Thursday, April 30, 2009
Malaria, swine flu and those cunning Chinese
I watched a fascinating programme at lunchtime today and it brought back to me the perennial debate in research between inductive and hypothetico deductive approaches to scientific discovery. Having exhausted most of a book on the topic, it is not in my mind to go over that ground here except by being as cryptic as the desire for reader accessibility will allow. In essence, if you want to solve some problem in the world, you can go and collect evidence from sites of interest (eg people actually suffering from malaria) seek patterns, try remedies from folk lore and from existing knowledge and build the most efficacious medical approach you can. Alternatively, you can establish a scientific model, push it this way and that in the laboratory, try it on people and refine it over time. Inductive means ‘discovery, grounded in context’ and deductive means ‘testing existing models’. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, getting scientists to change their paradigms is a task beyond mere collection of contrary evidence. Their professional lives depend on what they have achieved, erroneous or not.
Two competing forces of imperialism are head butting each other over the treatment of malaria in Africa. The Chinese claim to have eradicated it from some small populations by adopting the inductive approach. At the same time as they offer hope and a malaria free future to village people, they gain access to mineral wealth. The World Health Organisation will not accept Chinese claims because they are not published in reputable medical research journals and peer reviewed. Their imperialism is one of professional reputation and protective approaches to medical disciplines.
A nice zen story involves scientific sampling. Statistics depend upon using a sample from a population and generalising from the knowledge gained from that sample, to the whole population. Zen asks, ‘how do you sample a house?’. Is a brick a sample? A window? A brick and a window? In other words, a house is not conducive to sampling. It is too complex. Drugs that pharamaceutical firms offer are based on statistical sampling. They are nearly always crude in their appropriateness for complex diseases in whole populations. Think thalidomide. Think Viagra. Look at the side effects of long terms studies of individual drugs. It’s a game of poker involving percentages.
Science does not like the unprovable even if the results are astounding. The Chinese think they have won a battle in the fight against malaria. The WHO is snooty about it. Here in Africa people want to be malaria free. If god, the devil, witchcraft, dog’s piss or some bitter tasting plant gives a cure, they don’t ask if the treatment has been peer reviewed.
As I write, swine flu is moving more like a virus carried by the media, itself, than something biological, into pandemic status. After it is over, there will be miracle stories of cures that will sink without investigation, particularly if they are associated with efficacious concoctions of diabolical Chinese herbs. Meanwhile, tamiflu will have been dolled out to everyone who sniffs and sneezes, paranoia will reign and the scientists will be busy isolating and manufacturing a lucrative successor to tamiflu which will be operational in six months time. And will receive prestigious column space in the Lancet.
I watched a fascinating programme at lunchtime today and it brought back to me the perennial debate in research between inductive and hypothetico deductive approaches to scientific discovery. Having exhausted most of a book on the topic, it is not in my mind to go over that ground here except by being as cryptic as the desire for reader accessibility will allow. In essence, if you want to solve some problem in the world, you can go and collect evidence from sites of interest (eg people actually suffering from malaria) seek patterns, try remedies from folk lore and from existing knowledge and build the most efficacious medical approach you can. Alternatively, you can establish a scientific model, push it this way and that in the laboratory, try it on people and refine it over time. Inductive means ‘discovery, grounded in context’ and deductive means ‘testing existing models’. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, getting scientists to change their paradigms is a task beyond mere collection of contrary evidence. Their professional lives depend on what they have achieved, erroneous or not.
Two competing forces of imperialism are head butting each other over the treatment of malaria in Africa. The Chinese claim to have eradicated it from some small populations by adopting the inductive approach. At the same time as they offer hope and a malaria free future to village people, they gain access to mineral wealth. The World Health Organisation will not accept Chinese claims because they are not published in reputable medical research journals and peer reviewed. Their imperialism is one of professional reputation and protective approaches to medical disciplines.
A nice zen story involves scientific sampling. Statistics depend upon using a sample from a population and generalising from the knowledge gained from that sample, to the whole population. Zen asks, ‘how do you sample a house?’. Is a brick a sample? A window? A brick and a window? In other words, a house is not conducive to sampling. It is too complex. Drugs that pharamaceutical firms offer are based on statistical sampling. They are nearly always crude in their appropriateness for complex diseases in whole populations. Think thalidomide. Think Viagra. Look at the side effects of long terms studies of individual drugs. It’s a game of poker involving percentages.
Science does not like the unprovable even if the results are astounding. The Chinese think they have won a battle in the fight against malaria. The WHO is snooty about it. Here in Africa people want to be malaria free. If god, the devil, witchcraft, dog’s piss or some bitter tasting plant gives a cure, they don’t ask if the treatment has been peer reviewed.
