WHO concerned at new Ebola strain

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

WHO concerned at new Ebola strain:

The World Health Organization expressed concern on Friday about the emergence of a new strain of the Ebola virus that has infected 51 people and killed 16 in western Uganda.

The outbreak, announced by U.S. and Ugandan health officials on Thursday, is in Bundibugyo, near the border with Democratic Republic of Congo.

Genetic analysis of samples taken from some of the victims shows it is a previously unknown type of Ebola, making it the fifth strain, they said.
[...]
Ugandan health officials have said the new strain appears to be relatively mild, but Dr Tom Ksiazek of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it was not yet clear whether this was the case. He said experts need to check to see how many diagnosed patients are still alive.

Patients with the new strain showed some clinical symptoms, including vomiting, that differed from the usual ones, Hartl said.

“We are very concerned about this because it does not present (clinically) in exactly the same way as other Ebola strains,” he said.

A less virulent Ebola might sound less dangerous, but it should spread further than one that kills its hosts too quickly.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

How Yale Professors Lose Weight

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

How Yale Professors Lose Weight:

A Yale economics professor and a Yale law school professor are hoping that the next diet trend to take off is their own, which involves getting dieters to sign binding contracts committing to pay significant sums of money if they fail to meet their weight-loss goals.

The economist, Dean Karlan, tested the method himself, promising to hand over $1,000 to a friend every week that he didn’t drop one pound. Soon enough, he lost 10 pounds, getting down to 170 pounds without paying a cent.

Now, Mr. Karlan and Ian Ayres, the law professor who also teaches at Yale’s school of management, are launching a company based on this strategy. StickK will officially open next month, just in time for New Years’ resolutions aimed at losing pounds gained at holiday parties and family feasts. The company will have a Web site offering individuals hoping to reach a goal — anything from sticking to a diet to learning to ride a unicycle — legally binding contracts where they will pay a set dollar amount to charity if they fail in their endeavor.

The author of the book “The Undercover Economist,” Tim Harford, is testing out StickK’s methodology. He has paid a $1,000 so-called contract bond to the company, and has promised to donate 10% of this deposit to charity if he fails to complete 200 push-ups and 200 sit-ups every week.

“When I signed up to do this, I thought to myself, the contract bond isn’t going to matter at all; what’s relevant is that I’ve made the psychological commitment to do these press-ups and sit-ups,” he said. “I was completely wrong. There’s absolutely no way I would have done these press-ups and sit-ups for the past six weeks had it not been for the commitment bond.”

In December, customers will be able to decide on an amount to put up as collateral if they fail in their goals, and will give StickK their credit card numbers, which will be charged if they miss their objectives. There will also be a verification system, such as a designated friend or gym that will chart customers’ progress.

StickK hopes to make money through selling advertising and through commissions on dieting products that will be sold on their Web site, Stickk.com. They are still choosing the charities they will include, and are focusing on ones that are not political or religious. Customers will not be free to choose their own charities, as this could lessen their motivations to achieve their goals. The name of the business comes from the idea of helping customers stick to their goals by using a “stick” as well as a carrot, the business’s founders said.

Mr. Ayres said he first used the system to lose some pounds, and he now has $500 a week at stake to maintain his weight. He calculates that he has put over $21,000 — or $500 a week for almost a year — at risk through this system. But it makes more sense than traditional weight loss systems, he said. “What’s interesting is that Weight Watchers costs you $500 a year and gives modest results. I put $500 at risk every week, but it’s cost me nothing because I’ve met my goals so far.”

Posted in Economics, Fitness | No Comments »

Raleigh may get tiered water rates

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

Raleigh may get tiered water rates — finally, after suffering thought all kinds of water-use restrictions to combat a severe drought:

Raleigh’s flat, relatively cheap residential water rate is about $2.13 per 1,000 gallons a month.

By contrast, Cary’s four residential water rates rise from $3.28 per thousand gallons a month for the first 5,000 gallons to $5.33 per thousand gallons a month for a consumption range intended to cover a typical home’s irrigation needs. It also has a penalty rate more than double that for extremely high users.

“The tough thing about utility rate policy is that not everybody agrees with it,” said Karen Mills, Cary’s finance director. “You have competing interests and priorities, and you have to try to balance that as well as you can.”

But Cary’s leaders endorsed tiered rates in the late 1990s, when the town’s water-treatment capacity was tight. It has kept them in place since then, which has bolstered the town’s other water-conservation policies.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Is the whole thing a Kafkaesque nightmare?

