Raising Doctors to Treat Children New York Times There are many reasons for the declining interest in pediatric subspecialties, including longer hours and the burden of medical school debt worsened by the ... |
Documentary Film Review: Countdown to Zero
An explosive and thought-provoking plea to abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us, as President John F. Kennedy once stated.
Warning Issued To UConn Medical School – Hartford Courant
Warning Issued To UConn Medical School Hartford Courant The University of Connecticut's medical school received a "warning of probation" from an accrediting ... |
Should the Hippocratic Oath include a pledge not to plagiarize? – Los Angeles Times
Should the Hippocratic Oath include a pledge not to plagiarize? Los Angeles Times This week, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School addressed a different sort of fraud ... One in 20 applicants for Harvard Medical residencies plagiarized their ...FierceHealthcare |
Thats no Puffin!
Check me out - and the islands moth trap behind! (by Wez Smith)
Gannet up (by Wez Smith)
Gannet on the dock bank (by Wez Smith)
Thursday 22nd July comments: Gannets don’t breed on the Farnes, never have and possibly (I’ll not stick my neck on the line) may never breed on the Farnes. So imagine our surprise when walking around Inner Farne and discovering an adult checking out our moth trap!! The bird, in good health, decided to walk along the dock bank area of the island, nonchalantly walking past the admiring wardens and walking down to the sea and away!
Apart from that, we’ve been closed today as strong winds whipped up the sea from the north but we are due to be open again tomorrow, so no lasting damage.
Latest news:
Puffins still with us, but just a matter of time before they leave!
Guillemots almost completely gone
Arctic and Sandwich Terns – large roosts on Longstone and Inner Farne
Roseate Tern – family parties starting to show throughout the day on Inner Farne – birds moving up from nearby Coquet Island
Sooty Shearwater - first of the year north on 22nd July
Bottle-nosed Dolphins 2 lingering offshore on 20th-21st July
Hummingbird Hawkmoth 1 on a visitor boat and then Inner Farne on 21st July
Wood Sandpiper 2 – singles present Inner Farne and Brownsman on 22nd July
Tracking the National Mood Through Twitter – New York Times (blog)
 New York Times (blog) | Tracking the National Mood Through Twitter New York Times (blog) ... along with researchers from Harvard Medical School, set out to determine how happy or sad Americans are at different times of the day and week. ... |
What’s Racist about Balanced Budgets?
Hey there, Wes Messamore here. In my most recent Op Ed video, I take a look at the NAACP's absurd claim that the Tea Party is racist, examining the issues that really matter to the Tea Party, and showing how they have nothing at all to do with race. This is a video that I can't believe I actually had to make.
Full text here. For more, visit Young Americans for Liberty as well as my libertarian website, The Humble Libertarian.
David Cameron loves America; And his counterpart in the U.S.?
From Cliff Thies:
"As this is my first visit to America as prime minister, let me emphasize that I am unapologetically pro-American. I love this country and what it's done for the world...." -- David Cameron, Prime Minister of Great Britain
We're still waiting on President Barack Obama to say something like this about the United States or about Great Britain or about any of our great allies around the world, whether small or big, new or long-standing.
Rand Paul vs. Jack Conway race solidifying at 49% to 41%
Bad News for Liberal Media
From Eric Dondero:
There's virtually no change in the new numbers for the Kentucky Senate race. Rand Paul is holding a very steady lead with 49%. Democrat Jack Conway is stuck right at 41%.
From Rasmussen:
The latest Rasmussen Reports statewide telephone survey of Likely Voters shows Paul picking up 49% of the vote, while Conway earns support from 41%. Four percent (4%) would prefer another candidate, while six percent (6%) more are not sure.
Support for both Paul has been at 49% for three straight surveys while Conway has held steady at 41% or 42%.
After two full months now of pounding by the liberal media, libertarian Republican Rand Paul is just where he was the day he won the nomination.
Victory for Cedra! She’s on the Ballot
LATE NIGHT BREAKING NEWS!!!
From the Editor: We are running this press release unedited in full. A district judge in Illinois, late yesterday overturned a ruling by the local Democrat-controlled Elections Board keeping Republican Cedra Crenshaw off the ballot.
One Mom Beats the Chicago Machine and is Reinstated on the Ballot
Press Statement from the Office of Cedra Crenshaw
For Immediate Release
“I am just one mom, and today is a victory for all moms, dads, and regular people vs. the Chicago Machine and their political games. I am delighted by the news that I am back on the ballot. Together, we will hold my opponent accountable for his horrific voting record,” said Cedra Crenshaw.
