intellectual vanities… about close to everything

On Wednesday, Jan. 16 2008, I read, that a man who pleaded guilty Tuesday to ripping the head off a duck in the lobby of a St. Paul, Minn., hotel is not a horrible person. His attorney said: “He’s really a nice young man, he’s humble, he’s hard-working, he was a good student and worked hard to get the job he did,” said attorney Michael Colich. “Nobody’s been willing to look at what good things he’s done in his life and what good things he’ll do in his life.”

Ramsey County District Judge Margaret Marrina said it appeared Clark, 26, had “a substantial amount to drink” before the incident. He will be sentenced next month, the newspaper reported. Although attorney and the prosecution agreed on a sentence — no more than 45 days in jail, two years of probation, 40 hours of community service, a $500 fine, restitution and no pet ownership for two years [sic] — the judge will decide.

On Sunday, Jan. 13, 2008, I read, that “violence is a leading cause of death for Iraqi adults and was the main cause of death in men between the ages of 15 and 59 years during the first 3 years after the 2003 invasion.Although the estimated range is substantially lower than a recent survey-based estimate, it nonetheless points to a massive death toll, only one of the many health and human consequences of an ongoing humanitarian crisis.”

A large national household survey conducted by the Iraqi government and WHO estimates that 151 000 Iraqis died from violence between March 2003 and June 2006.

The study found that on average 128 Iraqis per day died of violent causes in the first year following the invasion and that the average daily violent death toll was 115 in the second year and 126 in the third year. More than half of the violent deaths occurred in Baghdad.

nota bene: “Some homes could not be visited because of high levels of insecurity and more people move residence in times of conflict. These factors were taken into account in the analysis as they may affect the accuracy of the survey work,” said Salih Mahdi Motlab Al-Hasanawi, Minister of Health of Iraq. “Nonetheless, the survey results indicate a massive death toll since the beginning of the conflict.”

That makes a cruel arithmetical average of  123,33 Iraqui lives per day for the first three years of what U.S. President George Bush called a job for US troops to render Iraq democratic and stable.

What I don’t read is,  that any judge were to decide, how many days in jail, how many years of probation, how many hours of community service, how big a fine, restitution a human life in Iraq is worth. And who of the Bush administration is going to be sentenced…

see also:

what i read, and what i don’t… wed, 14 march 2007:U.S. President George Bush said at the Pentagon U.S. troops will stay in Iraq until “the job is done”

Kommt nach Schröders Spaßgesellschaft jetzt Merkels Arbeitslager oder eher Schäubles totaler Überwachungsstaat? Niemandem scheint aufzufallen, dass “camp” nichts anderes als”Lager” heißt, und dass sich Herrn Kochs “Erziehungs-Camps” in gefährlicher inhaltlicher und begrifflicher Nähe zum Konzentrationslager befinden. Frau Merkel nennt das dann “Debatte mit Augenmaß”…

sieht so aus, als ob unsere Volksvertreter sich bestenfalls vage an die Geschichte der Weimarer Republik erinnern, so hypnotisiert sind sie von ihrem eigenen Mauerfallheldentum …

Das da hätt’ einmal fast die Welt regiert,
Die Völker wurden seiner Herr.
Jedoch ich wollte,
daß ihr nicht schon triumphiert:
Der Schoß ist fruchtbar noch,
aus dem das kroch .
Bertolt Brecht, Kriegsfibel, 1955

Why is it so hard to love one another?

Why is it so hard to love?

Why is it so hard?

Why is it so?

Why is it?

Why?

Is it?

Is it so?

Is it hard?

Is it hard to love?

Is it so hard to love one another?

“der weg ist der weg. das ziel ist das ziel. alles andere ist semantischer quatsch, als aphorismus verkleidet.”

Given the age pyramid, this probably explains the latest presidential election results…

male	female
Population of the United States, by Age and Sex, 1950-2050 (millions)

HIV patients with declining platelet counts appear to be at increased risk for HIV–associated dementia.

