Recently in Science, Technology & Health Category

Regular flossing can add years to your life.

When you floss, you help prevent your gums from becoming inflamed. That's a good thing. What is happening when your gums are inflamed is that you have a chronic bacterial infection in your mouth. This harms your arteries through two mechanisms: the bacteria find their way in to your arteries and hang out (causing plaques), and your body mounts an immune response to the bacteria in your mouth, causing inflammation (which in turn can cause your arteries to narrow). This makes it hard for your heart to do its job and can lead to heart disease.

There is some debate about how many years you can gain with heart disease. Dr. Perls says 1.5 years, while Dr. Roizen says 6 years.

I haven't read the studies, but could it be that people who have the discipline to floss regularly also have other good habits?

There are a host of technical problems that this project faces, but it's at least interesting to read about applying swarm intelligence to power generation.

The "marine energy" industry has come up with a number of ideas to make use of the movement of water around the globe, be it from ocean waves, tides slipping into and out of inlets, or regular ocean currents like the Gulf Stream.

The more common solution to the problem has been to build large turbines, to be anchored to the seabed.

But the nature of the Gulf Stream presents different challenges, said Professor White.

"Even though the Gulf Stream is constrained between two bodies of land, the flow rate and location of peak velocity will change, based on seasonal and weather conditions."

The solution, Professor White and his team suggest, are autonomous turbines with so-called "swarm intelligence" that can navigate through the ocean currents, similar to a school of fish searching for food.

"Swarm intelligence can achieve two goals. One is to find the 'sweet spot' of the Gulf Stream, which is the location where the array will achieve maximum power output," he said.

"The other goal is to find the array orientation and alignment that provides optimal efficiency."

Problems:

1. How do swarm members communicate underwater?

2. How do mobile turbines hundreds of meters under the middle of the ocean transmit the power they generate to consumers?

(HT: MG.)

Yes, the term "death panel" is pretty loaded, but it's also hard to deny the accuracy of the words when you read about government bureaucrats making medical decisions for the rest of us.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is on the verge of taking the highly unusual step of “decertifying” the cancer drug Avastin that it had previously approved. In addition to sparking concerns that this is another step towards medical rationing, the FDA’s proposal will worsen another important but less-frequently recognized danger of government-run health care — namely, the politicization of health benefits. Both problems will accelerate under ObamaCare unless our politicians repudiate the principle of government-run health care.

Avastin is used to help lengthen and improve the quality of life of patients with late-stage cancers of the colon, lung, kidney, and brain. (It cannot cure these terminal cancers.) As the Washington Post recently reported, the FDA had also approved it for late-stage breast cancer, but based on recommendations from its scientific advisory panel it is considering rescinding that approval on the grounds that the risks outweigh the benefits.

Paul Hsieh hits the nail on the head and points out that there is no reasonable way for the government to make medical decisions for everyone.

The basic problem is that government should not be making these sorts of medical coverage decisions at all. Neither the FDA, the USPSTF, the IPAB, nor any other alphabet-soup government agency should decide what treatments and procedures you may (or may not) receive when your life is at stake. Instead, patients should be allowed to purchase the treatments they wish (in consultation with their physicians) in a free market based on their own individual priorities and preferences.

People should be free to make these decisions themselves. Some people will make bad decisions, yes, but putting the government in charge of everyone just to protect bad-decision-makers from themselves is unjust and tyrannical.

English is not typically considered a tonal language, but the following seven-word sentence can give you an idea for how difficult it can be to program a computer to understand the nuances that humans take for granted. As you read the following sentence, consider how the meaning shifts depending on which of the seven words you emphasize -- seven words, seven different interpretations for the sentence.

"I never said she stole my money."

I encountered this sentence several times while studying linguistics and artificial intelligence because it is a simple demonstration of why language is so difficult for computers to understand or generate. Wikipedia offers these seven interpretations.