From the inception, Crenshaw had called on Sen. Arthur Wilhelmi to stop his party’s ballot challenge. Instead, Wilhelmi encouraged the specious, technical attack to restrict Crenshaw’s ballot access, as he repeatedly said, “the law needs to be followed.” Today, the court spoke and the Wilhelmi machine lost. Good government and the rule of law won the first battle.
Throughout Wilhelmi’s entire political career, he has been timid in the face of corruption. Wilhelmi could not even stand up to corrupt Gov. Rod Blagojevich. On the question, should the people of Illinois have the right to recall corrupt Gov. Rod Blagojevich- he voted “present”. Even as the Crenshaw challenge became a national news story, Wilhelmi refused to defend the most basic principle in our representative democracy: ballot access. Wilhelmi was again “present” while basic democratic principles were being trashed by the leadership of his party. The people of Illinois are weary of Wilhelmi- politicians.
“My team worked very hard to get on the ballot, collecting 2,100 petition signatures in only 19 days. It is evident that our work ethic needs to go to Springfield and reform Springfield!”, stated Crenshaw.
This is a leadership election and once elected to the state senate Crenshaw will introduce legislation to clarify election law and help make ballot access less complicated for everyone -- even independents and third parties. The people of Illinois need to hold their career politicians to account, and competition at the ballot box means accountability for lawmakers.
If you'd like to make a donation to her campaign cedracrenshaw.com
Kristin Davis to appear on "Libertarian Politics Live" on NYC Muslim Mosque
"Leftist Asshole" interupts her Birthday party
From Eric Dondero:
Fireworks erupted at the Birthday Party of Kristin Davis, Anti-Prohibtion Party candidate for New York Governor, last Saturday night.
Davis interupted her prepared remarks to make a special statement on the Muslim Mosque at Ground Zero controversy.
"If I can ask you to be serious for one minute in a night which is supposed to be a party I want to talk about something I feel very, very strongly about- I do not want a Mosque built near the 9/11 sight. I think it is wrong and would be held up as an important propaganda victory by radical extremist Islamics. The people of New York, the families of those murdered oppose this monument to the attack on this country."
Semi-nude Models and Marijuana leaves
The event took place at the Lounge 49 Grove in Manhattan. About 40 guests were in attendance including celebrities, former escorts, and supporters of her candidacy.
As the blog BlaysianBitch describes:
Partygoers were greeted with semi nude models decorated with Davis’ name as well as marijuana leaves. Campaign workers made rounds asking everyone registered to vote in New York State to sign a petition.
Then a heckler interrupted. Continuing:
The crowd cheered after the madam condemned the proposal until a man in the audience, later identified as Scott Pellegrino, challenged her.
Pellegrino, who came in support Davis asked, “ Are you saying the people who are trying to start the mosque blew up the buildings?” He was met with jeers from the crowd...
Davis responded that building the mosque would “send a message to the terrorists who decimated the city that its ‘okay’ and I don’t want it there.”
Afterwards, Pelligrino said:
“I was extremely upset to hear her crazy, right-wing, racist view on the mosque. She seemed to collectively blame all Muslims, I tried to clarify.”
Reached by Libertarian Republican for a comment, Davis Campaign Consultant Roger Stone, said of Pelligrino, he's a "fucking leftist asshole."
Davis will be a guest on LR's "Libertarian Politics Live" tonight at 8pm cst to discuss the spat at her birthday party and the issue of the Muslim Mosque at Ground Zero.
Cassini Sees Building Snowballs
The shepherding moon Prometheus creating waves and building snowballs in the Saturn F - ring. Click for larger. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI
Check out this latest Cassini release. It’s a really cool picture of Saturn’s F-ring showing the wake channels made as the little moon Prometheus moves around it.
The picture is a bit hard to interpet, so here is a page with movie choices that will help show what is going on, sorry, not great for dial up users, but the description will help along with the main press release below. Now we know why the ring rarely looks the same every time we see it.
Here’s the Cassini press release to better describe what’s going on:
While orbiting Saturn for the last six years, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has kept a close eye on the collisions and disturbances in the gas giant’s rings. They provide the only nearby natural laboratory for scientists to see the processes that must have occurred in our early solar system, as planets and moons coalesced out of disks of debris.
New images from Cassini show icy particles in Saturn’s F ring clumping into giant snowballs as the moon Prometheus makes multiple swings by the ring. The gravitational pull of the moon sloshes ring material around, creating wake channels that trigger the formation of objects as large as 20 kilometers (12 miles) in diameter.
“Scientists have never seen objects actually form before,” said Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team member based at Queen Mary, University of London. “We now have direct evidence of that process and the rowdy dance between the moons and bits of space debris.”