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

Independent film-maker Tom DiCillo made a movie called Delirious, which Roger Ebert enjoyed — but despite Ebert’s good review, it only made $200,000. So DeCillo asked Ebert, Is the whole thing a Kafkaesque nightmare?

“To give you some indication of how disoriented I feel at the moment,” he wrote, “I am getting no real, tangible feedback from anyone. And so I’m kind of struggling on my own to make sense of how a film I put my soul into, that Buscemi put his soul into, a film that generated such strong, positive reviews, had no life in the market.

“I’m not talking about gigantic box office success. I’m simply speaking of a modestly successful run that earned people their money back and, more productively, helped encourage other financiers and studios to invest in another one of my films. Of course I’m extremely proud of the film. Of course I feel a sense of victory in just getting it made. But for a filmmaker to survive there has to be some form of return.

“This is not intended to be a complaint or Whine Fest. I know this is a brutal business and I’m not asking for, nor expecting, special treatment, babying or sympathy from anyone. I’m just looking for some answers.”

Ebert answers his questions:

1. The film got unusually strong reviews. Why did it not find an audience theatrically?

Reviews work best in connection with a visible opening. When moviegoers have never seen an ad for a movie and it isn’t playing in their city, state or region of the nation, what difference do reviews make?

Apart from that, here’s a funny thing: Lots of moviegoers trust a critic less than a brainless ad promising them the sun, the moon and the stars. They have a certain reluctance to see a movie that might be good. Millions of teenage boys, in particular, flock to the stupid and the brutal, and have no interest in any film that involves words like “paparazzi.” (Millions of others are our hope for the future, of course, but opening weekends are driven by horror, superheroes and comic book and game adaptations, and depend on the fanboys.)

2. Were the U.S. distributors right in passing on it? In other words, is “Delirious” unmarketable?

Because I enjoyed it from beginning to end, I wouldn’t call it unmarketable, but it isn’t a high-concept (i.e., low-concept) film, and it needs a chance to be discovered.

Let me give you an example. The second funniest film I’ve seen in the last 10 years is “The Castle” (1997), from Australia. When I showed it at my Overlooked Film Festival, the 1,600 people in the audience almost lost their lunch, they were laughing so hard. It grossed less than a million in North America. It didn’t have stars, it wasn’t about castles, and hardly anybody went. So it wasn’t “marketable.” Because I Iove movies, it cheers me up when people have a good time at one. This one was released by the old Miramax. “The test audience didn’t like it,” Harvey Weinstein told me, after he yanked it. OK, either (a) the test audience was wrong, or (b) it was the wrong test audience.

3. If a small film like “Delirious” is judged by its opening weekend gross for survival, what does that say about the state of U.S. independent film? In other words, if an independent film needs a big opening weekend to succeed, how does this make it different from a Hollywood film?

It says indies are being forced out by the Opening Weekend Syndrome. Indie films will rarely have big opening weekends because they don’t have the publicity machines to grind out press junkets, talk-show guest shots, celeb magazine profiles, big ad campaigns, and fast-food tie-ins. They need a chance to find an audience. “Chariots of Fire” (1981) opened in one theater, crept into two or three, tip-toed across the country, had great word of mouth, played for months, and won the Oscar. Today, it would have closed after that first theater. Here’s a hypothesis: Anyone reading this article is likely to enjoy a movie more if it doesn’t have free collectibles at McDonald’s.

4. If a big opening weekend is the only guarantee of life for an independent film, does this affect the kinds of independent films being made?

Hard to say, because so many indie films are labors of love that their makers had to make. Consider Miranda July’s “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (2005), which had a $2 million budget and grossed less than $4 million. Not so great. When the lights went up at Sundance, Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly was across the aisle from me. “Whatd’ya think?” she asked me or I asked her, I can’t remember which. I remember the reply: “I think it’s the best film in the festival.” Other person: “Me, too.” How in the hell can a movie that delicate and magical not find a big audience when I know there are people starving for films like that?

5. Does independent film exist anymore?

Yes, barely. The irony is that indies are embraced at film festivals, which have almost become an alternative distribution channel. “Delirious,” for example, was invited by San Sebastian, Sundance, San Francisco, Seattle, Avignon, Munich and Karlovy Vary. All major festivals. But you didn’t make “Delirious” to sell tickets for festivals. I frankly think it’s time for festivals to give their entries a cut of the box office.

