Tuesday, February 2, 2016

Week #3 (2/1-2/5)- Why the Iowa caucuses matter and everything you need to know about them (Los Angeles Times)

Why the Iowa caucuses matter and everything you need to know about them

On Monday, at 7 p.m. local time, Iowa voters will begin the process of picking the country’s next president at a series of nearly 1,700 gatherings in meeting halls, high school gymnasiums and community centers between the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers.

The Iowa caucuses will go a long way toward shaping the presidential race, even though the results have little bearing on the delegates that Iowa will send to the national nominating conventions.

If it sounds arcane and confusing, that’s because it is. We’re here to help.

What is a caucus?

A caucus is a precinct-level meeting of politically like-minded individuals. Participation is open to anyone over age 18, or who will be old enough to vote in the Nov. 8 presidential election. There is no cost to attend and an individual can show up Monday night and register with the party of his or her choosing. However, participants must be there at the designated time—unlike, say, a primary where polling places are open from morning to night—and wait for the chance to vote for their presidential favorite. That puts a premium on committed supporters willing to turn out on a chilly evening and stick around.

How does it work?

Republicans and Democrats caucus differently.

After some organizational business and speeches, Republicans write down their pick for president and turn in their secret ballot.

Democrats break into groups according to their preference, plain for all to see. If a candidate fails to achieve the “viability” threshold of at least 15%, he or she is eliminated and supporters fall in behind another Democratic candidate. Or they can go home, though that is considered bad caucus form.

Why do the parties do things differently?

Because they can. Caucuses are party meetings, independent of any government or election agency. So the parties set their own rules. Democrats were deeply divided over the Vietnam War, so they fashioned the viability rule as a way of forging consensus and avoiding a split of the party into multiple small factions.

Why does Iowa go first?

Because for a long time, nobody much cared. The caucuses have been taking place, in some form, since the early 1800s. The presidential preference vote was an add-on, a bit of fun for insiders who were gathered to attend to party business. In 1972, the national media picked up the results of the informal balloting and that helped George S. McGovern, a surprising favorite, push past better-known rivals to win the party’s nomination. Four years later, underdog Jimmy Carter used a strong Iowa showing to win the White House, and Iowa has occupied a prime spot on the political calendar ever since.

Has anyone challenged Iowa’s primacy?

Politicos in other states constantly gripe about Iowa’s outsized role, but the national parties set rules that keep it first, and no presidential candidate hoping to win the state ever wants to be seen as anything less than whole-hog for Iowa. So while there is perennial talk of Iowa losing its first-in-the-nation caucus slot, nothing has ever come of it. Under the national rules, New Hampshire holds the first presidential primary eight days later.

Winning the nomination is all about winning national convention delegates. So how do the caucuses affect that process?

They don’t, really. The caucuses elect delegates to county conventions, the first step in a long, complicated process that eventually yields Iowa’s delegates to the national convention many months from now. But by then no one is paying attention outside Iowa.

So why is the whole political world obsessed with the results in Iowa on Monday night?

Because after months of polls, debates, rumors, speculation and other chattering, Iowa will provide the first test of actual voter sentiment. Also, it takes a lot of work to ensure supporters show up and caucus. So the popularity contest is seen as a test of both a candidate’s appeal as well as his or her ability to build a campaign that has the organizational mettle to win the nomination.

So whoever gets the most votes wins?

Not necessarily. Expectations play an enormous role in judging the caucuses. A candidate seen as performing better than expected can be judged a winner, while a candidate who performs worse than anticipated may be deemed a loser. Perhaps the best example came in 1984, when former Vice President Walter F. Mondale won nearly half the vote, but the “winner” was Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, who got an unexpected 16.5% support. That launched him into a months-long struggle with Mondale for the nomination, who ultimately prevailed. But Hart’s performance turned him into the Democrats’ 1988 national front-runner until his candidacy flamed out in scandal.

What are the expectations this time?

On the Republican side, if anyone other than Donald Trump or Ted Cruz finishes in first or second place, it will be a shocker. Among Democrats, the race is so close that a first-place finish by either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders would not be a big surprise. If Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, an asterisk in polls, somehow slipped into one of the top-two slots, that would also be a stunner. Beyond that, if any candidate on either side blows out the rest of the field, that would constitute a major surprise and a huge victory. A Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll released Saturday night showed Donald Trump up slightly over Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders effectively tied. Those results went a long way toward setting expectations, and any significant deviation could determine whether a candidate is deemed a winner or loser.

