It was one of the first things a professor of Population Genetics taught us upon entering his class. No, not a hush-hush "Here's the real truth" conspiracy revelation -- rather, it was wrong in the sense that it represented a simplified sub-set of modern understanding. Evolutionary Theory had moved so far forward from Darwin's time, that those in the field referred to the current body of work as Neo-Darwinian Evolution, incorporating modern insights and knowledge that fundamentally changed our understanding.
For instance, consider Kimura's Theory of Neutral Evolution. You probably learned in grade school that most mutations are bad, and a few are good, right? Kimura posited that instead, a few are bad, a very few are good, but most do not affect an organism's fitness, they are "neutral". It sounds like a trivial observation, but it has enormous consequences for genetics as a statistical science. For instance, it is one of the vital components that contribute to the genetic signature of Linkage Disequilibrium, which allows us to spot selection pressure on the genetic scale, with the practical application of drawing our attention to portions of the genome likely to be interesting.
A large segment of the public sees Evolution as being a field of dusty bones, with little more consequence and applicability than Kipling's Just-so Stories. On the contrary, without evolutionary theory, nothing in the statistics of genetics makes sense; understand it allows you to make predictions vital to new hypothesis-forming, and in some cases even test them. A dynamic, fascinating field of study is being ignored in the debate, and that's the real tragedy.
Check out Richard Feynman's lecture regarding space-time and his analogy of bugs on a sphere. If you tell them that the rule for making a square is to go N units in one direction, then turn 90 degrees and repeat until you complete the square, they would find that they cannot actually make a square. This leads them to conclude that there is "something wrong" with their space.
I haven't actually seen the lecture you're talking about, but just from the description I can already start to understand his sense of humor, in that we humans literally are the bugs living on the sphere. We just don't notice that the squares we "draw" all the time basis are wrong, because we don't draw them big enough; which I suppose is analogous to the issue of physics wierd-ness being un-noticed until you zoom into the really small scale (or into the really high-energy scales).
If you want to know results, try Venezuela. A year ago, they removed the guns from private citizen's hands because of escalating violence. Their crime rate is now 1/1000 (yes, ten cubed) what it was before the gun ban.
Assuming the official statistics can be trusted, that is. The article I'm quoting is a few years old, but it points out some problems that were already occurring, regarding the country's response to the exploding homicide rate:
The government, however, seems less concerned with reducing the crime rate than with preventing press coverage of it. The main detective corps, known as the CICPC, closed its press office years ago, forcing crime reporters to meet under a nearby tree. In response to El Nacional's morgue photo, it announced that it would request that the paper be prosecuted for violating children's right not to be exposed to violent images. Police officers were stationed at the morgue to prevent any repetition.
How many of these people still have their tonsils? I recall reading in one of the journals, probably on arxxiv and phys.org too, that there is some supporting data showing essentially a second immune system just for the mouth.
BTW, what people commonly refer to as "tonsils" are actually just the palatine tonsils, which are part of an entire loose "ring" of lymphoid tissue encircling the pharynx that includes the pharyngeal tonsils (adenoids), tubal tonsils, lingual tonsils, and patchy bits of un-named Mucosa-associated Lymphoid Tissue (MALT) in between.
haven't read TFA, but could also mean those who get their carries fixed have more bitewing x-rays, which increases radiation to the head.
Because radiation prevents cancer???
He's saying that people who go to the dentist regularly (to get some cavities fixed) get fewer cavities overall thanks to better care, but they also get more dental X-rays. The amount of radiation in a dental X-ray is super-small and generally not considered a cancer risk; however, there's been growing use of Dental CT scans, which actually require a substantial dose to obtain.
If you can posit a mechanism where a vaccine against a virus might restore your tcell count but leave the virus untouched, you might have a point, but there is no such mechanism.
Vaccine, no. But some other techniques might result in such a situation; gene-therapy to produce a functional CCR5-delta32-like state of resistance might do it, if the result was a mixed population of both altered and unaltered T-cells.
While no succesful implementation of a therapy currently exists, the strategy is thought to be sound, given the success of the Berlin Patient example, which used a transplant of naturally occurring CCR5-delta32 bone-marrow. Unlike the Berlin Patient however (who was a leukemia patient to begin with), complete eradication of original host immune system before therapy is likely too risky for general use, which is why I think a mixed susceptible/resistant system afterwards is a more likely outcome.