“Human immunodeficiency virus–associated dementia (HIV-D) is a syndrome encompassing a spectrum of cognitive, behavioral and motor deficits that usually has an insidious onset and a chronic progressive course,” the authors write as background information in the article. Therapies leading to longer life for HIV patients have paradoxically increased the prevalence of this condition. Identifying biological markers for the development of HIV–associated dementia is critical both for diagnosing the disorder and for understanding its underlying mechanisms.

Lynn M. Wachtman, D.V.M., M.P.H., of Bloomberg School of Public Health, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, and colleagues studied 396 patients with advanced HIV who were recruited for this prospective study between 1998 and 2003. Participants were examined every six months and completed mental and physical evaluations.

Blood samples were also collected and assessed for platelet count (the number of clotting cells in the blood), hemoglobin levels, CD4 lymphocyte count (a measure of certain types of white blood cells, which reflects the state of the immune system) and plasma HIV RNA levels (which indicate the amount of “viral load,” and predict HIV progression).

After a median (midpoint) follow-up of 31.1 months, 40 participants developed HIV–associated dementia. A decline in platelet count from baseline was associated with the development of dementia within six to 12 months. “Those HIV-infected individuals with a decline in platelets from baseline values at this lagged time point had a two-fold increased risk of dementia” in several different analyses, the authors write. The specific timing of the association indicates that the levels of circulating platelets fluctuate as HIV–associated dementia develops, they note.

“Further analyses indicated that decline from baseline platelet levels was associated with a five- to six-fold increased risk of dementia during the first two years of follow-up, but it was not associated with an increased risk of dementia after two years,” the authors continue. “It is possible that individuals who do not progress rapidly to neurologic compromise differ in respect to immune activation, treatment adherence or virologic control relative to those who develop dementia more rapidly.”

“Because CD4 cell counts and HIV RNA levels have proven not to be predictive of HIV–associated dementia, it is important to investigate alternative serum and hematologic markers,” the authors conclude. “Should these markers be routinely measured in a clinical setting, such as platelet counts, they may prove useful for patient management. This study identifies a significant association between platelet decline and incident HIV–associated dementia.” Further study of platelet levels during HIV–associated dementia may lead both to a specific marker for the development of HIV–associated dementia and a better understanding of how the disease develops.

Arch Neurol. 2007 Sep;64(9):1264-72.

Platelet decline: an avenue for investigation into the pathogenesis of human immunodeficiency virus associated dementia.

Wachtman LM, Skolasky RL, Tarwater PM, Esposito D, Schifitto G, Marder K, McDermott MP, Cohen BA, Nath A, Sacktor N, Epstein LG, Mankowski JL, McArthur JC.

By Wendy Barnaby

Psychological factors can make people more likely to suffer physical illness, but cognitive behavioural therapy can help sufferers manage their condition.

“People often pigeonhole diseases as being biological or psychological, but in fact they’re often a complex mixture of both,” Professor Rona Moss-Morriss of the University of Southampton told the BA Festival of Science on Monday.

She and her colleagues studied 1000 people who contracted either glandular fever or food poisoning. They wanted to see who would go on to develop irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

The symptoms of IBS are severe stomach pain, with diarrhoea or constipation or both.  The people with food poisoning were more likely to develop IBS, perhaps because both conditions affect the stomach.  But psychological factors were important, too.

The researchers asked the patients how they felt when they had food poisoning, what they did and what they believed.  They found that those who were more stressed, and who had very high expectations of themselves, were more likely to develop IBS.

Having high expectations manifested itself in an “all-or-nothing” pattern of behaviour, in which people would try to ignore the symptoms to fulfil their normal obligations, only to collapse in bed, try to get up too quickly, and collapse again.

The researchers have submitted a study for publication in which they used the psychological intervention called cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to help people with IBS. “It appears to be a promising approach,” they said.

