Tiny Green Insect

While cleaning my table today, I spotted a fleck of coloured dust. I was just about to flick it away when I noticed that the "dust" seems to have eyes!

It is a tiny green insect.

Which is dead.

So I put it on a piece of memo paper and took some photos of it:



There it is.

Neon-green body with irridescent orangey-pink wings... and very obvious BLACK eyes.

Isn't it cute?



I placed a regular 10 cent coin beside it.

Next to the insect, the coin looks like a gigantic, hefty hunk of pig iron.



Here is a crop of the previous photo at 100% full resolution.

As you can see, the insect is about as long as the thickness of the coin.

Which means it is about 1 mm long, with wings that are less than 2 mm long. I count three obviously visible wings; one might have broken off. So it used to have four wings and not two wings like a housefly.

You can also see that it is at the limit of my camera's resolving power. I can't get much more detail than that.



So I tried to take photos of it through my trusty 6X loupe - like a makeshift macro lens.

It's not very good but some additional details become visible.



At 100% resolution you can now see some veiny details on the wings, the blue-green thread-like legs, and what looks like two mouth parts below its face.



From the front, the face of the insect resembles a mantis, but it's hard to tell if the elongation below the eyes is mainly part of the mouth or the neck.

You can also see some serrations on its legs. I estimate the length of each spike to be less than 0.05 mm - well below the resolving power of the naked eye.



From the side, it doesn't look like an insect at all. It looks more like a frog with wings... on snow skis!



From the back, its three wings can be clearly seen.

I haven't been able to identify this insect yet. It's not a lacewing fly and it doesn't look like a parasitic wasp.

Whatever it is, it is the smallest flying previously flying insect I have ever examined.


Would you like to know more?

Other denizens of my neighbourhood:
- A grey lizard that isn't really grey
- Bugs in the city

Pick Your Brain For Some Loose Change... And Your Watch

Here's an intriguing Scientific American video that uses street magic to help illustrate some concepts in neuroscience.

Or is it using neuroscience to help illustrate some concepts in street magic?



Not surprisingly the street magician steals the show, after all, it's his job to capture your attention by being in your face, enthusiastic and funny.

Whereas the scientists appear standoffish and matter-of-fact.

This distinct contrast tells us that there's some showmanship going on here, and obviously it's the magician who's doing it.

Or is it?

via Mind Hacks

Can Science Answer Moral Questions?

Just watched an interesting TED talk by Sam Harris about how science can shed some light about questions of morality.

I like many of Harris' talks, and as a structuralist I agree with the overall premise that questions of morality can be investigated scientifically.

Thus I was looking forward to hearing his arguments; however, after listening to him I realized that I mainly disagreed with him instead!

Here, check it out first:



Eloquently articulated, to be sure, but I have so many disagreements with his view that... wow, where do I even begin?

1. "Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures."

Firstly, I don't know which moral philosopher would agree with Harris' definition of "values", but dictionary.com defines "values" as "the ideals, customs, institutions, etc., of a society toward which the people of the group have an affective regard."

In common language the term "values" has a very strong social component which is missing in Harris' definition - making "values" appear to be some kind of individual-level property.

This is a very big problem. There is a difference between the moral sense/personal principles of individuals and the social values of groups.

Harris makes it look as if social values can ultimately be reducible to neuroscience, which in my view is pitching it at the wrong organization level.

Secondly, how would you measure "well-being" in the context of social values?

There are many cultures that consider some amount of physical/psychological pain to be an important aspect of a person's development toward adulthood, or to be recognized as a legit member of society.

Even if someone was able to create some kind of standardized "well-being" metric, how would you convince other people to agree with it?

Take for example, our "civilized" culture in Singapore where children are subject to at least a decade of institutional education, usually longer.

It is a system which regularly inflicts pain of varying degrees.

Does anyone think that most teenagers want to be scolded by teachers/prefects, spend their holidays on homework/tuition, learn calculus/linear law, or train furiously/contort their bodies in order to get silver for their NAPFA test to avoid PTP during NS?

So are all these activities immoral?

2. "There are truths to be known about how human communities flourish - whether or not we understand these truths. And morality relates to these truths."

During the talk, Harris constantly emphasized human "flourishing".

Harris was trained as a biologist, as was I. From a biological perspective, the survival of a population can be easily measured - in terms of reproductive fitness, children per woman, population growth rates etc.

But how would anyone agree on what "flourishing" means, let alone how to measure it?

Take for example, the Spartan civilization in Ancient Greece.

Spartan society was highly structured, militaristic and brutal - from the cradle to the grave.

Small or deformed babies were left to die of exposure. Boys began military training at age seven - deliberately underfed to encourage them to learn the skill of stealing food.

By eighteen they were trained to kill members of the Helot minority; at twenty they were eligible for military service and they would remain on duty until they were 60 years old.

If a Spartan soldier lost his shield in battle and returned alive, it was assumed that he attempted to flee and thus was subject to punishment by death or banishment. Even mothers enforced the militaristic lifestyle that Spartan men endured!

Yet, for such a cruel and warlike society, Sparta was well-admired during its day, considered by many people - even some of its rivals in Athens - to be an ideal state free from the corruption of commerce and money. Spartan women also enjoyed more rights and equality to men than elsewhere during that time period.

In terms of survival as a group, Sparta managed to maintain its political independence for several centuries.

So did the Spartans "flourish"?

And how do we critique the morality of their societal practices scientifically?

**********

There are many, many other things that I disagree with, but it's late and I need to sleep.

Suffice to say that I am amazed to see how reductionist Harris' view is, and how much he is attracted by the concept of a universal morality - eg. continuum along a single dimension, fixed peaks and valleys in his "moral landscape".

