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December 19, 2011 — xanthippaCancer treatment breakthrough – from a 17-year-old!
December 8, 2011 — xanthippaThis is one of those feel-good stories that just makes you wonder…
‘Her creation is being heralded as a “Swiss army knife of cancer treatment.” Zhang managed to develop a nanoparticle that can be delivered to the site of a tumor through the drug salinomycin. Once there it kills the cancer stem cells. However, Zhang went further and included both gold and iron-oxide components, which allow for non-invasive imaging of the site through MRI and Photoacoustics.’
For her success, Angela Zhang was awarded the grand prize at the Siemens competition which highligts research excellence at high school level.
Wow!
Learning the wrong lesson from a tragedy
December 6, 2011 — xanthippaToday marks a dark anniversary: the massacre at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.
A truly dark day in history.
Many people marked it by attending memorials, including on Parliament Hill.
No, I will not go into a rant about the fact that we were not told back then, nor are any current mainstream news coverages of the anniversary even mentioning that Mark Lepin’s murderous rampage was inspired by his Islamic beliefs – if I do, I’ll get stuck on this and never get to my main point:
All those protesters on Parliament Hill, all those propagandists who are continuously politicizing this massacre (without accurately and honestly describing it) for their own advantage – all the media whipping up the anti-gun hysterics – are drawing the wrong conclusion from this horrible tragedy!
This must be challenged!
Some of these protesters are saying that if another woman gets shot ever again, their blood will be on the hands of those who scrapped the long gun registry.
WRONG!
Guns are the great equalizers!!!
Even a small, frail woman can protect herself from a large attacker with a gun and a bit of training.
Would 14 women really have been massacred at Ecole Polytechnique if each and every one of them had been armed at the time of Lepin’s attack?
And, please, consider the following: during the attack, Lepin’s gun jammed and he had to clear it. Yet, while his gun was not functional, nobody tackled him – though they could have. If they had, many lives would have been saved.
So, why didn’t anyone tackle him?
Because we have been inculcated with an irrational fear of guns.
I am not saying that fearing guns is irrational in and of itself – rather, that the level of fear with which we, urbanites, treat guns is irrational.
There is a remedy: each and every adult should be taught basic gun use and safety. It should be part of every person’s education, just like learning to drive is. (Remember, in Canada, cars ‘kill’ way more people than guns do!)
And while I am not advocating that each and every person should be legally mandated to always carry a loaded weapon in public, ready to use at all times, I think it is reasonable that we demand that each and every educator do so. After all, we entrust them with the care of our children – they ought to have the means and ability to protect them.
Even with the best police response times, a gunman who enters a school will have ample time to massacre students. What is the current mandated response? Lock students in their classrooms, turning them into sitting ducks and ensuring that it is easier for the villain to find her/his intended target.
Consider how much safer our children – all students – would be if every teacher would be able and ready to offer armed resistance!!!
So, let’s demand of ourpoliticians that they pass a law making it mandatory for each and every teacher to be trained in the use of firearms and to be fully armed at all times while at work! It’s the only logical lesson to be learned from this horrible, horrible tragedy.
Asperger Syndrome and ‘religious belief’
December 5, 2011 — xanthippaHere, I would very much like to ask Aspies who consider themselves to be ‘theists’ (who believe in one or more deities) to describe the mechanics of their ‘belief’ as best as possible. (Of course, I would like all Aspies to describe their mechanics of ‘belief’ – but theist ones in particular, because I suspect that Aspie theists are quite rare.)
Why?
I have as yet to meet one…
I do know many Aspies, most of whom have been raised in theist homes when they were children. Yet, when I have discussed this whole topic of religion and belief, it has become clear to me that not one of them ‘believes’ in deities in the sense that neurotypicals who ‘believe’ do. The closest to ‘belief’ these people have come is to choose to live as if this whole ‘God proposition’ were true in much the same way that people can accept that something ‘is true’ in the ‘universe of Star Trek’ and can then extrapolate ‘new ideas’ within that pre-defined frame. Within these parameters, this is true…
But, of course, this does not really relate to reality…
I am not sure if I am explaining this in a way that non-Aspies will understand.
What I am trying to describe is akin to saying: not that I agree with this, but let’s accept this to be true for the sake of this discussion… I suspect that the Aspies who live as theists follow some version of this reasoning, which I understand is different from the ‘belief’ that most neurotypicals experienc.
Yes, I do understand that I am skirting the whole debate ‘what constitutes belief’ – but I hope that rather than focusing on the greater debate here, people will comment (so we can explore this discussion) on the difference between ‘religious belief’ as experienced by Aspies and non-Aspies.
