Looking for more information about the West Africa Ebola crisis

It's been hard to find good reporting about the West Africa Ebola crisis, at least here in the states.

Most of the coverage has involved the Dr. Kent Brantly story, which is certainly a compelling story, but there is much more I'd like to know.

I've found a few good articles, though.

A detailed article carried by ABC News helps in explaining why it is so hard to combat the epidemic: Ebola Outbreak Feeds on Fear, Anger, Rumors

Many health care workers and aid workers have said one cause for the rapid spread of the Ebola virus is the public's general mistrust of the government. Among the rumors about this disease:

• Ebola does not exist and government workers are using it as an excuse to steal organs to sell on the black market.
• The government is pretending Liberia has Ebola so they'll have an opportunity to receive and then abuse donated funds.
• If a person goes to the hospital with a disease that has symptoms that mirror those of Ebola, such as malaria, that person will end up getting Ebola from the hospital.
• Medical staffers are so afraid to catch Ebola, they neglect patients in the quarantine unit and let them starve to death.
• Because of the noxious fumes that come from the solution workers use to spray affected areas, some people believe the spray is meant to kill them, and they don't want workers to come into their communities.

Rumors such as the ones listed above overshadow the work done by the overextended aid workers and local medical professionals who risk their lives on the front lines of the battle against Ebola. Fear and mistrust has caused some community members to sometimes react violently to the arrival of medical professionals in their communities.

On the NPR site, transcripts of two interesting interviews:

• Fear, Caution As Doctors Fight Ebola On The Ground

  SAYAH: We need more people. We need more actors to be involved in educating the population, the communities, sensitizing them about the fact that the key to resolving this is that people come and get treated and not hide their sick and not have secret burials. We have a lot of work ahead. It's now in three countries in multiple sites. We've never seen it before. Doctors Without Borders has stretched its capacity to respond. We're doing the best we can but I think many more actors need to be mobilized.

• Sierra Leone, Struggling With Ebola, Passes On Africa Summit

  FOFANA: Well, it has been difficult because it's never been here before. And health workers were not prepared for Ebola when eventually it did emerge. And lots of the health workers have died in all three countries. About in the region of 100 health workers have contracted the virus and at least half that number have died. We have been told by some nurses that the personal protective gear that they have been given is not good enough. They say the clothing is very thin, and they do not feel very much secure in them.

And the BBC has been doing some excellent reporting:

• Living in the shadow of Ebola

  I spent an instructive couple of hours at the weekend with a woman from Finland. Eeva was once a midwife, but she's just finished a five-week stint with a Red Cross team that has been going door to door in Kailahun province, the border region where Ebola first arrived in Sierra Leone.

  She was on what's known as a sensitisation mission, explaining to people exactly how the virus spreads and how to avoid it.

  There are three simple rules, she told me.

• Ebola outbreak: US experts to head to West Africa

  Dr Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced the new US measures in an interview with ABC's This Week.

  "We do know how to stop Ebola. It's old-fashioned plain and simple public health: find the patients, make sure they get treated, find their contacts, track them, educate people, do infection control in hospitals."

Let's continue talking about privacy and surveillance

It's been 14 months now since the Edward Snowden story broke.

During that time, there has been a conversation of sorts. I wish that more had participated; I wish that more had resulted.

But I'm pleased, at least, that the conversation continues.

Some have been focusing on the economic and commercial aspects of the conversation:

• Personal Privacy Is Only One of the Costs of NSA Surveillance

  The economic costs of NSA surveillance can be difficult to gauge, given that it can be hard to know when the erosion of a company’s business is due solely to anger over government spying. Sometimes, there is little more than anecdotal evidence to go on. But when the German government, for example, specifically cites NSA surveillance as the reason it canceled a lucrative network contract with Verizon, there is little doubt that U.S. spying policies are having a negative impact on business.

• Report Says Backlash From NSA's Surveillance Programs Will Cost Private Sector Billions Of Dollars

  Also directly affecting US companies is a future full of increased compliance costs as countries move towards data sovereignty. This means tech companies like Facebook and Google will need to build local data centers if they wish to keep citizens in affected countries as users. The European Parliament's new data protection law could easily result in massive fines for US companies.

Others have been looking at the changing relationship between the American scientific community and its most important patron, the U.S. Government:

• Mathematicians Discuss the Snowden Revelations

  The only reason I am putting these words down now is the feeling of intense betrayal I suffered when I learned how my government and the leadership of my intelligence community took the work I and many others did over many years, with a genuine desire to prevent another 9/11 attack, and subverted it in ways that run totally counter to the founding principles of the United States, that cause huge harm to the US economy, and that moreover almost certainly weaken our ability to defend ourselves.