I realize that the systems perspective is not immediately intuitive, and people, even science-trained people, like to see things along a simple spectrum of black and white, right and wrong.

This spectrum, especially for social values, cannot exist because of confounding variables such as short-term vs long-term benefit, individual vs group benefit, stability vs flexibility etc - there are multidimensional trade-offs that preclude simple optimality.

A Grey Lizard That Isn't Really Grey

Last month, during the Chinese New Year period, I was passing through a jogging track beside a canal in Ghim Moh when I spotted this little critter:















GREY LIZARD!

It had a surprisingly deep grey colour that matched the surrounding asphalt very well. If not for the fact that it was dashing across the track right in front of me, I would have missed it.

I think that its grey skin is a good camouflage to protect the lizard against predators, such as birds.

I don't know much about lizards, but I find its even grey tone surprising since I've only seen garden lizards in brown and green.

My first thought when I saw it was - maybe there is a selection pressure for "jogging track lizards" to be grey?















Here's the fellow next to a ten cent coin.

The lizard was about 3 cm long. It could be a juvenile, so the grey colouration could be a transitory feature.

Most scientists who study the evolution of animal features tend to focus on the adult form. That doesn't mean that the features of young animals are less important.

We must remember that the environment starts to act against an animal, even before it was born!

If an animal cannot survive its youth, it cannot become an adult.















When I took a close-up photo of the lizard, I realized that it wasn't really grey!

The scales were in a mottled pattern of light and dark brown, and coupled with the fact that the lizard appeared to be moulting, the resultant colour from a distance was a dull, dark grey.

It made me ponder about the concept that quantitatively different features at the component level can result in qualitatively different features at the system level, ie. emergence.

After all, if you try to find a novel "grey gene" on this grey lizard, you might end up finding nothing! It might have been the combination of expression level changes to existing brown colour genes and opacity of the scales that contributed to its overall grey appearance.

Well, that's too much speculation for one day.

So I left the lizard, which had remained frozen in that position for minutes on the asphalt and didn't leave even after I had walked several metres away.

Survival instinct or excessive fear?

Seconds later, a bicycle zipped by that same spot.

I didn't look back.


Would you like to know more?
- Tertiary color (Wikipedia)

A Teen Who Looks Like An Old Woman

Zara Hartshorn is a 13-year-old who lives in a poor neighbourhood in northern England.

Life there is difficult enough, but Zara is experiencing an even tougher problem...



She has lipodystrophy, a rare genetic condition involving the loss of fatty tissue, resulting in the wrinkled skin that makes her look much older than she really is.

Where Is The "Swim" In A Swimmer?

Here's a concise and nicely presented video by QualiaSoup about the problems with the philosophy of dualism.






I should add that substance dualism is also not consistent with the experience of people who go through general anaesthesia.

They describe feeling drowsy before the operation and then abruptly awake after the operation, as if no time had passed in between.

This subjective continuity of consciousness is a problem for dualists - where did the consciousness "go" during those hours?

If consciousness can be suspended in this manner by chemicals, then it cannot be independent of physical reality. The strong possibility exists that consciousness is simply a process of physical reality, and can be obliterated via physical means.

Also, if an "eternal soul" is supposed to persist even when consciousness is suspended during anaesthesia, this suggests that they are distinct entities.

If someone's "eternal soul" survives physical death but is not linked to her consciousness, then she didn't really survive.

Scientist, Programmer and Prostitute

The year was 2003.

PhD student Brooke Magnanti was living a double life. In the midst of making corrections to her thesis, she was unable to find a job in science and running out of money to pay rent.

So she became a part-time computer programmer... and prostitute.

For 14 months she worked as a high-class call girl in a London escort agency. She wrote about her sex work experiences as an anonymous blogger in the "Belle de Jour" blog, which led to a series of successful books and even spun off a TV show.

Today, she is a research scientist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology at St Michael's Hospital in Bristol.

Until two days ago, practically no one knew of the true identity of Belle de Jour.


Why is Fresh Brainz interested in this story?

Apparently she was also an experienced science blogger before she turned to prostitution. So boys and girls, what did we learn today?

1. Science blogging is not enough to pay rent.

2. Part-time computer programming is not enough to pay rent.

3. Sex work is enough to pay rent.

4. Science blogging + Sex work = Sex blogging

Crystal clear.


Would you like to know more?
- Belle de Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl
- British scientist unmasked as call girl Belle de Jour (Reuters)
- Belle de Jour blogger unmasks herself as 'big mouth ex-boyfriend' looms (Guardian)

Was It The Publication Record?

I must say that I find Dr. Cai Mingjie's blog "A Singapore Taxi Driver's Diary" an interesting and engaging read.

It is a brutally honest account of a new taxi driver trying to make a living on the roads of Singapore.

But after reading his posts, most readers would undoubtedly ponder the question:

What happened?

How did an Associate Professor become a taxi driver?

Prominent blogger AcidFlask has a hunch; he examined Dr. Cai's publication record and found that Dr. Cai published a total of 16 papers (14, plus two more discovered by his commenters) in 16 years.

He felt that:

"With that in mind, it becomes a damning fact that Dr. Cai only has 14 publications to his name since joining the IMCB 16 years ago. Going only by that criterion of quantity, publishing less than one paper a year makes for a truly unimpressive publication record. But just about every practicing scientist knows that despite the current pressure to publish or perish, science and research isn’t (entirely) about churning out more and more papers, and the number of papers that can attributed to one’s name is not necessarily a good measure of a scientist’s productivity."

While AcidFlask acknowledges that there could be many other plausible factors leading to Dr. Cai's contract termination, one of his commenters is much, much less charitable...

