Category: The Dish

by Tracy R. Walsh

We’re one step closer to it:

Sometime in the future, technicians will go over the scene of the crime. They’ll uncover some DNA evidence and take it to the lab. And when the cops need to get a picture of the suspect, they won’t have to ask eyewitnesses to give descriptions to a sketch artist – they’ll just ask the technicians to get a mugshot from the DNA.

That, at least, is the potential of new research being published [yesterday] in PLOS Genetics. In that paper, a team of scientists describe how they were able to produce crude 3D models of faces extrapolated from a person’s DNA. “We show that facial variation with regard to sex, ancestry, and genes can be systematically studied with our methods, allowing us to lay the foundation for predictive modeling of faces,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “Such predictive modeling could be forensically useful; for example, DNA left at crime scenes could be tested and faces predicted in order to help to narrow the pool of potential suspects.”

Sara Reardon explains:

[Mark] Shriver and his colleagues took high-resolution images of the faces of 592 people of mixed European and West African ancestry living in the United States, Brazil and Cape Verde. They used these images to create 3D models, laying a grid of more than 7,000 data points on the surface of the digital face and determining by how much particular points on a given face varied from the average: whether the nose was flatter, for instance, or the cheekbones wider. They had volunteers rate the faces on a scale of masculinity and femininity, as well as on perceived ethnicity.

Next, the authors compared the volunteers’ genomes to identify points at which the DNA differed by a single base, called a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). … Then, taking into account the person’s sex and ancestry, they calculated the statistical likelihood that a given SNP was involved in determining a particular facial feature. This pinpointed 24 SNPs across 20 genes that were significantly associated with facial shape. A computer program the team developed using the data can turn a DNA sequence from an unknown individual into a predictive 3D facial model.

Peter Aldhous notes the research opens up “the intriguing possibility of producing facial reconstructions of extinct human relatives”:

Even for Neanderthals, where there are numerous fossil skulls, palaeoanthropologists have little idea about the soft tissues of the face. “We don’t know how far out their noses extended,” says Shriver. This means that artists’ impressions of what the species looked like are partly guesswork. Shriver hopes that there will be enough overlap between the Neanderthal and modern human genomes for variants that influence face shape to start filling in such gaps.

(Image via PLOS Genetics)

by Patrick Appel

Ryan O’Donnell explains the above chart, which shows the relationship between political districts’ ideology and their representatives’ votes:

Obviously we’d expect Democratic politicians to vote more conservative the more conservative their district gets, and more liberal the more liberal their district gets. And by-and-large, they do. But Republicans don’t really follow that trend, as you can see in red on the graph [above] … If you only take away one thing from this graph, it should be that the expected value for Republicans is nearly a perfect horizontal line. Translated into plain English, that means Republicans vote conservative almost no matter what. It doesn’t matter what type of districts they represent.

The lesson Matt Steinglass draws from this:

This doesn’t predict what might happen if Republicans gained control of the Senate, or of the presidency. It’s possible that with more power Republicans would feel freer to disagree with each other. With their backs to the wall, out-of-power Democrats might feel the need to present a more united front. But basically Democrats have less voting discipline than Republicans. …

In other words, if all else fails, the gridlock of the American government will probably end the next time the country elects a Republican president, since Republican legislators have the discipline to stonewall Democratic presidents while Democrats are more willing to compromise. That asymmetry is probably infuriating to Democrats, but unless their legislators adopt different voting behaviour, it’s not going to change.

by Chas Danner

In another video from the former hostage, he notes how both he and his Iranian jailers would try to cite Guantanamo to their advantage:

He goes on to try and explain the bizarre and twisted relationship he had with his interrogators, who tried to behave as both enemy and friend:

Shane Bauer is an investigative journalist and photographer who was one of the three American hikers imprisoned in Iran after being captured on the Iraqi border in 2009. He was held for 26 months, four of them in solitary confinement. He subsequently wrote a special report for Mother Jones about solitary confinement in America, and he’s currently running a Kickstarter-like campaign to enable him to spend a full year investigating America’s prison system. Shane and his fellow former hostages, Sarah Shourd (now his wife) and Josh Fattal, have co-written the memoir A Sliver of Light based on their experiences. Except here. Read about what happened one night when Shane’s guards left his cell open here. Shane’s previous videos in the series are here.

(Archive)

by Patrick Appel

David Blumenthal explains why the health care industry hasn’t embraced digital medical records:

The reason why the medical profession has been so slow to adopt technology at the point of contact with patients is that there is an asymmetry of benefits. From the patient’s perspective, this is a no-brainer. The benefits are substantial. But from the provider’s perspective, there are substantial costs in setting up and using the systems.

Until now, providers haven’t recovered those costs, either in payment or in increased satisfaction, or in any other way. Ultimately, there are of course benefits to the professional as well. It’s beyond question that you become a better physician, a better nurse, a better manager when you have the digital data at your fingertips. But the costs are considerable, and they have fallen on people who have no economic incentive to make the transition. The benefits of a more efficient practice largely accrue to people paying the bills. The way economists would describe this is that the medical marketplace is broken.

Richard Gunderman provides another perspective:

[Dr. Paul] Weygandt [a VP at a medical communications firm] believes that contemporary medicine has allowed too many intermediaries—financing, technology, and the way practices are structured—to come between patients and doctors. Too much time is focused on generating revenue rather than quality. Too many technological systems are built in ways that make sense to computer engineers but not to doctors. And too much time is spent pointing and clicking rather than capturing the essence of a patient’s story.

What can be done? Weygandt argues that doctors need to play a more active role in all aspects of healthcare’s future, not just implementing but also designing it. Too often, such decisions are currently being made by people who do not take care of patients, and in many cases, have never cared for patients.