Murray discussed the findings today (July 20, 2010) at the Committee on Space Research meeting in Bremen, Germany, and they are published online by the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 14, 2010. A new animation based on imaging data shows how one of the moons interacts with the F ring and creates dense, sticky areas of ring material.Saturn’s thin, kinky F ring was discovered by NASA’s Pioneer 11 spacecraft in 1979. Prometheus and Pandora, the small “shepherding” moons on either side of the F ring, were discovered a year later by NASA’s Voyager 1. In the years since, the F ring has rarely looked the same twice, and scientists have been watching the impish behavior of the two shepherding moons for clues.
Prometheus, the larger and closer to Saturn of the two moons, appears to be the primary source of the disturbances. At its longest, the potato-shaped moon is 148 kilometers (92 miles) across. It cruises around Saturn at a speed slightly greater than the speed of the much smaller F ring particles, but in an orbit that is just offset. As a result of its faster motion, Prometheus laps the F ring particles and stirs up particles in the same segment once in about every 68 days.
“Some of these objects will get ripped apart the next time Prometheus whips around,” Murray said. “But some escape. Every time they survive an encounter, they can grow and become more and more stable.”
Cassini scientists using the ultraviolet imaging spectrograph previously detected thickened blobs near the F ring by noting when starlight was partially blocked. These objects may be related to the clumps seen by Murray and colleagues.
The newly-found F ring objects appear dense enough to have what scientists call “self-gravity.” That means they can attract more particles to themselves and snowball in size as ring particles bounce around in Prometheus’s wake, Murray said. The objects could be about as dense as Prometheus, though only about one-fourteenth as dense as Earth.
What gives the F ring snowballs a particularly good chance of survival is their special location in the Saturn system. The F ring resides at a balancing point between the tidal force of Saturn trying to break objects apart and self-gravity pulling objects together. One current theory suggests that the F ring may be only a million years old, but gets replenished every few million years by moonlets drifting outward from the main rings. However, the giant snowballs that form and break up probably have lifetimes of only a few months.
The new findings could also help explain the origin of a mysterious object about 5 to 10 kilometers (3 to 6 miles) in diameter that Cassini scientists spotted in 2004 and have provisionally dubbed S/2004 S 6. This object occasionally bumps into the F ring and produces jets of debris.
“The new analysis fills in some blanks in our solar system’s history, giving us clues about how it transformed from floating bits of dust to dense bodies,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “The F ring peels back some of the mystery and continues to surprise us.”
The late Kevin Beurle was made the honorary first author on this paper because of his contributions in developing software and designing observation sequences for this research. He died in 2009.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Here comes Katla? | Cosmic Variance
Being kind of a volcano/earthquake geek, I regularly check in on the recent California earthquake records, the Kilauea activity, and, in the past couple months since the Eyjafjallajokull, the earthquake activity near it that might presage an eruption of Eyja’s big sister, Katla. Historically, eruptions of Eyjafjallajokull are followed by eruptions of Katla, which are an order of magnitude larger. The eruption of Eyjafjallajokull disrupted air travel in Europe for weeks. It’s interesting to consider what a big volcano Katla might do. There is also the fact that Katla erupts every 40-80 years and hasn’t erupted since 1918, making this a potentially bigger buildup to an eruption. Some of the Katla eruptions in the past have gone on for months.
Since I have been watching, the number of earthquakes near Katla has been small, with a few periods of a dozen or so within a 24 hour period. Almost every time I have looked it’s been very quiet, perhaps one or two a day. I was away the previous two weeks, and apparently missed a day with 11 earthquakes on July 10. I checked again today, and I got the map below, with over a dozen earthquakes! Now, clearly, these are all small earthquakes, with magnitude near 1, and there are no reports of steam or ash as yet.
I bet it’s coming, though, fairly soon. The president of Iceland does, too.
The olm: the blind cave salamander that lives to 100 | Not Exactly Rocket Science
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In the caves of Slovenia and Croatia lives an animal that’s a cross between Peter Pan and Gollum. It’s the olm, a blind, cave-dwelling salamander, also called the proteus and the “human fish”, for its pale, pinkish skin. It has spent so long adapting to life in caves that it’s mostly blind, hunting instead with various supersenses including the ability to sense electricity. It never grows up, retaining the red, feathery gills of its larval form even when it becomes sexually mature at sweet sixteen. It stays this way for the rest of its remarkably long life, and it can live past 100.
The olm was once described as a baby dragon on account of its small, snake-like body. It’s fully aquatic, swimming with a serpentine wriggle, while foraging for insects, snails and crabs. It can’t see its prey for as it grows up, its eyes stop developing and are eventually covered by layers of skin. It’s essentially blind although its hidden eyes and even parts of its skin can still detect the presence of light. It also has an array of supersenses, including heightened smell and hearing and possibly even the ability to sense electric and magnetic fields.
