As long as I kept the dialog to “buon giorno,” “uno” (when pointing to a particularly remarkable pastry), “grazie” (when buying said pastry) and “sera” (turns out “buona” is optional), the illusion was perfect. I was Roman. So what if I had only the sketchiest of mental maps of the city and came across the Trevi Fountain by chance? Or that my  concrete-coddled American legs were no match for the Eternal City’s infernal paving stones? I was Roman enough to have paid my respects at Julius Caesar’s surprisingly humble tomb at the Forum:

In ricordo della Idi di marzo

But two or three times a day, someone would burst my bubble with a babble of Italian, forcing me to admit that I was but a clueless American, more lost than they. That is until the undaunted Eva, who announced she was Dutch, spoke English and asked one of the few questions for which I actually had an answer: “Do you know the way to the Piazza Navona?” “Si, si! Just heading that way myself…”

Built on the site of a first century stadium, the piazza is a long irregular oval, punctuated by three fabulous fountains and filled with artists of varying talent doing their best to sell paintings. On one side sits a massive 17th century basilica built above the tomb of St. Agnes, not far from the brothel where she was martyred 1,700 years ago (Sant’Agnese in Agone). On the other, a row of so-so restaurants offering better view than food. A rotating cast of “living statues” rounds out the regulars, including the inevitable King Tut (I must have seen 8 of them working various piazzas). The afterlife, it turns out, is funded by tourists.

Another day, another euro: Morning on the Piazza Navona - King Tut suiting up and The Headless Man waiting for tourists...

Into this delicious mix of past, present, saints, sinners, art and artifice, Eva and I strolled as dusk dimmed and the piazza’s evening crowd began to gather. She turned out to be a frustrated international studies grad student who had found a program in Rome that, unlike others closer to home, hadn’t been fussy about her bachelor’s degree in psychology. It was a deficiency they felt she could overcome.

At TrackerNews we celebrate the mix and the match, crossing disciplines every chance we get, firmly believing in the the serendipity of collaboration.

It is just plain easier to think outside the box when at least one person isn’t in it. It also improves the odds for generating new ideas and breakthrough answers. The rest of Eva’s class was full of the usual round of poly-sci, history and econ majors. How could the addition of someone with a little background in psychology be anything but a plus?

TrackerNews was designed with the Eva’s of the world in mind. The typical news aggregator skews to dateline or popularity. TrackerNews skews to contextual relevance, focusing on connections. We seek out what automated RSS feeds routinely miss: research papers, older news stories, author interviews, the brilliant one-off’s. The mission is quality over quantity in the day-to-day and archival depth over time.

THE LESSONS OF LEONARDO

When I bought my Kindle a few months back, in the pre-iPad era, I knew it would turn out to be the “8-track cassette” of e-readers: a good-enough idea until something less idiosyncratic came along. Its klutzy set-up for creating and accessing notes has indeed proved annoying, but still not a bad way to haul around a lot of books.

I traveled through Italy reading Fritjof Capra’s, “The Science of Leonardo” – which, ironically, was made possible by the quirky fate-twist that as a bastard offspring, he skipped university. This lack of formal education was a sore spot at the time, but allowed him the freedom to think in new ways. Eventually, he read all the classic texts on his own, but was spared the tests proving he had interpreted them “correctly.”

Instead, after what sounds like a fairly idyllic childhood spent roaming the Tuscan hills pursuing his interests as a budding naturalist, Leonardo was apprenticed to a sculptor in Florence. The studio was where Art met Science and Engineering. Practical issues such as how to weld, how to cast, how to hoist, how to handle different materials and how to design for durability were simply part of the job. It was a perfect spot for a natural-born “systems thinker” with a talent for spotting patterns that could be applied from one field to another.

…Leonardo da Vinci was the first in an lineage of scientists who focused on the patterns interconnecting the basic structures and processes of living systems. Today, this approach to science is called ‘systemic thinking.’ This, in my eyes, is the essence of what Leonardo meant by farsi universale. Freely translating his statement into modern scientific language, I would rephrase it this way: ‘For someone who can perceive interconnecting patterns, it is easy to be a systemic thinker.’

It wasn’t just static patterns that fascinated Leonardo, but patterns of transformation. Change over time was integral to his thinking, whether analyzing the flow of water or the development of a fetus, or the mathematics that allows one geometric shape to become another. In a world of snapshot thinkers, Leonardo was talking video.

BACK ON THE PIAZZA: CHINA, GENDERCIDE, CONGO, CLIMATE CHANGE  & A THESIS

Eva listened attentively to my soapbox rant on TrackerNews, Leonardo and the endless benefits of omnivorous curiosity and multi-faceted perspective. How, she asked, might that apply to a somewhat pressing personal and very specific problem, namely, coming up with a thesis topic: “Something about China.”

“Easy,” I replied. “Find a couple of major trends that look likely to intersect and analyze the implications. Take a multi-disciplinary approach, look for patterns and try to figure out how all the moving parts will interact and change over time. Think like Leonardo!”

So… China. No shortage of material there. I suggested two trends we’ve covered on TrackerNews: demographic skew and natural resource depletion.

• One of the most important sit-up-and-take-notice stories of the decade, if not the century, is  The Economist’s “The Worldwide War on Girls,”which takes a hard look at the consequences of a China’s one-child policy and boy-centric tradition. Beyond the disturbing ethical issues of sex-selective abortion and infanticide – “gendercide” – it is estimated there will soon be 40 million more Chinese men of marriageable age than Chinese women for them to marry. That’s enough extra men to fill 5 New York Cities. What will become of them?

• An equally disturbing story is Richard Behar’s 2008 6-part tour de force for Fast Company, “China Storms Africa.” The Chinese, flush with of cash but running low on natural resources,  are on a raw materials buying spree, with serious global power-shift and environmental ramifications. Although the specter of oil palm plantations is only a tiny part of a much larger story, it has the potential to affect the entire planet. Consider: The island of Borneo has slashed and burned its way to the #3 spot of global CO2 emitters, right behind the U.S. and China, by clearning rain forests to make way for these biodiversity-annihilating plantations. In the summer of 2009, a Chinese company announced plans for 1 million hectare – 3,800 square mile – operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Will China’s man-surplus be funneled into an ever-expanding military machine? Will they be deployed around the world to defend the nation’s growing foreign interests? What does this mean for Africa over the next 10, 20, 50, 100 years? For global climate change? For the global economy? What happens to China? Will the extra men marry foreign women? Will Chinese women find themselves in a position of power, sought after and valued? Or shut out of a giant boys’ club? What kind of political force will these extra men present?

******

Poor Eva was taking notes as fast as she could, as I realized how deeply curating TrackerNews for the last year has affected my thinking. Tangents eventually connect, stray thoughts find kindred thoughts, ideas collide and spark epiphanies.