• The Mathematical Community and the National Security Agency

  We face a variety of threats -- from car accidents, which take about as many lives each month as the 9/11 tragedy, to weather (ranging from sudden disasters, such as hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, to the dangers from climate change), to global avian flu pandemics. The moves taken in the name of fighting terrorism, including the intrusive NSA data collection that has recently come to light and more generally the militarization of our society, are not justified by the dangers we currently face from terrorism.

• NSA and the Snowden Issues

  NSA's intelligence activities stem from a foreign-intelligence requirement -- initiated by one or more Executive Branch intelligence consumers (the White House, Department of State, Department of Defense, etc.), vetted through the Justice Department as a valid need -- and run according to a process managed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

And still others are looking at other aspects of the privacy-vs-surveillance debate:

• Why were CERT researchers attacking Tor?

  CERT was set up in the aftermath of the Morris Worm as a clearinghouse for vulnerability information. The purpose of CERT was to (1) prevent attacks by (2) channeling vulnerability information to vendors and eventually (3) informing the public. Yet here, CERT staff (1) carried out a large-scale, long-lasting attack while (2) withholding vulnerability information from the vendor, and now, even after the vulnerability has been fixed, (3) withholding the same information from the public.

• Cryptographer Adi Shamir Prevented from Attending NSA History Conference

  As a friend of the US I am deeply worried that if you continue to delay visas in such a way, the only thing you will achieve is to alienate many world-famous foreign scientists, forcing them to increase their cooperation with European or Chinese scientists whose countries roll the red carpet for such visits. Is this really in the US best interest?

  Best personal wishes, and apologies for not being able to meet you in person,

  Adi Shamir

• US State Department: Let in cryptographers and other scientists

  I’ve learned from colleagues that, over the past year, foreign-born scientists have been having enormously more trouble getting visas to enter the US than they used to. The problem, I’m told, is particularly severe for cryptographers: embassy clerks are now instructed to ask specifically whether computer scientists seeking to enter the US work in cryptography. If an applicant answers “yes,” it triggers a special process.

• The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control

  The lack of official oversight is one of Binney’s key concerns, particularly of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa), which is held out by NSA defenders as a sign of the surveillance scheme's constitutionality.

  “The Fisa court has only the government’s point of view”, he argued. “There are no other views for the judges to consider.

None of these topics are simple; none of these conversations are easy.

We must keep the discussion going.

What are "halachic considerations"?

I'm sorry, I am not well-educated in these areas: IDF declares death of missing officer Hadar Goldin

The IDF spokesman announced early on Sunday morning that at 11:25 p.m. on Saturday, the Chief Rabbi of the IDF, Brigadier Gen. Rafi Peretz, declared the death of IDF officer Lt. Hadar Goldin, who fell in battle in the Gaza Strip on Friday.

The decision was made according to the findings of a special board, headed by the rabbi, who consideration medical, halachic and other relevant considerations.

There is lots of subtlety here that eludes me, sadly: IDF determines 2nd Lt. Hadar Goldin, previously considered captured in Gaza, is dead

The conclusion was based on forensic evidence from the scene of the attack,a statement by the IDF Spokesperson's Unit said. It added that prior to the decision, religious, medical and other relevant issues were taken under consideration.

I fear that behind these carefully considered, carefully presented words there is nothing but sadness.

This is how a tragic friendly fire incident is described, yes?

Please, somebody, somehow, bring these people some peace.

Let's hear it for the old guys!

James Tarjan was one of the top chess players in the country when I was learning chess as a child in the early 1970's.

I knew he had stopped playing chess, but I had absolutely no idea that he had become a librarian!

He's apparently been living just 75 miles away from me for the last 25 years, working at the Santa Cruz public library.

Dana MacKenzie takes up the story: Rip Van Winkle Returns.

... James Tarjan, a grandmaster and frequent contender for the U.S. championship in the 1970s who has not played a single tournament game since 1984. He dropped out of chess and for at least the last ten or fifteen years he has been a librarian for the Santa Cruz Public Library.

It looks like he's still playing well at the open, with 4.5 points out of 6 rounds.

Way to go, GM Tarjan!

Random links for August 1st

With all the big issues going on nowadays, a lot of this seems pretty trivial. Still, I find things like this interesting, so I put them on my blog.

• 'We need more': Fight against Ebola virus thin on the ground

  So there must be a cast of thousands in there, deploying equipment, medications and vaccines, and dispensing advice, right?

  Wrong.

• How we treat Ebola

  When Ebola haemorrhagic fever broke out recently in Guinea, West Africa, MSF set up three specialised treatment centres in the worst-hit areas. Ebola is so infectious -- and so deadly -- that patients need to be treated in isolation by staff wearing special protective clothing. Emergency coordinator Henry Gray and logistician Pascal Piguet, both just back from Guinea, explain why, with Ebola, every little detail counts.

