FINEST KIND CLINIC AND FISHMARKET.... Discussing medicine, culture, and the joys of cooking Pansit.
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| U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Gustavo Gonzalez |
U.S. Marines and U.S. Public Health Service members return during Operation United Assistance at Roberts International Airport in Monrovia, Liberia, Oct. 31, 2014. The operation is providing command and control, logistics, training and engineering support to the U.S. government’s efforts to contain the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa.
The Wall's fall mattered for everyone who understood the Cold War's stakes and risks. The stakes were freedom versus tyranny. The Cold War risks in Western Europe were manifold, but they included escalation from a conventional firefight to global thermonuclear war.
Which is why I stress joy and relief. Those were the emotions that flooded me on Nov. 9, 1989, as I saw video of East and West Berliners clasping hands and weeping. Where were the border guards? Berliners said the East German border police had disappeared -- they had refused to shoot. Then the crowd surged. Within a couple of hours, guitars replaced Kalashnikovs. I recall TV footage (the reporter said he was live in East Berlin) of a gleeful young man whacking the Wall with a sledgehammer.
Mazur has this to say on the history of the equals sign:
The ideas of algebra brought on the symbols, not the other way around. Robert Recorde had written the words “is equal to” almost two hundred times in his book Whetstone of Witte (1557) before noticing that he could easily “avoid the tedious repetition” of those three words by designing the symbol = to represent them.
In Ghardaia the violence between Arab and Berber residents is all about water rights, jobs, land, ethnicity and religion. Arabs also accuse the 800,000 Berbers in the south of supporting al Qaeda. The province of Ghardaia is on the edge of the Sahara Desert and contains only 200,000 people. The unrest has been going on since late 2013. Over a hundred people have been arrested and there have been over 400 casualties (including at least 15 dead). Over a hundred building has been burned down along with dozens of vehicles. Thousands have fled the city and many businesses stay closed for days or weeks at a time. The police, who are largely Arab, are accused of being biased against the Berbers. The ethnic tensions in this area, 600 kilometers south of the capital, have been growing since 2008 and there was another outbreak of violence in October 2013 that was put down violently. As bad as the ethnic tensions have been there are also disagreements over religion. The Arabs belong to the Maliki school of Islam while the Berbers are largely from the smaller Ibadi sect.
About 30 percent of Algerians are Berber, but the percentage is higher in the south. Ghardaia is an ancient Berber city of 90,000 that contains many Ibadi shrines. Berbers are found throughout North Africa, west of Egypt and down to the semi-desert Sahel (where the closely related Tuareg tribes live). The six million Berbers of Algeria are considered the most abused in the region. Ghardaia Arabs got the recent unrest started by desecrating some of these shrines. This led to violent Berber reprisals, especially when images of the damage appeared on the Internet. The government is concerned for several reasons. For one thing there are oil fields are nearby. Worse, the sustained unrest among the Berbers could be the first breeze in an uprising that could engulf the entire country.
Dartmouth economics professor Douglas Irwin has an excellent op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal — “The Ultimate Global Antipoverty Program,” with the subtitle “Extreme poverty fell to 15% in 2011, from 36% in 1990. Credit goes to the spread of capitalism.” Here’s an excerpt:
I've seen this first hand, and it's ignored for the "ain't it awful" stories of the day.The World Bank reported on Oct. 9 that the share of the world population living in extreme poverty had fallen to 15% in 2011 from 36% in 1990. Earlier this year, the International Labor Office reported that the number of workers in the world earning less than $1.25 a day has fallen to 375 million 2013 from 811 million in 1991.Such stunning news seems to have escaped public notice, but it means something extraordinary: The past 25 years have witnessed the greatest reduction in global poverty in the history of the world.To what should this be attributed? Official organizations noting the trend have tended to waffle, but let’s be blunt: The credit goes to the spread of capitalism. Over the past few decades, developing countries have embraced economic-policy reforms that have cleared the way for private enterprise.
if you wonder why "food poverty" is higher in rural areas, it is because often the farmers sell most of their crop for money (for school fees, clothing, etc) at harvest time, and then run out of their personal stash of rice. So "hunger season" is right before the harvest.
The proportion of households living below the official poverty line has declined slowly and unevenly from 59 percent in 1961 to below 39 percent in 1991 and around 36 percent in 1994. Urban poverty stood at around 23 percent in 1991 and rural poverty at 53 percent (by World Bank staff calculations). Food poverty (or those living below subsistence) was around 20 percent of households in 1991, but 32 percent of rural households while only 12 percent of urban households. Two-thirds of the poor are engaged in the agriculture, fishery, and forestry sectors and have an elementary school education or less. However, the depth of poverty is relatively small (with the poverty gap index only 17 percent in 1991, having fallen by 40 percent since 1961), and income disparities among the poor have declined noticeably.
