Fine. I leave it to you, the hypervigilant. Even though the statistics show mass shootings are on the rise, and not one has been stopped by armed good guys—armed civilian good guys. In fact, they've been shot more often than they've shot the baddies. Which is natural, since assault weapons are on the rise, and it's hard to conceal a weapon that can outshoot someone with a Bushmaster. I leave it to you, because I still puzzle in my mind over all the tactical difficulties posed by someone in civilian clothes carrying a gun during a shooting. (How do you telegraph your goodness to the cops and bystanders?)
One of the things LaPierre blamed for the killings was the absence of "an active, national database of the mentally ill." Since he didn't take questions at his press conference, nobody was able to ask him who would decide who goes into the database, how they would decide, and whether they would then prevent people in the database from buying guns.
One thing I do know about is the medical evidence.
In fact, psychiatrists (the people who decide who is mentally ill) say that such laws would be useless. There was a debate about that in the Annals of Internal Medicine between a gun-owning doctor and a doctor who wanted to stop people with mental disease from buying guns. The gun-restricting doctor admitted he was wrong. Only a tiny minority of people with mental illness are a danger to anyone else. About 30% of the population over 65 has clinical depression. Does LaPierre want to take the guns away from 30% of the population over 65?
In fact, the NRA has lobbied for laws that let people who were prevented from possessing guns, because they were convicted of violent crimes, appeal and have those convictions set aside again in a rubber-stamp procedure, so they could buy guns again. And several of those people have committed murders as a result. So LaPierre wants to give guns back to murderers to let them murder again.
Unfortunately, as a story in Nature said last year, there is no good evidence on gun violence one way or the other. That's because the NRA lobbied congress to stop the Centers for Disease Control from doing gun-related research. That was in response to a study that found that people who bought guns were more likely to use them to commit suicide than to defend themselves. That study would be impossible today, because of the network of NRA-supported laws that prevent researchers from even getting information about guns.
But in the absence of hard data, most doctors and scientists say that the cause of this level of gun violence is the widespread ownership of guns, and that if there were fewer guns in circulation, there would be fewer gun-related homicides and suicides. They also say it's politically impossible to do anything significant about it in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. So our NRA-protected gun access makes it impossible to stop terrorist attacks in malls. Anyone with basic gun skills can get a quick-firing gun and kill 20 people in a crowd before even a more-skilled gun owner can stop him. And if a group of terrorists plan a coordinated attack, they could kill hundreds. If a concealed-gun owner jumps into the fray, on the average he seems to do more harm than good.
We now have as many guns as people in the U.S. Anyone who is determined can get a handgun or automatic weapon, legally or illegally. Someone who is intending to commit mass murder in a mall is not going to be deterred by the need to violate the gun laws, with a straw purchaser or otherwise.
The NRA has been saying that the solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. When the bad guy starts shooting up a mall, one of the good guys with a gun in the mall is supposed to stop him.
I'm saying that the NRA's argument won't work. Terrorists can surprise and outgun the good guys with the guns in the mall. If the good guys have handguns, the terrorists will bring automatic military weapons. Since the terrorists have the initiative, by the time the good guys realize what's going on and can respond, the terrorists can kill dozens or hundreds of victims.
So what are the good guys supposed to do? Carry automatic military weapons every time they go to the mall?
Laws will have only a limited effect on preventing a terrorist scenario like that. By saturating the country with guns, the NRA has a fait accompli. Terrorists can now get guns, and there's nothing effective that we can do to stop them. Good guys with guns can't stop them.
So occasional terrorist attacks are the price we pay for the current expansive view of the Second Amendment.
Having armed civilians wandering around a shopping mall shooting anyone with a backpack, bag or briefcase who looks "suspicious" frankly sounds like a far more terrifying prospect than a terrorist with a bomb and one likely to result in far more deaths.
How do you tell a gang of terrorists from a gang of good guys?
What happens when three or four guys wearing keffeyas and carrying military rifles march into a shopping center? What if they don't wear keffeyas? What if they disguise themselves as good guys by wearing American flag and NRA patches?
Why are you limiting it to just terrorist attacks?
At last check, with the exception of the Gabrielle Giffords's shooting... every single mass shooting in this country since the 1950's where there have been more than 3 deaths have taken place at a location where people were not able to carry a firearm.
Well at the Gabrielle Gifford shooting, there was a good guy with a gun, and he had enough sense not to use it, because by the time he got there, they had the bad guy under control and a good guy was holding his gun.
I don't see how that good guy scenario is supposed to play out. If the bad guy finds a crowd, he can get off 20 rounds, and kill a large number of people, before the good guy can do anything. So having good guys with guns can limit the damage to 10 victims. Unless the bad guy can get a bigger clip.
So we're supposed to have malls full of handguns and automatic weapons, people taking handguns and automatic weapons into bars and parking lots, shoplifters with handguns and automatic weapons.
Is there anyplace in the world like that, besides Afghanistan?
