facility:university of north carolina

En Floride, une «marée rouge» décime la faune marine - Libération
▻http://www.liberation.fr/direct/element/en-floride-une-maree-rouge-decime-la-faune-marine_86078

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a0/Karenia_brevis.jpg/290px-Karenia_brevis.jpg

Les autorités ont décrété l’état d’urgence en Floride, où une « marée rouge » dévastatrice noircit l’eau de mer et tue dauphins, tortues marines et poissons à un rythme effréné. Rien que ce mois-ci, plus de cent tonnes d’animaux marins ont été ramassées sur des plages désertes et empestées par une odeur nauséabonde autour de la ville de Sarasota, sur la côte ouest de la Floride, normalement très prisée des touristes.

La #marée_rouge, « #red_tide » en anglais, est un phénomène naturel provoqué par le Karenia brevis, un organisme unicellulaire microscopique surtout présent dans le Golfe du Mexique. Il relâche une neurotoxine puissante pouvant se propager dans l’air, causant migraines, toux et crises d’asthme chez l’homme. Le #Karenia_brevis se retrouve tout au long de l’année en faible quantité. Mais si ces organismes se multiplient, le péril est grand pour les animaux.

Florida red tides occur almost every year in the Gulf of Mexico and can harm marine animals and humans.
▻http://myfwc.com/research/redtide/general/about

Karenia brevis est un organisme unicellulaire photosynthétique dont le diamètre varie entre 20 et 40 µm, pour une épaisseur de 10-15 µm, de forme plus ou moins carrée3. Contrairement à d’autres espèces de dinoflagellés, il ne possède pas de thèque ni de péridinine3. Deux flagelles sont insérés sur la cellule, lui permettant de nager activement3. Karenia brevis peut se multiplier de manière asexuée ou se reproduire de manière sexuée. Dans le premier cas, il y a division binaire de la cellule. La reproduction sexuée s’effectue grâce à la production de gamètes mâle et femelle de même taille (isogamie). L’intervalle de températures optimales pour sa croissance est 22-28°C, et elle est adaptée à des intensités lumineuses faibles4. Ce dinoflagellé peut utiliser des composés azotés organiques et inorganiques comme source d’azote4.

▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karenia_brevis

Announcements – USC ANNENBERG PRESS
▻https://annenbergpress.com/category/announcements

Numéro spécial coordonné par danah boyd et Alice Marwick

The International Journal of Communication is delighted to announce the publication of a new Special Section on “Privacy at the Margins” on March 1, 2018 which includes 10 articles from international scholars.

Privacy is considered a human right, but achieving privacy in a networked age requires a certain level of privilege. This Special Section on Privacy at the Margins brings together nine original social science papers and an editorial introduction to reveal the complex dynamics—such as coercion and consent—that underpin a range of privacy experiences around the world.

Edited by Alice E. Marwick, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Data & Society and danah boyd, Microsoft Research and Data & Society, the papers presented in this Special Section of the International Journal of Communication use a diverse array of methodologies, both quantitative and qualitative, to address issues and domains including workplace surveillance, interpersonal privacy, and government privacy processes. In order to “interrogate what privacy looks like on the margins,” the section explores privacy experiences in India and in Appalachia, and among Aboriginal Australians and Azerbaijani youth. Several papers account for the skills needed to be successful at achieving privacy, and the trade-offs required by those who both gain and lose from being visible. Notably, these articles challenge basic assumptions underlying privacy research and invite scholars to consider new facets of the problem.

#Vie_privée #danah_boyd #Alice_Marwick

The doctor responsible for gene therapy’s greatest setback is sounding a new alarm - MIT Technology Review
►https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610141/the-doctor-responsible-for-gene-therapys-greatest-setback-is-sound

https://cdn.technologyreview.com/i/images/wilson-james-lab-shot.jpg?cx=0&cy=0&cw=2858&ch=1607&sw=1200

James Wilson of the University of Pennsylvania reported this week that monkeys and pigs given super-high doses of gene therapy died or suffered disturbing behavioral changes.

