Author: Brian Carnell

Clueless at the United Nations

The Times (UK)’s Richard Owens offers a priceless summary of the first day of the UN World Food Summit in Rome,

The opening day of the UN World Food Summit, dedicated to combating global hunger, was marked yesterday by a sumptuous lunch for the 3,000 delegates served by 170 Italian waiters.

The summit leaders were offered foie gras, lobster, and goose stuffed with olives. followed by fruit compote.

The Rome lunch was a symbol, for Western leaders at least, of the extravagant and bloated bureaucracies that the aid business has created, and went some way towards explaining why so few of them were in attendance yesterday.

Scripting News Shows Why Weblogs Won’t Replace Newspapers

And wouldn’t you know it, Dave Winer himself presents an excellent example of why weblogs will never replace newspapers — because so many webloggers, including Winer, cut corners on fact checking things they publish. Look at this piece of nonsense Winer wrote yesterday,

Theoretically, a week from yesterday, we will know who Deep Throat was. The Washington Post, whose reporters invented the name, says “Only four people on the planet are known to have the name — [Bob] Woodward; his partner, Carl Bernstein; Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of The Washington Post; and of course, Deep Throat himself.” If this is true, then we know that Deep Throat is John Dean, who plans to spill the beans in his book, coming out next Monday. John Robb thinks Deep Throat was Alexander Haig. Others say Henry Kissinger, William Colby (CIA) and L Patrick Gray (FBI).

As I keep saying, doesn’t anybody use Google to verify facts?

Yes, John Dean is writing an e-book to be published by Salon.Com about Deepthroat. No, he is not going to out himself as deep throat.

Dean has been openly speculating about who Deep Throat was for years. In 1975 Dean claimed that Deep Throat was Earl J. Silbert, one of the Watergate Prosecutors. In his 1982 book Lost Honor, Dean changed his mind and fingered Alexander Haig has Deep Throat.

Now Dean says that he’s spent 20 years investigating and this time he’s certain he’s identified the real Deep Throat. If Dean is going to out himself as Deep Throat, it is odd that he told the San Francisco Chronicle,

There’s one person who’s headed into Richard Nixon’s eternal history who outranks me as his worst enemy and that’s Deep Throat. Nixon said Dean was a traitor and Deep Throat was even worse. I wanted to visit with this person.

In fact it’s clear that Dean is just going to throw yet another name into the pot of people who have been identified over the years as Deep Throat. How Winer arrived at the bizarre idea that Dean was going to out himself is beyond me.

Personally, I don’t think Woodward and Bernstein were truthful when they claimed Deep Throat was not a composite character.

Cholera Gives Up Its Secrets In Mice

Cholera still sickens about 300,000 people every year, mostly in developed countries with poor water treatment systems. Efforts to create a vaccine for the disease have been always been stymied. But results from a cholera model in mice appears to offer a clue as to why that is so.

Researchers at Tufts University infected one group of mice with a cultured strain of the cholera bacteria and a second group of mice with a strain of the bacteria taken from the feces of cholera patients.

The strain taken from patients was as much as 700 times more infectious than the cultured strain. Moreover, when the patient strain was placed in a culture, within 18 hours it reverted to the relatively low-infectious version.

The implication is that the cholera bacteria has evolved a behavior usually seen in complex parasites such as malaria that use different forms for transmission between individuals than they have for infecting individuals once they are in the body (cholera has two chromosomes where most bacteria only have a single chromosome which may play a role in the transformation it makes once inside its hosts).

Since vaccines for cholera have focused on causing an immune response to the cultured form of the bacteria, they likely have failed to cause an immune response to the infectious form of the bacteria.

If the results in mice also hold for human beings, then researchers might be able to finally create an effective vaccine by targeting the proteins of the infectious form of the disease.

Source:

Cholera needs guts to survive. Tom Clarke, Nature, June 6, 2002.

Cholera bacterium’s quick change revealed. Deborah MacKenzie, New Scientist, June 2, 2002.

Chomsky’s Linguistic Theories

As much as I detest Noam Chomsky, I don’t agree at all with Glenn Reynolds’ claim that Chomsky’s linguistic theories are failing. Reynolds claims,

IT’S NOT JUST NOAM CHOMSKY’S POLITICS THAT ARE DISCREDITED: His linguistic opinions aren’t faring so well either.

But that assessment is based entirely on this story about the role of “uh” and “um.” Chomsky argues that those are not words and are not properly part of language at all. A couple of researchers at Stanford and the University of California at Santa Cruz disagree, arguing that “uh” and “um” tend to be used in ways that send consistent cues to listeners and are therefore part of language.