Here's the article I was thinking about. From the conclusion:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... Artemisinin Resistance in Plasmodium falciparum Malaria Arjen M. Dondorp, M.D., François Nosten, M.D., Poravuth Yi, M.D., et al. N Engl J Med 2009; 361:455-467 July 30, 2009 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa0808859 [Free]
Chloroquine and sulfadoxine–pyrimethamine resistance in P. falciparum emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s on the Thai–Cambodian border and spread across Asia and then Africa, contributing to millions of deaths from malaria.28,29 Artemisinins have been available as monotherapies in western Cambodia for more than 30 years, in a variety of forms and doses, whereas in most countries (other than China, where they were discovered), they have been a relatively recent introduction.1 Despite the early implementation of an active malaria-control program by the Ministry of Health of Cambodia, including the introduction of artemisinin-based combination therapies in 2001, a recent survey showed that 78% of artemisinin use in western Cambodia consisted of monotherapy provided through the private sector.30 The extended period of often-suboptimal use, and the genetic background of parasites from this region,31 might have contributed to the emergence and subsequent spread of these new artemisinin-resistant parasites in western Cambodia. In contrast, artemisinin derivatives have been used almost exclusively in combination with mefloquine on the Thai–Burmese border, where parasitologic responses to artemisinins remain good, even after 15 years of intensive use.27 Measures for containment are now urgently needed to limit the spread of these parasites from western Cambodia and to prevent a major threat to current plans for eliminating malaria.
I realize it is hard to realize medical people eking out a life of 200-400 dollars/month in a mission in algeria and mozambique, while expats are doing qualified jobs earning between 10 to 50 times more, does not defect out of fear of not seeing the family back home anywhere, or worse, they being harmed. And if you think Cuba does not profit with their exploitation, you are very naive. We are not talking about rich people doing a sting out of their own good will. And I am not American, btw.
Of course Cuba profits from this "exploitation," if you want to call it that, just as the American medical schools profit by the exploitation of charging American students $1-200,000 for their education, or American health insurance companies profit by the exploitation of skimming 20% off the top of every medical expense, or American pharmaceutical companies profit by the exploitation of charging asthma patients $100 for an inhaler that costs $10 anywhere else in the world.
With the American embargo, this is one of the few ways Cuba can get hard currency.
I would rather be Cuban doctor, treating patients in Algeria or Mozambique who would never get medical care otherwise, than an American soldier in Iraq killing whole families and destroying a country and killing 150,000 innocent people.
http://science.slashdot.org/st... Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 10, 2014 @06:12PM from the skeletons-in-the-closet dept. sciencehabit writes Valerie Barr was a tenured professor of computer science at Union College in Schenectady, New York, with a national reputation for her work improving computing education and attracting more women and minorities into the field. But federal investigators say that Barr lied during a routine background check about her affiliations with a domestic terrorist group that had ties to the two organizations to which she had belonged in the early 1980s. On 27 August, NSF said that her 'dishonest conduct' compelled them to cancel her temporary assignment immediately, at the end of the first of what was expected to be a 2-year stint. Colleagues who decry Barr's fate worry that the incident could make other scientists think twice about coming to work for NSF. In addition, Barr's case offers a rare glimpse into the practices of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), an obscure agency within the White House that wields vast power over the entire federal bureaucracy through its authority to vet recently hired workers.
In her 11 August response, Barr questioned whether the special agent who conducted the investigation “can be an impartial evaluator of academic scientists, or anyone with liberal political beliefs.” As evidence, she points to a posting on a blog maintained by the agent, a veteran who served in Iraq, and his family. The item is a copy of a popular Internet meme about an incident that supposedly took place in an introductory college biology course.
According to the story, a “typical liberal college professor and avowed atheist” declares his intent to prove that there is no God by giving the creator 15 minutes to strike him from the podium. A few minutes before the deadline, a Marine “just released from active duty and newly registered” walks up to the professor and knocks him out with one punch. When the professor recovers and asks for an explanation, the Marine replies, “God was busy. He sent me.”
The question of whether the left or right is worse in science is an interesting one. Chris Mooney wrote a book called The Republican War on Science, and he certainly got a few good shots.
I agree that you have to question everyone. I don't trust the left either. I once caught Robert Knight on WBAI lying. He was talking about an article in Science magazine. I had the issue open in front of me and it didn't say what he claimed it was saying.
What our intelligence services are doing is overthrowing brutal, efficient dictators who kept their country together and replacing them with brutal, inefficient armed gangs who are tearing their country apart.
Saddam Hussain had one of the best education systems, and one of the best health care systems, in the mideast. They had a higher ratio of female college professors than we do in the US.
The term "color revolution" has nothing to do with race. It refers to movements like the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Purple Revolution in Iraq, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon (not a color but it fits in the category), and the other revolutions of the Arab Spring.
What they have in common is that most of them, like the Orange Revolution, got money, strategic advice, and other support from the U.S., through the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute. The U.S. gave support to the parties that they favored in elections, in ways that would be illegal if foreigners did it in U.S. elections. And the idealistic revolutionaries were swept away by armed gangs.
ULTRA ran during WWII. The issues and ethics of that war were relatively clear, and it was reasonable for people to put aside any reservations about the uncomfortable things the British, Americans and Soviets did and work together on the common goal.