• "I never said she stole my money" - Someone else said it, but I didn't.
• "I never said she stole my money" - I simply didn't ever say it.
• "I never said she stole my money" - I might have implied it in some way, but I never explicitly said it.
• "I never said she stole my money" - I said someone took it; I didn't say it was she.
• "I never said she stole my money" - I just said she probably borrowed it.
• "I never said she stole my money" - I said she stole someone else's money.
• "I never said she stole my money" - I said she stole something of mine, but not my money.

Perhaps you can think of even more? Consider the ways that authors attempt to evoke these interpretations without resorting to italics or bolding. It's not trivial! Consider how quickly children learn to differentiate and utilize these forms. In this case, intonation is being used to indicate the target of the sentence's overall negation, but that's just one way that English uses tone. No wonder it's hard to make machines that can understand natural language!

Oil is disappearing from the Gulf of Mexico faster than expected.

"That oil is somewhere. It didn't just disappear," said Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser.

Salvador Cepriano is one of the men searching for crude. Cepriano, a shrimper, has been laying out boom with his boat, but he's found that there's no oil to catch. ...

Even the federal government admits that locating the oil has become a problem.

"It is becoming a very elusive bunch of oil for us to find," said National Incident Cmdr. Thad Allen.

The numbers don't lie: two weeks ago, skimmers picked up about 25,000 barrels of oily water. Last Thursday, they gathered just 200 barrels.

Still, it doesn't mean that all the oil that gushed for weeks is gone. Thousands of small oil patches remain below the surface, but experts say an astonishing amount has disappeared, reabsorbed into the environment. ...

The light crude began to deteriorate the moment it escaped at high pressure, and then it was zapped with dispersants to speed the process along. The oil that did make it to the ocean's surface was broken up by 88-degree water, baked by 100-degree sun, eaten by microbes, and whipped apart by wind and waves.

Wait a second... am I supposed to believe that a supposed environmental catastrophe has turned out to not be as bad as everyone predicted? Impossible!

Wired has some awesome cockpit pictures, including the SR-71 Blackbird, 787 Dreamliner, and a monster truck.

(HT: GeekPress.)

Ralph Kinney Bennett points out that the great strength of the automobile is its potential.

The automobile’s potential is its greatest secret—an open secret and yet, it often seems, a forgotten one. The big SUV in my garage may occasionally make a 10-mile trip to Walmart or 2-mile run to the volunteer fire station when the siren sounds. But it has the potential—the size, the power, the range—to take me, my friends, and our bicycles over the mountain to a distant bike trail, or 1,100 miles with a load of furniture and books to my son’s house in Florida.

A century ago, the gasoline-powered automobile revolutionized personal mobility. It did it so profoundly and swiftly as to make it a routine aspect of our daily lives. Wide-ranging mobility is so normal that many people, particularly in the anti-car crowd, have forgotten its importance. On whatever day you may happen to read this, Americans will travel 11 billion miles in their cars, going to work or to lunch with friends, shopping, visiting the doctor or dentist, picking up materials for a home project, transporting kids to soccer or a pet to the vet—compacting into a few hours tasks which, had they even been contemplated before the automobile, would have taken carefully planned days or weeks.

This marvelous potential, whether we use it a little or a lot, is woven deeply and invisibly into the fabric of our economy and of our lives. We Americans do not buy cars merely to get from point A to point B. We do not buy cars to meet average 20- to 40-mile-per-day travel expectations. We buy them with the idea that they can take us where and when we want to go, day or night, good weather or bad. What’s more, we buy them for their potential to carry not just ourselves but our families, friends, poker cronies, softball teammates, dogs and cats, antiques, tools, fishing rods, Avon deliveries, picnic lunches, easels and paints, Salvation Army donations, church bazaar cookies, saddles and tack, groceries, vacation paraphernalia, and whatever else we may dream of with some degree of comfort and safety across town or country. And, oh, yes, we might be dragging a boat or a couple of dirt bikes or a pony trailer behind us as well.

Until electric vehicles can match this potential, it doesn't matter if they can meet the needs we face on 95% of our days.

(HT: Instapundit.)

