Granted, this is a small group, there does seem to be something interesting going on. It does not matter whether you believe in new fangled uranium weapons or not. For a boy to have 2000 nanograms of uranium per liter of urine suggests that someone’s measurements are wrong or that something weird is happening. I’ll wait for the papers, that are supposed to be coming out. Further work should clear up the matter.
Best SARS graphs yet. The best SARS graphs I have seen yet is this series of SARS graphs on Diaspoir.net by David O’Brien, an engineer in Hong Kong. He has a separate graph for every country that has reported a case of SARS! The graphs neatly show the number of deaths and recovered patients, and the big areas that represent people who are still sick with SARS. Highly recommended.
Thanks to RH for the tip. [SARS Watch Org]
Some very nice information.
Dog Genome Sequencers to Begin Ruff Draft of Boxer Breed: Chimp, Honeybee Almost Sequenced. GenomeWeb May 21 2003 0:12AM ET [Moreover - moreover...]
Everyone wants to find something to sequence. But it looks like getting the bovine sequence will be difficult. They still need to raise $50 million to match the funds from the government. Although Texas would like to give $10 million, in a time of budget problems, this could be problematic.
Circumcision does not dull sensitivity: study [Reuters Health eLine]
Thank Goodness. I would have loved to have seen the grant application for this work!
Where did SARS come from? The odds say zoonosis. I frequently get comments on SARS Watch Org and via email, suspicious that the SARS virus was created by somebody, because how could it appear from thin air? The probable answer is explained in this interesting article from the Boston Globe, Crossing the species barrier, which gives has some good background for the lay person on zoonosis, or the common spread of diseases from animal to human. The article gives examples of the many diseases that have crossed over from animals. A sample: When… [SARS Watch Org]
The Boston Globe article has some good info. One of the lessons from Jared Diamond’s classic book, Guns, Germs and Steel, was its convincing proposition that many of our most common illnesses came from the domestication of animals (i.e. smallpox). Zoonosis is an easy route for viruses to hop to a new niche. Until our immune systems adapt, they can cause huge problems. Pandemics always look like they appear from nowhere. That is the power of exponential growth.
SARS is becoming more and more worrisome. A good place to get some updates about SARS is SARS Watch. Written by a non-doctor but good blogger. In particular some of the disturbing work suggesting that the coronavirus may not be the whole story. There is still some epidemiology to be done.
Eric Bonabeau will be discussing how to connect small dumb parts to get smart swarms. Nature has already done this so use that as a model. Use social insects because they DO connect dumb parts to create smart actions.
Create artificial insects. Flexible. Robust. Decentalized. Self-organized. Bottom up approach. How do we shape emergence? [Can we?] How do we define individual behavior to produce desired emergent behavior? Again, look at Nature [the environment. Not the magazine].
Actually, look at Double-Bridge experiment.[Sorry. I do not know if this is free. I just used google to search fordouble bridge experiment ant, and this was a top link. try one of the other links.] But this figure uses exactly what Eric describes [t should since it is from his Nature paper]. Evaporation adds robustness to the trails but preventing a convergence to a local minimum if there is a better path somewhere else.
Now discussing traveling salesman problem. Hard to compute. This is from his Nature paper also. Using virtual ants, you can get a solution. In fact it also finds more than one solution. Also can alter if some of the nodes (cities) disappears or changes. So it allows almost real-time analysis. This permits dynamic factory scheduling.
Goggle found another article discussing some of Eric’s work at Science News. He is discussing bucket-brigade approaches. Ants again helped identify how to do this optimally. It is being used by many companies.
[Font problems. It is all in Greek right now.]Discussing Aggressor-Protector game.
Problems with simple rules. Army ants and circular mills [here is a picture from last years meeting. This is from May Woo's site who is supposed to be at this meeting.] Vicious cycle. No one ant is in control. Same idea with nest building in wasps. hard to find the rules for building complex structures. Took him some time to define rules.
Here is a powerpoint presentation to Eric’s talk from last year.
New technologies make it so much easier to visualize and examine new discoveries. Here is a graphical representation of the putative structure of the SARS virus genome provided by Evan Carmichael, using software from his company,Redasoft:
The genomic sequence was only determined a few days ago. Now you can get an idea of which genes are where. Attempts at vaccines will be next.
Recent Living Code writing:
Recent material examines:
The Guardian, taking the NYT as a model (for journalism if not openess of archives), wants to have science articles slug it out on an even footing with other stories. If it succeeds, I may have to put the Guardian on my A list. This editorial does describe some of the real needs for good scientific journalism, since so much of the major impacts on our lives come from science, whether it is a cancer sure or pesticide that can be used as a nerve agent.
