A new tool

First human gets new antibody aimed at rabies virus:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

MassBiologics of the University of Massachusetts Medical School today announced the beginning of a Phase 1 clinical trial, testing the safety and activity of a human monoclonal antibody (MAB) developed to neutralize the rabies virus.

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Rabies is essentially 100% fatal, with over 10 million people exposed worldwide and kills 55,000 people or so each year. Post-exposure treatment can be very effective. This usually includes a specific gamma globulin mixture to neutralize the virus.

However, this can be very expensive. So they have developed a monoclonal antibody that neutralizes the rabies virus, preventing it from having any deleterious effect.

If this is demonstrated to be effective and safe, it could make it much easier for countries such as India to deal with rabies exposure.

Technorati Tags: Health, Science

What to do?

Balko on Absolute Prosecutorial Immunity:
[Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars]

Balko has an article at Reason about a case the Supreme Court will hear this fall over what seems like a perfectly obvious question: Can a prosecutor be held personally liable for his actions if he intentionally falsifies testimony and/or evidence in a prosecution that puts an innocent person in prison for 25 years? If you think the answer should obviously be yes, you’re a sane, reasonable, decent human being.

If you think the answer should be no because prosecutors should be absolutely immune to any civil suits even if it can be proven that they deliberately violated the law and created fake evidence on which to convict an innocent person, then you must be a prosecutor. Or one of 27 state attorneys general. Or the Obama administration. They all filed briefs taking that heinous position.

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If a prosecutor knowingly falsifies evidence, and even creates it out of whole cloth, what is the penalty? If they have absolute immunity, they are shielded from civil suits but if they retire, it appears they are also free of any criminal suits.

So why wouldn’t they always manufacture evidence? The penalties for being found out seem awfully trivial. Perhaps the Supreme Court will feel similarly.

Technorati Tags: General

Cool parasitology on a dinosaur

by Diegosaurius Rex
Was mighty T. rex ‘Sue’ felled by a lowly parasite?:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

When pondering the demise of a famous dinosaur such as ‘Sue,’ the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex whose fossilized remains are a star attraction of the Field Museum in Chicago, it is hard to avoid the image of clashing Cretaceous titans engaged in bloody, mortal combat.

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Wow. The lesions seen on the jaws of some dinosaurs matched quite well with similar lesions found in some modern birds. It is a very interesting hypothesis and would just be one more link in the chain between the similarity of birds and some dinosaurs.

I wonder what else they could do to show a connection? Would there be remnants of the parasite’s DNA? Can the lesions be seen in more recent ancestors of modern birds?

Technorati Tags: Science

Different numbers

Most would refuse emergency use H1N1 vaccine or additive:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

A majority of Americans would not take an H1N1 flu vaccine or drug additive authorized for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration, according to a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and University of Georgia study. The study, available online today in Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science, found that fewer than 10 percent of those surveyed said they would be willing to take such a vaccine or drug and nearly 30 percent remained undecided.

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Yeah, lots of people would refuse because they do not see a huge number of people dying. I’m sure the numbers would change if mortality was higher.

What was interesting is that most people really have little idea of what is likely to happen. 85 percent really do not feel that they will become sick, yet the rapidity of the spread of swine flu indicates that perhaps 80% of the American population will get sick. That is what some models are showing.

There is a big disconnect between what individuals project and what epidemiological models predict. I would imagine we will find out just which is more correct shortly.

Technorati Tags: Health

Valuable Vaccines

I’m having an interesting discussion with someone about the HPV vaccine based on this article that discussed a girl dying after given the vaccine. The fact that someone happened to die after being given the vaccine is not necessarily indicative of anything.

If 1000 or 100,000 people are given anything, even a placebo, some may die shortly thereafter for totally unrelated reasons. But people try to create a reason using a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument. (I love using Latin.) “They died after getting the vaccine so the vaccine must be the cause.”

Of course they could also say, “he was wearing a red shirt when he died so red shirts are deadly.” B ut we all do know that would be incorrect because we all know people who have worn red shirts who have not died.

