feb 2010 / greg goebel / public domain
* This weblog provides an "online diary" to provide notes on current events, interesting items I run across, and the occasional musing. It promotes no particular ideology. For update notifications, follow "gvgoebel" on Twitter.
* LISTEN CLOSELY: Humans have an innate capability to learn and use language that far outstrips the communications capabilities of even the chattiest of our fellow animals. As reported by an article from BBC WORLD Online ("Big Brother Untangles Baby Babble" by Jonathan Fildes), there is an ongoing argument over the roots of human language, the question being: "nature versus nurture?" Do children learn language on the basis of an innate capability? Or is language something they are taught by the people around them? A professor of robotics named Deb Roy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab has been working on the question by simply listening in, if in an extremely thorough way, on babies as they progress from babble to coherent speech.
Roy became interested in the issue in 2005 while working on machine communications. He noticed that the studies he found on the emergence of language in babies only took fairly brief snapshots of a baby's language development, which he found much too sketchy to provide insight. Others agreed. Steven Pinker of Harvard University, a well-known "evolutionary psychologist", commented: "Current samples that the field works with -- typically an hour of recorded speech a week -- are one to two orders of magnitude too small for our scientific purposes."
At the time, Roy's wife was expecting, and in anticipation of the arrival of his child, Roy wired up his home with 11 fisheye-lens cameras activated by motion sensors; 14 omnidirectional microphones; server computers with vast quantities of mass storage; and a kilometer (3,300 feet) of wiring to link it all together. Every waking moment of the baby was to be recorded for analysis. Roy called the effort the "Human Speechome" project, as something of a pun on the Human Genome project. The baby, a boy, was monitored every day for three years from 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM, with the system gobbling up 200 gigabytes of data every year. The total came to 150 terabytes, with 70% of the boy's waking moments tracked.
* Now Roy's group is taking on the hard part, trying to sort through the ocean of data accumulated in those three years. Specialized software tools were built to help. The first, named "Total Recall", was effectively a viewer, allowing the 25 channels of data collected to be sorted out and inspected. Given the ability to scan through the data stream, the next task was to actually transcribe what the baby had said, which Roy estimated ran to over 10 million words.
That turned out to be tough. Roy's research group first tried to use off-the-shelf speech recognition software, but it wasn't up to the job of picking out speech from household background noise, with error rates up to 90%. Human transcribers had the skill to sort through the noise, but it was laborious, requiring about ten hours to transcribe an hour of speech.
That was obviously a nonstarter as well, but the MIT researchers decided it could be made to work if the human transcribers were given a software tool to help. The tool, "Blitzscribe", scanned through the audio data stream to find speech in the recordings and chop it up into convenient chunks for a human transcriber to deal with. Now transcribing an hour of speech only requires two hours of work. The output of the effort not only includes the speech, but how it was said -- its "prosody" -- and who said it. An associated tool, named "TrackMarks", was put together to analyse the video data stream, figuring out such elements as the relative location of the speakers and the orientation of their heads.
Roy is nowhere near coming up with a "grand unified theory of language" yet, but he feels he has acquired some interesting insights even in this early stage of analysis. For example, his team has been able to zero in on a process that he calls "word birth", or the time when a baby first learns how to use a word. The analysis shows that parents subconsciously simplify sentences until the baby gets the idea. As Roy puts it: "We essentially meet him at the point of the birth of the word and gently pull him into the language."
A profound revelation? Maybe, maybe not; scientific theory is often built up from small insights instead of an apple falling on one's head, but not all small insights are actually worth anything. However, as Roy points out, this shows the kinds of questions that can be addressed with the tools and data he now has.
There is one big problem with his experiment, however: it only covers one subject, Roy's own son. To be persuasive, much more data will have to be accumulated on other babies, and few are eager to go through the labor and expense of duplicating Roy's experimental setup. Roy was aware of that issue from the outset and never regarded his effort as much more than a pilot program.
