Month: April 2005

Will Polio Ever Be Eradicated?

The World Health Organization maintains that it will eradicate polio worldwide, but the disease is beginning to re-emerge in African countries that had previously been polio-free. Will anti-polio campaigners ever manage to eradicate polio?

The current outbreak in Africa is directly traceable to a decision by religious extremists in northern Nigeria to suspended polio vaccinations in 2003.

Shortly after that decision, polio cases in Nigeria began to spike. That was soon followed by cases popping up in nearby countries including Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Ivory Coast, and Sudan. All five of those countries had been free of polio until 2003. Along with Nigeria, polio still persisted prior to 2003 in Egypt and Niger.

Polio has since spread to an additional seven African countries that had been free of polio, and the disease could spread further.

Admittedly the number of cases is still very small — Nigeria reported the most cases in Africa in 2004 at 763, but the outbreak of cases in previously polio-free countries is jacking up the costs of immunization. According to Dr. David Heymann, who heads up WHO’s polio eradication program, the resurgence of cases in polio-free countries will add at least $150 million to immunization efforts on the continent.

Source:

Health Officials Say They’ll End Polio In Africa, Despite Its Spread. Lawrence Altman, The New York Times, January 16, 2005.

Developed Countries Should Lower Trade Barriers, Period

In the wake of the devastating tsunami that parts of Asia in December, the World Trade Organization’s Supachai Panitchpakdi urged developed nations to lower trade barriers with nations hit by the tsunami.

How pathetic. The developed world should eliminate their ridiculous trade barriers with developing nations permanently. Such barriers have done far more long-term damage to the developing world than the tragic — but one-time — horrors created by the December 2004 tsunami.

Along with further worsening poverty in those countries, trade barriers directly contribute to corruption and other problems in developing nations by making it difficult for enterprising individuals to succeed in the market.

Anti-free traders shouldn’t worry, however — special interest groups here in the United States were quick to defend their particular fiefdoms from liberalization.

Deborah Long, the hack in charge of speaking for the Southern Shrimp Alliance, argued that suspending duties on Asian shrimp imports would be unfair. Lloyd Woods, who serves the same role with the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition, argued that the best way to help Sri Lanka, Thailand and India wasn’t to eliminate textile tariffs against those country, but rather impose import quotes on Chinese textiles!

Straight from the land of the tariff and the home of the scared s–tless by the prospect of truly free trade.

Source:

Rich nations are urged to ease trade with affected countries. Elizabeth Becker, The New York Times, January 15, 2005.

Research Suggests Close Link Between Cholera Outbreaks and Phage Levels

Research published in the February 2005 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science provides intriguing insight into cholera outbreaks, and may someday lead to a method of predicting or even preventing such epidemics.

After studying levels of cholera bacteria (Vibrio cholerae) in water, researchers at the International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research and Harvard Medical School noticed a relationship between the level of cholera bacteria and the presence of phage — a virus that uses bacteria to reproduce itself.

There was an inverse relationship between the two: as the level of phage increased, the number of cholera bacteria declined. Similarly, when phage levels fell, cholera bacteria levels increased.

It is somewhat of mystery why cholera plagues are self-limiting and tend to end of their own accord. This research provides one possible answer, namely that cholera outbreaks might begin when phenomena such as monsoons dilute the amount of phage in water, and then end of their own accord once phage levels again increase.

Much more research needs to be done to establish the precise relationship between phage and cholera bacteria, but this study provides intriguing clues that may help to predict and ultimately prevent cholera outbreaks.

Sources:

Cholera understanding ‘improved’. The BBC, January 16, 2005.

New insights: Why are cholera epidemics self-limited?. Press Release, International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, March 7, 2005.

Straight Outta Compton — The Profane Version

This blogger started a bit of a trend by taking the title song from NWA’s Straight Out Of Compton and producing a track that silenced out the non-profane parts. But someone did him one better. This track consists of a sped-up version of all the profanities on the entire album in one 34 second track!