A later report indicates that she had an serious underlying medical condition that was the cause of death. This is why we do clinical trials and compare to placebo. If you give a shot to 1000 people, a fraction of them will have adverse effects, even with placebo. Simp;y because someone dies does not indicate the vaccine is the cause.

People use post hoc arguments all the time, along with selection bias, to ‘prove’ a point, such as this vaccine is bad. It is very easy to be fooled, which is why we run blinded trials where no one knows which is which. It is to remove the inherent bias any human being brings to a study.

From recent work (i.e. the FDA just had an advisory group examine the results from 2 clinical trials) adverse reactions (i.e. redness swelling, etc) are found in 0.4% of patients given the HPV vaccines versus 0.6% given a placebo.

But the effect on society of this vaccine could be tremendous. Cervical cancer could be eradicated in 50 years. Throat cancer, which more and more appears to be caused by HPV, could be impacted.

There may be some economic reasons to argue about the vaccine such as its cost. But I have seen little data to indicate that it is not safe and effective.

Technorati Tags: Health

Not good news

Four degrees of warming ‘likely’:
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

The global average temperature could rise by 4C (7.2F) as early as 2060, according to a new study by the UK Met Office.

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Four degrees would have pretty disastrous effects. And the projection has the Arctic raising 15 °C. This large a change would have significant effects on rainfall patterns and snow pack. Fresh water for a large part of the world population would be greatly impacted.

Not a nice conclusion.

Technorati Tags: Environment

Almost a Dickian story

Surrogates: Life… Only Shallower:
[Via Science Not Fiction]

The world of Surrogates, people venture forth into the world via sleek and sexy avatars from the comfort of elaborate wireless hookups in their bedrooms. Life…Only Better goes the technology tagline. In theory, the scene won’t take place for another half century – unless you’re watching the film in Los …

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I was struck by how much this felt like a movie based on a Philip K. Dick story. The paranoia, the inability to know what was real or not, the disconnection of human emotion from consequence. It even had a novel drug – sparking, where the surrogates slightly electrocuted each other.

I really liked it. Very much a genre movie without a whole lot of deep thought about the message that was there. Just put us into this world, and solve a murder. But it is a world where you can never be sure just who is operating the surrogate you are interacting with, where there is not a single human-human interaction or even a touch until the very end.

It did not do well at the box office but I think it will gain in stature as time goes one. It posits important questions about what makes us human that are not easily answered.

Technorati Tags: General, Science, Technology

NetNewsWire Upgrade

My RSS reader, NetNewsWire, that is distributed by Newsgator, has gone thought a new upgrade. And instead of being synched at the newsgator site, it is now being synched through Google Reader.

It is still the great bit of software it always was but there were some hiccups with Google Reader since, essentially, everything needed to be re-synced between my laptop, desktop and iPhone.

So, instead of having about 1000 feeds to go through, I had 24,000 unread items the first time. Fun.

I am working my way through all my feeds to make sure they are up to date, etc. I am now down to about 15,000, I should be done by this afternoon.

Then it is back to the fun times that are using Net NewsWire.

Technorati Tags: General, Web 2.0

Ignoring facts for belief

by griffithchris
A crazy mixed up kid comes up with a crazy mixed up conspiracy theory about a crazy mixed up blog collective:
[Via Respectful Insolence]

That Jake Crosby, he’s a crazy mixed-up kid, but I kind of like him.

He seems like a nice enough and smart enough kid, but, sadly, he’s fallen in with a bad crowd over at the anti-vaccine crank propaganda blog, Age of Autism, so much so that he’s even blogging there, helping, whether he realizes it or not, to promote the message that vaccines cause autism and that various forms of biomedical quackery can somehow “cure” autism. I say “whether he realizes it or not” because he seems to have settled into the role of AoA’s token young adult on the spectrum who promotes the party line. Indeed, he’s truly drunk the Kool Aid–big time–as I pointed out a few months ago when I noticed that he had written in my comment section in response to my observation that “no amount of science…will ever convince them [anti-vaccinationists] that vaccines don’t cause autism.”:

“Amount” doesn’t matter. A million “studies” claiming the Earth were flat wouldn’t make it true. Likewise, pseudostudies claiming no association to autism consistent with overwhelming evidence of a CDC-cover up will only further convince me that vaccines cause autism.