The New York Times Changes Access to Old Content. The New York Times has just changed their archival policy so that all links we’ve used in the bIPlog that are more than 30 days old will redirect to a page requesting that you purchase the article for $2.95. Links have worked before now, even though articles were months or years old. Vin Crosbie, President of Digital Deliverance, talked last week at the JSchool about news online, and the mechanisms and logic that publishers use… [bIPlog]
This could be the end of the Times as a source of links in the Internet. I will no longer link to any of their pages since no one would be able to see anything after 30 days. Why tell anyone else about something interesting if they will have to pay 3 bucks to read it? For anyone to have to pay $2.95 to read a single article that is over 30 days old is ludicrous. You can get a great deal by paying $25.95 for access to 25 articles. Wow!! That is so nice of them. Plus you get 6 months to use this. Actually, all you buy is access to the article, not the article itself. You can look at the article (without pictures or graphs) for 90 days. Then you have to pay again. And, apparently, this holds true even if you are a subscriber. At least there is nothing on the payment page that says differently
What is funny about this is that scientific journals are going exactly the opposite direction. It costs money to read the current issue but many are making all their work open to everyone after a period of time. PNAS, for instance, allows open access to anything 6 months older or more. So, at least here there is a benefit to having a subscription. You can get access to 6 months of material at a reasonable price. But, if you can wait a while, you will eventually get older material. Plus, if you do not want to buy a subscription to get those 6 months of access, you can access all the articles at their site for for seven days for $15. Now, scientific papers may age more rapidly than newspaper articles. But I am skeptical. The NYT just lost its premier role in links and moved itself way down the list of places to read. (I wonder if the writers get any of that $3 as a residual?)
This graph from the New England Journal of Medicine provides some insight into the number of cases reported each day. I wonder where we are on the tipping point for this outbreak. If the curve tails off, we have it under control. If it reaches exponential increase, we are into a pandemic.
SARs - How Tipping Points work in Epidemics.
Why should we worry? After all only a thousand or so cases and less than 100 deaths. I have posted this chart before. It shows how a system tips. If the infected hit a threshold around 5% on the bell curve, the rate of infection will accelerate on the non linear curve.This is why the Health authorities are sweating blood now.
Here is the point. If SARS gets to the threshold on the bell curve, it breaks out and the system tips. What does that mean for you and me? A 4% death rate doesn’t sound like much but that’s 40,000 deaths a million Say there are 5 million in the Greater Toronto Area. Breakout into the whole community would mean the maximum likelihood of 200,000 deaths. Beyond the loss of life, the real issue will be our own societal immune reaction. We will panic into paralysis.
We are already seeing the city begin to shut down for all business and all forms of meeting such as schools. Hong Kong is closed already. If we get breakout, we will not only have a tragedy in loss of life but a breakdown of life as we know it as we panic to protect ourselves. Intercity travel will be halted let alone international travel. Most of our manufacturing is now Just in Time - what risk there? Air Canada will not be the only airline to fold.
It’s ironic, we are often killed by an overreaction of our own immune system. We risk being killed economically by our social immune system as we attempt to protect ourselves from SARS.
If we go down this path - what tips next? The stock market for sure. Then what? With the war and SARS we stand at the edge of a scale of social uncertainty not known in historic times.
Some more SARS stuff.
- A web page dedicated to SARS
- CNet - April 2, 2003, 5:25 PM PT - Disease scare crashes Intel events - The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak has caused Intel to cancel two conferences in Asia and postpone a trip to the region by CEO Craig Barrett.
- AP - 4:32 AM EST Wednesday, Apr. 2, 2003 - WHO issues travel warning over SARS outbreak - Geneva â?? The United Nations health agency issued a rare travel warning Wednesday, advising against trips to Hong Kong and the Chinese province of Guangdong because of a deadly outbreak of a mystery disease.
- CNNfn April 2, 2003: 1:11 PM EST - Economist predicts world recession - Morgan Stanley economist cites SARS, war uncertainties as the main causes for pending recession.
- Time Online Edition - Wednesday, Apr. 02, 2003 - Making Sense of SARS - The outbreak in Asia has spread to at least 13 other countries. How to stay safe â?? and calm â?? in the face of this mystery disease
- BBC - Thursday, 3 April, 2003, 10:00 GMT 11:00 UK - Worldwide bug pandemic warning - Efforts to stop a deadly pneumonia may not prevent a global explosion in cases, a world-leading infectious disease expert has warned.
Earlier, I praised the WHO on their handling of SARS, but as the news starts to unfold, I guess it’s not that simple. The tendency for the web to amplify fluctuation is probably hurting our ability to get a good sense of the actual risk of the situation. I think we should be focusing on what we should do to minimize risk rather than freaking out about it. On the other hand, it still appears we know so little about it. The question is whether the damage from freaking out exceeds the risk that SARS poses…
[Joi Ito's Web] [Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]
I have the feeling that fears of SARS may actually bemore damaging than the illness itself. But if it does break out in a large fashion, it could easily overwhelm public health system. Having a high rate of infectivity coupled with the number that need hospitalization, along with the high rate of the disease in health care givers yields a frightening possibility. Let’s see - The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are War, Pestilence, Famine and Death. I guess I really need to get a job. Then I might have a better attitude ;-)
Some of my recent writing at Livingcode:
