Life imitates art:
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Milo Minderbinder!
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
Life imitates art:
paging
Milo Minderbinder!
New Scientist has investigated
drug industry funding
for patient groups. These organizations are, at least in theory, founded and led by people who
actually have a specific disease or condition, with the goal of providing information and support
for their members and others with the same disease.
Unsurprisingly, pharmaceutical companies gave more money to patient groups devoted to diseases where there's an available medication, and less to those where the treatment is surgical, or where there is little or no effective treatment (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Also, groups devoted to conditions where drug companies have been accused of "disease-mongering," convincing healthy people that they need medication, got a large percentage of their funds from companies selling that medication.
The groups that got a lot of industry funding denied that it biased their activities. NS's data suggest that, even if there's no explicit quid pro quo, the money is making a difference: the study compared two women's health organizations, one of which takes industry funding and one which makes a point of not doing so, and their statements about hormone replacement therapy.
Critics claim, however, that dependence on industry funding can unintentionally compromise an organisation's objectivity. "I think it's naive to think that you aren't being influenced," says Douglas Ball of Kuwait University, who has studied patient groups in many countries, including the US. Lexchin agrees: "Psychologists talk about the 'gift relationship'. The patient organisations are getting something and feel the need to repay that gift. Whether they are conscious of it or not is really irrelevant."Sharon Batt of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, has just begun to study patient group behaviour and funding after years working in breast cancer advocacy, where she noticed a general pattern. Organisations that accept pharmaceutical funding "tend to advocate for faster review and availability of drugs, greater insurance coverage, and they tend to see 'direct-to-consumer' advertising as a benefit to patients", she claims. Groups that maintain financial independence, on the other hand, "emphasise safety over speed and are critical of direct-to-consumer advertising", she says.
These groups don't seem to be the worst kind of astroturf: they aren't entirely industry-funded, and most of them, as far as I can tell, are in fact run by the patients involved. The warning here is largely for patients looking for unbiased information: just because a group says it's run by and for patients doesn't mean it isn't taking its information from the same drug industry reps who are buying your doctor lunch.
It's been well-known for a while that elephants have a complex family structure.
That structure is
breaking down in many places. Violence between humans and elephants is both a cause and a consequence
of that breakdown, as are intra-elephant violence and attacks on other species.
Psychologists and neurologists have been studying how elephants react to trauma, and are getting good results treating some of them with techniques similar to those used for post-traumatic stress in human patients.
This fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues concluded, had effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss and poaching, along with systematic culling by government agencies to control elephant numbers and translocations of herds to different habitats. The number of older matriarchs and female caregivers (or “allomothers”) had drastically fallen, as had the number of elder bulls, who play a significant role in keeping younger males in line. In parts of Zambia and Tanzania, a number of the elephant groups studied contained no adult females whatsoever.…What Bradshaw and her colleagues describe would seem to be an extreme form of anthropocentric conjecture if the evidence that they’ve compiled from various elephant resesarchers, even on the strictly observational level, wasn’t so compelling. The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression. Studies of the various assaults on the rhinos in South Africa, meanwhile, have determined that the perpetrators were in all cases adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot down in cullings. It was common for these elephants to have been tethered to the bodies of their dead and dying relatives until they could be rounded up for translocation to, as Bradshaw and Schore describe them, “locales lacking traditional social hierarchy of older bulls and intact natal family structures.”
In fact, even the relatively few attempts that park officials have made to restore parts of the social fabric of elephant society have lent substance to the elephant-breakdown theory. When South African park rangers recently introduced a number of older bull elephants into several destabilized elephant herds in Pilanesburg and Addo, the wayward behavior — including unusually premature hormonal changes among the adolescent elephants — abated.
The National Weather Service has added
an "Experimental Weather Safety Planner" to
their Web site. You can select up to six parameters, enter acceptable numerical values, and then either click
the map or enter a latitude and longitude and click "submit": "This will query the forecast grids to find
when your weather requirements will be met at the nearest grid point over the next 7 days."
The available parameters are temperature, relative humidity, surface wind speed (mph), surface wind direction, sky cover, precipitation potential (those six are filled in by default), "temperature >=100," "temperature <=32", dewpoint, heat index, and surface wind speed (in knots).
The output is a chart, with colored bars highlighting the times in the upcoming week that each of your requirements is expected to be satisfied; it seems simple enough to identify times (if any) that meet all one's requirements.
I'm assuming this is US-only, and haven't tested it beyond playing with my own location and a couple of simple parameters that seem possible for this time of year (nothing below freezing, for example). But it might be useful, fun, or both.
For the record: when the
United States Congress voted for torture and arbitrary imprisonment yesterday, only
one Republican Senator had the
decency,
or understanding of what the United States used to stand for, to vote no: Lincoln Chaffee of
Rhode Island. John
McCain, who a lot of people have told me is somehow different from the run-of-the-mill
Republican, and who knows what torture can do to a prisoner, voted in favor.
