Eideard

Five years ago, Bill Gates made an extraordinary offer: he invited the world’s scientists to submit ideas for tackling the biggest problems in global health, including the lack of vaccines for AIDS and malaria, the fact that most vaccines must be kept refrigerated and be delivered by needles, the fact that many tropical crops like cassavas and bananas had little nutrition, and so on.

No idea was too radical, he said, and what he called the Grand Challenges in Global Health would pursue paths that the National Institutes of Health and other grant makers could not.

About 1,600 proposals came in, and the top 43 were so promising that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation made $450 million in five-year grants — more than double what he originally planned to give.

Now the five years are up, and the foundation recently brought all the scientists to Seattle to assess the results and decide who will get further funding.

In an interview, Mr. Gates sounded somewhat chastened, saying several times, “We were naïve when we began…”

He underestimated, he said, how long it takes to get a new product from the lab to clinical trials to low-cost manufacturing to acceptance in third-world countries…

That little won’t buy a breakthrough, but it lets scientists “moonlight” by adding new goals to their existing grants, which saves the foundation a lot of winnowing. “And,” he added, “a scientist in a developing country can do a lot with $100,000.”

Over all, he said: “On drawing attention to ways that lives might be saved through scientific advances, I’d give us an A.

“But I thought some would be saving lives by now, and it’ll be more like in 10 years from now.”

RTFA. A case study – series of studies – in developing philanthropy. Above all else, give the Gates’ credit for their commitment and dedication. It ain’t even easy to try to give money away to help people.

Absent friends…

The former public face of Australian prisoners of war will spend Christmas behind bars after admitting his war service claim was a lie.

Arthur “Rex” Crane, 84, posed as a World War II veteran for 22 years and achieved a national profile as Australian president of the Ex-Prisoners of War Association until he was outed by a military historian who believed his story did not add up. During that time, Crane successfully claimed $464,409 in war pension and disability payments, which he was not entitled to receive.

He pleaded guilty in Brisbane’s District Court last month and was yesterday sentenced to four years in jail, of which he will serve six months.

The court heard Crane developed the false war story to fit in with actual veterans he was working alongside in a country pub in the 1960s. Within a few years, Crane had convinced everyone, from doctors to his own family.

Crane explained his lack of documentation by claiming he was a boy guerilla, conscripted by the British while living with his parents in Malaya in the 1940s.

He claimed he was then captured by the Japanese, tortured and sent to work on the notorious Thai-Burma Railway alongside 13,000 other Australian POWs.

But Crane’s story came undone during a speech to veterans last year when historian Lynette Silver found his story unbelievable. Within a month, the historian found documents showing Crane had been enrolled at an Adelaide school during his supposed imprisonment…

The historian yesterday said she was “astounded” the Department of Veterans Affairs failed to identify such a blatant fraud…

Crane has been ordered to repay the money, although it is unlikely the sum will ever be recovered.

This speaks volumes about acceptable lies, lies which qualify a fraud automatically as so deserving that no one ever checks to verify the tale.

“It was just two nerds comparing notes,” the spokesman said. “Keep the speculation in check.”

But when those nerds happened to be the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Robin Li, the head of Baidu – the biggest search engine in China – there was no way a quiet business lunch was going to remain quiet.

Moments after Zuckerberg and Li were seen strolling through the canteen in Baidu’s Beijing headquarters today, an employee posted a blurred mobile phone photograph of them on his microblog…

Zuckerberg – recently named person of the year by Time Magazine – has made no secret of his desire to expand in China, where Facebook has been blocked by the government censors’ Great Firewall since 2008…

Zuckerberg’s current holiday is his first known trip behind the Great Firewall. But he has started taking Mandarin lessons, and recently asked Facebook members for tips on places to visit with his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan.

In a recent speech at Stanford University, he said the company may turn its attention to China in a year if it can first crack Japan, South Korea and Russia.

“How can you connect the whole world if you leave out a billion people?” he asked then…

Zuckerberg appears to have found common ground with Li, an internet entrepreneur who has completed a postgraduate course in the US.

Since then, he has shrugged off Google and Yahoo, as well as criticism about a supposedly weak stance on censorship and copyright piracy, to make Baidu the dominant force in the Chinese search engine market…

Commerce can do more to bring reluctant democracies forward into the modern world than any prating about the holiness and destiny of democracy. Instead of spending time lecturing each other on politics and history, methods and practice – learn how to profit and grow together.

Leave the purity of your bodily fluids for priests, pundits and politicians.

Unlike most of my disclaimers, I actually own a boatload of Baidu. Only because I bought a wee bit when it was much cheaper – and before they had their 10:1 stock split.

Two enterprising Polish poachers used a home-made, radio controlled submarine to trawl for fish in a frozen lake.

Police in the small town of Zbaszyn in western Poland said they caught the two red handed with the submarine, although another man managed to escape when the officers approached the “three suspicious characters with nets on the lake”.

A search of the suspects revealed a hand-held GPS device, which took the police the next day to a 40-kilogram stash of fish, and five 200-metre nets.

“They drilled a hole in the ice and then dropped the submarine in on a tether,” said Romuald Piecuch, a local police spokesman. “They then manoeuvred it around under the ice with the net before bringing it back to the hole with the anything they had caught.” Despite their prowess at harvesting fish in a manner that won them the grudging respect of the police, the spokesman added that the value of the torpedo-like submarine probably exceeded the value of the fish.

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. It doesn’t take a boatload of brains to be a crook.

Scientists have found a ‘chocolate cure’ for having a persistent cough. They have isolated a naturally-occuring substance in cocoa that they say stops the “root cause” of the irritating condition.

Some 7.5 million people in Britain suffer from a persistent cough every year according to a recent review, defined as one that lasts more than two weeks after the underlying cause disappears.