One reason for China's success is lowering greenhouse gas emissions was that they implemented this practice (making me laugh at the naive westerners who didn't even mention this when they praised China's green policies).
Alternate wetting and drying is an agricultural practice whereby farmers allow their rice paddies to dry until the water table is below the soil surface before irrigating again. Compared with maintaining paddies in a continuously flooded state, this practice can lower water use by 25 per cent, and reduce energy use for pumping the irrigation water.
AWD also reduces methane emissions from rice production by 50 per cent or more because periodically aerobic soil conditions inhibit methane-producing soil bacteria.
If the fields are flooded in the traditional paddy method, she has found, the rice handily takes up arsenic. But if the water is reduced in an effort to limit arsenic, the plant instead absorbs cadmium — also a dangerous element.
“It’s almost either-or, day-and-night as to whether we see arsenic or cadmium in the rice,” said Dr. Guerinot, a molecular geneticist and professor of biology at Dartmouth College.
The levels of arsenic and cadmium at the study site are not high enough to provoke alarm, she emphasized. Still, it is dawning on scientists like her that rice, one of the most widely consumed foods in the world, is also one of nature’s great scavengers of metallic compounds.
Consumers have already become alarmed over reports of rice-borne arsenic in everything from cereal bars to baby food. Some food manufacturers have stepped up screening for arsenic in their products, and agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration now recommend that people eat a variety of grains to “minimize potential adverse health consequences from eating an excess of any one food.”
But it’s not just arsenic and cadmium, which are present in soil both as naturally occurring elements and as industrial byproducts. Recent studies have shown that rice is custom-built to pull a number of metals from the soil, among them mercury and even tungsten. The findings have led to a new push by scientists and growers to make the grain less susceptible to metal contamination.
The highest levels often occur in brown rice, because elements like arsenic accumulate in bran and husk, which are polished off in the processing of white rice. The Department of Agriculture estimates that on average arsenic levels are 10 times as high in rice bran as in polished rice.
The samples were analyzed using an inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectrometer (ICP-OES),and their arsenic levels were below the ICP-OES detection limit of 15 parts per billion (ppb).
The Philippines has not yet set a maximum limit of arsenic in rice. Australia and New Zealand (1000 ppb total arsenic in cereals) and China (150 ppb inorganic arsenic for rice and rice products) have set limits.
The global “normal” range for arsenic concentration in rice is 80-200 ppb. A study by Yamily Zavala and John Duxbury at Cornell University in New York revealed that arsenic concentrations in rice from the US and Europe were similar (198 ppb), and significantly higher than rice from Asia (70 ppb).
The Cornell study showed that arsenic-contaminated irrigation water, not soil, led to increased grain arsenic concentration. As rice is grown in flooded soils, it absorbs and stores a lot more arsenic compared to other plants through its roots.
"Frozen" as the Shining.
You'll notice the characters who meet their icy demise at the ends of these movies don't match up. Because love. When Anna sacrifices herself to save Elsa—despite the fact that Elsa almost killed her twice—she is able to save them both, teaching Elsa that love can conquer a cold death and help her control her dangerous wintery outbursts.
I mean, it's not "The Shining," y'all. It's Disney's "The Shining." So, Kristoff doesn't get an ax plunged into his chest, Olaf doesn't have to face "Heeeeere's Johnny!" and Anna and Elsa and Olaf and everyone can live happily ever after.
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| Meet the Cromartie Fool, the goofy man holding a kale stock. According to Celtic tradition, it was believed that this jester presided over Halloween festivities—many of which involved single men and women uprooting kale stalks to determine their future. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-halloween-tradition-best-left-dead-kale-as-matchmaker-100207686/#EXuYqlcPp2WfiMZz.99 Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter |
There are men who carry flaming barrels of tar through a Devon village, folk who pour cider over apple tree roots and cross-dressing troupes who perform something called Soul Caking to ward off evil spirits.
There is also a village in Somerset called Hinton St George which has a tradition of pumpkin carving and night-time walks that sounds remarkably similar to the Halloween rituals we all know.
but of course, instead of using her predicament to educate the public on the proper way to screen passengers (i.e. anyone testing positive should be pulled aside an the temperature rechecked), she is suing.