The MIT Media Lab is now producing more convenient tools for the job and for similar jobs. One of the first products is the "Speechome recorder", which looks something like a high-tech floor lamp. It has an overhead arm with a microphone and camera, as well as a camera at toddler eye level in the base. The base has a touchscreen panel for control and status, and enough mass storage to accumulate data for several months. The recorders are now being put to use in studies of autistic children.
Roy also sees the work done on analysis for the Speechome project having applications elsewhere, for example in "smart" video camera systems, or in models of how humans move around in living spaces -- which might be useful in architectural design. However, the core of the effort was always to determine how babies learn to talk, and the Roy sees the possibility of duplicating that capability as the big payoff: "What if we can build a machine that can step into the shoes of a child and learn in human-like ways? Imagine transferring that into a video-game character or into a domestic robot that can now learn to communicate and interact in social ways. I see a lot of pathways back."
* OBAMA'S SPACE PLAN: The recommendations of the Augustine Committee on the future of the US space program were discussed here some months back. The Obama Administration has considered those recommendations, and on 1 February 2010 President Obama announced the conclusions.
The basic message was simple and straightforward: the Constellation program, the plan established by the Bush II Administration in which the US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) would return to the Moon as a stepping stone to Mars, was to get the axe. The NASA space shuttle will be retired no later than 2011, as previously planned, while the International Space Station (ISS) will continue operations to at least 2020. With the shuttle gone, the US will not have a manned spaceflight capability for some years. In the new space order, that gap will be plugged by commercial space companies responding to NASA contracts.
The cancellation of Constellation was not at all surprising, since the program was in serious budget trouble; it was simply not affordable. What was surprising was that the Obama plan, as stated, said nothing specific about what the US planned to do about manned spaceflight. What the new plan does specify sounds on the face of it as a general reassessment of the US manned space program:
EGIN QUOTE:
The President's Budget cancels Constellation and replaces it with a bold new approach that invests in the building blocks of a more capable approach to space exploration that includes:
END QUOTE
While the Augustine Committee had encouraged continued development of the Orion space capsule and work on the "not Shuttle-C" heavy-lift booster, the plan as released said nothing about them. The president made it clear that planning was still in progress and that a detailed roadmap for NASA wasn't going to be in place for months. That makes commentary on the plan ambiguous for the time being.
The pessimistic point of view being floated is that the Obama Administration is giving up on US manned spaceflight. That's the common unhappy view of Congresspeople whose districts include aerospace industries involved in manned space, and a big fight is expected over the plan. However, not everyone who is interested in space exploration is an enthusiast for manned missions, the attitude being that robotic missions are much cheaper and more useful, and to that faction the "pessimistic" view is actually welcome. The support for robot missions rings through loud and clear in the Obama space plan. No more "cart before the horse"; no longer, so the advocates say, will robotic programs be starved and looted to support manned programs.
Manned spaceflight advocates reply in frustration that it makes no sense to explore space if humans don't do it themselves -- but their exasperation with the Obama space plan may be exaggerated. The optimistic point of view is that the Obama space plan doesn't kill off manned spaceflight, it simply says that the US needs to step back and completely reconsider the matter. The plan envisions giving NASA almost $6 billion USD in additional funding over the next five years, with a strong focus on development of new technologies and a commercial manned spaceflight capability. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, an ex-shuttle pilot, has told critics the agency is not giving up on the heavy-lift booster on which manned deep-space missions are predicated -- though he does warn it won't be flying until after 2020. The hike in funding renders the outcry of "NASA is being gutted" implausible -- while those agitated over the cancellation of the Constellation program are stuck with the problem of explaining where the money would come from for a program that was going nowhere in any hurry after expenditure of about $9 billion USD.