Of course, this assumes that having a population of some (instead of all) HIV-resistant T-cells is sufficient to protect against the more serious consequences of AIDS. It may not be a true assumption, given that we now know HIV has cytopathological effects beyond that of killing CD4 cells.
As someone who actually worked on (albeit briefly) an HIV vaccine candidate, I'd like to comment that there have been a number of successful anti-SIV vaccines already, each of which have gone on to miserable -- and expensive -- failures when the underlying technology was applied to an HIV vaccine. And for those candidates that actually made it to human trials before failure, each attempt had a human cost as well (conspiracy theorists, go fuck yourselves).
That being said, the approach used is rather clever, if someone risky. The technique used is what is known as a "Heterologous Antigen" delivery, but in this case it has been combined with a persistent agent that establishes a life-long infection. The vector used was Rhesus Cytomegalovirus, which has a analogous human virus known as Human Cytomegalovirus, aka Herpesvirus-5.
CMV is a very common infection (in some countries 90+%, although somewhat lower in the United States). It's generally considered harmless to healthy individuals, and most pick it up during childhood, where it is commonly passed around in daycare centers and such. Initial symptoms are usually mild and non-specific (although in some individuals it can produce Mono-like symptoms), and typically afterwards the viral infection is well-controlled with no further signs of infection. Unlike some more famous members of the Herpesvirus family, it does not produce any sores or vesicles or such.
However, on occasion it can be dangerous, as one of the infectious agents that can sometimes result in TORCH syndrome effects (like the infamous "Blueberry Muffin Baby") when primary infections (first encounter with the infectious agent for an individual) occurs in a pregnant women. It can also be dangerous in immunosuppressed individuals, such as organ transplant recipients and advanced AIDS patients.
While the biomass energy of each trophic level decreases to roughly 10% of the level it predominantly feeds upon, carbon sequestration is not coupled with this. If it were, there would be no carrion, crap, or bird droppings in the forest. Only the carbon exhaled as CO2 escapes the ecosystem; the rest is recycled through bacteria, fungi, and other saprophytes and effectively stays sequestered.
You are correct that the relationship between energy transfer and carbon transfer is not directly proportional, but it is definitely related in a way that might be easier to understand if I explain it in an alternate fashion. Think of it this way -- Primary photosynthetic producers must capture and inject energy into H2O and CO2 substrates, to produce useful molecules which have higher energy (less stable) C-C and H-C bonds (and yes, many other types of bonds eventually, but this is where the initial captured chemical energy goes, before being converted to other things).
No matter who or what they've been in, any bonds which are not eventually returned to their original state (oxidized back to H2O and CO2) represent energy retained in the system; if you were to somehow take all the left-over organic matter and oxidize it in a bomb calorimeter, you'd get an measurement of that "missing" chemical energy retained in the system that wasn't spent by all the various organisms (while they were busy eating each other).
For that matter, some of the CO2 that is exhaled is recaptured through photosynthesis before it has left the physical dimensions of the ecosystem. This stuff is not simple.
Yes, Carbon can get recycled many times before it "goes back" into a non-biological reservoir such as the global atmosphere. When coupled together with biological isotopic preference effects, you get changes in the Delta13C signal. Combining this with some other information, it thus becomes possible to get an approximation of how much recycling is going on.
That's the choice really. We recently had a leader who was all about pouring out a Bajillion Dollars on desert sand, to look Strong and Decisive.
Now all we have to do is put up with one willing to look "weak and indecisive" to save us a Bajillion Dollars on another patch of desert sand. I don't have a problem with that.
The idea behind the chemical weapon aversion AFAIK is that unlike bullets-- which are great on a battlefield-- chemical weapons have a tendency to be at least as damaging to the civilian populations as they are to the military, and often moreso.
More like the problem that it turns warfare into an exercise in Pest Control. Quite literally -- nerve gas is just pesticide tuned for the human nervous system.
The idealized version of warfare is one which you have a conflict that ends with 1 Army functional, 1 Army broken, and 2 Civilian populations relatively intact. In practice it doesn't happen quite that way, but our International Conventions are intended to try to keep it as close as possible to this ideal.
