But, disease is neccessary to maintaining population levels! What will we do once the African population skyrockets, with the limited natural resources avaliable! Malaria keeps the population in check!
Well... it's technically true...maybe. Could just be a skewed statistic, I don't know. BUT, if it is true, the truly responsible thing to do would be to increase the use of birth control and family planning to even things out. But of course, that's imperialist thinking... so this is just bad all around.
To the delight of cynics who relish the association of Microsoft and bugs, Gates, at the Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference in February, released several mosquitoes into the audience as part of a speech against malaria, quipping, "There is no reason only poor people should have the experience."
Usually the population takes care not to over populate naturally. As less people die, children become harder to raise and cost more resources. Since people don't have those resources, they stop having children. It's going on right now in countries that have declining birth rates, they're naturally having less children to save money.
Most of Africa is, though, on a Type III survivorship curve, which means that the same reproduction rates will occur, but the majority of the children born will live, causing a population explosion much like the baby boomers explosion that happened when medical advances were appearing rapidly and medicine was reliable and effective. African nations have a high birth/high death rate population cycle, which means that if you pull out the high death rate caused by malaria, it becomes high birth rate/low death rate, which will result in said population boom.
Most of Africa is, though, on a Type III survivorship curve, which means that the same reproduction rates will occur
That's not entirely true Voltage. Most of Africa, especially the lesser developed nations, have a much higher fertility rate than that of the development world. Malaria kills some people, yes, but that's just one of many factors keeping the mortality rate, and as a consequence, the birth rate, high.
When a country is less developed, its people have many children. The mortality rate among children tends to be higher, and so this becomes simply a law of averages. If the survival rate of children past the age of 5 is only 20%, due to disease and bad nutrition, then you better have five kids. One of them should make it long enough to become strong to take care of you. This is an oversimplification, and people don't think specifically in these terms, but this is how it works. That's why poor countries have so many kids, to increase the chances that some will live.
As development slowly increases, the fertility rate will continue to raise until it hits a certain point, at which point it will start to decline. When the economy is more developed, the people will have better access to education, medical care, and money. The middle class will start to develop. At this point children have a fairly good chance of surviving, and if you have five kids then they will probably all live to be adults. So then the mindset begins to change, and people are more concerned with not more kids, but fewer, better kids.
This is what is happening in Japan right now and in parts of Europe. Education is expensive and competitive, and if you have two kids, then you may only be able to afford to send them to normal schools. But if you have one kid, you can focus all your attention and money on making one child very good, increasing the chances they get into a better college and get a better job later in life.
Malaria, AIDS, whatever, are all just symptoms of poor economic development. If the people have better access to education, food, and medicine, then fewer people will contract and die of these diseases.
Yes, but the immediate effects will be a population skyrocketing. A middle class never develops immediatly. If mortality rates suddenly go down, then fertility rates lag behind them for a short time, as illustrated in this poorly drawn by me jpeg.
1: High Birth-High Death Rate
2: The Death Rate is decreasing due to medical advances, the birth rate has not yet adjusted
3: A low birth, low death rate has been reached. This is the common rae in most first world countries, and is commonly where a middle class develops.
TSUKUBA, Japan — A new walking, talking robot from Japan has a female face that can smile and has trimmed down to 43 kilograms (95 pounds) to make a debut at a fashion show. But it still hasn't cleared safety standards required to share the catwalk with human models.
Developers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, a government-backed organization, said their "cybernetic human," shown Monday, wasn't ready to help with daily chores or work side by side with people _ as many hope robots will be able to do in the future.
"Technologically, it hasn't reached that level," said Hirohisa Hirukawa, one of the robot's developers. "Even as a fashion model, people in the industry told us she was short and had a rather ordinary figure."
For now, the 158 centimeter (62.2 inch) tall black-haired robot code-named HRP-4C _ whose predecessor had weighed 58 kilograms (128 pounds) _ will mainly serve to draw and entertain crowds.
Developers said the robot may be used in amusement parks or to perform simulations of human movement, as an exercise instructor, for instance.
HRP-4C was designed to look like an average Japanese woman, although its silver-and-black body recalls a space suit. It will appear in a Tokyo fashion show _ without any clothes _ in a special section just for the robot next week.
The robotic framework for the HRP-4C, without the face and other coverings, will go on sale for about 20 million yen ($200,000) each, and its programming technology will be made public so other people can come up with fun moves for the robot, the scientists said.
Japan boasts one of the leading robotics industries in the world, and the government is pushing to develop the industry as a road to growth. Automaker Honda Motor Co. has developed Asimo, which can walk and talk, although it doesn't pretend to look human.
