Author Archives: ZWMKlarazzttn

Donald Trump Doesn’t Know Foreign Groups Because They’re Just “Arab Name, Arab Name”

by ZWMKlarazzttn Posted on September 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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During Wednesday’s GOP presidential debate, Donald Trump—the Republican who’s still running laps around the competition in the polls—faced a seemingly tough question from moderator Jake Tapper: can he really serve as an effective president when he can’t name or even recognize many foreign leaders and groups?

The question stems from Trump’s appearance earlier this month on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, in which he confused Iran’s Quds Force, a special forces unit within the country’s Revolutionary Guard, with the Kurds in Iraq.

Tapper framed the question around Sen. Marco Rubio’s recent criticism of Trump over the gaffe. “If you don’t know the answer to these questions, then you are not going to be able to serve as commander and chief,” Rubio said earlier this month.

How’d Trump deal with Tapper’s question? After all, confusing and mispronouncing foreign names was a standard criticism that dogged George W. Bush throughout his presidency. But Trump? Nah, he’s not worried. First, he boasted about how Hewitt—a co-moderator of the CNN debate—had since apologized and said that “Donald Trump is maybe the best interview anywhere that he’s ever done.”

“I will say this though,” Trump continued, “Hugh was giving me name after name—Arab name, Arab name, Arab—and there are few people anywhere, ANYWHERE, that would have known those names. I think he was reading them off a sheet.”

Oy vey.

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Donald Trump Doesn’t Know Foreign Groups Because They’re Just “Arab Name, Arab Name”

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Can Poop Save Us From the Next Global Epidemic?

by ZWMKlarazzttn Posted on August 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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About a quarter of deaths around the world are caused by infectious diseases—a number that is expected to increase with rising rates of antibiotic resistance. In the race to catch these diseases before they spread, international disease surveillance systems typically rely on reporting from doctors after infections occur, which can lead to dangerous delays and even more transmissions.

But a group of scientists have suggested a new way to quickly detect diseases: poop. More specifically, poop collected from international flights.

Researchers from the Technical University of Denmark argued in a piece recently published in the journal Scientific Reports that airports could identify infectious diseases immediately by analyzing the bacterial DNA from the waste collected in the tanks beneath on-board lavatories.

“What we did was take a single sample from the entire mixed toilet waste from each plane, purified the DNA, and sequenced everything,” says Frank Møller Aarestrup, who heads the Research Group for Genomic Epidemiology. After sequencing poop samples from 18 international flights, the scientists were able to compile plane profiles that showed the prevalence of common pathogens and the how many antibiotic-resistant bacteria were also onboard.

Aarestrup says the process requires just one lab analysis, and he and his team are now recommending that airports have their own sequencers, which he estimates would cost around $150,000 in equipment and one full-time employee. “Not so much, the impact considered,” he adds.

It sounds like a great solution, but it may not be as easily implemented as Aarestrup and his team suggest.

Jonathan Eisen, a professor at the Genome Center at the University of California-Davis, says he doesn’t think the science is quite there yet. “Yes, people may shed various pathogens that go into the sewer system,” he says, “but we still don’t know what to look for and how to detect at these organisms at low levels.”

Though the data showed promise, Eisen says, there are still many unknowns and far too much complexity involved in trying to drill down into this kind of information to have a functioning surveillance system. And there are are a series of other obstacles that still have to be considered.

“There are issues of privacy that they didn’t address at all or issues of false-positive correlations that you might detect,” he explains. “It is really cool to get data from global populations, and I think it is going to be really useful for some purposes. But I don’t see screening sewage systems in airport facilities as a proven avenue for doing that.”

Unfortunately for now, Eisen says, successful poop surveillance is just an exciting hypothetical.

“It is interesting—really interesting actually,” he says. “But I think right now it is a research project. A cool, fun project on microbial diversity and the human environment that is unquestionably worth doing—but without any obvious use yet.”

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Can Poop Save Us From the Next Global Epidemic?

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Actually, It Turns Out That November Is the Cruelest Month

by ZWMKlarazzttn Posted on June 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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I’ve been wondering why my health collapsed so badly when I turned 55, and now Science™ has provided the answer. It’s because I was born in October, which lags only November for being the net riskiest birth month. Here’s the Washington Post:

Mary Regina Boland, Nicholas Tatonetti and other researchers at the Columbia University Department of Medicine examined records for an incredible 1.75 million patients born between 1900 and 2000 who had been treated at Columbia University Medical Center. Using statistical analysis, they combed through 1,688 different diseases and found 55 that had a correlation with birth month, including ADHD, reproductive performance, asthma, eye sight and ear infections.

The researchers emphasize that other environmental factors, like diet, medical care and exercise, are more likely to influence whether you get a disease. And since these numbers are culled from New York City, they may not be applicable to babies born in other places.

Culled only from New York City, huh? And it was just a massive data mining operation looking for correlations at the 95 percent level? This suggests you’d get 84 correlations just by chance. They got 55.

So….maybe not so impressive. Then again, this is all addressed in the paper, and it’s far too complicated for me to understand. I mean, what the hell is a “multiplicity correction using FDR (α_0.05, n_1688 conditions)”? Beats me. But everything in this paper is “FDR adjusted.” So maybe that means the correlations are legit. Perhaps someone who knows what this means can weigh in in comments.

In any case, if we believe this, it explains why my sister, brother, and mother are all healthy, while I’m a basket case. I was born in the wrong month. But on the plus side, I apparently have a lower than normal risk of cardiovascular diseases, including heart failure. Good to know.

POSTSCRIPT: Everyone gets that I’m just having fun here, right? Honestly, I haven’t the slightest idea of whether this stuff holds water. Still, everyone loves simple charts that put them and their friends in buckets, right?

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Actually, It Turns Out That November Is the Cruelest Month

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