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  • Paul Krugman wins the 2008 Nobel for Economics (Sujatha)

    Krugman
    Paul Krugman has won this year’s economics Nobel Prize.

    http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/paul-krugman-wins-economics-nobel/?hp

    (Thanks for the link, Ruchira.)

    In a charmingly self-deprecating interview on the New York Times:

    “For economists, this is a validation but not news. We know what
    each other have been up to,” Mr. Krugman said. “For readers of the
    column, maybe they will read a little more carefully when I’m being
    economistic, or maybe have a little more tolerance when I’m being
    boring.”

    He said that he does not expect his critics to let him off any easier because of his new accolade, though.

    “I think we’ve learned this when we see Joe Stiglitz writing,” Mr.
    Krugman said, referring to the winner of the economics Nobel in 2001.
    “I haven’t noticed him getting an easy time. People just say, ‘Sure,
    he’s a great Nobel laureate and he’s very smart, but he still doesn’t
    know what he’s talking about in this situation.’ I’m sure I’ll get the
    same thing.”

    Update:

    Despite Ruchira’s and my suspicion that his recent prominence in denouncing the set of events that led to the market meltdown played a decisive role in confirming his win of the Nobel prize, the prize committee indicated otherwise:

    Perhaps better known as a columnist than an economist to the public, Krugman has also come out forcefully against John McCain during the economic meltdown, saying the Republican presidential candidate
    is "more frightening now than he was a few weeks ago." Krugman
    (pronounced KROOG-man) also has derided the Republicans as becoming
    "the party of stupid."

    Tore Ellingsen, a member of the prize committee, acknowledged that
    Krugman was an "opinion maker" but added that he was honored on the
    merits of his economic research, not his political commentary.

    "We disregard everything except for the scientific merits," Ellingsen told The Associated Press.

    The 55-year-old American economist was the lone winner of the 10
    million kronor ($1.4 million) award and the latest in a string of
    American researchers to be honored. It was only the second time since
    2000 that a single laureate won the prize, which is typically shared by
    two or three researchers.

  • Amazing High Speed Photos (Sujatha)

    Enjoy!

  • Who Is “That One”? (Joe)

    Apparently he is "a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as President of the United States."  Or so says John McCain.

    One interesting thing about that Boston Globe article: it sure looks as if John McCain corrected a supporter’s assertion that Obama is "an Arab" — i.e., a secret Muslim — with the counter-assertion that Obama is a good family man who is wrong on the issues.  Either this is incredibly irresponsible journalism, or John McCain thinks and/or is saying that Arab heritage (or Islamic faith) is counterposed with being a decent human being.

    One other bizarre thing that surfaces in that article: the popularity of the Republicans’ "Obama is the most liberal Senator" meme.  Even if you think that Obama has been a very liberal Senator, this is just absurd (and I would not agree with such a characterization).  There’s no way that Obama’s voting record and past statements even approach those of, say, Ted Kennedy or Russ Feingold.

  • What’s really not going on in this election? (Joe)

    "Obama isn’t practicing any kind of crouching Rezko hidden Ayers plausibility fu."

  • Who won the debate? – “That one.” (Sujatha)

    Debate
    I think  this article by Mary Lyon mirrors my impressions quite well on the presidential debate last night, and saves me the trouble of having to write in detail about it.

  • Nobel Quibbles (Sujatha)

    The Nobel prize for medicine this year has been awarded to HIV and HPV pioneers: Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi of France (HIV)  and Harald zur Hausen of Germany (HPV).

    "Luc Montagnier,
    director of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, and
    Francoise Barre-Sinoussi of the Institut Pasteur won half the prize of
    10 million Swedish crowns ($1.4 million) for discovering the virus that
    has killed 25 million people since it was identified in the 1980s.

    Dr. Harald zur Hausen of the University of Duesseldorf and a former director of the German Cancer Research Center shared the other half of the prize for work that went against the established opinion about the cause of cervical cancer.