Oh yeah. I thought I had read about this here already. It must have been from elsewhere then.
<insert obligatory short Japanese joke>
EDIT: I heard about the mosquito laser thing from a different source much earlier as well. Maybe I should try to think to post here more often when I come across these things. It'd never do to be working on old information when a robot invasion comes.
(Technicians check a positioner inside the target chamber at the National Ignition Facility in California. A tiny capsule containing fusion fuel would be placed at the very end of the pencil-shaped positioner, then blasted by 192 laser beams)
All of a sudden, nuclear fusion is becoming an energy buzzword instead of an energy joke: One route to fusion is being hailed as having the potential to become a "holy cow game-changer," another mainstream method is getting a multimillion-dollar boost, and a dark-horse candidate is stealthily moving forward as well. Heck, even cold fusion is back in the game.
So what's behind the seemingly sudden interest?
Part of the buzz is dictated by the calendar. After 12 years of construction, the world's most powerful laser is finally finished at the National Ignition Facility in California, and VIPs are getting a look at some of the best that Big Science has to offer in fusion energy research.
But part of it is dictated by the hard times we're living in, said Richard Nebel, who heads a team looking at an unconventional kind of fusion technology. "These can be the times when innovation can really take hold," he told me today.
The way Nebel sees it, tough times can spur people to look for unconventional solutions to society's challenges - for example, how to develop cleaner, cheaper, more abundant sources of energy. Biofuels (including algae), wind, wave, geothermal and solar power are all part of the mix, along with better batteries and greater fuel efficiency.
There's a place for safer nuclear power as well, involving fission as well as future fusion - or maybe even fission-fusion hybrids. Here's a quick rundown of the latest developments:
Laser fusion
The $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility has been 12 years in the making, but today the Energy Department announced that the super-laser-blaster is fully operational and ready for business. The department has emphasized the facility's function as an H-bomb simulator, probably because that's its most down-to-earth application. However, a lot of researchers and onlookers are hoping that the NIF can provide a realistic route to commercial fusion power.
The NIF's array of 192 pulsed lasers are designed to blast pellets of deuterium-tritium fuel so intensely that they ignite in a fusion reaction. Earlier this month, NIF's operators reported that they delivered more than a megajoule of laser energy to the target chamber's focus point - which should be enough to get nuclear fusion started.
The prospect of creating a controlled fusion reaction is what led New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to write that the research planned for NIF might be a "holy cow game-changer" in the energy quest. If the technique actually works, a $10 billion pilot power plant could be built to prove that "any local power utility could have its own miniature sun - on a commercial basis," Friedman said.
And if not? "At the pace we're going with the technologies we have, without some game-changers, climate change is going to have its way with us," he wrote.
Tokamak fusion
The other Big Science path to fusion leads through France, where the $13 billion ITER fusion research plant is under construction. ITER, due for startup in 2016, is an international effort that is based on magnetic-confinement technology. The fusion reaction would be contained within a highly shielded, doughnut-shaped chamber known as a tokamak.
A year ago, U.S. participation in ITER was essentially put on hold due to the budgetary battles between Congress and the Bush administration. There was a risk that U.S. firms would be locked out from participation in the project - but that scenario was averted when the Energy Department restored ITER's funding just in the nick of time.
The omnibus spending bill for the remainder of this fiscal year, which was signed into law three weeks ago, includes $124 million for the U.S. involvement in ITER. Thom Mason, the director of Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, told the Knoxville News Sentinel's Frank Munger that the U.S. ITER effort had been "running on fumes" for the past few months.
"So, this will really help the morale and get people moving," he said.
The big priority now is to arrange for the purchase of U.S.-built hardware that the federal government has promised to contribute to the ITER reactor. That should have a "good economic impact in terms of employment," Mason said.
Fission-fusion hybrids
Some researchers say the fusion process could be paired up with the fission process to reduce the amount of waste left behind by conventional nuclear reactors.
The classic hybrid concept - known as Laser Inertial Fusion-Fission Energy, or LIFE - was developed by NIF researchers: They suggested that a laser-sparked fusion reaction could supply extra neutrons inside a fission reactor. That power boost would burn up radioactive leftovers that otherwise would have to be stored or reprocessed.
More recently, physicists at the University of Texas at Austin proposed a similar hybrid technique that would employ a fusion tokamak rather than a laser-blaster. The technique was touted by Forbes magazine's Jonathan Fahey as a "Texas Smoosh 'Em." (Fahey also looked at the LIFE concept.)
