revere | November 25, 2008My 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 to turn a profit for the shareholders. But they lead a double life. One as the respectable business person. The other as a cruel, vicious and cold blooded murderer. The US has led the world in anti-tobacco measures and now Europe is catching up. But it's a big world and the tobacco giants have just…
revere | November 25, 2008Happy 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 visits, more than 3,000,000 page views and written over 2800 posts. On our Scienceblogs site alone we've logged almost 25,000 comments (we don't have a count for the Blogger era). There has never been a day without a post on the site, so that makes 1461 straight days of posting here. It makes me…
revere | November 24, 2008The 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 zombie lies. One of the great things about writing on the internet is the ability to link to really excellent pieces and Darksyde over at DailyKos has just such a piece you owe it to yourself to read. It's not short but not excessively long, either. Just long enough to get the job done. And the job…
revere | November 24, 2008Public 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 influenza is a good case in point. The influenza virus is mainly a parasite of birds but some forms also infect humans and some infect both. The influenza/A subtype designated H5N1 ("bird flu") is a case in point. It devastates terrestrial birds, like poultry, and when it infects humans it has a truly…
revere | November 23, 2008Not 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 Law 96-185) on December 20, 1979 (signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on January 7, 1980), prodded by Chrysler workers and dealers in every congressional district who feared the loss of their livelihoods. The military then bought thousands of Dodge pickup trucks which entered military service…
revere | November 23, 2008When 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 beginning, the state of Texas created a Bible course. And the course was formless and void. Darkness hung over the details of the course.
Eventually, the state said, "Let there be K-12 instruction in religious literature that includes the Old and New Testaments."
And the Wichita Falls Independent…
revere | November 22, 2008More 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 Atlantic Recording v. Raleigh, a case being heard in St. Louis, MO. This time an amended class action claim in being filed under RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
The allegations?
RICO
Fraud
Conspiracy
Trespass
Prima Facie Tort
violation of the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act…
revere | November 22, 2008At 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 nasty kind of hemorrhagic fever. Richard Preston gave some gory descriptions in his 1999 bestseller, The Hot Zone. Case fatality ratios for Ebola are well over 50%, exceeding 90% [typo corrected] in some outbreaks. Ebola viruses are part of a viral family called filoviruses, that also includes Marburg…
revere | November 21, 2008The 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 Starbucks within blocks. Soon we'll be able to see the soul satisfying outline of a huge coal fired power plant, an oil refinery or some other familiar polluter to make us feel at home. It's just too bad that the EPA's own administrators can't get onboard:
The Environmental Protection Agency is finalizing…
revere | November 21, 2008John 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 was close but not very close: 137 - 122. Dingell has not been representing the people of his District as much as he has been representing the US Automakers. He he got the sobriquet Dirty Air Dingell the old fashioned way: he earned it:
The Energy and Commerce panel is one of the most important House…
revere | November 20, 2008There's a lot of stupidity in state legislatures, and the responsibility for that stupidity rests squarely with the people who voted for these morons. Take Tennessee. Please.
Combating music piracy at Tennessee's public university system is more important than hiring teachers and keeping down tuition costs.
Just-signed legislation requires the 222,000-student system to spend an estimated $9.5 million for file sharing "monitoring software," "monitoring hardware" and an additional "recurring cost of $1,575,000 for 21 staff positions and benefits (@75,000 each) to monitor network traffic" of its…
revere | November 20, 2008There is a story on the wires today about an upcoming Lancet article describing the case of a young Columbian woman whose failing airway was replaced by a bioengineered airway whose cells were cultured from adult stem cells obtained from the patient's bone marrow. Since there is as yet no scientific paper, I got these details from a press release from the University of Bristol, one of four participating European universities in this unique case (the others were in Barcelona, Padua and Milan).
