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October 10, 2007
I didn't think it possible, but the intellectual property nonsense promoted by the movie and record industries has reached new heights of lunacy. This is from the UK, but it could just as easily be the US: A car repair firm has been taken to court accused of infringing musical copyright because its…
October 10, 2007
It's taken longer than many of us wanted, but some new data on host susceptibility is now coming in. The influenza research group at St. Jude's has just published a paper in CDC's journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, verifying that common land based birds can be infected with highly pathogenic…
October 9, 2007
The good news in 1995 was that American students performed better than Austrian students in advanced mathematics among students finishing highschool. The bad news was that Austria as the only on eof 16 countries American students finished ahead of, and in physics they didn't even do that. They were…
October 9, 2007
Fumigating the soil before planting pretty much kills any pests that might be in it. Unfortunately the fumigant tends to seep up through the soil and expose workers and others nearby. When the highly toxic fumigant methyl bromide was banned under the Montreal protocol as a greenhouse gas an ozone…
October 8, 2007
Once again it's the 2007 Blogging Scholarship contest. It's been just short of a year since we offered everyone reading the opportunity to Send a Blogger to College. Now you get another chance. Of course the blogger in question, the now well-known Shelley Batts, maestra of Retrospectacle and my…
October 8, 2007
Preamble via Slashdot: News.com reports that the FCC won't be investigating the phone record disclosures by communications companies under US government pressure. Despite a congressional request for that probe, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin quashed the inquiry based on comments from National…
October 8, 2007
The US invasion of Iraq has not managed to spread Democracy in the region but it is successfully spreading Cholera: The number of cholera cases in Iran is on the rise after the outbreak of an epidemic in neighbouring Iraq, an Iranian health official was quoted as saying on Saturday. "The last count…
October 7, 2007
Since most of you know from this blog what a nerd I am now, in late adulthood, you can only imagine how nerdy I was when I was a teenager. Nerdy enough to be part of a rocket club. Not sponsored by the school. Just five of us who got together and built solid fuel rockets. This was 50 years ago. We…
October 7, 2007
Last week someone by the name of Theo Hobson expelled a hard, dry turd onto the pages of The Guardian: Richard Dawkins wants America's atheists to stand up and be counted. He wants them to form a lobby that's capable of challenging the religious culture they inhabit. He says that about 10% of the…
October 6, 2007
The headline was worrisome: "Bird flu becoming riskier for humans." The story was about a new paper in PLoS Pathogens from Kawaoka's lab that was said to identify "a specific change that could make bird flu grow in the upper respiratory tract of humans," according to the lab leader. Birds usually…
October 5, 2007
Someday people will look back on the period of terrorism hysteria with wonder, maybe even wry amusement. There are terrorists, to be sure. Some of them work for sovereign states and are part of their military or police. Some of them work for "non state" entities. Those are the ones governments like…
October 5, 2007
When the Topps Meat Company recalled 300,000 pounds of frozen hamburger on September 25 because of E. coli contamination that was bad. It got worse on September 30 when the recall was expanded to 21.76 million pounds, the third largest recall in US history. It got worse yet when it was revealed…
October 4, 2007
You're in a crowded bar near the airport and your co-worker is trying to tell you something important. She wants you to do something before you drive her car to the garage for her. She is heading out of town. But you can't hear her over the din from the crowd. It's too noisy, too much cross talk.…
October 4, 2007
Swedish scientists are warning about Tamiflu in the environment because it passes through sewage treatment plants more or less unchanged. Readers of this blog may remember this coming up before when Andrew Singer and his colleagues in the UK published an article in Environmental Health Perspectives…
October 3, 2007
If you increase spending for research on the world's most dangerous microbes you might want to also increase your surveillance and safety oversight. Since 2001 NIH expenditirues for biodefense research have increase over 40 times. And oversight? American laboratories handling the world's deadliest…
October 3, 2007
The report of another bird flu death from Indonesia wouldn't seem to be "news." In a way, the fact it isn't "news" is news but we'll put that aside for the moment. Another thing about the story that isn't news is that the victim is a young person from the city of Jakarta, not a resident from a poor…
October 2, 2007
Is Nigeria a member of the Coalition of the Willing? It appears to be, on the basis of this evidence. For background, let's go back to a BBC story on April 30, 2003: Foreign currency worth nearly $200m has been found in a Baghdad neighbourhood, the US military say. Troops found $100m and 90m euros…
October 2, 2007
DDT has a checkered history, to be sure. Many of us remember walking through clouds of it in our childhoods, as it was sprayed willy-nilly for nuisance mosquitoes. The discovery that it was persistent in the environment (didn't break down) and harmed birds by thinning their egg shells (Rachel…
October 1, 2007
George Mason University in Virginia is a good school. Slightly on the conservative side, politically, but with astute thinkers in economics, political science and many other fields, including molecular biology. It also has a National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Diseases. It has just…
October 1, 2007
Adverse drug reactions often appear idiosyncratic. Some drugs have powerful effects and everyone experiences the side effects (e.g., cancer chemotherapeutic agents). Others, however, seem to disagree with only a few people, although that disagreement can be major. Obviously drug companies would…
September 30, 2007
Bioterrorism defense dollars seem to be devoted mainly to procurement. This follows President Bush's prescription for how all Americans could defeat the terrorists after September 11: go shopping. Practicing what they preach, the federal government has gone on another buying spree for something we…
September 30, 2007
Last week about 50 Boulder High School students walked out of class rather than recite the Pledge of Allegiance with the words "one nation, under God" in it. They wanted to recite their own version, cleansed of the offending phrase. I have a better idea, but first here's what happened in Boulder:…
September 29, 2007
There's a polio problem in Nigeria. You may have heard that. Unfortunately what you haven't heard -- and what one could even characterize as a cover-up -- is that among the many cases of polio in northern Nigeria and surrounds, there are also 69 cases of paralytic polio in children from the type 2…
September 28, 2007
General Petraeus, speaking for President Bush, has told us things are going well in Iraq. He backed it up with charts, numbers and "twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence…
September 28, 2007
If regulators in the state of California, a slate of scientists and doctors including 6 nobel laureates in chemistry and environmental and farmworker groups were all against registering a new toxic fumigant for fruits and vegetables, who would you expect to be in favor of it? If you guessed the…
September 27, 2007
So the Harvard Coop fiasco goes into yet another day with lawyers at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society giving the book sellers (part of the Barnes and Noble College Division) a much needed lesson in copyright law. To recap (see also here and here), Harvard…
September 27, 2007
It's not nice to get mumps. Mumps is caused by a paramyxovirus. Since the introduction of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine most people have been spared the unpleasantness of the swollen, inflamed an painful salivary glands, or in older individuals, the systemic complications like orchitis (…
September 26, 2007
The Department of Defense is not the only Bush agency with a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Apparently CDC has one too: For three years, inspectors from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found warning signs in Texas A&M University's biodefense program ? everything from…
September 26, 2007
If you are in the elderly population (over 65 years of age) you are in the crosshairs of CDC's influenza vaccination program. The reasons seem clear -- at first, anyway. Risk of influenza-related death (as measured by a specific statistical technique to estimate excess mortality during influenza…
September 25, 2007
In my other life (science) I've been reading about measurement theory (Dover just reprinted the multivolume set, Foundations of Measurement by Krantz et al.). It's pretty abstract stuff (Archimedean simply ordered groups make an early appearance) but the problem is not at all abstract: how do you…