Why do I think this is a topic worthy of discussion?
For the sake of the children, of course… Let me explain.
I know that I am incapable of ‘belief’ in the traditional sense – at best, I view validity of ideas based on probabilities. Even the ideas I hold as my ‘core views’, the ones I consider define me as me, even those ideas I cannot rate at 100% probability.
I have been this way from as far back as I can remember. I could never understand why other children would behave as if things were ‘definite’ or ‘certain’, how they could be so sure of, well, anything… They, on the other hand, thought that my constant qualifications of my position on anything meant I was setting things up so I could lie, or some other display of dishonesty…which, of course, was the exact opposite of what I was trying to do. I have since learned, in most social interactions, to censor out the vast majority of the uncertainties and qualifications – yet my speech still contains much more of these than displayed in majority of neurotypicals’ conversations.
Back to ‘the children’: I know many families where two non-Aspies have Aspie children, but I do not know of a single family where two Aspie parents would have any non-Aspie children, which is why the focus of this discussion is on Aspie children in non-Aspie households.
If I am correct in my observation that Aspies are physically incapable of ‘neurotypical belief’, what happens when theist parents are raising Aspie children?
What happens when Aspie children are sent to be educated in religious schools?
The demands made on Aspie children to ‘believe’ (in the neurotypical manner) in deities may be something these children are simply not physically capable of!
Of course, in theism, failure to ‘believe’ in just the right manner is interpreted as ‘sin’ and ‘heresy’ – a very bad thing. Children who fail to ‘believe’ are considered defiant and disobedient, to be punished and broken until they ‘believe’.
I have observed a number of Aspie children in these situations. In some Aspie children I have observed, this demand to ‘believe’ in a way they were physically incapable of had led to serious internal turmoil and led them to believe they were inherently bad people. In others, it led to further withdrawal from social interactions, and in two cases I am aware of it led to serious childhood depression. (Granted – other factors were there, but this was a big complication…)
So, we are talking about very serious effects here.
Last summer, an Aspie friend of my son joined us for our holidays: it was his first time away from his family and his parents were thrilled that he got an opportunity to spend a week ‘with his own kind’ – in an all-Aspie household. I think he had enjoyed himself, but there was one incident I was not certain of how to handle.
We holidayed up north, where the nature is pristine and light pollution is very low at night. As we were going through a meteor shower, we spent one clear evening lying on our backs on the beach and watching the deep, velvety night sky bejeweled by millions of stars. We saw some spectacular ‘shooting stars’ when our young (13) Aspie friend got quite upset: he explained that watching the vastness of the universe in the night-time sky made him finally realize that there probably is no afterlife…
This inability to ‘believe’ – in spite of a desire to – is unpleasant in itself. Adding to it parental and societal disapproval for ‘not believing’ – that can cause definite damage to a young person’s ability to grow up healthy and to their maximum potential.
Obviously, even though I probably know more Aspies than an average person does, my sample size is insufficient for anything more than ‘a hunch’…which is why I would welcome comments that might help us explore this issue together.
TED talks: Hans Rosling show the best stats you’ve ever seen
November 30, 2011 — xanthippaThe ‘Filter Bubble’
November 10, 2011 — xanthippaThere is a most brilliant (and relatively short) TED Talk – a must see for anyone who uses a search engine.
Slowly but surely, most search engines and social networks are tracking each of our histories and editing out things they think we would not like. This means that searching for identical keywords can produce vastly different search result for different people – which is fine, IF we could ‘opt out’ (at least some of the time)…but most of us don’t even know this is happening!
This, in my never-humble-opinion, is a problem. And it is the topic of the above mentioned TED Talk by Eli Pariser – he refers to it as ‘the filter bubble’.
He raises a lot of good questions.
One possible answer to at least one of these questions is a search engine that markets itself with proud claims that it will not bubble or track you! If you have not heard of them, take a peek at DuckDuckGo.
While on the topic of technology, Michael Geist has been doing some important work reporting on the Digital lock dissent. He has also posted a most excellent ‘link-library’ to help people support their arguments when they try to dispell the myths the digital lockers are promulgating.
H/T: Tyr
‘The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert’
November 9, 2011 — xanthippaYes – I have just finished reading this book (Kindle version) and would like to say a few words about it.
First, in the name of transparency, I disclose that I am named in the acknowledgments as one of the over 40 citizen auditors whom the book’s author, Donna Laframboise, had recruited to audit the references in various IPCC AR4 chapters in order to verify whether the sources were peer-reviewed scientific journals or other materials. (More on this later.)
Let me start with the conclusion: well worth a read!