With Chemical Warfare taken to its extreme, the outcome is a war in which you end up with 2 opposing Armies remaining, but each with zero Civilian populations left to defend.
There is a gap the size of the Formosan Straight between "non-military" and "peaceful", and everyone involved knows that the Superweapon that will be deployed in the upcoming conflict is Money.
As far as I can tell, the KMT's main plan is to play for time and hope the PRC becomes more democratic as it develops, while developing tourism and cultural exchange with the general public of the Mainland. This reduces the risk of an open conflict and has allowed for a diplomatic "cease-fire" (where the PRC has slowed -- but not stopped -- its efforts to diplomatically isolate Taiwan and exclude it from international organizations). On the downside, the strategy also puts Taiwan in ever-increasing danger of being economically absorbed, and the PRC knows and takes advantage of this.
The DPP's strategy seems to favor edging towards an independent identity, going just far enough each time to trigger the PRC into counter-productive retaliations that alarm the international community, and reduce already-low opinion of the PRC government both domestically and abroad. Seeing as how the PRC usually takes the bait, it's a dangerous game with a lot of potential economic consequences. It also causes big political headaches for the US, which in principle supports Taiwan, but probably would like to pay as little of an economic and military cost as possible in doing so.
Basically the only ones who claim to know for sure is the US govt
Russian govt as well -- if they don't have Syrian communications thoroughly compromised at this point, then Putin needs to shoot whoever is in charge of the job.
Of course, what their government chooses to say to the rest of the world is an entirely different matter from what they know, and this goes for any of the major global powers.
"Fix poverty". Which immediately leads to the question, *how* do you fix poverty?
Good question and history (as it so often does) provides us with some instructive examples; the war on Hookworm which took place (as related in books such as The Germ of Laziness).
In the early 20th century, Hookworm eradication was seen as a key part of anti-poverty initiatives aimed at the South and the Appalachians, due to the anemia and energy-sapping effects of heavy infestation that left its victims too fatigued to do much work. Combined with the public-health initiatives were large-scale development projects such as those part of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
While poverty still remains with us today, the combined development and public-health push was largely successful in eliminating the the most desperately impoverished pockets of 3rd-world-tier poverty that existed at that time, and has left a legacy of infrastructure which we still benefit from today.
By allowing HIV to spread, the Africans will evolve HIV resistance. In the mean time, the high mortality rates will prevent oversupply of labor, resulting in better wages and working conditions for African laborers.
It's actually the caucasians that have the HIV resistance. 1 out of 10 have one gene mutation making it more difficult to contract HIV and 1 out of 100 have both genes mutated making them immune to HIV.
That would be the famous CCR5-Delta32 mutation, which is present at a frequency of about 4-16% in populations of European decent. Assuming Wikipedia is correct, the frequency of CCR5-Delta32 homozygous individuals would thus be 0.16% to 2.56% assuming Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium.
However, there are also other non-CCR5 traits which confer varying degrees of HIV resistance.
The real problem is this kind of complicated, expensive and dangerous "solution" when simply introducing other crops that naturally provide vitamin D would fix the issue.
Yes, there are so many other food choices that would fix the problem. As it is in the US -- I hear it all the time that. If only people would eat this and not that we'd fix Obesity, Colon Cancer, Heart Disease, etc. And then take a look around and see how much progress we've made as the public health message goes out decade after decade.
If only, if only, if only. How well does if only work in the 3rd world? Well, regardless of how well it works, it'll have to do the job.
And while I can't say for sure how many families will decide to eat Golden Rice voluntarily, the question doesn't matter as long as it remains a locked up as a laboratory curiosity, because we've already made the decision for them.
Reminds me of that old joke about the US spending millions of dollars to develop a pen which can write in space, and the Soviet cosmonauts simply using a pencil.
I love that anecdote, because the punchline is that graphite particles are electrically conductive, and in microgravity will float around, posing a short-circuiting hazard. The Soviets ended up adopting pressurized-pen technology in 1969.
The government in Beijing has been trying to convert the Cantonese-speaking part of the country (which includes Hong Kong) to Mandarin since Mao's day, without much success. Due to development, internal migration, improved transportation and communications, and pressure from the central government, Mandarin is finally displacing Cantonese in some areas.