#4 by i am not that great at August 19th, 2009:

"i don’t think it is that worth defending him per se. in the current competitive research environment, his publication record in 16 years probably only speaks of one thing – he is working in a very sheltered environment in which he does not have to fight for funding, and he is very comfortable in it.

i didn’t go that in depth into digging up his past papers, but my impression from his pubmed-searchable papers is that – his lab didn’t actually grow that much in the 16 years, and he does not have collaborators.

if he had worked in the states, and if he had been so comfortable with himself, he wouldn’t have survived the assistant professor stage. he probably is indeed a good scientist, but the environment spolit him. and when imcb’s culture changed, he didn’t realise it and he didn’t change, and he got killed.

hence, regardless of what measure a*star uses to judge the performance of its employees, he would still have been killed. face it, even in the US, if you are a young professor, you will have to work for money. if you apply for funding from ACS, you ought to package your work around cancer. it is a fact of life. if you work in a*star, you will have to make those guys that give you money happy. it is a different story if you are tenured, but obviously that guy is not…!"

**********

So, was it his publication record that ended Dr. Cai's appointment?

Here at Fresh Brainz, we are outsiders to this issue.

Moreover any single case is always a "unique" case.

However, Dr. Cai was not the only Principal Investigator who was affected.

When there is more than one case, an opportunity to learn more about the truth surfaces.

In Dr. Cai's blog a commenter by the name of Xinmin (most likely A/Prof. Cao Xinmin) left this comment:

Xinmin said...

"I read your article with tears. At the beginning, I was very sad, but at the end, I was so proud of you. I admire your courage and spirit. With these, nothing can beat you. As your former colleague, another PI in IMCB, we share a similar fate. I graduated from University of Chicago, working in IMCB for 19 years, publishing >50 papers (including 7 in 2008), trained many PhD, university, and polytechnic students. All the years of hard work and teaching don’t seem to count for anything. My lab will be closed down soon. You are not the first, and I won't be the last. We have made Singapore our home, and our children have gone or will go to National Service. More importantly, we have made our contributions to put Singapore on the world’s scientific map! Isn't it ironic that when the government is putting in considerable efforts to develop life science in Singapore, we lost or will lose our jobs? I may not have the qualification to become a taxi driver, but I will do my best in my life after IMCB, whatever that will be and to be like you. Even as a taxi driver, you live in a brilliant and wonderful way. I wish you all the best!

August 18, 2009 1:00 PM"

Was the publication record a major factor?














I'll let the readers decide.

Taxi Driver, Associate Professor

In a bizarre turn of affairs, Stanford-trained former Principal Investigator and Adjunct Associate Professor Cai Mingjie is now a taxi driver.

He writes the blog "A Singapore Taxi Driver's Diary".

It's a great read, please check it out.

Here's an exerpt:

"On my way home, I thought about what “man goes higher” means. In most people’s dictionary, it means higher pay, higher education, higher social status, etc. A higher position on the social food chain. That’s the norm of the society. From a professor to a taxi driver could only be seen by most people as a classical example of the exact opposite of “man goes higher”. But, I look at it differently. Yes, the bigfoots sitting high on the food chain can force me into a jobless situation. What it has done to me, however, is only to push me to a “new high”, a new boundary where their powers to set the rules, to twist the rules, to do whatever at will, do not apply, where I don’t have to survive by playing their games.

This is all that matters to me. Low or high, I can take it either way. In fact, I feel happier now as a taxi driver than before in my last two years as a professor, when I often had to feel sorry for myself for having to work in that environment."

**********

Still think that research is about the love of science (or pouring liquids from one tube into another)?

That's not the whole story, my friends.

*Update (19 Aug 2009)

Dr. Cai has been interviewed by Amresh Gunasingham from the Straits Times.

Online edition: PhD holder now a cabby

Print edition (scanned): cabby PhD holder now a taxi driver

The Problem-solving Intelligence Of Bird Brainz

Picture this - you are a hungry bird and you are looking at a fat, juicy worm.

Unfortunately, the worm is floating on a bit of water in a very tall glass, and your beak is not long enough to reach it.

What do you do?



Sharp.

That practically replicates the Aesop's Fable "The Crow and the Pitcher"!

Is that a particularly smart bird, you ask?

Actually, four out of four rooks in the experiment were able to figure out this solution to the problem.

An elegant demonstration that problem-solving intelligence at least predates the evolution of mammals.

Pipette tip to Bayblab.


Would you like to know more?
- Rooks Use Stones to Raise the Water Level to Reach a Floating Worm (Current Biology)

Creationism And False Dichotomies

Lim Say Liang at The Online Citizen has written an interesting article entitled "God sneaks into our classrooms" about how creationism has turned up in Singaporean schools.

I understand that creationism is formally not acceptable by the MOE, so I have nothing to add to that discussion from an education policy point of view.

From the scientific perspective, as Dr. John van Wyhe from Cambridge has emphasized in his recent talk, there has been no debate between evolution and creation since the 1870s.

Evolution - more specifically the part about common descent - has been accepted by the scientific community for over a hundred years.

However, debate about the details of evolution, such as its primary mechanism (eg. natural selection vs neutral drift) continues on today.

This sort of dispute is usually only interesting among specialists (may sound very boring to the general public) but will be gradually resolved in time with theory development and more experimental evidence.

On the other hand, the "Evolution vs Creation" culture war (and predominantly US culture at that) is a very tiresome and possibly neverending squabble that will persist as long as people, politics and money exist.

I won't go into the details of this - interested readers can just click the "evolution" tag to see my numerous articles (and even more numerous comments) regarding this topic.

Instead I would like to focus on a pair of comments posted in response to the TOC article -


1. New Renaissance on August 3rd, 2009 2.33 pm:

"In fact, what critical thinking can there be if only one side is presented?"