Nowadays, we don't have any great common goals and the wars and undercover activities are usually promoted by war hawks with their own agendas, usually without the kind of consensus and approval I think is necessary in a democracy. Why did the U.S. overthrow Aristide? Why did we invade Iraq?
During a war like WWII, that threatens our existence, we have to put up with secrecy and limits to our freedom and democracy. We don't have a war like WWII, so those compromises aren't justified. The only wars we have are the ones that the intelligence services themselves created. So now, these politically neutral technical innovations are doing more harm than good.
I've noticed that too. Conservatives use theories, but unlike scientists, they don't bother to see whether their theories are confirmed by reality. If reality does contradict their theories, they just assign some conservative intern to come up with an explanation of why it actually works. "The economic actors weren't following the rules!" Or "This economic boom is the long-delayed consequence of the Reagan tax cuts."
One of the most memorable examples of a conservative economist was Sam Peltzman, a University of Chicago professor who wrote studies of the pharmaceutical industry. He testified before Congress that government regulations would prevent life-saving drugs to reach the market. The congressman running the hearings asked him to give an example of some of the drugs. Peltzman said, I don't know, I'm an economist, not a pharmacist. In other words, he predicted this effect of regulations, but he didn't actually go out into reality to see whether the world actually behaved the way he said it did.
For somebody like me who was raised in the scientific tradition, it took me a long time to realize that this is what they're actually doing.
February 18, 2009 Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0 Local business owners say Yelp offers to hide negative customer reviews of their businesses on its web site... for a price. By Kathleen Richards
"Hi, this is Mike from Yelp," the voice would say. "You've had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You've had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those."
This wasn't your average sales pitch. At least, not the kind that John, an East Bay restaurateur, was used to. He was familiar with Yelp.com, the popular San Francisco-based web site in which any person can write a review about nearly any business. John's restaurant has more than one hundred reviews, and averages a healthy 3.5-star rating. But when John asked Mike what he could do about his bad reviews, he recalls the sales rep responding: "We can move them. Well, for $299 a month." John couldn't believe what the guy was offering. It seemed wrong.
I think the intelligence community has done more harm than good more often than not.
I think American foreign policy has done more harm than good to America more often than not.
For example, look at the Iraq war. We destabilized that entire region of the middle east, and left it wide open for ISIS and other militant groups.
We supported the other "color" revolutions which also deposed effective dictators who were finally out of power after we supported them for so long. In every case the hippie revolutionaries were quickly brushed aside and replaced by really tough guys.
Same with Assad in Syria. When he loses control of a region, ISIS moves in. You notice that the U.S. has stopped calling for Assad to leave.
If a doctor is evaluating a drug, and he sees 10 studies, and 9 of them have no effect, he concludes that the drug has no effect.
In that NYT story, I couldn't find the actual 2009 study. "Statistically significant results" is a low bar. It could be a small effect, or it could just be the random variation of 10 studies.
I live in New York, so I know that everything you say about Andrew Cuomo is true.
Here's somebody who can explain it better than I can.
http://www.politico.com/magazi...? In The Arena The Plot Against Public Education: How millionaires and billionaires are ruining our schools. By BOB HERBERT October 06, 2014
Oh yeah, I was going through my files and found this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10... Inflating the Software Report Card By TRIP GABRIEL and MATT RICHTEL Published: October 8, 2011 United States Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse review of 10 major software products for teaching algebra and elementary and middle school math and reading found that 9 “did not have statistically significant effects on test scores.”
Did they? Some were in foreign missions doing highly qualified medical field work for peanuts in nasty and/or poor countries, and did not leave/defect out of the fear of having family back home.
The U.S. probably has more doctors who are motivated primarily by money than anyplace else in the world.
In Cuba, medical school is free. The government tells them that they will get a free education, and in exchange they will serve the people. There are a a lot of people in Cuba, and around the world, who are willing to accept that deal. They have students from low-income areas in the U.S., like The Bronx and Mississippi, who want to go back and serve the people they grew up with. There are doctors who actually want to serve in those foreign missions, helping patients who wouldn't get any care otherwise.
Since medical school costs $250,000 in the U.S., a lot of people think the Cuban system is a pretty good deal.
Any Cuban doctor could get in an inner tube, paddle to Florida, and start making $150,000 a year. (A neurologist in Canada could triple her income, to $3-400,000, by moving to the U.S.)
Most of them don't. There actually are doctors who feel that their country gave them a free education, and they have an obligation to serve their country in return.
There actually are doctors who want to serve people who need them, rather than make as much money as possible.
I realize this is hard for an American to understand.
Cuba actually has one of the best health care systems in the world, for their income, and a pretty good system even without correcting for income. The New England Journal of Medicine had several articles about that. American doctors who go to Cuba rate them highly.
They sent their doctors to Sweden for training. The Cubans established their own medical school, Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (ELAM), which is the largest medical school in the world and trains doctors from Latin America and all over the world -- including the U.S. Tuition is free, and they cover all costs, for students who agree to practice in medically underserved areas (including parts of the U.S.) when they graduate.