We stood in the piazza riffing for almost a half hour. These big picture issues don’t come up nearly enough in the conversations of humanitarian aid workers, social entrepreneurs, environmentalists or policy-makers. What a kick it would be if this accidental conversation actually led to Eva’s thesis.

Why it would be just the kind of thing we would post on TrackerNews…

ADDITIONAL READING / LISTENING / VIEWING:

• “Willie Smits restores a rainforest” (TED talk – video)

• Fritjof Capra interview / “The Science of Leonardo” (NPR – audio)

• Leonardo da Vinci bio (Wikipedia)

]]> http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2010/04/18/lessonsofleonardo/feed/ 0 J.A. Ginsburg caesarstomb livingstatues scienceofleonardo leonardos http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2009/12/08/the-human-algorithm-poptech-poptracker-a-challenge/ http://trackerblog.trackernews.net/2009/12/08/the-human-algorithm-poptech-poptracker-a-challenge/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:35:12 +0000 J.A. Ginsburg http://trackerblog.instedd.org/?p=1035 ]]>

At TrackerNews, our approach is a little different from most aggregators. While they focus either on the latest or most popular stories, we focus on context. Stories cycle through the site in groups to deliver  a more faceted experience: breaking news is paired with archived stories, research papers, blog posts, websites, book reviews, e-books – print, audio, video. Every link is researched, reviewed, summarized, curated. Stephen Baker, former BusinessWeek journalist and author of the The Numerati, summed up it best: “TrackerNews puts the human algorithm back in the equation.”

We are not opposed to automated news feeds. Indeed, we scour them all the time. But they tend to skew to the new and the popular. Likewise, search engines often have hidden skews, affecting the order in which links appear (sponsored links, deals with news organizations, SEO tricks, etc.). Thousands of links make come up in a Google search, but who ever goes beyond the second page? As Mies van der Rohe pithily noted, “Less is more.”

"TrackerNews" Screen Grab Slide Show

Over the last year, TrackerNews has covered everything from malaria, mapping and microfinance, to chemical spills, earthquakes, political protests, human trafficking, energy, lighting, mobile tech, logistics, floods, famines, urban farming, the bushmeat trade, rapid diagnostics, mental illness and global warming. Our searchable database, which also includes an extensive collections of resources, has swelled to 3,000+ links and is just beginning to get interesting. (see slide show)

THE POPTECH TRACKER: A BETA DEMO

Ironically, as our database grows day by day, becoming a richer and more useful resource, its very size may itself start to become an issue.

The PopTech ’09 Tracker (“PopTracker”) is an experiment in managing a tremendous number of links that relate to a single overarching subject. Conference presenters, teachers, fellows, along with PopTech-sponsored programs,  have been sorted into categories, then listed alphabetically. Between 4 and 10 related links are attached to each person or program, including presentation videos (added as they become available).

Even in its bare-bones format, the PopTracker shows promise as an at-a-glance research tool. Ultimately, our goal is to create a tool that will not only give everyone the ability to curate and organize information themselves, but also to share content with others using graphically intuitive templates. This is just a first step.

It has, however, been a really fun one.

PopTech 2009 Tracker / "PopTracker"

With a conference as sprawling as PopTech, it  is impossible for anyone to take it all in, even someone attending every lecture (and a blur of parties…). Researching and selecting links has been an education, full of delightful surprises. The goal was not to be exhaustive, but to provide insight. The biggest challenge? Trying to figure out which category best captured someone’s work.

Where do you put a Willie Smits, for example? His agro-forestry schemes repair the environment, while providing both food and energy. Or what about Michael Wesch, whose YouTube research deftly weaves together pop culture, social networks and cultural anthropology?  Or Daniel Nocera, whose “biomimick a molecule” fuel cell design not only has the potential to provide an endless supply of clean cheap power,  but purify polluted water in the process?

These are people who live hyphenated lives, who think between the boxes. Solar textiles. MacBook-ified cello music. “Scent” dinners. Cyber-security-digital-book-translation. Urban agriculture.

The PopTracker is itself a mash-up as well, riffing on the conference and going beyond it with links to research, books, music and  interviews. Yet while it provides a good way to get a sense of the whole, any cross-disciplinary links must still be made by readers. So…

A CHALLENGE

To the graphically gifted (and you know who you are Frog Design, Winterhouse, Nick Bilton, Nancy Duarte, Nicholas Felton, et al):

A data visualization showing connections and potential connections between the ’09 PopTech’ers.

The prize:

A “Green Bar” link on TrackerNews & a permanent  ”Red Bar” link on the PopTracker!

Map of swine flu outbreak - with time animation bar (BBC)

• In the U.K., experts predict there could be as many as a 100,000 cases per day by August – which would also dash hopes for an economic recovery any time soon, according to a new study.

• In Argentina, flat-footed bureaucrats are in the cross-hairs for taking too long to implement protective measures. Now Argentine pigs are sick, too.

• In Saudi Arabia, where nary a pig dares wander, officials are bracing for millions of devout Muslims planning hajj trips this November, advising the old, young, pregnant and those with chronic conditions to reschedule.

• In the U.S., a new survey suggests that obesity doubles the risk for serious flu complications. Exactly why this is so is a bit of mystery, but a mouse study may provide a clue. Fat mice produce elevated amounts of leptin, a hormone involved in immune response. Researchers theorize that the mice became desensitized to leptin, so their immune systems don’t kick into gear fast enough. When their immune systems finally do kick in, they go into overdrive with a “cytokine storm” – a defense so strong, it kills the host.

At the other end of the spectrum in the developing word are the nearly one billion chronically hungry weakened by malnutrition. Now factor in air pollution, which has long been known to exacerbate respiratory illnesses in general, and it is really not too much of stretch to say that almost everyone suffers from some kind of complicating underlying condition. To put it in medical terms, co-morbidities are probably the rule, not the exception.

Still, there is something particularly unfair and frightening about the risk to pregnant women. Though case numbers are small, a disturbing trend has begun to emerge of otherwise healthy women fighting for their lives and the lives of their unborn babies only days after coming down with swine flu.

ABC "Nightline" segment opens with the story of Audrey Opdyke, 26 weeks pregnant, who came down with swine flu. She was put in an induced coma to try to save the baby. Shortly after this piece aired, an emergency C-section was performed. The baby did not surive.

The CDC’s page on “Pregnant Women and Novel Influenza A (H1N1) Virus: Considerations for Clinicians” does not discuss etiology, but it might be similar to the obesity story — although instead of leptin desensitizing the immune system, pregnancy itself might act as a dampener (to prevent rejection of the fetus). By the time the mother’s body mounts a defense, it is too much, too late.