If there is room for hope, it’s that good actors are happy to appear in them because the indies are a repository of great roles. Halle Berry has starred in movies budgeted at millions, but won the Oscar for “Monster’s Ball.” Robert De Niro top-lined millions of bucks, but won the Oscar for the low-budget “Raging Bull.” Charlize Theron could pull down $1 million-$2 million a picture or more, but won the Oscar for “Monster,” which cost lots less than a million. Actors know that beyond a certain budget level, mega-productions are less likely to contain great acting opportunities. What’s being marketed is the spectacle, not the performances.

6. Can any of these questions even be answered? Should I even bother with trying to find the answers? Is the whole thing a Kafkaesque nightmare or can it all be shrugged off simply by saying, “You win some, you lose some.”

I don’t know. Maybe DVDs and Netflix and Blockbuster on Demand and cable TV and pay-per-view and especially high-quality streaming on the Internet will rescue you and your fellow independents. I come from an innocent and hopeful time when we went to the Art Theater in Champaign-Urbana to see anything they were showing, because we knew it wouldn’t have Frankie Avalon in it, and they gave you a free cup of coffee, and we thought that was way cool. It was a movie by Cassavetes or Shirley Clarke? Or DiCillo or Sayles or Jarmusch? How did we get so lucky?

Posted in Business, Media | No Comments »

In Japan Half The Top Selling Books Are Written On Mobile Phones

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

If you thought reading a book on a portable electronic device was odd, please note that in Japan half the top-selling books are written on mobile phones:

With all the talk about Amazon’s Kindle, there’s a bigger revolution taking place and those who studied classic literature will be horrified. In Japan, half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, mobile phone novels (keitai shousetsu) have become a publishing phenomenon in Japan, “turning middle-of-the-road publishing houses into major concerns and making their authors a small fortune in the process.”

Posted in Business, Technology | No Comments »

Should public schools be privatised?

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

Andrew Norton asks, Should public schools be privatised?:

People are used to the idea of state schools, so they don’t think about how uneasily government-controlled education fits with liberal democracy. If someone said that Australia’s media should be owned by the state, with journalists told by the state what they should say, with media audiences examined to make sure they had absorbed the official line, there would be predictable and justifiable outrage.

Yet public education means essentially that for Australia’s young people. The government owns most schools, employs most teachers, tells them what to teach through state-set curricula, and examines students to make sure they have it right — even kids escaping to private schools can’t avoid these last two aspects of state-run education. And unlike state-owned media, there are severe consequences for ignoring state education.

(Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok.)

Posted in Education, Policy | No Comments »

Fever can unlock autism’s grip

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

Fever can unlock autism’s grip:

It appears that fever restores nerve cell communications in regions of the autistic brain, restoring a child’s ability to interact and socialize during the fever, the study said.

“The results of this study are important because they show us that the autistic brain is plastic, or capable of altering current connections and forming new ones in response to different experiences or conditions,” said Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a pediatric neurologist at Baltimore’s Kennedy Krieger Institute, who was one of the study authors.

The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, was based on 30 children with autism aged 2 to 18 who were observed during and after a fever of at least 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

More than 80 percent of those with fever showed some improvements in behavior during it and 30 percent had dramatic improvements, the researchers said. The change involved things like longer concentration spans, more talking, improved eye contact and better overall relations with adults and other children.

Posted in Autism, Science | No Comments »

Raleigh may get tiered water rates

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

Raleigh may get tiered water rates — finally, after suffering thought all kinds of water-use restrictions to combat a severe drought:

Raleigh’s flat, relatively cheap residential water rate is about $2.13 per 1,000 gallons a month.

By contrast, Cary’s four residential water rates rise from $3.28 per thousand gallons a month for the first 5,000 gallons to $5.33 per thousand gallons a month for a consumption range intended to cover a typical home’s irrigation needs. It also has a penalty rate more than double that for extremely high users.

“The tough thing about utility rate policy is that not everybody agrees with it,” said Karen Mills, Cary’s finance director. “You have competing interests and priorities, and you have to try to balance that as well as you can.”

