Woman Jailed for Faking Cancer to Get Implants

(CBS/AP) PHOENIX - A Phoenix woman who pretended to have cancer in order to raise money for breast implants has been sentenced to a year in jail and three years of probation.

Court spokesman Kelly Vail says 27-year-old Jami Lynn Toler was sentenced Wednesday. She pleaded guilty in August to a theft charge in a plea agreement. Prosecutors had called this case "appalling," CBS affiliate KPHO in Phoenix reports.

Authorities say Toler helped organize fundraisers and collected more than $8,000 beginning last September. Medical records obtained by Mesa police show she didn't have cancer and paid a plastic surgeon with the cash.

Court Commissioner Brian Kaiser also ordered Toler to pay restitution.

Police reports show Toler told her former boss she needed a double mastectomy and breast reconstruction but was uninsured. She told the same story to her mother and grandparents.

Authorities said Toler helped organize fundraisers and collected more than $8,000 beginning in 2011, KPHO reports.

Medical records obtained by Mesa police show she didn't have cancer and paid a plastic surgeon for breast augmentation with $5,000 cash, KPHO reports.

Retiring Boss Gives Employees $1,000 for Each Year They’ve Worked for Him

Some folks get a gold watch on the day they retire. Others get a handshake and a nudge out the door. Very few people actually give more than they get on the last working day of their lives — and almost nobody has given as much as Howard Cooper.

When Cooper, 83, retired from the auto dealership he owned in Ann Arbor, Mich., he had a special present for each of his 89 employees: a check for $1,000 for every year each employee worked for him.

So, for a worker like Bob Jenkins, a mechanic who had worked for Cooper’s dealership for 26 years, these checks were life changing. “I was shocked,” Jenkins said. “You just don’t expect something like that.”

Cooper told the site that he wanted to thank his employees for giving him the success he has had and the checks were simply a way he could do that. Cooper had already turned down more cash from other offers, but went with Germain after negotiating a guarantee that his entire staff could stay on after he left.

Once Cooper, who started the dealership in 1965, began thinking about his retirement, he brought 46-year employee and controller Sandy Reagan in on the surprise handouts and had her print the checks a few days in advance.

The two kept the secret until the grand reveal that left employees in total shock and earned Cooper a standing ovation.

“The lady behind me had tears running down her face,” Reagan said.

[Via Time]

Odd Job: Standing in Line for Apple's iPhone 5

SAN FRANCISCO — Charlie Hufnagel, 24, has done a lot of odd jobs over the last couple of months.

He serenaded someone’s sick boyfriend (Prince’s "Let’s Go Crazy"), pulled an all-nighter making 12 alligator piñatas out of papier-mâché, and fetches limited releases of 1980s punk-rock records at secret Fat Wreck Chords parties.

But his latest gig is the one getting him the most attention: Camping out for five days in front of the Apple store in San Francisco's Union Square.

Someone hired him on TaskRabbit to be first in line for the new iPhone 5 that goes on sale Friday morning. He’s getting paid $1,500, which seems like a decent wage for a week’s work, if not for the working conditions: drunk people singing Weezer songs outside his tent at night, the bone-jarring sounds of street construction that kick into high gear at 7 a.m. and, the worst yet, his iPhone 4 being stolen while he was making a run to the 24-hour Denny’s.

"I don't think I would do it for less," said Hufnagel, an unemployed digital-media specialist who lives in San Francisco’s Mission district. "I have some dignity."

For now he's the only one in line. His companions are the endless stream of shoppers heading in and out of the Apple store and the construction workers digging up the streets right next to his green REI tent.

He also gets regular visits from TaskRabbit, which has given him a small budget for food deliveries through Deliver Now (mostly burritos from Chipotle) in exchange for wearing company swag and putting up signs promoting that you can hire a TaskRabbit to stand in line for your iPhone 5 on Friday morning.

Hufnagel came prepared. Inside his cramped, disheveled tent, he has a portable lantern, a stack of books (and a Kindle but he doesn’t feel right using it outside the Apple store) and ample food supplies: ramen (that he boils on a Sterno grill), apple sauce, canned pineapple, a big sack of granola from Rainbow Grocery, a box of cool mint chocolate Clif Bars (with caffeine), one mason jar filled with water and another filled with tea and nutritional yeast flakes to sprinkle on his food for added protein.

He charges his laptop and phone (before it was stolen) in the Apple store, and also uses the bathroom there, or hikes over to one of two nearby Starbucks or the aforementioned Denny’s.

