Thumbprints?

This article is initially funny. As you read it, however, you will become more and more incensed with corporate arrogance and this bank's cavalier attitude towards people:

Bank insisted on thumbprint from armless man

The Americans with Disabilities Act will be 20 years old next year, and Steve Valdez is still wondering when a Bank of America branch near his Tampa, Fla., home is going to hear about it.

The 54-year-old Hillsborough County employee told TODAY’s Lester Holt Monday in New York he is still irked by what happened to him recently when he went into the branch, where his wife has an account, to cash a check made out to her. The teller and branch manager refused to cash the check because he didn’t have an account there and he couldn’t give them a thumbprint to confirm his identity.

The kicker is they wouldn’t accept his reason for not providing the thumbprint: He doesn't have any thumbs, or arms for that matter, because of a birth defect.

Even when he offered two forms of photo identification, the teller wouldn’t budge. He was told company policy required the thumbprint. If he wanted to cash the check, either his wife could come in to cash the check or he could open an account.

... Valdez, who functions with two prosthetic arms, is not the sort to complain about his disability. In his entire life, he said, he’d never found it necessary to speak up about being discriminated against. But this time, the bank went too far, he said.

Read the entire article here.

Deal or No Deal?

From this site:

In one of those inspired bits of research we love so much, a team at Duke University trained a group of rhesus macaques to play a game based on Deal or No Deal.

The researchers gave the macaques a choice of eight white squares to pick up. Underneath each was a colour representing a prize, with green bringing the best reward - a sugary drink. After picking a square, the animals were shown the prizes they had passed up. ...

Brain scans revealed activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a region known to monitor the consequences of actions when the monkeys won a prize. But the same area also lit up when they were shown what they had missed, indicating that they were thinking about what might have been.

"This is the first evidence that monkeys, like people, have 'would-have, could-have, should-have' thoughts," said Ben Hayden, a researcher at the Duke University Medical Center and lead author of the study.

Even the macaques got sucked into that troubling, stressful, "what if" thinking. Wow!