It could the premise of a good movie…

…or even a good book.

Bringing back into existence extinct animals through the use of genetic and reproductive technologies. I wonder where that idea came from, researchers at Scripps & San Diego Zoo?

Well, okay, it’s not quite extinct, but the Drill Monkey from equatorial Africa is pretty darn endangered, which might be a redeeming factor for this story. Instead of creating a whole range of new endangered species, we should be working on protecting the ones we already have. And we definitely should be trying to avoid resurrecting giant reptilian predators that will eat all our goats.

Jim’s Story: Engine bodies and body engines

This is taken from my Science Education textbook, The Art of Teaching Science. Is this a science lesson gone wrong? or a science lesson gone right?

Snapshot 10.1

Jim (not his real name) was explaining homeostasis to his Year 12 biology class. Homeostasis is the process where bodily inputs and outputs are balanced to maintain a constant internal environment. To model body temperature regulation, Jim used a car engine’s cooling system to show how heat input and output are balanced.

Is this anti-racism comic being racist?

Take a look at this comic:

This is clearly a comic against racism, but is this particular page racist?

Click the image for the complete comic.

Suspected zombie outbreak in Melbourne

Warning: We have a possible patient zero…

(Image: xkcd)

I hope this new-fangled national health reform has some sort of measures that prevent the dead just up and walking out into the streets and cause the zombie apocalypse.

To be fair, Mr. Thornton is still speaking, however may be deluded as he still professes disbelief in his death despite documents clearly stating otherwise. He may not be a zombie, perhaps a vampire or post-mortem deity?

Get the book on taxonomy fail

But we’re all mammals aren’t we … wait … what … that’s not right

Credit: 365:14 – Taxonomy Fail by sidesmirk, on Flickr (Creative Commons – Attribution, Share Alike)

Abortion in Queensland – is it what you think?

If you criminalise abortion, what do you expect will happen?

(The Australian) TEGAN Simone Leach was 19, pregnant and “scared” when her boyfriend’s sister arrived in Cairns last Christmas Day with a consignment of contraband tablets and doctor’s instructions written in Ukrainian.

What transpired after Ms Leach allegedly terminated her pregnancy with the abortion pill RU486 and the Queensland police got involved, has unleashed a legal and political storm of the like not seen before in this country.

Ms Leach will face court next month charged with the crime of procuring her own miscarriage, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind to be brought under Queensland’s century-old abortion laws.

If convicted, she faces up to seven years’ jail.

The young man in her life, Sergie Brennan, 21, faces up to 14 years’ imprisonment for attempting to procure an abortion and three years’ jail on a further charge of supplying the means to procure an abortion. [more]

As expected there is quite a lot of anger coming from liberal left sector – with the launch of the Pro-choice Action Collective in Queensland. They have a facebook group and a website. But is this the right case to be defending?

The curious case of the unqualified qualication

According to 6minutes.com.au the Chiropractor’s Association of Australia has asked people to stop practicing chiropract. Well, particular people. Doctors in particular. Because they are not qualified enough.

Oh, wait we are only at the entrance to this rabbit hold.

According to the CAA it takes a minimum of 5-years to become a chiropractor, while a doctor can just upskill with a correspondence course from the RACPG.

The article also suggests that tha CAA candidly admits that there are risks associated with spinal manipulation. I wonder if the wider chiropractic community will accept these risks are potential (and any risk will not be wholly mitigated by the presence of trained ‘professional’).

Now while the CAA almost seems laughable here, they are actually attempting to enforce exactly what the evidence-based medicine community has asked of them: clean up their own house. They are accepting responsiblity for the safe practice of chiropract by all practicioiners, by attempting to get some training standards in place.

Rather then laughing this off perhaps the EBM community should be asking – why are all these actual GPs and MDs engaging in an unproven non-reality based mode of practice with established associated risks, and why is the RACPG encouraging it?

I can think of a couple of weak reasons, can you?

New tech = New lit: Deconstructing the sms-ay

First week of university down. It looks like they might actually try to teach me something.