Cuba has an infant mortality rate and life expectancy that compares favorably with the U.S., so they must be doing something right. The infant mortality and life expectancy is better than low-income parts of the U.S., like The Bronx, NY, or Louisville, KY, where people who can't afford to pay for health care are left to die after they spend all their money. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... They learn how to practice medicine without regularly using expensive equipment like CAT scans, which are actually overused (sometimes causing more harm than good) in the U.S.
Cuban doctors have done some important medical research. For example, developed a couple of new vaccines for diseases of the undeveloped world, and they even supplied them to the U.S.
To the best of my knowledge "head starts" in letters and numbers make no difference in long-term outcomes. I'm disappointed to hear Gates pushing for this sort of thing. Solid educational resources at the right developmental stages are critical for long-term success, not some sort of fast-track to the ABCs.
That's my understanding too. Children are only ready to read and do arithmetic at an appropriate age, usually around 5. If you push them before they're ready, they won't be able to do it, and you'll just frustrate them. Preschool can teach them valuable things, like socializing with other children. Reading and arithmetic just crowds out other valuable things.
Even president GW Bush didn't understand that. He used to go to schools and read books, but the books were age-inappropriate. "A Hungry Caterpillar" is a preschool book, but he read it to older kids. It's shocking that somebody in charge of making important decisions about education (usually arbitrarily) could be so ignorant, and nobody told him (not even his wife, who was a librarian).
The TV show Sesame Street was very effective at teaching preschool kids the alphabet and counting. They had education consultants, and they knew it didn't make any difference in long-term outcomes, but they did it anyway. The parents loved it. Having their kids recite the alphabet was pretty dramatic. It made Sesame Street popular and guaranteed their funding. And it didn't hurt. They taught other things that were useful, like reading in the higher grades. Sometimes you have to compromise in a good cause.
Here's an example of what I consider science teaching:
A kindergarten teacher was also a science teacher. She had taught her kids about birds. It was a nice day out, so she decided to take her kids out for a walk in the woods.
A woodpecker flew in, and started pecking on a tree.
Woodpeckers were uncommon in this area. The kids had never seen a woodpecker before, and she had never mentioned it in class.
One of the kids said, oh, he's trying to get insects to eat in the tree!
This is the kind of moment that makes life worth living for a science teacher.
This 5-year-old girl had generalized from the feeding habits of the birds that she had learned about, to a bird she had never learned about. There was quite a bit of scientific insight that went into that observation. You wouldn't think that a 5-year-old was capable of that, but science teachers know that they are.
And it was completely unexpected. You couldn't plan for that in a computer program, and it wold be unlikely to happen again.
I would argue that this is real science teaching. And a computer could never replace that teacher. How could a computer decide that it's a nice day, and the kids have been cooped up in the classroom, so let's go out for a walk in the woods, and actually observe the science that we've been reading about?
Computers can do a lot in education. Of course, books and magazines can do a lot in education. Of course, a lot of what computers do well is simply replacing books and magazines. A children's library needs a librarian. It's not a dumpster full of books. Librarians (like teachers) know what children will like and understand at different ages. They can recommend books, and buy books that are popular, so you can look at the spines of books on a bookshelf, pull out a book, and find something interesting. Google is basically a dumpster full of books. It's helpful if you know what you want, but it only has one trick (counting links), and otherwise it offers you no guidance. You need to already have a pretty good education before you can use Google effectively. Otherwise, you're going to wind up like Jenny McCarthy.
Computers can supplement teachers, on the shelf along with the books. They can do calculations and manage data and create models. They're great for word processing.
Computers can't give you a woods full of birds. They can't give you the chemicals and equipment that you could find in a science stockroom. My science teacher threw a piece of sodium into a pan of water, but no educational computer program is going to tell you to throw a piece of sodium into a pan of water. Most of all, educational computer programs can't really answer questions, especially the unexpected questions, and the most insightful questions, like, "Why doesn't this work like the book said it does?"
A lot of these education "reforms" want to reduce teachers from unionized professionals with a lifetime commitment, to replaceable less-skilled contingent workers who follow standardized workbooks, and are basically computer tenders.
I fear Bill Gates, even when he is bearing gifts. Up to now, he and his lobbyists have been trying to "disrupt" education, by forcing schools to adopt standardized testing, written by Pearson educational publishers, that have never been validated by any of the standard validation methods that every science-based psychologist uses. Teachers are being fired based on tests that literally have no more validity than random numbers. He's taking the MBA methods used by employers to evaluate assembly line workers and marketing managers, and applying them to teachers, as if you could judge the value of teachers by their success in the free market of test results.
He's accepted the war on government, and he wants to replace public schools with private charter schools, even though private charter schools have repeatedly failed in their own terms -- their results on high-stakes standard tests, as evaluated by the NAEP
Slashdot Mirror
I was referring to Wayne LaPierre's statement.
This has been rebutted by people who know far more about guns than I do:
One of the things LaPierre blamed for the killings was the absence of "an active, national database of the mentally ill." Since he didn't take questions at his press conference, nobody was able to ask him who would decide who goes into the database, how they would decide, and whether they would then prevent people in the database from buying guns.