The caves of Slovenia and Croatia have provided the olm with safe haven for over 20 million years, but these unchanging habitats are changing quickly. Chemical pollutants leaching into the caves and the attentions of eager black market collectors have seriously hit the olm population, and it is now vulnerable to extinction. Scientists have risen to the challenge by setting up various “cave laboratories” throughout Europe to save and study this iconic species at the same time.
One such laboratory lies in Moulis, France. In 1952, a group of scientists set up several riverbed-like basins in a local cave to mimic the olm’s natural habitat. The animals are protected and regularly fed. Sixty years on, there are more than 400 individuals in the cave, making it the only successful olm breeding programme in the world. And ever since 1958, researchers have been recording births and deaths among the olms on a weekly basis. Thanks to their painstaking census, we now have a unique glimpse into this odd creature and how it lives as long as it does.
Yann Voituron from the University of Lyon has analysed the five decades of data and found that the oldest olms are around 48-58 years old. Still, they show no sign of age-related physical decline. Based on the adults’ survival rates, Voituron calculated that the species lives to an average age of 69 years, supporting reports of captive olms living to 70.
Across different animal groups, the average lifespan can be anywhere from 10-67% of the maximum one. This means that at the very least, the oldest olms should be able to hit a respectable age of around 102 years and it may well live for even longer. Perhaps Voituron’s grandchildren will be able to check up on the same olms that he’s now studying.
Among back-boned animals, the bigger you are, the longer you live (generally speaking – there are exceptions). Whales, elephants and giant tortoises all top the longevity record books, but the humble olm can reach a century while weighing in at a puny 20 grams. The only other amphibian to even approach its lifespan is the giant salamander, which is a thousand times heavier. You can see how unusual the olm is in the graph below in the gallery above, which plots the lifespan of living amphibians against their mass. The olm is the black dot, looming over the clustered throng of white ones.
The deeper mystery here is how the olm achieves such a long life. The standard explanation says that ageing is the result of the very chemical reactions that power our lives. These reactions furnish us with energy but produce highly reactive molecules called free radicals, which damage any DNA or protein that they touch. Over the years, this constant barrage takes a toll on our bodies and ageing is the result; longer lives can therefore be achieved by stopping the onslaught of free radicals, so the story goes.
There are two main ways of doing this, but neither applies to the olm. Reducing your metabolism could do the trick. Since free radicals are the by-products of energy-producing chemical reactions, species that opt for life in the slow lane will produce less of them. As a group, salamanders are hardly go-getters, but the olm’s metabolic rate isn’t any lower than that of its much shorter-lived cousins. An alternative is to cope with the steady flow of free radicals with antioxidants that neutralise them. But again, the olm’s antioxidant abilities aren’t anything to shout about.
Something else must be happening in this bizarre creature and for now, it’s a mystery that goes unsolved. Voituron thinks that this tiny salamander will open some promising doors into the biology of ageing for years to come.
It might have something to do with the predator-free nature of the olm’s caves. Species that can escape from an early death often live longer than their peers, including birds and bats that can take to the air, and tree-dwelling mammals that can hide among the branches. Perhaps the safety of the olm’s home has allowed it to evolve an extreme lifespan without sacrificing its metabolism. Indeed, Darwin himself commented on the safety of the olm’s caves in his famous tome On the Origin of the Species:
“Far from feeling surprise that some of the cave-animals should be very anomalous…as is the case with blind Proteus… I am only surprised that more wrecks of ancient life have not been preserved, owing to the less severe competition to which the scanty inhabitants of these dark abodes will have been exposed.”
Reference: Biology Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0539
More on ageing:
- A life in the trees is a longer one
- Balancing amino acids for a longer life
- Secrets of the supercentenarians: Life begins at 100
- Rapamycin – the Easter Island drug that extends lifespan of old mice
If the citation link isn’t working, read why here
NCBI ROFL: First-person shooter games as a way of connecting to people: “brothers in blood”. | Discoblog
“This work seeks to understand young adults’ motives for online gaming and extends previous research concerning social interaction in virtual contexts. The focus of the study is on Counter-Strike and World of Warcraft. Drawing on Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, an analysis of young gamers’ motivation for gaming is carried out. The empirical data was generated employing a mix of qualitative methods such as researcher introspection, observation, and interviews with young adults in two different online gaming centers in Stockholm during 2006 and 2007. The results show that online gaming is foremost motivated by social reasons providing the gamers with a possibility of cooperation and communication. Some of the gamers in the study were motivated by escapism. Online gaming also provides gamers with an experience in which “flow” can be obtained and serves as a “hallucination of the real,” making it possible to do things and try out behaviors that would be impossible to do or try in real life. The gamers felt that online gaming gave them more experiences than real life could provide. For research purposes, this work provides a better understanding of the motivational aspects for gamers.”