The most interesting aspect of BAE's new Taranis UAV is that it appears to possess autonomous air-to-air combat capabilities.

The Taranis, named after the Celtic god of thunder, is about the same size as a Hawk jet and is equipped with stealth equipment and an 'autonomous' artificial intelligence system. ...

Taranis will be stealthy, fast, able to carry out use a number of on-board weapons systems and be able to defend itself against manned and other unmanned enemy aircraft.

Most policy makers are extremely wary of trusting autonomous systems with firing authority of any kind. I'm moderately skeptical of the claims made in the article.

Who doesn't love statistics? Ever hear of Benford's Law?

Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way. According to this law, the first digit is 1 almost one third of the time, and larger digits occur as the leading digit with lower and lower frequency, to the point where 9 as a first digit occurs less than one time in twenty. This distribution of first digits arises whenever a set of values has logarithms that are distributed uniformly, as is approximately the case with many measurements of real-world values.

One of many techniques for catching statistical cheats. Note to self: don't attempt to fabricate statistical data.

"SHR" outlines that we're now facing the worst case scenario in the Gulf. It's a slow-motion disaster that is only going to get worse over time.

All of these things lead to only one place, a fully wide open well bore directly to the oil deposit...after that, it goes into the realm of "the worst things you can think of" The well may come completely apart as the inner liners fail. There is still a very long drill string in the well, that could literally come flying out...as I said...all the worst things you can think of are a possibility, but the very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more. There isn't any "cap dome" or any other suck fixer device on earth that exists or could be built that will stop it from gushing out and doing more and more damage to the gulf. While at the same time also doing more damage to the well, making the chance of halting it with a kill from the bottom up less and less likely to work, which as it stands now?....is the only real chance we have left to stop it all.

It's a race now...a race to drill the relief wells and take our last chance at killing this monster before the whole weakened, wore out, blown out, leaking and failing system gives up it's last gasp in a horrific crescendo.

We are not even 2 months into it, barely half way by even optimistic estimates. The damage done by the leaked oil now is virtually immeasurable already and it will not get better, it can only get worse. No matter how much they can collect, there will still be thousands and thousands of gallons leaking out every minute, every hour of every day. We have 2 months left before the relief wells are even near in position and set up to take a kill shot and that is being optimistic as I said.

Over the next 2 months the mechanical situation also cannot improve, it can only get worse, getting better is an impossibility. While they may make some gains on collecting the leaked oil, the structural situation cannot heal itself. It will continue to erode and flow out more oil and eventually the inevitable collapse which cannot be stopped will happen. It is only a simple matter of who can "get there first"...us or the well.

We can only hope the race against that eventuality is one we can win, but my assessment I am sad to say is that we will not.

I haven't read of an optimistic scenario presented by anyone knowledgeable. Links welcome.

(HT: Wizbang and Instapundit.)

IBM's Watson artificial intelligence can answer questions posed in natural language.

For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.

With Watson, I.B.M. claims it has cracked the problem — and aims to prove as much on national TV. The producers of “Jeopardy!” have agreed to pit Watson against some of the game’s best former players as early as this fall. To test Watson’s capabilities against actual humans, I.B.M.’s scientists began holding live matches last winter. They mocked up a conference room to resemble the actual “Jeopardy!” set, including buzzers and stations for the human contestants, brought in former contestants from the show and even hired a host for the occasion: Todd Alan Crain, who plays a newscaster on the satirical Onion News Network.

You can play against Watson yourself if you want. I lost badly.

Read all about the Bathyscaphe Trieste, the only ship to ever dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

For the past few decades artificial intelligence researchers have generally believed that connectionism was the key to building a generalized AI system. Short version of connectionism: symbolic thought is the emergent result of connections between billions of neurons, each of which individually plays only a small, distributed role.

It's pretty surprising that researchers seem to have found evidence that individual neurons can identify objects as dissimilar as sports cars and dogs because the predominant theories expect that such high-level symbolic recognition would be distributed across a large number of neurons, not concentrated in any recognizable location.