The idea's boosters say going with hybrid reactors would reduce the need for long-term waste repositories such as the one that had been planned for Yucca Mountain in Nevada. It looks as if the Obama administration is pulling the plug on the plans for Yucca Mountain, so
any strategy that cuts down on the nuclear waste problem would be warmly welcomed.
However, it's not yet clear whether the fusion-fission hybrid concept is workable. Over at the Atomic Insights blog, Rod Adams is skeptical about NIF in general and hybrid nuclear power in particular. "Fission works; fusion is a complex hallucination," Adams writes.
Polywell fusion
If fusion is a hallucination, the wildest part of the vision would have to be the project that Nebel and his colleagues are working on at EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. in New Mexico. They're following up on preliminary indications that a relatively low-budget, high-voltage gizmo known as a Polywell fusion device could produce more energy than it consumes - that is, if the gizmo is scaled up to the appropriate size.
Late last year, Nebel's team sent a report about their experiments to their funders at the U.S. Navy. The results were encouraging enough that the Navy is providing the money for follow-up work through the end of this year.
Nebel told me the interim funding was meant to "keep us alive until they figure out what they want to do." Although he was reluctant to go into the details, progress reports posted on the Talk-Polywell discussion forum and the Dean's World blog indicate that the device's design is being tweaked to improve its performance.
"We've been trying to clean up some of the things we know we can do better," Nebel said.
Nebel has long hoped that the technology could be ramped up to create commercially viable fusion reactors - which would cost way less than $10 billion each, by the way. He is still hopeful. "We think that we should be able to go forward with this," he said.
However, Nebel is also reluctant to overpromise. That might not be a bad thing, considering that so many people involved in the fusion quest have been promising so much for so long. The most Nebel will say is that the studies - and the discussions with potential funders - are continuing.
SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas (AP) — Allison, a green sea turtle with only one flipper, has been going around and around and around for most of her life.
But swimming in tight circles is tough for a 5-year-old turtle whose life expectancy is about 150 years.
Allison was set straight Wednesday, when researchers outfitted her in a black neoprene suit with a carbon-fiber dorsal fin on the back that allows her to glide gracefully with other turtles.
“That’s a sea turtle doing what a sea turtle does,” said Dave Cromwell, a worker who watched the turtle’s new moves at Sea Turtle Inc., a Texas not-for-profit group that rehabilitates injured sea turtles.
The fin on the suit, which resembles a wetsuit covering about three-quarters of her body, acts like a rudder and gives her stability. Allison can change direction by varying the strokes of her front right flipper, the lone survivor in what rescuers believe was a shark attack.
Sea Turtle Inc. curator Jeff George said turtles with only one flipper are usually euthanized because they would struggle to reach the surface for air. Two-flipper turtles can be adopted by zoos and three-flipper turtles can be returned to the wild.
Allison, who arrived at the rescue center in 2005, was given a slim chance of survival, but she recovered from her injuries and wormed her way into the hearts of her rescuers, who tried to find a way to help the circling turtle.
“The whole reason we’re doing this is to improve her quality of life,” said Tom Wilson, a 21-year-old intern who thought up the suit.
George said a team of scientists last year spent months trying to develop a prosthetic flipper to counter the thrust of Allison’s remaining paddle, but there was not enough of a stump remaining to attach prosthetics.
Wilson’s idea applied the physics of canoe paddling. The scientists have developed equations that will allow them to tailor new suits and fins because Allison could grow to around 500 to 600 pounds.
Even though Allison will never return to the sea, the groundbreaking work will make her an “ambassador” for an endangered species, George said.
For now, the triumph that the turtle could swim like the others was enough for those at the rescue center: Cromwell said watchers wept the first time Allison dove to feed at the salad bar of waving Romaine lettuce.
Sure, Today she gets a prosthetic shark fin, but what about tomorrow? This turtle is going to end up with hundreds of prosthetic shark teeth, and terrorize the seas.
“Question Answering” is technology's next grand challenge
IBM has unveiled the details of its plans to build a computing system that can understand complex questions and answer with enough precision and speed to compete on America's favorite quiz show, Jeopardy!.
Produced by Sony Pictures Television and distributed by CBS Television Distribution, Jeopardy! is a game demanding knowledge and quick recall, covering a broad range of topics, such as history, literature, politics, film, pop culture, and science. It poses a grand challenge for a computing system due to the variety of subject matter, the speed at which contestants must provide accurate responses, and because the clues given to contestants involve analyzing subtle meaning, irony, riddles, and other complexities at which humans excel and computers traditionally do not.
