Tag: failedstate

Terrorism in Brazil

on May 12, 2006, São Paulo came under a violent and coordinated attack. The attackers moved on foot, and by car and motorbike. They were not rioters, revolutionaries, or the graduates of terrorist camps. They were anonymous young men and women, dressed in ordinary clothes, unidentifiable in advance, and indistinguishable afterward. Wielding pistols, automatic rifles, and firebombs, they emerged from within the city, struck fast, and vanished on the spot. Their acts were criminal, but the attackers did not loot, rob, or steal. They burned buses, banks, and public buildings, and went hard after the forces of order—gunning down the police in their neighborhood posts, in their homes, and on the streets.

Unfinished business

New Orleans Votes to Bring Down Memorials to White Supremacy. 4 prominent Confederate monuments will be removed from the city’s landscape.

A tiny step in the right direction. It’s time to deal with the reality that the south lost. Just like you don’t see a lot of Mussolini statues in Italy these days, why should it be any different with this nonsense?

The TI-83 scam

education is even more busted than healthcare and this is a great example why.

TI calculators have been a constant, essential staple in the slow-moving public education sector. Students and teachers are so used to generations of students learning the familiar button combos and menu options that TI provides a computer program that perfectly resembles the button layout of the TI-83.

However, even if teachers wanted to be bold and bring in better technology, they would end up right back at square one because of that infamous force in American education: standardized testing.

Personalized medicine

Each patient is a unique, dynamic system and at the molecular level diseases are heterogeneous even when symptoms are not. In just the last few years we have expanded breast cancer into first 4 and now 10 different types of cancer and the subdivision is likely to continue as knowledge expands. Match heterogeneous patients against heterogeneous diseases and the result is a high dimension system that cannot be well navigated with expensive, randomized controlled trials. As a result, the FDA ends up throwing out many drugs that could do good.

Egg board corruption

The American Egg Board’s members are appointed by the FDA, and it was they who funded a secret, deceptive smear campaign against startup Hampton Creek’s vegan egg replacement.

From paying food bloggers to post egg-heavy recipes to buying Google ads that returned results for eggs to people searching for Hampton Creek, to lobbying food experts, animal-rights activists and others to speak out in favor of the poultry industry, the AEB pulled out all the stops to undermine their competition.

Watching Sandra Bland

The Texas state trooper threatening to use his Taser on Sandra Bland (a driver he’d pulled over for the infraction of failing to signal when she changed lanes), shouting “I’m going to light you up!” Without the Garner video, there would have been eyewitnesses but no seemingly incontrovertible testimony. Without the camera on Officer Brian Encinia’s dashboard, most of us might never have heard what happened to Sandra Bland. The existence of such evidence helps in investigations and prosecutions; it’s supposed to be a deterrent to both bad behavior on the part of the cops and false allegations of police abuse. But it does not guarantee either better behavior or justice. A grand jury declined to indict the police officers in the Eric Garner case. More broadly, it puts us in a strange, morally exigent position: we can’t say we didn’t see, we never knew; we have no plausible deniability. The videos keep coming out.

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