In previous studies, Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor of Neuroscience, found that individual neurons in monkeys' brains can become tuned to the concept of "cat" and others to the concept of "dog."

This time, Miller and colleagues Jason Cromer and Jefferson Roy recorded activity in the monkeys' brains as the animals switched back and forth between distinguishing cats vs. dogs and sports cars vs. sedans. Although they found individual neurons that were more attuned to car images and others to animal images, to their surprise, there were many neurons active in both categories. In fact, these "multitasking" neurons were best at making correct identifications in both categories.

Of course, there are still multiple neurons involved in any of these recognition problems, but it's still striking that such distinct localized behavior can be observed on single neurons.

The New York Times has an interesting article about how sequencing the human genome has led to very few cures.

Ten years after President Bill Clinton announced that the first draft of the human genome was complete, medicine has yet to see any large part of the promised benefits.

For biologists, the genome has yielded one insightful surprise after another. But the primary goal of the $3 billion Human Genome Project — to ferret out the genetic roots of common diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s and then generate treatments — remains largely elusive. Indeed, after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.

But what the Times and maybe many scientists fail to grasp -- and what Ray Kurzweil would be quick to point out -- is that genetic medicine is still on the flat part of the exponential growth curve. If you examine the green line on the chart below (which represents exponential growth) you will see that it begins very flat. This flatness is an illusion of scale, and as progress is made down the curve the slope steepens eventually and surpasses the linear and quadratic curves.

The benefits of technology follow an exponential curve. It is a mistake to judge the results of the Human Genome Project before we reach the elbow in the curve.

Additionally, I will add that what appears to have been quite a surprise to many medical researchers is no surprise to me at all.

It was far too expensive at that time to think of sequencing patients’ whole genomes. So the National Institutes of Health embraced the idea for a clever shortcut, that of looking just at sites on the genome where many people have a variant DNA unit. But that shortcut appears to have been less than successful.

The theory behind the shortcut was that since the major diseases are common, so too would be the genetic variants that caused them. Natural selection keeps the human genome free of variants that damage health before children are grown, the theory held, but fails against variants that strike later in life, allowing them to become quite common. In 2002 the National Institutes of Health started a $138 million project called the HapMap to catalog the common variants in European, East Asian and African genomes.

With the catalog in hand, the second stage was to see if any of the variants were more common in the patients with a given disease than in healthy people. These studies required large numbers of patients and cost several million dollars apiece. Nearly 400 of them had been completed by 2009. The upshot is that hundreds of common genetic variants have now been statistically linked with various diseases.

But with most diseases, the common variants have turned out to explain just a fraction of the genetic risk. It now seems more likely that each common disease is mostly caused by large numbers of rare variants, ones too rare to have been cataloged by the HapMap.

Old (Wrong) Theory: Most common diseases are caused by a few localized, common, genetic variants. Implication: the human genome is generally in a stable equilibrium that is occasionally disturbed by small numbers of large genetic failures.

New (Right?) Theory: Most common diseases are caused by a large number of small problematic genetic variants. Implication: the human genome is generally unstable and all these genes that we think aren't doing anything are actually quite important. Small variations in these "supporting" genes cause the unstable equilibrium to break down. Human life is like a water tower that collapses if you remove enough cross-beams, even if you don't touch the uprights.

It's no surprise to me at life is an unstable equilibrium, and the only reason I can think of for biologists to assume differently because the theory of evolution completely breaks down if genetic viability isn't inherently stable. (Or so it would seem to me.)

Here's a graph that illustrates how Obama's health care reform bill killed job growth before it even passed.

In case it isn't obvious at first glance, the chart shows that as soon as Obamacare was proposed at the end of October, 2009, companies immediately stopped hiring as many people and unemployment filings decreased at a much reduced rate.

I've been looking around but I can't seem to find an iPed for sale online. Apparently the iPad clone is selling for $105 in China and runs Google's Android OS. If anyone finds a source for these, please let me know.

