Alaska Board of Game Approves Wolf Kill

In March, the Alaska Board of Game voted unanimously to approve a plan to kill wolves and move black bears in 520-square mile area in interior Alaska, in order to boost the moose population in the area. The proposal requires the additional approval of the state Fish and Game Department and Alaska’s governor, Frank Murkowski.

The plan also calls for a temporary moratorium on moose hunting in the McGrath area.

Friends of Animals’ Priscilla Feral has threatened a consumer boycott of Alaska if it approves the wolf kill. She was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that she was “horrified but not surprised” by the board’s decision.

In testimony before the Alaska Board of Game on March 6, Feral told the board,

If the Board of Game convinces Gov. Murkowski to approve this proposal, and appease the predator control minority, as opposed to most Alaskans and wildlife-watching tourists who denounce shot-gunning wolves from helicopters, FoA will initiate demonstrations and protests all over the country ? and internationally –matching every dollar you devote to killing wolves in launching an offensive.

Murkowski is himself a hunter who has said before that he is unafraid of a consumer boycott of his state and will almost certainly approve the plan.

Source:

Game Board backs predator control near McGrath. Associated Press, March 12, 2003.

Los Angeles Times on John Hopkins 'Forgetful' Mouse

The Los Angeles Times ran a bizarre editorial in response to news in March that researchers at John Hopkins University had developed a method to create a strain of forgetful mice.

More specifically, as the United Press International summed up the story,

. . . [researchers] prevented a molecular event in brain cells required for storing spatial memories. The mice quickly forgot where to find a resting place in a pool of water, showing that subtly altering the chemistry of a certain protein can affect a brain cell’s ability to external stimulation or neuronal plasticity.

Researchers did this by genetically altering a receptor that binds glutamate which, in turn, prevented a process called phosphorylation. The upshot is that the mice with the altered receptors had more difficulty in forming short term memories than normal mice.

Why is this important? UPI quotes from Hopkins professor of neuroscience Richard Huganir,

Since 1986, phosphorylation has been recognized as a key to modulating receptor responses to neurotransmitters like glutamate, but this is the first demonstration that phosphorylation of a particular target protein mediates the processes we believe are behind learning and memory.

In its March 16 editorial on the finding, the Los Angeles Times settles for rather bizarre needling of the researchers at John Hopkins,

Well, they’ve finally done it. Scientists at world-renowned Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions have invented a forgetful mouse. Now if only the humans could remember why they did that. What these well-educated people did was manipulate a gene to prevent a certain molecular event from occurring in a mouse’s brain cells required for storing spatial memory. As everyone watched, the tiny rodent, whose pals quickly learned and remembered precisely how to exit a pool of water, seemed befuddled.

Talk about abuse. Little guy spends a life getting good at mazes in a laboratory with bright lights, just hoping for a few crumbs of (non-French) cheese, maybe a little positive reinforcement. Large creatures in white coats fool his brain so he stands, lost and alone, in a puddle of water right next to a dry platform crowded with long-tailed cousins with functioning memories. The pestilential humiliation of it all.

This resembles a pilot for reality TV. Prize-seeking participants lose their memories and minds before rollicking audiences with genetically altered senses of humor. There is science behind this laboratory tomfoolery. If we can better understand fundamental aspects of learning and memory formation in the brain of a mouse, then perhaps someday we can understand human memory malfunctions, or maybe even teenage thinking and other mental distortions.

. . .

Another possibility is that this whole brain study is really a mouse trap. These little creatures are actually studying humans to see what prompts them to push the Feed button, turn off the lab radio and go away to write a scientific paper or something. At this very moment, while humans think we’re unlocking the complexities of a mouse brain, some erudite rodents on the second floor could be peer-reviewing a paper by their ground-floor understudies, “Inter-Spatial Motivational Studies of Reward Stimulation Strategies Among Homo Sapiens.”

Although the mice’s research would no doubt be couched in familiarly unfamiliar scientific terms and buried among bewildering charts and graphs, the main thrust would be the surprising outcome that merely by standing in a puddle of water and looking lost, a lone mouse can create great excitement among nearby humans, causing them to chatter actively, then scurry away and extinguish those fluorescent lights, finally.

What was the Times thinking?

Source:

Stories of modern science . . . from UPI. Ellen Beck, United Press International, March 10, 2003.

A Less-Mighty Mouse Mind. Los Angeles Times, March 16, 2003.

