The other side of the tracks

Do you really believe that middle-class kids are more talented than those from the ghetto?  We know that they will go further, faster, higher in the dreadful one-winner-only race that shags us all over impregnates the soul of Western Society . . . but for intrinsic ability? . . . . for novel solutions to the fine mess the planet is in?  What about women? Do you really believe that the sex ratio among presidents, generals, CEOs, professors is naturally  skewed from 1:1?  Because the genes for leadership are on the Y chromosome?

If you do believe any of the above, you might need an antidote; it's only an anecdote [N=1 is not data] but inspiring nonetheless. Here [L with her 2 daughters] is Lynn Ruane telling her story by talking about leadership at FemFest.  It's the same, more or less, as the Irish Times picked up.  Lynn grew up on a council estate in the depths of the West Dublin ghetto in Killinarden. She tells her story as series of incidents punctuating a life which was typical of the dispossessed: drugs, shop-lifting, vandalism, teenage pregnancy. But the force was strong with young Lynn. Her confrontations with The Man, didn't cow her; nor did they make her lose herself in rage. She rather tapped into a core of solid self-belief either acquired or delivered from god.  It might have started with the trousers, being told that only boys were allowed to wear them in school, or the skirts which only altar boys were allowed to wear in church.  Lynn wanted to have those forbidden garments and she asked for it in such a not-to-be-denied way that she changed how age-old certainties were viewed in her parish. It was uncanny, her power over weaker minds, like Obi Wan Kenobi murmuring "these are not the droids you want" when he arrives in Mos Eisley. We could have more of her - and here she is back-stage and talking direct to camera.

This year, Lynn Ruane is President of the Students Union in Trinity College Dublin, having clawed herself an education out in Tallaght. She's shown above with her two daughters beside the Pomodoro Sphere in the centre of the campus, which is an Establishment Bastion. Seemingly, the Presidency comes with a grace-and-favour apartment in College and she lives there with her family. If she seems to be absurdly young to have a teenage daughter, it's because she had an early start. I gather that the girls have been lowering the tone of the sacred lawns of TCD: now and then roaring out of the window to tell their mother not to forget the milk.  That's all to the good. The pomposity needs to be pricked occasionally. I have stake/status in Trinity because I'm now an Adjunct Lecturer there; so if I approve, it is okay [hmmmm? probably not].

Watch out for Lynn Ruane.  She is now thinking of running for the Senate - of the country, not the TCD talking shop. We've had a couple of female Presidents of Ireland in the last 25 years, but we've never had a female Taoiseach.  €5 on Lynn Ruane?  Get your bet on while the odds are still long.

Zinjanthropus

It's Mary Leakey's birthday today 6th Feb 1913. She's a pretty good role-model for a career as woman-in-science if you like women who are tear-aways who shake up the system a bit.  She was the daughter of an itinerant artist Erskine Nicol who tooled about the empire making watercolours of exotic locations for sale to retired colonels and romantic bank-clerks back home in England. She was well connected in the upper-classes with good anti-slavery credentials in her ancestry. That gave her a certain freedom to pursue her own slightly off-centre dreams without the requirement to get a job behind the counter in Woolworths.  She lived as a child in USA, Italy, France and Egypt.  She became fluent in French and picked up an interest in the ancient past as well as picking up - and classifying - an ever increasing collection of archaeological artifacts.

