Day: January 25, 2004

HSUS Hollywood Office Releases Picks for Worst TV "Foe Paws"

The HSUS Hollywood Office (formerly Ark Trust) recently released its annual list of television “foe paws” — television shows that, according to HSUS, “are given the thumbs down for their negative animal messages.” This year’s list was by far the most entertaining yet.

Among those receiving HSUS’ thumbs down was Jimmy Kimmel Live for a February feature on bull riding,

We know it’s a guy’s show and Jimmy Kimmel is such a guy! So who better to
promote the macho ‘sport’ of bull riding. Converting the studio back lot
into a rodeo arena, Kimmel glorifies the ‘brave’ cowboys whom he suggests
are risking their lives for this demonstration. After all, it’s not harmful
to the animals involved, is it? Then Kimmel lets something slip when a bull
is reluctant to leave his shoot, “Shall we electric shock this thing?” he
asks. That appalling remark reveals the truth about bull riding and says a
lot about Jimmy Kimmel?(Feb 13).

HSUS also accused The Simpsons of putting forth a negative message about animals for a December episode in which the family dog has puppies,

Oh, how it pains us to cite this seminal comedy series and frequent Genesis
Award winner, which has delivered some truly enlightened messages about
animals. Why then did the writers miss a golden opportunity to stress the
need to spay and neuter the family dog? Granted, Homer meant to have him
fixed but didn’t due to the dog’s nervousness. Okay, we get the joke but, to
make matters worse, the animal conscious Lisa is shown handing out the
unwanted puppies to literally anyone who’ll take them! We say it’s out of
character for Lisa and out of whack for The Simpsons. (Dec 7)

Oh, the horrors!

My favorite of the bunch, though, is HSUS’s complaint about an episode of Wanda at Large featuring comedian Wanda Sykes. In the episode Sykes takes on animal rights activists who complain about her wearing fur,

It must be open season on attacking animal advocates! Familiar with her so
called tell-it-like-it-is signature style, we wish Wanda would have told it
like it really is instead of resorting to a sly send up of animal activists.
Angry at being lambasted for wearing fur, Wanda sets out to ‘take down’ the
campaigner leading the protests against her in a TV debate. Portrayed as
naive, misinformed, and deserving only ridicule, the activist and the issues
she cares about are given no credibility. We’re not alone in failing to see
the humor in this sit-com ? it was cancelled in December! (Nov 15)

Hmmm…activists portrayed as “naive, misinformed, and deserving only ridicule”? Sounds about right to me.

Source:

HSUS Hollywood Office Releases Annual ‘Foe Paw’ Report. Press Release, Humane Society of the United States, January 7, 2004.

Furl.Net

A couple weeks ago I mentioned my frustrating with looking at older articles I or other people have written only to find that the source material those blog entries were based on had gone 404. That’s also, by the way, why I don’t really understand the point of blogs that are nothing more than links — visit the archives of those sites sometimes and they’re basically worthless because of that problem.

Anyway, Conversant is flexible enough that I could put together a system in a couple hours — without having to do any programming or scripting — so I can store copies of all the articles I’m referencing with the blog entries that reference them.

But what about things I run across that I want to save but that I’m not necessarily blogging about? I’ve used a variety of tools over the years to try to solve this problem, but none of them are as elegant as Furl.Net.

Currently in beta, with Furl you sign up for an account — free at the moment — and then add a little “Furl It” icon to your Bookmarks toolbar. Then when you find an HTML page you want to archive, simply press the “Furl It” bookmark and up pops a dialog box where you can assign a number of metadata to the page to be saved, such as a rating, a topic, keywords, description, etc. Hit “Save” on the form and the page is added to your Furl.Net archive.

This wouldn’t be of much use if a) it didn’t work seamlessly, b) it did’t have a nice interface to search through and sort your archive, and c) it didn’t have a way to get your archive off of Furl and on to your local hard drive.

Fortunately, the Furl.Net folks have done a wonderful job of covering all of the bases there. The process works flawlessly from my testing, the interface — especially with all of the metadata options it provides — is wonderful, and there are ways to get your data out today with additional export methods in development (today you can only get the links out via XML, but the developer promises a full export of all data via ZIP or some other compressed filed method is in the works).

An Impromptu Physics Lesson

Driving home from the grocery store Friday night, my daughter received an impromptu physics lesson on what happens when two bodies try to occupy the same space:

It was dark, very slipper and we were in the far right lane of a four-lane divided street. As we came up to an intersection with a side street, there were about six cars lined up in the left lane next to us to turn left. So when the teenanger anxious to get home and change her clothes for a night of clubbing decided to turn left right in front of us, she almost certainly couldn’t have seen us coming (hint, this is why her mother advised her previously that making a left turn there was not a good idea — this is a notorious set of intersections that results in an accident or two weekly during the winter).

As you can see, the damage wasn’t very extensive to our car, and even less to hers due to the relatively low speed (though this was my fifth or sixth accident — none of them my fault — and it’s always extraordinarily jarring to be traveling one minute and then colliding and stopping the next).