Influenza presents another, more subtle, threat to the unborn: Exposure to the virus in the first trimester appears to increase the (still small) risk the child will develop schizophrenia later in life. Again, the “how” remains murky, but if it is due to the mother’s immune response rather than direct exposure to the virus, then a vaccine, which also triggers an immune response, could be dangerous.

As swine flu begins to spread into the developing where maternal health care is already spotty, the effects of this pandemic could prove especially heartbreaking.

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PIGS, PATHOGENS & OPPORTUNITY

Now a second strain of a combo pig/human/avian influenza virus has been identified in Saskatchewan, Canada. So far it causes only mild illness and spreads pig-to-pig and  pig-to-person. Whether it can spread person-to-person is still unknown; the illness may be so mild that patients aren’t tested. But it shows that such viral mixing is likely much more common than previously thought, and that large hog factory farms with their high density populations provide a perfect setting.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in the Philippines, pigs have been identified as a host of Reston ebolavirus, the only strain that isn’t fatal to humans. The discovery, via metagenomics, came as a surprise. (listen to Science magazine podcast with APHIS-USDA researcher Michael McIntosh). The pigs were also suffering from  porcine reproductive and respiratory disease syndrome, the severity of which may have been the result of co-infection. USDA researchers are concerned, of course, about food production and safety implications. The WHO is worried about the ease of pig to human transmission. In January, several hog farm workers, along with a butcher, tested positive for REV antibodies. Should the strain mutate into a more virulent or even lethal version, all bets are off on stopping the carnage.

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Eventually, the fog of the current battle against swine flu (a.k.a. “Pandemic H1N1 2009 “) will lift. One can only hope that then policy-makers will  – finally – begin to shift focus to the biggest “underlying condition” of all: a modern farming system rife with significant public health dangers. Otherwise, almost inevitably, they will find themselves in a few years once again calling for emergency conferences, fretting over limited budgets, drawing up distribution plans for vaccines and resistance-prone anti-virals and fighting a variation of the very same war.

Perhaps Peter Cooke put it best in the cult classic “Frog & Peach” routine he performed with Dudley Moore about a catastrophic failure of a restaurant located in the middle of the Yorkshire Moors. When asked whether he had learned from his mistakes, Cook’s proud proprietor replies, “Yes! I have learned from my mistakes! And I am sure I could repeat them exactly!”

Well, exactly…

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FURTHER READING

When Pigs Flu: Swine-flu outbreak could be linked to Smithfield factory farms (Tom Philpott/Grist)

Follow the Pigs! – Swine Flu, Factory Farms, Mapping and Public Health (TrackerBlog)

A Virus by Any Other Name: Lessons from an Outbreak (so far…) (TrackerBlog)

Fresh (movie trailers – pay particular attention to segment on pig farmer Russ Kremer’s life-changing bout with farm-incubated MRSA)

Food, Inc (movie website / trailer)

Polyface Farm’s Joel Salatin interview (Venture / Bloomberg TV)

"Current WHO phase of pandemic alert"

Last week, the World Health Organization ratcheted up its pandemic rating for swine flu (aka H1N1) all the way to an unprecedented “pandemic imminent” level 5, with a top-of-the-chart 6 considered inevitable. Was it time to wear masks? Stock up on Tamiflu and canned goods? Update wills? Pull out old high school lit-class copies of The Decameron?

Well, no. At least not yet. Plenty of people got sick, but is was mostly run-of-the-mill seasonal flu-style misery. Fevers, aches, pains, head-aches, gastrointestinal woes. In the jargon of the public health set: “mild.”  Yet swine flu remains an imminent pandemic and will likely be once all the cases are tallied up.

What’s wrong with this scale?

Quite a few things, it turns out. But the biggest complaint from doctors (including my neighbor, a hospital administrator at a major medical center in Chicago) has been its emphasis on viral spread rather than  severity of illness.

If hospital staffers weren’t sure how deeply furrowed their brows should be, how could anyone expect the media to strike the right tone, or the general public to have a clue? A system intended to inject a sense of thoughtful rationality into the management of global public health emergencies has ended up confusing and frightening more the clarifying. Now that the immediate danger appears past, there is almost of a sense of “Whoops! Nevermind…”  The CDC is already voicing concern over public complacency, worried people will shrug off warnings the next time. Who’s fault is that? (literally…)

A possible easy fix:

• Add a new level 6 that factors in virulence along with human-to-human transmission, and bump the current level 6 to a 7.

PANDEMICS: FIGHTING THE LAST WAR, PREPARING FOR THE NEXT

The scale’s other issues are more subtle. According to the official “WHO phase of pandemic alert” webpage, “pandemic” means “influenza pandemic.” It is as if the SARS scare never happened. In fact, by the WHO’s definition, HIV/AIDS wouldn’t make the cut as a pandemic, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Instead of promoting an approach to biosurveillance designed to track both known and novel pathogens, the WHO’s scale seems oddly specific and limited.

It is even odder considering research the WHO itself has supported to develop cheap rapid diagnostic tests that actually can test for novel pathogens. By a back-of-envelope estimate, 99% of vertebrate viruses have yet to be identified (50,000 vertebrate species, assuming 20 viruses each = 1 million). Since most diseases are zoonotic (meaning they affect multiple species, including humans), such tests are critically important.

Epidemiologist Ian Lipkin, who heads up the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University, which as been working with the WHO,  gave a quick overview to three such tests in a recent Pop!Tech lecture: Mass Tag PCR, GreeneChips and High Through-put Sequencing. Each is able to test for dozens of pathogens simultaneously and narrow down candidates. Even if a pathogen hasn’t been seen before, Lipkin’s team can identify its family – what viruses, bacteria or fungi it is related to and how closely – in a matter of hours.

Epidemiologist Ian Lipkin explains cutting edge diagnostics: "We have the tools to address the risks of pandemics. The implementation difficulties are political and logistical."

SCIENCE FACT / SCIENCE FICTION

What could be worse than pandemic influenza? How about pandemic rabies?  No one is saying the threat is imminent, but the recent emergence of a new strain of the virus in Arizona spreading animal-to-animal through casual contact has researchers more than a little concerned.

Rabies attacks the central nervous system, causing victims to become aggressive, crazy and likely to bite, which is how the virus typically transmits. Fortunatelely, unlike flu where a vaccine must be given prior to infection, a rabies vaccine can be given post-infection. That’s where the good news ends.

The new strain, which mutated from a bat strain, spreads like flu – no bite required – vastly increasing transmission efficiency, especially among social animals such as foxes and raccoons. It has also been seen in skunks. Whether the mutated virus can jump to humans is anybody’s guess, but the fact that it has been observed in foxes means coyotes and dogs are probably at risk. And since foxes, raccoons and skunks have adapted with gusto to the suburban/urban life good life, the opportunity is certainly there.