In 2013 she was tribbed with a UK postage stamp in an eclectic series entitled "Great Britons" who were all born in 1913 or 1863. You'll never guess who else made the cut. She met Louis Leakey on a dig and later was recommended to him as a scientific illustrator for his forthcoming book. He was the brightest and best of  the palaeo-anthropologists at Cambridge University.  He was ten years older than her and married and his affair with Mary was received with shock and scandal in the narrow academic community in which they moved. The two of them tired of being cold-shouldered at Cambridge parties and more or less emigrated to East Africa to pursue a lifetime in fossil-hunting and adventure. She, they, were happier out there in the sun and scrabbling about in the dirt for artefacts and fragments of fossilised bone. She is most famous for discovering the skull of a fossil hominid which Louis named Zinjanthropus boisei, which was renamed as Paranthropus boisei before eventually coming to rest [for most people] as Australopithecus boisei. You may ask what-matter they call a skull but the naming of parts is fraught with politics and ambition and encourages particular ways of interpreting the world. boisei is an example of a robust hominid built like a gorilla with massive brows and and a sagittal crest like a mohican haircut to support massive muscles to the jaw. The Leakeys convinced themselves that this was one of our ancestors and wanted to trib a) Zinj an old Arab slaver's name for the Kenya Coast and b) Charles Boise, a financial backer. It is clear to us now that boisei is a side-branch collateral relative rather than a direct ancestor.  "Paranthropus" recognises this off-shoot idea. Australopithecus is now the grab-bag for a clatter of different species and varieties of fossil hominids which preceded and lived in parallel with members of our genus Homo. Australopithecus includes A. afarenis "Lucy" a much slighter creature who pre-dated boisei and seems more on our direct track. This robust/gracile branching is a repeated theme in primate evolution: Gorilla gorilla vs chimpanzees Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus then A. boisei vs A. afarenis and A. africanus then Homo neanderthalensis vs Homo sapiens.

Mary Leakey also discovered the Laetoli foot-prints: trace-fossils of  two people - quite possibly/poignantly mother and daughter - walking across some volcanic dust.  "People"? probably not; because these footprints date to 3.6 mya and there's no evidence that they could talk. But walking upright frees up the hands to make things: like the stone tools that Mary Leakey was digging up - and classifying - next to more and more fragments of hominid fossils. The Leakeys mentored Jane Goodall, who researched living primates in East Africa as the Leakeys continued to research the dead. Tradition, dynasty . . . Mary and Louis had three sons Jonathan, Richard and Philip who grew up in and around the work camps and digs that their parents were working in. Jonathan is now a businessman in Kenya but as a young chap he found OH 7 [Olduvai Hominid 7] "Jonny's Child" the type specimen for Homo habilis.  My old boss used to say of another H. habilis specimen "ER1470 could have driven a bus"; and that species has much better credentials for being a direct ancestor than Zinj. Read a bit more, better informed about Mary Leakey.

More women in science.

ne nonne num

One of the perils of talking, and even more of e-mailing, is that your words get taken up wrong by the other person. We are much more willing to accept additional information that agrees with our current position than anything contradictory: changing our mind requires work.  Literally: changing our thought patterns costs extra molecules of glucose and ATP.  This is apparently true for 'multi-tasking'.  We none of us do that, but by rapidly inching forward two separate tasks in turn we can appear to be doing two things at once.  The flic-flic-flic changes are ruinously expensive energetically.  The Organized Mind, which I've been reading since Christmas says [Chapter 5 Section the biological reality of time] that in an hour's daydreaming or watching the telly, the brain consumes 11 calories = 15 watts.  Reading a book  over the same time takes 44 calories and sitting in class trying to follow Dr Bob explaining the functions of the kidney is even harder work - 65 calories.  This is because the central executive functions of the cortex are involved.  Multi-tasking is more like studenting than being sacked out on the sofa.  Here's some advice: if you have important decisions to make, address them after breakfast [oatmeal porridge, toasted almonds, honey and buttermilk] when you have energy reserves rather than later in the day when your thinking capacity has been depleted by use.

We can structure a question in such a way as to elicit an agreeable answer, and come away mistakenly believing that we have achieved consensus.  This is the peril of Mr Big surrounding himself with Yes-men.  Famously the apparatchiks of the newspaper magnate in Evelyn Waugh's satire Scoop had only two possible answers to the boss's statements and questions: "Yes, Lord Copper" and "Up to a point, Lord Copper".  The latter being used when the old buffer was demonstrably wrong-headed or daft.  Latin has three sorts of interrogative:

• Neutral using ne. Do you want to join the team?
• tune id veritus es? Do you fear that?
• Question expecting the answer yes using nonne.  Surely you wish to join our team?
• nonne me amas? Surely you love me? 
• Question expecting the answer no using num. You cannot want to join that team.
• num dubium est? Is there any doubt?