• NATO's Underground Roman Super-Quarry

  There is an underground Roman-era quarry in The Netherlands that, when you exit, you will find that you have crossed an invisible international border somewhere down there in the darkness, and that you are now stepping out into Belgium; or perhaps it's the other way around, that there is an underground Roman-era quarry in Belgium that, when you exit, you will find that you have crossed an invisible international border somewhere down there in the darkness, and that you are now stepping out into The Netherlands.

• Life on the Subsurface: An Interview with Penelope Boston

  Boston has worked with the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program (NIAC) to develop protocols for both human extraterrestrial cave habitation and for subterranean life-detection missions on Mars, life which she believes is highly likely to exist.

• Living up to Your (Business) Ideals

  If you want to live up to your business ideals, you have to take the time to authentically identify your values, the things you care about. You also have to commit to the ongoing tending and cultivation of those values in your organization. It is not a “set it and forget it” scenario.

• Being Profitable

  Maybe time is the most important factor for you. How much can everyone work? How much does everyone want to work? How much must you then charge for that time to end up with salaries you can be content with?

• git Flight Rules

  Flight Rules are the hard-earned body of knowledge recorded in manuals that list, step-by-step, what to do if X occurs, and why. Essentially, they are extremely detailed, scenario-specific standard operating procedures.

• Hybrid Logical Clocks

  Physical Time (PT) leverages on physical clocks at nodes that are synchronized using the Network Time Protocol (NTP). PT also has several drawbacks. Firstly, in a geographically distributed system obtaining precise clock synchronization is very hard; there will unavoidably be uncertainty intervals. Secondly, PT has several kinks such as leap seconds and non-monotonic updates. And, when the uncertainty intervals are overlapping, PT cannot order events and you end up with inconsistent snapshots as the one shown below.

• A Quick Introduction to CoreOS

  CoreOS, in case you haven’t heard of it, is a highly streamlined Linux distribution designed with containers, massive server deployments, and distributed systems/applications in mind.

• Touch events on the pathfinding pages

  For my pathfinding pages I wanted to support "painting" on the map to make or erase walls. When you change the map, the pathfinding algorithm updates the paths.

• Tom Brady is the loneliest quarterback on the planet

  I thought, "the three-time Super Bowl winner and one of his wide receivers trying to high-five and missing each other's hands? That's pretty funny!" Oh no. What is funnier still is Brady trying to high-five one or more of his teammates and the other players totally ignoring him. What's even funnier than that? This has happened over and over again.

Desert news

Since I happened to be in the desert last week, I've been somewhat sensitive to desert news.

So I found these interesting:

• Sahara Dust Produces Massive Bahama Carbon Sink

  This post was inspired by a terrific new and important paper that speaks to the role of Saharan dust, the iron and other mineral micronutrients it carries to the ocean, and how this results in a new explanation of the power and potency of ocean photosynthesis in regulating global CO2. Once again we find that the living ocean is not merely a chemical test tube but rather a complex living ecology. But sometimes the chemistry shines through as well or I should say the bio-chemistry.

  In short the authors show that when Sahara dust arrives in the Bahamas cyano-bacteria, what we used to call blue-green algae, bloom. As they bloom their photosynthesis removes CO2 from the water making the pH locally rise, alleviating ocean acidification. That blooming rise of ocean pH to a slightly more alkaline state results in what the Bahamanian’s have long called “Ocean Whitings” where the ocean becomes white like milk.

• Pioneering environmental project taking root in the sand

  A one hectare site outside Doha, Qatar, will soon host the SFP AS Pilot Plant. It will contain a unique combination of promising environmental technologies carefully integrated in a system to maximize beneficial synergies. A wide specter of leading experts and technology developers are taking part in the effort to realize the project. A cornerstone of the pilot is greenhouses utilizing seawater to provide cool and humid growing conditions for vegetables. The greenhouses will also produce freshwater themselves. The greenhouses will be coupled with a state of the art parabolic trough solar collector with a thermal desalination unit supported by PV-technology. The pilot will also allow for cultivation of algae in a system of photobioreactors and open pond cultivation systems.

  An important part of the pilot is to demonstrate the potential for cultivating desert land and making it green. Outdoor vertical evaporators will create sheltered and humid environments for cultivation of plants. Additionally, the pilot will contain outdoor hydroponic raceways for cultivation of halophytes – plants tolerant of irrigation with salty water. The facilities in the pilot plant will be supported by on-site laboratories, scientists and professional growers.

I have this feeling that the Sahara Forest Project team meant "wide spectrum", not "wide specter", yes? Or maybe they wanted to say "broad coalition"?