One thing I do know about is the medical evidence.
In fact, psychiatrists (the people who decide who is mentally ill) say that such laws would be useless. There was a debate about that in the Annals of Internal Medicine between a gun-owning doctor and a doctor who wanted to stop people with mental disease from buying guns. The gun-restricting doctor admitted he was wrong. Only a tiny minority of people with mental illness are a danger to anyone else. About 30% of the population over 65 has clinical depression. Does LaPierre want to take the guns away from 30% of the population over 65?
In fact, the NRA has lobbied for laws that let people who were prevented from possessing guns, because they were convicted of violent crimes, appeal and have those convictions set aside again in a rubber-stamp procedure, so they could buy guns again. And several of those people have committed murders as a result. So LaPierre wants to give guns back to murderers to let them murder again.
Unfortunately, as a story in Nature said last year, there is no good evidence on gun violence one way or the other. That's because the NRA lobbied congress to stop the Centers for Disease Control from doing gun-related research. That was in response to a study that found that people who bought guns were more likely to use them to commit suicide than to defend themselves. That study would be impossible today, because of the network of NRA-supported laws that prevent researchers from even getting information about guns.
But in the absence of hard data, most doctors and scientists say that the cause of this level of gun violence is the widespread ownership of guns, and that if there were fewer guns in circulation, there would be fewer gun-related homicides and suicides. They also say it's politically impossible to do anything significant about it in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. So our NRA-protected gun access makes it impossible to stop terrorist attacks in malls. Anyone with basic gun skills can get a quick-firing gun and kill 20 people in a crowd before even a more-skilled gun owner can stop him. And if a group of terrorists plan a coordinated attack, they could kill hundreds. If a concealed-gun owner jumps into the fray, on the average he seems to do more harm than good.
We now have as many guns as people in the U.S. Anyone who is determined can get a handgun or automatic weapon, legally or illegally. Someone who is intending to commit mass murder in a mall is not going to be deterred by the need to violate the gun laws, with a straw purchaser or otherwise.
The NRA has been saying that the solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. When the bad guy starts shooting up a mall, one of the good guys with a gun in the mall is supposed to stop him.
I'm saying that the NRA's argument won't work. Terrorists can surprise and outgun the good guys with the guns in the mall. If the good guys have handguns, the terrorists will bring automatic military weapons. Since the terrorists have the initiative, by the time the good guys realize what's going on and can respond, the terrorists can kill dozens or hundreds of victims.
So what are the good guys supposed to do? Carry automatic military weapons every time they go to the mall?
Laws will have only a limited effect on preventing a terrorist scenario like that. By saturating the country with guns, the NRA has a fait accompli. Terrorists can now get guns, and there's nothing effective that we can do to stop them. Good guys with guns can't stop them.
So occasional terrorist attacks are the price we pay for the current expansive view of the Second Amendment.
Having armed civilians wandering around a shopping mall shooting anyone with a backpack, bag or briefcase who looks "suspicious" frankly sounds like a far more terrifying prospect than a terrorist with a bomb and one likely to result in far more deaths.
How do you tell a gang of terrorists from a gang of good guys?
What happens when three or four guys wearing keffeyas and carrying military rifles march into a shopping center? What if they don't wear keffeyas? What if they disguise themselves as good guys by wearing American flag and NRA patches?
Why are you limiting it to just terrorist attacks?
At last check, with the exception of the Gabrielle Giffords's shooting... every single mass shooting in this country since the 1950's where there have been more than 3 deaths have taken place at a location where people were not able to carry a firearm.
Well at the Gabrielle Gifford shooting, there was a good guy with a gun, and he had enough sense not to use it, because by the time he got there, they had the bad guy under control and a good guy was holding his gun.
I don't see how that good guy scenario is supposed to play out. If the bad guy finds a crowd, he can get off 20 rounds, and kill a large number of people, before the good guy can do anything. So having good guys with guns can limit the damage to 10 victims. Unless the bad guy can get a bigger clip.
So we're supposed to have malls full of handguns and automatic weapons, people taking handguns and automatic weapons into bars and parking lots, shoplifters with handguns and automatic weapons.
Is there anyplace in the world like that, besides Afghanistan?
Here's the article I was thinking about. From the conclusion:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
Artemisinin Resistance in Plasmodium falciparum Malaria
Arjen M. Dondorp, M.D., François Nosten, M.D., Poravuth Yi, M.D., et al.