A wildlife vaccination campaign using an edible vaccine might help contain the spread, but funding is scarce. Howeer, based on limited research, it is clear that the problem has been brewing for a few years, so instead of one small viral fire to put out, there are likely several smoldering across an increasingly large geographic area.

_________________________________

Contagious, fatal madness. An animal disease spread to humans. Civilization ripped to shreds. Shrieks! Screams! Blood! Gore! Wait a minute…haven’t we seen this movie?

photo: CDC

A week has passed since the World Health Organization convened its first emergency meeting to deal with menacing new flu virus thought to have sickened thousands and killed dozens of young Mexican men. New cases continue to tally up around the world (15 countries so far) and the virus is  spreading person-to-person. The outbreak has been ranked at an unprecedented level 5 (out of 6 ) on the WHO’s pandemic scale. But for now, at least, it appears the world has dodged a bullet. Most cases are non-lethal, if not exactly mild. This is not 1918 Spanish flu redux. Yet. And if it does mutate into something more dangerous, we now have viral “seed stock” and a battalion of scientists working around the clock on a vaccine.

Whew!

So what has been learned by this apparent near-miss?

The most important take-away may just be what a near miss it has been. Factory farms – aka Confined Area Feeding Operations, aka CAFOs – have been royally “outed” as a major threat to global public health. And thanks to the web (Twitter in particular), it is not going to be easy for special interests to duck hard questions and discredit sources.

Five years ago, an enterprising journalist might have written an investigative piece on CAFOs for a major newspaper that might have caused a stir for moment or two, won some awards and then been filed in the  paper’s “morgue” (news-speak for library), only to be discovered a few years later by the next enterprising journalist. Or maybe the story would be written for a hip rock’n'roll magazine (“Boss Hog” / Rolling Stone).

There has been no shortage of well-researched articles, books, television news exposes, radio segments and documentaries on CAFOs over the last 20 years. But it has taken the web to unleash the power of the aggregate. Seen individually, these stories alarm. Seen together, their collective roar may finally manage to turn outrage into action.

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NEWSPAPERS MAY BE DYING, BUT MEDIA IS ALIVE & KICKING

Over the last week, articles in web publications The Huffington Post and Grist were among the first to connect the epidemiological dots pointing to a CAFO in Veracruz, Mexico as the probable of an outbreak of flu in a nearby town that sickened 1,800 people in early April.  Others, including this blog (“Follow the Pigs”) were on the trail as well, with content linked to research papers and reports – something not possible in the Age of Paper.

Obscure studies on swine viruses  – the kind of wonky detail usually of interest only to a handful of veterinarians -  were passed around the web as smoking gun evidence. Veratect, a private health & hazard surveillance company, published  a flu outbreak time line that included an entry explicitly flagging the outbreak in Veracruz as early as April 6 (10 days before the Mexican authorities alerted the Pan American Health Organization, and nearly 3 weeks before the WHO’s first meeting).

Even the genome of the virus itself was published online, a triumph of open source research for the greater good. There, for all to see, analyze and debate were eight tiny genetic segments of inconvenient truth: The virus was almost identical to a strain circulating in American pig farms for at least a decade. This was not a man-made virus, but was a man-mediated one. CAFOs clearly had played a pivotal role amplifying and spreading the disease, giving a swine virus plenty of opportunity to transform into a human threat.

A human outbreak wasn’t a matter of if or even when, but where.

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WHAT’S IN A NAME?

There were plenty of warnings (Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Production report, “Multiple lineages of antigenically and genetically diverse influenza A virus co-circulate in the United States swine population” & “Swine Influenza Viruses: A North American Perspective”).

Yet despite the certainty of its genetic identity, the strain has been officially rechristened by the CDC and the WHO as  “H1N1″ in a bold effort to quell a backlash against the pork industry. Good luck with that. H5N1 is still known bird flu or avian influenza, despite what poultry producers may prefer.

Not only will this re-branding effort fail, but it also obscures a connection of real value to public health: Flu viruses mix and match genetic components and jump species.

Even if it turned out this new tweaked human-friendly swine strain didn’t cause clinical illness in pigs (and it does), it is important to understand the connections in order to identify systemic vulnerabilities (CAFOs).

In the era of “One Health,” a surveillance approach that focuses on links between human, animal, plant and environmental health, it may be time to redefine zoonoses: Instead thinking of them as animal diseases that jump to humans, it may be more productive to see them as diseases that affect multiple species, including humans. Germ-jumping is a two-way street with human pathogens  jumping into other species. It’s not “us” versus “animals” but all of us animals versus germs.

“If you wait for the first human index case, you’ve lost critical time,” according to veterinary epidemiologist Tracey McNamara whom I interviewed after the West Nile outbreak a few years ago. McNamara played a key role making the link between dead crows and sick people and spearheaded using crows as an early warning for the virus.

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VIRAL TWITTER

As the week wore on, articles, studies and blog posts were flagged, linked, tweeted and retweeted on Twitter -  a torrent of information that quickly began to appear in stories produced by traditional media outlets.

Twitter’s value was not in its #swineflu message stream, which was was littered with gossip, misinformation and noise, but in streams in from individuals and news and health organizations:

@veratect, @microbeworld, @aetiology @nprhealth @bloodandmilk @wired @cdcemergency @trackernews (among others) Yet even the #swineflu stream provided a good sense of public concern.

Twitter fractured, inverted, pixelated and reconstructed the entire news cycle (ironically, not unlike a re-assorted flu virus). One example: Hours before the WHO officially announced it would raise the pandemic level to 5, Reuters put up a bulletin that promptly raced around the twitterverse. By the time officials gathered for news conference, it was old news.

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CSI: EPIDEMIOLOGY IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Journalists chased after one another down dusty rutted roads to ground zero, the small town of La Gloria, a five-hour drive from Mexico City. There they met a four year-old with the dubious distinction of being earliest known victim of H1N1 swine flu, then trucked over to the nearby CAFO, Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of American agro-giant Smithfield Foods, for a quick tour.

In report after report, the residents of La Gloria stuck to their story:

• The CAFO had been a stinking health hazard since it opened
• A swarm of flies from the Granjas Carroll’s hog waste pond invaded the town in  March / early April
• Soon after half the town – about 1,800 people – became ill with what appeared to be flu
• Granjas Carroll had been cleaned up for the press

They had been told by Mexican health officials they had a bacterial illness. One of the few samples saved and sent abroad for testing proved otherwise. Score one of the locals.

photo: Encyclopedia of Life, Phil Myers, Museum of Zoology, University of Michigan

But can flies spread flu? There hasn’t been much research, though it’s not entirely out of the range of possibility. (Detection and isolation of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza A viruses from blow flies collected in the vicinity of an infected poultry farm in Kyoto, Japan, 2004)

As for Granjas Carroll, a definitive link will probably never be made. It is simply too easy to lose the evidence. According the Smithfield website, Grajas processes 950,000 hogs annually, or about 80,000 per month. It takes between 5 and 6 months to raise a piglet to bacon-ready. I have been puzzling about the math, but clearly the turnover is ferociously rapid. Infected pigs, including those that might have had subclinical infections, could have easily been lost in the shuffle, or dumped into a waste pond to be feasted upon by flies.