Week #3 (2/1-2/5)- Iowa Caucuses: Best Lines From the Candidates' Speeches (ABC News)

As results poured in from the Iowa caucuses, the 2016 presidential hopefuls took to packed venues to address their supporters one last time before moving on to New Hampshire and other early nominating states.

For some, it was a night of celebration. For others, tonight's results come as a disappointment after weeks of campaigning across the Hawkeye state.

Here are some of the highlights from Monday night’s speeches:

Iowa Caucuses 2016: Live Updates as Voting is Underway

Iowa Caucuses 2016: How the Caucuses Work

Ted Cruz

The projected winner of the Iowa Republican caucuses walked on a stage at the Iowa State Fair Grounds to thunderous cheers and applause.

“Tonight is a victory for the grassroots. Tonight is a victory for courageous conservatives across Iowa, and all across this great nation," he said. "Tonight the state of Iowa has spoken. Iowa has sent notice that the Republican nominee for the next president of the United States will not be chosen by the media. Will not be chosen by the Washington establishment. Will not be chosen by the lobbyists. But will be chosen by the most incredible powerful force, where all sovereignty resides in our nation by we the people. The American people.”

Donald Trump

Trump was projected to finish second behind Cruz.

“I'm just honored, I'm really honored, and I want to congratulate Ted and I want to congratulate all the incredible candidates including Mike Huckabee who's become a really good friend of mine. So congratulations to everybody,” Trump said.

Trump said he looked forward to New Hampshire, but had a few last words about the state he had just lost in.

“I think I might come here and buy a farm, I love it,” Trump said.

Marco Rubio

The Florida senator thanked God, his wife, family and then his competition.

“I want to congratulate my friend senator Ted Cruz,” Rubio said. “I want to thank another good friend of mine governor Mike Huckabee, for his service to our country. He has announced tonight he's suspending his campaign. We have tremendous admiration for governor Huckabee and we thank him for all he's done.”

“They told me that we have no chance because my hair wasn't gray enough and my boots were too high. They told me I needed to wait my turn, that I needed to wait in line.”

Martin O’Malley

The former Maryland governor had one of the worst nights, failing to win a single county and announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign. At his concession speech, O’Malley rejected the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Trump.

“We need to continue to hold strong to the truth that the enduring symbol of the United States of America is not the barbed wire fence," he said. "It is the statue of liberty.”

Hillary Clinton

The former Secretary of State declared early on that she was the winner of the Democratic Iowa caucus even though the race was too close to project.

“This has been an incredible honor to campaign across Iowa, with so many of you to make the case for the kind of future, we want.”

Clinton acknowledged that there is a real “difference of opinion” about how to best achieve the goals of the Democratic Party, but she emphasized her campaign stands for “what is best in America” and hammered the Republican Party.

“When it is all said and done, we have to be united,” Clinton said. “A Republican vision and candidates that would drive us apart and divide us.

Bernie Sanders

While Clinton was ready to say she won, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders did not feel as comfortable with that rhetoric in front of supporters at a Des Moines Holiday Inn quite yet.

“Nine months ago we came to this beautiful state,” Sanders said. “We had no political organization, we had no money, we had no name recognition. And we were taking on the most powerful political organization in the United States of America. And tonight while the results are still not known, it looks like we are in a virtual tie.”

Sanders congratulated Clinton and her organization for “waging a very vigorous campaign.” He also thanked O’Malley and said, “It's never easy to lose. I've lost more than one campaign.”

He said O’Malley contributed a lot to the dialogue and ran an issue-oriented campaign.

“I think the people of Iowa have sent a very profound message to the political establishment, to the economic establishment, and by the way, to the media establishment,” Sanders said about the night’s events.

Week #3 (2/1-2/5)- How Zika Virus Can Spread (The New Yorker)

Although the Aedes aegypti mosquito is responsible for the great majority of Zika virus transmissions, a team of researchers has helped to discover that the virus can also be sexually communicated.CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY MARIO TAMA / GETTY

When Andrew Haddow was a boy, in the nineteen-eighties, his father told him bedtime stories about his grandfather, a Scottish scientist named Alexander John Haddow, who studied rare viruses in the jungle outside Entebbe, Uganda. As Haddow got older, he began reading his grandfather’s papers. One of them was about the discovery, in 1947, of a virus in the blood of a rhesus monkey that lived in the Zika Forest. This virus—which, like dengue fever and yellow fever, is transmitted to humans mostly by mosquitoes—remained virtually unknown for the next sixty years, but it interested Haddow. In 2012, Haddow, now a medical entomologist, published a paper on the genetic lineage of the Zika virus. Haddow identified two points of origin—one African, the other Asian—and showed that a recent outbreak on the island of Yap, in the Federated States of Micronesia, had been caused by the latter strain. His paper also warned that Zika might spread.