As I write, swine flu is moving more like a virus carried by the media, itself, than something biological, into pandemic status. After it is over, there will be miracle stories of cures that will sink without investigation, particularly if they are associated with efficacious concoctions of diabolical Chinese herbs. Meanwhile, tamiflu will have been dolled out to everyone who sniffs and sneezes, paranoia will reign and the scientists will be busy isolating and manufacturing a lucrative successor to tamiflu which will be operational in six months time. And will receive prestigious column space in the Lancet.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Zen flesh, Zen bones, pork and the sun
Having left behind the extraordinary silent harmony of nature and nurture (see photograph) around the Buddhist temples of Kyoto and Hiroshima, I am back in Ghana where the chaos of the roads, electric sounds and utilities prevails, as always. If you asked me how I’d like to spend my last few hours of this life, it would be in a Zen garden. There is something exquisite, a deep personal response from one’s essence when viewing sand sculptures which seem to preserve every grain in place, or individual plants, bushes and trees that are accorded place and reverence in the spread of foliage and earth. Very different from UK gardening programmes which, even in the most planned of country estates, use such hyperboles as ‘rich’, ‘riotous’ , ‘pageant’ and portray the garden as a site for drowning, a multi-sensory paradise. Well, Buddhists haven’t the same symbolism and paradise doesn’t come into it. It is not a form of drowning either but rather an uninterrupted meditation. Its effects permeate Japanese society where interiors are spare, where the meal table is aesthetically pleasing, where flowers are arranged in vases, according to a centuries-developed art, where targets shoot arrows in a Zen stillness and where cherry blossom has a spiritual symbolism that drives the entire population to picnic under the falling petals.
Well, so it seems to me on my brief visits there. It may all be superficial and I am taken in like a gullible tourist. Then again, when one is willingly taken in and the experience bolsters a basic drive to find meaning in life, then it can be almost ecstatic in its effect.
Surface and depth were paraded on BBC World News this morning. First, the sun has dimmed. It is not known whether this is similar to the 70 year dimming that led to a mini ice age a couple of centuries ago but its surface has turned turbulence-free. The second story concerned three piglets that are sharing the good life in a pen with a tiger. They have been clothed in stripy jackets so that the tiger’s natural predisposition for a pork lunch is counteracted by its desire to look after its own kin.
Western-philosophically speaking, from Plato on, human beings have pondered on the degree to which life is an illusion. Phenomenologists have sought to train the mind to empathise with the reality of living things, inanimate material and of others’existence. But most philosophy agrees that we can know the act of knowing but never the object of that knowing. Maya in Hindu belief.
Zen gardens, by their attention to the essence of things, make you aware of the illusion of living; the pork under the tiger skin or the leopard sun that can change its spots.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Watchmen
I was born before Graphic Novels achieved their genre status as adult literature. But their precursors, Horror Comics, had their heyday when I was pre-teens and used to go up the village to have my hair cut at the part time barber’s. He sold everything that was unacceptable which gave him a certain consistency in that his haircuts were equally lacking in whatever confers self-esteem on a youngster. Anyway, condoms, horror comics, pre-marital advice books and photo-nudes were tantalisingly half-hidden around his garden shed. So you can ask me about those days and not about graphic novels. The only one I have is in French and concerns Zatoichi, the blind samurai.
One tag line for the film Watchmen, asks “Who watches the Watchmen?" Well, at one linear strip of time it was my son and I in Hiroshima last week. We cycled through the night and left our bikes outside the cinema. Unlocked. Safe. This is Japan. Three hours later, after a complex plot where not even a single atom was safe and with a death toll of 15 million plus (no mathematical error) we cycled back through the night in that hyper state which follows a good viewing. (At times I identify to such a degree with car chase films I have to restrain my driving.)
Watchmen is full of good retro dialogue and a rather sideways and sometimes sadistic take on super hero films. None of the characters are actually good. Their flaws cause many of the plot's twists. The movie plays an interesting riff on liberal conscience. The central anti-hero, Rorschach, has a number of speeches in which he derides the liberal conscience, particularly when it comes to paedophilic killers and low lifes who have no moral parameters. As a would be tolerant and well meaning liberal, I found myself identifying guiltily with Rorscach’s bloody vendetta. I suppose it is the sign of good cinema that you can be traduced into identifying with characters that seem to be a long distance from your own. But maybe that is only the way we idealise our selves. Maybe we have the worst inside us and life is about handling and conquering what we know is base and irredeemable. The battles we fight with our consciences are micro wars that merely reflect what goes on around us on a greater scale.
Anyway, Watchmen took over a decade to be made. It is set in Nixon’s Cold War and creates a background collage of people and events of that period all played with great verisimilitude by actors. The soundtrack is redolent of the time-honoured mix of disregard for the establishment and narcissism that epitomises much of the best of rock since the fifties.