English, as you see, requires more elaborate phrasing to convey the subtle differences. Note also the potentially emotive change from the team to our team to their team. Does this make a difference in real life? Well framing questions or information in a particular way can certainly yield different responses and this has been shown with many large samples of people being given the same data in different ways.  A typical scenario, nicked from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow via The Organized Mind, is when medical patients are divided into two groups who have their options explained to them thus:

• Group 1
• Of 100 people who have surgery, 90 live through the operating theatre and 34 are alive at the end of 5 years
• Of 100 people undergoing radiation therapy, all live through the treatment and 22 are alive at the end of 5 years 

• Group 2
• Of 100 people who have surgery, 10 die under the knife and 66 are dead within 5 years
• Of 100 people undergoing radiation therapy, nobody dies during the treatment but 78 are dead within 5 year.

These options are identical in mathematical probability but emotionally and psychologically they are different.  In the first "frame", Surgery is much preferred because the 5 year survival is much better.  In the second "frame" radiation is preferred because nobody dies the day you check into for treatment.  In such cases, you really don't want to be buffeted by your emotional brain, you want accurate numbers from studies that include people like you.  It's also relevant in less life-and-death situations.  When the Head of Department casts his eyes round the meeting room table and says "So we're all agreed on that are we?".  It takes assertiveness to demur or ask for the heads of agreement to be explicitly stated or written up on the white-board.  Especially if the meeting is now running into everyone's lunch-hour.

Zebra Fish-crossing

There has been an invasion from the East; but it's not more about Syrians washing up of the beaches of Europe, we're talking about more distant  inhabitants [not human] washing up in the coastal waters of Syria and other countries in the Near East. There have been significant changes to the marine ecology since the opening of the Suez Canal - called Lessepsian migrations after the supervising engineer . Mostly these have occurred on the Mediterranean side because the sea level is slightly lower than in the Red Sea so water has been streaming into the Med for the last 150 years. For several years after the canal was opened, the hypersaline Great Bitter Lakes, which form part of the canal track, killed off most things which attempted to explore North&Eastwards. The salinity fell by dilution and so more and more species are making the transit. The Red Sea is more salty and less nutrient-rich than the Med, so its inhabitants are well 'ard and compete successfully against the fat effete Mediterraneans.  When Egypt built the Aswan Dam to tame and control the flooding of the Nile - and generate some electricity for a developing nation - that reduced the inflow of fresh water to the Eastern Med; which brought up the salinity; which made it less traumatic for the invaders.

Fish passing in the Night

Some 300 species - of fish, molluscs and crustaceans - have been recorded in the Mediterranean. There is some evidence that the rate of novel introductions is increasing and if you're properly trained in marine taxonomy you can find previously undocumented invasive species wherever you look - six new species of fish near the island of Rhodes for example.  I can't find anyone screaming about habitat destruction or the demise of native species, so it's not something we should lose sleep about . . . yet.  When another Red Sea native the scorpionfish Pterois volitans was dumped into the sea off Florida, that was a disaster.  And it might be another story now that the Egyptian government has widened the canal to double the revenue [to $13bn] and reduce passage time. Certainly the Guardian was predicting the end of the world as we know it in 2014.

The number of species travelling upstream to the less hospitable Red Sea, are about 100x less: seemingly limited to two species of goby Gobius paganellus, and Gobius cobitis, and a large carnivorous seabass Argyrosomus regius.

Strike!

[A selection of posters] Blooble translate: "I don't believe in anything, I'm just here for the violence" "I'm so angry I made a sign" "Protest signs are an ineffectual way of commenting on nuanced views on issues that cannot + should not be reduced to simple pithy slogans" "A lot of things are actually going pretty well" Not shown: "My arms are tired" "Down with this sort of thing".
 
Working at The Institute is full of novel experiences for me. Mastering Excel; dealing with bereaved students; avoiding destructive personalities; having tea without milk; driving a car to work. My Union, the TUI, is bringing us all [N=4000 IT sector teachers] out on a one-day strike today. This fact was invisible on the state broadcaster RTE last night. Although the Irish Times was gracious enough to give voice to the TUI President yesterday morning. It's hard to see from that piece what the government is specifically being asked to do about the unhappiness of the TUI and its members.  The train-drivers of Ireland are also in the mood for fight but a) they seem to get better press coverage b) as the strike date looms their leaders are sat down at a negotiating table trying to thrash out a deal.

