Yuk!!!

George Bush at one recent G8 meeting, caught in the act of massaging Angela Merkel…

Ewww… May be he wanted to seduce her off the Tokyo Treaty?

How much the (OECD) world invests in R&D

It’s in this nice graph, from the latest edition of Nature. Sad to see Italy lagging behind, I did not expect the 4% that Sweden pulls but at least 2%, come on!!!

The latest analysis from the US National Science Board confirms that Israel leads the world in its economic devotion to research and development (R&D).
Its civilian R&D spending in 2005 accounted for 4.71% of gross domestic product (GDP), more than twice the average among members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Although US R&D investment was the world’s largest ( $340 billion ) and in 2004, it was more than that of the rest of the G7 nations combined, the report offers some evidence of a slight decline in its standing.
Its 2.57% share of GDP is comfortably above the OECD average of 2.25%, but both South Korea and Switzerland have leapfrogged ahead of the United States by this measure since the board’s previous report in 2006.
Germany could now be poised to do the same.
Most countries are investing more in R&D than they were, says Arden Bement, director of the National Science Foundation, which published the report.
For example, although China ranks 23rd in GDP share ( just 1.34% ) it has pulled ahead to third in total R&D investment with an estimated $115 billion in 2005.

I am most surprised at the incredible figure for Israel expenditure: almost 5% of the GDP in R&D. and I thought they had to spend all of their GDP in weapons to keep their many enemies at bay…

EurAsia V Americas

I break for one post the diary from Africa series.

When I was a child in primary school, my teacher asked us to jot down a story with us as characters. Most people would have written about a picnic, I went for a Science-Fiction-Thriller.

At the height of the Cold War, I imagined a near future where Europe and Russia were united together, and the enemy was a super-state born from the US’s annexion of most of the Americas. In this story, me and my classmate had to skate all the way up to Moscow to disable a weapon or explain a situation to some powerful man sitting in the Cremlin, and wish away a war. Crazy stuff uh?

I was reminded of this this morning when I heard that Poland is now joining the EU’s Schengen Area. This is causing lots of protests from Ukrainian, who were used to freely cross the Polish border to trade (food for tobacco and alcool), but now an’t any longer. I guess they will be the next to enter the EU, then. yet, I was surprised by how quickly the EU has grown during my lifetime… Where will it stop? At the South, Turkey is pressing to enter, how much before the whole Mediterranean Sea is encircled by it?

At the same time, a US Homeland Security officer yells that Europe is a breeding ground for the terrorists’ next generation… May be my childish story caught the attention of a much more influential storyteller… (that’s megalomania, for you)

A hurdle on the road to personalised cancer treatment

The new Nature is out, (since a couple of days, in fact) with a nice piece on the difficulties facing the development and approval of biomarkers-based cancer diagnostic assays.

Quickly, they work by taking a broad look at the proteins (or RNA, or else) expressed in your body at the moment, and compare them with similar sample in healthy and sick people. if the fingerprints (protein prints, or RNA-prints, or else-prints) match, then there’s a good chance that you may share the same medical condition.

Trouble is, these tests do not yet seem able to differentiate between different kind of cancer enough to be useful in suggesting a treatment. To do so, large, long, expensive clinical trials are necessary. And the companies that produce those diagnostics do not have that kind of money. Pharmaceutical companies do, and they also have some interest in this: with clear diagnoses and treatment indication,s their drugs could be given only to patients likely to responds. Of course, this means that they would sell more or less drugs than they currently do. It can go both ways.

However, there are good chances. If it is true that the UK government will soon require certainty of effect on drugs before re-imbursing them to the company, then such a test would act as a shield in those cases where the drug were not to work nonetheless. I guess a middle ground will have to be found, with the government accepting a certain rate of failure in the prediction of the treatment and therefore shouldering the price of ineffective drugs rather than unloading it onto an already unstable pharmaceutical complex. Whether you like them (us) or not, the world needs new medicine and that’s the most efficient way to create them.

I fully agree

cut and paste from:

Belgium:Time to call it a day

Sep 6th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Sometimes it is right for a country to recognise that its job is done

Illustration by Claudio Munoz

A RECENT glance at the Low Countries revealed that, nearly three months after its latest general election, Belgium was still without a new government. It may have acquired one by now. But, if so, will anyone notice? And, if not, will anyone mind? Even the Belgians appear indifferent. And what they think of the government they may well think of the country. If Belgium did not already exist, would anyone nowadays take the trouble to invent it?

Such questions could be asked of many countries. Belgium’s problem, if such it is, is that they are being asked by the inhabitants themselves. True, in opinion polls most Belgians say they want to keep the show on the road. But when they vote, as they did on June 10th, they do so along linguistic lines, the French-speaking Walloons in the south for French-speaking parties, the Dutch-speaking Flemings in the north for Dutch-speaking parties. The two groups do not get on—hence the inability to form a government. They lead parallel lives, largely in ignorance of each other. They do, however, think they know themselves: when a French-language television programme was interrupted last December with a spoof news flash announcing that the Flemish parliament had declared independence, the king had fled and Belgium had dissolved, it was widely believed.

No wonder. The prime minister designate thinks Belgians have nothing in common except “the king, the football team, some beers”, and he describes their country as an “accident of history”. In truth, it isn’t. When it was created in 1831, it served more than one purpose. It relieved its people of various discriminatory practices imposed on them by their Dutch rulers. And it suited Britain and France to have a new, neutral state rather than a source of instability that might, so soon after the Napoleonic wars, set off more turbulence in Europe.