Frankly, their logic isn’t all that convincing to this non-linguist, but even if theyre are correct, that doesn’t seem to detract from the central point of Chomsky’s linguistic theory that the capacity for language is innate rather than an artifact of culture.

There is a lot of debate over the specifics, and a lot of animosity toward Chomsky within linguistics and he has a habit of saying things about how this capacity for language evolved (i.e., he’s come close to denying that it evolved at all), but he’s certainly right on the big picture.

Now if we could just get him to stop using language to make ridiculous claims like: we should take Osama bin Laden at his word or that tens of thousands of people died from the U.S. attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant or that efforts to hold public schools accountable is a right wing corporate plot against America’s children.

Cholera Gives Up Its Secrets In Mice

Cholera still sickens about 300,000 people every year, mostly in developed countries with poor water treatment systems. Efforts to create a vaccine for the disease have been always been stymied. But results from a cholera model in mice appears to offer a clue as to why that is so.

Researchers at Tufts University infected one group of mice with a cultured strain of the cholera bacteria and a second group of mice with a strain of the bacteria taken from the feces of cholera patients.

The strain taken from patients was as much as 700 times more infectious than the cultured strain. Moreover, when the patient strain was placed in a culture, within 18 hours it reverted to the relatively low-infectious version.

The implication is that the cholera bacteria has evolved a behavior usually seen in complex parasites such as malaria that use different forms for transmission between individuals than they have for infecting individuals once they are in the body (cholera has two chromosomes where most bacteria only have a single chromosome which may play a role in the transformation it makes once inside its hosts).

Since vaccines for cholera have focused on causing an immune response to the cultured form of the bacteria, they likely have failed to cause an immune response to the infectious form of the bacteria.

If the results in mice also hold for human beings, then researchers might be able to finally create an effective vaccine by targeting the proteins of the infectious form of the disease.

Source:

Cholera needs guts to survive. Tom Clarke, Nature, June 6, 2002.

Cholera bacterium’s quick change revealed. Deborah MacKenzie, New Scientist, June 2, 2002.

Another Professor with a Loyalty Requirement

A bizarre controversy has been unfolding the past few weeks at Iowa State University where a professor threw a student out of her class because he disagreed with her political views.

Student Jay Gardner, 38, took a graduate class on “Ethnicity, Class and the Media” from professor Tracy Owens-Patton. After a few weeks, Owens-Patton threw Gardner out of her class on the grounds that he was a white supremacist who was disrupting her course.

Among other things, Owens-Patton complained that in class Gardner defended racial profiling, pointing out that African Americans commit more crimes. Owens-Patton also said that Gardner criticized the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday — a charge that Gardner denies.

Gardner told the Desmoines Register,

If you’re going to make claims that white America is intentionally suppressing, holding down, oppressing African-Americans . . . you have to let some students give their opinions on it, and that wasn’t happening.

Owens-Patton also complained that in a discussion Gardner said that he was biased against minorities, but Gardner told the Ames Tribune,

Patton asked if we had any problems with stereotyping and others, and I gave both pros and cons for stereotyping. I said that some probably use stereotyping as a quick way to communicate since people tend to think in schemas or generalizations.

When it comes to deciding who to believe, Owens-Patton did not help herself by apparently lying in her complaint about Gardner. In her complaint addressed to her superiors at ISU, Owens-Patton claimed that police told her that Gardner “could be a third person” in a new white supremacist movement at ISU.

The only problem is that the police officer she cited, Capt. Gene Deisinger, told the Des Moines Register that, “There are no police reports that I know of, nor any groups that have identified themselves as white supremacists at Iowa State.”

The best summation of this controversy came from ISU vice provost Howard Shapiro who told the Des Moines Register,

Whose right it is to determine what is taught in the class and how it’s conducted is the professors’. It’s not a democracy. It’s a classroom.

Apparently once students step into a classroom at ISU, they leave democracy behind and enter a mini-totalitarian state where the whims and dictates of morons like Owens-Patton have absolute authority to quash any dissent. So much for that vaunted ideal of academic freedom.

Source:

White student fights removal from ISU class Staci Hupp, DesMoines Register, May 22, 2002.

ISU grad student denies making ethnic comments. Jason Kristufek, Ames Tribune, June 4, 2002.

Ames police unaware of racist group. Staci Hupp, DesMoines Register, May 24, 2002.