Report on Foot-and-Mouth Outbreak Faults Department's Contingency Planning

The Public Accounts Committee released a report in March on the 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the United Kingdom which faulted the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (DEFRA) for failing to have adequate contingency plans in place to deal with such an outbreak.

The last major outbreak of the disease had occurred in 1967, and in the intervening years lessons from that outbreak were lost or not followed in dealing with the 2001 outbreak.

DEFRA had considered the risk of an outbreak of foot and mouth disease low and its contingency plans assumed that there would be at most 10 affected farms at any one time. In fact, in the 2001 outbreak there were 27 farms that were initially affected by the outbreak.

Moreover, the it waited far too long to call in the Army to handle the outbreak — an error which also amplified the problems involved with the 1967 outbreak.

The report estimates that the outbreak cost Great Britain upwards of 5 billion pounds. Had the Army been brought in to enforce an immediate nationwide ban on livestock movement, the report estimates that the cost to British taxpayers for cleanup and compensation would have been only 1.5 billion pounds rather than the 3 billion pounds the government eventually ended up paying.

Additionally, the plan that the government finally put into place to deal with the outbreak focused on protecting the agricultural industry, but the majority of the financial losses were from the tourist industry after limitations on the movement of people were put in place. The report says that the blanket closure of footpaths for long periods of time was unnecessary and should not have been allowed.

Sources:

Public Accounts – Fifth Report. Public Accounts Committee, March 5, 2003.

FMD Epidemic of 2001 – costs and lessons. American Association of Swine Veterinarians, March 17, 2003.

Farm disease errors ‘inexcusable’. The BBC, March 14, 2003.

Wired Catches Weblogger Plagiarizing

According to this Wired News story, Sean-Paul Kelley — who maintains the increasingly popular weblog The Agnoist — simply cut and pasted reports from Stratfor and passed them along unsourced on his weblog to give the impression he had some sort of inside channel on war-related issues.

The Wired story reports,

In a series of interviews with Wired News, Kelley changed his story several times. At first, he said he used just four or five Stratfor items a day without crediting the company. Later, he owned up to “six or seven days when half was from Stratfor.”

Aside from a few scattered attributions, Kelley presented Stratfor’s intelligence as information he had uncovered himself, typically paragraph-long reports detailing combat operations in Iraq. He took these wholesale from a Stratfor proprietary newsletter, US-Iraqwar.com, which Kelley admits he subscribes to.

. . .

But in addition to failing to name Stratfor as the rightful source of the information, it appears that in at least two instances Kelley also tried to pass it off as intelligence provided by his own unnamed sources. On March 20, at the war’s outset, he wrote that “a little birdie told me” about certain information. In another case, his source was “a Turkish friend.”

If he was going to plagiarize, you’d think he’d have chosen a source a bit more obscure than Stratfor — as his weblog became more popular, it was almost guaranteed someone would notice the plagiarism.

Scott Rosenberg Held Hostage by Radio Userland’s Limitations

I use Radio Userland as a news aggregator, but have never really investigated its feasibility as a weblog tool. I was very surprised to see how easily Scott Rosenberg’s Salon.Com blog has been hijacked by spammers thanks to the extremely limited nature of Radio Userland’s Comments feature,

Speaking of comments, those of you who pay attention to the comments on this blog will have noticed a marked increase in the strange practice of spam-posting comments — reposting the same verbiage multiple times. (Sometimes this happens as a result of slow response time from the server, but those cases usually lead to 2, 3 or 4 reposts, not ten and 20.) This is a waste of bandwidth and, more important, a waste of this blog’s readers’ time. So cut it out. If necessary I’ll just turn off comments here, but I’d rather not do that. I’ve got no problem with endless vocal disagreement with me. There’s been lots of good, smart dialogue in there. But I have no patience for juvenile spam tactics.

And yes, I know that Radio UserLand’s comments feature is pretty rudimentary — it should offer the ability to delete posts, ban posters and otherwise moderate those comments boards. I’m sorry it’s not better. Since we don’t develop the software here at Salon, I can’t take this on myself, but will continue to communicate this kind of feedback to the UserLand team.

I disagree with Rosenberg about pretty much everything, but now it’s pointless to even post such disagreements on his comments section because some idiot goes in and posts hundreds of kilobytes worth of junk text precisely to sabotage his comments section.

Userland announced the comments feature for Radio back in February of 2002, so it’s a bit surprising they haven’t added even basic features like the ability to delete a post. Maybe someone could put together a checklist for Userland on how to get there, because it’s got to be embarassing to have such a prominent user of their software have these sorts of problems.