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This is a frequent problem of many people. WHen presented with evidence and facts demonstrating that their belief is wrong, they simply ignore the facts. It appears to be a basic human problem.

One of the major aspects of science as a philosophy is that most scientists are trained in processes to counterbalance this basic problem. We use a framework that helps protect against bias and then use a fairly open and transparent vetting process to further build bulwarks against fantastical thinking.

Denialists seldom have any of these frameworks to prevent bias. In fact, they are very reminiscent of various doomsday cults that state the world will end on a certain date. Seldom do these cults lose members when the date passes. They just find some other ad hoc approach to the world.

When your framework requires a vast conspiracy involving hundreds or thousands of people in order to be maintained, your framework is seriously flawed and potentially destructive. Yet, that is what most denialists require.

Technorati Tags: Health, Science

One of the things wrong with Obama

by bobster855 *

Lizardbreath: The Shameful Obama Administration:

[Via Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Economist Brad DeLong's Fair, Balanced, and Reality-Based Semi-Daily Journal]

I did not work to elect Barack Hussein Obama so that his Justice Department could do things like this:

Lizardbreath: US District Judge Colleen Kottar-Kelly just ordered the release (don’t get excited, it’s not going to happen unless the Justice Department decides not to appeal) of Fouad al-Rubiah, one of the prisoners at Guantanamo. Read the opinion — there are a lot of redactions, so you can’t get the details, but we took a middleaged aircraft engineer who flew to Afghanistan for charitable purposes a short while before 9/11, cobbled together some insane story out of interrogations from unreliable informants, and tortured him into confessing to it. If I follow the course of events correctly through all the redactions, we then continued to torture him because the story we told him to confess to didn’t make any sense. And now we’ve asked a judge to keep him imprisoned on the basis of the confessions that the US interrogators found unbelievable.

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We continue to hold prisoners we have tortured that not only have no real value but whose continuing imprisonment is an embarrassment to our values. Now a judge has ordered the release of one such prisoner.

I fully expect Obama’s government to continue the detention of prisoners beyond any good reason. We have tortured them and kept them for many years so far. I imagine that we will keep them for a few more. History will not judge this well at all.

*This photo from the National Archives presents Generals Patton, Bradley and Eisenhower being shown how the Nazis tortured inmates at the Gotha concentration camp. I guess I would call this a stress position. The Germans also had defined documents detailing how their “Verschärfte Vernehmung” or ’sharpened interrogation’ was to be used. The document mentioned was a secret directive from Heinrich Muller.

UPDATE: A very nice discussion of the court case.

Technorati Tags: Politics

Fudging a survey?

Are Oklahoma Students Really This Dumb? Or Is Strategic Vision Really This Stupid?:
[Via FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right]

Although the evidence continues to mount that there is something very funny about Strategic Vision’s process, for the most part there has not been too much reason to question their results themselves, which have tended to play it safe and straight down the fairway. Strategic Vision was rated as a pollster of roughly average accuracy in our pollster rankings, which were based on results through the 2008 primaries.

As Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling notes, however, it would not be that hard to manufacture the results of an election poll. Just look up the average at RCP or Pollster.com, or 538, tweak upward or downward a couple of points depending on your whim, and you’re good to go. But once you venture outside of the bubble of electoral politics and into an area where you can’t copy off your neighbor, there is potentially more room for a dishonest pollster to get themselves into trouble. Here, then, are a few oddities from a poll that Strategic Vision recently conducted for an educational thinktank.

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I wrote about this last week. I was a little concerned at the time since so many of the answers were ‘Don’t know.’ I thought that many of the students might have been goofing, since there was no real reason for them to answer properly.

The fact that 30 students said the Indian Ocean was off the East Coast. indicated to me something was off. If they were ignorant enough not to know it was the Atlantic, why would they even come up with Indian.

Well, this looks even more interesting. The organization that produced the survey results seems to have generated numbers that are a little too good. Someone who really knows numbers does not pass the smell test.