One of the units I’m taking is Multiliteracy in Middle Years. It involves identify and using different text types (in the classroom), and identify and also teaching your students which grammar is suited to the textual style. To explain the latter, the lecturer gave us this example – it’s the first few lines of what a 13 year old UK student submitted when asked to write an essay about what they did last holidays:

My smmr hols wr CWOT B4, we usd 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kds FTF. ILNY. it’s a gr8 plc.

Anyone … ? I think she* visited Kuwait or something.

Some of you are probably smacking your heads in disbelief at that little effort. Grammar Nazis are possibly having fits. It is not even consistent, the writer ignored quite a few punctuation points and vowels, but then decides that an apostrophe for “it’s a gr8 place” is deserved (correctly).

What should a teacher do when confronted with this?

Taxonomy bugs (I mean fail)

When I was trawling through the internet for some taxonomy fails to feature I came across some in the flickr stream of bug girl (from bug girl’s blog) – specifically these cases where an incorrect insect was used to illustrate an article on the insectoid origins of carmine, a common dye  that can be used in foods (the article made mistakes beyond just the wrong picture – read at bug girl).

At the time I decided not to run them on the blog. I mean identifying insects is tough work. They are  the most diverse group of animals on the planet. I got a migraine trying to wrap my head around the 50-70 marsupials of Dasyuridae which fit into the category “oversexed hoppy rat-like thing which may or may not have a pouch” – differentiating 1,000s of species, when your samples are usually smaller than your fingers – that’s hardcore. So, in my ignorance I was willing to forgive a news editor who uses a relatively unknown insect to represent another relatively unknown insect*.

Scientific American is slightly less easier to forgive when they use the same beetle with the incorrect story. It then gets a little bit crazier as editors decide to use their own stock imagery – any old insect will do, even a freaking ladybug.

This is not a once off. Bug girl highlights another capture of “bugs are bugs” in which stinkbugs are used to represent bed bugs (though, while they may only drink plant sap, I still would not want the former in my hotel room).

Or there is this epic taxonomy fail Alex Wild at myrmecos blog spotted on iStock Photo – either that or someone mutated a Drosophila a bit too much.

Oh dear…

And to leave you with a picture to round things off:

see more Fail Blog

*Before entomologists send me hate mail – after my scale insect mimic identification, I now kow how different a carmine scale insect differs from the beetle pictured, so I can understand your frustation better. But hey, whatever, they’re still just bugs. Hate mail can be directed to zayzayem [at] hotmail [dot] com.

Name your job

One of the final pieces I need to line up is part time work while I study, if only to minimise my need to deal with Centrelink.

This means dusting off and brushing up the old resumé… and making myself as appealing as possible to employers.

Something interesting in my “to post” box was some research out of Canada that showed employers are discriminating against persons with non-English names that might be perceived as difficult to pronounce. If you’d like to see the names they used, the actual working paper here: Why Do Skilled Immigrants Struggle in the Labor Market? A Field Experiment with Six Thousand Resumes.

A few weeks after I read this item, the story circulated in the Australian press, this time citing an Australian study from ANU that used only 4,000 resumes. Headlines abounded stating that Australian bosses were racist.

Now this may be fair conclusion, but it neglects to mention that this scenario is the same any where – someone with a local sounding name is always more likely to be hired (the Australian study found that Italian surnames were no hinderance in Melbourne, a city with Australia’s largest Italian community). This does not mean it’s an okay practice, but it is something to consider.

Child Labour: Cheaper by the dozen

This is a very interesting development in the ethical debate of using children in reality family TV – does it constitute a violation of child labour laws?

Jon & Kate Plus 8 has garnered the biggest ratings in it’s four-year history due to the tabloid brouhaha over the couple’s marriage. It has also attracted the notice of the Pennsylvania labor department, who are investigating whether the show complies with the state’s child labor laws.

If no violation is found, could this be a gateway to a number of child sweatshops installing extra security cameras and then claiming it’s really a groundbreaking new reality show, Kids, Inc.