Today, in much of Latin America, Haddow’s prediction has become a frightening reality. The World Health Organization estimates that the virus could infect as many as four million people in the coming months; on Monday, it declared the outbreak a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern,” a designation that has rarely been applied in the past, and is intended to coördinate international funds and expertise. Fortunately, the majority of people who catch Zika (perhaps eighty per cent) will experience no symptoms. But what no one, including Haddow, foresaw was the apparent, though still unproven, link between the virus and microcephaly, a condition that causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads and, in most cases, irreversible brain damage. In Brazil, where the virus was first reported in May, health officials have implicated Zika in thirty-seven hundred new cases of microcephaly. (Fewer than a hundred and fifty cases surfaced in 2014.) Some epidemiologists have said that the virus’s invisibility makes it more dangerous; a pregnant woman might not know that she has contracted it.

Although mosquitoes are responsible for the great majority of transmissions, Haddow helped to discover that the virus can also be sexually communicated. In 2009, during a field study in Senegal, he met another medical entomologist, Kevin Kobylinski, who was conducting malaria research. They went out for beers, and Kobylinski described a mysterious illness—rash, extreme fatigue, joint pain, blood in his semen—that had plagued both him and a colleague, Brian Foy, after a trip to the country the previous year. Foy’s wife, who had not been to Senegal, had also become ill, nine days after his return to the United States. Haddow immediately suspected Zika. Kobylinski sent him blood samples, which proved that the diagnosis was correct. In 2011, they co-authored a paper in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases suggesting, based on circumstantial evidence, that Foy had unwittingly infected his wife with Zika. Foy also proposed that sexual transmissions might have contributed to the outbreak on Yap, which touched seventy-three per cent of the island’s population.

Meanwhile, Zika had been travelling east. In 2013 and 2014, French Polynesia experienced a large outbreak. The virus had hopscotched across the South Pacific—the Cook Islands, New Caledonia, Easter Island. In each place, local mosquitoes likely fed on the Zika-infected blood of travellers. Then, in August of 2014, according to Didier Musso, a French scientist based in Tahiti, teams from those South Pacific island groups competed in a canoe race, the Va’a World Sprint Championship, which was held in Rio de Janeiro.

Now the virus has spread to more than twenty countries in the Americas. It’s coming our way. So far, thirty-six Americans, including four pregnant women and five New Yorkers, are reported to have contracted the disease, all while travelling outside the country. Air-conditioning, screened windows, and modern plumbing will most likely prevent Zika from spreading too readily here. The same cannot be said of Brazil, or Colombia, or El Salvador. It’s the rainy season in much of Latin America, and the mosquito population in cities is at its festering peak. Brazil has deployed two hundred thousand troops to reduce the numbers of bugs, an effort that promises to be about as effective as using a colander to remove salt from the sea. Colombia’s national health institute reported that twenty-one hundred pregnant women have contracted the Zika virus. In El Salvador, the government recently announced that women should not get pregnant until 2018—despite the fact that abortion is illegal there and contraceptives are difficult to find.

Viral epidemics like this one are not just the result of human encroachment on the jungles of Uganda, or of teams of travelling canoeists from the South Pacific, or even, simply, of globalization. Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that is largely responsible for transmitting pathogens such as Zika and dengue, thrives in the warm, humid, increasingly dense urban centers of Latin America, and climate change has been making these places warmer and wetter. According to a report by the World Health Organization, dengue infected people thirty times more frequently in 2013 than it did in the nineteen-sixties, making it the planet’s most rapidly spreading mosquito-borne virus. The International Panel on Climate Change recently projected that “the area of the planet that was climatically suitable for dengue would increase under most scenarios.”

One way to combat Zika might be to target the DNA of the Aedes mosquito. This method has been attempted before, as Michael Specter reported in the magazine in 2012. Researchers breed a strain of male Aedes with a single modified gene, which programs its offspring for self-destruction. The mutant males are released into the wild, where they mate with females, fertilizing their eggs; after the eggs hatch into larvae, they die. In field studies conducted in the Cayman Islands, Panama, and Brazil, the genetically modified Aedes was able to reduce the wild-mosquito population by ninety per cent, cutting down significantly on transmission rates at the same time.

Last year, Brazil’s National Biosafety Technical Commission awarded Oxitec, the company that invented and developed the mutant Aedes, a license to release it anywhere in the country. In April, Oxitec began its “friendly Aedes aegyptiprogram” in partnership with the city of Piracicaba, in southeast Brazil. The local government chose to roll out the program in a neighborhood with a high level of dengue infection. (Zika was still largely unknown.) White vans now cruise its streets, releasing up to eight hundred thousand male mosquitoes a week. According to the latest data, the “friendly” insects have reduced the wildAedes population by eighty-two per cent.