Photo: flickr/Pål Berge
Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: The ideal elf: identity exploration in World of Warcraft.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Gaming at work positively correlated with multitasking.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Are National Guardsmen the positive or negative control?
WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!
Knowledge is not value-free | Gene Expression
This isn’t The New Yorker, and I’m not writing twenty page essays which flesh out all the nooks and crannies of my thought. When I posted “Linguistic diversity = poverty” I did mean to provoke, make people challenge their presuppositions, and think about what they’re saying when they say something.
I think knowledge of many languages is awesome. I am weak at language acquisition myself, but, as someone with an interest in Bronze Age Near Eastern history I’m obviously invested in people having some comprehension of Sumerian and Akkadian (not to mention Hittite or ancient Egyptian). And I’m not someone who has no interest in the details of ethnographic diversity. On the contrary I’m fascinated by ethnic diversity. Like many people I enjoy reading monographs and articles on obscure groups such as Yazidis (well before our national interest in Iraq) and the Saivite Chams of Vietnam. Oh, wait, I misspoke. I actually don’t know many people who have my level of interest in obscure peoples and tribes and the breadth of human diversity. If you’re the type of person who reads monographs on Yazidis not because it pertains to your scholarly specialty, but because you’re interested in a wide range of facts and topics, and would like to have discussions with someone of similar disposition (me), contact me with your location and if I swing through town we can have coffee or something. I’m interested in meeting like minds who I can explore topics with (and here I’m not talking about someone who is a Hakka and so knows a lot about the history of the Hakka; I’m not Hakka and I know something about the Hakka and I’m not an Oirat I know something about the Oirat, and so forth). All things equal the preservation of linguistic diversity is all for the good, and not only does it enrich the lives of humanity as a whole, it enriches my life in particular because of my intellectual proclivities. But all things are not equal.
First, let me digress and admit that I do not adhere to a plain utilitarianism which does not value the cultural accretions and symbolic residues of history. For a concrete example, consider the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan in 2001 by the Taliban. On a concrete material level this was simply the rearrangement of molecular aggregations. We even have the visual sensory representation of the Buddhas before their destruction in the form of photographs. Why the outrage? Naturally Buddhists were outraged because the images of the Buddha had a sacred valence for them. But the world in general was outraged, Buddhist and non-Buddhist. The local Shia Muslims who live in the region, the Hazaras, were aghast at the cultural destruction, as they considered the Buddhas to be part of their heritage. At the time the Hazaras were being subjected to genocidal persecution from the Taliban, who considered them racially alien due to their Mongolian heritage and also heretics because of their Shia faith, so they were in no position to interpose themselves between the Taliban and the Buddhas.
As for the Taliban their concept of the Buddhas of Bamyan is that they were plain stone. Additionally, the Taliban perceived that the Buddhas were blasphemous because they were idolatry, drawing upon a long line of iconoclasm which goes back to the legendary Abraham. Unlike the atheist the Taliban may have perceived in the stone something more than material, rather, the stone may have been an expression of demonic or devilish forces in the world. Even if it lacked malevolent spirit forces, if they were objects of worship by human beings then that naturally violated their conception of the proper order of things.
But there’s a more nuanced context to the destruction of the Buddhas: Afghanistan was suffering through a famine during that period. Though the proximate cause for their destruction seems to have been the influence of the Arabs who were a power in Afghanistan at the time, Arabs who had no cultural affinity for Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic heritage, I have read that one aggravating issue may have been that the leadership of the Taliban was offended that the world seemed more focused on the potential destruction of statues than on the suffering of flesh & blood people. You can extrapolate this sort of objection pretty easily; at the same time that the Buddhas of Bamyan were under threat, tens of thousands were dying weekly in the Congo.
Here is where I must admit that my actions suggest that I am no simple utilitarian, who prioritizes the suffering of flesh and blood above stone and symbol. At the time in 2001 I specifically remember being very concerned about the destruction of the Buddhas, though I did not imbue them with spiritual value. I do not imbue the pyramids of Giza with spiritual value in a deep metaphysical sense, but I would be concerned about their destruction. I am not the only one. How many Egyptians would have to die in local violence to obtain the same world-wide media coverage as a terrorist detonation of a series of devices which destroyed the pyramids? I estimate on the order of millions (and even here, I am not so sure, as the genocide of millions in Africa receives far less coverage than I believe that a destruction of the pyramids would entail).