The Apollo program of the 1960s was a clear and impressive success for NASA, but by 1975, when the program was ending, NASA's mission needed to be fundamentally reexamined. It didn't happen. NASA went forward with a space shuttle, then a space station, as "flagship" programs -- both conceived with weakly defined goals, both suffering from serious cost and development problems as NASA pursued them with inadequate resources and half-hearted political support. Of course, NASA has had its significant successes in the previous decades as well. Maybe now we sit down, review what's been done right, what's been done wrong, figure out what can actually be done on a sensible budget, and finally get things on track. For the time being, what happens next is anyone's guess.
* THE TAMING OF THE CAT (3): There's no way of knowing how long it took to turn wildcats into housecats, but animals can be domesticated very rapidly. In 1959, Soviet researchers began a program to produce tame silver foxes on a fox farm, and within decades ended up with docile foxes. Interestingly, they had many of the same neotenous characteristics as dogs. However, it seems unlikely that Neolithic farmers performed much selective breeding on cats and so it probably took centuries, even millennia.
The second oldest hint of cat domestication is from Israel, where a dig found a cat molar about 9,000 years old. The third oldest remnant is from Pakistan and is about 4,000 years old. The scarcity of cat remains in that timeframe suggests that cats and humans had yet to link up in a big way. The first really hard evidence of cats mingling with humans comes from Egyptian paintings dating back 3,600 years that show cats sitting under chairs, sometimes collared, or eating from bowls. One suspects that even then, they could be picky eaters. Given the large number of Egyptian paintings of cats, it's not surprising that it was thought for so long that Egyptians were the first to domesticate the housecat.
Now we know that cats had been living around humans for a long time before that, but certainly the Egyptians were fond of cats. 2,900 years ago, the housecat had become the national deity of Egypt, the goddess Bast or Bastet, and mummies of housecats are very common. The Egyptians revered the cat so much that they banned export of the beasts, but they had spread from Egypt to Greece by 2,500 years ago. During Greek and Roman times, cats clearly rode on grain ships to keep rats in check, with the little felines spreading around the shores of the Mediterranean and then up into Europe, where they were well-established 2,000 years ago. Oddly, housecats seemed to have reached Britain before the Romans arrived, with scholars still puzzling over who might have brought them there.
Of course, cats migrated East as well, becoming established in India and China. Isolated from Western housecat populations, due to "genetic drift" Asian housecats evolved into distinct races, the best-known being the Siamese and the Burmese. Genetic analysis suggests these races emerged at least 700 years ago. In recent centuries, cats came to the Americas and Australia, though being relative newcomers in those lands, they have not developed into distinctive races.
* Human selective breeding of cats for interesting features seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon: in Egyptian paintings, housecats have much the same coloration as wildcats. Most modern breeds of cats were developed by enthusiasts in Britain during the 19th century, with the first "fancy cat" breeds exhibited at the Crystal Palace in London in 1871. A Persian won the prize, though there was considerable excitement over the Siamese.
Today, cat fanciers recognize about 60 different breeds of cats. Only about a dozen genes control the variation between these breeds -- coat color, fur length and texture, and so on. The genetic variation between different breeds of cats is very slight, on the order of the general variation between French and Italians. Cats in no way compare to the genetic diversity of dogs, which range in form from chihuahuas to great danes. The greater variability of dogs is not surprising, since dogs have been bred for many purposes for a long time, with dogs performing jobs such as guard duty, pulling sleds, livestock herding, tracking by smell, and so on.
In contrast, to the extent cats have a job, the only serious one is hunting mice -- and it seems they basically exploited that opportunity themselves. Cats appear to have hooked up with us because it was to their convenience, and no one who understands cats would dispute that notion. Housecats are still very similar to their wildcat ancestors, exhibiting only a few minor difference. They have slightly shorter legs, a smaller brain and, as noted by Charles Darwin, a longer intestine, which may have been an adaptation to living on kitchen scraps.