During the day, he sets up a small chair and table in front of the Apple store that he mans with his MacBook. At night, he puts on earplugs and leans the chair and table against the inside of the tent so he'll wake up if someone unzips it.

Passersby gawk and stop to snap pictures of him and his tent, making him feel a bit like a zoo animal, he said. Every person asks the same question: How long have you been here? (That may be because he has a sign that encourages people to ask him).

"The hours are weird but I get to meet a lot of interesting people and I am getting paid to do it," Hufnagel said.

Hufnagel won't be alone for long. Soon he will be joined by hordes of iPhone 5 groupies — and all the other working stiffs hired to stand in line through services such as TaskRabbit and Exec.

Hufnagel says he had been thinking about buying and then selling the iPhone 5 to make some extra cash. Now he’s thinking about keeping it to replace his iPhone 4 if the cops don’t track it down. After all, the screen was already cracked.

"It seems pretty snazzy, and if it turns out I need a new phone, I would definitely upgrade," he said. "If by some miracle I get my iPhone 4 back, I may stick with that for now."

[Via LA Times]

Fewer Americans Commuting Solo

The dismal economy and skyrocketing gas prices may have accomplished what years of advocacy failed to: getting more people to stop driving solo. The share of workers driving to work alone dropped slightly from 2010 to 2011 while commutes on public transportation rose nationally and in some of the largest metropolitan areas.

Group commuting — riding buses, trains, subways or sharing cars or vans — rose from 2005 to 2011 in more than a third of 342 metropolitan areas for which data exist.

About two-thirds saw jumps in residents using public transit. The share driving to work alone dropped in about two-thirds or more than 200 metros.

New York, by far the national leader in mass transit use, saw a two-percentage-point jump. Now, almost a third of residents in the New York metro area use public transportation.

Ride-sharing "a lot of times is a response to higher gas prices," says Eddie Caine, who heads the van pool program for Valley Metro, Phoenix's regional transportation agency. "But once people try van pooling, they tend to enjoy not having the stress, saving money and they make friends."

The national average price for regular gasoline is $3.85 a gallon, according to AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. That's up from $3.72 a month ago and $3.59 a year ago. The record is $4.11 set in July 2008.

The Phoenix agency just added bike racks to its vans for people who don't want to drive to their pick-up points.

This week, the American Public Transportation Association reported the sixth consecutive quarterly increase in ridership -- up 1.6% in the second quarter. Rail showed the biggest jump. Several public transit systems in small and large cities (Ann Arbor, Mich., Boston, Oklahoma City) reported record ridership.

Almost 60% of trips on mass transit are work commutes. The surge in group commutes is showing up in some areas where van pools shuttle employees from train stations or suburbs to job centers. Overall, the percentage of workers carpooling held steady at 9.7% but is still slightly below pre-recession levels -- a likely effect of high unemployment in sectors such as construction and manufacturing.

[Via Usa Today]

Women Spend 17 Years of Their Lives Dieting

Women on an average spend a staggering 17 years of their lives dieting while 90 per cent of them have been on some form of diet in their lifetime, according to a new UK survey.

Researchers found that the average British woman diets twice a year, losing 4.9 kilogrammes each time.

Life expectancy data in the UK showed that the average woman lives until 82 and weighs on average 69 kilogrammes, so if she begins dieting at the age of 18, she will lose her body weight 9.1 times and if she spends seven weeks on a diet twice a year she will spend 17.2 years dieting.

"Deciding to lose weight can be an easy one to make when we know we have a special occasion coming up or aren't feeling confident in our appearance, however as we can see actually embarking on a diet and losing the extra pounds is more difficult and takes real commitment," Kevin Dorren, Founder & Head Chef of Diet Chef, who carried out the research, said.

Not fitting into any of their clothes was the top reason for 52 per cent women to lose weight.

The same percentage of women said that developing a muffin top was the first sign that they had piled on the pounds.

Ultimately it is a general love of food (35 per cent) and lack of willpower (33 per cent) that keeps would-be dieters from achieving their dream body with over a third saying they were their main reasons for struggling with managing their weight loss.

Although a fifth of women said they found it too expensive to buy healthy food.

One in three women splurged on comfort purchases when feeling down about their diet, with shoes being the top thing to buy (37 per cent).