The main worry I had was initially for her safety. Everyone was fine my our car, but when I opened the driver side door, the kid had a total look of shock about her — she was answering my questions, but veerryy slowly. It took awhile of me repeating the same questions to her before I was satisfied she was just shook up emotionally rather than suffering any internal injuries or other problems that needed medical attention (well, she did sit around lighting up cigarettes afterward, much to my daughter’s horror — “she’s gonna die, daddy”).

The worst part, oddly enough, was waiting for a cop to show up. I took more than 90 minutes from the time I reported the accident to 911 before a police officer showed up. By that time my daughter was bouncing off the walls inside the car with ADHD-fueled boredom.

Leukemia Vaccine Effective in Mice

In October, researchers reported in the journal Nature Medicine of their successful tests of a DNA vaccine in mice. In January, further evidence from a trial of the vaccine demonstrated that it could protect at least some of the mice for very long periods of time.

The research focused on acute promyeloctyic leukemia which is currently treated with chemotherapy which cures about 75 percent of cases.

The researchers used a mice model of the disease, exposing one experimental group to the vaccine and another experimental group to the vaccine and chemotherapy. In half the mice receiving the combination of the vaccine and chemotherapy, half the mice lived an additional 300 days — the equivalent of 25 human years.

The vaccine uses fragments of a faulty gene found in cancer cells to train the immune system of the animals to recognize and destroy cancerous cells.

As lead researcher Dr. Rose Padua told the BBC, this sort of approach might one day help improve survival odds for those patients who don’t respond to chemotherapy alone,

Currently, despite a major improvement in the survival of APL patients, a cure is still not achieved in all patients. The DNA based vaccine has proven to induce protective immunity. This example of a target therapy in an APL animal model may provide us with an alternative therapy, which if translated to humans, will improve quality of life and survival rates for leukemia patients.

Obviously, any human application would still be many years away.

Source:

Hope for leukemia vaccine. The BBC, January 7, 2004.

DNA drug offers leukaemia hope. The BBC, October 20, 2003.

China Slaughters Thousands of Civet Cats in Wake of New SARS Case

Despite warnings from the World Health Organization that it would likely be counter-productive, Chinese officials move forward in early January with the slaughter of thousands of civets after a new case of SARS was discovered.

After discovering the first confirmed case of SARS in China in six months, authorities in the southern Guandong province ordered the mass slaughter of all civet cats. In all, somewhere between 4-10 thousand civits were killed.

The animals were slaughtered by drowning, electrocution, incineration and, in some reported cases, clubbing to death. Officials in the Guandong province announced there would be a $12,000 fine for anyone who was found trying to hide the animals. The civet cat is sold as a food delicacy in some parts of China.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization said the slaughter was premature and likely to be counter-productive. According to the WHO, the connection between civets and human cases of SARS has still not been definitively proven, although WHO concedes that civets do contract a disease that appears to be very similar to SARS.

Moreover, the WHO warned that if civets are carriers of SARS, methods of killing them like clubbing could end up potentially exposing more people to the disease than simply letting the animals live.

Ignoring the criticism, Guandong authorities supervised the January slaughter which also apparently spread to other animals, including badgers and rats.

Sources:

China steps up SARS civet cull. The BBC, January 9, 2004.

WHO criticises China cull plans. The BBC, January 5, 2004.

China follows Mao with mass cull Tim Luard, The BBC, January 6, 2004.

Mayo Clinic Researchers Observe Fusing of Human, Non-Human Cells in Living Body

The Mayo Clinic announced on January 8 that its genomics researchers demonstrated for the first time that human and non-human cells could naturally mix their genetic material in a living body. According to a press release from the Mayo Clinic announcing the discovery,

In the research reported today, Mayo Clinic investigators implanted human blood stem cells into fetal pigs. The pigs look and behave like normal pigs. But cellular analysis shows they have some human blood cells, as well as some cells that are hybrid — part human, part pig — in their blood, and in some of their organs. Molecular examination shows the hybrid cells have one nucleus with genetic materials from both the human and the pig. Importantly, the hybrid cells were found to have the porcine endogenous retrovirus, a distant cousin of HIV, and to be able to transmit that virus to uninfected human cells.

Jeffrey Platt, director of the Mayo Clinic Transplantation Biology Program, said the surprising results may help explain how some viruses can jump so quickly between humans and non-humans. In a press release statement, Platt said,

What we found was completely unexpected. This observation helps explain how a retrovirus can jump from one species to another — and that may speed discovery about the origin of diseases such as AIDS and SARS. The discovery may also help explain how cells in the circulation may become part of the solid tissue.

The Mayo Clinic findings will be published in March in the online Express edition of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal.

Source:

Mayo researchers observe genetic fusion of human, animal cells — may help explain origins of AIDS. Press Release, Mayo Clinic, January 8, 2004.