The process has been going on for far longer than that. A number of ancient poems that do not rhyme in modern Mandarin Chinese will do so when spoken in Cantonese.
The article linked briefly mentioned the existing newborn screening program (Inborn errors of metabolism screening), but I'd like to discuss it a bit further. This is a long-existing program in the US which is administered at the state level, which means the particular regulations and included diseases vary; some states have far more extensive testing than others.
The program is mandatory (usually with some form of parental opt-out), and checks for certain rare genetic diseases, the proto-typical example of which was phenylketonuria -- a metabolic defect that will lead to seizures and mental retardation if allowed to progress, but if treated early (by adhering to a strict diet) will allow a for a relatively normal level of intelligence and life-span. As time and medical understanding progressed, numerous other diseases have been recommended as well: http://www.acog.org/Resources%20And%20Publications/Committee%20Opinions/Committee%20on%20Genetics/Newborn%20Screening.aspx
From a public health perspective, one issue is that the cost of the program has to be balanced against the relative benefit; since each new test added is state-wide, the cost quickly adds up. And, everyone likes saving babies (especially disease-specific foundations, lawyers, and politicians), there's pressure to add conditions which are extremely rare, to the point that one additional "saved" baby can cost multi-millions of dollars.
While a sequencing at birth could potentially replace most of these individual tests, there's quite a bit of scope for feature-creep as to what is required to be done with the data afterwards. I could see this becoming very expensive indeed.
Whose thumb is that? I'm not just being clever, I'd like a pointer to that discussion. It looks like I might learn something. In other words, citation needed!
It is the case that the biomass of each trophic level decreases from the base of the chain to the top. This is because energy is lost to the environment with each transfer as entropy increases. About eighty to ninety percent of the energy is expended for the organism’s life processes or is lost as heat or waste. Only about ten to twenty percent of the organism’s energy is generally passed to the next organism. The amount can be less than one percent in animals consuming less digestible plants, and it can be as high as forty percent in zooplankton consuming phytoplankton. Graphic representations of the biomass or productivity at each tropic level are called ecological pyramids or trophic pyramids. The transfer of energy from primary producers to top consumers can also be characterized by energy flow diagrams.
Rotting vegetation does not release all the carbon that was sequestered during growth into the atmosphere. Much of it is transformed into other living things: termites and other insects, nematodes, fungus, etc. A log in contact with dirt becomes more soil; it does not evaporate into gases. The carbon is sequestered for as long as the ecosystem remains healthy and growing.
A rule of thumb is that roughly 10% of total energy acquired by an organism is transferred to the next trophic level, when that organism is consumed. While energy and fixed carbon aren't entirely synonymous entities, they are connected, and I would expect to see a similar order-of-magnitude effect in this case.
It is possible, however, that he is not in complete control of his own forces. Suppose that some unit of his military resorted to gas weapons out of fear, anger, or desperation? Not just a rogue unit (which could be thrown under the bus), but perhaps critical high-ranking members of his military. Or, if the action were supported afterwards by a sufficiently large segment of his troops, regardless of who pulled the trigger -- there's no way he could repudiate the action afterwards and survive, when they're all that's keeping him alive right now.
In that case, it would be technically true that Assad was not behind the attack. Still doesn't give us any better policy options though, unfortunately.
I would recommend autonomous car makers stay out of the litigious US market initially, and focus their initial launch on some place like Singapore.
It has: 1) No Snow, which is still causes difficult problem for autonomous vehicles. 2) Highly structured environment. It is a nation that essentially consists of a single, highly-organized city. 3) That single city has a government that operates as a sovereign entity, and can adapt its legal framework to accommodate the cars. 4) That sovereign entity has demonstrated itself to be business friendly (sometimes at the expense of the individual). 5) Has car owners who are accustomed to accepting extensive government regulation and oversight.
Much as I would love the idea of having a self-driving car myself, I can't see how such a thing is compatible with American Society.
Slashdot Mirror
only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.
Just imagine if there had been a Tin Whisker shorting that switch.
The funny thing is, Darwinian Evolution is wrong.
It was one of the first things a professor of Population Genetics taught us upon entering his class. No, not a hush-hush "Here's the real truth" conspiracy revelation -- rather, it was wrong in the sense that it represented a simplified sub-set of modern understanding. Evolutionary Theory had moved so far forward from Darwin's time, that those in the field referred to the current body of work as Neo-Darwinian Evolution, incorporating modern insights and knowledge that fundamentally changed our understanding.