The 30 year old patient's main airway (the lower trachea) and left main stem bronchus (one of the two…
revere | November 19, 2008The Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) is one of the most maligned and hated federal agencies. And for good reason. They are worse than useless, performing uncounted acts of "security theater" (in Bruce Schneier's apt coinage), like confiscating water bottles and making you take off your shoes. The TSA also has an active use of "behavior detection officers" whose job it is recognize the telltail signs of a terrorist intention -- like looking anxious before getting on an airplane. The TSA claims the program, which is now in operation at 150 major airports and employs almost 2500…
revere | November 19, 2008A congressionally mandated independent panel of scientists has just issued a report verifying what many of us have know since the early 1990s. Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) is real:
Gulf War syndrome is real and afflicts about 25 percent of the 700,000 U.S. troops who served in the 1991 conflict, a U.S. report said Monday.
Two chemical exposures consistently associated with the disorder -- one to a drug given to soldiers to protect against nerve gas and the other said to protect against desert pests -- were cited as causes in the congressionally mandated report presented to Veterans Affairs…
revere | November 18, 2008In 2001 Ignacio Chapela, an ecologist from the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author David Quist published a highly controversial paper in Nature that appeared to show that genetically engineered genes used in genetically modified (GM) corn (maize) was spreading from GM cornfields in Mexico into traditional corn crops. This set off a firestorm where proponents of GM agriculture declared the paper fatally flawed, pointing out some apparent errors. Accusations of agribusiness conflicts of interest were traded with those of political agendas. Nature subsequently published an "editor'…
revere | November 18, 2008It's now two and half months since CDC and US FDA declared an end to the infamous tomatoes-no-it's-peppers salmonella outbreak of last summer. The outbreak itself was even longer: 3 months. There were some 1400 reported cases but probably many more that escaped detection. That's typical for foodborne disease outbreaks.
In case you've forgotten, here's a summary, courtesy Georgetown University's Produce Safety Project (PSP):
Although CDC and FDA initially pointed in early June to tomatoes as the cause of the outbreak based on epidemiological data, no contaminated tomato was ever found. In…
revere | November 17, 2008Interesting new findings on household bleach as a disinfectant. Yes, we know it's a disinfectant. What we don't know is why it is a disinfectant. How exactly does it work? This utilitarian question has just been explored in a paper in the super select and prestigious journal Cell. Here's a bit of background, courtesy the PR flacks at the University of Michigan, whose job it is to publicize the work of their faculty:
In a study published in the Nov. 14 issue of the journal Cell, a team led by molecular biologist Ursula Jakob describes a mechanism by which hypochlorite, the active ingredient of…
revere | November 17, 2008The team of investigative reporting team of Susanne Rust and Meg Kissinger at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel just keeps rolling along, this time with an amazing story about how microwave safe plastics are leaching bisphenol-A (BPA) at potentially unsafe levels. We are saying potentially unsafe because we really know little about the effects of hormone mimics like BPA except that at levels currently found in BPA containing plastics in contact with food and liquids produce biological effects in test systems and a recent analysis of a representative survey of US adults showed an association…
revere | November 16, 2008World leaders confront global crisis
Economic summit in Washington is likely only a first step
to new rules to prevent financial meltdown and market mayhem.
In 1955 the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a classic book about the stock market crash of 1929 (The Great Crash 1929). It hasn't gone out of print since, thanks, Galbraith observed in a later introduction added in the 1990s, to the penchant of the US economy to have periodic recessions. It is again prominently displayed in bookstores. That's where I noticed it last month and bought a copy. It's a frightening read. All you…
revere | November 16, 2008The latest hilarious dust-up over religion has to do with an ad on DC buses scheduled for the holidays by the American Humanist Association (AHA):
Ads proclaiming, "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake," will appear on the outside and inside of DC Metro buses starting next Tuesday and will run throughout December. Newspaper versions of the ads ran in The New York Times and The Washington Post this week.
The advertising campaign is part of an effort by the American Humanist Association to reach out to like-minded individuals around the nation's capitol and elsewhere who might…