However, modern artificial insemination and in-vitro fertilization technology suggests that the housecat is on the threshold of a genetic flowering, as human breeders hybridize cats with other feline species to create radically new breeds. The "Bengal" and the "Caracat", for example, resulted from crossing the house cat with the Asian leopard cat and the caracal, respectively. Love cats or kick cats, they're here to stay. [END OF SERIES]
* CASE CLOSED -- LEE HARVEY OSWALD (1): The obvious place to start in examining the JFK assassination is to take a close look at Lee Harvey Oswald. He was born in a rundown neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana, on 18 October 1939. His mother was Marguerite Oswald, his father was Robert E. Lee Oswald, who was Marguerite Oswald's second husband and had died two months before the birth. Marguerite had two other sons, Robert Oswald and John Pic, Pic being the son of Marguerite's first husband. It was not much of a happy family, Robert and John later having little good to say about their mother, describing her as high-strung, irresponsible, self-centered, paranoid, greedy, and domineering.
Marguerite Oswald found things so hard to deal with that she put Robert and John in an orphanage. Lee was a toddler at the time and the orphanage couldn't take him; Marguerite clumsily tried to enlist a range of caretakers while she tried to hold down a job, resulting in a completely unstable environment for the young Lee. In 1942, when he was three, she managed to get him into the orphanage as well, which actually a fairly benign environment, with Robert and John looking out for him.
In 1944 she pulled her sons out of the orphanage and took them to Dallas, Texas. She had a relationship with a Dallas businessman named Edwin Ekdahl, who she married in 1945. Lee became very fond of Ekdahl and even accompanied him on business trips. However, Marguerite couldn't get along with anyone, the marriage gradually degenerated into continuous fighting, and they went through a nasty divorce in 1948. During this time, Lee's life was unsettled and his brothers noticed he was becoming ever more quiet and withdrawn.
The unsettled pattern of moving around continued over the next few years. John joined the US Coast Guard in 1950, while Robert joined the US Marine Corps in 1952. Lee looked up to Robert and, inspired by Robert's example, decided he wanted to sign up with the Marines as well once he was old enough. In the summer of 1952, Marguerite took Lee to New York City, where John was stationed, with the mother and son moving into the apartment rented by John and his wife. The arrangement was supposed to be temporary but Marguerite didn't want to leave, leading to confrontations. Marguerite's domineering ways were also finally getting to Lee: one day he punched her in the face. Things were out of control and John ordered them out of the house. Lee was never friendly to John after that.
Lee continued his unsettled existence, shifting from one school to another and often absent from classes. He was finally examined by a psychiatrist, who found the boy angry, withdrawn, antisocial. Most revealingly, Lee Harvey told the psychiatrist: "I don't want a friend and I don't talk to people." When asked if he preferred the company of boys or girls, he replied: "I dislike everybody."
Things got so bad between Lee and the New York City school system that proceedings were started to put him in a home for disturbed boys, where he would receive psychiatric care. Some case workers involved had recognized that Marguerite seemed to be a big part of Lee's problems, the mother being both overly indulgent and overly controlling, and prying him loose from her seemed like a good idea -- to the authorities at least. Of course Marguerite didn't like it, and at the beginning of 1954, she took Lee back to New Orleans. The authorities in New York City had no jurisdiction out of state and Lee basically dropped off their radar screen.
Those who knew Lee after he went back to New Orleans found him standoffish, insolent, and inclined to get into fights. For whatever reason, he started reading about Communism and was taken with the idea. Otherwise he didn't seem to have much in the way of interests, being indifferent to his studies and with no extracurricular activities; he did join the Civil Air Patrol but dropped out quickly. In 1955, he dropped out of school entirely and worked at odd jobs.
* Despite Lee Harvey Oswald's interest in Communism, he still wanted to emulate his brother Robert and tried to join the Marines when he was 16, with Marguerite lying about his age to help him get in. They didn't buy it, but when he turned 17 the next year, in October 1956, he promptly signed up.
Oswald went through boot camp training at Camp Pendleton near San Diego, California, scoring under-average in general aptitude tests, but scoring in the mid-range in rifle marksmanship. On leaving boot camp he went to Jacksonville, Florida, to be trained as a radar operator. He ended up working at a Marine air traffic control station near Atsugi Air Base in Japan.