For instance, consider Kimura's Theory of Neutral Evolution. You probably learned in grade school that most mutations are bad, and a few are good, right? Kimura posited that instead, a few are bad, a very few are good, but most do not affect an organism's fitness, they are "neutral". It sounds like a trivial observation, but it has enormous consequences for genetics as a statistical science. For instance, it is one of the vital components that contribute to the genetic signature of Linkage Disequilibrium, which allows us to spot selection pressure on the genetic scale, with the practical application of drawing our attention to portions of the genome likely to be interesting.
A large segment of the public sees Evolution as being a field of dusty bones, with little more consequence and applicability than Kipling's Just-so Stories. On the contrary, without evolutionary theory, nothing in the statistics of genetics makes sense; understand it allows you to make predictions vital to new hypothesis-forming, and in some cases even test them. A dynamic, fascinating field of study is being ignored in the debate, and that's the real tragedy.
Wait a second...yeah me to
Psst... the second "o" at the end there just happens to be tucked away in an extra dimension the rest of you can't see. :)
Check out Richard Feynman's lecture regarding space-time and his analogy of bugs on a sphere. If you tell them that the rule for making a square is to go N units in one direction, then turn 90 degrees and repeat until you complete the square, they would find that they cannot actually make a square. This leads them to conclude that there is "something wrong" with their space.
I haven't actually seen the lecture you're talking about, but just from the description I can already start to understand his sense of humor, in that we humans literally are the bugs living on the sphere. We just don't notice that the squares we "draw" all the time basis are wrong, because we don't draw them big enough; which I suppose is analogous to the issue of physics wierd-ness being un-noticed until you zoom into the really small scale (or into the really high-energy scales).
If you want to know results, try Venezuela. A year ago, they removed the guns from private citizen's hands because of escalating violence. Their crime rate is now 1/1000 (yes, ten cubed) what it was before the gun ban.
Assuming the official statistics can be trusted, that is. The article I'm quoting is a few years old, but it points out some problems that were already occurring, regarding the country's response to the exploding homicide rate:
http://www.economist.com/node/21009630
The government, however, seems less concerned with reducing the crime rate than with preventing press coverage of it. The main detective corps, known as the CICPC, closed its press office years ago, forcing crime reporters to meet under a nearby tree. In response to El Nacional's morgue photo, it announced that it would request that the paper be prosecuted for violating children's right not to be exposed to violent images. Police officers were stationed at the morgue to prevent any repetition.
or people who fail to take care of their teeth happen to do something else beneficial.
Here's another possibility beyond what people have already mentioned -- People with bad teeth may have less oral sex. No, I'm serious:
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/kimmel_cancer_center/centers/head_neck/HPV_and_head_and_neck_cancer/hpv.html
How many of these people still have their tonsils? I recall reading in one of the journals, probably on arxxiv and phys.org too, that there is some supporting data showing essentially a second immune system just for the mouth.
BTW, what people commonly refer to as "tonsils" are actually just the palatine tonsils, which are part of an entire loose "ring" of lymphoid tissue encircling the pharynx that includes the pharyngeal tonsils (adenoids), tubal tonsils, lingual tonsils, and patchy bits of un-named Mucosa-associated Lymphoid Tissue (MALT) in between.
haven't read TFA, but could also mean those who get their carries fixed have more bitewing x-rays, which increases radiation to the head.
Because radiation prevents cancer???
He's saying that people who go to the dentist regularly (to get some cavities fixed) get fewer cavities overall thanks to better care, but they also get more dental X-rays. The amount of radiation in a dental X-ray is super-small and generally not considered a cancer risk; however, there's been growing use of Dental CT scans, which actually require a substantial dose to obtain.
If you can posit a mechanism where a vaccine against a virus might restore your tcell count but leave the virus untouched, you might have a point, but there is no such mechanism.
Vaccine, no. But some other techniques might result in such a situation; gene-therapy to produce a functional CCR5-delta32-like state of resistance might do it, if the result was a mixed population of both altered and unaltered T-cells.