It is important to note that swine flu, which is endemic in much of the United States and Mexico, is not a reportable disease, but seen more as a nuisance for farmers because it affects productivity and profits. Sick animals don’t fatten up as fast. Federal inspectors, already stretched to the limit, aren’t focused on it. Inspections, especially at such vast operations, are largely paperwork. Most likely it is a staffer rather than a government veterinarian that selects which animals to test, how many to test and who does the lab analysis. It would be surprising if blood samples were kept. And, finally, given the variety of strains that can circulate in a single herd, the effectiveness of vaccination has itself become question.

Wired.com’s Brendon Keim interviewed Columbia University epidemiologist / pathologist Ian Lipkin,  a member the WHO’s surveillance network: “We haven’t found evidence of infected pigs. But even if we never find that smoking pig, we can surmise that this is probably where it came from.”

CAFOs are where public health, environmental  health, food policy and global trade intersect. More and better regulations are urgently needed. Let’s make the most of this wake up call. The next time we probably won’t be so lucky.

________________________

more reading:

Pork industry is blurring the science of swine flu, Debora Mackenzie, New Scientist

Exclusive Interview: CDC Head Virus Sleuth, Science Insider, AAAS

Corridors of Power: Fidel Miramon? (photos of Granjas Carroll waste ponds – original in Spanish – cannot independently verify authenticity)

Interview with Ilaria Capua, founder of GISAID flu database, SEED magazine (print & video)

Poisoned Waters, PBS/Frontline (2-hour documentary on the destruction of the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound watersheds, includes section on chicken CAFOs)

Those words were ringing in my ears when the first reports of the Mexican swine flu outbreak began trickling in few days ago. Dozens of young, otherwise healthy men were dying. Was this an encore of the infamous 1918 pandemic? Another SARS? Patients killed by their own overzealous immune systems (“cytokine storms”)? Or poor patients who came to the hospital too late to be saved?  Then came lab reports of an unusually cosmopolitan swine/avian/human virus, with genetic links to two continents. This sort of thing doesn’t just happen. An awful lot of things have to happen first to make it possible.

The only certainty: a pig link.  This wasn’t a wildlife disease that jumped species when man, beast & germ met up in crowded marketplace (civets & SARS). There was no bushmeat involved (Ebola, HIV/AIDS). This was a swine flu, with some deadly dashes of avian and human strains.

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SICK PIGS

Since TrackerNews is both an aggregator and a resource (searchable dabase of vetted links), I looked for research that might provide some clues. Fairly quickly, I found two:

• A 2004 article from Pork magazine: SIV Gets More Complicated (Herd Health), which noted a spike in the number of swine flu strains. There are now so many that a single herd can harbor more than one strain. Instead of a seasonal problem, swine flu has morphed into a year-round plague. Even more vexing, there are too many strains for a single vaccine to cover. “Since 1998, SIV has moved from a single, stable virus to a virus with the ability to reconfigure itself to the point where it may avoid control by existing vaccines.”

• A 2008 article from National Hog Farmer: Researchers Identify New Swine Flu Strain -  a strain with a “molecular twist” that merged avian and swine components. Not only did it infect pigs, but mice and ferrets in the lab so was well adapted for mammals. This particular strain, which was found in 2006 in two separate herds that, notably, both drank from ponds frequented by migrating waterfowl, hasn’t been seen again and likely presents little threat to humans. But the point is they saw the mix. It happens. And, given all the range of swine strains – some of which have passed from humans to pigs -  the opportunity to hit the pandemic jackpot has been steadily ratcheting up.

More digging would no doubt have turned up many more studies, but these two sketch out the basic issues.

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CAFO’s

The next clue came from a swine flu outbreak timeline compiled by Dr. James Wilson, CTO and Chief Scientist of Veratect, a biosurveillance service:

April 6

Veratect reported local health officials declared a health alert due to a respiratory disease outbreak in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico.  Sources characterized the event as a “strange” outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led to bronchial pneumonia in some pediatric cases. According to a local resident, symptoms included fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm. Health officials recorded 400 cases that sought medical treatment in the last week in La Gloria, which has a population of 3,000; officials indicated that 60% of the town’s population (approximately 1,800 cases) has been affected. No precise timeframe was provided, but sources reported that a local official had been seeking health assistance for the town since February….

…Residents believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to “flu.” However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this outbreak….

Although health officials ruled out influenza, they started a vaccinating the locals…

Confined Animal Feeding Operations, a.k.a CAFOs, a.k.a factory farms have revolutionized agriculture over the past 20 years. This is agriculture on steroids. Sometimes literally. Poultry, cattle and pigs are raised in such ferocious, relentless quantity, the animals  require a battery of drugs and chemicals simply to live long enough to be slaughtered. The waste streams and accompanying stench are a nightmare for anyone and anything down wind or down stream. Stats defy comprehension.

According to a 2006 Rolling Stone‘s Jeff Tietz’ tour de force expose on hog CAFO king, Smithfield Farms (of which Granjas Caroll, the CAFO in Vera Cruz, is a subsidiary):

• “Hogs produce three times more excrement than human beings do. The 500,000 pigs at a single Smithfield subsidiary in Utah generate more fecal matter each year than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan.” (Granjas Caroll processes nearly a million pigs annually)

• “The immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds — oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin — diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they’re slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.”

• “Industrial pig waste also contains a host of other toxic substances: ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, phosphorous, nitrates and heavy metals. In addition, the waste nurses more than 100 microbial pathogens that can cause illness in humans, including salmonella, cryptosporidium, streptocolli and girardia. Each gram of hog shit can contain as much as 100 million fecal coliform bacteria.”

Egads.

A report from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production goes into more microbiological detail. CAFO’s are a major source for the development of antibiotic resistance and water and air pollution disaster. Pig and poultry CAFOs are cauldrons for dangerous flu strains.

David Kirby’s Huffington Post article, Swine Flu Outbreak — Nature Biting Back at Industrial Animal Production? ties it all in a bow:

… Dr. (Ellen) Silbergeld thinks the genetic swimming pool that is found in modern swine – or poultry – production is probably the place from whence this killer bug evolved.