Atsugi at the time was operating the super-secret Lockheed U-2 spy plane and some conspiracy theorists have suggested there was a "spooky" angle to Oswald's activities there. Maybe Soviet agents decided Oswald was in a position to help the Communist cause and signed him up as a spy. However, the Marine radar station had no real clearance into U-2 operations; to the group, the U-2s were simply featureless blips on radar that came and went, difficult to tell from any other aircraft flying into or out of the base. He didn't even know much about the radar systems he used, being trained simply to operate them, with little or no knowledge of their design principles.
Oswald found the Corps a disappointment. He was solitary, surly, and the other Marines picked on him. He gradually became a disciplinary problem, a "screwup" as they say in the military, and he was court-martialed twice in 1958. The first time was when he accidentally shot himself with a 0.22-caliber derringer he liked to play with; he wasn't supposed to have personal weapons around the barracks and he was busted in rank. The second time he got into a fight with an NCO, and ended up in the brig for almost two months. Some conspiracy theorists have suggested there was something "spooky" about his time in lockup as well, that Oswald was actually being drilled by the CIA or some other black organization while he was supposed to be imprisoned -- but the idea is pure speculation, with no support in the evidence or from witnesses.
Oswald rotated back to the US in late 1958. By that time, he was completely disenchanted with the Marines and was spouting off wild Communist rhetoric to almost anyone who would listen. He managed to swing a "dependency discharge" to care for his "disabled" mother -- Marguerite had indeed hurt herself, but not severely; she had talked a doctor into declaring her disabled so she could get payments. Lee Harvey Oswald was discharged from the US Marine Corps on 11 September 1959. He applied for and was accepted by a college in Switzerland, but that was just a dodge to allow him to get a passport. His real destination was the USSR. He left the USA on a freighter on 20 September and effectively dropped out of sight as far as American authorities were concerned. [TO BE CONTINUED]
* SCIENCE NOTES: As reported by an article from BBC WORLD Online, the peculiar head of the hammerhead shark has long puzzled zoologists. What's it for? Is it a swimming aid? Or does it have something to do with smell, or electrical sensitivity? Now research suggests that it provides excellent binocular and all-round vision.
Two American scientists wired up various hammerhead species to monitor brain activity, placed them in a tank, and then displayed lights in various positions to see how the sharks reacted. The beasts demonstrated an ability to see all around themselves, and to gauge distance of targets -- with the width of their field of view of depth perception increasing with the eye separation of the hammerhead species. A normal hammerhead like the lemon shark has an overlapping field of view only ten degrees wide; in contrast the winghead shark, with a much wider head, has an overlapping field of view of 48 degrees. The eyes of these sharks are positioned slightly forward on the "hammer" to give better forward vision, but they can also see nearly straight up and straight down, as well as peer back with a slight tilt of the head.
* WIRED Online had an interesting report on the various configurations of talons of different kinds of birds of prey -- raptors -- showing how they had specializations for different lifestyles:
* SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN reports that researchers have deciphered the genome of yet another important crop plant: corn. The effort was originally pushed in the 1990s by the US National Corn Growers Association and was partly performed with money from the US National Science Foundation. Corn growers see the genome effort as pushing the development of new varieties that provide more value while using fewer resources to grow.
Corn has a big genome, running to about 2 billion DNA base pairs (BP), compared to 2.9 billion BP for the human genome. Corn actually has about 32,000 genes, 12,000 more than humans, crammed onto ten chromosomes as compared to the 23 chromosomes of humans. The relative complexity of the corn genome made it a difficult subject of study, and so it took some time to decode it. The researchers point out that it's not so surprising that plants can have larger genomes than animals, since plants have much less control over their environment. One of the scientists pointed out that plants can't move away if things get difficult on the patch of dirt where they're rooted: "A plant essentially has to stand there and take it."