While no succesful implementation of a therapy currently exists, the strategy is thought to be sound, given the success of the Berlin Patient example, which used a transplant of naturally occurring CCR5-delta32 bone-marrow. Unlike the Berlin Patient however (who was a leukemia patient to begin with), complete eradication of original host immune system before therapy is likely too risky for general use, which is why I think a mixed susceptible/resistant system afterwards is a more likely outcome.
Of course, this assumes that having a population of some (instead of all) HIV-resistant T-cells is sufficient to protect against the more serious consequences of AIDS. It may not be a true assumption, given that we now know HIV has cytopathological effects beyond that of killing CD4 cells.
As someone who actually worked on (albeit briefly) an HIV vaccine candidate, I'd like to comment that there have been a number of successful anti-SIV vaccines already, each of which have gone on to miserable -- and expensive -- failures when the underlying technology was applied to an HIV vaccine. And for those candidates that actually made it to human trials before failure, each attempt had a human cost as well (conspiracy theorists, go fuck yourselves).
That being said, the approach used is rather clever, if someone risky. The technique used is what is known as a "Heterologous Antigen" delivery, but in this case it has been combined with a persistent agent that establishes a life-long infection. The vector used was Rhesus Cytomegalovirus, which has a analogous human virus known as Human Cytomegalovirus, aka Herpesvirus-5.
CMV is a very common infection (in some countries 90+%, although somewhat lower in the United States). It's generally considered harmless to healthy individuals, and most pick it up during childhood, where it is commonly passed around in daycare centers and such. Initial symptoms are usually mild and non-specific (although in some individuals it can produce Mono-like symptoms), and typically afterwards the viral infection is well-controlled with no further signs of infection. Unlike some more famous members of the Herpesvirus family, it does not produce any sores or vesicles or such.
However, on occasion it can be dangerous, as one of the infectious agents that can sometimes result in TORCH syndrome effects (like the infamous "Blueberry Muffin Baby") when primary infections (first encounter with the infectious agent for an individual) occurs in a pregnant women. It can also be dangerous in immunosuppressed individuals, such as organ transplant recipients and advanced AIDS patients.
While the biomass energy of each trophic level decreases to roughly 10% of the level it predominantly feeds upon, carbon sequestration is not coupled with this. If it were, there would be no carrion, crap, or bird droppings in the forest. Only the carbon exhaled as CO2 escapes the ecosystem; the rest is recycled through bacteria, fungi, and other saprophytes and effectively stays sequestered.
You are correct that the relationship between energy transfer and carbon transfer is not directly proportional, but it is definitely related in a way that might be easier to understand if I explain it in an alternate fashion. Think of it this way -- Primary photosynthetic producers must capture and inject energy into H2O and CO2 substrates, to produce useful molecules which have higher energy (less stable) C-C and H-C bonds (and yes, many other types of bonds eventually, but this is where the initial captured chemical energy goes, before being converted to other things).
No matter who or what they've been in, any bonds which are not eventually returned to their original state (oxidized back to H2O and CO2) represent energy retained in the system; if you were to somehow take all the left-over organic matter and oxidize it in a bomb calorimeter, you'd get an measurement of that "missing" chemical energy retained in the system that wasn't spent by all the various organisms (while they were busy eating each other).
For that matter, some of the CO2 that is exhaled is recaptured through photosynthesis before it has left the physical dimensions of the ecosystem. This stuff is not simple.
Yes, Carbon can get recycled many times before it "goes back" into a non-biological reservoir such as the global atmosphere. When coupled together with biological isotopic preference effects, you get changes in the Delta13C signal. Combining this with some other information, it thus becomes possible to get an approximation of how much recycling is going on.
That's the choice really. We recently had a leader who was all about pouring out a Bajillion Dollars on desert sand, to look Strong and Decisive.
Now all we have to do is put up with one willing to look "weak and indecisive" to save us a Bajillion Dollars on another patch of desert sand. I don't have a problem with that.
The idea behind the chemical weapon aversion AFAIK is that unlike bullets-- which are great on a battlefield-- chemical weapons have a tendency to be at least as damaging to the civilian populations as they are to the military, and often moreso.
More like the problem that it turns warfare into an exercise in Pest Control. Quite literally -- nerve gas is just pesticide tuned for the human nervous system.
