60 days till midnight...

Swine flu is the Y2K of our time, the beast that roared but never bit, the River Phoenix of the disease-disaster constellation....right? Wrong...

The first few days of swine flu seemed like the aporkalypse. 1800-odd cases, 80 deaths and plane-loads of coughers and sneezers on their way to threaten our 'border security'. Antivirals were in short supply, pork was suspicious (if not unsafe) and we needed to close the airports and stick thermometers in tourists in order to keep ourselves safe. The ABC was doing its bit for the nation with some hard hitting reportage on scurrillously unhindered passengers at Sydney Airport. The end was nigh...

But then it wasn't.... no one that mattered was getting sick, there wasn't any Australian cases and masks were not the newest fashion accessory in Mosman. Besides; Madonna was getting remarried, the government was inventing words and abusing idiom (see "nation-building", "forged in the fire") and NRL players were objectifying women again. All was right with the world, the danger had passed.

At this point, most right-thinking media consumers probably saw a furphy...the eggheads and politicans had sold us a pup!! The cynical saw an availability heuristic in action; "suspicious thinkers" saw a consipracy at every-turn. Pockets had been lined, Roche had sold a bucket-load of Tamiflu and curious troop movements were seen in the Arctic...we'd been hoodwinked and there was actually nothing to fear. Just another beat-up by rent-seekers and panic-button pushers.

The problem with this perfectly reasonable view is its distance from pesky reality. The latest scientific information, based upon initial case and fatality data from Mexico, turns up some interesting information. Firstly, the speed with which the virus spreads seems to be relatively slow...for a pandemic (in germ geek-speak; R0=1.6). The number of people who will likely die once they have been infected also seems to be quite low (CFR <0.6%). style="font-weight: bold;">is a potential Lilliputian.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's not going to affect you, just that it might take some time before it does. The impression that the H1N1 flu was a fizzer is tempting, but misleading; especially when the models of how disease spreads through a population seem to tell us that pandemics can have relatively long periods of stasis before reaching a tipping point beyond which the disease spreads rapidly and effectively.

Therefore, to put the provisional R0 of 1.4-1.6 in context, we need to go down in the weeds a little bit. For those of you allergic to graphs...shield your eyes now.

• from Caley, Becker, Philp. (2007). ‘The Waiting Time for Inter-Country Spread of Pandemic Influenza’ http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000143#s3

(A) Given our value for R from the Science paper. The delay before an epidemic-inducing 20 concurrent infectious cases in Australia (or any country outside of North Am) has a 95% probability of being between 40 and 70 days from initiation of the epidemic in the source region.
(B) Number of travellers leaving source region and arriving in at-risk country per day has a negligible effect on the median delay once number of travellers >100 (i.e. remains at ~60 days for R₀ of 1.5)
(C) Screening incoming travellers for symptoms has a negligible effect on delay
(D) “In general, the additional delay achieved by introducing non-pharmaceutical border control measures is generally small in comparison with the natural delay”

The (highly) general conclusion from this is that we may have to wait up to two months for the natural introduction of the pandemic into Australia....and that border screening will do very, very little to alter this. Sixty days is a long time for the media-land goldfish (and its ADHD brother, the blogosphere), and hence the tendency is towards swiftly shifting attentions and the phenomenon of rapidly appearing and dissappearing threats.

The idea that disease could take a long time to get to Australia also works counter-intuitively in a world were the bananas on your kitchen table were in the Phillipines two days ago. But the confusion is lessened when you realise that the probabilities of any one passenger on a flight to Australia being infectious with a disease that has only infected a few thousand people in a country of 100 million, while rising towards 1, are relatively small in the initial stages of an epidemic.

Hence the idea that we are 60 days from midnight...or atleast 60 days from when I'll be proven wrong...

Olympics and the Two Child Policy

Yes. What a joy to behold, the world together as one, capitalist, communist, hedonist, all united as sportists under a banner of corporate sponsorship and nationalism. Finally, we all come to believe in peace as determined by gold medals. Joy.

Despite this glowing sense of hope and unity springing from corporatised nationalistic sporting fervour, a little cynicism creeps in. I don't know if China are telling the truth or not. What? No, this is not some violent Tibetan media conspiracy.

First, there was the digital footprints left by the opening ceremony. And now I am thinking more of the One Child Policy being enacted by the nonahe(a)dral politburo in China. That vision of sweetness in the little red dress who sang so beautifully, turns out to be chimeric construct of voice and face. As the Spice Girls once sang, 'Two become one.' Now, don't get me wrong, this is not a moral travesty of the level of Milli Vanilli, (but that's just because Germans are evil.)

Perhaps the truth of the Chinese agenda is being uncovered in ways that the politburo could not forsee. Oh well. All we can do is hope, like the Dalai Lama that Chinese Democracy will come soon.

SPORT!