The upshot was neither an unmitigated success nor an unmitigated failure. Belgium industrialised fast; grabbed a large part of Africa and ruled it particularly rapaciously; was itself invaded and occupied by Germany, not once but twice; and then cleverly secured the headquarters of what is now the European Union. Along the way it produced Magritte, Simenon, Tintin, the saxophone and a lot of chocolate. Also frites. No doubt more good things can come out of the swathe of territory once occupied by a tribe known to the Romans as the Belgae. For that, though, they do not need Belgium: they can emerge just as readily from two or three new mini-states, or perhaps from an enlarged France and Netherlands.

Brussels can devote itself to becoming the bureaucratic capital of Europe. It no longer enjoys the heady atmosphere of liberty that swirled outside its opera house in 1830, intoxicating the demonstrators whose protests set the Belgians on the road to independence. The air today is more fetid. With freedom now taken for granted, the old animosities are ill suppressed. Rancour is ever-present and the country has become a freak of nature, a state in which power is so devolved that government is an abhorred vacuum. In short, Belgium has served its purpose. A praline divorce is in order.

Belgians need not feel too sad. Countries come and go. And perhaps a way can be found to keep the king, if he is still wanted. Since he has never had a country—he has always just been king of the Belgians—he will not miss Belgium. Maybe he can rule a new-old country called Gaul. But king of the Gauloises doesn’t sound quite right, does it?

…and the Big Cut&Paste

Turkish (self proclaimed) theoretical physicist accused of plagiarising papers.

According to Nature, the ArXiv removed their pubblications (70, 40 of which authored by one same guy – now that’s a lot even for theoreticists), after ascertaining that they contained large sections from previous papers. two of the PhD involved had a host of papers in gravitational physics, but couldn’t solve basic newtonian physics problems… Ugh!

The trouble began last November, when Salti and another graduate student, Oktay Aydogdu, underwent oral examinations for their PhDs. Although both had an extensive list of publications in gravitational physics, they struggled to answer even basic, high-school-level questions, according to Özgür Sariog brevelu, an associate professor at METU. “They didn’t know fundamental stuff like newtonian mechanics,” he says.

More worrying for me is that these people did actually publish their work on peer-reviewed journals, although Low Impact. Is this the kind of serious checks that publishers claim to offer when they oppose open publishing?

Grey Power

The Economist tackle the issue of Italy’s education system breakdown (may require subscription)

The biggest fault in Italian education is that there are too many old teachers

Since 2000 successive reports from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment have shattered the belief that Italian schools are among Europe’s best. The most recent put them near the bottom of the heap. In maths Italy’s 15-year-olds were outperformed by their peers in all but three OECD countries. Almost a third were “unable to display the minimum level of mathematics proficiency needed to succeed in their professional and private life”. The share of young adults with essential qualifications was far below the OECD average.

No similarly exhaustive comparison has been done for tertiary education. But that so many young Italians study abroad, and so few young foreigners (2% of all foreign students) do in Italy, points to equally low standards at university level.

All of this sounds sadly true to me.

If I have to judge on the limited sample of high school students which I get to talk to (my youngest brother) , I can see the huge divide with what I was taught to, often by the very same professors (thirteen years apart, we shared the same math teacher). Even taking into account differences in personal attitude, the rest must be ascribed to decreasing quality of education.

We must find a way to fix this. I will certainly not be one of the meagerly-paid high school teacher for Italy’s new path to education. 1100 Euros/month to tackle 25 teen-agers day after day is pretty close to my idea of Hell.

911 Vendetta

I went back to youtube looking for answers to “The web is Us/ing us”, and found instead this nice clip with voiceover from V 4 Vendetta and pictures courtesy of the George W Bush administration. – a.k.a miserable failure – a propos of that, Google says they haven’t stopped it, yet now when you look up the term on google you only get news about it and not GWB’s official biography – I guess China isn’t too far away for all of us…

anyway, here’s the video: enjoy.

Ann Coulter gets Pwned!!!

I love the BBC!!!

Study Finds Hurricanes Frequent in Some Cooler Periods

Ouch! even when the ocean has been warmer, in the past five thousand years, strings of hurricanes managed to ravage the Atlantic Caribbean… This is the conclusion of some analysis performed by some scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Here’s their press release. Apparently, variation on the intensity of El Niño and monsoon intensity in West Africa influence the Caribbean hurricane season.
Should we trust them? Are we sure they are not some kind of fake research institute funded by republicans? As a matter of fact they’re not, and they state their position on real warming quite clearly in the paper, saying that more than one mechanism may be at play in determining the weather patterns in the area – Global warming effect seems to be ascertained, and if it were to compound with one of these cold-pacific, rainy-Africa periods, effects might be even more devastating than expected. No Hurray for global warmers denialist, then. Quite the opposite. But then they will probably laugh at the idea that one can obtain reliable sampling of past hurricane intensity from the muddy bottom of lagoons. Their intelligence, unfortunately, can’t grasp that much. In the mud, they simply live…

a funny news from their website: Vitamin B12 Is Also an Essential Vitamin for Marine Life
The vitamin has impacts on the marine food web and Earth’s climate – reading it like this, it looks like we should dissolve big-ass pills of vitamins in the oceans, to keep it healthy. But don’t worry, those scientist haven’t gone mad…

in the words of the authors: The presence or absence of B12 in the ocean plays a vital and previously overlooked role in determining where, how much, and what kinds of microscopic algae (called phytoplankton) will bloom in the sea, according to a study published in the May issue of the journal Limnology and Oceanography.

These photosynthesizing plants, in turn, have a critical impact on Earth’s climate: They draw huge amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, from the air, incorporating carbon into their bodies. When they die or are eaten, carbon is transferred to the ocean depths, where it cannot re-enter the atmosphere.

Many more news to discover in their website… go and check it out!