    "The three laureates have discovered two new viruses of great
    importance and the result of that has led to an improved global
    health," said Jan Andersson, a member of the Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute.

    The discoveries made it possible to diagnose both infections, and led
    to the development of two vaccines that prevent cervical cancer, and
    more than 20 drugs that can keep HIV patients healthy."

    Hiv
    But this isn’t without controversy, as US researcher Robert Gallo feels that he should share credit with the French scientists for the discovery of HIV.

    "U.S. researcher Dr. Robert Gallo was locked in a dispute with
    Montagnier in the 1980s over the relative importance of their roles in
    groundbreaking research into HIV and its role in AIDS. Gallo told The
    Associated Press that he was disappointed at not being included in the
    prize.

    Montagnier told the AP in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where he
    is attending an international AIDS conference, that he was still
    optimistic about conquering the disease.

    The prize, he said, "encourages us all to keep going until we reach the goal at the end of this effort."

    Montagnier said he wished the prize had also gone to Gallo.

    "It is certain that he deserved this as much as us two," he said."

    Nobel prizes cannot be shared by more than three awardees, and in this case, while Gallo’s contribution to establishing the connection between HIV and AIDS and the technical advances to isolate the HIV were seminal, the Nobel prize committee decided that the work performed by Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi in first discovering and characterizing the virus was more deserving.

    Gallo’s dispute with Montaigner over who should get credit for the HIV discovery goes back to the late ’80’s:

    His dispute with Montagnier reached such a level in 1987 that
    then-President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac of
    France penned an agreement dividing millions of dollars in royalties
    from the AIDS blood test. The settlement led to an agreement that
    officially credited the Gallo and Montagnier labs with co-discovering
    the virus.

    In the 1990s, however, the U.S. government
    acknowledged that the French deserved a greater share of the royalties.
    The admission solidified the French position that Montagnier had
    isolated the virus in 1983, a year before Gallo.

    It might be that Eurocentricism played a role in this selection (i.e. in keeping it between the French researchers, rather than splitting between Montagnier and Gallo), but disappointments and surprises aside, it definitely makes an interesting case for how to honor all those who were excluded from these prizes, despite their significant contributions to the various fields that are awarded Nobel prizes.

    Hpv
    A little more detail about Harald zur Hausen’s discovery that the Human Papilloma Virus is an etiologic agent in a variety of cancers, including cervical cancer, based on which vaccines have been recently developed and approved for use in the general population here in another pre-Nobel article:

    In his early work, zur Hausen demonstrated that Burkitt’s lymphoma
    cells contained Epstein-Barr viral DNA, thus proving that viruses can
    persist in human tumor cells, and are associated with tumor growth. Zur
    Hausen and his colleagues were also able to demonstrate the association
    of Epstein-Barr virus in epithelial cells of nasopharyngeal carcinoma.

    …

    In the 1970s and 1980s, zur Hausen provided the key investigative
    findings that led to the recognition that certain types of HPV are the
    etiologic agents of cervical cancer. This observation and the detailed
    studies that followed provided the basis for the extensive
    epidemiologic studies that independently validated the importance of
    these findings worldwide. Zur Hausen’s subsequent research on the
    immunogenicity of this virus set the stage for the development of a
    vaccine.

    "Dr. zur Hausen is responsible for a body of scientific research that
    laid the foundation for one of the most important events of the past
    year in cancer research and public health – the approval of an
    effective vaccine for HPV," said Margaret Foti, Ph.D., M.D. (h.c.),
    AACR chief executive officer. "We expect this vaccine will lead to a
    marked decrease in the incidence of cervical cancer and ultimately
    protect countless young women from this disease."

    Zur Hausen’s work has also linked HPV to several other cancers
    including laryngeal carcinoma, penile carcinoma, and epidermal
    dysplasia.