Iloved the film and it is still with me. Grrrrrrrrrhh….
I was born before Graphic Novels achieved their genre status as adult literature. But their precursors, Horror Comics, had their heyday when I was pre-teens and used to go up the village to have my hair cut at the part time barber’s. He sold everything that was unacceptable which gave him a certain consistency in that his haircuts were equally lacking in whatever confers self-esteem on a youngster. Anyway, condoms, horror comics, pre-marital advice books and photo-nudes were tantalisingly half-hidden around his garden shed. So you can ask me about those days and not about graphic novels. The only one I have is in French and concerns Zatoichi, the blind samurai.
One tag line for the film Watchmen, asks “Who watches the Watchmen?" Well, at one linear strip of time it was my son and I in Hiroshima last week. We cycled through the night and left our bikes outside the cinema. Unlocked. Safe. This is Japan. Three hours later, after a complex plot where not even a single atom was safe and with a death toll of 15 million plus (no mathematical error) we cycled back through the night in that hyper state which follows a good viewing. (At times I identify to such a degree with car chase films I have to restrain my driving.)
Watchmen is full of good retro dialogue and a rather sideways and sometimes sadistic take on super hero films. None of the characters are actually good. Their flaws cause many of the plot's twists. The movie plays an interesting riff on liberal conscience. The central anti-hero, Rorschach, has a number of speeches in which he derides the liberal conscience, particularly when it comes to paedophilic killers and low lifes who have no moral parameters. As a would be tolerant and well meaning liberal, I found myself identifying guiltily with Rorscach’s bloody vendetta. I suppose it is the sign of good cinema that you can be traduced into identifying with characters that seem to be a long distance from your own. But maybe that is only the way we idealise our selves. Maybe we have the worst inside us and life is about handling and conquering what we know is base and irredeemable. The battles we fight with our consciences are micro wars that merely reflect what goes on around us on a greater scale.
Anyway, Watchmen took over a decade to be made. It is set in Nixon’s Cold War and creates a background collage of people and events of that period all played with great verisimilitude by actors. The soundtrack is redolent of the time-honoured mix of disregard for the establishment and narcissism that epitomises much of the best of rock since the fifties.
Iloved the film and it is still with me. Grrrrrrrrrhh….
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Border Crossings
The flight from Accra to Osaka, via Dubai, leaves a triptych of images of their Customs. Until I started writing this I had never thought about the metaphoric ambiguity of the terminology. When we enter a country we expect to meet different cultural norms and there, at the border, this expectation is flagged up in the sign saying Customs. From this point everything may change for a temporary immigrant. To leave Accra I had to hand over my passport with my right hand. I remember Tony Blair, trying to impress a Muslim leader with a present of a miniature Koran and sliding it acroos to him with his left hand. Worse than no present at all. Accra’s Customs are possibly the most orderly element of Ghanaian life. It is as though international etiquette reaches this point and makes no further impression on the country. A sort of Canutish sea of anarchy washes it from the inside. It is said that it is a doddle to buy your way into Ghana without the necessary papers, at an official kiosk here. Bribery is rife, according to the newspapers. Every civil servant throughout the country expects to make his or her wage via backhanders. They’d die in penury without this oiling of their palms. It is built in to bureaucratic life.
Dubai, on the other hand, is above such lawlessness. But money drives this weird, artificial settlement in the desert, nevertheless. The Customs here have marble floors and gleaming steel and spacious lifts and white robed men and black robed women, speaking impeccable English with grave courtesy, sliding you seamlessly through the protocols and on to the lifts that rise silently to the Arcade above. You exit and are shocked that, at two in the morning, the place is jostling with thousands of shoppers, packing the half mile stretch of counters selling everything from newspapers to gold. It is retail land at wholesale prices, opulent and inviting. An Aladdin’s cave.
In Osaka Airport I disembarked from the internal shuttle train and followed the sign saying ‘Foreigners’ between the maze of posts and red ribbons that turn people into rats and reached a barrier of around ten gates, manned by people in white medical robes, white masks and white gloves.. It was reminiscent of when the scientists came for ET. Signs exhorted visitors to declare their diseases and a disembodied, gauze sieved voice verbalised it to me. “Have you fever? Have you complaint? Have you illness?” I hid my cold and tried not to be adenoidal in my straight faced , “No”. “Where from?” asked the mask. “Dubai, “ I replied, omitting the Ghana bit for fear of being hauled into a hose down module of some kind, a human cattle grid. Thence to a second line of barriers where my retinas were photographed, my finger prints taken and my bags searched.
Three types of Counter Culture. Under the Counter. Over the Counter. Counter intelligence.
Labels: Accra. Customs., Dubai. Osaka