[Via The Indian Express]

7,000 Millionaires Paid No Income Taxes in 2011

The White House's new campaign banner/economic principle is the so-called "Buffett Rule," which holds that no millionaire should pay a lower effective tax rate than a typical middle class family. Sound sensible, yes? Of course it does. The tax code is progressive and purposefully so. Marginal income tax rates increase with income. The more you make, the greater share of income you pay. Disagreeing with this general principle puts you to the right of a typical Republican.  

But the Buffett Rule wasn't meant to hold up to strict constructionism. To understand why, consider the 76 million people who don't legally owe individual income taxes in 2011. The vast majority of this group was poor. They didn't owe individual income taxes because they didn't owe a lot of money to start, and various exemptions, like the earned income tax credit, wiped out the rest.

But among families making more than $100,000, there were also half a million tax units -- enough to replace the population of Tucson, Arizona -- that also paid no income tax. Even more surprising, 7,000 millionaires also paid no individual income tax.

Let's focus on these 7,000 tax payers. They help to show why, even if the Buffett Rule is a sensible principle, it wouldn't be a commonsense law.

There are three buckets of factors that can bring taxable income down from $1 million to zero. One is tax tricks. The IRS should crack down more. Two is relying heavily on investments. The administration can try to level taxes for earned income and investment income. Third is great misfortunes. When investments lose significant income, a house or business is destroyed, or a family member gets sick and incurs high medical costs for the self-insured, all these things chop away at taxable income and eventually bring a millionaire's income taxes to zero.

The fact that 7,000 millionaires didn't pay income tax in 2011 is a Rorschach test for the Buffett Rule. Are you outraged by the figure? Then you probably think the rule should be enshrined into law. But if you see the figure as an artifact of a complicated tax code doing its best to account for a varied and complicated country of 150 million tax units, you might not be so outraged. We can, and we should, raise taxes on millions of more Americans, and we should start with the rich, because they can afford to pay sooner. But it's best to see the Buffett Rule as a political tool designed to drive a wedge between the White House and Republicans who have written off tax increases forever.

[Via The Atlantic]

7 Things Neuroscientists Know But Most People Don't

1. Body image is dynamic and flexible. 
Our brain can be fooled into thinking a rubber arm or a virtual reality hand is actually a part of our body. In one syndrome, people believe one of their limbs does not belong to them. One man thought a cadaver limb had been sewn onto his body as a practical joke by doctors.

2. Perceptual reality is entirely generated by our brain. 
We hear voices and meaning from air pressure waves. We see colors and objects, yet our brain only receives signals about reflected photons. The objects we perceive are a construct of the brain, which is why optical illusions can fool the brain.

3. We see the world in narrow disjoint fragments. 
We think we see the whole world, but we are looking through a narrow visual portal onto a small region of space. You have to move your eyes when you read because most of the page is blurry. We don't see this, because as soon as we become curious about part of the world, our eyes move there to fill in the detail before we see it was missing. While our eyes are in motion, we should see a blank blur, but our brain edits this out.

4. Our behavior is mostly automatic, even though we think we are controlling it. 
The fact that we can operate a vehicle at 60 mph on the highway while lost in thought shows just how much behavior the brain can take care of on its own. Addiction is possible because so much of what we do is already automatic, including directing our goals and desires. In utilization behavior, people might grab and start using a comb presented to them without having any idea why they are doing it. In impulsivity, people act even though they know they shouldn't.

5. Our brain can fool itself in really strange ways. 
In Capgras syndrome, familiar objects seem foreign (the opposite of deja vu). One elderly woman who lived alone befriended a woman who appeared to her whenever she looked in a mirror. She thought this other woman looked nothing like herself, except that they seemed to have similar style and tended to wear identical outfits. Another woman was being followed by a tormenter who appeared to her in mirrors but looked nothing like herself. She was fine otherwise.

6. Neurons are really slow. 
Our thinking feels fast and we are more intelligent than computers, and yet neurons signal only a few times per second and the brain's beta wave cycles at 14-30 times per second. In comparison, computers cycle at 1 billion operations per second, and transistors switch over 10 billion times per second. How can neurons be so slow and yet we are so smart?

7. Consciousness can be subdivided. 
In split-brain patients, each side of the brain is individually conscious but mostly separate from the other. In post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), memories of a traumatic event can become a compartmentalized inaccessible island. In schizophrenia patients hear voices that can seem separate from themselves and which criticize them or issue commands. In hypnosis, post-hypnotic suggestions can direct behavior without the individual's conscious awareness.

[Via Quora]