2. Jer Bear on August 3rd, 2009 3.09 pm @ New Renaissance:

"The other side of science is not fiction. The other side of science is science itself. One cannot disprove logic with fairy tales – therefore if you truly believe in teaching our children critical thinking, show them the thousands of articles written to refute certain scientific and mathematical explanations. Creationism or ‘intelligent design’ doesn’t count."


I think Jer Bear has addressed the New Renaissance's criticism quite well, but I would like to add my views on this matter.

I have observed that creationists like to think of science as if it was some kind of legal process and like to think of scientists as if they were lawyers.

In fact, creationist lawyers tend to think that their legal training makes up for their lack of scientific training.

Why is this so?

Simple.

Dichotomies, even false dichotomies, have a lot of SOCIAL POWER.

Remember ex-US president George W. Bush's infamous line: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."?

A legal system is an adversarial system. Either a suspect is innocent or guilty. There is no middle ground and thus no need to consider alternative explanations.

By proving your opponent wrong, a lawyer can confidently "prove" that she is right.

When deliberately forced upon science, this legalistic perspective crushes the whole scientific process into an oversimplified single dimension with two absolute outcomes: right or wrong.

That is why creationists spend practically all of their time attacking science rather than do actual research to support their views.

To their credit, they do understand the human psyche very well; the general public is easily impressed by outward appearance of authority, conviction and eloquence. As long as they can "prove" that the scientists are unsure, or hesitant, or not very good at public speaking, or too easily annoyed, creationists can then claim success.

This can be done without actually addressing the scientific content of the argument; indeed, it can be done without adequate understanding of the subject matter at all!

That is because creationists are not as interested in knowing what is factually correct as they are obsessed about being "proven" right. If they are "proved" to be right they can consolidate the social cohesion among fellow believers and also feel that they have the justification to impose their worldview on everyone else.

To directly address New Renaissance's comment that there can't be any critical thinking if only one side is presented, I would say:

"Are there only two sides in every debate? What critical thinking can there be if only two sides are presented?"

If the subject matter is creation stories, why not present a multicultural primer about creation stories throughout the world? If the focus is on anti-evolutionary views, why not include a section on animal spiritualism and Hare Krishna's "devolution" idea?

Creationists will never advocate multifactorial thinking, because it weakens their case that they can be "proved" right as long as their opponent is "proved" wrong. If there are ideas that don't support their case, they will cleverly package all of them together into a single opponent, even if those ideas don't have much in common with each other.

Eventually they will try to force an adversarial approach in order to maximize their social power.

Only the debates between "us" and "them" matters; disagreements between them "evolutionists" or disagreements between them "pagans" don't matter.

They are all wrong anyway... because my belief "proves" it.

Mob Behaviour Of Social Groups

What a remarkable confluence of events today!

1. This morning I received an email from an old friend - unfortunately it was a chain mail with some pretty NASA photograph in it.

I prefer not to propagate chain mails, so I deleted it while asking myself: "Why do people fall for chain mails so easily?"

2. Next, I came across this YouTube video about chain letters on MySpace and other social networking sites:



Nykytyne2 sees a connection between Pascal's Wager and the mob behaviour of people who keep reposting chain letters.

He thinks that social networking and multiplayer game sites can potentially be a great tool for social psychologists to study mob behaviour.

3. And then, sociologist Jesse Fagan of Orbital Teapot posts a summary about this research study:

Effective leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move (Couzin et al. 2005, Nature)

This paper has revealed a very interesting result. Jesse explains:

The powerful insight, I thought, was that groups that behave like swarms or flocks can find some resource if only a small proportion of the the individuals have the knowledge. Furthermore, the ratio between those who know and those who follow scales logarithmically with respect to the size of the total group. That means the larger the group, the group of knowledgeable individuals does not have to rise linearly.

When I say agents who behave like a swarm I mean they obey a small set of simple rules.

So here's a plausible explanation for why there are so many "sheeple" in the world today mindlessly following a tiny clique of powerful overlords.

Maybe it doesn't hurt society to have many stupid people who are only good at following orders - there could be a structural reason behind this.

Ain't that neat?

The question, the hypothesis-generation and the results all popped up within the space of a few hours.

Sometimes I wonder if I am trying to find systems science, or if systems science is trying to find me...

Swine Flu: Alert Orange

Latest update on swine flu - the Ministry of Health has upgraded the Disease Outbreak Response System Alert status in Singapore from Yellow to Orange:

Swine Flu

Last Updated 30 April 2009

The Mexican swine flu outbreak situation continues to evolve rapidly.

As of 30 April 2009, there are reportedly 99 confirmed cases of Mexican swine flu (H1N1) cases in Mexico (with 8 deaths), 91 in the United States (with 1 death), 19 in Canada, 10 in Spain, 5 in United Kingdom, 3 in Germany, 3 in New Zealand, 2 in Israel, 2 in Costa Rica, 1 in Austria, 1 in Switzerland and 1 in Peru.

As of 30 April 09, there are no human cases of Mexican swine flu in Singapore. There have been 22 cases in total referred for further medical assessment. Of the 22 cases, 19 cases have been tested negative for Influenza A. 2 tested positive for usual circulating seasonal strains of Influenza A and 1 is pending laboratory investigations.

Alert Status

On 29 April 2009, WHO raised the current level of flu pandemic alert from phase 4 to 5. The change to a higher phase indicates that there is human-to-human spread of the virus into at least two countries in one region. The declaration of Phase 5 is a strong signal that a pandemic is imminent, though not inevitable. WHO has recommended countries to take steps to heighten surveillance, adopt measures for early detection and treatment of cases, and step up infection control in all healthcare facilities.