    Gardasil, a controversial vaccine to guard against the HPV strains causing the majority of cervical cancer still hogs the limelight occasionally, more due to the reports of dire adverse reactions (dizziness, neuropathies or worse) which have been reported in a tiny fraction of the several million shots administered so far. Dr.Zur Hausen’s work was undoubtedly the precursor which led to this vaccine being developed as a possible way to combat cervical cancer, even as its efficacy as a preventative therapy is still out before the jury.

    Note: For those who might not have seen this, Ruchira’s husband Dr. Sudhir Paul’s research in discovering a possible avenue of attack against the HIV, is highlighted in this post on A.B.

  • My Vacation Hold

    I will be leaving for India tomorrow and will return toward the end of the month. Unless I have something really interesting to report, I will not be posting during this period.  My co-authors will keep the front page refreshed as often as time permits. They may not be able to post daily or as frequently as I do. So please expect a slow down in the blogging rate during the month of October.

  • Irony of the Day (Joe)

    Way back in the day (last October) I went off on Dozier Internet Law for its absurd website terms-of-use page, which made a number of laughable legal claims; these appear to me to basically be intellectual-property claims couched in contract context.  I was particularly impressed by the You May Not Link Here Clause: "we … do not allow any links to our site without our express permission."

    Well, one Accidental Blogger reader recently brought to our attention a new suit filed by Dozier, in which it will reportedly sue an internet user for not linking to its website.*  Nice!

    —–
    * I hope or assume that this description is an oversimplification.  Really don’t care.  I just like the implication that you can be sued for linking to Dozier’s stupid website or, in the alternative, for precisely the opposite.

  • It’s Down to Obama and McCain, Now (Joe)

    I think Jack Balkin is absolutely correct in his assessment of the VP debate.  This is probably a mild victory for the Obama campaign.  Sarah Palin was picked to help push McCain over the top.  For a while, it seemed as if people might actually vote for the, as she called it, Palin-McCain ticket because of her — defying the normal rule that people vote for Presidents, not Vice Presidents.  Then she had her disastrous television interviews — the Katie Couric ones were particularly damaging — and she came across as incoherent and moronic.  She arguably made the bumbling George W. Bush (the 2000 version) seem intelligent and knowledgeable by comparison. 

    Then at the debate, Biden clearly "won," if people voted based on the VP selection.  But most important, Palin didn’t have that terrible moment of self-destruction.  I actually had half-expected a complete melt-down.  But unlike the Couric interview where she had to have known which questions were coming, for the debate she was clearly prepared.  True, she didn’t answer any of the questions, but rather would say "That’s a good question; instead, I’m going to talk about something else that’s written on my notes."  Without the major gaffe for media to repeat ad nauseam, she can just sort of fade out of the public consciousness. 

    Not as good as it could have been, but this is clearly a victory for Senator Obama.  The Republicans actually managed the debate with the sole intention of making Palin irrelevant, and they succeeded.  But gosh darn it (to borrow one of the Governor’s colloquialisms), they originally selected her to help the campaign.  If they just wanted safe, they would have been better off with Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty. 

    So now we’re left with Senators McCain and Obama.  With people worried about the economy, our guy is the one people trust on economic matters — probably because McCain’s expertise is limited to steroids in baseball and killing Iranians.  And even with the bailout, Americans are freaked out about the economy.  So doesn’t it seem like it’s going to continue to remain the central issue?  I think I’m talking myself into being optimistic about the election.

  • Setting up the stage for tonight’s debate

    The wingnuts are crying "foul" even before tonight’s debate has taken place. If Palin does well, it will be because she is smarter than the liberal media gave her credit for. If she tanks the blame goes to ….. moderator Gwen Ifill!

    If the Democrats were crafty about strategery, they would invite Tina Fey, in her Palin persona, to occupy a front row seat.