In September, as reported Zika cases were multiplying, a biotech corporation called Intrexon bought Oxitec. On January 19th, Intrexon announced plans to expand Oxitec’s Aedes program in Piracicaba, and to build a new mosquito-making factory in the city that will be thirty times larger than its existing plant. This may be only the beginning. “We’ll be growing a lot faster in the next six months,” Glen Slade, Oxitec’s head of business development, told me on Friday. “We’re having conversations in Mexico, as we are in many other countries. We’ve had significant interest from a lot of other Brazilian municipalities as well.” The company is waiting for Brazil to approve its application for a license that will allow it to sell its mosquitoes commercially. Slade said the company didn’t know yet what it would charge. Late last week, Intrexon’s stock spiked by twenty-four per cent.

Monday, January 25, 2016

Week #2 (1/25-1/29)- Why Female Professors Get Lower Ratings (NPR)

LA Johnson/NPR

Picture your favorite college professor. Here are some adjectives that might come to mind: Wise. Funny. Caring. Prompt. Passionate. Organized. Tough but fair.

NPR ED

Student Course Evaluations Get An 'F'

Now, are you thinking of a man or a woman?

A new study argues that student evaluations are systematically biased against women — so much so, in fact, that they're better mirrors of gender bias than of what they are supposed to be measuring: teaching quality.

Anne Boring, an economist and the lead author of the paper, was hired by her university in Paris, Sciences Po, to conduct quantitative analysis of gender bias. Through her conversations with instructors and students, she became suspicious of what she calls "double standards" applying to male and female instructors.

Philip Stark, associate dean of the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, is a co-author of the paper along with Kellie Ottoboni. Stark has a longstanding research interest in — some might say a vendetta against — course evaluations. We've reported on his work previously.

In this paper, the team ran a series of statistical tests on two different data sets, of French and U.S. university students.

The French students were, in effect, randomly assigned to either male or female section leaders in a wide range of required courses. In this case, the study authors found, male French students rated male instructors more highly across the board.

Is it bias? Or were the male instructors, maybe, actually, on average, better teachers? (It's science; we have to ask the uncomfortable questions.)

Well, turns out that, at this university, all students across all sections of a course take the same, anonymously graded final exam, regardless of which instructor they have.

This offers the chance to look at one dimension of actual instructor quality: Presumably better section leaders would help students get better grades on the same exam. In fact, they found, the students of male instructors on average did slightly worse on the final.

Overall, there was no correlation between students rating their instructors more highly and those students actually learning more.

The American case was a little bit different. Here, the authors performed a new analysis of a clever experiment published in 2014. Students were taking a single online class with either a male or female instructor. In half the cases, the instructors agreed to dress in virtual drag: The men used the women's names and vice versa.

Here, it was the female students, not the males, who rated the instructors they believed to be male more highly across the board. That's right: The same instructor, with all the same comments, all the same interactions with the class, received higher ratings if he was called Paul than if she was called Paula.

And that higher rating even applied to a seemingly objective question: Did this teacher return assignments on time? (The online system made it possible to ensure that promptness was identical in every case.)

The paper is one more depressing entry in the growing scientific literaturedocumenting how racial, gender and other forms of bias play out in and around the classroom.

What to make of the fact that the bias was wielded primarily by men in France and by women in the U.S.?

"That the situation is Really Complicated," Philip Stark writes in an email to NPR Ed, and, he adds, it won't be easy to correct for it. In fact, the authors titled their paper "Student Evaluations of Teaching (Mostly) Do Not Measure Teaching Effectiveness."

These results seem pretty damning, but not everyone is convinced.

Michael Grant is the vice provost and associate vice chancellor for undergraduate education at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He says there's a lot of research supporting the effectiveness and usefulness of student evaluations.

"There are multiple, well-designed, thoughtfully conducted studies that clearly contradict this very weakly designed study," he says, citing this study from 2000 andthis study conducted at his own university. His personal review of student ratings from one department at CU Boulder over nine years did find a bias in favor of men, he says, but it was very small — averaging 0.13 on a 6-point scale.

At Sciences Po, educators are taking steps to try to reduce gender bias in end-of-course evaluations, beginning with informing students about that bias. However, both Boring and Stark seem ready to write off Student Evaluations of Teaching, or SET, as pretty much useless.