Even though there are currently no human cases of Mexican swine flu in Singapore, the Singapore Ministry of Health on 30 April 09 upgraded the Disease Outbreak Response System Alert status in Singapore from Yellow to Orange. There is a real possibility that such cases may surface in Singapore and we must be prepared at all fronts to delay its spread to Singapore for as long as possible.

Public Advisory

Members of the public are strongly advised to postpone or avoid non-essential travel to Mexico and affected areas. In the event that travel is unavoidable, the public is advised to take precautionary measures such as avoiding crowded areas and maintaining high standards of personal hygiene at all times.

The public is advised to maintain high standards of personal hygiene, such as washing hands frequently with soap and water, especially after contact with respiratory secretions (e.g. after sneezing and coughing). Those who are unwell with respiratory illness should stay at home and wear a surgical mask if possible.

Schools, workplaces and places of mass gathering are encouraged to conduct temperature checks routinely. Those with a higher-than-normal temperature should be advised to seek treatment immediately. Recording of all information of all visitors, including the date and time of visit, personal particulars and contact number of visitors, is recommended. This will facilitate contact tracing when the need arises.


Would you like to know more?

- FAQS on Swine Flu (flu.gov.sg)
- Communicating the Swine influenza A (H1N1) crisis (The Biology Refugia)
- We are now at Alert Orange (Angry Doctor)

Health Alert: Swine Flu

An outbreak of Swine Flu, caused by a new subtype of the Swine Influenza A/H1N1 virus, has occurred in the USA and Mexico.

The World Health Organization (WHO) states that this is a situation of high concern:

"The majority of these cases have occurred in otherwise healthy young adults. Influenza normally affects the very young and the very old, but these age groups have not been heavily affected in Mexico.

Because there are human cases associated with an animal influenza virus, and because of the geographical spread of multiple community outbreaks, plus the somewhat unusual age groups affected, these events are of high concern."

1. Here are the affected countries so far (27 Apr 2009):

















Google Maps - H1N1 Swine Flu (by niman)

Pink markers are suspected cases
Blue markers are confirmed cases
Deaths have no dot in the marker

Mexico

Total - about 900 suspected cases

18 laboratory confirmed cases
20 confirmed deaths due to swine flu

United States of America

Total - 20 cases(laboratory confirmed cases)

California - 7 cases
Kansas - 2 cases
New York City - 8 cases
Ohio - 1 case
Texas - 2 cases

Canada

Total - 6 confirmed cases

British Columbia - 2 cases
Nova Scotia - 4 cases

New Zealand

Total - 10 likely (Influenza A positive) cases

Israel

Total - 1 suspected case

Spain

Total - 3 suspected cases

France

Total - 2 suspected cases

2. Health advisory from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

For public:

Residents of States with Swine Influenza Cases

CDC has identified human cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) virus infection in people in the U.S. CDC is working with local and state health agencies to investigate these cases. We have determined that this virus is contagious and is spreading from human to human. However, at this time, we have not determined how easily the virus spreads between people. As with any infectious disease, we are recommending precautionary measures for people residing in these areas.

- Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.

- Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after you cough or sneeze. Alcohol-based hands cleaners are also effective.

- Try to avoid close contact with sick people.

- If you get sick, CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.

- Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Germs spread that way.

There is no vaccine available at this time, so it is important for people living in these areas to take steps to prevent spreading the virus to others. If people are ill, they should attempt to stay at home and limit contact with others. Healthy residents living in these areas should take everyday preventive actions.

People who live in these areas who develop an illness with fever and respiratory symptoms, such as cough and runny nose, and possibly other symptoms, such as body aches, nausea, or vomiting or diarrhea, should contact their health care provider. Their health care provider will determine whether influenza testing is needed.

For Clinicians:

Clinicians should consider the possibility of swine influenza virus infections in patients presenting with febrile respiratory illness who

- Live in an area where human cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) has been identified or

- Have traveled to an area where human cases of swine influenza A (H1N1) has been identified or

- Have been in contact with ill persons from these areas in the 7 days prior to their illness onset.

If swine flu is suspected, clinicians should obtain a respiratory swab for swine influenza testing and place it in a refrigerator (not a freezer). Once collected, the clinician should contact their state or local health department to facilitate transport and timely diagnosis at a state public health laboratory.

Update 28 Apr 2009

WHO raises pandemic alert to phase 4



Latest tally:

Mexico = ~ 2000 suspected cases (149 suspected deaths)
USA = 40 confirmed cases
Canada = 6 confirmed cases
Spain = 1 confirmed case
UK = 2 confirmed cases

Update 29 Apr 2009

Till date, no deaths outside of Mexico.

Latest tally:

Mexico = ~ 2000 suspected/ 26 confirmed cases(152 suspected/ 7 confirmed deaths)
USA = 64 confirmed cases
Canada = 13 confirmed cases
New Zealand = 11 confirmed cases
Spain = 2 confirmed cases
UK = 2 confirmed cases
Israel = 2 confirmed cases

*Update 30 Apr 2009

WHO raises pandemic alert to phase 5



First death from swine flu outside Mexico - a 23-month-old Mexican child died in Texas.

Latest tally:

Mexico = ~ 2000 suspected/ 26 confirmed cases(159 suspected/ 7 confirmed deaths)
USA = 91 confirmed cases (1 confirmed death)
Canada = 13 confirmed cases
New Zealand = 11 confirmed cases
UK = 5 confirmed cases
Spain = 4 confirmed cases
Germany = 3 confirmed cases
Israel = 2 confirmed cases
Austria = 1 confirmed case


Would you like to know more?

- Swine Influenza and You (US CDC)
- Singapore will be pro-active in handling possible swine flu outbreak (Channel NewsAsia)

Training Fresher Brainz!

