ArchivePage 3 of 21

Intestinal Worms: Not Awful but Surreptitious

Published
by
thadk
on 2008/9/2
in General
. 0 Comments

Dirt and Worms (CC photo attrib)

The night-shift doctor cheerfully informed me on Thursday that once again I have contracted Ascaris Doctorchickenscratchisuniversal otherwise known as Roundworm. I first heard of the details underlying intestinal worms from the Bio/Micro/Zoology course students at Uni and remember being disgusted and amused by their complexity of assault on the human physiology.
 

Identification involves a swab from a “marble sized” waste globule secured in a sturdy receptacle resembling a match box, stained for contrast. The eviction involves three days and six pink chew pills, all in all not so bad. The second day of treatment seems to include a fever and generally crazy immune response as to be expected from leaches being poisoned from their firm stations, with their able counter-immuno manipulations of my body disabled. All week previous I slept 2-4 hours more than normal, generally interfering with my frantic pre-semester sysadminning duties with my Solaris systems but thankfully not with my rigorous hiking regime I’ll cover later. I suspect they’d been around for at least four weeks prior while they slowly built in strength and energy draining capabilities to their doom.
 

I swear I’ve been taking every possible precaution: bleaching fruits with edible skins, peeling tomatoes, filtering & boiling water for ten whole minutes, all for naught. Well, there was that one bunch of Concorde grapes… Still, I was mildly amused when the US had the recent outbreak of food-skin-borne bacteria, all in a days work in The Rest of the World.
 

Health Positives:

  • Doctor bill + medication: less than $3, uninsured cost; 35 minutes after work.
  • haven’t had more than a few hours of flu in almost a year, maybe the standard-PC-issue flu shot works?
  • Having real energy to spearhead projects again after weeks of none is like a longer-term adrenalin shot.

The Future of the Internet: Review of Stanford iTunesU course

Published
by
thadk
on 2008/8/20
in Coding, General and Uni
. 0 Comments
Prologue: So this post is a bit of an anachronism, I hadn’t quite finished it last summer before I left for Peace Corps but now it is burning a whole in my pocket as I want to reference it on someone else’s blog. Generally, I want to take the opportunity publicize this fantastic audio course which continues to provide me insight into Internet economics and politics without minimal assumptions about the listener’s tech background.

British Broadband

The Stanford lectures:

Future of the Internet Stanford Course

Over the past week as I engaged with the course I kept my eyes open for news that related to the fundamentals of the internet. There was no shortage. Stanford has a five-session continuing education course on iTunes U that I’d like to use as the kernel of this entry. The economics that were demonstrated went a long way toward helping me follow the logic of modern industry visionaries such as PBS’s Robert X. Cringely. It is impossible to sum up an 6 and a half hour course in a blog post. Still, I hope to give you the flavor and a bit of value-added reflection using momentous (maybe) current events.

The course is presented by the erudite internet researcher Ramesh Johari. He has published several articles on the counterintuitive network economics that underlay our information-based world. The lecture revolves around five uniquely positioned businesses–AT&T, Google, Akamai, NetFlix and Comcast. Each has a very different role and very different interests. Google and NetFlix are content looking to get bandwidth-heavy things like movies to the “eyes”; Comcast is “eyes”–they’re a major broadband provider; AT&T represents the backbone providers; and Akamai holds the omniscient middleman role of the Content Distribution Network (CDN). Each player has very different values and the question is always ‘who should pay who?’ and ‘what kinds of billing does the technology allow?’.

The phone telephony ‘network’ of copper was different from the protocols underlying the internet. As the linked video featuring one of the founders of the modern network describes, the components on the phone network are almost completely unreliable even with gold plated everything so it required that they have massive redundancy–if any part of the path went down, it was dead. If someone nuked the US, huge swaths of the phone network would be nonfunctional. Internet is different, internet routers know the nearest few connections and which direction will take you closer to your target for the lowest cost. If something breaks, take a different, somewhat more expensive, path.

student sitting in a network classroom

In the first two sessions of the course, Ramesh covers the background necessary to understand the important protocols: stupid-simple network routing using IP; reliability brokered by TCP; and sheer speed established with UDP. He also hints to economic gotchas for those of us who are already enlightened to enjoy. For me, one of the most interesting concepts he introduced in the first lecture was the Internet Exchange Point. This location, often run by a nonprofit, allows a bazaar of internet traffic where everything is free, given that you’ve strung your own set of the wires into the joint to share. The wikipedia article lists hundreds of these. They are important. Without them developing countries would route all their traffic out to their ISP in the United States and back whenever you wanted to connect with the other ISP in town. Even Tanzania has one.

presentation viewed through lecture seats

The course considers Network Neutrality consistently. As recent studies have found no differentiation between services means that to have services that require low-latency you need much more capacity than you might otherwise. Implementing this differentiation however necessarily enables and even requires profit/billing models that largely do not exist today. You can’t allow liers to monopolize a special bracket for high priority network traffic or it gets saturated. Ramesh points out a major niggle though: internet backbone creation funding model is really not stable yet. The last build-out was funded by the dot-com bubble and the hold-harmless bankruptcies that ensued. Over the next year it will largely be at capacity (or at least ‘lit up’).

pro-internet freedom?

