revere
Posts by this author
December 5, 2008
Given the size of the kinds of Federal bail-outs being discussed these days, Harvard University's endowment, almost $37 billion, by far the largest of any university in the world, sounds like chump change. But it is a staggeringly large endowment for a university and the interest alone accounted…
December 5, 2008
Environmental health researchers got some good news yesterday. The NIH's only institute that focusses almost entirely on public health and environmental science, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), got a new Director after years of chaotic and controversial regime of…
December 4, 2008
Another one gone. First Miriam Makeba. Now Odetta. It's almost as if they waited for the election and then said, "It's OK, now." Odetta was 77 and her voice still powerful. It remains even more powerful in memory. This one has hit me hard.
Two contrasting clips. The first, a studio recording from…
December 4, 2008
The 53 year old South African businessman arrived in Rio de Janeiro on November 23. Two days later he began to feel unwell. Today he was returning to South Africa -- in a zinc lined coffin:
Brazilian media reported officials as saying he may have been infected when he was a patient at a hospital in…
December 3, 2008
Many of us supported Barack Obama during the Presidential campaign, not because we agreed with all of his positions but we agreed with many of them that were crucial. We also saw no morally viable alternative. We hope to be able to continue our support, but it will always be offered in a…
December 3, 2008
Don't ask me why I am so fixated on this topic but whenever I see an article about driving and cell phone use I post on it (example here). The idea that talking on the phone, dialing or texting while driving might be a wee bit of a cognitive problem doesn't seem too controversial, but many people…
December 2, 2008
Mighty oaks from little acorns grow, but not this year. At least in a lot of places. Because for reasons no one seems to understand many places in North America are reporting no acorns at all. I'm not talking reduced numbers of acorns or few acorns. I'm talking about zero acorns:
The idea seemed…
December 2, 2008
Cholera is a vicious disease. It can take a healthy person and kill him or her in a day by rapidly dehydrating them from a massive, watery diarrhea. The resulting electrolyte imbalance can lead to vascular collapse or cardiac arrest. Cholera is usually spread by fecally contaminated drinking water…
December 1, 2008
Barack Obama will become President of the United States in just 50 days, but the still-President, George W. Bush, is still trashing the place prior to going out the door. The latest outrage is the rush to complete a rule the new President is strongly opposed to. Somehow I don't think that's the way…
December 1, 2008
The common cold is probably common because a lot of different viruses cause similar symptoms. We usually treat it symptomatically or just endure it. We rarely expend much time, effort or money identifying which virus caused it. As as a result we undoubtedly haven't identified all the viruses that…
November 30, 2008
A story on the wires about a paper in the journal Epidemiology this month (November) confirms what other work has shown: those beautiful flowers we buy in American florist shops have an added price attached to them, paid by the children of Central America. Epidemiology is one of the top tier…
November 30, 2008
Gravity -- just a theory, not a fact:
November 29, 2008
The economy is bad and everyone expects retail sales to be substantially off. But parents will scrimp on presents for each other to make sure their kids get presents they want. Whether we approve or not, we do it for our kids. I assume it's hardwired into our brains somehow. But in the waning hours…
November 29, 2008
Genetically modified crops is not a special interest of mine, which is a good thing because once you get into that controversy you are like the worker who gets his sleeve caught in the machine: before long you are dragged into the gears and badly mauled. I'm not reflexively against it. I recognize…
November 28, 2008
Travel is off this year because of the dreadful state of the world economy, but this is still probably the biggest travel weekend of the year. So to commemorate it and because our publisher, Seed, is a German publisher as well, we present this tribute to the pleasures of Thanksgiving travel, first…
November 28, 2008
In 1988 a 32 year old woman, 36 weeks pregnant, checked into a community hospital in Wisconsin. She'd had flu-like symptoms with a moderately high (spiking to 102 degrees F.) fever for the previous week. Three days before admission she started a cough that brought up sputum and a day before started…
November 27, 2008
It's Thanksgiving Holiday in the US. For many Americans a time to dine on traditional foods with family and friends; for a significant number of Americans a difficult time of loneliness or family tension; for the original Americans, a time to reflect on how European occupiers and invaders took your…
November 27, 2008
The other day we wrote a post about the reduction in genetic diversity among commercial chicken breeds that attracted a surprising amount of informed comment (surprising to us, anyway; I think it shows more about the general knowledge of a city boy like me than anything else). So while we were on…
November 26, 2008
In a recent interview with a Japanese broadcasting company, still-President George Bush summed up his judgment on the Iraq debacle: it's a great success. He's "very pleased," mainly that he toppled Saddam Hussein. What about the rest. Like the streets being rivers of sewage?
Spare tires come in…
November 26, 2008
My Scibling Mark H. over at the Denialism blog has reproduced an internal NIH memo that is something to behold:
If you aren't used to the conventions of scientific collegiality you might not realize at first the unbelievable stupidity of this. A visiting international scientist (a Canadian or…
November 25, 2008
My students sometimes say of me that no horse is too dead for me to stop beating it, but when it comes to the tobacco industry there seems to be no way to stop its zombie like undead behavior. These folks are businesspeople, of course, and they are just carrying out their fiduciary responsibility…
November 25, 2008
Happy Blogiversary to us. Yes, it's our fourth Blogiversary, meaning Effect Measure has lasted longer than many marriages. Our first post was on November 25, 2004 at our old site over at Blogger. We moved here to Scienceblogs on June 9, 2006. According to Sitemeter, we've had over 1,650,000 unique…
November 24, 2008
The science of climate change is difficult and everyone agrees there are uncertainties and a contested point or two. But some points are asserted over and over again and aren't really contested. They are just plain false. Yet no matter how often they are refuted they rise again from the dead, true…
November 24, 2008
Public health scientists and professionals have human health and welfare at the center of our concerns. But we have learned that the human species is part of a tightly connected web of other living species and we are all roaming around in a common environment, the surface of the earth. Avian…
November 23, 2008
Not quite 29 years ago the Chrysler Corporation asked the US Government for $1.5 billion in loan guarantees. $1.5 billion sounds like chump change now, but it was a pretty big deal in 1979:
The United States Congress reluctantly passed the "Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act of 1979" (Public…
November 23, 2008
When my sister and brother-in-law were stuck in Wichita Falls, TX during his military service (we're talking the 1950s, folks) it was a godforsaken part of a godforsaken state. No longer. God has moved in and set up shop. The Wichita Falls Times Record has the genesis of this development:
In the…
November 22, 2008
More delicious irony concerning the bottom feeders at the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the copyright thugs whose frivolous lawsuits extort money from innocent teens, grandmas and those in between. They are being hit with another counter claim ((the first was rejected) in…
November 22, 2008
At least one little corner of the biodiversity problem seems to be doing well: biodiversity among deadly diseases. An outbreak of Ebola disease in Uganda in 2007 has now been shown to be caused by a previously unknown variant, now called Bundibugyo ebolavirus.
Ebola virus produces a particularly…
November 21, 2008
The trouble with National Parks for a city boy like me is too much wilderness. I am only able to stand up on asphalt. So it is comforting to find out the Bush administration is looking out for folks like me, should by some quirk of fate we find ourselves outdoors in a National Park with no…
November 21, 2008
John Dingell (D-MI), longtime Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has done some good things in his time, but overall he's been a net minus. When Henry Waxman (D-CA) toppled him from his perch today my feeling was an uncharitable, Good Riddance. The vote in the Democratic Party caucus…