When I completed my first vlog on the "History of the Pipette" over a year ago, I asked my sister, who is trained in the film production process, for some feedback.

She thought that it felt like a training video.

And lo and behold - it DID become a training video!

A new website called "Labtutorials in Biology" has featured my vlogumentary along with many other videos in one of their articles.

I think it's a great idea to have such a collection of video resources as an introduction to basic lab techniques for students and curious members of the public.












Why not pop over there for a quick look at their latest posts?

No Really, I CAN See Through You

Sometimes I wonder if deep sea fish aren't really Aliens from another planet...




Well, at least Macropinna microstoma doesn't have zombie eyes and Giger-esque teeth like the deep sea fish in my profile.

In fact it's rather cute, in a revulsive-ectoplasmic-anime-character-from-hell sorta way.


Would you like to know more?
- Weird-eyed fish (Pharyngula)

FAMILIAR Part 4: Aligned Resources

One important reason why the Star Wars series of films has such a wide appeal is due to its story structure. George Lucas was inspired by Joseph Campbell's book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and deliberately applied Campbell's ideas into his storyline.

Campbell was studying comparative mythology and wanted to find out if there are common elements between major myths around the world that have lasted for thousands of years. He elucidated a fundamental structure which he called the "monomyth" or "the hero's journey" and summarized it like this:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

The monomyth is divided into three sections - "Departure", "Initiation" and "Return". Each of these sections has a set of characteristic stages, for example "Supernatural Aid" in Departure where the hero encounters an old wizard (Obi-Wan!) who provides him with special tools (Lightsabre!) and advice (Use the Force!) for the adventure ahead.

Only a few world myths contain all these stages, some of them only have a few stages and others have them in a different order. Campbell's monomyth is thus criticized for focusing on the similarities and glossing over the differences between the myths, and scholars have also questioned its usefulness and general validity.

Nonetheless the monomyth has been an influential tool for plot development; aside from Star Wars, popular movies like The Lion King and the Matrix series (possibly the Harry Potter series as well) have story structures that are modelled on the monomyth.

I won't go into further details of the monomyth here, but suffice to say that by using a comparative strategy, Campbell was able to create a common resource out of the dozens of diverse mythologies in the world. He recognized that it is impossible to do this based on any single myth.

Indeed, I would argue that in general single cases only represent data and not knowledge. Outside the context of mythology, even single cases that are firmly rooted in physical evidence cannot really enlighten us about the nature of our Universe; we can only learn about them, not from them.

In other words, they have descriptive but not prescriptive value.

**********

The power of comparative analysis was driven home in my mind very early in my graduate student career by my advisor.

During a genomics lecture he illustrated this by showing a single sequence from one species of animal. For example, here's part of the amino acid sequence of a human gene:

MYNMMETELKPPGPQQTSGGGGGNSTAAAAGGNQKNSPDRVKRPMNAFMVWSRGQRRKMAQEN...

Well, it's a string of letters. You can't learn much just by staring at it.

But when you do an alignment with homologous genes from many other species...






... important features immediately jump out at you.

The yellow blocks represent regions that are completely identical over hundreds of millions of years of evolution - it's a good bet that those regions are functionally crucial. Blue and green blocks are identical only among some species, while white areas exhibit high variability.

Therefore, you can see regions of similarities as well as regions of differences. Regions that are common to mammals, or just to rodents, or unique to one species which may reflect functions that are only relevant to those group of animals.

This is knowledge.

Whether it is science or history, information derived from a single case is only descriptive of the case itself - in order to understand fundamental principles, produce testable predictions or to "give advice" to other people, you must have data from more than one case. With an increasing number of aligned cases comes a more accurate and more refined knowledge of the subject matter.

Hence the "analogy" aspect of FAMILIAR - knowledge obtained by comparing the features of complex systems and aligning them into a structured resource, not only at the same organizational level, but also across organizational levels.

I am aware that argument from analogy is a logical fallacy, but that does not preclude the use of an "analogy machine" like FAMILIAR to start the investigation by generating hypotheses and enabling cross-discipline visualization.

Having a systematic way to align single cases into a common resource allows people to see both the similarities and differences between the cases. Where the cases are too different in key areas to be effectively compared, proposed models can be rejected as uninformative. Where cases have striking similarities over numerous key characteristics, there is compelling support for a fundamental structure among them.

However, human knowledge is wildly varible in format. How is it possible to align diverse forms of knowledge into one common resource?

Stay tuned for the next post on the FAMILIAR Core.

FAMILIAR Part 3: General System Theory

Ludwig von Bertalanffy was an Austrian-born biologist who was a major figure in the development of the systems theory.

Around the mid-20th century he was concerned about the overemphasis on the reductionistic approach and the resulting fragmentation of science. In 1968 he published his book General System Theory where he wrote:

A consequence of the existence of general system properties is the appearance of structural similarities or isomorphisms in different fields. There are correspondences in the principles that govern the behaviour of entities that are, intrinsically, widely different. To take a simple example, an exponential law of growth applies to certain bacterial cells, to populations of bacteria, of animals or humans, and to the progress of scientific research measured by the number of publications in genetics or science in general.

System isomorphisms also appear in problems which are recalcitrant to quantitative analysis but are nevertheless of great intrinsic interest. There are, for example, isomorphies between biological systems and 'epiorganisms' like animal communities and human societies.

It seems therefore that a general system theory of systems would be a useful tool providing, on the one hand, models that can be used in, and transferred to, different fields, and safeguarding, on the other hand, from vague analogies which often have marred the progress in these fields.

Bertalanffy, together with some of his contemporaries, noted that regulation via feedback loops allow a system to maintain stability (today this field of study is called cybernetics).