The idealized version of warfare is one which you have a conflict that ends with 1 Army functional, 1 Army broken, and 2 Civilian populations relatively intact. In practice it doesn't happen quite that way, but our International Conventions are intended to try to keep it as close as possible to this ideal.
With Chemical Warfare taken to its extreme, the outcome is a war in which you end up with 2 opposing Armies remaining, but each with zero Civilian populations left to defend.
Peacefully/diplomatically
There is a gap the size of the Formosan Straight between "non-military" and "peaceful", and everyone involved knows that the Superweapon that will be deployed in the upcoming conflict is Money.
As far as I can tell, the KMT's main plan is to play for time and hope the PRC becomes more democratic as it develops, while developing tourism and cultural exchange with the general public of the Mainland. This reduces the risk of an open conflict and has allowed for a diplomatic "cease-fire" (where the PRC has slowed -- but not stopped -- its efforts to diplomatically isolate Taiwan and exclude it from international organizations). On the downside, the strategy also puts Taiwan in ever-increasing danger of being economically absorbed, and the PRC knows and takes advantage of this.
The DPP's strategy seems to favor edging towards an independent identity, going just far enough each time to trigger the PRC into counter-productive retaliations that alarm the international community, and reduce already-low opinion of the PRC government both domestically and abroad. Seeing as how the PRC usually takes the bait, it's a dangerous game with a lot of potential economic consequences. It also causes big political headaches for the US, which in principle supports Taiwan, but probably would like to pay as little of an economic and military cost as possible in doing so.
Basically the only ones who claim to know for sure is the US govt
Russian govt as well -- if they don't have Syrian communications thoroughly compromised at this point, then Putin needs to shoot whoever is in charge of the job.
Of course, what their government chooses to say to the rest of the world is an entirely different matter from what they know, and this goes for any of the major global powers.
"Fix poverty". Which immediately leads to the question, *how* do you fix poverty?
Good question and history (as it so often does) provides us with some instructive examples; the war on Hookworm which took place (as related in books such as The Germ of Laziness).
In the early 20th century, Hookworm eradication was seen as a key part of anti-poverty initiatives aimed at the South and the Appalachians, due to the anemia and energy-sapping effects of heavy infestation that left its victims too fatigued to do much work. Combined with the public-health initiatives were large-scale development projects such as those part of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
While poverty still remains with us today, the combined development and public-health push was largely successful in eliminating the the most desperately impoverished pockets of 3rd-world-tier poverty that existed at that time, and has left a legacy of infrastructure which we still benefit from today.
By allowing HIV to spread, the Africans will evolve HIV resistance. In the mean time, the high mortality rates will prevent oversupply of labor, resulting in better wages and working conditions for African laborers.
It's actually the caucasians that have the HIV resistance. 1 out of 10 have one gene mutation making it more difficult to contract HIV and 1 out of 100 have both genes mutated making them immune to HIV.
That would be the famous CCR5-Delta32 mutation, which is present at a frequency of about 4-16% in populations of European decent. Assuming Wikipedia is correct, the frequency of CCR5-Delta32 homozygous individuals would thus be 0.16% to 2.56% assuming Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium.
However, there are also other non-CCR5 traits which confer varying degrees of HIV resistance.
The real problem is this kind of complicated, expensive and dangerous "solution" when simply introducing other crops that naturally provide vitamin D would fix the issue.
Yes, there are so many other food choices that would fix the problem. As it is in the US -- I hear it all the time that. If only people would eat this and not that we'd fix Obesity, Colon Cancer, Heart Disease, etc. And then take a look around and see how much progress we've made as the public health message goes out decade after decade.
If only, if only, if only. How well does if only work in the 3rd world? Well, regardless of how well it works, it'll have to do the job.
And while I can't say for sure how many families will decide to eat Golden Rice voluntarily, the question doesn't matter as long as it remains a locked up as a laboratory curiosity, because we've already made the decision for them.
Reminds me of that old joke about the US spending millions of dollars to develop a pen which can write in space, and the Soviet cosmonauts simply using a pencil.
I love that anecdote, because the punchline is that graphite particles are electrically conductive, and in microgravity will float around, posing a short-circuiting hazard. The Soviets ended up adopting pressurized-pen technology in 1969.