  • The coastal ecology after Ike

    In the last few weeks since Ike struck the coast of Texas, you have heard a lot about my thirteen days without electricity, entire neighborhoods without power and water and massive havoc wreaked on the infrastructure of Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula. All that pertains to man made edifices of modern living. Ike was a Cat 2 hurricane but with a huge span. Although it produced maximum wind gusts of around 110mph, it hovered over the region for a long time and the winds blew in a sustained manner for several hours. Its  prolonged presence over Texas  damaged not just buildings and electric poles but uprooted hundreds of thousands of trees, eroded beaches and mucked up bodies of fresh water. It will take mother nature a long time and several years of calm summer climate to repair the battered coastal terrain, making life very difficult for plants, marine life, birds and other animals who make their habitat in southeast Texas.

    Ike_debrisThousands of migrating warblers pass through the Bolivar Peninsula about this time every year, making one last stop for food and water before their 600-mile flight over the Gulf of Mexico.

    But the warblers and other migratory birds might not be able to find refuge for a while on the remote and particularly vulnerable place. Hurricane Ike stripped the birds’ favorite mulberry trees, leaving little fuel for their long journey ahead — one of the sobering consequences of the storm.

    Even without a major oil spill, Ike caused widespread environmental damage to Southeast Texas, ripping through the region’s barrier islands, washing debris into Galveston Bay and the Gulf, and imperiling animals, fish and plants by pouring excessive amounts of saltwater into marshes.

    "The extent of the damage won’t be known for a while," said Larry McKinney, executive director of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. "But it’s possible that we’ve had 20 to 30 years of damage at once."

    The upper Texas coast is already under stress because of development, rising seas and sinking land. The conditions have led to the rapid erosion of the shoreline, with as much as 10 feet washing away each year, by some estimates.

    The dunes and marshes matter because they act as a speed bump, reducing the strength of wind and waves and robbing hurricanes of the warm water that fuels them. Without the buffer, storms can move ashore unimpeded and do more damage.

    Amidst the damage and debris, weird things showed up after the storm. We saw surreal pictures on TV – of boats atop trees, terrified animals on roof and tree tops, cars cut into two with falling debris, refrigerators floating on water, hundreds of gallons of ice cream melting on a sidewalk before a convenience store, a seventy five story sky-scraper in downtown Houston with every window blown out on the east side. Last Saturday I heard about a truly unusual and whimsical piece of nature’s "art."  A friend of mine who owns a beach house in Galveston dropped by after having inspected her partially damaged house the previous day. The house sits on seventeen feet high stilts, so the damage to the main living quarters was not extensive. But downstairs everything that was not nailed down got washed away without a trace leaving behind three feet of mud and silt. But one item, a crab bucket, remained. It was upside down and stuck fast to the dry concrete. When my friend’s husband pulled it up, the bucket was full of water that had stood on dry ground for a week.  An upside down tower of water! What a neat idea for installation art!

    The soaking hurricane has also left people with a dry sense of humor.  My friend joked that when she and her husband are old and debilitated, a quick and painless way to die will be to take a couple of deck chairs and a few martinis to the beach and wait for a hurricane to strike.

  • An Unhealthy Obsession(Sujatha)

    Obs_2
    A couple of weeks ago, an insert containing a DVD was in my Sunday newspaper : ‘Obsession’, with the O represented by a Crescent and Star, well recognizable as the symbol of Islam, and the N ending in the business end of a machine gun. The linkage implied was all too clear, despite miniscule disclaimers to the contrary about the majority of Muslims being peaceful– that " Islam = Terrorism".
    The DVD purports to give an ‘insider’s view’ of the  ‘War against the West’, but I didn’t feel too keen to give that piece of propaganda any viewing, until a week ago, a second DVD arrived, this time in the mail. My, those are some determined people trying to get out their message. So I kept it aside, intending to view it when I could make the time, to see why it was generating generous quantities of protest letters to the editor.

    This morning, however, reading about a ‘Hazmat’ incident at a mosque in Dayton, it became all too clear what the target audience and the intended effect was.