He was also interested in the apparent contradiction between the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the increase in organizational complexity of living systems during embryo development and evolution. He proposed an idea that resolves this:

According to the second principle of thermodynamics, the general trend of events in physical nature is towards states of maximum disorder and levelling down of differences, with the so-called heat death of the universe as the final outlook, when all energy is degraded into evenly distributed heat of low temperature, and the world process comes to a stop.

In contrast, the living world shows, in embryonic development and in evolution, a transition towards higher order, heterogeneity, and organization.

But on the basis of the theory of open systems, the apparent contradiction between entropy and evolution disappears. In all irreversible processes, entropy must increase. Therefore, the change of entropy in closed systems is always positive; order is continually destroyed.

In open systems, however, we have not only production of entropy due to irreversible processes, but also import of entropy which may well be negative. This is the case in the living organism which imports complex molecules high in free energy. Thus, living systems, maintaining themselves in a steady state, can avoid the increase of entropy, and may even develop towards states of increased order and organization.

Bertalanffy's concept of an open system is usually illustrated like this:















Input refers to the stimuli and imported materials from the external environment, throughput refers to the processes within the system, and output refers to the resulting response or exported materials.

To emphasize the importance of feedback control, this version is also used:














Bertalanffy's open system model inspired biologist James Grier Miller to examine the applicability of systems theory to living systems.

Miller published Living Systems Theory in 1978, expounding his general theory about the existence of all living systems, their structure, interaction, behavior and development. He proposed that living systems must contain 20 critical subsystems which he later arranged into 8 nested hierarchical levels:















Miller noted that:

All nature is a continuum. The endless complexity of life is organized into patterns which repeat themselves—theme and variations—at each level of system. These similarities and differences are proper concerns for science. From the ceaseless streaming of protoplasm to the many-vectored activities of supranational systems, there are continuous flows through living systems as they maintain their highly organized steady states.

His observation of recursive patterns is likely to be inspired by the work of Benoît Mandebrot, the mathematician who founded the field of fractal geometry. Mandebrot observed that many objects in nature exhibited self-similarity and scale invariance - parts that are made up of smaller scale versions of the overall shape.



















Interestingly, neither Bertalanffy nor Miller made any big impact on the field of biology itself, which in the wake of monumental discoveries of DNA and the central dogma, has remained firmly rooted in the reductionist paradigm.

General System Theory has become influential mainly in information science and cybernetics, whereas Living Systems Theory is more commonly read in sociology.

That is why as a neuroscience undergrad I had never heard of these guys and was completely unaware of systems theory, even though I regularly lamented with one of my fellow students about the lack of a systems interpretation of neuronal behaviour.

I first read Bertalanffy in 2005 when I picked up his General System Theory from the NUS library during the height of the popularity of the buzzword "Systems Biology". I wanted to know all this "systems" talk really meant, apart from expensive, shiny new high-throughput liquid handling robots.

I found his book to be quite repetitive but I was impressed by his open systems model, which I now call the "Bertalanffy Box". Excitedly, I wrote an article about it which was published in a student's magazine (GSS Journal 2005).

Here is an exerpt:

Actually, Systems Biology is not strictly a new idea. Some aspects of this perspective can be traced as far back as Plato! The modern synthesis of its fundamental concepts, however, first appeared in the General System Theory (GST) proposed by biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the late 1940s. At that time, Bertalanffy was disturbed by what he saw as the overspecialization and fragmentation of science. He felt that the standard reductionistic approach to science was driving scientists to obsess over tiny details that may not advance the understanding of the big picture. His solution was to find some common patterns of organization in nature which could help unify the sciences and even the humanities together.

In a nutshell, the GST is a holistic theory that describes a complex system by examining the interactions between its components, rather than by analyzing the detailed structure of each component. Gesalt psychologists say that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” an illustration which is also valid for the GST. In the context of biology, Bertalanffy described living organisms as “open systems” that interacts comprehensively with their environment. Next, he recognized that complex systems have emergent properties that cannot be predicted by knowing the properties of its components. In addition, he observed that such a system can also exert control over its components, such as in homeostasis, by using feedback loops.

Although I liked the simplicity of the Bertalanffy box, I found it to be incomplete and aesthetically displeasing. It is only focused on one particular system and has no scaleable aspects, thus it cannot take into account the inputs that might have arrived from another organization level, and ignores the outputs that will affect another organization level.

While recuperating from an illness in a hospital, I decided to improve the Bertalanffy box by integrating Bertalanffy's idea with Mandebrot's (I hadn't read Miller yet), and this is the result:















The "extended" Bertalanffy box (which I called a "leaky" open system at that time) features a system that is affected by both internal and external inputs and contributes outputs to both internal and external states. Thus, it is embedded in an organization level with constant interactions with lower, adjacent and higher levels.

Now I had a repeatable unit that is scaleable and conceptually self-similar.

To illustrate the self-similar aspect in a more visually striking manner, I designed this diagram about a year ago:















Here you can see a complex system opened to reveal the interactions in its intrinsic environment. It is made up of complex systems which are in turn made of smaller complex systems. With this simple repeating unit, you can model a system of any amount of complexity.

I hope I have clearly explained the "Fractal" aspect of FAMILIAR.

But what about the "Analog" part?

Stay tuned for my next post on heroes' journeys and multispecies alignments.

FAMILIAR Part 2: Why No Runaway Complexity?

Long time Fresh Brainz readers probably know that my undergrad training was not in molecular biology, but in neuroscience.

My interest in systems science started about 10 years ago when I learnt a bizarre fact about neurons - that the transmission of neural impulses was a probabilistic process.

The firing of a neuronal action potential is not perfectly reliable because it depends on a complex interplay of input signals such as EPSPs, IPSPs and internal states such as the refractory period.