The government in Beijing has been trying to convert the Cantonese-speaking part of the country (which includes Hong Kong) to Mandarin since Mao's day, without much success. Due to development, internal migration, improved transportation and communications, and pressure from the central government, Mandarin is finally displacing Cantonese in some areas.
The process has been going on for far longer than that. A number of ancient poems that do not rhyme in modern Mandarin Chinese will do so when spoken in Cantonese.
The article linked briefly mentioned the existing newborn screening program (Inborn errors of metabolism screening), but I'd like to discuss it a bit further. This is a long-existing program in the US which is administered at the state level, which means the particular regulations and included diseases vary; some states have far more extensive testing than others.
The program is mandatory (usually with some form of parental opt-out), and checks for certain rare genetic diseases, the proto-typical example of which was phenylketonuria -- a metabolic defect that will lead to seizures and mental retardation if allowed to progress, but if treated early (by adhering to a strict diet) will allow a for a relatively normal level of intelligence and life-span. As time and medical understanding progressed, numerous other diseases have been recommended as well:
http://www.acog.org/Resources%20And%20Publications/Committee%20Opinions/Committee%20on%20Genetics/Newborn%20Screening.aspx
From a public health perspective, one issue is that the cost of the program has to be balanced against the relative benefit; since each new test added is state-wide, the cost quickly adds up. And, everyone likes saving babies (especially disease-specific foundations, lawyers, and politicians), there's pressure to add conditions which are extremely rare, to the point that one additional "saved" baby can cost multi-millions of dollars.
While a sequencing at birth could potentially replace most of these individual tests, there's quite a bit of scope for feature-creep as to what is required to be done with the data afterwards. I could see this becoming very expensive indeed.
Whose thumb is that? I'm not just being clever, I'd like a pointer to that discussion. It looks like I might learn something. In other words, citation needed!
Hmm... well, a good start might be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_web#Energy_flow_and_biomass
It is the case that the biomass of each trophic level decreases from the base of the chain to the top. This is because energy is lost to the environment with each transfer as entropy increases. About eighty to ninety percent of the energy is expended for the organism’s life processes or is lost as heat or waste. Only about ten to twenty percent of the organism’s energy is generally passed to the next organism. The amount can be less than one percent in animals consuming less digestible plants, and it can be as high as forty percent in zooplankton consuming phytoplankton. Graphic representations of the biomass or productivity at each tropic level are called ecological pyramids or trophic pyramids. The transfer of energy from primary producers to top consumers can also be characterized by energy flow diagrams.
Rotting vegetation does not release all the carbon that was sequestered during growth into the atmosphere. Much of it is transformed into other living things: termites and other insects, nematodes, fungus, etc. A log in contact with dirt becomes more soil; it does not evaporate into gases. The carbon is sequestered for as long as the ecosystem remains healthy and growing.
A rule of thumb is that roughly 10% of total energy acquired by an organism is transferred to the next trophic level, when that organism is consumed. While energy and fixed carbon aren't entirely synonymous entities, they are connected, and I would expect to see a similar order-of-magnitude effect in this case.
3) He is not a retard
It is possible, however, that he is not in complete control of his own forces. Suppose that some unit of his military resorted to gas weapons out of fear, anger, or desperation? Not just a rogue unit (which could be thrown under the bus), but perhaps critical high-ranking members of his military. Or, if the action were supported afterwards by a sufficiently large segment of his troops, regardless of who pulled the trigger -- there's no way he could repudiate the action afterwards and survive, when they're all that's keeping him alive right now.
In that case, it would be technically true that Assad was not behind the attack. Still doesn't give us any better policy options though, unfortunately.
World is full of stupid people.
So meet me at the mission at midnight, we'll divvy up there.
I would recommend autonomous car makers stay out of the litigious US market initially, and focus their initial launch on some place like Singapore.
It has:
1) No Snow, which is still causes difficult problem for autonomous vehicles.
2) Highly structured environment. It is a nation that essentially consists of a single, highly-organized city.
3) That single city has a government that operates as a sovereign entity, and can adapt its legal framework to accommodate the cars.
4) That sovereign entity has demonstrated itself to be business friendly (sometimes at the expense of the individual).
5) Has car owners who are accustomed to accepting extensive government regulation and oversight.
Much as I would love the idea of having a self-driving car myself, I can't see how such a thing is compatible with American Society.