There’s currently a measles outbreak occurring in Williamsburg and Borough Park in Brooklyn. There have been 34 cases, 8 of which were in adults.
Here’a brief history of measles in America. This is what effective vaccines do:
Measles is coming back because of a quack of a doctor in the UK who admitted to publishing blatantly false data for fame and notoriety. He falsely connected autism with the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccine. He’s since admitted it and has been banned for life from practicing medicine in the UK. Rightly so. The body count is up to 1155.
Measles is also coming back because of the anti-science movement (hipsters in Williamsburg?). The anti-vacciners are on par with the Christian Scientists believing that prayer will save your diabetes. If you are not vaccinating your children, you are simply rejecting science and one of the most remarkable inventions of humankind. On the same level as rejecting cars, planes, elevators, etc..
The issue of vaccinating your kids has very little to do with your kids, and everything to do with protecting the health of your community. Vaccinate your kids, and you’re doing your kid, your family, and your community a social favor. Don’t vaccinate your kids, and you are selfishly anti-social putting your kids, yourself, and your community at unnecessary risk of death.
tedx:
Teen Develops Computer Algorithm to Diagnose Leukemia
“Brittany Wenger isn’t your average high-school senior: She taught the computer how to diagnose leukemia.
The 18-year-old student from Sarasota, Fla. built a custom, cloud-based “artificial neural network” to find patterns in genetic expression profiles to diagnose patients with an aggressive form of cancer called mixed-lineage leukemia (MLL). Simply put, this means Wenger taught the computer how to diagnose leukemia by creating a diagnostic tool for doctors to use.”
Brittany is also a TEDx speaker! She spoke at TEDxCERN this May, and TEDxWomen in 2012.
See our coverage of TEDxCERN here, and — below — watch Brittany’s TEDxWomen talk about Cloud4Cancer, a computer program she designed to diagnose breast cancer more accurately and less invasively.
You should care because the unexotic underclass can help address one of the biggest inefficiencies plaguing the startup scene right now: the flood of (ostensibly) smart, ambitious young people desperate to be entrepreneurs; and the embarrassingly idea-starved landscape where too many smart people are chasing too many dumb ideas, because they have none of their own (or, because they suspect no one will invest in what they really want to do). The unexotic underclass has big problems, maybe not the Big Problems – capital B, capital P – that get ‘discussed’ at Davos. But they have problems nonetheless, and where there are problems, there are markets.
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There are only so many suit customisation, makeup sampling, music streaming, social eating, discount shopping, experience curating companies that the market can bear. If you’re itching to start something new, why chase the n-th iteration of a company already serving the young, privileged, liberal jetsetter? If you’re an investor, why revisit the same space as everyone else? There is life, believe me, outside of NY, Cambridge, Chicago, Atlanta, Austin, L.A. and San Fran.
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| — | Despite its questionable parenthetical insinuation that STEM funding goes mainly towards the development of inane apps and its use of the word “wantrepreneur,” this article by MIT’s C.Z. Nnaemeka on “the unexotic underclass” makes some good points about innovating in the middle. (via explore-blog) |
Online education strips away all of those expenses except for the cost of the professor’s time and experience. It sounds perfect, an alignment of technology, social need and limited resources. So why do so many people believe that it is a deeply flawed solution? Because it means massive swaths of higher education is about to change. Technology has disrupted many industries; now it’s about to do the same to higher ed.
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College Is Going Online, Whether We Like It Or Not - Zachary Karabell - The Atlantic (via infoneer-pulse) Bullshit. Online Ed that is nothing but a talking professor sucks. Great online education costs money too, just in different places. (via caterpillarcowboy) I agree with David. Here is what is going to happen, lesser schools will look at online as a money grab by cutting staff while increasing enrollments (class size does not matter so much when its all online). However, the smarter schools will understand the true value of online education and will invest more dollars because online is merely a supplement to a more holistic learning experience, but one that can dramatically improve student performance. (via marksbirch) |
So great: If Stanley Kubrick had directed Game of Thrones and Saul Bass had designed the poster.
Pair with the legacy in film and design Saul Bass did leave.
Two billion people in cultures around the world include insects as a part of their diet, and there are lots of stories about it in the news right now. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization has recently recommended that we eat more insects, National Geographic recommends 8 bugs to try, this Washington Post video profiles a D.C. resident that cooks and eats cicadas, BBC News has a video about how insect-farming can combat hunger, and The Guardian has reported on what a healthy and sustainable food source they are:
The cost of meat is rising, not just in terms of hard cash but also in terms of the amount of rainforest that is destroyed for grazing or to grow feedstuff for cattle. There is also the issue of methane excreted by cows. The livestock farming contribution in terms of greenhouse gas emissions is enormous – 35% of the planet’s methane, 65% of its nitrous oxide and 9% of the carbon dioxide.
Edible insects emit fewer gases, contain high-quality protein, vitamins and amino acids, and have a high food conversion rate, needing a quarter of the food intake of sheep, and half of pigs and chickens, to produce the same amount of protein. They emit less greenhouse gases and ammonia than cows and can be grown on organic waste.
In the KQED Quest video above, meet Monika Martinez, a San Francisco artist and proprietor of Don Bugito, the nation’s first edible insect food cart.
Mark Zuckerberg was ridiculed more for turning down Yahoo’s $1 billion offer for Facebook in 2006 than for buying Instagram at the same price.
A key unknown in lunar science is to what extent the Moon is a melted, radially layered planet like Earth or a primordial unmelted relic of the early solar system, like many asteroids. A new era of lunar exploration is underway, offering major new insights into this decades-old question.
In this week’s podcast, planetary scientist Ben Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reviews current understanding of the lunar interior and shares new results from spacecraft observations and studies of Apollo samples.
Image: NASA/JPL/Galileo Spacecraft