Their new study follows one in which some IBS patients were given CBT along with an anti-spasmodic drug, mebeverine, while others received mebeverine alone.  Those who received CBT as well saw their symptoms improve.

Professor Trudie Chalder of Kings College London said a study of patients with type 1 diabetes would give “good news” when it is published shortly. Her results were, she said, “extremely promising.”

She used CBT to address people’s beliefs about their diabetes.  For example, some people will say: “There’s nothing I can do to control my diabetes because it’s a biological disease which I have no control over.”  Having used CBT to challenge such beliefs, Professor Chalder aimed to improve people’s blood sugar levels by encouraging them to exercise regularly and eat a healthy diet. 

The researchers are also aiming to use CBT to help people adjust to having multiple sclerosis.
 
Read more news coverage of this story in the Daily Telegraph and the Times.

Posted by scarr at September 11, 2007 03:52 PM

The “Great Firewall of China,” used by the government of the People’s Republic of China to block users from reaching content it finds objectionable, is actually a “Panopticon” that encourages self-censorship through the perception that users are being watched, rather than a true firewall, according to researchers at the University of New Mexico and the University of California Davis.

Photo: UNM researcher Jed Crandall, School of Engineering

The researchers are developing an automated tool, called ConceptDoppler, to act as a weather report on changes in Internet censorship in China. ConceptDoppler uses mathematical techniques to cluster words by meaning and identify keywords that are likely to be blacklisted.

Many countries carry out some form of Internet censorship. Most rely on systems that block specific web sites or web addresses, said Earl Barr, a graduate student in computer science at UC Davis who is an author on the paper. China takes a different approach by filtering web content for specific keywords and selectively blocking web pages.

In 2006, a team at the University of Cambridge, England discovered that when the Chinese system detects a banned word in data traveling across the network, it sends a series of three “reset” commands to both the source and the destination. These “resets” effectively break the connection. But they also allow researchers to test words and see which ones are censored.

Jed Crandall, an assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico’s School of Engineering and former UC Davis graduate, UC Davis graduate students Daniel Zinn, Michael Byrd, and Earl Barr and independent researcher Rich East sent messages to internet addresses within China containing a variety of different words that might be subject to censorship.

If China’s censorship system were a true firewall, most blocking would take place at the border with the rest of the Internet, Barr said. But the researchers found that some messages passed through several routers before being blocked.

A firewall should also block all mentions of a banned word or phrase, but banned words reached their destinations on about 28 percent of the tested paths, Byrd said. Filtering was particularly erratic at times of heavy internet use.

The words used to probe the Chinese internet were not selected at random.
“If we simply bombarded the Great Firewall with random words, we would waste resources and time,” Zinn said.

The researchers took the Chinese version of Wikipedia, extracted individual words and used a mathematical technique called Latent Semantic Analysis to work out the relationships between different words. If one of the words was censored within China, they could look up which other closely-related words are likely to be blocked as well.

Examples of words tested by the researchers and found to be banned included references to the Falun Gong movement and the protest movements of 1989; Nazi Germany and other historical events; and general concepts related to democracy and political protest.

“Imagine you want to remove the history of the Wounded Knee massacre from the Library of Congress,” Crandall said. “You could remove ‘Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee’ and a few other selected books, or you could remove every book in the entire library that contains the word ‘massacre.”’

By analogy, Chinese Internet censorship based on keyword filtering is the equivalent of the latter — and indeed, the keyword “massacre” (in Chinese) is on the blacklist.

Because it filters ideas rather than specific websites, keyword filtering stops people from using proxy servers or “mirror” websites to evade censorship. But because it is not completely effective all the time, it probably acts partly by encouraging self-censorship, Barr said. When users within China see that certain words, ideas and concepts are blocked most of the time, they might assume that they should avoid those topics.

The original panopticon was a prison design developed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century. Bentham proposed that a central observer would be able to watch all the prisoners, while the prisoners would not know when they were being watched.

The work will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Computer and Communications Security Conference in Alexandria, Va., Oct. 29-Nov. 2, 2007.