Human life and suffering are balanced against the aesthetic of life itself, which is more than bread and water. How many millions could have been fed with the funds which went to the Apollo mission? And yet what dollar value could we put on the photo of the pale blue dot? What dollar value on the reality that a human being has stepped foot on another planet? These are difficult questions in some ways because assessments of value and worth need to get the root of one’s implicit calculations. I know many people from the biological sciences who have little use for space exploration. And yet I know many people of marginal academic inclination who perceive much of biological research to be esoteric and without direct utility.
And it is here that biologists can respond that the domain of knowledge leads directly to discoveries in medicine and technology which will enable greater human happiness and well being, no matter what one thinks of the millionth beetle cataloged. On the margin some of these justifications for research based on plausible utility are as ludicrous as the justifications for a manned space mission. But the attempt must be made. Whether the quest for knowledge is worthy or not is not evaluated by some objective abstract criteria; even if researchers sit on granting committees the funds must ultimately come from elsewhere.
Which brings me back to the extinction of languages. The Lousy Linguist is skeptical of my contention that very high linguistic diversity is not conducive to economic growth or social amity. I outlined the theoretical reasons previously. If you have a casual knowledge of history or geography you know that languages are fault-lines around which intergroup conflict emerges. But more concretely I’ll dig into the literature or do a statistical analysis. I’ll have to correct for the fact that Africa and South Asia are among the most linguistically diverse regions in the world, and they kind of really suck on Human Development Indices. And I do have to add that the arrow of causality here is complex; not only do I believe linguistic homogeneity fosters integration and economies of scale, but I believe political and economic development foster linguistic homogeneity. So it might be what economists might term a “virtuous circle.”
A more on point response came from John Hawks:
I’m sympathetic to recognizing the real loss that accompanies the disappearance of a language from the world of speakers. The “unique oral history” and “lost in translation” ideas are true as far as they go — the value of folk art and oral history is that they enable social relationships.
But most communities of a few hundred speakers don’t have a Beowulf. Unique perspectives and unique history, to be sure — just as every Rembrandt is unique. But every Rembrandt is not the Night Watch. Most unique perspectives are about the speaker’s life. At some point we can’t learn the stories of all our ancestors anyway, because there are simply too many of them. Obviously I think we should enable people to learn about their history, yet we can’t keep communities pinned like butterflies in a cabinet of curiosities.
Human language communities in prehistory had a few hundred to a few thousand speakers. Those communities shared the same basic social lives and needs. Ninety-five percent or more of all those languages were lost — and those remaining have mostly come from a handful of languages less than 10,000 years ago.
I read in the Rijksmuseum that art historians figure more than 95% of the work of artists from the Dutch golden age had been lost or destroyed over the last 300 years.
John says it with more sensitivity and sympathy for the issue than I did, but I agree 99% with what he is saying here. The only point I might quibble over is that perhaps all groups do have their Beowulf. And yet it doesn’t matter. If the speakers of the language decided to shift to another language, then they are making the choice which increases their own flourishing. Speakers of a few hundred languages are not always in the circumstances of Native or Aboriginal peoples in North America, where they can gain sympathetic hearing for preservation of their folkways from the government and majority population. They need to make the best decision for themselves at the time, and often assimilation is the best of all choices, because the sample space of choices is limited. It is correct that bilingualism, or resistance to linguistic assimilation can persist. Hasidic Jews in New York City have communities where English is a second language and adults, of the third generation born and raised in the United States, have strong accents. But this community’s insulation comes at a cost, their relative poverty.
But for most communities the level of poverty of Hasidic Jews, or the material deprivation of the Amish, is wealth indeed. Many groups in Africa, South Asia and Australasia have not moved far up on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Many of these groups live in grotesque poverty, experience radical marginalization, and some of them fear for their individual survival, not just tribal or ethnic coherency. If those in the developed world do value the preservation of these groups and the richness which they add to the world by their very existence, then a concrete program has to be offered. Perhaps a massive direct wealth transfer to targeted ethnic groups which are being assimilated (in India and Southeast Asia conversion to Christianity has been the most efficacious manner in which to preserve ethnic and linguistic identity, so perhaps one should donate to evangelical missionary groups). Or, the selective sponsored immigration of whole tribes and ethnic groups to the West, with an agreement that these groups have a sort of spatial sovereignty similar to Native Americans. In this way they wouldn’t be subject to the same dynamics as they were in their nation of origination.
I don’t care about linguistic diversity enough to support either of these programs. But that’s an expression of my values. And, I think it’s an expression of the values of most humans (granted, most humans do not value knowledge, but they do pay taxes which fund social engineering projects so their opinion counts). For those who do value linguistic diversity, to be taken seriously you need to present more than what it offers you and your own interests when you bear none of the costs of marginalization. Aggregate intangible utility may be maximized by this diversity, but it is simply unjust for that aggregate utility to be gained at the expense of the ones adding the diversity at the cost of their exclusion from the nation-states in which they’ve found themselves.