    The Muslim community gathered Sunday, Sept. 28, 48 hours after an unknown irritant disrupted worship at the Islamic Society of Greater Dayton.
    "We were in the midst of the Fifth Prayer when people started coughing," said Ismail Gula, the society’s secretary.
    Gula said the building was evacuated and the service to break the daily fast of Ramadan continued at a nearby facility.
    He said he had no idea what might have caused the incident. "It might be anything," he said.
    Gula said he had received many calls of support from Christians and Jews over the weekend.
    …

    Also on Sunday, members of several Dayton religious groups were scheduled to view and discuss a DVD about Islamic radicalism mailed to some area homes and circulated with newspapers here and around the country.
    "Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West," was a paid advertising insert in the Dayton Daily News, Springfield News-Sun, Hamilton JournalNews and Middletown Journal, all owned by Cox Ohio Publishing, on Monday, Sept. 22. It appeared in more than 70 other newspapers nationwide.
    The Rev. Gary Percesepe, executive director of Greater Dayton Christian Connections, characterized the DVD as "fanning the flames of fear and prejudice against Muslims, with the potential to inspire hate crimes."

    What was the provenance of this DVD, which is being distributed by the millions through newspaper inserts and direct mail?  Why are they playing the fear card as in " The threat of Radical Islam is the most important issue facing us today…It’s our responsibility to ensure we can all make an informed vote in November"

    This NPR link sheds some more light on who is behind this:

    Obsession was produced by the Clarion Fund, a 501(c)(3) charity, which cannot get involved in campaign politics.
    But its spokesman has said the newspaper distribution had one purpose: to make terrorism a presidential campaign issue where it counts — in the battleground states. He said Clarion did this with a half-million dollar grant from a secret donor.
    And others have been promoting Obsession in other ways. Joe Wierzbicki, a political consultant, offered free copies of the DVD to listeners on a talk show in Detroit last month. He was promoting a free screening of Obsession on Sept. 11 in Dearborn, a city with a large Arab population.

    The DVD (at least the trailer and the couple of scenes that I deigned to watch) was rife with clips of Arabic and Iranian propaganda of kids yelling ‘Death to America’ , imagery of the aftermath of bombings in Israel, the ubiquitous footage of 9/11, a self described former PLO terrorist now reformed and equating Palestinian propaganda with the methods used by Nazis to revile Jews. The interesting twist is that the same techniques were being used to revile Muslims through a good part of the film (based on the chapter headings which were all vilifying ‘Radical Islam’).

    Where will it all end, this incitement to hate and violence? Will this Obsession convert Muslims into the new Jews, at least in America?

  • The Low Ranking Monkey and The Low Hanging Fruit

    We did have a presidential debate last Friday after Drama Queen John McCain (do read Frank Rich’s spot on analysis of McCain’s theatrics) managed to create a short lived suspense around the event. The inaugural debate has been characterized in the media as a lukewarm tie (the press didn’t get a single memorable one-liner and neither man drew much blood with verbal thrust and parry). Using boxing terms, the pundits have declared that the contest was close and depending on the political and personal leanings of the commentator, we were told both Obama and McCain won on points in the "content" part of the debate. But in "style," Obama was a knock-out winner – almost everyone, including TV viewers agreed that he looked decisively more "presidential" than the grumpy old man he debated. While Obama was relaxed and gracious, addressing moderator Jim Lehrer as well as his opponent, McCain looked churlish, angry and cagey – refusing to look at Obama for 90+ minutes.

    Obamamccain_handshakeMcCain’s incredible feat of totally avoiding eye contact with his challenger did not go unnoticed. The first thing my husband said when the debate got over was, "Not once did McCain look at Obama!"  The post debate TV analysts also picked up on it. I don’t know whether you noticed but even during the first handshake and the one at the end, Obama looked straight down at McCain while the latter averted his eyes after a fleeting and unfocused glance in Obama’s general direction.