They're calling
her
"Lucy's little sister": a largely complete skeleton of a three-year-old Australopithecus
afarensis has been found near the Awash River in Ethiopia. Much of the fossil is still
encased in rock, but enough has been exposed to suggest that yes, the species was bipedal, but combining
the shoulder with Lucy's arms suggests they were better climbers than we are. The brain
size—"330 cubic centimetres, between 63 and 88 per cent of the size of an adult of the
species"—suggests that A. afarensis was already evolving toward our slower brain
development.
Hail
Eris!2003 UB313, the world some blame for the "demotion" of Pluto, has an official name, and the
discoverer found something more appropriate than "Xena."
Between Mars and Jupiter they interpose a planet, again.
The newest definition
counts Pluto and Charon, puts Ceres back on the list, and throws in 2003UB13, which
is overdue for a common name. That's a round dozen for the moment, with open
questions: how many "Plutons" are out there in the Kuiper Belt? Why stop at Ceres?
And, though the BBC seems to be skipping this one, if Charon counts separately from
Pluto, what about Earth's Moon?
Scientists analyzing variation in
a gene called Mc1r describe the range of
fur colors in wooly
mammoths: it seems to have been either black or dark brown, if one of a mammoth's
copies of the gene was, or a light ginger or blond if both were only partially active.
There's no obvious benefit from the variation, since mammoths were rather large to
be effectively camouflaged by any solid-color coat.
Italy has
arrested its own head of
military counter-espionage on charges of involvement with CIA "extraordinary
renditions." Marco Mancini is the first Italian to be publicly linked to the
kidnapping of Osama Mustafa Hassan in 2003. The Italian government had previously
issued arrest warrants for 22 Americans in this case,
but U.S. authorities have refused to cooperate with Italy.
We've got another
molecular biology analysis redrawing most of the
mammalian
family tree.
Before cheerfully putting horses closest to carnivora and a distance from cattle,
the authors note that
Comprehensive analyses of large collections of DNA sequences mostly reject the conclusions from morphological analyses.Reassuringly, marsupials are still an outgroup to the rest of the mammals; they seem not to have tested sequences for monotremes.
Dick Marty's report on the
the European role in
CIA kidnapping and torture is based in part on detailed tracking of flights.
Mr Marty says that far from being hoodwinked by a "CIA plot", 14 European states were fully aware of much of what was going on. "It is now clear - although we are still far from having established the whole truth - that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities. Other countries ignored them knowingly, or did not want to know."
Marty says that, in addition to letting the CIA use British airspace and airports for these flights, the British government provided information that was used in torturing British residents.
The Polish denials of involvement are implausible, given that EU air traffic records show the planes entering Poland, and Poland refused access to its own records.
Mr Marty also highlights a number of flights from Afghanistan to Poland at times when it is now known that terrorism suspects were being transferred from Kabul to unknown destinations. His suspicions were fuelled by the Polish authorities' failure to cooperate: while EuroControl's records detailed a series of flights into the country, including a number to the Szymany air base, north east of Warsaw, local officials claimed they had no records of the visits. Mr Marty describes that as "highly unusual", and adds: "Poland cannot be considered to be outside the rendition circuits simply because it has failed to furnish information corroborating my data from other sources."
Remember: torture is both immoral and ineffective, no matter who is doing it. The time period for this is the time period during which the Taleban has been reconquering parts of Afghanistan.
Yes, I'm using British sources here. The Washington Post story notes that, as a matter of policy, that paper isn't publishing the names of the countries accused of hosting CIA prison camps, and the New York Times' story on the CIA today is about them knowing where Adolf Eichmann was in 1958 and not telling Israel. Worth publishing, yes, but that "cautionary tale" about the agency is far less urgent than reining in the torturers who are operating under its roof now.
A report for the Council of Europe
has concluded that fourteen
European nations colluded with the CIA's "extraordinary renditions".
The new report says: "It is now clear - although we are still far from having established the truth - that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities."Other countries ignored them knowingly, or did not want to know."
Spain, Turkey, Germany and Cyprus provided "staging posts" for rendition operations, while the UK, Portugal, Ireland and Greece were "stop-off points", the report says.
It says Italy, Sweden, Macedonia and Bosnia allowed the abduction of residents from their soil.
The most serious charges are levelled at Poland and Romania, where Mr Marty says there is enough evidence to support suspicions that CIA secret prisons were established.
Although the Swiss senator [Dick Marty, head of the investigation] says the US must bear responsibility for the flights, he says the programme could operate only with "the intentional or grossly negligent collusion of the European partners".
The article quotes predictable denials and quasi-denials, ranging from Tony Blair saying the report "added nothing new to the information we have" to the prime minister of Poland calling the allegations "libel."
I can't get to the actual report right now: the Council of Europe web site is giving "service not available" messages for the relevant pages.
Copyright 2006 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
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