Finally in the third episode he breaks it all open, He shows how the biggest internet companies (AT&T,Verizon) are actually stuck and will never have full control of the internet. A middleman company called Akamai that is “neutral” actually has more power over the internet than anyone else. Google can make all of their connection fees go away just by getting bigger and giving stuff away. This guy does research on the economic situation and he points out all the shortsighted moves of AT&T (internet backbone) and SBC (broadband) when they merged last year because they didn’t understand their own internet market and economics. They actually sold Cingular and then bought it back.

uncrimped ethernet RJ45 jack

See Also:

In this Google Lecture Van Jacobson suggests that distributed protocols like BitTorrent and Avalanche are the latest abstraction which like the internet protocol upon phone infrastructure, will become the dominant network perspective for the coming years. He starts with an account of how the internet was invented from the groundwork of ma-bell and works his way to BitTorrent and the revolution in thinking.

Africa Unjustly Trapped: Why?

Published
by
thadk
on 2008/5/25
in Culture and Liberty
. 1 Comment

Recently I’ve heard from some interesting figures which resonated with me as I sit in a disturbed corner of Africa. I have read the first book and I am keen to get my hands on the second after hearing its thesis. Their theoretical grounding is good and they offer suggestions to solve significant cultural issues but they are, as far as I can tell, still small voices. I’m going to try and sum their theses up grossly in order to put their arguments out and perhaps pique your interest.

I’ve mentioned before on the blog how it makes little sense to me how a country with such rich prospects as Tanzania can be so poor. Another wonder of mine is why do the AIDS prevention techniques presented to me by the US government feel hollow. For me, these books ring as partial answers.

I hope to have more later about each, for now, bullets:

Invisible Cure by Helen Epstein: Why has Africa been trapped with HIV and AIDS? (Amazon)

VIA New York Review of Books review

  1. Africans are no more promiscuous than most other people, as measured by numbers of sexual partners in a lifetime, casual sexual encounters, and visits to prostitutes.
  2. Common transactional relationships (significantly: more than one at the same time) arise from the gulf between an rich and impoverished men and women and the vacuum left by the breakdown of traditional familial, land & tribal ties.
  3. Multiple partners have somewhat more traditional precedent in Africa than in most any part of the world. Both male & female partners are fairly free in this regard (unlike in strict Muslim cultures)
  4. HIV is most contagious in the first few months of the disease. Concurrent partners have contact in that period essentially “networking” the disease, spreading it far beyond the promiscuous members of society.
  5. The bulk of high profile eradication campaigns have ignored this, instead favoring pet ideological goals.
    1. Conservative and religious groups prefer to condemn sex before marriage rather than emphasize faithfulness.
    2. Liberal and Population Control groups have encouraged fairly impractical condom use, especialy for “risky” individuals.
    3. Talking about partner reduction is hard for outsiders. When key reports in 1990 showed this was likely to be successful, the reports were set aside by the UN in favor of easier condom programs.
  6. Uganda was the only success story with a focus on “Zero Grazing” partner reduction, existing community ties, and making the disease the enemy instead of the people with it.
  7. Even today, Uganda is losing its grip on the fundamental solution, preferring to pander to Abstinence-linked funds from Washington and is losing its edge in prevention.

     
     

Bottom Billion by Paul Collier: “Why are nations trapped in poverty?” (Amazon)

VIA My Heart’s in Accra review and EconTalks podcast

  1. Internal Conflicts: highly persistent and high risk of going back into them once you come out of them. They are extremely common! Africa in the 1970s large scale violence was low. 1990s so much. Less recently but still an ugly reality
  2. Having a lot of natural resources: should be an opportunity but it too often used to corrode and corrupt the politics (Int’l Aid contributes too). Even if it doesn’t make violence it makes political leaders dysfunctional. Instead they have a contest with each other to control the public purse. Tragedy of the commons “Resource which no one regards as their own”. Causes “Dutch Disease” where in the 1960s, newly discovered vast Natural gas resources deemphasized stable manufacturing markets that help average citizens raise their standard of living.
    1. I suspect this one is the most relevant in TZ. In the past two months the sapphire market has exploded in my town. Agricultural land here is particularly lush compared to other East African countries like Kenya.
  3. Landlocked without natural resources. Options for development are limited to services. (W/ resources Botswana). Around the world, this is 1/3 of the population. Only in Africa these actually became countries, most other places they became parts of more prosperous countries.
  4. Start with poor economic policies, bad governance. Need to fix but pace of reform was much faster if country was big and if population was educated. Reform requires a critical mass of educated people! Educated mass often departs (though it *does* send back money!! How does this count, as aid?)
    1. The great leader Nyerere managed to keep civil war and tribalism at bay here but also conceded defeat in securing anything resembling fiscal prosperity in TZ, as he resigned.

Quick: Someone set up a Print-On-Demand service in TZ, duplication rights, and give me some paper so I can disseminate. Getting tired of dealing with customs.