Addendum: Spencer Wells has noted that there is somewhat the same issue with genotypic diversity, as small groups are absorbed into larger groups. By analogy, one might offer up a program whereby tribal members are encouraged to marry only their own ingroup so as to preserve genetic lineages which may be of intellectual interest, and add diversity to the world. This is naturally the sort of argument many racialists present, though with a slightly different spin.
Image Credits: Wikimedia, CNN, Glenn Fleishman
China’s Latest Environmental Ills: Oil Spills and Copper Mines | 80beats
Two Chinese bodies of water made pollution headlines this week: the Yellow Sea is home to an oil spill, and the Ting River to waste water from a copper processing plant.
The Ting River
The waste water came from the Zijinshan mine in China’s Fujian province. Though earlier this month mine operators blamed weather for waste water entering the river, this week they admitted to and contaminating the river with–as The Sydney Morning Herald puts it–”four Olympic-size swimming pools” worth of waste water containing acidic copper.
Zijin’s board of directors expresses “its deep regret regarding the incident and the improper handling of information disclosure by the company, for causing substantial losses to the fish farmers located at the reservoir downstream of the mine and having a harmful impact on society,” the company said yesterday. [Bloomberg Businessweek]
Chinese police have detained two of the mine’s operators. Meanwhile, acidic copper has reportedly killed 4 million pounds of fish and threatens drinking water.
Reports from China’s official Xinhua News Agency suggest that Zijin is being required only to fix the problem and compensate locals with an offer of three yuan for every kilogram of dead fish. That makes the potential payout about 6 million yuan, [about $900,000]. [Sidney Morning Herald]
The Yellow Sea
Two oil pipelines have exploded in the port city of Dalian and have covered what the AP reports to be around 70 square miles of ocean. That’s not much compared to the 2,700 square miles covered by the Gulf of Mexico spill, but the spill is still a relatively big one in China’s recent history and certainly dramatic given its fiery start.
Images of 100-foot-high (30-meter-high) flames shooting up near part of China’s strategic oil reserves drew the immediate attention of President Hu Jintao and other top leaders. Now the challenge is cleaning up the greasy brown plume floating off the shores of Dalian, once named China’s most livable city. [AP]
Chinese reporters say that the no more oil is entering the sea and that officials have deployed 800 fishing boats to join 24 ships already on scene to stop the oil’s spread before it reaches international waters.
Economic activity in the north-eastern port has been seriously disrupted. Six “very large crude carriers”, with about 12m barrels of oil, were expected to be diverted, possibly to South Korea or other terminals in China with the capacity for such large vessels. Ships carrying imported corn have also been forced to dock elsewhere. Thousands of firefighters have doused the flames and port engineers have staunched the leak, but the clean-up mission will take at least four more days, according to the domestic media. [The Guardian]
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Image: Wikimedia / Dalian / ASDFGHJ
Underappreciated Star-Shaped Brain Cells May Help Us Breathe | 80beats
Astrocytes, it was long believed, were little more than the scaffolding of the brain—they provided a support structure for the stars of the show, the neurons. But a study out in this week’s Science is the latest to suggest that this is far from the whole story. The study says that astrocytes (whose “astro” name come from their star-shape) may in fact play a critical role in the process of breathing.
Astrocytes are a type of glial cell — the most common type of brain cell, and far more abundant than neurons. “Historically, glial cells were only thought to ‘glue’ the brain together, providing neuronal structure and nutritional support but not more,” explains physiologist Alexander Gourine of University College London, one of the authors of the study. “This old dogma is now changing dramatically; a few recent studies have shown that astrocytes can actually help neurons to process information” [Nature].
Gourine’s team peeked into the brains of rats to figure out the connection between astrocytes and breathing. In humans and in rodents, the level of carbon dioxide in the blood rises after physical activity. The brain has to adjust to this, setting the lungs breathing harder to expel that CO2.
Astrocytes, the scientists found, are key players in this process. When the cells sensed a decrease in blood pH (because the carbon dioxide made it more acidic), they immediately released calcium ions, which the researchers could detect because they’d given the rats a gene encoding a protein that shone fluorescent in the presence of calcium. The astrocytes also released the chemical messenger ATP. That ATP appeared to trigger the nearby neurons responsible for respiration, kicking them into gear.
The astrocytes are no one-trick ponies, though. They could be important not only for breathing, but also for brain circulation, memory formation, and other activities.