IBM's computing system — called a Question Answering (QA) system among computer scientists — has been under development for nearly two years. With the April 27 announcement, IBM's researchers plan to put it to the test in a machine versus human contest on the gold-standard quiz show. And, officials from Jeopardy! announced plans to produce a human vs. machine contest on the renowned show.
Code-named "Watson," the IBM computing system is being designed to rival the human mind's ability to determine precise answers to natural language questions and to compute accurate confidences in the answers. According to Dr. David Ferrucci, leader of the project team, "The confidence processing ability is key to winning at Jeopardy! and is critical to implementing useful business applications of Question Answering."
Watson will also incorporate massively parallel analytical capabilities and, just like human competitors, Watson will not be connected to the Internet or have any other outside assistance.
Useful business applications are the ultimate goal of the Watson project. Such applications would be able to handle semantics (the meaning behind words) and answer more complex questions that require the identification of relevant and irrelevant content and the interpretation of expressive language along with the logical inference to deliver precise final answers and clear justifications. For it to be useful to people and business, a QA system must perform these functions as quickly or nearly as quickly as a human being can; humans, after all, have the ability to know what they know in less than a second.
Jeopardy!-playing computers! I know I'm looking forward to the Singularity a little too much, but come on, this is primo Singularity material!
The world's strongest laser - powerful enough to create conditions as hot as inside the Sun - was unveiled Friday in the western U.S. state of California for an audience of politicians and scientists.
The stadium-sized National Ignition Facility actually houses 192 lasers that all point towards a tiny blob of hydrogen.
When the lasers shoot, scientists expect the hydrogen will fuse into helium, a chemical reaction like what makes stars burn and nuclear bombs explode.
The project began in 1997 and cost the federal government an estimated $3.5 billion. The government says it will allow scientists to study in a lab what happens in a nuclear explosion. They say it will help scientists assess the safety of the aging U.S. nuclear arsenal.
But critics say the laser is unnecessary and costly. Some also worry it could help develop new nuclear weapons.
Proponents of the giant laser say there is another possible benefit. They say they hope to create a fusion reaction called "fusion ignition." This reaction could create huge amounts of electricity.
Scientists suggest such reactions could lead to a new green energy source, and eliminate the current dependence on fossil fuels.
California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger hailed the laser as a breakthrough for his state. The unveiling was attended by around 3,500 people.
Scientists say they plan to begin experimenting with fusion ignition by next year.
On June 8, 1959, the US Navy fired a Regulus I missile from the USS Barbero (SSG-317) and directed it to land at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station at Mayport, Florida, near Jacksonville. While the sub was docked at Norfolk, Virginia, Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield helped place two blue and red metal containers, holding 3,000 letters, inside the sub’s missile prior to the flight.
The missile was fired from the submarine shortly before noon and arrived at Mayport twenty-two minutes later. The 3,000 letters inside the missile were identical letters from the Postmaster General that were addressed to President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon, cabinet members and top federal officials, all members of congress, Supreme Court justices, U.S. governors, postmasters generals from around the world and the officers and crew of the Barbero. Summerfield’s letter was an enthusiastic announcement of the experiment, which had not been publicly announced beforehand. Summerfield’s office received several letters from stamp collectors who complained that they had not been given the opportunity to place items aboard the flight. In the four decades since the flight, some of the Regulus I letters have found their way into public hands. Some made their way to dealers that year and were sold at over $100. The letter addressed to the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution remains in the National Postal Museum’s collections.
Ostensibly an experiment in communication transportation, the Regulus’ mail flight sent a subtle signal that in the midst of the Cold War, the US military was capable of such accuracy in missile flight that it could be considered for use by the post office. The missile employed a then state-of-the-art guidance system that could precisely deliver a thermonuclear weapon from a distance of 600 miles. The trip from the USS Barbero to Mayport was only 100 miles in distance, but it helped to illustrate another possible use for the weapons technology. The space used for the containers was space that was originally designed to hold the missile’s nuclear warhead.
Postmaster General Summerfield was ecstatic over the possibilities of postal uses for the technology, claiming that “This peacetime employment of a guided missile for the important and practical purpose of carrying mail, is the first known official use of missiles by any Post Office Department of any nation. Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles.” Summerfield’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, the 1959 USS Barbero test firing was the only incidence of using a missile to carry mail in the US.
Little did they know at the time that the creation of the the internet and e-mail in particular would largely eliminate the need for guided missile delivery. Certainly not as awesome, but perhaps more cost effective.