"Trying to adjust for the bias to make SET 'fair' is hopeless," says Stark, "(even if they measured effectiveness, and there's lots of evidence that they don't)."

Boring acknowledges that "SETs can contain some information that can be valuable." But, she adds, they are too biased to be used in a high-stakes way as a measure of teacher effectiveness.

Week #2 (1/25-1/29)- Opinion: Gene editing is powerful tool for good but only if used wisely (Project Syndicate)

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Genes make us who we are, for good or bad. Made of a substance called DNA, each is responsible for a particular trait. Passed down from parent to child, they are responsible for everything from hair color to a tendency toward a particular disease. Our genetic makeup has been beyond our control. Yet scientists have long wondered: Could harmful genes be altered before they are passed down to the next generation, or while a baby is still in its mother's womb?

There should no longer be any doubt on that score. One day, perhaps very soon, humans will be genetically modified. A new tool -- called CRISPR -- is already being used to edit the genomes of insects and animals. A genome is simply the complete set of genes found in any particular living thing.

CRISPR is essentially a very sharp molecular knife that allows scientists to remove and insert genes precisely and inexpensively. It is only a matter of time before it will be used to engineer our descendants -- eliminating many dangerous hereditary diseases in the process.

To be sure, this eventuality is being hotly debated. The main arguments against genetic modification of human embryos are that it would be unsafe and unfair and that modification would quickly go beyond efforts to reduce the occurrence of inherited illnesses. However, ultimately, none of these reasons is likely to be persuasive enough to stop the technology from being widely used.

Arguments Against Gene Editing Won't Stop Use

Safety is clearly an important factor, but it is unlikely to be a decisive one. The new gene-editing techniques appear to be very accurate. Animal tests and experiments with human embryos that will not leave lab dishes seem to prove there is little risk involved in their application.

Likewise, as important a concern as fairness may be, it has never held back the adoption of technology. Yes, the benefits of CRISPR are likely to be made available primarily through private, profit-seeking companies, giving the rich far better access to the technology than the poor. However, that fact is not likely to lead to a postponement -- much less a ban -- of gene editing.

The world is full of unjust differences between people. The rich send their kids to elite schools, while the poor hope their child's school buildings do not collapse while class is in session. And yet, as unfair as this may be, the rich are not waiting for a level playing field. Instead, they are making wide use of elite private education. The same process will play out with genetic engineering.

A Slippery Slope Toward Eugenics

The critics’ most worrisome argument is that opening the door to repairing genetic disorders will also leave the way open for eugenics. Rather than focusing on eliminating diseases, eugenics seeks to introduce desirable traits into the human population. The problem, of course, is who gets to decide which traits are desirable. Furthermore, it is not clear whether doctors should be in the business of performing medical procedures aimed simply at enhancement, rather than eliminating disease.

Nonetheless, the same technology that can be deployed to eliminate hereditary diseases can undoubtedly be used to try to build genetically enhanced children. Inevitably, some will seek to do just that.

However, that is not enough of a reason to give up on the promise of geneticengineering. The world is plagued with hereditary diseases that cause very real misery: sickle cell anemia, hemophilia, type 1 diabetes, cystic fibrosis, mitochondrial diseases, polycystic kidney disease, Tay-Sachs disease, Canavan disease, mucopolysaccharidoses, some forms of breast, prostate, and colon cancer, and the list goes on. It is absurd to think that genetic engineering will not be used to eliminatethem.

Pressure from parents seeking to prevent their children and grandchildren from suffering will undoubtedly overwhelm concerns about the possibility that others will use the same technology to attempt to build superkids -- and rightly so. The sick should not be held hostage to worries about possible dangers or abuses.

Instead, Let's Set Up Protections

There is no reason to waste time arguing about whether humans should be geneticallyengineered. As justifiable as some of the concerns may be, there are simply too many benefits to be gained from preventing hereditary diseases. Those seeking to limit genetic engineering to such efforts would be better off devoting their energies to explaining why eugenics is wrong. They should not attempt to stop the march ofprogress toward healing the sick and eliminating awful disorders.

Rather than arguing about whether CRISPR should be used in humans, weshould refocus the public debate on appropriate safeguards. We shouldbegin determining who decides when CRISPR is safe enough to be deployed, andwhat counseling should be provided for parents considering its use. We should beginfiguring out how to broaden access for the poor.

The more time we spend debating whether to adopt a technology that undoubtedly willbe adopted, the less time we will have to consider more important issues. We need toknow, for example, how to respond to the for-profit medical community's promise togive us taller, smarter, healthier, cuter, stronger, and more loving children. Marketingcampaigns offering us just such wonders will begin rolling out soon enough, like it ornot.

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