“CAFOs are not biosecure,” she told me. “They have high rates of ventilation and enormous number of animals that would die of heat stress unless the building was ventilated. We and others have measured bacteria and viruses in the environment around poultry and swine houses. They are carried by flies, too. These places are not bio-secure going in – or going out.”

“These mixing bowls of intensive operations of chickens and pigs are contributing to speeding up viral evolution,” Dr. Silbergeld added. “I think CAFOs are contributing.”

But, what about traditional outdoor farms? Aren’t those animals even more susceptible to wild type viruses than animals kept indoors, as industry claims? “Well, let’s say that animals in confinement are ten times less likely to be infected by wild animals,” she said, “But there are 100 times as many of them. You do the math.”

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MAPPING

Only time will tell whether the ongoing swine flu outbreak peters out as a local tragedy or develops into a full-blown global catastrophe. Only diligent epidemiological investigation will prove if there is indeed a CAFO link. But we would be foolish not to see this as a last ditch wake up call for stricter controls over CAFOs. The risks are simply too great, too inevitable.

So, as maps are developed charting the progress of the outbreak, I hope they are layered with the kinds of information that explain not only how this happened, but also to help visualize vulnerabilities.

• CAFO location: Where are they in relation to human cases?

• Hog shipping routes: Contaminated trucks have been implicated in other animal disease incidents

• Data on swine/avian strains documented in pigs – even those that don’t cause clinical illness

• Data on swine flu outbreaks at pig operations: In many areas, including the Vera Cruz region in Mexico, the disease is considered endemic. Were pigs vaccinated? Would the vaccine have protected against this strain?

• Bird migrations, especially of waterfowl

• Human vaccine status: Have cases diagnosed in the U.S. been milder because the patients had been vaccinated while patients in Mexico had not? Although the vaccine targeted different strains, was their any cross protection?

• State of patients at time of first doctor visit: Do poor patients wait longer to seek medical help?

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PUBLIC HEALTH DISCONNECT

The last point raises some inconvenient truths for public health. Here in the U.S. where over 40 million are uninsured and probably an equal number are under-insured, it is unrealistic to tell people to see a doctor (they may not have one). Likewise, skipping work is a tough choice for families living paycheck to paycheck. According to a new study published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly 60% of Americans delayed or deferred health care over the last year. Prescriptions went unfilled and treatments skipped.

Public health goals and private realities simply aren’t meshing .

Advising residents of Mexico City to keep 6 feet away from one another is equally unrealistic.

For that matter, if flu protection is a national – an international -  priority, why not make flu shots free for everyone?

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more reading:

Swine-flu outbreak linked to Smithfield factory farms (Grist/Tom Philpott)

Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Eric Schlosser)

The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Michael Pollan)

China: wheat crop failure

It is a one-size-fits-all news story, good for almost any part of the world right now: Cue the video to a farmer standing in a field of parched and stunted plants. Then cut to b-roll of cattle carcasses dotting the landscape, rivers barely trickling, reservoirs sinking fast and caked mud at the bottom of village wells. Under unrelentingly cheerful skies, tell a tale of thirst, hunger, devastation and death.

Kenya: 2 years, no rain

A drought is a stealth disaster. There are no headline-grabbing satellite images of hurricane swirls, no “iReporter” videos of towns blown apart by tornados, no families perched on roofs desperate to escape rising floodwaters, no photographs of cities buried under snow. A drought has a different, much slower rhythm. The signs — a warming ocean, a shift in the wind — are subtle. But the effects can reverberate across continents, last for years, even decades, and spare nothing in its path.

Argentina: dying cattle

Like recessions, droughts are declared official well after serious damage has already been done. It takes time for a patch of pleasant sunny weather to morph into a severe drought. And although scientists have become better at interpreting data for predictions (reading teak rings in Indonesia), options for prevention remain pretty much non-existent. Whether or not man-made climate change is at least in part responsible for the current spike in droughts — as many suspect — the odds of man changing the climate back any time soon are pretty slim.

Taking more of an address-the-symptom-never-mind-the-cause approach, the Chinese bullied a few inches of snow to fall in Beijing by assaulting the heavens with a barrage of  silver iodide-loaded cloud-seeding missiles. But beyond a brief uptick in the number of  tourists at the Great Wall and a little frosty fun in the city, not much changed.

Australia: the "big dry"

Meanwhile, the best plan to prepare for lean harvests remains the old biblical stand-by of stashing away surplus reserves from good harvests. But what do you do when global grain stores are running low and almost every “bread basket” farming region in the world is buckling under the same wilting weather report?

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• Australia: Roughly 40% of the harvest, including $13.5 in exports sold mostly to Asia and the Middle-East, comes from the drought-plagued Murray Darling basin. Irrigated crops such as rice and grapes have been particularly had hit, but even native eucalyptus trees have taken a hit, with a staggering 80% stressed or dead. Water reserves are at just 16% of capacity. To make matters worse, algae are blooming and fish are dying in the warmth of shallower waters.

• The Middle-East: Australia’s bleak harvest is especially bad news here since the region is reeling under its own extreme drought. Annual rainfall totals in Jordan are down over 70%, while Israel experiencing its hottest, driest winter in 60 years. In Iraq, the marshlands of Garden of Eden and Marsh Arab fame are drying up. Water wars are heating up in comparatively moist Lebanon, exacerbated by out-of-date irrigation systems and a growing population. Everything is that much worse in the West Bank and Gaza with the Palestine Water Authority calling the situation “dangerous.”

• California: The recent decision by the federal government to turn off the spigot, at least temporarily, to irrigate the state’s Central Valley farms may have been inevitable, but it didn’t make the damage any easier to take: $2 billion in losses, 850,000 acres out of production, as many as 80,000 jobs lost. Although recent heavy rains helped, the problem is deeper. Or higher. The snowpack that feeds the streams that feed the Colorado river that supplies irrigation water is down by 40%. Ironically, the rains could make things worse, leading a burst of plant growth that will dry out just in time for fire season. In the meantime, sky-high alfalfa prices are threatening the entire dairy industry. Farmers, faced with losing money on every cow, are now sending them to the slaughterhouse instead of the milking barn, while horses, sometimes by the herd, are simply being abandoned by their owners. Elsewhere, Texas is toast and Florida’s looking pretty crispy.

• Kenya & Somalia: According to the World Food Program, 10 million people in Kenya are in urgent need of food aid. The impact of drought has been magnified by political violence and a fractured infrastructure. People are being forced to walk further and further – at great personal risk – simply to get water. It hasn’t rained in two years, the maize harvest is a complete bust and what little ground cover has managed to grow isn’t enough to support livestock. Just over the border in Somalia, the situation is just as dire. Families by the thousands are pouring into urban areas desperate for help. Meanwhile, some aid organizations have reportedly left the area due to fighting between Islamists and pro-government forces.

