Category: Uncategorized

Malaria vaccine

Delays for malaria vaccine. First european approval, then WHO approval, then per-country approval in Africa. No wonder we can’t have nice things with that much redundancy.
2021-04-24: Malaria Vaccine 77% effective

A year-long trial of R21 in Burkina Faso has shown 77% efficacy, which is by far the record, and which opens the way to potentially relieving a nearly incalculable burden of disease and human suffering. This is definitely the best malaria vaccine candidate the world has yet seen, and that is unequivocal good news. Congratulations and thanks to the widespread group of researchers who have made this possible – and especially, thanks to 450 infants and toddlers in central Burkina Faso and to their parents. You have done the world a great service.

2023-07-03: Many vaccines are in development, with different approaches.

Most vaccines aim to reduce malaria deaths and illness. But to eradicate malaria altogether, scientists will also have to find a way to stop transmission. Sporozoite- and merozoite-targeting vaccines could help to reduce transmission by preventing infections or reducing the number of parasites in the blood. Duffy, however, is working on an altogether different vaccine that makes transmission its main aim — one that can destroy the malaria parasite inside the mosquito.
Inside people, a small subset of merozoites differentiate into male and female gametocytes, which the parasite needs to complete the sexual stage of its life cycle. When a mosquito feeds on an infected person, it ingests red blood cells that contain the parasites’ gametocytes. These gametocytes emerge as gametes in the mosquito’s gut, mate, and eventually give rise to fresh sporozoites ready to infect the next person.
The idea behind Duffy’s vaccine is to take out the gametes by stimulating the human immune system to generate antibodies against a protein called Pfs230 that gametes display on their surface. A feeding mosquito will then take up not just the gametocytes, but also those antibodies. When gametes emerge from red blood cells in the mosquito’s gut, the theory goes, the antibodies will be there to destroy them before they can complete their development

Stockholm Rent Control

Dear Seattle, I am writing to you because I heard that you are looking at rent control. Seattle, you need to ask your citizens this: How would citizens like it if they walked into a rental agency and the agent told them to register and come back in 10 years? I’m not joking. The image above is a scan of a booklet sent to a rental applicant by Stockholm City Council’s rental housing service. See those numbers on the map? That’s the waiting time for an apartment in years. Yes, years. Look at the inner city – people are waiting for 10-20 years to get a rental apartment, and around 7-8 years in my suburbs.

Thermal Face Recognition

Cross modal face matching between the thermal and visible spectrum is a much desired capability for night-time surveillance and security applications. Due to a very large modality gap, thermal-to-visible face recognition is one of the most challenging face matching problem. In this paper, we present an approach to bridge this modality gap by a significant margin. Our approach captures the highly non-linear relationship between the 2 modalities by using a deep neural network. Our model attempts to learn a non-linear mapping from visible to thermal spectrum while preserving the identity in- formation. We show substantive performance improvement on a difficult thermal-visible face dataset. The presented approach improves the state-of-the-art by more than 10% in terms of Rank-1 identification and bridge the drop in performance due to the modality gap by more than 40%.

Against Performance Reviews

The annual performance review has been falling out of favor in some quarters. Microsoft and Gap are among several companies that have reformed their evaluation processes in recent years. Accenture, an emblem of traditional corporate culture if ever there was one, announced that it is getting rid of annual evaluations for its 360k employees, replacing the process with a system where managers will give feedback on a more regular basis. The existing evaluations are cumbersome and expensive. “the outcome is not great.”

Kazakhstan Sleeping Villages

tl;dr: no known cause

Radiation. Government conspiracy. Mass hysteria. There are plenty of theories as to why the residents of a tiny Kazakh mining region keep falling asleep for days at a time, but no answers. Deputy Prime Minister Berdibek Saparbaev announced that the mystery of the sleeping sickness had been solved: It was the specific combination of reduced levels of oxygen and heightened levels of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons. But as usual, rumors overshadowed reality. “The real moment is that we came to the conclusion that there are natural processes that lead to the combination of these kinds of factors and that specifically this combination of factors could give this effect. I can’t say for certain now. Our assumption is that all 3 components must coincide. When all 3 exist, that’s when people will start falling and sleeping again.” He had searched for similar cases in scientific literature, but so far had found nothing. He suggested the illness would return in September when people started to heat their homes.

Attack of the Beer Chains

2 national chains that focus on craft beer are putting their stakes in Manhattan’s beer scene with upcoming openings. Florida-based World of Beer and The Brass Tap will open franchises in the coming months, bringing with them wide selections of beer to compete with local beer bars. Here’s a look at what both have to offer.

Computer-Aided Explanation

the point where AI is helping understanding directly isn’t that far off.

For instance, might it be possible to get the statistical models of language to deduce the existence of verbs and nouns and other parts of speech? That is, perhaps we could actually see verbs as emergent properties of the underlying statistical model. Even better, might such a deduction actually deepen our understanding of existing linguistic categories? For instance, imagine that we discover previously unknown units of language

Super-cheap flights

If the cost of international flights drops to the $300 to $400 range instead of $700 to $1500 or more and better cabin air pressure means no jet lag, then shorter one week international vacations would open up as a far bigger market and more frequent option.

2017-09-05:

After 2050, there will likely be 6-7B people that are the equivalent of today’s developed world middle class or affluent class. 2 to 4 trips per person per year is not inconceivable (higher incomes and low transportation costs). This would be 12-28B international arrivals.