The next step is to find a way to inhibit astrocytes in vivo, said Gourine. Then, researchers will be able to test the numerous hypotheses for the functions of astrocytes in the brain. It is likely astrocytes in various regions of the brain serve different functions, said [Cendra] Agulhon, just as many different types of neurons do many different jobs. “Depending on where they are and what kind of neurons they are surrounded by, they will function differently,” she added. “We are just starting to understand how important astrocytes can be” [The Scientist].
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Image: Wikimedia Commons
ScienceBlogs has good blogs | Gene Expression
I don’t have real value to add on the ScienceBlogs controversy. The only thing I want to mention is that there are some nascent superstar weblogs on that network which aren’t big names, yet, but perhaps will be. You can miss them coming in via the front page because they don’t crank out 10-15 posts per day, but they make them count when they do post. Two new weblogs which have caught my attention are Thoughtful Animals and Observations of a Nerd. There are others too if you poke around (your disciplinary focus may differ).
At this point I think for some people ScienceBlogs is not a the optimal venue. Obviously I was one of those people, as I left in late March. But for other people the reach of a prominent network still has utility. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. So by all means, let’s keep track of the SB Diaspora, but there are also diamonds in the rough who aren’t budging.
Hope for the Needle-Phobic: A Painless Vaccine “Patch” | 80beats
Replacing a traditional needle with a fingernail-sized patch may one day make some immunizations painless and possibly more effective. A study published in Nature earlier this week shows that a patch–a square of “microneedles” that are too short to register a typical shot’s sting and that dissolve in the skin–effectively immunized mice against a strain of the flu virus.
The researchers have yet to test the patch on humans, and that next step could take a few years; the move from a successful animal trial to a human trial isn’t a small feat. Still, many see this patch’s promise. As Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and chief of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, says:
“The caveat is, this needs to be extended to humans…. It’s not uncommon for vaccines or vaccine delivery systems to look very promising in experimental animals, then fail in humans. But there is every reason to believe this kind of technology could be applicable to children and adults.” [HealthDay News]
If the patch proves successful in human studies, here are some reasons it might quickly catch on.
Less Packaging
Traditional flu immunization shots deliver vaccines via metal, hypodermic needles. The leftover? A contaminated needle that goes straight to the biohazard bin. Researchers have designed this patch’s microneedles to disappear after application. They are made from a “bicompatible polymer” that holds the vaccine directly. After immunization, the needles dissolve into the skin itself as they deliver the vaccine, leaving only a watersoluble backing. Explains study coauthor Richard Compans:
“With respect to [the previous] vaccine delivery, we worked with solid metal needles…. The current technology is different because the vaccine is contained in the needle itself, and there is no needle left after the process.” [Tech News Daily]
Less Pain
As their name implies, microneedles are short–shorter than .03 inches each. That’s too short to trigger the pain associated with a traditional shot. The patch has a grid of 100 of the tiny needles as opposed to one large metal one.
Each microneedle is 650 microns long, about as tall as 10 human hairs stacked on top of each other…. They are arrayed in a grid-like pattern on a patch that’s easy to stick on your arm. [Los Angeles Times]
More Protection
There may be other benefits from a shot not going as deep. The study tested three groups of mice: one given no flu vaccine, one given a flu vaccine in the traditional way, and one given the vaccine via the microneedle patch.
Infecting the mice with the flu virus thirty days after immunization, both the mice vaccinated traditionally and with the patch successfully fought off the virus. To test how long the vaccine worked, the researchers then vaccinated a different three sets of mice. Three months later, the mice vaccinated with the patch actually performed better than the needle-immunized mice–more easily clearing the virus from their lungs.
Researchers suspect that the reason may be skin cells’ different immune reaction to virus attackers, which they encounter more often than muscle cells do (where traditional flu shots deliver the vaccine).
Skin, it seems, may trigger the immune system better than muscle, according to Richard Compans, professor of microbiology and immunology at Emory University School of Medicine: “The skin is a particularly attractive site for immunization because it contains an abundance of the types of cells that are important in generating immune responses to vaccines.” [CNET]
Less Postage?
Although traditional delivery systems for standard vaccines are working in many places, the researchers think that a patch vaccine might allow a more rapid and effective response to unexpected outbreaks. Instead of asking people at risk to go to a central location like a flu clinic, doctors could mail them a do-it-yourself patch.
[Coauthor Mark R.] Prausnitz says it’d be much easier if people could either vaccinate themselves or have someone less skilled vaccinate them instead of requiring a doctor or nurse. If the patches are one day approved by the FDA, Prausnitz envisions people ordering patches through the mail or at their local pharmacies.”The technology is ready to take the next step into humans,” says Prausnitz. “Our main barrier is getting funding.” [NPR]
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Image: flickr / El Alvi