But Cary’s leaders endorsed tiered rates in the late 1990s, when the town’s water-treatment capacity was tight. It has kept them in place since then, which has bolstered the town’s other water-conservation policies.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Charles Munger on Side-Stepping the Gangs, Pimps, and Dope-Dealers

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

I’ve already mentioned that Berkshire Hathaway’s Charles Munger gave a speech at UCSB in 2003 that was chock-full of thought-provoking bits. Here’s another such bit:

Berkshire had this former savings and loan company, and it had made this loan on a hotel right opposite the Hollywood Park Racetrack. In due time the neighborhood changed and it was full of gangs, pimps, and dope dealers. They tore copper pipe out of the wall for dope fixes, and there were people hanging around the hotel with guns, and nobody would come. We foreclosed on it two or three times, and the loan value went down to nothing. We seemed to have an insolvable economic problem — a microeconomic problem.

Now we could have gone to McKinsey, or maybe a bunch of professors from Harvard, and we would have gotten a report about 10 inches thick about the ways we could approach this failing hotel in this terrible neighborhood. But instead, we put a sign on the property that said: “For sale or rent.” And in came, in response to that sign, a man who said, “I’ll spend $200,000 fixing up your hotel, and buy it at a high price on credit, if you can get zoning so I can turn the parking lot into a putting green.” “You’ve got to have a parking lot in a hotel,” we said. “What do you have in mind?” He said. “No, my business is flying seniors in from Florida, putting them near the airport, and then letting them go out to Disneyland and various places by bus and coming back. And I don’t care how bad the neighborhood is going to be because my people are self-contained behind walls. All they have to do is get on the bus in the morning and come home in the evening, and they don’t need a parking lot; they need a putting green.” So we made the deal with the guy. The whole thing worked beautifully, and the loan got paid off, and it all worked out.

Posted in Business, Charles Munger, Economics, Urbanism | No Comments »

Mexican Ladders and the Process Edge

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

In Serious Play, Michael Schrage shares a story about Mexican ladders from Peter Keen’s The Process Edge to explain why you need to model the right thing to get the right results:

A leading Mexican manufacturer decided to reengineer how it built aluminum ladders. According to its sales and accounting model, the company had been making an operating profit of $4.50 per ladder. The reengineering initiative nearly doubled profits to $8.20 per ladder. Unfortunately, those profit figures proved meaningless. The reengineering had completely ignored the most critical cost issues because the company’s business model — and its accounting mechanisms — were flawed.

When the company switched to activity-based accounting to evaluate overhead, its managers were horrified to discover that the company’s legal expenses were higher for ladders than for any other product they manufactured. People who fell off ladders tended to sue the manufacturer. Those costs were crippling.

When the total litigation and settlement costs were tallied, the company discovered that it was losing almost $10 on every ladder that it made. And even after the reengineering initiative had slashed manufacturing costs by one third, it was losing more than $6 on every ladder.

With some legal finesse, the company found a way to offer its customers free accident insurance at a cost of just $2 per ladder.

Posted in Business, Serious Play | No Comments »

How America Lost the War on Drugs

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

Ben Wallace-Wells of Rolling Stone explains How America Lost the War on Drugs — after spending $500 billion:

Even by conservative estimates, the War on Drugs now costs the United States $50 billion each year and has overcrowded prisons to the breaking point — all with little discernible impact on the drug trade. A report by the Government Accountability Office released at the end of September estimated that ninety percent of the cocaine moving into the United States now arrives through Mexico, up from sixty-six percent in 2000. Even Walters acknowledges that for all of the efforts the Bush administration has devoted to overseas drug enforcement, the price of cocaine has dropped while its purity has risen. More than forty percent of Americans support legalizing marijuana, yet the government continues to target pot smokers. In October, the administration announced it was planning a new military offensive, dubbed Plan Mexico, with a price tag of $1.4 billion.

Read the whole article.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

The Peace Drug

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Tom Shroder of the Washington Post calls MDMA, or ecstasy, The Peace Drug, because it has done so much good for the few people treated with it for post traumatic stress disorder:

Mithoefer states the case in an article he wrote for a book of scholarly essays, Psychedelic Medicine: Social, Clinical and Legal Perspectives: “The reported results [of early therapeutic use] include decreased fear and anxiety, increased openness, trust and interpersonal closeness, improved therapeutic alliance, enhanced recall of past events with an accompanying ability to examine them with new insight, calm objectivity and compassionate self-acceptance.”

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Social Networking through Computer-Aided Design

Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

In Serious Play, Michael Schrage, of the MIT Media Lab, examines how organizations use models, simulations, and prototypes to stimulate innovation.