Due to the inherent unpredictability of any single neuron, vertebrates have to rely on a large number of neurons in each nerve in order to convey a reliable signal to other parts of the body.

This struck me as something that is particularly odd.

If you can't even trust one neuron to do its job, how can you trust a thousand of them?!??

Why won't they simply misfire all over the place and garble the signal?

The nervous system has often been compared with human technology such as computers, but you'd be barking mad to try design a computer using millions of components that are not 100% reliable.

These questions perplexed me during my undergrad years and also in my first job as a research assistant in neuroscience. What was even more puzzling then was the realization that other researchers around me simply took this fact for granted - nobody would explain to me why a bunch of unreliable parts could suddenly make a reliable system.

As I started grad school in 2004, I noticed that a similar situation occurs in cell biology. In an unfinished article entitled "Brief thoughts on the Inception of Systems" I wrote:

A cell is an amazing mixed bag of biochemical processes, some of them quite straightforward, others so convoluted that Occam’s razor would not find its mark there.

Unlike the oft used analogy of a factory, each cell is made up of components that do not fit together clearly like a clock. For example, many proteins have multiple roles across several different pathways. From cell to cell, proteins can have different functions depending on where and when it is expressed.

The compounded variability from the probabilistic performance of each intracellular player should become so large so as to make an integrated system impossible.

What I am saying is, if one wanted to make a reliable machine to fulfill a very specific function, one would not deliberately use components with variable and probabilistic characteristics. But yet cells do exists, and are quite stable and reliable. How can this be?

How indeed?

Let me illustrate this problem with a graph.















When the number of components in a system is small, the total number of interactions is limited and predictability of component behaviour is high.

This is why we can play games like pool and snooker - we can tell where the target balls will end up.

As the number of components increase, the total number of interactions increase exponentially to such an extent that it quickly becomes impossible to know exactly what will happen.

Imagine a pool table with thousands of balls.

In addition, the probabilistic behaviour of each component makes this problem far, far worse.

Imagine a pool table with thousands of unbalanced balls!

By this additive concept, it should be impossible for any limited sentient being to comprehend much of the Universe, since it consists of trillions upon trillions of probabilistic subatomic particles in constant interaction.

But here lies the trick...















In some cases, the increasing number of components start to exhibit emergent properties, forming a complex system. The whole system itself becomes reliable enough to be a "component" (or module) of another larger system.

Each successive complex system then occupies a higher organization level in a hierarchical structure, so that the total number of "component" interactions at the higher organization level never gets out of hand.

This why we can predict the trajectory of a cannonball with such accuracy, even though we can never predict the exact locations of all the component electrons in a cannonball.

There is no runaway complexity because complexity appears "fold in" on itself with each successive organization level.

But how exactly does a complex system make itself reliable and predictable?

Stay tuned for my next article about Ludwig von Bertalanffy and his General System Theory.

FAMILIAR: Unity of Knowledge

It is with great reluctance that I reveal my new model of organizing and creating new knowledge, called FAMILIAR (Fractal-Analog Method of Integrating Limitless Information into Aligned Resources), partly because I had planned to refine this idea further so that I can publish it properly in a book, and partly because I'm not best friends with humanity right now and I don't want my ideas to fall into the hands of the people I hate.

As it currently stands, the model has some holes and is fairly useless, but when decked with sufficient relevant data it has some potentially powerful implications.

This is an exclusive privilege for Fresh Brainz readers only - please do not pass this knowledge to scumbag bankers, dickhead politicians and fuckfaced lawyers because they can turn this idea into a weapon for controlling everyone.

Many thanks.

**********

"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible." - Albert Einstein

Indeed, considering its complexity and vastness, the most mysterious thing about the Universe is the fact we can even begin to understand it.

Strangely enough, the reality is that the vast majority of living systems are routinely capable of coping with the staggering complexity of the Universe. People and microbes alike experience perfectly happy lives without needing to know the existence of quarks or quasars.

The key to this is the ability to prioritize and react only to a few immediately relevant aspects of the total complexity - to differentiate between knowledge and data.

Scientifically, "knowledge" comprises a collection of data (or fact) and an explanatory structure (or theory) that organizes the data into a meaningful whole. While data constitutes an important aspect of knowledge, by itself it is not knowledge. In fact, data that cannot yet be aligned into any coherent explanatory structure will usually be regarded as noise.

It doesn't take a genius to perceive the difference between knowledge and noise; the tiniest single-celled organism instinctively ignores most of the stimuli it receives from its environment and responds to only some of them that pose an immediate threat or benefit.

Likewise, scientific knowledge doesn't directly mimick the full complexity of a given system, but brutally simplifies it into some basic principles that are comprehensible and useful to the human mind, thus allowing testable predictions and technologies to be produced.

This simplification process is often accused by opponents of rational inquiry to be fatally flawed because it is unavoidably tentative and incomplete.

How can anyone claim to understand the whole Universe if one has only examined an infinitesimal fraction of it?

Here at Fresh Brainz, we think that such a feat is possible once you appreciate the crucial distinction between knowledge and data, and understand the core structure of systems that reiterate themselves over and over again, from the subatomic world, through the intricacies of cells, organisms and societies to the interactions of galactic clusters.

I should emphasize again that as limited beings we can never hope to collect every last bit of data about the Universe, but we can achieve an increasingly complete knowledge about the Universe.

FAMILIAR is a simple, scaleable model that seeks to organize and unite all aspects of human knowledge so that we can learn about the core structure of systems and in doing so, gradually approach a complete understanding of our Universe.

Stay tuned for the next post about runaway complexity.


Would you like to know more?
- Prologue to FAMILIAR: Redundancy Redundancy