Corn was domesticated about 10,000 years ago from a Mexican grass named teosinte. Although modern corn is a monstrous mutant compared to its teosinte precursor, the genomic analysis suggests that process of domestication only involved about 100 to 200 genes. Interestingly, the genetic variation between corn strains is high, with the researchers comparing the genetic difference between any two corn varieties as at least as great as that between a human and a chimp. However, plants hybridize much more easily than animals, and crossing corn strains usually results in fertile offspring.
* SPACE EYES FOR WARFIGHTERS: As reported by an article in AVIATION WEEK ("Eyes For Centcom" by Amy Butler, 30 November 2009), the Goodrich and ATK companies are now collaborating on a new military reconnaissance satellite intended strictly for the warfighters in the field. The "Operationally Responsive Space 1 (ORS-1)" satellite is a fast-track project, to be launched 24 months after authorization to proceed -- which was given late in 2008. Although traditionally US surveillance satellites have been under the control of the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), ORS-1 will be effectively owned by the US military Central Command (CENTCOM), which controls operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other areas of the Middle East.
ORS-1's payload will consist of an electro-optic / infrared (EO/IR) camera, based on the series of "SENIOR YEAR Electro-optic Reconnaissance System (SYERS)" multispectral EO/IR cameras developed for the Lockheed Martin U-2 manned spyplane. The re-use of SYERS payloads on ORS-1 will allow systems that currently handle U-2 intelligence to handle ORS-1 intelligence. ORS-1 is being built around the spacecraft bus ATK developed for the TACSAT 3 experimental quick-response military surveillance satellite, launched in May 2009 and mentioned here last June. Like TACSAT 3, ORS-1 will look like a fat tube mounted on top of a hexagonal box, with three solar arrays extending from the base of the box. ORS-1 will improve on TACSAT 3 by adding a propulsion system for orbital maneuvering.
ORS-1 is expected to have a launch mass of 450 kilograms (1,000 pounds), and will be launched by a Minotaur-1 small booster into an orbit that will allow it to overfly CENTCOM's operational theaters several times a day. While spacecraft often require an extended period of on-orbit checkout before they can be put into service, the goal for ORS-1 is to have it at work a week after launch. Control will be provided by the Air Force Satellite Control System network, which will upload new mission taskings for the spacecraft several times a day.
While ORS-1 will not provide the same resolution as the large imaging satellites flown by NRO, the smallsat's imagery will still have adequate resolution to perform targeting -- the SYERS system provides geolocation data along with its imagery -- or provide cues for other surveillance platforms when more resolution is needed. Mission design lifetime is a year, but the spacecraft will carry enough fuel for up to four years of operation.
* In related news, Northrop Grumman has publicized a concept for a "Hybrid Launch Vehicle (HLV)" intended for quick-response space missions, devised by the company under a study funded by the US Air Force. The HLV would consist of an unmanned reusable winged vehicle carrying a small expendable booster on its back. The HLV would be launched vertically, with the winged vehicle using rocket power to accelerate to Mach 7 and reach an altitude of 45,750 meters (150,000 feet), where the expendable booster would be released -- to either put a payload into orbit or send a conventional weapon downrange to a distant target. The winged vehicle would then fly back using some type of airbreathing propulsion, to land on a runway like an aircraft.
It will take no more than 48 hours to turn the HLV around for a new flight. Different configurations are envisioned for flying either medium or heavy payloads. The Air Force is after other concepts from other companies, the intent being to select one concept down the road for development as a subscale flight demonstrator. Northrop Grumman believes the HLV could cut launch costs by two-thirds compared to the use of a current expendable launch vehicle.
The immediate reaction is: We've heard that one before. Low-cost, fast-turnaround access to space is a dream that's been around almost since the beginnings of spaceflight, and it's a mirage that keeps fading off over the horizon. However, now space tech seems to be moving along more predictably, and the concept seems more credible than it would have twenty years ago. Arthur C. Clarke was said to have commented that space exploration was really a 21st-century activity, brought on prematurely by political competition in the 1960s -- and realities seem to be bearing out that insight.