N Engl J Med 2009; 361:455-467
July 30, 2009
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa0808859
[Free]
Chloroquine and sulfadoxine–pyrimethamine resistance in P. falciparum emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s on the Thai–Cambodian border and spread across Asia and then Africa, contributing to millions of deaths from malaria.28,29 Artemisinins have been available as monotherapies in western Cambodia for more than 30 years, in a variety of forms and doses, whereas in most countries (other than China, where they were discovered), they have been a relatively recent introduction.1 Despite the early implementation of an active malaria-control program by the Ministry of Health of Cambodia, including the introduction of artemisinin-based combination therapies in 2001, a recent survey showed that 78% of artemisinin use in western Cambodia consisted of monotherapy provided through the private sector.30 The extended period of often-suboptimal use, and the genetic background of parasites from this region,31 might have contributed to the emergence and subsequent spread of these new artemisinin-resistant parasites in western Cambodia. In contrast, artemisinin derivatives have been used almost exclusively in combination with mefloquine on the Thai–Burmese border, where parasitologic responses to artemisinins remain good, even after 15 years of intensive use.27 Measures for containment are now urgently needed to limit the spread of these parasites from western Cambodia and to prevent a major threat to current plans for eliminating malaria.
I recall reading that the reason for the drug resistance was the over-use of sub-therapeutic levels of artemisinin in the area.
And for that reason, the resistance is limited to those regions where they use sub-therapeutic levels.
Right?
I realize it is hard to realize medical people eking out a life of 200-400 dollars/month in a mission in algeria and mozambique, while expats are doing qualified jobs earning between 10 to 50 times more, does not defect out of fear of not seeing the family back home anywhere, or worse, they being harmed. And if you think Cuba does not profit with their exploitation, you are very naive. We are not talking about rich people doing a sting out of their own good will. And I am not American, btw.
Of course Cuba profits from this "exploitation," if you want to call it that, just as the American medical schools profit by the exploitation of charging American students $1-200,000 for their education, or American health insurance companies profit by the exploitation of skimming 20% off the top of every medical expense, or American pharmaceutical companies profit by the exploitation of charging asthma patients $100 for an inhaler that costs $10 anywhere else in the world.
With the American embargo, this is one of the few ways Cuba can get hard currency.
I would rather be Cuban doctor, treating patients in Algeria or Mozambique who would never get medical care otherwise, than an American soldier in Iraq killing whole families and destroying a country and killing 150,000 innocent people.
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday September 10, 2014 @06:12PM
from the skeletons-in-the-closet dept.
sciencehabit writes Valerie Barr was a tenured professor of computer science at Union College in Schenectady, New York, with a national reputation for her work improving computing education and attracting more women and minorities into the field. But federal investigators say that Barr lied during a routine background check about her affiliations with a domestic terrorist group that had ties to the two organizations to which she had belonged in the early 1980s. On 27 August, NSF said that her 'dishonest conduct' compelled them to cancel her temporary assignment immediately, at the end of the first of what was expected to be a 2-year stint. Colleagues who decry Barr's fate worry that the incident could make other scientists think twice about coming to work for NSF. In addition, Barr's case offers a rare glimpse into the practices of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), an obscure agency within the White House that wields vast power over the entire federal bureaucracy through its authority to vet recently hired workers.
http://news.sciencemag.org/peo...
In her 11 August response, Barr questioned whether the special agent who conducted the investigation “can be an impartial evaluator of academic scientists, or anyone with liberal political beliefs.” As evidence, she points to a posting on a blog maintained by the agent, a veteran who served in Iraq, and his family. The item is a copy of a popular Internet meme about an incident that supposedly took place in an introductory college biology course.
According to the story, a “typical liberal college professor and avowed atheist” declares his intent to prove that there is no God by giving the creator 15 minutes to strike him from the podium. A few minutes before the deadline, a Marine “just released from active duty and newly registered” walks up to the professor and knocks him out with one punch. When the professor recovers and asks for an explanation, the Marine replies, “God was busy. He sent me.”
The question of whether the left or right is worse in science is an interesting one. Chris Mooney wrote a book called The Republican War on Science, and he certainly got a few good shots.
I agree that you have to question everyone. I don't trust the left either. I once caught Robert Knight on WBAI lying. He was talking about an article in Science magazine. I had the issue open in front of me and it didn't say what he claimed it was saying.
What our intelligence services are doing is overthrowing brutal, efficient dictators who kept their country together and replacing them with brutal, inefficient armed gangs who are tearing their country apart.
Saddam Hussain had one of the best education systems, and one of the best health care systems, in the mideast. They had a higher ratio of female college professors than we do in the US.
The term "color revolution" has nothing to do with race. It refers to movements like the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Purple Revolution in Iraq, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon (not a color but it fits in the category), and the other revolutions of the Arab Spring.
What they have in common is that most of them, like the Orange Revolution, got money, strategic advice, and other support from the U.S., through the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute. The U.S. gave support to the parties that they favored in elections, in ways that would be illegal if foreigners did it in U.S. elections. And the idealistic revolutionaries were swept away by armed gangs.
ULTRA ran during WWII. The issues and ethics of that war were relatively clear, and it was reasonable for people to put aside any reservations about the uncomfortable things the British, Americans and Soviets did and work together on the common goal.
Nowadays, we don't have any great common goals and the wars and undercover activities are usually promoted by war hawks with their own agendas, usually without the kind of consensus and approval I think is necessary in a democracy. Why did the U.S. overthrow Aristide? Why did we invade Iraq?
