video footage of an official at another school using a remote desktop application to spy on students in a similar way. He says almost proudly, “They don’t even realize we’re watching.” In other words, school-sponsored surveillance might not even be uncommon.

You can read the full text of the case filing in the PA case: Robbins vs. Lower Merion School District (PDF). What do you think about schools spying on their students? As in other realms where this issue is becoming more prevalent, is the benefit of giving kids access to laptops worth the price of their privacy?

[img credit: BoingBoing and bionicteaching]