* DEFYING HIV: The HIV retrovirus that causes AIDS is notorious for its ability to gradually grind down the immune system of a host. Nobody's figured out how to make an effective vaccine to stop HIV and there's no cure for it, though antiretroviral drugs can slow down the virus enough to give a patient a reasonably normal lifespan. As reported by an article in AAAS SCIENCE ("HIV Natural Resistance Field Finally Overcomes Resistance" by Jon Cohen, 11 December 2009), one of the deepest and possibly most significant puzzles in this unpleasant scenario is that there are individuals who seem to shrug off HIV. Understanding how they do so may help researchers find new tactics to fight AIDS.
* In 1989 Stuart Shapiro, an American virologist, took his pregnant wife Awuor, born and raised in Kenya, to the doctor for a health check. The result was a hideous revelation to the couple: Awuor was HIV-positive. The doctor recommended that the pregnancy be terminated, since the baby was almost certain to be HIV-positive as well, doomed from birth. The couple decided against it and Awuor gave birth to a daughter, Akinyi.
Stuart went to work for the US Food & Drug Administration to make sure he knew about the latest advances in anti-HIV drugs, but they didn't come fast enough to save Awuor, who died in 1996. However, Stuart saw a silver lining in the tragedy. He had been with Awuor for seven years before she had been found HIV-positive, but in the years after she was diagnosed, all tests showed him to be HIV-negative. Akinyi always tested HIV-negative as well. There was something in the makeup of father and daughter that allowed them to block HIV infection.
HIV resistance is clearly rare, and for a long time some researchers refused to believe it actually existed. AIDS has a long latency time, meaning people don't get sick quickly, and for all anyone knew maybe such people were just lucky, statistical freaks. However, the evidence piled up and the disbelief gradually faded out. In November 2009, the first scientific conference on HIV resistance took place in the city of Winnipeg, in the Canadian province of Ontario. Shapiro was one of a hundred scientists in attendance, representing not only the community of HIV resistant, but also the US National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Shapiro is a program manager at NIAID, overseeing a high-profile grant program to a university consortium named the "Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI)". He encouraged the attendees at the meeting to exploit what the HIV resistant had to tell them: "I don't want them to leave any stone unturned."
* Unfortunately, while researchers have been turning over the stones, they haven't made much progress. Dozens of studies have examined people who by all the odds should be HIV-positive, but aren't: "discordant couples" like the Shapiros, babies of HIV-positive mothers like Akinyi, hemophiliacs who received transfusions of tainted blood, intravenous drug users, prostitutes and their clients, and promiscuous gay males. The problem is that the various studies have been performed with little concern for collaboration, with different researchers using different tests and different measurement criteria.
One of the purposes of the Winnipeg conference was to try to impose some order on the chaos. The meeting was organized by Frank Plummer, boss of the Canadian National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg. Plummer had been tracking the health of a hundred Nairobi sex workers for two decades and -- following a hint from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), a major donor to AIDS research -- decided that it was time to get people together on the HIV resistance phenomenon.
The meeting tended to highlight the confusion in the field. Talks were delivered on studies of HIV resistance groups including Nairobi prostitutes, Italian discordant couples, Vietnamese intravenous drug users, and Swedish gays, with different research projects coming to widely differing and in some cases directly contradictory conclusions. After sitting through the sessions, immunologist Michael Lederman of the Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio, said that he was "quite pessimistic that we're going to sort this out."
Lederman thinks that one of the problems is that it is difficult to characterize the actual exposure to HIV of most of these groups. He has focused on a group that is relatively easy to characterize: hemophiliacs in the USA and Europe who received contaminated lots of blood-clotting factors in the early 1980s. About 5% of these people did not become infected. Investigation showed that the blood of these HIV-resistant hemophiliacs differs from normal blood in that their killer T cells do not replicate rapidly in response to an HIV attack -- but Lederman does not know if that observation is honestly significant, or just some incidental effect. CHAVI is working on a larger study that involves HIV-resistant hemophiliacs, though the collaboration is also targeting other groups.