During a war like WWII, that threatens our existence, we have to put up with secrecy and limits to our freedom and democracy. We don't have a war like WWII, so those compromises aren't justified. The only wars we have are the ones that the intelligence services themselves created. So now, these politically neutral technical innovations are doing more harm than good.
I've noticed that too. Conservatives use theories, but unlike scientists, they don't bother to see whether their theories are confirmed by reality. If reality does contradict their theories, they just assign some conservative intern to come up with an explanation of why it actually works. "The economic actors weren't following the rules!" Or "This economic boom is the long-delayed consequence of the Reagan tax cuts."
One of the most memorable examples of a conservative economist was Sam Peltzman, a University of Chicago professor who wrote studies of the pharmaceutical industry. He testified before Congress that government regulations would prevent life-saving drugs to reach the market. The congressman running the hearings asked him to give an example of some of the drugs. Peltzman said, I don't know, I'm an economist, not a pharmacist. In other words, he predicted this effect of regulations, but he didn't actually go out into reality to see whether the world actually behaved the way he said it did.
For somebody like me who was raised in the scientific tradition, it took me a long time to realize that this is what they're actually doing.
You mean this?
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/...
February 18, 2009 ... for a price.
Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0
Local business owners say Yelp offers to hide negative customer reviews of their businesses on its web site
By Kathleen Richards
"Hi, this is Mike from Yelp," the voice would say. "You've had three hundred visitors to your site this month. You've had a really good response. But you have a few bad ones at the top. I could do something about those."
This wasn't your average sales pitch. At least, not the kind that John, an East Bay restaurateur, was used to. He was familiar with Yelp.com, the popular San Francisco-based web site in which any person can write a review about nearly any business. John's restaurant has more than one hundred reviews, and averages a healthy 3.5-star rating. But when John asked Mike what he could do about his bad reviews, he recalls the sales rep responding: "We can move them. Well, for $299 a month." John couldn't believe what the guy was offering. It seemed wrong.
I think the intelligence community has done more harm than good more often than not.
I think American foreign policy has done more harm than good to America more often than not.
For example, look at the Iraq war. We destabilized that entire region of the middle east, and left it wide open for ISIS and other militant groups.
We supported the other "color" revolutions which also deposed effective dictators who were finally out of power after we supported them for so long. In every case the hippie revolutionaries were quickly brushed aside and replaced by really tough guys.
Same with Assad in Syria. When he loses control of a region, ISIS moves in. You notice that the U.S. has stopped calling for Assad to leave.
If a doctor is evaluating a drug, and he sees 10 studies, and 9 of them have no effect, he concludes that the drug has no effect.
In that NYT story, I couldn't find the actual 2009 study. "Statistically significant results" is a low bar. It could be a small effect, or it could just be the random variation of 10 studies.
I live in New York, so I know that everything you say about Andrew Cuomo is true.
Here's somebody who can explain it better than I can.
http://www.politico.com/magazi...?
In The Arena
The Plot Against Public Education: How millionaires and billionaires are ruining our schools.
By BOB HERBERT
October 06, 2014
Oh yeah, I was going through my files and found this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10...
Inflating the Software Report Card
By TRIP GABRIEL and MATT RICHTEL
Published: October 8, 2011
United States Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse review of 10 major software products for teaching algebra and elementary and middle school math and reading found that 9 “did not have statistically significant effects on test scores.”
There is plenty of evidence that computer programs can effectively teach basic math and language skills
It seems plausible, but I have been unable to find any evidence of this. I would appreciate a citation, preferably to a peer-reviewed journal.
I assume you are not a kindergarten teacher.
Did they? Some were in foreign missions doing highly qualified medical field work for peanuts in nasty and/or poor countries, and did not leave/defect out of the fear of having family back home.
The U.S. probably has more doctors who are motivated primarily by money than anyplace else in the world.
In Cuba, medical school is free. The government tells them that they will get a free education, and in exchange they will serve the people. There are a a lot of people in Cuba, and around the world, who are willing to accept that deal. They have students from low-income areas in the U.S., like The Bronx and Mississippi, who want to go back and serve the people they grew up with. There are doctors who actually want to serve in those foreign missions, helping patients who wouldn't get any care otherwise.
Since medical school costs $250,000 in the U.S., a lot of people think the Cuban system is a pretty good deal.
Any Cuban doctor could get in an inner tube, paddle to Florida, and start making $150,000 a year. (A neurologist in Canada could triple her income, to $3-400,000, by moving to the U.S.)
Most of them don't. There actually are doctors who feel that their country gave them a free education, and they have an obligation to serve their country in return.
There actually are doctors who want to serve people who need them, rather than make as much money as possible.
I realize this is hard for an American to understand.
Cuba actually has one of the best health care systems in the world, for their income, and a pretty good system even without correcting for income. The New England Journal of Medicine had several articles about that. American doctors who go to Cuba rate them highly.
They sent their doctors to Sweden for training. The Cubans established their own medical school, Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (ELAM), which is the largest medical school in the world and trains doctors from Latin America and all over the world -- including the U.S. Tuition is free, and they cover all costs, for students who agree to practice in medically underserved areas (including parts of the U.S.) when they graduate.
