Science – Page 50 – artdiamondblog.com

Life Has Improved; And Can Continue to Improve

Source of graphic: online version of the NYT article cited below.

(p. 1) New research from around the world has begun to reveal a picture of humans today that is so different from what it was in the past that scientists say they are startled. Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone “a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.”

. . .

(p. 19) . . . stressful occupations added to the burden on the body.

People would work until they died or were so disabled that they could not continue, Dr. Fogel said. “In 1890, nearly everyone died on the job, and if they lived long enough not to die on the job, the average age of retirement was 85,” he said. Now the average age is 62.

A century ago, most people were farmers, laborers or artisans who were exposed constantly to dust and fumes, Dr. Costa said. “I think there is just this long-term scarring.”

For the full story, see:

Kolata, Gina. "The New Age; Older and Better; So Big and Healthy Grandpa Wouldn’t Even Know You." The New York Times, Section 1 (Sunday, July 30, 2006): 1 & 18-19.

Source of graphic: online version of the NYT article cited above.

Source of graphic: online version of the NYT article cited above. Source of book image: http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521808782

Fogel’s book is a primary academic source for much of what is interesting in the New York Times article. Fogel predicts that if we don’t screw things up, half of today’s college students will live to be 100. He shows that academics in the past have consistently and significantly underestimated the maximum lifespans that would be attainable in the future.

The full reference for the Fogel book is:

Fogel, Robert William. The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100, Cambridge Studies in Population, Economy and Society in Past Time. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Test That Showed No Life on Mars, Now Also Shows No Life on Earth, Either

One of the Viking landers on Mars. Source of photo: http://www.msss.com/mars/pictures/viking_lander/viking_lander.html

When scientists announced Monday that the search for life on Mars 30 years ago may not have been quite the bust it has long been portrayed, it didn’t mean that the mission had missed any microorganisms, let alone advanced life forms. But it did underline the growing sense that decades of assumptions about extraterrestrial life need serious re-examination.

In 1976, scientists studying data sent back by the Viking landers were quick to dismiss life on Mars. . . .

. . .

Some three decades later, more-sophisticated instruments have shown that the Vikings couldn’t have detected organic molecules even if any were present. When scientists fed soil from the Atacama Desert of Chile and Peru, and the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, experiments like those the Vikings conducted came up empty. Yet, new techniques show the samples contained 10 to 1,500 micrograms of carbon per gram.

"If we knew this 30 years ago, our interpretation of the Viking results would have been very different," says Rafael Navarro-González of Mexico’s National Autonomous University, who led the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For the full story, see:

SHARON BEGLEY. "SCIENCE JOURNAL; Scientists Revisit Data On Mars With Minds More Open to ‘Life’." The Wall Street Journal (Fri., October 27, 2006): B1.

“giving individual schools more autonomy”

(p. A1) SAN DIEGO — When San Diego’s school district began overhauling its science-education curriculum five years ago, it wanted to raise the performance of minority, low-income and immigrant students.

But parents in middle- and upper-income areas, where many students were already doing well, rebelled against the new curriculum, and a course called Active Physics in particular. They called it watered-down science, too skimpy on math.

A resistance movement took hold. Some teachers refused to use the new textbooks, which are peppered with cartoons. They gathered up phased-out texts to use on the sly. As controversy over the issue escalated, it played a part in an election in which the majority of the school board was replaced. Now, further curriculum changes are under consideration.

. . .

(p. A11) Mitz Lee, a parent activist at Scripps Ranch High, also a high-achieving school, continued quietly organizing opposition and eventually made it a cornerstone of her 2004 campaign for a seat on the school board.

Opposition to the program remained sharp among some veteran science teachers. Tom Deets, who teaches at Patrick Henry High, argued that freshman who hadn’t passed eighth-grade algebra weren’t ready for physics. Rather than teach the new course, he switched to math until the district offered him an administrative job.

Aiming to keep their hands on alternative teaching materials, an active underground sprang up, with teachers squirreling away old physics textbooks to make sure the district couldn’t collect them. "At one time, I probably had 400 books," says Hal Cox, a retired submarine commander who teaches physics at Hoover High School. "I put them in lockers, everywhere I could find."

The opposition came to a head with the school-board elections of 2004, when three critics of the district’s overall curriculum changes, including those in math and reading, were elected to its five-member school board. The winners included Ms. Lee, who had campaigned for an end to "fuzzy" science and was elected by the widest margin of the new board members. She has lately been pushing for giving individual schools more autonomy on course choice. "I don’t want any more central mandates," Ms. Lee says.