At the moment most medications to control the symptoms are opiate-based ones like cough syrups containing codeine, a narcotic.

But in October the Medicines and Health products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said under-18s should not take such medication, because the drawbacks outweighed the benefits.

Now a British-based drugs company called SEEK is helping develop a medication based on a drug called theobromine, that it says “has been shown to inhibit the inappropriate firing of the vagus nerve, which is a key feature of persistent cough”.

It is found in “significant quantities in cocoa-based products“, said the firm…

The drug is already sold in South Korea, and SEEK hopes it will be on sale in British pharmacies within two years.
Prof Alyn Morice said that while it was “theoretically possible” to get enough theobromine in a bar of dark chocolate to alleviate a cough, studies had yet to be done to reveal the exact dose required.

You know what my answer to that last question will be: Don’t know if one dark chocolate bar is sufficient to stop your cough? Have another!

The Cryosat-2 spacecraft has produced its first major science result. Radar data from the European satellite has been used to make a map of ocean circulation across the Arctic basin.

Cryosat’s primary mission is to measure sea-ice thickness, which has been in sharp decline in recent decades. But its ability also to map the shape of the sea surface will tell scientists if Arctic currents are changing as a result of winds being allowed to blow more easily on ice-free waters.

“Nobody really knows how the Arctic is going to behave as the ice retreats, but we do anticipate that significant changes will occur,” said Dr Seymour Laxon, a Cryosat science team member from University College London, UK.

“This is just the first data, and it shows we now have the tool to monitor what is happening,” he told BBC News…

The European Space Agency (Esa) satellite was launched in April. It carries one of the highest resolution synthetic aperture radars ever put in orbit.

The instrument sends down pulses of microwave energy which bounce off both the top of the Arctic sea-ice and the water in the cracks, or leads, which separate the floes.

By measuring the difference in height between these two surfaces, scientists will be able, using a relatively simple calculation, to work out the overall volume of the marine ice cover in the far north…

And the opening months of observations have enabled the Cryosat team to build a unique map from just the radar echoes bouncing off leads.

RTFA for the details. Great work – the beginnings of completely new data to aid scientists studying climate and more.

Flat-earthers stuck into pundits who flagellate themselves over less-than-geologic time may now return to Faux Newz.

Wireless opponent Arthur Firstenberg wants a new round of public hearings on last month’s upgrades of AT&T’s cellular-phone system in Santa Fe.

Firstenberg, who says he is hypersensitive to electromagnetic signals from wireless devices, drew headlines last year by suing his neighbor over her use of an iPhone and a Wi-Fi system. A judge has thrown out the iPhone claim, but the Wi-Fi claim is set for trial on March 21. Do you believe it?

Now, Firstenberg is asking for a judge to require AT&T to apply for a special exception from the city to increase the intensity of its signals. Otherwise, he contends, AT&T should be forced to shut off its new system in 30 days…

AT&T’s implementation of 3G service “vastly increased the bandwidth of their radio emissions,” constituting “a change in the intensity of use,” according to Firstenberg’s pro-se petition for a writ of mandamus…

Attached to Firstenberg’s petition are letters from more than a dozen people asking the Board of Adjustment to reject the changes because they are concerned that their health, or that of others, is being damaged by the proliferation of electromagnetic signals.

Angela Werneke of Santa Fe wrote that she has immune deficiency, chronic fatigue and chronic migraines. Although she has not been diagnosed with electromagnetic sensitivity, she wrote, she is “deeply concerned, not only for my own personal health and well being, but also for all those who are being marginalized from our community by the pervasive and rapidly increasing levels of electromagnetic radiation.”

Felicia Noelle Trujillo, a Feldenkrais practitioner in Santa Fe, wrote that she has patients who are undeniably sensitive to electromagnetic radiation and will suffer from “this brutal and instant rise in the levels of EMR in their environment, when they are already in a weakened state.”

The essentially “weakened state” lies between the ears of these Dodo-birds. Certainly, they have a right to initiate lawsuits. Just as certainly the courts have a responsibility to throw them out as soon as the petitions waltz in through the door in all their frivolous glory.

No, I don’t see any more need to speak politely about this foolishness than I must when considering the threat to Homeland Insecurity from that alleged terrorist, Rumplestiltskin.

A detailed, in-depth report from the Washington POST on the state of surveillance – your government keeping an eye on you:

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation’s history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

The government’s goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States…

The Cold War is over. Excepting the federal bureaucracy has decreed the security interests of the nation are best served by keeping an eye on you. A bigger, stronger, better-funded apparatus for spying on American citizens than anything ever deemed useful in the bad old days.

Today’s story, along with related material on The Post’s Web site, examines how Top Secret America plays out at the local level. It describes a web of 4,058 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions. At least 935 of these organizations have been created since the 2001 attacks or became involved in counterterrorism for the first time after 9/11…

* Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.

* The FBI is building a database with the names and certain personal information, such as employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously. It is accessible to an increasing number of local law enforcement and military criminal investigators, increasing concerns that it could somehow end up in the public domain.

* Seeking to learn more about Islam and terrorism, some law enforcement agencies have hired as trainers self-described experts whose extremist views on Islam and terrorism are considered inaccurate and counterproductive by the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies.

* The Department of Homeland Security sends its state and local partners intelligence reports with little meaningful guidance, and state reports have sometimes inappropriately reported on lawful meetings.

RTFA. You may as well know who’s behind the wheel of that black Crown Vic parked down at the foot of your driveway.

Same as it ever was.

Click on the above pic to see full-sized. It’s worth it!

As the regulars know, Eid threw down the gauntlet… or did I throw down the gauntlet?… anyway, war broke out, so there must have been a good reason.