“What is remarkable is we have not seen it before,” says Wilson. “We were surprised but shouldn’t have been. If you push the dose of anything high enough, you are going to see toxicity.”

The warning comes amidst a scramble by three companies—Sarepta Therapeutics, Pfizer, and Solid Biosciences—to be the first to use the technique to cure muscular dystrophy. That disease strikes young boys, destroys their muscles, and kills them by their 20s.

To attack the disease, researchers replace patients’ damaged copies of a gene called dystrophin by introducing viral particles that carry a correct copy. Reaching the countless muscle cells in a boy’s body requires extremely high doses of these particles—400 trillion or more per pound of body weight.

R. Jude Samulski, who studies viral gene therapy at the University of North Carolina and is involved with Pfizer’s project, says that because Wilson’s viruses were slightly different from those being used in trials, it is not known whether his findings apply to the studies under way.

However, Samulski says the mixture of scientific ambition, technological advances, desperate patients, and potential financial windfalls could be combustible.

“It would be very naïve for our community to assume we won’t have toxic effects,” he says. “People get comfortable, saying, ‘Hey, let’s do it—there is nothing lose.’ Well, it’s out there waiting. But when it’s going to happen, why it’s going to happen—nobody knows.“

#Médecine #Gene_therapy #Thérapie_génique #Néolibéralisme

Dispossession | Pete Daniel | University of North Carolina Press
▻https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469622071/dispossession

https://d1xwerhqtnbyw0.cloudfront.net/resized/height-225/path-assets/covers/v2/daniel_dispossesion_PB.jpg

Between 1940 and 1974, the number of African American farmers fell from 681,790 to just 45,594—a drop of 93 percent. In his hard-hitting book, historian Pete Daniel analyzes this decline and chronicles black farmers’ fierce struggles to remain on the land in the face of discrimination by bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He exposes the shameful fact that at the very moment civil rights laws promised to end discrimination, hundreds of thousands of black farmers lost their hold on the land as they were denied loans, information, and access to the programs essential to survival in a capital-intensive farm structure.

#agriculture #discrimination #racisme

AI Predicts Autism From Infant Brain Scans

Scientists of the University of North Carolina have developed an algorithm which can diagnose autism in babies between 6 and 12 months old. Through brain scans it appears the algorithm’s prediction is right about 81% of the time.

▻http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/imaging/ai-predicts-autism-from-infant-brain-scans

#AI #IA #artificial_intelligence #intelligence_artificielle
#deep_learning
#autism
#brain

The Disturbing #Alliance Between Zionists and Anti-Semites
▻http://forward.com/opinion/363545/the-disturbing-alliance-between-zionists-and-anti-semites

The answer may lie in the history of the Zionist movement, a history which demonstrates that there is no inherent contradiction between Zionism and anti-Semitism. The two ideologies have in fact often worked in concert to achieve their shared goal: concentrating Jews in one place (so as to better avoid them in others).

Even before the modern Zionist movement arose in the late 19th century, Christian philosophers and statesmen debated what to do with the “oriental” mass of Jewry in their midst. As the scholar Jonathan Hess of the University of North Carolina has noted, one “solution” popular among Enlightenment figures who harbored anti-Semitic feelings was to deport Jews to a colonial setting where they could be reformed. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, among the founders of German Idealism, noted in 1793 that the most effective protection Europeans could mount against the Jewish menace was to “conquer the holy land for them and send them all there.”

#sionisme #antisémitisme

a very strange fact about drug prices: They do not really exist

▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/this-drug-is-defying-a-rare-form-of-leukemia--and-it-keeps-getting-pricier/2016/03/09/4fff8102-c571-11e5-a4aa-f25866ba0dc6_story.html

This drug is defying a rare form of leukemia — and it keeps getting pricier - The Washington Post

List prices are nothing more than a starting point for bargaining between drugmakers and the companies that provide prescription drug benefits. The cost for patients varies widely, influenced by discounts and rebates developed behind closed doors and applied in #secret.

