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Fast Access to Records Helps Fight Epidemics
By MILT FREUDENHEIM, The New York Times, June 18, 2012
Public health departments around the country have long scrutinized data from local hospitals for indications that diseases like influenza, tuberculosis, AIDS, syphilis and asthma might be on the rise, and to monitor the health consequences of heat waves, frigid weather or other natural phenomena. In the years since 9/11, this scrutiny has come to include signs of possible bioterrorism.
When medical records were maintained mainly on paper, it could take weeks to find out that an infection was becoming more common or that tainted greens had appeared on grocery shelves. But the growing prevalence of electronic medical records has had an unexpected benefit: By combing through the data now received almost continuously from hospitals and other medical facilities, some health departments are spotting and combating outbreaks with unprecedented speed.
( Read more... )
ROUGH SEAS A 19th-century engraving depicts John Cabot on his second voyage, reaching what is now Newfoundland in 1497. His first voyage was aborted, and his third was a mystery, with Cabot thought to have perished at sea.
Discovery of a £16 Advance Sheds Light on John Cabot’s Adventures
By GUY GUGLIOTTA, The New York Times, June 18, 2012
In early 1496, a Venetian sea captain named Giovanni Caboto appeared in the southern English port city of Bristol. He had no money, but carried a warrant from King Henry VII to obtain a ship and sail on a voyage of trade and discovery.
England would call him John Cabot, and from 1496 to 1498 — less than a decade after Christopher Columbus — he set sail three times for the New World. The first voyage was aborted, but on the second he made landfall in what is now Newfoundland and claimed North America for England and the Roman Catholic Church.
That much is known. But of his third voyage there is nothing. He left Bristol and apparently vanished — slaughtered by enemies, taken by disease or swallowed by the sea.
And that is not the only enduring mystery about Cabot. Who helped him? Who bankrolled him? Did he really disappear?
But scholars first had to untangle another mystery: the authenticity of spectacular claims made by Alwyn Ruddock, a historian at the University of London who had researched Cabot for more than half her life.
Dr. Ruddock several times promised a book, but never wrote it. Instead, before she died in 2005 at 89, a childless widow, she ordered her executor to destroy her research. Seventy-eight bags of papers were shredded and incinerated, leaving scholars astounded.
Now an important piece of the Ruddock riddle has been solved. In 2010, an international team of scholars working together in what is called the Cabot Project came upon a set of 514-year-old Italian ledgers that Dr. Ruddock had found decades earlier but which had disappeared from view. They showed that in the spring of 1496, Cabot received seed money for his voyages from the London branch of a Florentine banking house called the Bardi.
( Read more... )
To Advance, Search for a Black Cat in a Dark Room
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE, The New York Times, June 18, 2012
Many people think of science as a deliberate process that is driven by the gradual accumulation of facts. Legions of smart scientists labor to piece together the evidence supporting their discoveries, hypotheses, inventions and progress itself.
But according to Stuart Firestein, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, this view is fallacious. Working scientists don’t get bogged down in factual swamps, he says, because they don’t care all that much for facts. Facts are not what science is all about. It’s only when the facts fail that scientists really put on their thinking caps.
Scientists, Dr. Firestein says, are driven by ignorance.
In this sense, ignorance is not stupidity. Rather, it is a particular condition of knowledge: the absence of fact, understanding, insight or clarity about something. It is a case where data don’t exist, or more commonly, where the existing data don’t make sense.
To show how scientists depend on ignorance, Dr. Firestein has written a short, highly entertaining book aimed at nonscientists and students who want to be scientists.
( Read more... )
By MILT FREUDENHEIM, The New York Times, June 18, 2012
Public health departments around the country have long scrutinized data from local hospitals for indications that diseases like influenza, tuberculosis, AIDS, syphilis and asthma might be on the rise, and to monitor the health consequences of heat waves, frigid weather or other natural phenomena. In the years since 9/11, this scrutiny has come to include signs of possible bioterrorism.
When medical records were maintained mainly on paper, it could take weeks to find out that an infection was becoming more common or that tainted greens had appeared on grocery shelves. But the growing prevalence of electronic medical records has had an unexpected benefit: By combing through the data now received almost continuously from hospitals and other medical facilities, some health departments are spotting and combating outbreaks with unprecedented speed.
( Read more... )
ROUGH SEAS A 19th-century engraving depicts John Cabot on his second voyage, reaching what is now Newfoundland in 1497. His first voyage was aborted, and his third was a mystery, with Cabot thought to have perished at sea.
Discovery of a £16 Advance Sheds Light on John Cabot’s Adventures
By GUY GUGLIOTTA, The New York Times, June 18, 2012
In early 1496, a Venetian sea captain named Giovanni Caboto appeared in the southern English port city of Bristol. He had no money, but carried a warrant from King Henry VII to obtain a ship and sail on a voyage of trade and discovery.
England would call him John Cabot, and from 1496 to 1498 — less than a decade after Christopher Columbus — he set sail three times for the New World. The first voyage was aborted, but on the second he made landfall in what is now Newfoundland and claimed North America for England and the Roman Catholic Church.
That much is known. But of his third voyage there is nothing. He left Bristol and apparently vanished — slaughtered by enemies, taken by disease or swallowed by the sea.
And that is not the only enduring mystery about Cabot. Who helped him? Who bankrolled him? Did he really disappear?
But scholars first had to untangle another mystery: the authenticity of spectacular claims made by Alwyn Ruddock, a historian at the University of London who had researched Cabot for more than half her life.
Dr. Ruddock several times promised a book, but never wrote it. Instead, before she died in 2005 at 89, a childless widow, she ordered her executor to destroy her research. Seventy-eight bags of papers were shredded and incinerated, leaving scholars astounded.
Now an important piece of the Ruddock riddle has been solved. In 2010, an international team of scholars working together in what is called the Cabot Project came upon a set of 514-year-old Italian ledgers that Dr. Ruddock had found decades earlier but which had disappeared from view. They showed that in the spring of 1496, Cabot received seed money for his voyages from the London branch of a Florentine banking house called the Bardi.
( Read more... )
To Advance, Search for a Black Cat in a Dark Room
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE, The New York Times, June 18, 2012
Many people think of science as a deliberate process that is driven by the gradual accumulation of facts. Legions of smart scientists labor to piece together the evidence supporting their discoveries, hypotheses, inventions and progress itself.
But according to Stuart Firestein, a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, this view is fallacious. Working scientists don’t get bogged down in factual swamps, he says, because they don’t care all that much for facts. Facts are not what science is all about. It’s only when the facts fail that scientists really put on their thinking caps.
Scientists, Dr. Firestein says, are driven by ignorance.
In this sense, ignorance is not stupidity. Rather, it is a particular condition of knowledge: the absence of fact, understanding, insight or clarity about something. It is a case where data don’t exist, or more commonly, where the existing data don’t make sense.
To show how scientists depend on ignorance, Dr. Firestein has written a short, highly entertaining book aimed at nonscientists and students who want to be scientists.
( Read more... )
