TGIF

i sound like a broken record these days but i have too much on my plate right now....but i had to say hey and thank you for all of your comments and emails from wed's post.  they totally put a smile on my face and gave me that warm and fuzzy feeling inside to know that y'all are in the same boat as me!!   TGIF....i'm off to move piles around so painters can get into the kids' rooms.  have a wonderful weekend.

*images courtesy of love, thronton designers, make under my life, camille soulayrol, kerris dale design

Eating Wheat Gluten Causes Symptoms in Some People Who Don't Have Celiac Disease

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a condition characterized by the frequent occurrence of abdominal pain, diarrhea, constipation, bloating and/or gas. If that sounds like an extremely broad description, that's because it is. The word "syndrome" is medicalese for "we don't know what causes it." IBS seems to be a catch-all for various persistent digestive problems that aren't defined as separate disorders, and it has a very high prevalence: as high as 14 percent of people in the US, although the estimates depend on what diagnostic criteria are used (1). It can be brought on or exacerbated by several different types of stressors, including emotional stress and infection.

Maelán Fontes Villalba at Lund University recently forwarded me an interesting new paper in the American Journal of Gastroenterology (2). Dr. Jessica R. Biesiekierski and colleagues recruited 34 IBS patients who did not have celiac disease, but who felt they had benefited from going gluten-free in their daily lives*. All patients continued on their pre-study gluten-free diet, however, all participants were provided with two slices of gluten-free bread and one gluten-free muffin per day. The investigators added isolated wheat gluten to the bread and muffins of half the study group.

During the six weeks of the intervention, patients receiving the gluten-free food fared considerably better on nearly every symptom of IBS measured. The most striking difference was in tiredness-- the gluten-free group was much less tired on average than the gluten group. Interestingly, they found that a negative reaction to gluten was not necessarily accompanied by the presence of anti-gluten antibodies in the blood, which is a test often used to diagnose gluten sensitivity.

Here's what I take away from this study:

1. Wheat gluten can cause symptoms in susceptible people who do not have celiac disease.
2. A lack of circulating antibodies against gluten does not necessarily indicate a lack of gluten sensitivity.
   
3. People with mysterious digestive problems may want to try avoiding gluten for a while to see if it improves their symptoms**.
4. People with mysterious fatigue may want to try avoiding gluten.
   

A previous study in 1981 showed that feeding volunteers a large dose of gluten every day for 6 weeks caused adverse gastrointestinal effects, including inflammatory changes, in relatives of people with celiac disease, who did not themselves have celiac (3). Together, these two studies are the most solid evidence that gluten can be damaging in people without celiac disease, a topic that has not received much interest in the biomedical research community.

I don't expect everyone to benefit from avoiding gluten. But for those who are really sensitive, it can make a huge difference. Digestive, autoimmune and neurological disorders associate most strongly with gluten sensitivity. Avoiding gluten can be a fruitful thing to try in cases of mysterious chronic illness. We're two-thirds of the way through Gluten-Free January. I've been fastidiously avoiding gluten, as annoying as it's been at times***. Has anyone noticed a change in their health?


* 56% of volunteers carried HLA-DQ2 or DQ8 alleles, which is slightly higher than the general population. Nearly all people with celiac disease carry one of these two alleles. 28% of volunteers were positive for anti-gliadin IgA, which is higher than the general population.

** Some people feel they are reacting to the fructans in wheat, rather than the gluten. If a modest amount of onion causes the same symptoms as eating wheat, then that may be true. If not, then it's probably the gluten.

*** I'm usually about 95% gluten-free anyway. But when I want a real beer, I want one brewed with barley. And when I want Thai food or sushi, I don't worry about a little bit of wheat in the soy sauce. If a friend makes me food with gluten in it, I'll eat it and enjoy it. This month I'm 100% gluten-free though, because I can't in good conscience encourage my blog readership to try it if I'm not doing it myself. At the end of the month, I'm going to do a blinded gluten challenge (with a gluten-free control challenge) to see once and for all if I react to it. Stay tuned for more on that.

What was wiped? Part 1

Hello again Reader,

I've actually put an appointment on my calendar now to remind me to blog, let's see if reminders will ensure regular posts.This is a short beginning for part 1 to insure I meet these weekly updates.

Many times when you are working an investigation the question of spoliation will come up. In the most obvious scenarios of spoliation a suspect will use a tool that will to some extent wipe out his tracks. These tools come in three flavors:

1. Whole disk wipers: It's fairly obvious when this happens, though some suspects may tell you it's just encrypted. If they say that ask them what program they used to encrypt it and to please hand over the key.

2. File/directory wipers: If someone were to run a program such as bcwipe or eraser to delete files or directories the first thing these programs do is rename the file to prevent you from recovering what file was deleted. So if your suspect wiped 1,000 files you would find 1,000 randomly named files all seeming modified within seconds of each other on the disk from a different date. After renaming the file, it sets the time and after overwriting the contents of the file it sets the size to 0.

Here is a ftk imager view of a directory named temp with some random new files made:

Here is the same directory in ftk imager a second after wiping:

"How long these file stick around seems to vary by the file system. In older cases I found them months after the fact but on my Windows 7 system that I'm running ftk imager doing a view of my local physical drive some random files disappear in a couple seconds, which accounts for why we don't see 7 random files. " *This isn't exactly true, please see the update below* This wipe was done using bcwipe, the behavior of what wipers leave behind and how it runs on each OS and file system sounds like a good post for me to work on.

In part 2 we will go into system cleaners like CCleaner and some research into what they leave behind.

Update:

Looks like my disappearing wiped files are not a product of a different version of windows or the file system, it was the windows write cache. I made a couple of new files before and just wiped them immediately after, looks like they didn't actually get committed to the disk before I wiped them and thus would not be around afterwords.

To test this I downloaded a random set of source code from sourceforge, extracted it to a directory and then rebooted to make sure everything was flushed.

After rebooting I wiped seven files from a directory in the source tree and got seven wiped entries as expected:

As you can see, seven randomly named files all again with the date of 4/30/1986 and the time 11:43am. I guess this goes back to my last post, if something seems wrong double check your assumptions.

When I wipe the entire directory tree it then appears as an orphaned directory with all of the directory names and file names changed again to random letters with the same date as we saw before, except for the directories which remain the correct date (these times are in UTC so the date appears as 1/20/11):

i try

i try and i totally fail every time....
i want to be that mom that has her sh*t together and i try hard...but i am not.  i need to face the facts.  i am the mom that is running around w/ her head cut off.  it's a constant battle that i face every AM.  i just can't get organized.  it doesn't matter if i wake up 3 hrs before i have to get taylor to school, i am always racing around.  i am that mom, who doesn't read the calendar until i am emptying out her book bag on the way to school and notice that today is "wear white day" and tay has on bright pink....i'm the mom that sends her daughter to school in a dress, tights, and ankle boots on "gym day"....i'm the mom that the teacher has to call in the evening to go over the "dress code" and "the calendar/ schedule".....so please, all of you 'together' moms, tell me how you do it.  i need help :)

Your Daily Knuth

I keep meaning to write a script that greets me with a Knuth quote when I log in every morning, but I haven't had time.

Today while looking up something else I came across these two gems, though, and thought I'd share:

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" 

and

"If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy."

I sometimes think Knuth is like the Mae West of Computer Science. Or maybe Confucius. Which I guess makes Stallman... Sun Tzu? :-)