Cuba has an infant mortality rate and life expectancy that compares favorably with the U.S., so they must be doing something right. The infant mortality and life expectancy is better than low-income parts of the U.S., like The Bronx, NY, or Louisville, KY, where people who can't afford to pay for health care are left to die after they spend all their money. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... They learn how to practice medicine without regularly using expensive equipment like CAT scans, which are actually overused (sometimes causing more harm than good) in the U.S.
Cuban doctors have done some important medical research. For example, developed a couple of new vaccines for diseases of the undeveloped world, and they even supplied them to the U.S.
"They" is plural.
"You" is plural too, but eventually it drove out "thee" and "thou" and became accepted as a singular.
I once saw an article in Scientific American that showed you how to train a pigeon to peck on a lever for food.
First you stop feeding the pigeon until he's lost 10% of his weight. That motivates him to get food.
To the best of my knowledge "head starts" in letters and numbers make no difference in long-term outcomes. I'm disappointed to hear Gates pushing for this sort of thing. Solid educational resources at the right developmental stages are critical for long-term success, not some sort of fast-track to the ABCs.
That's my understanding too. Children are only ready to read and do arithmetic at an appropriate age, usually around 5. If you push them before they're ready, they won't be able to do it, and you'll just frustrate them. Preschool can teach them valuable things, like socializing with other children. Reading and arithmetic just crowds out other valuable things.
Even president GW Bush didn't understand that. He used to go to schools and read books, but the books were age-inappropriate. "A Hungry Caterpillar" is a preschool book, but he read it to older kids. It's shocking that somebody in charge of making important decisions about education (usually arbitrarily) could be so ignorant, and nobody told him (not even his wife, who was a librarian).
The TV show Sesame Street was very effective at teaching preschool kids the alphabet and counting. They had education consultants, and they knew it didn't make any difference in long-term outcomes, but they did it anyway. The parents loved it. Having their kids recite the alphabet was pretty dramatic. It made Sesame Street popular and guaranteed their funding. And it didn't hurt. They taught other things that were useful, like reading in the higher grades. Sometimes you have to compromise in a good cause.
Here's an example of what I consider science teaching:
A kindergarten teacher was also a science teacher. She had taught her kids about birds. It was a nice day out, so she decided to take her kids out for a walk in the woods.
A woodpecker flew in, and started pecking on a tree.
Woodpeckers were uncommon in this area. The kids had never seen a woodpecker before, and she had never mentioned it in class.
One of the kids said, oh, he's trying to get insects to eat in the tree!
This is the kind of moment that makes life worth living for a science teacher.
This 5-year-old girl had generalized from the feeding habits of the birds that she had learned about, to a bird she had never learned about. There was quite a bit of scientific insight that went into that observation. You wouldn't think that a 5-year-old was capable of that, but science teachers know that they are.
And it was completely unexpected. You couldn't plan for that in a computer program, and it wold be unlikely to happen again.
I would argue that this is real science teaching. And a computer could never replace that teacher. How could a computer decide that it's a nice day, and the kids have been cooped up in the classroom, so let's go out for a walk in the woods, and actually observe the science that we've been reading about?
Computers can do a lot in education. Of course, books and magazines can do a lot in education. Of course, a lot of what computers do well is simply replacing books and magazines. A children's library needs a librarian. It's not a dumpster full of books. Librarians (like teachers) know what children will like and understand at different ages. They can recommend books, and buy books that are popular, so you can look at the spines of books on a bookshelf, pull out a book, and find something interesting. Google is basically a dumpster full of books. It's helpful if you know what you want, but it only has one trick (counting links), and otherwise it offers you no guidance. You need to already have a pretty good education before you can use Google effectively. Otherwise, you're going to wind up like Jenny McCarthy.
Computers can supplement teachers, on the shelf along with the books. They can do calculations and manage data and create models. They're great for word processing.
Computers can't give you a woods full of birds. They can't give you the chemicals and equipment that you could find in a science stockroom. My science teacher threw a piece of sodium into a pan of water, but no educational computer program is going to tell you to throw a piece of sodium into a pan of water. Most of all, educational computer programs can't really answer questions, especially the unexpected questions, and the most insightful questions, like, "Why doesn't this work like the book said it does?"
A lot of these education "reforms" want to reduce teachers from unionized professionals with a lifetime commitment, to replaceable less-skilled contingent workers who follow standardized workbooks, and are basically computer tenders.
I fear Bill Gates, even when he is bearing gifts. Up to now, he and his lobbyists have been trying to "disrupt" education, by forcing schools to adopt standardized testing, written by Pearson educational publishers, that have never been validated by any of the standard validation methods that every science-based psychologist uses. Teachers are being fired based on tests that literally have no more validity than random numbers. He's taking the MBA methods used by employers to evaluate assembly line workers and marketing managers, and applying them to teachers, as if you could judge the value of teachers by their success in the free market of test results.
He's accepted the war on government, and he wants to replace public schools with private charter schools, even though private charter schools have repeatedly failed in their own terms -- their results on high-stakes standard tests, as evaluated by the NAEP