Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 03/30/07
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
“DOWN THE YOUTUBE?”
Portions of article in the 03/23/07 issue of The Economist
“It has been a terrible month for Google, the biggest search engine and the internet’s reigning superpower, and for its subsidiary, YouTube, the pioneer and precocious leader of online video. Users may love them, but the old-media companies, feeling increasingly exploited, loathe them, sue them, and gang up on them. And that matters, because neither Google nor YouTube, as quintessential ‘new-media’ companies, own any of the content that they organize so well.
“With the announcement on Thursday March 22nd of a new online-video venture between NBC Universal, the huge media unit of General Electric and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, almost every big media company is now, with varying degrees of hostility, aligned against Google and YouTube…
“Of greater concern to YouTube, however, is the clear evidence that NBC and News Corporation both realize that they must not try to trap viewers on specific websites, but rather let them watch videos ‘on the sites where they live,’ as Peter Chernin, News Corporation’s president, puts it. Teenagers will be able to post video clips on their own MySpace pages; even bloggers using independent services will be able to embed videos on their personal diaries. They will be able to discuss and annotate the clips and films with their own gossip, and thus be ‘social’ in exactly the same way that YouTube allows. Just as on YouTube, the audience will be in control, by rating videos and spreading them ‘virally’ throughout the entire web.
“The only remaining difference will be that the content spread in this manner will be entirely and uncontroversially legal, and that advertising revenues will remain under the full control of the content owners. For the first time, it will be in the interests of the media companies to spill their best content onto the web. This is in stark contrast to the situation on YouTube today…
“Was YouTube – and the bigger ‘Web 2.0’ movement that it symbolized – just a brief bout of silliness, an echo of the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s? It was not. YouTube has already changed society and democracy in lasting ways, by lowering the barriers to entry for talented amateurs to reach an audience, and by providing an outlet for the creative impulse of millions. This is hardly trivial. But what YouTube has not done is to make professional content less attractive. YouTube has earned its place in the history books; just not on a profit-and-loss account…”
Access to the complete article is available only to subscribers of the magazine.
“TUBERCULOSIS: FORGOTTEN, BUT NOT GONE”
Portions of an article from the 03/24/07 issue of Economist.com
“World Tuberculosis Day is on Saturday March 24th. On the same day in in 1882 Robert Koch, a German bacteriologist, presented his discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to a meeting in Berlin. That announcement helped to establish the germ theory of disease – the idea that contagious illnesses are caused by specific micro-organisms.
“Tuberculosis was once terribly fashionable. Dying of ‘consumption’ seems to have been a favorite activity of garrett-dwelling 19th-century artists. It has, however, been neglected of late…According to figures released earlier this week by the World Health Organization, 1.6m died of the disease in 2005, compared with about 3m for AIDS and 1m for malaria. But it receives only a fraction of the research budget devoted to AIDS. America’s National Institutes of Health, for example, spends 20 times as much on AIDS as on TB…
“The Global Fund, an international organization responsible for fighting all three diseases, but best known for its work on AIDS, has used the occasion to trumpet its tuberculosis projects. The fund claims that its anti-TB activities since it opened for business in 2002 have saved the lives of over 1m people…
“Even drug companies are involved. In the run-up to the day itself, Eli Lilly announced a $50m boost to its MDR-TB Global Partnership. MDR stands for multi-drug resistance, and it is one of the reasons why TB is back in the limelight. Careless treatment has caused drug-resistant strains to evolve all over the world. The course of drugs needed to clear the disease completely takes six months, and persuading people to stay that course once their symptoms have gone is hard. Unfortunately, those infected with MDR have to be treated with less effective, more poisonous and more costly drugs. Naturally, these provoke still more non-compliance and thus still more evolution.
“As a result, the world is seeing the rise of extremely drug resistant (XDR) strains that kill almost everyone in whom they take hold. A WHO survey conducted between 2000 and 2004 suggested that 20% of cases were MDR and 2% XDR. Lilly’s contribution to the common weal is the transfer to manufacturers in badly affected countries of the technological tricks needed to make two antibodies that do generally work against MDR-TB (though not against XDR-TB).
“The lack of effective TB anti-TB drugs is also being addressed by trying to invent new ones. Until recently, this would have been anathema to drug companies. Creating treatments for infectious diseases of the poor is not an obvious way to riches and happy shareholders. Recently, however, firms have been able to offload some of the development costs on to philanthropic organizations such as the Gates Foundation. As a result, seven potential anti-TB drugs are now in clinical trials and around 20 more are under investigation.
“The other reason TB is back is its relationship to AIDS. The Global Fund’s joint responsibility for the diseases is no coincidence. AIDS does not kill directly. Rather, HIV, the virus that causes it, weakens the body’s immune system and exposes the sufferer to secondary infections. Of these, TB is one of the most serious. It kills 200,000 AIDS patients a year. However, some anti-TB drugs interfere with the effect of some anti-HIV drugs. Conversely, in about 20% of cases where a patient has both diseases, anti-HIV drugs make the tuberculosis worse. The upshot is that 125 years after Koch worked out what caused TB, it is still a serious threat…”
To read the complete article, click on
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_RJDJDDR
“NEW SECURITY SCANNER SEES THROUGH CLOTHES, BUT WITH MODESTY”
Portions of 03/27/07 article by John Roach for National Geographic News
“A new sensor technology under development promises to give security screeners a peek through clothing without revealing the naked details, a scientist says.
“The less invasive technology creates images from the heat waves people naturally emit. Since concealed objects such as guns and knives appear cooler than body temperature, they show up in contrasting colors… ‘This method does not reveal the body shapes like backscatter x-rays or visual light,’ Panu Helisto, chief research scientist at the VTT Technical Research Centre in Finland, explained in an email. ‘Intimate parts of the body are not clearly visible,’ he said. ‘It is also difficult, if not impossible, to recognize the person from such a body temperature map.’
“Since the device is also sensitive to the differing properties of materials, a metal object – even if it is the same temperature as the body – will show up in the image, Helisto added…
“Currently the sensor takes a few minutes to make a single image, which is too long for busy security checkpoints like airports, Helisto said. He and colleagues at VTT and the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, are working on a device that can make an image in one-thirtieth of a second. They anticipate completion within two years. At that speed the sensor would be sufficient for security screening. It will also be able to image objects 100 to 330 feet (30 to 100 meters) away, making possible covert surveillance at places such as subway and train stations, Helisto said…”
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