• Afghanistan: Drought has added yet another layer of complication to an already volatile situation. Taliban fighters in Pakistan routinely attack the Khyber Pass, which is used by the aid workers as well as military convoys to deliver supplies.

• Argentina: Rains have finally come to Argentina, but as in California, it may be too little, too late for many. The worst drought in a half-century has devastated this year’s corn crop, with yields down more than third from last year. An estimated 1.5 million cattle have been died. The  economic tally? Over $5 billion.

• Northern India: The state of  Uttarakhand is almost entirely dependent on rainfall and snow melt  for farming and lately there hasn’t been much. Warmer temperatures has also caused mustard, a key crop, to flower prematurely, reducing yields.

• China: A massive 240 million-acre drought, the worst in 50 years, has left an estimated 4.4 million people and 2 million livestock literally high and dry. Rainfall in some areas is less than 10% of normal totals, threatening half the wheat crop. And due to the global recession, factories in the cities have shut down, leaving an estimated 20 million migrant farm workers with nowhere else to go. Ironically, the water shortage may have been exacerbated by China’s extensive reservoir system, which has diverted water from underground aquifers and increased surface evaporation.

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TrackerNews has been full of  stories over the last few months painting the same grim picture:

• The Sea of Japan absorbs only half has much CO2 as it used to. Scientists suspect warmer water temperatures have changed the pattern of vertical currents known as “ventilation.” The water on top has essentially become saturated with CO2.  If it turns out this is happening in other oceans, the ramifications are immense. Oceans absorb about a quarter of human-generated CO2

• All this CO2 is making the oceans more acidic, which is destroying coral reefs, along with anything else unfortunate enough to rely on a calcium carbonate shell. That, in turn, is making it more difficult for stressed fisheries to recover, leading to higher food prices and hunger. The circle may be even more vicious. Researchers have just discovered that fish play a key role in marine carbon sequestration. Fish excrete vast quantities of calcium carbonate as a result of drinking seawater. Scientists speculate that climate-warmed seas would speed up fish metabolism leading to increased excretions. But fewer fish means a net decrease and less calcium carbonate in the water to neutralize acidity.

• Canadian forests are now carbon emitters. A combination of drought, logging, beetles, milder winters (warm enough to allow beetles to survive) and fire have turned 1.2 million square miles-worth of carbon sink solution into part of the problem.

Clearly, if we are going to make any headway with this disaster, we are going to have to come up with goals considerably bolder than “carbon neutral.” Optimistically, we are thisclose to an irreversible tipping point. According to yet another depressing study, global warming could trigger massive marine “dead zones” persisting for thousands of years.

BIOCHAR, a.k.a. AGRICHAR, a.k.a., TERRA PRETA:  OLD TECH TO THE RESCUE

Soil holds more carbon than the combined totals of the vegetation than grows in it and the atmosphere above it. And soil laced with biochar, a special charcoal made in a low oxygen burn, is particularly good at sequestering carbon. It also reduces nitrous oxide emissions, which is significant because molecule for molecule, nitrous oxide packs about 300 times the greenhouse gas punch as CO2.

That’s not why pre-Columbian Amazonians, who were the first to figure out how to make it, liked it. Bichar improves soil fertility. Its porous structure provides an inviting matrix for microbes and nutrients. It holds water more efficiently. Rootlets and other soil dwellers have an easier time navigating the depths.

Pockets of Terra Preta can still be found in South America – soil that is strikingly black amidst washed out, nutrient-poor rain forest dirt. Even after thousands of years, it still hold its richness and ability to sequester carbon. In short, biochar is a proven long-term option for reducing atmospheric carbon, with the added bonus of improving crop yields.

Tim Flannery (“The Weathermakers“) suspects it may be “the single most important initiative for humanity’s environmental future,” while James Lovelock (“The Revenge of Gaia“) suspects it may be our only chance:

So are we doomed?

JL: There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste – which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering – into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.

Would it make enough of a difference?

JL: Yes. The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per cent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes and worms. What we can do is cheat those consumers by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO2 is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won’t do it…. (“We’re doomed, but it’s not all bad”)

NEXT STEPS

"This book, I believe, provides the basic information required to allow implementation of the single most important initiative for humanity's environmental future" Tim Flannery

Interest in biochar has increased over the last few years, though it is still mostly soil scientists talking excitedly to one another.  The International Biochar Initiative, chaired by Cornell’s Johannes Lehmann, has helped focus efforts. There are currently research projects in nine countries, several conferences on the calendar and a new book due out in March.

Yet the big dollars for underground carbon sequestration about going into drilling projects. The U.S. Department of Energy has spent nearly a half billion dollars trying to figure out how to inject CO2 from coal plant smokestacks into rock deep beneath the surface — with precious little to show for it so far.

Imagine if that money had been invested into wind, solar, geothermal, smart grids and biochar. Reduced emissions. Increased carbon sequestration. Let’s aim for carbon negative! Given the alternative, it certainly seems worth a try.

So tell your friends. Tell everybody. Biochar: better climate through charcoal.

* related post: Matchmaking: On Soil, Lost Ideas, Terra Preta, Carbon Sequestration and Amy B. Smith

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CFLs (compact florescent light bulbs) may have become the symbol for greener lighting over the last couple of years, but  LEDs — those ubiquitous light emitting diodes on everything from digital alarm clocks to laptops — are poised for a global come-from-behind take-over. The key stumbling point has always been the cost the production. That’s about to change.

LEDs  use only a tiny fraction of the energy needed by florescents and can last a decade or longer, but manufacturing complications require the use of sapphire, a rare and expensive material. Now research at the University of Cambridge promises a super-cheap alternative. Once that pesky little problem is solved, CFLs — and their inconveniently un-green mercury residues — will soon go the way of….incandescents.

(The EPA’s clean up guidelines for broken CFLs are Hazmat-thorough and energy intensive, which begs the question why anyone living in an earthquake-prone area, or with young children in the house, would want to use them.)

Despite high costs, though, there is strong and growing demand for these energy-miser bulbs both the developing world where the electric grid has yet to reach, and in the developed world where grid-liberation is the goal.

SOURCES & STORIES

Below is a round-up of links that have been featured on the TrackerNews site:

• Light Up the World Foundation: Started by University of Calgary professor Dave Irvine-Halliday, LUWF has pioneered the installation of LED lighting units in the developing world that are powered by renewable sources (solar, wind, even pedal power). The goal is two-fold: bring light to some of the 2 billion people without electricity and provide an alternative to smokey, dangerous, ineffective kerosene lamps. “The Man Who Lit Up the Mountains” is a short video about LUWF and its first project in Nepal.