"Scientists" -- in scare quotes since climatologists seem to be mostly political activists -- are just starting to grapple with the fact that they've completely lost the public trust on global warming.

Here in Britain, the change has been driven by the news media’s intensive coverage of a series of climate science controversies unearthed and highlighted by skeptics since November. These include the unauthorized release of e-mail messages from prominent British climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that skeptics cited as evidence that researchers were overstating the evidence for global warming and the discovery of errors in a United Nations climate report.

Two independent reviews later found no evidence that the East Anglia researchers had actively distorted climate data, but heavy press coverage had already left an impression that the scientists had schemed to repress data.

I don't think it takes a brilliant scientist to interpret the hoard of climategate emails.

From: Phil Jones To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxxxxxxx.xxx Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000 Cc: k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx,t.osborn@xxxxxxxxx.xxx

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim's got a diagram here we'll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith's to hide the decline. Mike's series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK

It's nice that "two independent reviews" found no wrongdoing, but c'mon. That's absurd. We're not exalted "climatologists" but we can read.

The fact of the matter is that people don't need to understand the science. Scientists ask us to trust them because they know more than we do, but the climategate emails demonstrate that the world's leading global warming proponents are not trustworthy people. It doesn't matter that they're smart and educated. The emails show that they regularly lied to and manipulated the public.

That's that.

Despite the near impossibility of overcoming a Democrat filibuster even if Republicans manage to take both houses of Congress and the Presidency by 2012, a growing majority of Americans support the repeal of Obamacare.

Support for repeal of the new national health care plan has jumped to its highest level ever. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 63% of U.S. voters now favor repeal of the plan passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law by President Obama in March.

Prior to today, weekly polling had shown support for repeal ranging from 54% to 58%.

Currently, just 32% oppose repeal.

It's hard for me to envision a scenario in which Obamacare is actually repealed, but I think it is likely to be significantly modified before the major provisions begin to take effect. It will still end up being a huge net loss to our country (as intended by its proponents).

Despite the near impossibility of overcoming a Democrat filibuster even if Republicans manage to take both houses of Congress and the Presidency by 2012, a growing majority of Americans support the repeal of Obamacare.

Support for repeal of the new national health care plan has jumped to its highest level ever. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 63% of U.S. voters now favor repeal of the plan passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law by President Obama in March.

Prior to today, weekly polling had shown support for repeal ranging from 54% to 58%.

Currently, just 32% oppose repeal.

It's hard for me to envision a scenario in which Obamacare is actually repealed, but I think it is likely to be significantly modified before the major provisions begin to take effect. It will still end up being a huge net loss to our country (as intended by its proponents).

Paul Hsieh apty describes how ObamaCare will destroy health care:

ObamaCare thus places a noose around private insurers' necks. Insurance companies will be required to offer numerous benefits determined by politicians and lobbyists. But they will be allowed to charge only what government bureaucrats permit. No business can survive long if it must offer $2,000 worth of services to customers but can charge only $1,000.

Although it is tempting to take delight at the insurance industry's self-caused plight, the inevitable collapse of the private insurance market would also leave millions of Americans without coverage. Even though this crisis would be caused by government policies, liberals would gleefully portray it as a "failure of the free market" and demand that the government "rescue" health care. The end result would be a "single payer" socialized medical system like Canada's or Great Britain's, with rationing and long waits for medical care.

Instead of making their Faustian bargain with the government, insurance companies should have advocated for free-market reforms such as allowing customers to purchase policies across state lines, repealing existing mandatory benefits, and allowing patients to use Health Savings Accounts for routine expenses and low-cost "catastrophic-only" insurance to cover rare expensive events. Such free-market reforms could reduce insurance costs up to 50%, while preserving quality of medical care.

He also rightly points out that destroying health care isn't a bug in ObamaCare -- it's the underlying purpose! The point is to destroy the market for health care and force the American people into a completely government-run system. Why? Because it will give the elites more control of our lives and reduce our liberty. They think we're too dumb to be free, so they're trying to help us out.