I've never been of strike before - I've lived a very sheltered life: I was never a miner or a garment-worker or a stevedore. I've been assigned a two hour slot to picket outside the front gate of The Institute and I'm happy to see that some pals of mine are on the same gig, so we can have a natter. That's pretty wet as well, isn't it, if we were really committed we'd sacrifice the whole day, preferrably in a blizzard.  An extended lunch-break outside the gates doesn't really indicate a frightening amount of bottle.  The other Unions on campus have instructed their members to pass the pickets because current labour-law in Ireland treats sympathetic action as absenteeism and will a) lose a day's pay b) maybe lose your job.  So I expect that picketing will be all mouth and no trousers. I - will - not - chant - "Give me a T; give me a U; give me an I - what's that spell?"  Then again, I promise not to hold up a sign that says "I'm only here for the violence", I get quite enough passive-aggressive inside the gates.

Yellow Jack

Infections caused by YFV, yellow fever virus, manifest a variety of distressing symptoms, fever, headache, chills, back pain, fatigue, loss of appetite, muscle pain, nausea, and vomiting.  It's a bit like Darwin and his Chagas Disease without so much farting.  It takes about 3 days for your always-on innate immune system to bring the infection under control and for 85% of cases, that's it: you feel crap for half a week and then you've acquired life-long immunity.  The remaining 15% takes a grimmer toll, entering a toxic phase of establishment in the body involving recurrent fever, liver damage resulting in jaundice and bleeding into the intestine. Pirates and other seafarers on the Spanish Main, called it Yellow Jack or Bronze John from the jaundice whereas colloquial Spanish called it Vomito Negro from puking up the blood.  Yellow fever was probably endemic in Africa until its range was extended to tropical America: probably carried in the blood of a slave. When presented with illness as a percentage, most people fail to emote very much.  Perhaps you'll wake up to the problem when I say that, according to WHO, 200,000 people contract yellow fever each year, of which 30,000 die in a bloody mess - enough to fill a medium sized football stadium or populate a small city.  Malaria, by contrast and comparison, kills a million people each year I - II - III - mostly black babies.

Some viruses, like Ebola, can be transmitted directly from person to person, with more or less efficiency.  Many other viruses have found that propagation is easier if they hitch a ride in a 'vector'.  In the case of YFV, the vector is any one of a handful of species of mosquito, primarily Aedes aegyptii.  Like I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales, you get your dose by serving as a blood meal for a mosquito that has previously dined on another infected person. The mosquitoes which bite are all female, adult male mosquitoes don't feed - they are just sperm-donors. The symptoms are so generic that your doctor will need to know where you have been recently before making a diagnosis. The virus and its vectors only thrive in a rather precisely delimited band across tropical Africa - and an equivalent band (mostly Brazil) across the Atlantic.  If you're going to tropical Africa - get vaccinated, it will be better in the long run.

Yellow Jack famously brought a stop to the building of the Panama Canal.  Ferdinand de Lesseps, French engineer, knocked off the Suez Canal in 10 years 1859-1869 at a cost of £100 million. It required the removal, by digging and dredging, of 100 million cu.m of spoil but connected the Med with the Red Sea without using locks. There is a small difference in the height of the water at either end of Suez but not enough to make a difference to navigation. de Lesseps was then persuaded to do the same thing at Panama.  Should be a doddle: it's only 80km across compared to Suez's 190km. They started work in 1881, shifted almost as much spoil as Suez but had made less actual progress when the company went bust in 1889, costing the shareholders $260million dollars and the workers +20,000 lives.  Many of the casualties were from Yellow Fever and malaria but sketchy health&safety, poor planning and faulty engineering decisions added to  the toll taken by landslides, accidents and drownings. Nobody knows exactly how many people died under the French because they only recorded deaths in the company hospitals.

