… now the secret of immortality.What am I missing here? I’m confused. Was this about a science fiction short story that will be printed in the Sunday, 2 December edition of The New York Times Magazine? The title of the story is Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality? The genesis for the discovery of the jellyfish is this (authentic?) article Reversing the Life Cycle: Medusae Transforming into Polyps and Cell Transdifferentiation in Turritopsis nutricula (Cnidaria, Hydrozoa), Biol. Bull. June 1, 1996 vol. 190 no. 3 302-312. Did Knight Science Journalism review the short story? Or did they critique The New York Times’ decision to print the short story, in its 6.500 word entirety?
In my rant about the new aesthetic of the future, I complained that there were few, if any, genuinely new visions of the future coming out of science fiction. Post-cyberpunk Author Neal Stephenson has been complaining about the lack of innovation in science fiction. Sci-fi author Charlie Stross …
Charlie Stross was more innovative, no, let’s just try “clairvoyant” about the near future than I would have ever thought possible.
How many people had any foreboding about Sadaam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991? Well, probably some people in military intelligence, the United Nations and human rights advocacy groups. “The Taqrit Horror” (a term used by Stross in his science fiction) was hardly visible in mainstream Western (or most other) media in the late 1980’s. Yet Charlie Stross wrote A Colder War (full text) a short story, well, more of a novella, about it. It is one of the scariest works of near-future science fiction I have ever read. There are heavy Lovecraftian overtones.
Stross contributes regularly to a blog-of-sorts. It is good reading, even though it isn’t science fiction.
(via notational)
Mathematical model improves predictions for species facing climate change
UCLA life scientists developed and tested a comprehensive mathematical model to track the health of populations exposed to environmental change. The research was published on 2 December 2011 in the journal Science.
I fotgot to post this. I wrote it a few months ago. Ooops… It remains valid, regardless. (I really wanted to include some wolf pictures too, no luck though).
The usage is novel, in that it unifies so many sub-fields (population biology, ecology, genetics, life-span and offspring information) in a single predictive model. Doing so enables the model to be run with changes to any given variable, such as temperature, and see the effect on many aspects of a population. For the sake of convenience, let’s refer to this as a one-to-many type model (but only for describing input-to-output).
Prior species-based environmental models were not one-to-many. Instead, they were one-to-one. This meant they were limited to analyzing single relationships, such as the effect of food availability on population size.
Species ecosystems aren’t as complex as other dynamic natural systems. Weather systems and forecasting models such as those used by the NOAA are on the extreme end of a hypothetical complexity scale. They might be more accurately described as many-to-many input-output models! They would be inappropriate for species ecosystems, in part because the environmental field data is not sufficiently robust to support such sophisticated (high-strung?) models.
Wolves
This model was developed with input from wildlife scientists. The most extensive collaboration was with the group who introduced wolves to Yellowstone Park in 1995. The project was intended to control elk and bison overpopulation. It was successful. Deteriorated forest was restored. And much more.
The presence of wolves in Yellowstone Park created an effect known as a
trophic cascade — allowing many species, such as songbirds, beavers and grizzly bears, to thrive again
Meanwhile, elk and bison populations returned to more balanced levels.
Applications
Regarding use for climate change, one of the UCLA researchers said this about the model:
We are not effective at stopping global warming, but perhaps we could identify ways to alter or enrich habitats to mitigate environmental effects…
This is where the Yellowstone Park wolves, and associated project data collected over a 15 year interval, was relevant. That data was used for calibration and testing the model during development.
We could build scenarios for predicting whether a species has no chance of recovery [to guide timing and focus of] planned protection efforts.
Results
Gradual, sustained change over time has more impact on a given species within an ecosystem than frequent changes that fluctuate within the same upper and lower boundaries.
See Scientists develop complex mathematical model with improved predictive accuracy for climate change impact, UCLA Newsroom, December 02, 2011 for more details, and photos.
XSL Stylesheet for for Encoded Archival Description
tingletech/ead_basic_xslt - GitHub
generic XSLT 1.0 + EXSLT for EAD.