It is worth reading regardless of your opinions about global warming and the role humanity does or does not play in it because, contrary to some book reviews, the book does not actually address the science itself. Let me say it again: this book is NOT an examination of the science, nor does it draw any scientific conclusions. Not one!
Rather, this book takes the claims the IPCC (and its members) make about the organization and how it functions and tests them for consistency and validity. As the sub-title of the book says, it is ‘An Expose of the IPCC’. It is a journalistic expose of the process (and its corruption) behind the IPCC repots: exactly the sort of thing that investigative journalist are trained to do.
This is a serious matter: regardless of where your opinions may fall on the science itself, the process through which the IPCC reports – the reports with perhaps the furthest and deepest financial and political implications of our generation – are generated must be transparent and worthy of our trust. It is perhaps even more the interest of the ACC believers that this process is ‘beyond reproach’ – that their Kool-Aid is not tainted, if you will.
What Donna Laframboise has revealed in ‘The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert: An Expose of the IPCC’ is an eye-opener to people who have trusted the IPCC simply because they were told to trust world’s leading scientists.
No, the book is not perfect. There is a number of things that I would have either eliminated or re-phrased or even things I think are important that were not included in the book. For example, she does go on about the Y2K bug in an attempt to parallel the hysteria and I get her aim – yet I think this and similar bits detract, not add to the book. At times, her wording is more colloquial than what appeals to my taste, but that is a minor pick – and what she says, regardless of the style she says it in, is valid.
As for omissions – perhaps the most important one is that while I was checking the references for several of the chapters in AR4 for the Citizen Audit, I noted that a number of the references were not to peer-reviewed journals, but to actual official government policy papers.
To me, this is a big deal.
Yes, she correctly pans the IPCC for using a WWF and Greenpeace pamphlets and ads and press releases as source material – these are clearl not peer-reviewed science, despite the often repeated mantra that the IPCC uses exclusively sources from peer-reviewed scientific publications. Citing these as peer-reviewed science is very problematic and Donna does a great job exposing this.
But that a number of actual government policy papers (from several different national governments as well as from the EU) are the source material on which the IPCC draws its conclusions is, in my never-humble-opinion, just as big (if not even bigger) deal. Precisely because, as she documents in her book, it is governments who nominate people for IPCC participation, inclusion of policy papers by those very same governments demonstrates very clearly the conflicts of interest of many of the people behind the IPCC.
OK – that was my pet peeve. I have to admit, in light of what the book does reveal and how meticulously it documents all of its assertions, it is just a minor niggle.
Perhaps the most praise-worthy aspect of ‘The Delinquent Teenager’ is how meticulously it is researched and documented. I have not seen a hard copy, but the Kindle version (and, I understand, the pdf version) are filled with links to relevant material and almost a quarter of the book is ‘footnotes’. Really. Everything written in this book has been researched and documented beyond anything I have seen – ever. For a fact junkie such as I am, this really makes the case – and proves it.
Different people liked different aspects: here are a few other reviews of the book (this one has copious quotes).
What did I learn from the book that I did not know before?
Two things jump to mind right away:
1. There were no conflict of interest guidelines or rules for the IPCC as late as 2010 – they were deemed unnecessary. This is problematic on its own. However, following a scathing review by IAC, such conflict of interest rules have been done up. Alas, they will not apply to any of the people currently working on the next IPCC report, because, as Rajendra Pachauri who heads the IPCC says, that would not be fair…
It would not ‘be fair’ to expect the IPCC ‘experts’ to adhere to conflict of interest rules?!?!?
2. Donna Laframboise strings together a sequence of events that we should be aware of and supports it with quotes from Rajendra Pachauri and others: the role of the IPCC never was to present an impartial report.
Here is the sequence:
- UN creates INFCCC
- UNFCCC creates a treaty to curb carbon emissions.
- UN creates IPCC to support the UNFCCC and get buy-in from various governments and people around the world.
Let me emphasize this: the IPCC was created specifically to lend ‘scientific’ backing to the claim there is a problem only AFTER the UN had created the solution!
There is more in the book that I learned, but these two things are of such importance, it is difficult to believe any investigative
This is an important book – if you have not done so, please, read it!
Donna Laframboise: a book is born
October 19, 2011 — xanthippaDonna Laframboise is the corageous Canadian journalist who has taken on the ACC/Global Warmmongers.
She is the one who conducted the IPCC audit (in which your never-humble correspondant participated) which clearly demonstrated that the IPCC did not use ‘peer-reviewed scientific publications’ as the sources of information on which it drew to created its reports.
(Check out the free preview – it is 7 chapters long!)
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 