For the full story, see:

ROBERT TOMSHO. "Textbook Battle; Top High Schools Fight New Science As Overly Simple; San Diego’s Physics Overhaul Makes Classes Accessible, Spurs Parental Backlash; Test Scores Barely Budge." The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., April 13, 2006): A1 & A11.

“My Merit Is My Caste; What Is Yours?”

NEW DELHI, May 22 — The problem of caste prejudice here is as ancient as the Hindu texts. The efforts to redress it date from the formation of modern India nearly 59 years ago. Today — as India enjoys awesome rates of economic progress and confronts the challenge of spreading the benefits to its needy majority — the nation faces a polarizing totem of public policy: a government plan to extend college admission quotas to certain "backward" castes.

Affirmative action is in some ways an even more emotional issue in India than in the United States. In recent weeks, a proposal to extend quotas for admission to some of the country’s flagship, federally financed universities has caused fresh turmoil.

Protests — particularly by medical students who say merit should be the only basis for admission to India’s intensely competitive medical schools — have spread across the country and, here in the capital, hobbled public health services. Advocates and opponents of the measure have exchanged often ugly rants.

. . .

Medical students have been particularly outraged because the plan would further restrict the limited number of seats. Medical education in India begins with a five-year undergraduate program, and the proposal could affect students’ chances of completing their training.

The central lawn of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the pre-eminent public hospital, was occupied Friday by medical students on the fifth day of a strike that began last week and continued on Monday. "My merit is my caste. What is yours?" read one T-shirt.

. . .

The opponents say set-asides would diminish the quality of India’s best universities and divide students along caste lines.

"Why after 55 years are we still thinking in terms of caste-based reservation?" demanded Poojan Aggarwal, a third-year student at Safdarjung Medical College here. "We should talk now of total meritocracy. We know on this issue none of the political parties will support us."

For the full story, see:

SOMINI SENGUPTA. "Quotas to Aid India’s Poor vs. Push for Meritocracy." The New York Times (Tues., May 23, 2006): A3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

Spontaneous Order in Cockroaches

Even cockroaches manage to make collective decisions that, seemingly by magic, produce an outcome that benefits everyone (except the people whose kitchens they are in). When roaches decide where to move in, they must balance crowding against protection against predators. The goal: pack enough roaches into a shelter to provide strength in numbers, but not so much that dangerous crowding results.

When scientists put roaches into a dish containing identical shelters, they thought the roaches would fill one shelter and then use others for spillover. But the gregarious bugs defied expectations.

When more than half the bugs could fit into one shelter, they divided into two equal groups: For instance, when 50 had a choice of three shelters, each with a capacity of 40, 25 cockroaches gathered in one, 25 in another, and none in the third, biologist José Halloy of the Free University of Brussels and colleagues reported last month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dividing up evenly, he says, "spreads benefits and risks among all individuals," rather than having 40 bugs safe and happy while the 10 for whom there was no room at the inn suffer. But when each of three shelters could hold 70, all 50 cockroaches packed into one. Each outcome was optimal, producing the greatest safety in numbers without crowding.

Yet no leader assigns lodging. Roaches just check out shelters, with later arrivals deciding that a crowd signifies "this is the place to be." Overcrowding means "find somewhere else." A group decision that perfectly balances protection and crowding emerges from dozens of such individual decisions.

For the full story, see:

Begley, Sharon. "Buffalo Seek Consensus and Other Tales of How Animals Decide Things." The Wall Street Journal (Fri., April 14, 2006): A11.

Disruptive Innovation in Medicine

Source of image: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114540135592529301.html?mod=home_personal_journal_middle

(p. D1) The dysfunctional doctor’s office is getting a makeover.

A growing number of programs around the country are helping doctors redesign their offices to wring more profit out of their practices and fix problems that have long frustrated patients: weeks-long delays to get appointments, hours in the waiting room, too-brief visits with the doctor, and the near impossibility of getting the physician on the phone. While the goal is to improve care, the programs also aim to avert a looming shortage of primary-care doctors who are frustrated with low pay, long hours and rising overhead costs.

The new programs borrow lessons from other industries to help doctors work more efficiently, especially those in solo and small group practices who account for the majority of outpatient office visits. One approach employs calculations used by airlines, hotels and restaurants to predict demand: The idea is that doctors can cut patient waits much the way restaurant chains seat diners and turn over tables efficiently. Others involve relatively simple changes, such as leaving afternoon appointments open for urgent visits, or having patients fill out paperwork ahead of time online.

Managed-care giant Kaiser Permanente is launching a program to help 12,000 doctors that contract with its health plan increase their efficiency with a new electronic-medical-records system. Portland, Ore., physician Chuck Kilo, whose GreenField Health Systems helps restructure medical practices, and is assisting with the program, says that too many doctors’ appointments take up valuable office time with follow-up that could be accomplished with phone calls and email.

