Audio Abstract

Abstract for the paper entitled 

Biological Weapons: A National Security Problem that Requires a Public Health Response

Link:   http://opr.princeton.edu/papers/opr0104.pdf

Audio Abstract

Audio Description

Audio Description

Oh Brother Where Art Though 

Toad Scene

Delmar’s face next to a puddle.

Coming to his senses again, he slowly raises his head as his gaze wanders down his outstretched body.

 Directly opposite to him, his friend Everett also has all his fours stretched out from him.

The two are lying amongst the puddles of a stony riverbank.

Stiffly turning his head Delmar notices their third friend Pete’s clothes. Only that Pete isn’t in them anymore.

Struggling up on his feet, Delmar gapes at Pete’s empty but neatly arranged clothes.

Nervously wobbling back and forth he turns to Everett.

Everett jumps out of his sleep and rubs his head.

 Trying to keep his balance Everett rises stiffly. Following Delmar’s stare he also eyes Pete’s empty clothes. Then he turns away slowly and takes a few steps towards the brim of the riverbank.  Searchingly, he gazes down the river and at the brown forest across from them.

 Delmar is still staring wide-eyed at the wet jeans-shirt.

Everett turns back and fixates the jeans shirt. Delmar’s jaw drops as he is staring at the shirt in which something is crawling towards the collar.A horney toad jumps out of the shirt.

Everett throws back his head and raises his eyebrows. The horney toad makes three jumps across the riverbank and then hops into the water. Delmar chases after it. On all four he leaps into the shallow water.

Then with a dive he manages to grab it. Holding it tightly between his hands he brings the toad up close to his face.

Vucetich on Galton

Vucetich’s admiration for a colleague

“What are you reading darling? Could you please just lift up those heavy books for a moment so I can wipe your side table? Oh, I hate that you smoke in here Juan. One day, you and all your books will stand ablaze.” “Honey, I am not merely reading. I am connecting with Sir Franics Galton, my brother in thought, my brother in crime, one could even say.” “Brother in crime? Juan, what…?” No no, do not worry honey, I am not engaging in any criminal activities. Quite the opposite, Sir Francis Galton made outstanding achievements in the forensic field and after reading his biography, I am not surprised he came to fame. By the age of two this prodigy child was able to read and when he was five he already knew some Latin. Later in life, he went on to study medicine and became an enthusiastic traveler. Among exotic countries like Damascus, Beirut and Egypt he also travelled to my beloved motherland Croatia. 

However, the one specific trait which led him to become a scientific polymath was his penchant for measuring, comparing and identifying patterns.  He excelled in mathematics, meteorology, statistics and geography. It was only when his cousin, who was no less a figure than Charles Darwin, published his Theory of Species that Galton dedicated his life to one specific field, namely, the hereditary of human ability. To paraphrase it, he wanted to scientifically proof that intelligent parents have intelligent children. 

While this is all very fascinating, his findings in the forensic field are those which I was most impressed by. Sir Francis Galton was the first to scientifically prove the uniqueness of human fingerprints, convincing courts to accept them as evidence. On top of that he identified eight common patterns in fingerprints and drew up a system to classify them. In doing so he made fingerprinting implementable. Nowadays, when trying to match a crime scene fingerprint with one that is already in the database, one does not have to go through all the fingerprint cards anymore. When the crime scene fingerprint has a loop I can already narrow my search down to a small fraction and after taking subcategories into account I am usually quick to find a match. You remember the mysterious Rojas case? You know, the woman that strangled her two poor children? I could not have solved it without Galton’s fingerprinting classification technique. [400]

Bertillon on the West Brothers

Bertillon's curse

Before he had to go to bed, little John West zipped through the family home, checking if all his ghost traps were still activated. As he had been doing this every night for three years now, this was a quick undertaking. John was absolutely sure that their New England home in Leavenworth was haunted. Sometimes at night, he heard these inhuman wailing cries. He wasn’t scared though. On the contrary, he was really curious and put all his effort into catching the ghost.

This particular night, when the clock struck twelve, he suddenly woke up. Still confused he rubbed his eyes and suddenly realized that a milky-white figure was sitting on his window-sill. “What are you?” John stuttered. “How rude!” the ghost growled. “Sorry, who are you?” John’s voice was cracking with excitement. “I, I am the father of forensics. I am the famous Alphonse Bertillon” the ghost said as he lent back and crossed his legs. “Bertillonage, how does that sound, boy? Fantastic, does it not?

"Bertillonage is a system with which criminals can be identified by having 11 different body measurements taken and recorded. You know, people always thought I was a bit odd, unsociable and simple-minded but I created this ingenious identification system that was used in criminal institutes worldwide. With Bertillonage I put an end to repeat offenders masquerading as someone innocent and getting away with mild punishments. I thought the system infallible. You know what the odds of two people having the exact same measurements are? One to 4,191,304! Ingenious, I know. Bertillonage finally got me the praise I deserved.

"However, in 1903 your great-grandfather, Will West, put an end to my glory days. When he was caught, an officer took his measurements and identified him as the repeat offender William West. When your great-grandfather denied having been arrested before, the police officer turned the record over and saw that William West was already an inmate of the prison.

"Then those fingerprinting people were summoned and established what my Bertillonage could not – that Will and William West were in fact two different people. Afterwards, Bertillonage was disregarded as unreliable and replaced by fingerprinting. The thing is that your great-grandfather’s case was an exception because he and William were actually twin brothers! If they had just admitted that my system would not have been called a failure!" [392]

Napolitano on the theft of the Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa – an influential painting

“I hate art”. “That is quite a strong statement darling, why have you broken with art at such an early stage in your life?” “Well, we have this assignment to describe how we feel about the Mona Lisa and quite frankly I don’t feel anything. To me it just looks like an average portrait. I really don’t understand all the fuss about it.” “I do not blame you my darling, I was never the artistic type myself but the Mona Lisa really is a very influential painting. Actually, you might even say that it had an impact on my personal life.