Media Contacts: UNM - Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu or UC-Davis - Andy Fell, (530) 752-4533; e-mail: ahfell@ucdavis.edu

On Monday, July 30 2007, I read that the NYT criticizes Republican congressional leaders who have attacked the proposed expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a bipartisan initiative that would increase the number of insured children from low-income families. Republican “leaders may be on message at the White House, where President Bush is foolishly threatening a veto,” but they they “seem way off message for the American public and even their own party caucuses,” the editors write …

What I don’t read is, that there are some 462.430 children were born with no medical insurance since the actual 110th Congress commenced work. The number is increasing by one child in less than one minute’s time 24/7.  Watch the clock at http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/PageServer. I don’t read either, that actually in 2006 overall 6,9 million minors did benefit from this biggest public health initiative since the Medicaid-Programme in the sixties.

On the same day I read, that the WaPo also criticizes Republicans for blocking efforts to boost the number of low-income children who receive health insurance. The editors note that while Republicans say they “want to concentrate on enrolling poor children” in health insurance programs, they “fail to provide enough money to do so effectively.” Do “House Republicans really want to be arguing for taking away health insurance from children who now have it?” the editors ask …  

What I don’t read is, that the Bush administration plans on 30 Mio. USD for the following 5 years, whereas the first 10 years did cost 40 Mio. USD, while deputies and experts estimate 50 Mio. USD necessary to maintain the momentary insurance situation. Convincing as those figures are for national economists, I want to hear one parent among deputies using them to argue against medical assistance for his own child.

Like the discussion were not about children’s access to necessary healthcare - we are not discussing subsidies to Ben&Jerry’s icecream production - I read that asthmatic children profiting from medical assistance regularly, are 70% less likely to have an attack and need 60% less medical consultations.

I read, that President Bush said he would veto the Schip expansion bill on “philosophical” grounds. That is scary. When did GWB put hands on philosophy, and ”what kind of philosophy says that it’s O.K. to subsidize insurance companies, but not to provide health care to children?”, as NYT columnist Paul Krugman is asking. The way the president presented himself so far, makes the problem even more dangerous. What has he put hands on altogether, as he is hardly able to tell what philosophy is in fact?

Ironically enough, if Bush expresses his veto and his party offers even token support, it might be better for children benefiting from the programme as well as for those left outside. Democratic sweep in 2008 would be then even more likely, after all the Iraqui-war “successes” recently presented to the public; they would bring with them a mandate for serious reform — universal coverage, simplified reimbursement, first-dollar coverage for preventive and chronic care…

There are two distinct, but related, HIV viruses that humans can become infected with — HIV-1 and HIV-2. Individuals infected with HIV-2 progress to AIDS at a dramatically reduced rate compared with individuals infected with HIV-1; in fact, most individuals infected with HIV-2 die of unrelated causes.

It is hoped that understanding why individuals infected with HIV-2 rarely progress to AIDS will help with the design of therapeutics and vaccine strategies for the treatment and prevention, respectively, of infection with HIV-1.

A new study by Aleksandra Leligdowicz and colleagues at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine, Oxford, demonstrates that individuals infected with HIV-2 mount a strong immune response to a specific region of the viral protein Gag.

The robustness of this response was inversely correlated with the amount of virus detected in the individual. In turn, individuals with high levels of detectable virus had fewer CD4+ T cells, indicating that they were progressing towards AIDS. The authors therefore suggest that T cell responses to Gag are important in determining the better outcome of infection with HIV-2 than infection with HIV-1.

J Clin Invest. 2007 Sep 6; [Epub ahead of print]

Robust Gag-specific T cell responses characterize viremia control in HIV-2 infection.

Leligdowicz A, Yindom LM, Onyango C, Sarge-Njie R, Alabi A, Cotten M, Vincent T, da Costa C, Aaby P, Jaye A, Dong T, McMichael A, Whittle H, Rowland-Jones S.