Other models involve more-radical change, such as one called "Ideal Micro Practice" that sharply reduces or even eliminates support staff. With this blueprint, doctors rely on electronic health records and practice-management software to quickly dispense with administrative tasks. And they may run their offices solo, greeting patients personally as they come in the door.

"The office practice hasn’t changed much in 50 years," says John Wasson, a Dartmouth Medical School professor and practice redesign expert who is helping to launch a national program to expand the Micro Practice concept. "This is a disruptive innovation that can lead to increased quality and reduced costs."

For the full story, see:

LAURA LANDRO. "Cutting Waits at the Doctor’s Office; New Programs Reorganize Practices to Be More Efficient; Applying ‘Queuing Theory’." The Wall Street Journal (Weds., April 19, 2006): D1 & D3.

Source of graphic: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114540135592529301.html?mod=home_personal_journal_middle

“life is too short”

Source of book image: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0738204315/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/104-9985403-1047968?%5Fencoding=UTF8&customer-reviews.sort%5Fby=-SubmissionDate&n=283155

The Cluetrain Manifesto is a thought-provoking, entertaining, uneven, overly-mystical, somewhat dated classic on the impact of the internet on business and life. Here is the book’s startling start:

WE DIE.

You will never hear those words spoken in a television ad. Yet this central fact of human existence colors our world and how we perceive ourselves within it. "Life is too short," we say, and it is. Too short for office politics, for busywork and pointless paper chases, for jumping through hoops and covering our asses, for trying to please, to not offend, for constantly struggling to achieve some ever-receding definition of success. (p. 1)

Locke, Christopher, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Books Group, 2001.

Radiologist Outsourcing Is Mainly a Myth

David Leonhardt. Source of image: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/business/19leonhardt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

A few years ago, stories about a scary new kind of outsourcing began making the rounds. Apparently, hospitals were starting to send their radiology work to India, where doctors who make far less than American radiologists do were reading X-rays, M.R.I.’s and CT scans.

It quickly became a signature example of how globalization was moving up the food chain, threatening not just factory and call center workers but the so-called knowledge workers who were supposed to be immune. If radiologists and their $350,000 average salaries weren’t safe from the jobs exodus, who was?

On ABC, George Will said the outsourcing of radiology could make health care affordable again, to which Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York retorted that thousands of American radiologists would lose their jobs. On NPR, an economist said the pay of radiologists was already suffering. At the White House, an adviser to President Bush suggested that fewer medical students would enter the field in the future.

"We’re losing radiologists," Representative Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, said on CNN while Lou Dobbs listened approvingly. "We’re losing all kinds of white-collar jobs, all kinds of jobs in addition to manufacturing jobs, which we’re losing by the droves in my state."

But up in Boston, Frank Levy, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, realized that he still had not heard or read much about actual Indian radiologists. Like the once elusive Snuffleupagus of Sesame Street, they were much discussed but rarely seen. So Mr. Levy began looking. He teamed up with two other M.I.T. researchers, Ari Goelman and Kyoung-Hee Yu, and they dug into the global radiology business.

In the end, they were able to find exactly one company in India that was reading images from American patients. It employs three radiologists. There may be other such radiologists scattered around India, but Mr. Levy says, "I think 20 is an overestimate."

Some exodus.

For the full story, see:

Leonhardt, David. "Political Clout in the Age of Outsourcing." The New York Times (Weds., April 19, 2006): C1 & C4.

Endangered Fish Thrive on Oil Platforms

Large numbers of rockfish and other fish near the Gilda oil platform off the Ventura coast. Source of image: http://www.lovelab.id.ucsb.edu/Check.html

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., March 11 – A marine biologist has found that 27 oil platforms off California’s Central Coast may be havens for bocaccio, cowcod and other fish.

. . .

Since the 1950’s, when heavy fishing began in the region, some species have been reduced to 6 percent of their previous numbers, Dr. Love said. Overfishing has led to an economic disaster, leading some fisheries to close.

Dr. Love films fish around the platforms from a submarine and then counts them in his laboratory.

Among his findings are that large fish prefer crevices at the platforms’ base, and smaller ones like the middle section above their predators.

At Platform Gail, which stands in 739 feet of water nine miles off the Ventura coast, Dr. Love found what he believes to be the highest density of two species of overfished rockfish in Southern California.

Dr. Love emphasizes that his research does not draw conclusions about whether the platforms should be removed. He says his personal view is that the rigs should stay in place, cut below the waterline so that ships can pass safely over them.