This has nothing to do with smile though. For me, as Secretary of Homeland Security, the Mona Lisa, or more specifically the theft of the painting in 1911, made way to the mean of identifying people we use today: The fingerprinting system. Its predecessor, Bertillonage, worked quite differently. In Bertillonage, which was invented in the 19^th century by the Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon, several distinctive body features, like width of head or length of right ear, were measured and catalogued. So when a criminal was caught his body measurements were compared to those in the catalogue in the hope of getting a match. This system contained a number of flaws, for example were the measurements often inexact as every officer took them a lit bit differently.

 Critcs’ voices rose but it was the theft of our lovely smiling lady that was the undoing of Bertillonage. As the theft had caused a public uproar and one conspiracy theory chased the other the government wanted the case resolved as soon as possible. Bertillon was personally summoned to the crime scene and even managed to secure a fingerprint. He and his colleagues engaged in seven months of comparing I with thousands of data cards but found no match.

When the painting was finally regained two years later it turned out that the thief had actually beenin Bertillone’s files all along. They just could not find a match because it was the left thumbprint that was left on the crime scene and the right one that was in the files. Needless to say, this incident caused the police to rethink their tactics.

Average Joe - biological warfare

The Threat

Like every morning when his alarm clock struck seven, this stupid country song started playing. If there was one thing Joe really hated it was country music and everything related to it. That’s why his wife had given it to him. How much she laughed when he first heard this song one morning and, according to her, made a face like he had seen an alien. Now that she was so far away, he had actually grown to like it. After stretching out once more he got out of bed and threw an indifferent look out the window. Ever since Utopia threatened to infect US citizens with a deadly and highly contagious mutation of the smallpox virus, weather was something that could only be perceived from inside. He went to wake up his children, Bernard and Eve. Bernard was easy to get out of bed but with Eve it was a struggle every single morning. She was so much like her mother. “Dad, I hate this porridge, why can we only have fruit on Sundays? “, she complained. “You know why darling, fruit and vegetables are scarce.” She gave him a grumpy look and started picking at her food. While the kids continued their breakfast, Joe went to prepare their protection suits and their gas masks. They had to be checked for holes or any other breakages every morning. Joe also hated the artificially-prepared food, the gas masks, the countless blinking virus detection censors and all of the other safety regulations that had to be met after the Threat on the 2^nd of July in 2033.  This day had a huge impact on every US citizen but for Joe it was even tougher than for most others. At the time of the Threat his wife, who is a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, was working in Spain, covering the economic crisis. Then not even an hour after the Threat, US borders were hermetically closed. From this moment on the US government has been allowing 5 citizens per month to return home as part of the US Citizen Repatriation Program. His wife currently held the 124^th position. So if nothing else was going to happen, they would finally see each other again in two years. “Dad can you help me with my suit please?”, Eve was yelling from the other room. After they were both dressed up, looking like child soldiers, he went to unbar the front door. As he was just about to deactivate the viral screen door a deafening wail of a siren made him turn into a pillar of salt. “No, no, no, no please let this be a false alarm and not a real attack”, he thought but he knew that this wail just took his wife another couple of years away.

Rube Goldberg - "Creme that egg"

Rube Goldberg Machines

The name of the youtube video I chose is "creme that egg". Although the purposefull of this Rube Goldmachine might be doubted as it results in a delicious looking chocolate egg being smashed I found it quite amusing. Even appetizing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=vrCb_fNmSTA#t=10s

List of nouns

flummi

sloping surface

ski jump

cup

seesaw

string

marble

paper tube

kettle

lever

turning bridge

pulley

ramp

hammer

handle

edge

pendulum

carton box

List of verbs 

fall down into

be catapulted onto

bounce up into

roll down/along

pull

move upwards

activate

release

lower

pour into

tip over

hit from behind

drop into

knock over

George Will getting caught out!

Ethos, Pathos and Logos in “The Washington Post lets George Will reassert all his climate falsehoods plus some new ones”

 

 With his exemplary use of ethos, pathos and logos Joseph Romm debunks George Will’s deceitful climate assertions. Unlike Will, Romm, being editor of Climate Progress and son of award winning journalists, states and links to all his sources which include the prestigious Media Matters. In addition to being eloquent, he appears to have good knowledge of the subject and uses actual figures to support his assertions as opposed to just stating trends (like Will). The strong pathos in the text illustrates that the subject is one of Romm’s personal interest. He repeatedly states how he is staggered by the fact that an assumably credible newspaper not only permits Will to misinterpret sources and deceit the public but also lets him reassert his falsehoods! Basically Will treats his readers like naive children. Also the fact that his fact-checkers are self-employed reflects discredit on him and the newspapers peer-review-policy. What Romm disregards as Alice-in-Wonderland-journalism the Washington Post senior editor only sees as Will merely drawing inferences from data that most scientists reject. Romm criticizes that the Washington Post’s senior editor destroys the printed newspaper’s image of being a trustworthy media by applying a policy of letting Will write anything unless and even if somebody challenges him retrospectively. As far as the logos of this text is concerned one can only be impressed. Romm starts of with the main issue, namely Will’s deceit. Then the clearly structured text continues with first stating Will’s original assertions and then dismantling them completely. It is not only shown where Will has cheated but precisely in which way he is done so. For example, Will states that Science News has predicted major cooling and extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation. This is not a falsehood but Will “forgot” to include that this prediction deliberately excludes the human parameter! I would have to lie if I would say that it was not a pleasure to see Will getting caught out like that. [322]