The bottom line is that this kind of remote fever sensing had poor positive predictive value, meaning that the proportion of people correctly identified as having fever was low, ranging from 10% to 16%. Thus there were a lot of false positives. Negative predictive value, the proportion of people classified by the IR device as not having fever who in fact did not have fever was high (97% to 99%), so not many people with fevers will be missed with the IR device. Predictive values depend not only on the accuracy of the device but also how prevalent fever is in the screened population. In the early days of a pandemic, fever prevalence will be very low, leading to low positive predictive value. The false positives produced at airport security would make the days of only taking off your shoes look good.
Targeted Isolation May Be the Most Effective Way to Reduce Transmission of Ebola
New research led by the Yale School of Public Health shows that isolating 75% of infected individuals in critical condition within four days of symptom onset has a high chance of eliminating the spread of Ebola.Isolating the most severely ill Ebola patients before the fifth day of their illness may be the most effective way to reduce transmission of the virus, new research led by the Yale School of Public Health suggests.
. The research is published October 28 in the Annals of Internal Medicine. ,,,--------------------------------
Dietary cocoa flavanols—naturally occurring bioactives found in cocoa—reversed age-related memory decline in healthy older adults, according to a study led by Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) scientists.
That word, “heartless,” is underused today. It raises the stakes on our idea of “feelings.” We have too many feelings, most of them fake. The genuine ones tend to be quite selfish. We “hurt” easily, we indulge, easily. Empathy and compassion are reduced to “feelings,” and our “concern” is to make the rich pay. The actual poor are subject to our feelings of irritation. When cornered, rhetorically, we may write a cheque, but it becomes a kind of blood money. Living as I do in Parkdale, I am conscious of the ignorance of one street for another, one house for another, one apartment to the apartment next door. I can understand it. I don’t want to know these people, either.which reminds me of how many of our Native American neighbors took in relatives who needed a place to stay, or raised the children of relatives and friends who had drug problem.
So that my heart breaks — I am “genuinely impressed” — when I see examples of personal outreach to the neighbours. Most often I see this in the form of one rather desperately poor person, spontaneously helping another. Such as offering him a cigarette. (The smuglies in government have made cigarettes expensive.) Such as “being there” when a man is fallen, and not just calling nine-one-one. Such as taking care of the crazies, hands on. Such as — and this is the most impressive thing I’ve seen — teaching a hopeless wretch the use of a rosary. Because that can change everything.
The powerful, feeling-filled bond between a mother and her child is a big part of what leads working mothers to take their child-rearing responsibilities more seriously than working fathers.
If this essential difference is the problem, if it is the root of gender equality in the workplace, and if our highest priority is to eliminate gender inequality, then ectogenesis offers a way forward.
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“I have great respect for Dr. Fauci, but what he’s counting on is a voluntary system with folks that may or may not comply,” said Christie, citing the example of an NBC News crew who returned from West Africa and violated their self-quarantine.
“This is government’s job,” Christie said. “If anything else, the government’s job is to protect the safety and health of our citizens.”
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The model developed by Galvani and colleagues projects as many as 170,996 total reported and unreported cases of the disease, representing 12% of the overall population of some 1.38 million people, and 90,122 deaths in Montserrado alone by December 15.... The study predicts that, at best, just over half as many cases (53,957) can be averted if the interventions are delayed to November 15. Had all of these measures been in place by October 15, the model calculates that 137,432 cases in Montserrado could have been avoided.
"European Scientists Conclude That Distant Comet Smells Terrible.""The European Space Agency has posted a full rundown of the comet's BO on its website. The mix includes ammonia (NH3), hydrogen sulphide (H2S), formaldehyde (CH2O) and methanol (CH3OH)."
Maybe they should quarantine anyone who is high risk, such as travelers from Saudi or those who had contact with camels.
The Saudi authorities have been faulted for having allowed MERS to proliferate, particularly in Jidda, Riyadh, the Saudi capital, and the holy city of Mecca, where pilgrims from the entire world converge for the annual hajj. Pilgrims are known to have spread the disease to Iran, Jordan and Algeria. The W.H.O. said that as of Friday, it had tallied 883 MERS cases worldwide, including at least 319 deaths. Most cases are in Saudi Arabia.
Archaeologists say they’ve found the highest-known remains of Ice Age human settlements in the southern Peruvian Andes, dated to more than 12,000 years old. The two sites, described in the journal Science, sit higher than 4,000 meters (more than 13,100 feet) above sea level and indicate that humans may have adapted to the extremely harsh climate far sooner than many researchers had expected.
...Above 13,100 feet, the thin air and treeless terrain offers little protection from the high solar radiation. There’s not much fuel to make fires, there’s much less oxygen available to breathe and it takes about twice the number of calories just to "maintain normal metabolic function," the study authors wrote.