Why we (or I) fight.

So I've been reading a bit lately on the imminent launch of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the latest and certainly most ambitious project by CERN, at the French-Swiss border. It reminds me of why I do what I do (or at least how I can justify why I do what I do, which may be as good as I can get). Now, one question is "but Nick, you work in Ethics. How does a big-ass atom smasher give you pause about why you do what you do?"

Well, it is partly because of my science background, but also at the sheer scale of this project that CERN is attempting. I mean, in my romantic vision of the function of the philosopher, it is the uncovering of some deeper truths in our world that enlighten the philosopher, the colleagues they work with, and (at least I sincerely hope and my be deluded as a result of this belief) the world at large. Yes, continentals, I hear you sneering and muttering dark saying about the crimes of Descartes. But I sincerely believe that you also have made a very positive contribution to my life, even if only because I spend so much time scratching my head about things you've said.

But, as usual, I digress. While I'm doing so, take a look at some funkay pictures

If philosophy is the seeking out of truths for the noble purpose of raising humanity up, and not merely the sitting about ranting about minor problems with semantic content in papers written by those long dead (although that is also, in some respects, important in its own way), then the women and men who have worked on the LHC are philosophers without compare. Far be it to merely talk about what the deeper structure of the universe might be like, they have instead decided that they'll try and actually find out, by smashing together a set of particles together at such a speed that space and time itself are sundered, and hopefully a bunch of particles will be seen that every individual in the world who has studied particle physics up to (and of course beyond) a postgrad level is hoping exists. And if they don't, so much is the better because unlike (it seems) many aspects of philosophy, physics can be concisely disproved, torn asunder, and left to die. And physicists in general seem to be pretty okay with this. Don't mistake me: they aren't all, and nor is this typical of most sciences. Physics, in many ways, has it easy.

And no, this isn't going to solve world hunger, the energy crisis, global warming, extreme antibiotic resistant tuberculosis, corporate paedophilia, the rampant injustices of the free-market economic rationalist state, vertical power structures, retributive justice and all its worries (good luck to Chuck on his impending thesis submission!), or any of the plethora of terrible problems that plague our world.

But it is, in its own way, very beautiful, and enthralling to those who have seen what has been written on it. And why else is the world worth being in to the point that there are a growing number of philosophers trying to get out of the ivory tower, hit the streets and get some change happening? not that we are doing so very fast, but this is a growth period for the movement, I feel. Still, Clive does it well.

More than people might think, the LHC is the magnum opus of much of current science. It is one of the projects that those who practice, study, or merely dabble in the hard sciences are so keen to see happen. And I think a world where there is less of the above problems, less affluenza, and more experiments that might not even occur because the experiment itself will go back in time to stop itself happening. This thing pushes the edges of human understanding about the limits of our collective power over the universe, the strangeness of the world we live in, and (to this writer), gives me more faith in the wondrous aspects of science enriching our lives than anything Richard Dawkins had to say on the subject. It is my hope that the more of my world will be able to see and appreciate these wonders, and not just the rich white folk like myself (ha, I called myself rich). And that, at least, is one of the many reasons why I do what I do.

Bad Science for the masses

So the SMH, in all its scientific integrity, reported on pot smokers being not so mellow. The venerable Kate Benson, medical reporter, writes:

More than a third of people who present at Sydney emergency departments after smoking cannabis are violent and half have mental health problems such as severe anxiety and suicidal thoughts, shattering the image that dope smokers are relaxed and sleepy, researchers have found.

Wow, my impressions are certainly shattered. Who would have thought that out of the (no doubt) hundreds of thousands of pot smokers in my country alone, that the ones who ended up in an emergency room were representative of all of them? And further, that the pot smokers who ended up in emergency were likely to be somewhat distressed? I mean, its not like from my visits to emergency (not many of them involving me as a patient, thankfully) I don't see angry, upset or violent people in emergency. This presentation of the study reeks of, among other things, a massive problem with their attribution of causation, and a sampling problem. But, I'm sure that the SMH hoped they could pass it off on the unwitting masses and "do some good"

If the levels of THC in hydroponic gardens are that high, that's a danger, and it may be leading to an increase in psychotic drug users. But I don't think any myths have been shattered here.

I'm wondering if this is the University of New South Wales' bad science, or the SMH's lousy reporting. I'm hoping it is the latter.

Ethical DNA - what a load of shyte

I recently completed this online questionaire. I don't have time to go into the problems I have with it yet, in terms of surveys, questions etc etc. The thing that gets my goat the most is the term 'moral DNA', which really goes into reinforcing the folk conceptions of genetics.
For those of you who are interested in this type of stuff, check out Paul Griffith's site, in particular this article.
There is a stack of links to his publications on his site, and for anyone interested in genetics, in particular folk conceptions of genes and 'public understanding of science' type stuff, his work is pretty cool.

That is