Anyway, both pages and their supporting material are fascinating...

Backpacking 2014: Matlock Lake, John Muir Wilderness

It was that time of year again, so I packed up the pack, loaded up the car, and headed off with the gang.

We spent the night in Bishop so we could get an early start, and by 9:00 AM we were at the Onion Valley Trailhead.

Our destination was Matlock Lake, in the John Muir Wilderness Area.

The John Muir Wilderness Area is the most spectacular of all the central Sierra Nevada wilderness areas, and is also the location of the world famous John Muir Trail, surely the most amazing backpacking trail in the lower 48 states. Our trip didn't actually take us on the John Muir Trail, but we came very close to it, and there were many hikers on our trail headed to and from the JMT/PCT (in this area they are the same trail).

Although our hike was short, the elevation gain and overall altitude was substantial: the Onion Valley trailhead is at 9,200 feet, and our campsite was at 10,600 feet; with the various ups and downs of the trail we found that Deb's FitBit registered an astonishing 180 staircases at the completion of the first day's hike.

So we were good and tired at the end of the first day!

We were lucky enough to have clear skies, fair weather, and a new moon, giving us near perfect star gazing and an active evening debate about whether or not we were seeing Iridium Flashers.

On the second day we took a cross-country scramble to nearby Bench Lake, a gorgeous hidden lake which is about 300 feet above Matlock Lake. Bench Lake was beautiful and secluded, and the views were marvelous.

On our third day, we took a trip up and over Kearsarge Pass. At 11,800 feet, this pass was the highest I've been on foot in many years, perhaps decades. Sitting at the pass is an astonishing spectacle, as you can see, simultaneously, more than 60 miles to the east, across the Owens Valley and beyond, and more than 25 miles to the west, down through Kings Canyon National Park and beyond.

The trail to the pass is well-maintained and pleasant (it has to be, as it is a major mule train pack trail), but the conditions at the pass are not suited for long periods of relaxation; as another hiker at the pass commented, "above 10,000 feet in the Sierras there are only two situations that apply: either the sun is out and you are too hot, or there are clouds and you are too cold."

Indeed it is true.

Some of our party extended the hike by dropping down to visit the Kearsarge Lakes and then returning via the pass, while I made it a shorter day by returning straight to Matlock Lake where I had time for an afternoon dip in the lake.

The lakes in this are are at the forefront of a concerted campain to save the mountain yellow-legged frog:

Mountain yellow-legged frogs in the California Sierra Nevada are disappearing at an alarming rate, primarily due to a virulent fungus. UCSB scientists Cheryl Briggs and Roland Knapp are racing to understand why some populations of frogs succumb and others survive, with the aim of not only saving the frogs but also gaining knowledge of how and why organisms develop resistance to virulent pathogen attack.

Of course, your perspective on this may depend on where you are standing: Feds to list frogs as ‘endangered’

A final decision on the critical habitat proposal is expected to be made early next year, but the proposals were met with opposition in the Eastern Sierra, where residents said there is a fear that the designations will close off backcountry access (or at least appear to) and negatively impact the local, tourist-based economy. Some of those fears were validated during the public comment process when it was brought to light that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife had been removing trout from backcountry lakes for several years in an effort to protect the frogs and prevent an endangered species or critical habitat listing.

With fishing season kicking off today, anglers seeking solitude in the remote reaches of the Sierra Nevada are being advised that several lakes that were once thriving fisheries have been cleared of all trout to protect the frogs, which are eaten by the fish in their tadpole form.

Sure enough, there was not a fish to be found in the lakes we visited. As the Inyo Register observed:

In the Independence area, the DFW has removed trout from Bench, Matlock and Slim lake but the higher-elevation waters continue to produce trout. "We have no plans to remove fish from any of those."

It's not clear which higher-elevation waters they mean.

But we definitely saw lots of tadpoles and frogs, so that part of the program is certainly working!

And there is plenty of other life to see in the woods. With campfire restrictions nearly universal in California this year, we were limited to enjoying the wilderness around our camp stove, but I think this is a good thing, for Dead Trees Are Anything But Dead.

After three beautiful days in the wilderness, it was time to get back to coding, so we broke camp and had a pleasant walk down the hill to our cars.

I think it was a good thing we left as we did, for between the massive storm that came racing up from the south and the forest fire near El Portal, we were looking back over our shoulders at storm clouds and smoky skies during our drive home.

Although we might have wished for a bit more solitude, overall this was a near perfect trip for us: the weather was perfect, the scenery was glorious, everything went just as you would hope a backpacking trip would go.

If you're looking for a great place to go backpacking, and you haven't yet tried the Kearsarge Pass trail out of the Onion Valley Trailhead, you should put it on your list.