If the Winnipeg meeting didn't provide much illumination, it did encourage the researchers to form a consortium to share data and standardize their procedures. For all the difficulties they face, Shapiro says that one problem they won't have is finding volunteers from the community of the HIV-resistant: "We all wonder why we didn't get infected. It's almost like being a Holocaust survivor. And if studying us can help bring an end to the epidemic, it can help us make some sense of our lives and the suffering we've seen and felt."
* ANOTHER MONTH: I finally broke down and bought a Blu-Ray video disk player this last month. I wasn't sure that Blu-Ray in itself was any big deal, but manufacturers are starting to push the format, with pricing for disk sets starting to show a skew favoring Blu-Ray against traditional DVD. Given that Blu-Ray players have finally dropped in price to comfortable levels, I decided that it was time to read the writing on the wall and get with the new program.
I figured that as long as I bought the Blu-Ray player, I might as well buy a large-screen TV along with it. It was only a 26 inch (66 centimeter) unit, but it was of course more affordable than the bigger TVs, and besides given my fairly compact quarters, putting anything larger in my living room would have been like setting up a 2001 SPACE ODYSSEY monolith there.
Of course, having got all of this new gear, I had to rent a Blu-Ray video to see if it made much difference. The answer was NOPE: Blu-Ray might have made a difference with a much larger TV, but for the 26-inch display the effect wasn't so much better than that of a conventional DVD that I would have really noticed.
* Two Decembers ago I got to looking over the illustrations for my website and decided that the text I used to label the illustrations wasn't satisfactory. "OK, I guess I relabel them, then." That didn't seem like a really big job, might take me a few months of part-time effort at most -- but I had been working over the previous few years to bring the illustrations up to a better standard, and I figured I might as well do that, too, though I knew it would be more effort.
It took fourteen months to finish. Actually, of the 200-plus documents I had to update, only about 20 required any detail attention, and about half of them were fairly easy to fix. It was the last ten that were the problem, demanding that I clean up old drawings that were not up to spec and produce new drawings. To complicate matters, I also had a pile of old drawings that never ended up being used in documents that also needed to be brought up to spec; half-completed drawings in the queue; and a buffer of images I wanted to turn into drawings. I threw some of the pile away, but not that much, knowing it wouldn't make any sense to throw out an item I would likely come back to later.
All done now. There's something dreary about backlog, work that would be fun when fresh is tiresome when it's been queued up. Now I'm being much more careful about feeding drawings into the pipeline faster than I can complete them. The appalling thing was that when I emptied the queue, I realized that it was the first time I'd cleaned it out since I started at least ten years ago.
* I get email from strangers a few times a week. Given that internet communications tend toward the surly, it might be thought that much of my email is unpleasant, but in reality hostile messages are surprisingly rare, and in fact I get some very pleasant ones. However, I also get a fair number of nitpicks -- plus people after an answer to some obscure question, spamming the internet with email to anyone they think has the slightest possibility of giving them an answer. The odds of such a brute-force scheme actually working are very slight, but such folks tend to be pigheaded, believing that obstinacy will compensate for a failure to think things out. They of course never read the comments on my email page that tell them it is extremely unlikely I can answer such questions.
Getting nasty with such folk is futile, along the likes of getting annoyed with a concrete block. It turns out to be more useful, at least for me, to see them as a source of entertainment. One asked me about the disposition of a particular group of World War II aircraft, and I replied: "They were actually flown by Flash Gordon and the Lost Planet Airmen. It seems they were a serious thorn in the side of Ming the Merciless."
Another sent me a picture of a fin-covered cylinder from some aircooled piston engine and asked me to identify it. Taking a cue from the GIRL GENIUS steampunk webcomic series, I replied that it was a hive for alien robot mind control wasps. "Might be worth some money one of these days."
For some reason, I never hear back from these guys.
