Month: July 2013

William Gething, coauthor of Design for Climate Change, warns that traditional construction materials will “behave differently” in a world wracked by global warming:

Brick, for example, is likely to become more saturated, particularly with increasing insulation standards, so it is likely to be less effective at keeping moisture out. Materials move more in higher temperatures, so joint design will need to take this into account. More intense rainfall events mean that gutters need to be sized differently.

Amid these challenges, Steve LeVine heralds the rise of the “extreme-weather architect”:

The emerging class of architecture suggests the onset of a global design-and-construction industry worth tens of billions of dollars in the coming years. Places such as the Netherlands have had to build around environmental- and weather-related challenges for years. But to the degree that extreme-weather architecture and construction moves to the mainstream, it would become one of the biggest infrastructure businesses on the planet, straddling US, Europe, Asia and Latin America. The cost of one recent set of recommendations alone, by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, responding to the ravages of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, is estimated at $20 billion. Studies of the spending to come around the world range well into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Recent Dish on Bloomberg and reforms to combat flooding here. As sea levels rise, architects continue to investigate the possibilities of buoyant buildings. One design firm recently finished work on a floating school in Lagos, with a floating neighborhood in the works.

At age 13, after losing a family friend to pancreatic cancer, Jack Andraka set out to discover why the available tests couldn’t detect the disease earlier and at a lower cost. Amazingly, he stumbled upon a way to do just that – he estimates his method is 168 times faster, 26,000 times cheaper and over 400 times more sensitive than the tests available at the time. He tells his story in the above TED talk. In a companion interview, Andraka provides context:

I was really shocked by the fact that we didn’t have any way to detect pancreatic cancer. I mean, with a lot of diseases you have one test that can detect it. Like with breast cancer you have the mammography, or with HIV/AIDS you have that screening test. But with pancreatic cancer you have to have this really invasive biopsy or you have to go through an MRI or CT scan. All those are really invasive and I couldn’t believe there wasn’t just a routine assay you couldn’t just get to see if you had pancreatic cancer.

Update from a reader:

Oh no, not Jack Andraka again. He took an existing idea and pretends it was his idea.

His statistics all seemed to improve by a factor of 10 from the Intel paper where he first won their prize until two so-called science journalists at Forbes started writing about him. An article at pancan.org correcting some of his errors got scrubbed just before his appearance at the SOTU address.

He did an interesting science fair project and then seemed to get caught up in a huge hype machine that distorted what he did 0 fueled mostly, it seems, by the Forbes “journalists”. All this was happening around the time of the Manti Teo/Lennay Kekua story and Sports Illustrated was getting reamed for not enough fact-checking on a feel-good story. I would love to see Forbes get reamed for their inadequate fact checking on this feel-good story.

Yes, the world needs more people interested in science. But it also needs fewer science journalists passing on bogus data from science fair projects.

Another reader:

This TED talk has recently been making the rounds (I’ve been sent it by two people this week alone).  Alas, here is the take on it from an actual pancreatic researcher I know, at a major US medical school:

This marker was discovered by Anirban Maitra about a decade ago.  The student applied it to an inexpensive device and seems to be getting the credit.  I think the competition judges were wrong on the selection.

From a scientific perspective, the test is useless.  This problem repeats countless times because only clinicians and basic scientists are involved in these studies, no epidemiologists.  The problem is that pancreatic cancer (or ovarian, liver, etc., the rare ones) has a lifetime risk of 1% in the US.  This means that a test that did nothing, said everyone tested was negative, would be correct much more than 99% of the time.  In addition, even if it were 99% accurate in giving positive results, for every person correctly identified as having pancreatic cancer, more than 10 people would be incorrectly identified even though they didn’t have cancer (false positives).  These individuals would then go on to have expensive invasive testing and suffer psychologically before determined that they didn’t have cancer, and there would be some potential morbidity associated with the unnecessary testing.

So the problem is that for a rare disease like pancreatic cancer, a test that is 99% accurate (we say 99% sensitivity and 99% specificity) is still not useful enough as a population screening tool.  The test in question is not close to 99%, let alone better.