Trends in internet influenza

At the start of the month, Google announced it was expanding its search-engine-based epidemiology surveillance tool, Flu Trends, to process information originating from Australia and New Zealand (previously it was processing U.S. statistics and a beta Mexico version).

The tool is based on there being a correlation between the number of people typing in influenza-related keywords into Google and the actual number of cases of influenza in the country. Google claims it is supported by historical data. The concept does make sense: when you are your family are sick with flu-like symptoms, that would be the time you are more likely to search for information on possible causes – Thus people searching for “flu” could reflect the cases across the country.

But I was skeptical at how well it would work in a pandemic. Google’s data might hold up for its recorded history, but that does not extend back to 1968-9 – the last influenza pandemic. A pandemic not only involves the potential for an increased number of influenza cases and increased severity of those cases, it also means an increased amount of media coverage and public awareness. When I last looked at Google Trends and health searches, I saw a possible link between media coverage of Kylie Minogue and Australian searches for breast cancer. There is a good reason to suspect that the statistical relationship between search terms and disease cases will not hold up during pandemic conditions. This concern is not addressed appropriately in the Flu Trends FAQ.

 

Google Flu Trends Data, as of 20 June, 2009. Click for larger image. A - US 2008/09 search data c.f. historical B - Australia 2008/2009 data c.f. historical (2008/09 dark blue, historical light blue). C - Australia historical search data (blue) compared with official historical epidemiological seasonal ILI (infleunza-like-illness) data (orange)

Looking at the U.S data, for this past season, it looks like it could be an accurate reflection. And if anything, rather than seeing a spike of search term activity this year, there was not much difference than previous years. In fact, the historic data contains several search spikes that do not exist in this years trends. All this information could either accurately reflect that the influenza pandemic thus far has been little more than out-of-season seasonal flu, or, just maybe, that the increased media activity and awareness have actually actively decreased usage of Google for health information.

Were people being directly channeled towards non-search websites, like flupandemic.gov.au? Were they getting enough influenza information from other websites they frequent, like news websites? Was there enough offline influenza resources that people did not feel the need to Google to find out more? Or were people just overloaded and desensitized by the mass media hysteria?

I still prefer the Rhiza Labs case-mapping tool. It is much more informative and accurate.

Pandemic in perspective

see more Funny Graphs

Pandemic is not a synonym for crisis

…necessarily. In this case it’s more SNAFU.

I read this weekend’s Sunday Herald during lunch today. There was a double page spread on the growing “Swine Flu Crisis!” (251 Infected!*).

While I’m not sure if this graph is actually based on real figures, it does put the pandemic in perspective:

see more Funny Graphs

The threat of Mexican flu is quite relative. This strain may only turn out as bad as regular flu. But regular flu isn’t something to sniff at. Each year influenza occurs on a pandemic scale, this kills about 250,000 – 500,000 worldwide. So when the health authorities are saying “this is just like seasonal influenza”, they may be quite right to downplay the threat, but there is still a threat – SNAFU.

Was that enough mixed messages?

 

Hattip for GraphJam: Cheshire

*It’s now over 300, but didn’t reach 800. Either Mexican flu (or the testing labs) took the weekend off, or it’s possibly slowing down.

Pandemic panic epidemic

I have a few posts lined up about swine flu. With Australian cases of A/H1N1 Mexican influenza have been steadily creeping up, I should try and get them out before we all die or something.

But i’ll take my chances and post them tomorrow, it’s getting quite late.

However I just loved that one of my friends back home pasted this on facebook. The local paper is panicking that some cruise ship that dropped of some infected passengers in Sydney (more about them later) has detoured so that instead of being distantly offshore of the Queensland coast in the Great Barrier Reef, it is now slightly less distantly offshore of the Queensland coast in the Great Barrier Reef. [Insert dramatic tone].

I’m struggling to work out how exactly it could travel along the east side of Australia without at some point being “off the coast of Rockhampton” (I’m going to just ignore the Bully momentarily forgetting that Rockhampton is not on the coast).