We like to think that the French led the way [behind Louis Pasteur] in understanding the role of microbes in human and animal health.  The microbial basis of malaria was cracked by a British Army doctor Major Ronald Ross in India who observed Plasmodium cells in the gut of an Anopheles mosquito.  He won the Nobel prize in 1902. When US imperialists became convinced that American interests would be served by acquiring the French assets in Panama and finishing the canal, one of the first people sent out there was Col W.C. Gorgas,  of the US Army Medical Corps. Gorgas recognised that killing the mosquitoes and/or reducing their access to people was a logistical problem such as the military are uniquely well equipped to prosecute. It was multi-pronged:

• drain all pools within a cordon either side of the canal route (mosquitoes breed in still water)
• if you can't drain the pools and swamps cover them with a film of oil
• cut all the brush and undergrowth within the cordon (mosquitoes don't like open ground: they feel insecure)
• Make sure necessary drainage ditches (tropical rainfall in the area has to go somewhere) are always free-flowing
• ladle out free quinine to everyone in the area to reduce the infectable population
• screen all windows and door to prevent mosquito access
• pay people to kill adult mosquitoes that evade the measures listed above. 

The last idea worked surprisingly well: far more successfully that similar schemes to eliminate much larger pests like pythons in Florida or red foxes in Australia.  The preventive measures, although aimed primarily at reducing malaria rather than the less debilitating yellow fever, seem to have been more effective against the latter. This is partly due to the different lifestyle of the diseases' two vectors: primarily Aedes spp. for yellow jack and Anopheles for malaria.  The other obvious difference is that malaria is caused by a single-celled protozoan parasite and the other disease by a tiny virus. The virus gave its name - flaviviruses [flavus is Latin for yellow] to a whole family of related plague-causers: Hepatitis C virus HCV [previrusly]; Dengue Virus DENV; West Nile Virus WNV [Previrusly]; swine fever CSF aka hog cholera; and most recently in the news Zika virus.

A teetering sixpence

Een dubbeltje op zijn kant [R] is an sculpture / installation on a section of the dyke near Nieuwekerk aan den IJssel in the Netherlands. A dubbeltje is 10c in old money, equal to 2 stuivers. And the phrase means "a close run thing" or "a lucky escape".  When the elements rage and your life and livelihood is threaten with extinction you can run for the hills or pray like the soldiers on the Sea Horse . . . or, like the plain people of Heimaey you can do something about it.  I suggested in the Heimaey piece that taking arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them is a particularly protestant solution to a poor hand of cards.  If you're reading this, you have just survived the night of 31st Jan/1st Feb.  In 1953, something like 2000 people failed to do that and a further 70,000 were so wet and cold that they had to leave their inundated homes. An Atlantic storm and a high tide caused storm surges all round the North Sea which over-topped the sea-defenses in the S Netherlands, Belgium and the East coast of England. It was waterwolf in its most aggressive and destructive power.  The biggest loss of life in the 1953 Watersnoodramp / flood-disaster was in the provinces of South Holland, Zeeland and North Brabant with several islands and polders completely inundated. It was the last big flood in Western Europe to occur with 19thC infrastructure.  The storm happened on the Saturday/Sunday night and civil servants were in bed if they weren't in water: there was no convenient way to call key personnel to duty and no system for alerting the threatened population to move to safety.  As well, the science of meteorology was poorly developed and its predictive power was limited. It didn't help that events peaked in the middle of the long winter's night.  For all the death - 30,000 head of livestock as well as the people - there were thousands of tales of heroism and sacrifice.

It could have been far worse.  The Afsluitdijk [off-shut-dam] separating the Zuiderzee and Nordzee had been recently constructed and was said, in that one night, to have paid for itself in saving the communities round the lake, including Amsterdam from damage. The Schielands Hoge Zeedijk was the main flood wall protecting the 3 million inhabitants of South Holland and North Holland. The rising floodwaters were lapping the top and sought the weakest point which started to give way. Volunteers had been hefting sandbags in the hours before dawn but the local collapse called for immediate and intelligent response to avert disaster. The mayor of the nearest substantial community, Burgemeester J.C. Vogelaar of Nieuwerkerk aan den IJssel commandeered the nearest grain barge and ordered it to put its thumb in the widening gap. Skipper Arie Evegroen deftly buried the bows of the Twee Gebroeren in one side of the dyke and the water pressure slammed the rest of the hull shut against the flood. Huzzah! That's him in the sculpture pictured above. He said afterwards that he was sure his small ship would surf straight through and into the polder behind, so he was glad to have his dinghy ready to launch.

The same storm overwhelmed the Stranaer to Larne mailboat the MV Princess Victoria. 133 died and 44 survived; as with the Sea Horse the only survivors were adult men.