Another:

If you find out you have pancreatic cancer early then the most likely outcome is that you know for a longer time that you’re going to die. The survival rates by stage are here. And don’t forget these are also biased. Imagine that if a disease is definitely going to kill you by a certain date then early detection gives the illusion of better survival simply because you know about it earlier.

Kudos to the kid, but until somebody comes up with a cure it’s just false hope. These stories are fundamentally cruel and don’t deserve this kind of publicity.

[youtube http://youtu.be/phoUVH05kEg?t=17s]

Rachel Feltman explains how the online exchange Redditgifts created a culture – and eventually a business – of anonymous gift-giving:

Through a process that [developer Dan] McComas calls “friendly stalking,” users found out their recipients’ likes and dislikes based on the information given, which included their Reddit username, then sent them an anonymous present–laptops, lobsters, plush sharks stuffed with toys and t-shirts, cruises, and even the odd serenade from Jimmy Fallon. In the first exchange, there were 4,375 participants from 62 countries, and they spent $183,118 on gifts for each other. …

In a TED talk this past May, McComas tried to figure out what Redditgift’s “secret” is.

He pointed to the research of  Harvard Business School’s Michael Norton, presented in a TED talk called “Money Can Buy Happiness.” Norton gave students envelopes full of cash, including instructions to spend the money on either themselves or others by the end of the day. At the end of the day, the self-spenders weren’t any happier than they’d been in the morning, but the gift-givers were—whether they’d had $5 to spend on coffee for a stranger in Starbucks or $20 to give to charity. “What he learned,” McComas told the crowd, “is that you can buy happiness with money. You just have to spend that money on a stranger.” The warm-and-fuzzies a Santa gets from spending their cash on someone they’ll never meet are only amplified by a few of the site’s features: Recipients post pictures and descriptions of their gifts, so a Santa knows just how happy she’s made them—plus, each Santa knows that she’ll eventually get a surprise of her own in the mail.

Rod Dreher shakes his head at the House Republican’s farm bill, which boosts Big Ag subsidies and forgoes food stamp aid:

The Republican Party is throwing corporate welfare at farmers, but telling people who are so poor they qualify for government aid to feed themselves that they are not a priority. As a matter of basic politics, the Republicans have lost their minds. This is Mitt Romney’s 47 percent remark all over again.

President Obama has vowed to veto this GOP farm bill if it hits his desk, so Congress is going to have to try again. You know who needs to find their voice and use it right now? Conservative Christian pastors and leaders. Christians need to seriously reconsider uncritical support for a political party that prioritizes lavishing subsidies on the agribusiness rich while telling the poor to sit quietly and wait for scraps.

Kinsley is puzzled:

Forget about kids going to bed hungry. (Melodramatic, but accurate.) Can this possibly be good politics?

Are there actually people out there waiting for a candidate who will kill the food stamp program? It takes your breath away. The Republicans have now cornered the heartless vote. But are there enough heartless people in this country to counterbalance the sane people fleeing the other way?

The net effect of the farm bill, as it stands now in the House, is to take money away from a successful program for making sure that no one starves, and giving it to a variety of programs whose goal is to raise the price of food, for the poor and everyone else. Even if you only care about how things look, this does not look good, it seems to me.

Fred Matzner walks through the wreckage of the bill:

To start with, the bill takes aim at the environment by first crippling, and then outright ending, conservation programs, as well as zeroing out mandatory funding for rural renewable energy and efficiency development. Thousands of farmers from every state have participated in these programs, generating income while helping restore wetlands and prairies, reducing fertilizer and pesticide pollution that poison our rivers and drinking water, and decreasing the nation’s reliance on polluting fossil fuels.

In stark contrast, the bill would make permanent billions of dollars in subsidies for corporate farmers. This would upend decades of precedent and lock taxpayers into these high costs, at least creating a deterrent to regular updating and improving of our farm policies, and at worst threatening the continuation of important policies to protect soil, water, wildlife, and public health.

More Dish on the GOP’s big government bill here.