More than 220 years since a ship wrecked on the rocks surrounding a remote Aleutian island, biologists believe they may have finally cleaned up the resulting mess. Rats have ruled the island since 1780, when they jumped off a sinking Japanese ship and terrorized all but the largest birds on the island [Reuters]. The voracious rodents feed on bird eggs and even chicks and small adult birds, and they so dominated the tiny island that it was given the name Rat Island. Biologists embarked on an ambitious effort to wipe out the rats last year, and now say they may have accomplished their task–but the campaign may have resulted in some avian casualties.
Nine months after scattering poisoned pellets across the island, biologists say they haven’t spotted any remaining rats, but they have found the carcasses of 186 glaucous-winged gulls and 41 bald eagles. U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokesman Bruce Woods said it’s unlikely carnivorous eagles ate the Rodenticide grain pellets, but they may have devoured some dead rats that had consumed them. “Eagles are scavengers of opportunity,” he said. “Rats don’t make up a big part of their diet naturally, but if meat is available, they’re going to take it” [Anchorage Daily News].
In the $2.5 million campaign to eradicate the invasive species, scientists used cakes of grain laced with a rodent-killing blood thinner called brodifacoum. During [a] trial, 88 percent of rodents perished in their burrows where they would not be exposed to scavengers like eagles or gulls, according to an environmental assessment of the project…. On April 15, 2008, the Rat Island Restoration Project got the formal go-ahead, and in September a helicopter hovered over the 10 square mile island dropping the poisoned grain in a grid pattern [Scientific American], in an attempt to give every rat on the island a lethal dose of the poison.
“So far, no living rats have been observed,” said Woods, who noted that seven observers walked the island looking for signs of survivors. “We’re cautiously optimistic, but it’s a big island. It would be presumptuous to assume that we would have noticed rats if only a few were left.” Before federal biologists consider the island rat-free, they will survey it again next year [Anchorage Daily News]. Even a single breeding pair could eventually repopulate the island, researchers note.
The dead gulls and eagles have been sent to a lab to test for traces of the poison in their bodies, but Woods says that the relatively small number of dead birds won’t make an impact on the bird populations; the Fish and Wildlife agency estimates that 2,500 eagles live in the Aleutians, and says that gull numbers are far higher. The good news is that the survey team reports that Aleutian cackling geese, ptarmigan, peregrine falcons and black oystercatchers are all nesting on the island — and rats appear to be absent. “If the rats are truly gone,” Woods says, “then the long-term benefits to the ecoystem will outweigh the loss of these birds” [Scientific American].
Comments
wut.
That's not entirely true Voltage. Most of Africa, especially the lesser developed nations, have a much higher fertility rate than that of the development world. Malaria kills some people, yes, but that's just one of many factors keeping the mortality rate, and as a consequence, the birth rate, high.
When a country is less developed, its people have many children. The mortality rate among children tends to be higher, and so this becomes simply a law of averages. If the survival rate of children past the age of 5 is only 20%, due to disease and bad nutrition, then you better have five kids. One of them should make it long enough to become strong to take care of you. This is an oversimplification, and people don't think specifically in these terms, but this is how it works. That's why poor countries have so many kids, to increase the chances that some will live.
As development slowly increases, the fertility rate will continue to raise until it hits a certain point, at which point it will start to decline. When the economy is more developed, the people will have better access to education, medical care, and money. The middle class will start to develop. At this point children have a fairly good chance of surviving, and if you have five kids then they will probably all live to be adults. So then the mindset begins to change, and people are more concerned with not more kids, but fewer, better kids.
This is what is happening in Japan right now and in parts of Europe. Education is expensive and competitive, and if you have two kids, then you may only be able to afford to send them to normal schools. But if you have one kid, you can focus all your attention and money on making one child very good, increasing the chances they get into a better college and get a better job later in life.
Malaria, AIDS, whatever, are all just symptoms of poor economic development. If the people have better access to education, food, and medicine, then fewer people will contract and die of these diseases.
1: High Birth-High Death Rate
2: The Death Rate is decreasing due to medical advances, the birth rate has not yet adjusted
3: A low birth, low death rate has been reached. This is the common rae in most first world countries, and is commonly where a middle class develops.
Lasers to take out mosquitos. When they should clearly be affixing them to artifical hearts. Lasers that is, not mosquitos.
<insert obligatory short Japanese joke>
EDIT: I heard about the mosquito laser thing from a different source much earlier as well. Maybe I should try to think to post here more often when I come across these things. It'd never do to be working on old information when a robot invasion comes.
Robot penguins! Flying robot penguins!
Jeopardy!-playing computers! I know I'm looking forward to the Singularity a little too much, but come on, this is primo Singularity material!
One step closer to Skynet.
I mean, they could always reintroduce the eagles later anyway.