Monthly Archives: June 2017

Late-night host John Oliver took on anti-vaxxers over the weekend and made a passionate case forimmunizations.

Despite their success, small groups are both skeptical and vocal about vaccines, which is nothing new, he said Sunday on Last Week Tonight. But these days their voice has been amplified by the human megaphone that is the president of the United States.

Oliver cut to a video clip showing Donald Trump on the presidential campaign trail, saying that he supportsvaccinations for children, but I want smaller doses over a longer period of time because you take this little beautiful baby and you pump I mean it looks just like it's meant for a horse, not for a child.

That's a point the president has made in the past.

That sounds like a decent compromise because its the middle-ground position, right? Oliver said in the episode. The problem is, its the middle ground between sense and nonsense. Its like saying, It would be crazy to eat that entire bar of soap, so Ill just eat half of it.

But Oliver said it is not only Trumpwho is skeptical.

I kind of get why vaccines can creep people out, Oliver continued. Vaccination can mean getting injected by a needle filled with science juice. Although, pretty much every medical practice sounds terrifying when you break it down like that. An appendectomy means removing one of your organs through stabbery. Antibiotics are poisons used to murder things living in you. And even exercise means forcibly burning up your insides. My point is, the human body is a true carnival of horrors, and frankly, Im embarrassed to have one.

[Anti-vaccine activists spark a states worst measles outbreak in decades]

In February, The Washington Post's Lena Sun reported on how President Trump's embrace of discredited theories linking vaccines to autism has energized the anti-vaccine movement. Once fringe, the movement is becoming more popular, raising doubts about basic childhood health care among politically and geographically diverse groups.

The anti-vaccine movement, which has been around for years, gained momentum in 1998 from a now-discredited study by conspiracy theorist Andrew Wakefield, who claimed there was a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Thestudy was later determined to be fraudulent and retracted by the medical journal that published it. As a result, Wakefield losthis medical license. But people have continued to debate.

Some parents favor the president's approach which has been dubbed slow-vaxxing. But, as The Post reported, the overwhelming majority of doctorswarns that spacing out vaccinations can leave children without protection from disease.

If infants dont get vaccinated as recommended, it really increases the time they could be at risk of getting vaccine-preventable diseases, Kristen Feemster, a pediatrician and infectious-disease specialist who is research director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia, said earlier this year.

Sun reportedlast month that vaccination concerns have swept through the Somali immigrant community in Minnesota, where activists invited Wakefieldto talk to parents.

She wrote:

Immunization rates plummeted, and the first cases of measles appeared. Soon there was a full-blown outbreak, one of the starkest consequences of an intensifying anti-vaccine movementin the United States and around the world that has gained traction in part by targeting specific communities.

Sun added:

MMR vaccination rates among U.S.-born children of Somali descent used to be higher than among other children in Minnesota. But the rates plummeted from 92percent in 2004 to 42percent in 2014, state health department data shows, well below the threshold of 92 to 94percent needed to protect a community against measles.

OnLast Week Tonight, Oliver said parents are not just making decisions for their own children others' children are affected by those decisions as well.

When people hear about vaccines, so much of the emphasis is on nonexistent or wildly unlikely harms, hesaid. And we tend not to talk about the very tangible good that they do.

Oliver talked about his own situation, saying his son was born prematurely after a difficult pregnancy and he has often worried about his son'shealth. However, Oliver said, he will vaccinate his child.

It is likely that at some point you may hear scary vaccine stories from other parents or on the Internet, and it is hard not to be terrified when you encounter it, he said. Believe me, Im someone who is scared of literally everything the dark, the light, heights, depths, confined spaces, open spaces, strangers, intimacy, spiders and a sudden and mysterious lack of spiders.

But, he said, we are vaccinating him fully on schedule. And if I can overcome the temptation to listen to the irrational shouting of my terrified lizard brain, then I believe that everyone can.

This story has been updated.

Read more:

Why this babys mom is so angry at the anti-vaxxers

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John Oliver blasts Trump as a 'human megaphone' for the anti-vaccine movement - Washington Post

QUEENSBURY Police believe "human error" on the part of the girl who fell from a ride at The Great Escape was the cause of the weekend accident that has drawn national attention to the amusement park.

The 14-year-old, whose name has not been released, was not believed to be hurt, but was hospitalized for tests to insure she didn't have any internal injuries, sheriff's Lt. Steve Stockdale said.

He said he spoke with her family Sunday night, and she was expected to be released from Albany Medical Center either late Sunday or Monday barring complications.

The girl was hospitalized Saturday night after she fell an estimated 25 feet from the "Sky Ride," a gondola-style attraction that carries patrons over part of the park. She brushed against a tree, and a group of patrons helped break her fall, and numerous park visitors shot video of the incident that has gone across the Internet and television in recent days.

Stockdale said the girl, who is from Delaware, was riding with her younger brother, somehow slipped underneath the restraining bars that holds riders in the car.

The ride was also found to be functioning properly, Stockdale said.

Police had not interviewed the girl or her brother as of early Monday, but tests have ruled out a medical problem causing her to slip out, so it appeared that she was either not paying proper attention or was fooling around to slide underneath the bar.

Some witnesses surmised she may have been trying to kick trees as the ride passed them, but Stockdale said that did not appear to be the case. He said she had already slipped through by that point that she was seen flailing her legs.

Thankfully the girl fell at one of the points where the seats aren't at their highest on the ride, as they get significantly farther off the ground and over water closer to the end.

"It could have been a lot worse than it was," Stockdale said.