That Phone Would Be So Far Up Someone’s Ass . . .

I have to say that the father mentioned in this story displayed an extreme amount of self-control.

If I showed up at school to learn my daughter had been sexually assaulted and a) school authorities had failed to contact me or the police, and b) the school authorities urged me not to call police, I’d be finding alternate uses for that phone.

The NYT story is truly appalling,

One of the three assistant principals, Richard Watson, said he had found the videotape and then viewed it with other administrators. Their conclusion, they told investigators, was that there had been no coercion.

. . .

One witness’s statement said a boy pulled the girl onto the auditorium stage, ordered her to be quiet, pushed her to her knees and forced her to perform oral sex on him.

“If you scream, I’ll have all my boys punch you,” the boy told her and then hit her in the face, causing her mouth to bleed, a student told the investigators.

As my wife put it, what did they think the bleeding mouth indicated she liked it rough? WTF is wrong with these people? And why was the principle the only one fired? Dick here is simply being reassigned. He should have been fired for crap like this,

Another special-education teacher, Lisa Upshaw, told the investigators that administrators did not call the girl’s father immediately after learning about the attack.

When Mrs. Upshaw took it upon herself to call the father, Mr. Watson urged him not to come pick up his daughter until after the end of the school day “to avoid a confrontation with the suspects,” Mrs. Upshaw told the investigators.

When the father arrived, he asked whether the school administration was going to call the police, Mrs. Upshaw said in her statement. “Mr. Watson said, ‘No, we don’t want to do that. We don’t want the police,’ ” she told the investigators.

. . .

Mr. Watson and other administrators told investigators that the principal, Regina B. Crenshaw, had also advised the father to avoid calling the police, the investigation report says. Mrs. Crenshaw recommended that the father return the next morning and report the incident to a police officer who was usually stationed at the school but who was not there on March 9, the report added.

The auditorium is now a potential crime scene you halfwits! The father returned later with police who secured the auditorium and presumably gathered evidence there.

Its so weird that you see students getting suspended for drawing vaguely horror-themed pictures, but a genuine sexual assault is brushed off like it was nothing.

Source:

Principal Fired for Failing to Report Sex Assault Case. James Dao, The New York Times, April 13, 2005.

Science News on Stylometry and Oz

Ran across this 2003 article from Science News about stylometry — using mathematical models driven by computers to determine authorship of disputed works.

For example, two years after L. Frank Baum died The Royal Book of Oz was published and billed as Baum’s final Oz novel. But stylometric analysis of the book suggests that it was probably written by Ruth Plumly Thompson, which Oz fanatics had long suspected.

According to Science News,

Binongo’s work on The Royal Book of Oz is a good example. He started by collecting other samples of Baum’s and Thompson’s writings and breaking the samples into 5,000-word chunks. He then found the 50 most frequently used words in the body of texts and counted how often each word appeared in each chunk. This process distilled each chunk to 50 numbers.

Just as two numbers specify a point in two-dimensional space, and three numbers a point in three-dimensional space, the 50 numbers associated with each chunk of text specify a point in 50-dimensional space. Any differences in the scatter of Baum’s and Thompson’s points could be potential clues to the writers’ different styles.

. . .

There’s no guarantee that a pattern will show up in this plane. In the case of the Oz books, however, a pattern leaps out. The Baum texts cluster in one half of the plane, while the Thompson texts sit in the other half, showing what Binongo calls a clear “stylistic gulf.”

When chunks of The Royal Book of Oz are plotted in the same plane, they all land squarely in Thompson’s half.

“With this unerring consistency, we have confidence in our identification of Thompson as the author of the 15th book,” Binongo said in the spring issue of Chance.

The article details other such finds, along with a good outline of both the strengths and weaknesses of using this sort of stastical model to establish authorship (essentially, the more undisputed material by an author and the better preserved the text-in-question, the more reliable the technique is).

Source:

Statistical tests are unraveling knotty literary mysteries. Erica Klarreich, Science News, December 20, 2003.