Based on the XSLT for http://www.oac.cdlib.org/
Sample output is
I tried it. I’m not sure though. I did the following:
- Went here: http://tingletech.github.com/ead-test-col/
- Selected this: …cjh.org/YiddishTeachersUnion.html
- Got this:
http://tingletech.github.com/ead-test-col/cjh.org/YiddishTeachersUnion.html
the contents of which looked strange to me. But the XSL correctly took this:
Dukacfyi Udesotbezi Xundeduip’ xyrkafuhaob tiheqy
and produced this:
http://library.columbia.edu/services/preservation.html
which is kind of cool and impressive! (Unless I am totally misunderstanding how this should work… which is ALWAYS a possibility.)
Visualizing 138 Years of Popular Science
Jer Thorp, data artist in-residence at The New York Times, worked with Popular Science’s magazine archive to visualize how technologies have emerged. The results can be seen over on Flickr.
Via Thorp:
PopSci has a history that spans almost 140 years… I showed how different technical and cultural terms have come in and out of use in the magazine since it’s inception.
The graphic is anchored by a kind of molecular chain – decade clusters in turn contain year clusters. Every atom in these year clusters is a single issue of the magazine, and is shaded with colours extracted from the issue covers via a colour clustering routine. The size of the issue-atoms is determined by the number of words in each issue.
Pseudo-genetic data visualization of the evolution of technology via the growth medium of Popular Science terminology occurrences?
(Source: futurejournalismproject, via signalbuilder)
via neverendingaudit:
How to learn decades of netiquette in ten easy steps.
Every line of this brief article* was worthwhile. Don’t be put off from reading it because of the category (as I was, initially). It was listed in Computational Biology.
There won’t be any revelations about etiquette for most of us, for example:
… it is crucial that you not permit the discussion to degenerate into an argument. Even if you receive an impolite answer, stay calm and answer as gently as you can.
Yet I have rarely seen these ideas codified in such a straightforward, generally applicable framework as in this article.
* Full text. It is open access, free, no pay wall to scale.
Vaccination: Truth and consequences
A few days ago, I deposited part of the following wordy tirade in the comment section of the excellent Science-based Medicine blog. I felt motivated after reading a fine post about Vaccine Awareness, publication date November 2010, and still relevant.
Remember Smallpox?
I often wonder what anti-vaccine advocates have to say about smallpox.
Do they condemn small pox innoculation? I don’t think ANYONE could deny the ravages inflicted by smallpox on humanity, over the past 1000 years. Thanks to vaccination, smallpox has (virtually) been eradicated. Do anti-vaccination proponents acknowledge that smallpox vaccination was a GOOD thing?
Public health irony
In the poorer areas of the United States, particularly the southern states and Native American lands, there are higher rates of child vaccination than in the (generally) more wealthy Northeast and West Coast areas. Note that the coastal populations have better access to medical care for many reasons. The primary one is affluence.
Irrationality is the scourge of the wealthy and well-educated
Guess what: Incidence (maybe prevalence) of childhood disease such as measles and even polio is much HIGHER in the MORE economically affluent areas.
In the U.S., vaccination for childhood diseases is free for every child, as it should be. However, it is the parent’s right to refuse vaccination for a child. A higher proportion of well-educated, middle to upper income parents have chosen to do this recently. The consequences are increasingly obvious and dire. Measles had been eradicated in the U.S. over a decade ago. Not anymore. It is back. Herd immunity is suffering.
No, let me be very clear: Children are suffering. Children are suffering, some are dying, due to irrational fears of parents.
Measles is making an alarming comeback via The Mayo Clinic, 30 August 2011
[many cases of] measles have been reported in the United States this year and there have been similar outbreaks in Europe, a sign the disease is making an alarming comeback. The reappearance of the potentially deadly virus is the result of unfounded fears about a link between the measles shot and autism that have turned some parents against childhood vaccination.
A rising portion of the population is deciding not to immunize their children because of this controversy… and these children are now susceptible to the measles.
Suspicions about the vaccine have persisted, gaining steam with the public through celebrity advocates and widespread media coverage.
“The results have been devastating,” Dr. Poland (Mayo Clinic) says. “The campaign against the vaccine has caused great harm to public health across multiple nations, even though it has no scientific basis.”Measles remains the most contagious infectious disease humans can get. Due to the measles vaccine’s effectiveness and successful immunization programs worldwide, indigenous cases of the disease had been eliminated in the U.S., similar to eradication of smallpox.