To track how Gleevec became a multibillion-dollar drug, The Washington Post used the median amount paid by privately insured patients and their health plans before discounts and rebates, an analysis prepared by health services researcher Stacie Dusetzina of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill using data from Truven Health Analytics.

https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_1484w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2016/03/09/Health-Environment-Science/Graphics/2300-drugcost01xx-3drugs.jpg?uuid=XTQl0OY8EeWpzmgQVcegXw

#pharma #prix #santé #cancer

New Nations, Living in Limbo
By Jonathan Blaustein

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2014/09/26/blogs/20140926-lens-limbo-slide-69RC/20140926-lens-limbo-slide-69RC-blog480.jpg

And Narayan Mahon wanted to document them.

This fascinating realization came to him in 2005, when he learned about “#unrecognized_countries” while studying at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. At the time, he was just becoming interested in photography as well, so he applied to graduate school at Syracuse University with the express intention of visiting unrecognized countries for a long-term documentary photography project. It was a big stretch, given his limited knowledge of either subject.

“This is the first thing I ever worked on; the first photographic idea I ever had,” he said. “I had a point-and-shoot digital camera, and I didn’t know what aperture meant. I didn’t know an f-stop from a stop sign.”

He soon learned. Financing his project with student loans and a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, he embarked on his research in earnest. He set some very strict standards for the places he wanted to visit: that it maintain its borders and have a working government that seeks — but does not receive — international recognition.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2014/09/26/blogs/20140926-lens-limbo-slide-9C3J/20140926-lens-limbo-slide-9C3J-blog480.jpg

Un entretien avec l’auteur de l’ouvrage Ebony & Ivy (vidéo et transcription).

« Ebony and Ivy : The Secret History of How Slavery Helped Build America’s Elite Colleges »

▻http://www.democracynow.org/2013/11/29/ebony_and_ivy_the_secret_history

We spend the hour with the author of a new book, 10 years in the making, that examines how many major U.S. universities — Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Dartmouth, Rutgers, Williams and the University of North Carolina, among others — are drenched in the sweat, and sometimes the blood, of Africans brought to the United States as slaves. In “Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology American history professor Craig Steven Wilder reveals how the slave economy and higher education grew up together. “When you think about the colonial world, until the American Revolution, there is only one college in the South, William & Mary ... The other eight colleges were all Northern schools, and they’re actually located in key sites, for the most part, of the merchant economy where the slave traders had come to power and rose as the financial and intellectual backers of new culture of the colonies,” Wilder says.

#US #Ivy_League #universités #esclavage #histoire

Border Militarization

Call for paper - AAG 2014 Tampa CFP –

Organizers: Reece Jones, University of Hawai‘i, and Corey Johnson, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Sponsors: Political Geography Specialty Group of the AAG and the IGU Commission on Political Geography

Over the past two decades many borders were transformed from sites primarily characterized by law enforcement and policing activities designed to intercept people who violate immigration laws to sites for militarized security activities supposedly focused on preventing violent threats from entering the state’s territory. The stigma associated with fortifying political borders has disappeared and at least twenty-eight security barriers were initiated or expanded worldwide, or almost triple the number that were built during the entire Cold War. However, the construction of new physical barriers is only part of the story and an even more widespread and far-reaching trend has been the deployment of new surveillance systems including high tech sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), and military hardware including attack helicopters and armored vehicles. Contrary to expectations at the end of the Cold War, the current era of globalization has resulted in the most intensive and extensive period of bordering in the history of the world.

This session will analyze the emergence of a new border security paradigm of hardened and militarized borderlines and an interrelated global exchange of security practices, technologies, and information. We are looking for papers that consider militarization of borders on the ground and the circuits of knowledge that allow these technologies to be deployed at borders. Both theoretical papers that consider the significance of border hardening and empirical papers that describe the history and impact of new technologies at specific borders are welcome.

Please contact Reece Jones (reecej@hawaii.edu) or Corey Johnson (corey_johnson@uncg.edu) by November 15 in order for your abstract to be considered.

#frontières #murs #militarisation