    Determined to show his superiority, McCain repeatedly stated, "Sen Obama doesn’t understand," or "Sen Obama doesn’t know."  To burnish his own standing as a man who’s been around the globe a few times, he dropped names repeatedly – of distant and obscure places as also those of exotic (and obsolete) political figures. He rattled off anecdotes about Henry Kissinger, Tymoshenko, Yushchenko, Waziristan and Sebastopol although he stumbled over Ahmadinejad a couple of times! I felt I was watching a B-grade spy movie from the 1970s!

    McCain’s petulance and dismissiveness have been variously interpreted as anger, disdain and contempt for Obama whom he considers an empty suit, light on experience and heavy on silver tongued rhetoric. It is entirely plausible that McCain was affected by any or all of those emotions.  But there may be another credible explanation – McCain was fearful of his  youthful opponent and exhibited the body language of a nervous male primate. Writes a reader on Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo:

    I think people really are missing the point about McCain’s failure to look at Obama. McCain was afraid of Obama. It was really clear–look at how much McCain blinked in the first half hour. I study monkey behavior–low ranking monkeys don’t look at high ranking monkeys. In a physical, instinctive sense, Obama owned McCain tonight and I think the instant polling reflects that.

    Low-ranking monkey indeed – a jarring realization for an arrogant man who is used to being the alpha-male at most gatherings.

    I will be leaving for a longish trip in a week and will miss the remaining two presidential debates. Fortunately, I will be here to watch next Thursday’s vice-presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. Palin, the perky running mate of John McCain has shown her aptitude for reading from a teleprompter. But the very few times that she has faced questions from the press "unescorted," she has been exposed for the ignoramus that she truly is. Her last "outing," when she gave an interview to CBS anchor Katie Couric, was so full of imbecility that even some conservatives are calling for her withdrawal from the GOP ticket. Her upcoming stint at the podium with Biden is likely to resemble a Demolition Derby, media mavens are saying.

    I should relax, right?  Things seem to be going okay for the Dems with poll numbers up and what not. But although my general outlook in life can be characterized as "sunny" for the most part, like Matt, I am a pessimist when it comes to the political fortune of Democrats. Their bad luck in national politics in recent years defies logic. I cannot relax until I find out what Palin will do in the debate … and more important, how Biden will behave.  Senator Biden, knowledgeable though he is, is also a first class windbag who doesn’t listen well to others.  I am afraid that he may get caught up in the magic of his own garrulity and start speechifying. He could also fall victim to a misplaced sense of chivalry and let Palin off easy. Palin on the other hand, could get away by mouthing inane sound bites and the occasional below-the-belt punch line without answering a single question seriously. The McCain campaign has negotiated a debate format where this may come to pass. Will Biden have the gumption or the presence of mind to challenge her?  I hope so but am not too sure. The bar is now so low for Palin that she will get points for just showing up. On the other hand, Biden, a veteran debater on the senate floor, may stray into a rambling, pedantic trajectory and thereby fail to pluck the "low hanging fruit" that Sarah Palin is as a political adversary. We’ll see.

  • Science as Art (Sujatha)

    Glass_forest_500
    The 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge winners.

  • Feeling Human Again!

    The electricity in our house is back after thirteen interminable days of power outage.  On Thursday at 9:45pm while I was in my neighbor’s kitchen boiling water to fill the thermos, a utility truck came by and at 10:15pm, the house was humming with familiar sounds of whirring appliances. The funny thing is that I was told every day by Center Point Energy that the transformer that was the culprit for our prolonged misery could not be repaired until a bucket truck became available. The truck that finally came to our rescue was not of the bucket variety. The technician climbed the pole with the help of clamps – like a coconut tree climber.

    Although the financial hurricane on Wall Street side-swiped the natural disaster story on the Texas coast off the front pages of the news, Houstonians will remember Ike for a long time to come and Galvestonians, for even longer.