• The Lumina Project: This is an extremely rich resource for field research and reference materials — a must-visit site. Be sure to check out their collaborative partners for more good leads (e.g., Lighting Africa).  “Solid-State Lighting on a Shoestring Budget: The Economics of Off-Grid Lighting for Small Businesses in Kenya,” published last December, is typical of the thoroughness of their field work. It looks at everything from efficiency to consumer price-point sensitivity (~$15, btw). Even the best technology isn’t worth much if it doesn’t address barriers to adoption.  

• d.light: A start-up with momentum, that’s grown from an idea in a social entrepreneurship class at Stanford, to a company with a factory in China and sales offices in India and Tanzania, with an impressive list of investors. They sell two styles of LED lights, both of which can be recharged using solar or AC grid power. The Nova series is a hand-held super duper flashlight, while the Solata is a small, rather stylish table light. As par of their mission, d.lights offers a fellowship program to work in Shenzhen or New Delhi (February 15 is the deadline for 2009 applications;  a global photography fellowship has a “rolling application”).

• One Million Lights Foundation: Inspired by a school started by her father in rural India over 40 years ago, Anna Sidana founded OMLF to help improve education in regions of the world where a lack of electricity makes it impossible for children to study at night. These children generally work after school, so study time is precious. Last December, eBay chipped in for 15,000 MightyLights, which, like d-light Nova lamps, are industrial strength flashlights that can be recharged with a solar panel. (Sidana’s day job is Director, Financial Products for PayPal, which is owned by eBay.)  Here is a video of her presenting the first delivery to her father’s school.

• LEDlights.org Resources page: All kinds of good leads for articles, reviews and products

• Dean Kamen’s North Dumpling Island, aka “The World’s First LED Nation”: In an effort to bring  energy needs down to levels supportable by off-grid power generation, Kamen switched to LEDs for the nation’s three buildings and mini-Stonehenge installation. Although the change was pricey, costing tens of thousands of dollars, energy use was halved, even after adding outdoor lighting.

• The Solar Tree: This is what happens when a design aesthetic gets added to the equation. Ross Lovegrove, a.k.a. “Captain Organic” (see TED talk) turned street lighting into public gathering place. During the day, the tops of the Solar Tree’s leaves do what real tree leaves do: soak up the sun’s energy. At night, the leaves LED-laced bottom surfaces shed light.

PHYTOPHOTONICS

LEDs aren’t just for humans, either. Plants are partial to them, too, particularly the red and blue ones. Light color affects everything from leaf shape to chemical content to flowering times, so botanists are keen to see if they can use LEDs to manipulate plant development.

A prototype LED greenhouse is being built in Denmark. The expected energy savings are so dramatic, installation costs could be recouped in just three years. Sensors dim or brighten the lights to accomodate passing clouds, keeping plant light intake constant. It is also easier to harvest waste-heat from LEDs than from florescent lights, which can then be used to warm irrigation water.

It a world too full of dark news, LEDs literally are a beacon of light.

• A story about Russia’s efforts to recast Stalin as a hero. In a recent raid, computer hard-drives full of inconvenient documentation to the contrary were carted off from the offices of a human rights group. Also, a new treason law that not only threatens media, but any NGO that maintains an office in Russia.

Critics warned the loose wording will give authorities ample leeway to prosecute those who cooperate with international rights groups.

Under current treason statutes, some NGOs are not considered “foreign organizations,” meaning a person who passes a state secret to an NGO might not be considered a traitor.

Some of Russia’s most prominent right activists, including Moscow Helsinki Group head Lyudmila Alexeyeva and Civic Assistance director Svetlana Gannushkina, said the bill in fact gives authorities the power to prosecute anyone deemed to have “harmed the security of the Russian Federation.”

It is “legislation in the spirit of Stalin and Hitler,” the activists said in a joint statement — legislation that “returns the Russian justice to the times of 1920-1950s.”

• “Online and in Jail” -  the snappy headline from an article summarizing a new Committee to Protect Journalists report that found 45% of all “media workers” jailed in 2008 were web-based.

“Online journalism has changed the media landscape and the way we communicate with each other,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “But the power and influence of this new generation of online journalists has captured the attention of repressive governments around the world, and they have accelerated their counterattack.”

• China  -  back to its old “Great Firewall” tricks, restricting web access and harassing bloggers. Sri Lanka is in lock-step, jamming BBC broadcasts and forbidding a leading newspaper from printing the name of the president’s brother, who happens to be the defense minister. ICT4Peace’s Sanjana Huttotuwa paints a bleak future for the nation’s bloggers :

Bloggers in Sri Lanka aren’t recognised as journalists (save for a single statement by leading media freedom organisations in 2007) and do not enjoy the legal protection afforded to traditional media personnel. Independent online media websites have been increasingly hacked into this year. With traditional print media now embracing citizen journalism and with web audiences / consumers growing apace, there is no doubt that the regime’s attention will focus on the web and Internet in the future. Arguably, this already evident is some of the legislation it proposes for media regulation.

• In Kenya, the Communications Amendment Bill – which still awaits the president’s signature to become law -  would give the state the authority to raid newsrooms, control broadcast content and take stations off the air.  Malaria researcher Bill Breiger wonders whether this aversion to bad news at all costs could impact the monitoring of malaria treatment programs. After all, as a Gates Foundation-funded study released earlier this week on vaccine delivery stats shows, corrupt regimes falsifying records to skim off millions of donor dollars isn’t unheard of.

• 

  Committee to Project Journalists audio slideshow: "From Bad to Worse in Zimbabwe"

  In Zimbabwe, which has a knack for making every other “failed state” look slightly less failed, “press freedom is almost extinct,” according veteran journalist Geoff Hill.  That was back in June. Today, confronted with a massive outbreak of cholera that has sickened 20,000+ and killed over 1,100, press freedom seems like a dim distant memory. Robert Mugabe can deny the epidemic or blame it on the British and no one inside the country can question it.

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Australian blogger Antony Loewenstein traveled to Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudia Arabia, Cuba, China for his latest book, The Blogging Revolution: Going Online in Repressive Regimes, He found plenty of encouraging against-the-odds tales, but the game of cyber cat-and-mouse gets riskier by the day. And though the Global Network Initiative, an all-star effort to protect free speech on the web, is certainly a move in the right direction, it is difficult to say what tangible difference it can make against governments aggressively hostile to the cause.

In the U.S., the biggest threat to the fourth estate is economic rather than political. The New York Times has been forced to take out a mortgage to pay its bills, while the parent company of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times recently declared bankruptcy. Still, even in its weakened state, the Tribune broke a wiretapping story that led to the indictment of a governor on corruption charges last week.

Take a free and independent press out of the equation and you get Stalin as a hero, a Zimbabwean despot who makes up the “truth” as he goes along, creative corruption and a lot of suffering and death that might possibly be prevented. A free press alone isn’t a fix. But knowledge is power and ignorance can be lethal.

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