A very interesting discussion. He discusses some other instances.

Technorati Tags: General

Very nice to hear

Newmarket to Distribute “Creation” to US Audiences:
[Via The Panda's Thumb]

To keep this short, I’ll just quote the NCSE announcement:

The new film about Darwin, Creation, will be distributed in the United States after all, according to a story in the Hollywood Reporter (September 24, 2009). The film is expected to be released by Newmarket Films in December 2009. Earlier the producer of the film, Jeremy Thomas, lamented to the Telegraph (September 11, 2009), “It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it’s because of what the film is about. … It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America.” A few days later, however, NBC Bay Area (September 15, 2009) reported that a distribution deal was imminent.

In her review of Creation at The Panda’s Thumb blog, NCSE’s executive director Eugenie C. Scott described it as “a thoughtful, well-made film that will change many views of Darwin held by the public – for the good.” It also received praise from Steve Jones in Time Out London (September 22, 2009), who called it “a great film about a great man and a greater theory” and by Adam Rutherford in his Guardian blog (September 23, 2009), where he wrote, “we should … be grateful that this film is moving and beautiful, just like the creation Darwin so luminously untangled,” adding, “Creationists the world over deserve to see it.”

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I mentioned this movie a little while ago. I am glad it found a distributor. Newmarket has had a hand in several of my favorite movies, such as Memento, The Mexican, and Donnie Darko. Perhaps since the same company distributed The Passion of the Christ. it will be somewhat immune to creationist attacks.

Looks like a fun December.

Technorati Tags: General, Science

Writing grants

by dbdbrobot
The Grant Application Treadmill:
[Via In the Pipeline]

There’s a (justifiably) angry paper out in PLoS Biology discussing the nasty situation too many academic researchers find themselves in: spending all their time writing grant applications rather than doing research. The paper’s written from a UK perspective, but the…

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Part of the problem that keeps coming up with grant writing, besides what it does for people who work in research, is that the current system selects for a certain type of researcher. And it may well be that, in many cases, this type of researcher is not really one who can do very innovative research.

It is so much easier to get grants for incremental work. Researchers whose ideas require more revolutionary thought usually do not get grants, at least not RO1s from the government. If someone has an idea, gets funding for it then shows after 2 years that the idea was wrong, but will be likely that person will not ever get further funding. So the incentive is to only do research you know will work.

If there is a great idea floating around, people often do it on the sly, hoping no one will notice. Then if tit works, they can now write it up, pretending that some of the work has not already been done.

A lot of grants are actually given for ideas that have already been examined. The grant writers just pretend that some of the work has not already been done and the grant organizations then are pleased that so much was done in such a short time.

The grant making system was just really designed to deal with so many grants. It comes from a time when the difference in 2 points on a score would not mean the difference between funding or not. Now, some of the score a grant gets seems to come from things that are not necessarily germane to the work, such as reputation, lab size, spots on editorial boards, etc.

Not the best way to get innovative research going.

Technorati Tags: Science

Funny cat video

Friday Ninja Cat Blogging:
[Via Cosmic Variance]

I would not want to live in the same house as this cat. It’s a silent assassin. Via Cynical-C.

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This is one of the funnier cat videos I have seen. It is like a bad movie! It could only be done with a cat, I think. And I love the idea of it only moving when no one is watching.

Technorati Tags: General

Dino feathers

Dinosaurs had ‘earliest feathers’:
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

Exceptionally well preserved dinosaur fossils uncovered in north-eastern China display the earliest known feathers.

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New fossil discoveries are always fun news. The idea that some dinosaurs were the ancestors of birds has been around for a long time. This find has moved the appearance of feathers back in time to about 150 million ago.

These animals appear to have a different arrangement that seen with modern birds, in that they seem to have ‘wing feathers’ on all four limbs. There is actually a lot of interesting work showing the interchangeability of the scales on the legs of birds and feathers. Relatively simple genetic changes can produce feathers where none normally exist.

So, it seems to me that finding a fossil which has extensive leg feathers would fit quite nicely. A relatively simple change could result in leg scales instead of feathers.

Fun stuff.

Technorati Tags: Science