I enjoyed this anecdote about the Boeing 777′s then-new computer-aided design program and how it was misused:

Boeing’s new digital design infrastructure was so clever that engineers got computer-generated e-mail alerting them to “interferences” created by design conflicts. If the avionics team and the hydraulics team developed systems that competed for the same physical space in the digital simulation, for instance, CATIA alerted both groups to the conflict. the purpose was to settle conflicts before design prototype.

Much to their surprise, the 777 project’s managers discovered that several engineers deliberately built conflicts with other systems into their proposed designs. Sabotage? Rebellion against the new technology? Engineering humor? Abuse of the prototyping medium? No, the interferences were generated so that engineers in one part of the company could figure out which of their counterparts they should meet with to discuss future design issues.

Posted in Business, Serious Play, Technology | No Comments »

Gospel Truth

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

In Gospel Truth, April DeConick, professor of Biblical studies at Rice University and author of The Thirteenth Apostle, explains what the gospel of Judas really says:

Amid much publicity last year, the National Geographic Society announced that a lost 3rd-century religious text had been found, the Gospel of Judas Iscariot. The shocker: Judas didn’t betray Jesus. Instead, Jesus asked Judas, his most trusted and beloved disciple, to hand him over to be killed. Judas’s reward? Ascent to heaven and exaltation above the other disciples.

It was a great story. Unfortunately, after re-translating the society’s transcription of the Coptic text, I have found that the actual meaning is vastly different. While National Geographic’s translation supported the provocative interpretation of Judas as a hero, a more careful reading makes clear that Judas is not only no hero, he is a demon.

Several of the translation choices made by the society’s scholars fall well outside the commonly accepted practices in the field. For example, in one instance the National Geographic transcription refers to Judas as a “daimon,” which the society’s experts have translated as “spirit.” Actually, the universally accepted word for “spirit” is “pneuma ” — in Gnostic literature “daimon” is always taken to mean “demon.”

Likewise, Judas is not set apart “for” the holy generation, as the National Geographic translation says, he is separated “from” it. He does not receive the mysteries of the kingdom because “it is possible for him to go there.” He receives them because Jesus tells him that he can’t go there, and Jesus doesn’t want Judas to betray him out of ignorance. Jesus wants him informed, so that the demonic Judas can suffer all that he deserves.

Perhaps the most egregious mistake I found was a single alteration made to the original Coptic. According to the National Geographic translation, Judas’s ascent to the holy generation would be cursed. But it’s clear from the transcription that the scholars altered the Coptic original, which eliminated a negative from the original sentence. In fact, the original states that Judas will “not ascend to the holy generation.” To its credit, National Geographic has acknowledged this mistake, albeit far too late to change the public misconception.

So what does the Gospel of Judas really say? It says that Judas is a specific demon called the “Thirteenth.” In certain Gnostic traditions, this is the given name of the king of demons — an entity known as Ialdabaoth who lives in the 13th realm above the earth. Judas is his human alter ego, his undercover agent in the world. These Gnostics equated Ialdabaoth with the Hebrew Yahweh, whom they saw as a jealous and wrathful deity and an opponent of the supreme God whom Jesus came to earth to reveal.

Whoever wrote the Gospel of Judas was a harsh critic of mainstream Christianity and its rituals. Because Judas is a demon working for Ialdabaoth, the author believed, when Judas sacrifices Jesus he does so to the demons, not to the supreme God. This mocks mainstream Christians’ belief in the atoning value of Jesus’ death and in the effectiveness of the Eucharist.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

The Monster Hunter’s Handbook

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

The Monster Hunter’s Handbook presents itself as the compiled wisdom of the Heraclean Club, a renowned league of monster hunters.

It is divided into two sections, one on legendary monsters to hunt, and another on legendary weapons with which to hunt them.

I enjoyed the terms the author apparently coined for these two sections.

You may have heard of cryptozoology, the study of legendary creatures, like Big Foot and Nessie.

Thus, monster hunting is aggressive cryptozoology.

Unless you’re a war nerd, like me, you probably have not heard of hoplology though, the study of weapons and their use. (Hoplon was the ancient Greek term for shield, and hoplite the term for an armored warrior.)

Naturally, the study of legendary weapons, like Excalibur and the Spear of Longinus, is cryptohoplology.

(The image is from Howard Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur and His Knights.)

Posted in Animals, Martial Arts, Media, War | No Comments »

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