Dr. Love gets about 80 percent of his research money from the government, and the rest from the California Artificial Reef Enhancement Program, a Sacramento nonprofit group financed almost entirely by oil companies. The group has contributed about $100,000 a year to his research since 1999, said its executive director, George Steinbach. Dr. Love said oil industry money could not sway his research.

For the full story, see:

"Citing Oil Rigs as Fish Havens, Companies Resist Removal." The New York Times (Mon., March 13, 2006): A18.

Doctors Erect Barriers to Keep Out Competition

A Bangalore radiologist. One of three radiologists in India known to be reading U.S. scans. Each of the three has a U.S. degree, as required by U.S. law. Source of image: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/business/19leonhardt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

(p. C1) Radiologists seem like just the sort of workers who should be scared. Computer networks can now send an electronic image to India faster than a messenger can take it from one hospital floor to another. Often, those images are taken during emergencies at night, when radiologists here are sleeping and radiologists in India are not.

There also happens to be a shortage of radiologists in the United States. Sophisticated new M.R.I. and CT machines can detect tiny tumors that once would have gone unnoticed, and doctors are ordering a lot more scans as a result.

When I talked this week to E. Stephen Amis Jr., the head of the radiology department at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, he had just finished looking at some of the 700 images that had been produced by a single abdominal CT exam. "We were just taking pictures of big, thick slabs of the body 20 years ago," Dr. Amis said. "Now we’re taking thinner and thinner slices."

Economically, in other words, ra-(p. C6)diology has a lot in common with industries that are outsourcing jobs. It has high labor costs, it’s growing rapidly and it’s portable.

Politically, though, radiology could not be more different. Unlike software engineers, textile workers or credit card customer service employees, doctors have enough political power to erect trade barriers, and they have built some very effective ones.

To practice medicine in this country, doctors are generally required to have done their training here. Otherwise, it is extremely difficult to be certified by a board of other doctors or be licensed by a state government. The three radiologists Mr. Levy found in Bangalore did their residencies at Baylor, Yale and the University of Massachusetts before returning home to India.

"No profession I know of has as much power to self-regulate as doctors do," Mr. Levy said.

So even if the world’s most talented radiologist happened to have trained in India, there would be no test he could take to prove his mettle here. It’s as if the law required cars sold here to have been made by the graduates of an American high school.

Much as the United Automobile Workers might love such a law, Americans would never tolerate it, because it would drive up the price of cars and keep us from enjoying innovations that happened to come from overseas. But isn’t that precisely what health care protectionism does? It keeps out competition.

For the full story, see:

Leonhardt, David. "Political Clout in the Age of Outsourcing." The New York Times (Weds., April 19, 2006): C1 & C4.

Chernobyl Accident Cannot Occur In U.S. Type Reactors

Twenty years ago (April 25, 1986), the Chernobyl nuclear accident sent a plume of radiation into the air above Ukraine. The word "Chernobyl" remains the most emotionally charged argument used by the opponents of nuclear energy. But if examined carefully, the main lesson from Chernobyl may be that what happened there cannot occur in the better designed light water reactors used in the United States, and most of the rest of the world. William Sweet, the author of the commentary below, has also authored Kicking the Carbon Habit: Global Warming and the Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy.

(p. A23) . . . , though it went unnoticed at the time and has been inadequately appreciated since, Chernobyl also cast into relief the positive features of the reactors used in the United States and most other advanced industrial countries.

The reactor at Chernobyl belonged to a class that was especially vulnerable to runaway reactions. When operating at low power, if such reactors lost water, their reactivity could suddenly take off and very rapidly reach a threshold beyond which they could only explode. Making matters worse, surprisingly little more pressure than normal in the machine’s water channels would lift its lid, snapping the vital control rods and fuel channels that entered the reactor’s core.

On the night of April 25, 1986, poorly trained and supervised plant operators conducted an ill-conceived experiment, putting the machine into the very state in which reactivity was most likely to spike. Within a fraction of a second, the reactor went from being barely on to power levels many times higher than the maximum intended.

This kind of accident cannot happen in the so-called light water reactors used in the United States and most of Western Europe and Asia. In these reactors, the water functions not only as a coolant but as a "moderator": self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions cannot take place in its absence. This is a very useful passive safety feature. If coolant runs low, there is still a danger of a core meltdown, because the fuel retains heat; but the reactor will have automatically and immediately turned itself off.

For the full commentary, see:

WILLIAM SWEET. "The Nuclear Option." The New York Times (Weds., April 26, 2006): A23.

The reference to Sweet’s related book is:

Sweet, William. Kicking the Carbon Habit: Global Warming and the Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy. Columbia University Press, 2006.

Source of book image: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231137109/sr=8-1/qid=1146071688/ref=sr_1_1/104-5668094-9083929?%5Fencoding=UTF8