Albany Medical Center said it could not release patient information without the child's name to check her status.

Stockdale said the Sheriff's Office was besieged by media requests for interview about the matter, with national shows seeking access to the investigating officers and the victim and her family.

"I got two phone calls from 'Good Morning America,'" he said.

Two safety consultants contacted by "CBS This Morning" said gondola rides such as Sky Ride have good safety records. They told the network's reports that problems are typically caused by actions of the rider.

The state Department of Labor inspected the ride and cleared it to re-open Sunday, but the park opted to keep it closed through Sunday. It was unclear early Monday whether it would re-open Monday,as calls and emails to a corporate spokeswoman were not returned.

Visit link:
Police: 'Human error' believed to be cause of Great Escape accident - Glens Falls Post-Star

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

History: In rat research, a warning for human society Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Rats and mice, of course, are not perfect models of humans, he told The Washington Post in a 1971 profile. But the disaster they represent is so compelling that the world cannot wait for proof of every step in the equation. Calhoun, who died in ... and more »

Excerpt from:
History: In rat research, a warning for human society - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Despite these reports, the joint statement released by the White House after the visit lauded Vietnam for its "ongoing efforts to refine its legal system to better protect and promote human rights for everyone." That is laughable; Vietnam has done just the opposite. While the Vietnam National Assembly made some concessions to human rights in the 2015 criminal procedure code, its revisions to the penal code that same year further curtailed free expression. Calls from citizens and civil society to repeal or amend these provisions have fallen on deaf ears, and just this week the National Assembly passed another iteration of the penal code that is even more draconian. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the Obama administration negotiated with Vietnam and other nations, would have provided an incentive to the communist regime to ease its repression. But Trump jettisoned that accord, and in failing to publicly raise these issues in May he missed another opportunity.

Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have raised concerns about Vietnam's human rights abuses, showing that the administration's heedlessness does not represent American values. The State Department should take note and speak out in support of the activists who have championed democracy at grave personal risk.

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Washington Post Editorial: A glaring lapse on human rights - Salt Lake Tribune

No, robots won't take your job -- just part of it

With robots vacuuming our floors, answering our phones, driving our cars, and detecting our cancers, you would hope that at least one of the most basic and essential of human activities that stopped us from aimlessly wandering in search of food -- that which gave birth to great civilizations along the banks of mighty rivers -- would be immune from their predations.

Yet, over the last month, a startup named Abundant Robotics has shot into prominence for doing just that: Ensuring that humanity is one step closer to seeing machines rule the world of farming.

In early May, it attracted $10 million in new investment led by Google's investment arm largely because its new, still-evolving robot is one step closer to taking over a $4 billion industry in the US that currently relies on humans to pick apples. In the fall of this year, these robots will apparently further perfect their trade in the state of Washington and become one step closer to commercialization.

According to its CEO Dan Steere, Abundant's apple-picking bots can detect apples by and large as accurately as humans can, and they're able to extract them from trees with an uncanny gentle precision.

Having a machine pick an apple out of a tree may not seem like such a big deal, but it is in fact supremely difficult to do. Bruise the fruit or drop it, and it instantly becomes destined for the trash heap and bleeds the company. Which is why the ability to detect an apple and then handle it like a newborn infant has only become recently possible because of the relatively new leaps in processing power, vision algorithms, and image processing.

Can these machines, though, be ultimately good for a human society already riddled with unemployment and vanishing jobs? Curiously, in California, a state that accounts for 60 percent of the US's fresh produce, but which has seen its labour force decline by 60 percent, the answer is a resounding "Yes." Tack on President Donald Trump's efforts to curtail immigration, and the scenario gets more dire (and the answer gets more emphatic), especially for the apple industry, which relies on the roughly 40,000 foreign work force that travels to the US during apple season.

Plus, when you consider that around 70 percent of the American population was involved in farming in the mid 1800s compared to 2 percent today, the increasing mechanization of this age-old occupation shouldn't come as such a big surprise. After all, many parts of the food chain are already comfortably mechanized. Cows regularly queue up to robotic milking machines to milk themselves. And where the work is slow and dangerous, such as spraying chemicals to kill weeds that infiltrate lettuce farms, low-cost bots have become an ideal substitute for humans with pesticide-filled backpacks.

Apparently, wine bots already navigate vineyards pruning vines, while others are in the works to monitor crops remotely for moisture, disease, and growth. Efforts are underway to grow cereal crops all the way from planting to harvesting without a human hand involved in the process.

As for apples, a major supplier to Tesco has apparently sunk close to $7 million into packing technology that has allowed it to increase the scope of its operations without adding human bodies, allowing 20 bags to be packed in a minute versus the previous rate of three -- a staggering increase in productivity, thanks to robots that bag the fruits and load them onto pallets. Of course, not all produce -- strawberries is one example -- can be brought under the dominion of machines, and doing so would require significant adaptation of both crops and bots to eliminate human intervention.

Ultimately, how quickly bots take over farming depends on makers of agricultural machinery --how keen are they to experiment and sink money into alternative, constantly evolving ways of harnessing machines to do their bidding? The answer apparently is not so much. Doing so would not just mean significant expenditure. It would also endanger their current revenue stream provided for by existing machines, which would be tantamount to biting the hand that feeds it.

Nevertheless, the fact that a burgeoning human population will require 50 percent more food by 2050 amidst a growing shortage of labour and severe climate change means that this is just the beginning of the march of machines onto your favourite cabbage patch.

Related stories:

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Could apple-picking robots signal the end of a human hand in agriculture? - ZDNet