For many archaeologists, these factors explain why human settlements higher than about 13,100 feet and older than 11,500 years of age have eluded them. It probably took a good amount of time for the genetic variations to arise in the population that would favor, among other traits, higher metabolic rates and more lung capacity – traits found in certain high-altitude populations today. And yet these high-altitude settlements were set up within about 2,000 years of humans’ first arrival in South America. Whether they had developed the ideal traits or not, clearly humans didn't take that long to settle in (or, in this case, settle up).
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| This image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, taken in infrared light, shows where the action is taking place in galaxy NGC 1291 (NASA/JPL/Spitzer) |
 | Walter Isaacson | The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution Recorded 10/20/2014 Listen to MP3 audio |
And yes, they can fly. They seem very large but they weigh only about eight to ten pounds, the size of a large roasting chicken such as the Jersey Giant. They have a broad wing spread that gives them the “lift” they need. The tail, folded as it usually is, flops along through the air behind them, looking rather silly.
The unidentified man was looking for non-ferrous metals at a dump in the Tomsk region on Saturday when he was spotted by the bear, which immediately rushed toward him, the Interfax news agency reported Monday, citing local ranger Sergei Yelnikov.
When the man saw the bear coming, he picked up a computer that was lying nearby and threw it at the animal, before both ran away in opposite directions, the report said....
This is not the first instance of technology coming to the rescue in the case of a bear attack.
In July, a man in the eastern Sakha republic had an extremely lucky escape after his phone turned on as he was being mauled by a bear.
The phone's startup noise was enough to frighten away the beast, and the man, who had sustained a bite wound to his head, escaped with his life.
This bomb was part of a bizarre and desperate scheme to give the Americans and Canadians a taste of the bombings they were inflicting on Japan and Germany. In November 1944 the Japanese Army's "Special Balloon Regiment" began releasing the first of over 9,000 hydrogen filled balloons. These were expected to float with the prevailing westerly winds all the way from Japan to the west coast of North America. Each carried an 18 kg (40 pound) bomb that would explode on landing, injuring anyone in the vicinity or starting a fire. It was believed that these bombs would cause forest fires in the heavily wooded northeast coast of the United States and across the border in British Colombia. At least 300 (and perhaps as many as a thousand) of the balloons actually did reach North America, but only three are known to have caused any damage. This amounted to six dead civilians and two brush fires. The Japanese apparently missed the fact that most of this area was thinly populated and also a rare “temperate rain forest.” The region is very damp most of the time and not conducive to wild fires.
The second half of the show was hot with talk of western droughts, oil rigs outpacing coral reefs for fish productivity, giant carnivorous kangaroos, a new idea about asymmetry involving the Higgs particle, Ebola updates, and why we dance when we hold our pee.
Firestone implemented administrative and environmental modifications to convert an outpatient health clinic separated from the main hospital to meet the infection control standards of an Ebola treatment unit (ETU) following guidance developed by Médecins Sans Frontières (Figure 3) (1). The facility can house 23 patients, including those separated as having confirmed, probable, or suspected Ebola (Figure 3). By April 9, Firestone had completed the construction and certification of its ETU.
Patients with suspected Ebola were sent to the ETU. From August 1 to September 23, three patients were sent to the ETU with suspected Ebola following this screening protocol; one of the three had confirmed Ebola.the article also goes on how teams monitored contacts as outpatients...if you want the details go read the whole thing.
Additional triage was conducted to prioritize patients who required hospitalization but were not suspected of having Ebola based on their signs and symptoms. Patients who had some signs or symptoms of Ebola but not those meeting the national Ebola case definition were isolated in a single, dedicated room. HCWs used standard precautions (combined features of universal precautions and body substance isolation depending on levels of care required during hospital admission) (2) and periodically screened for additional signs and symptoms of Ebola throughout the hospital admission. Patients with illnesses subsequently meeting criteria for suspected Ebola were transferred to the ETU. During August 1–September 23, 10 patients initially admitted for care at the hospital with non-Ebola diagnoses were housed in individual rooms. Among the 10 patients, four had suspected Ebola and were transferred to the ETU; three of the four were eventually confirmed as having Ebola. After establishing this secondary triage of patients admitted for standard non-Ebola care, no additional high-risk exposures were identified among HCWs.
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Acclaimed photographer Steve McCurry is documenting the abuse of migrant domestic workers from Asia as part of his latest project. McCurry, who is known for iconic photos such as Afghan Girl (1985) has captured images of women who have returned from stints as domestic workers in the Far East and Middle East with disturbing stories of physical, mental and sexual abuse.
The images make for unsettling viewing – you can see a selection of them here. (NYTimes link).
