Ten Years After The Crisis, What Is Happening To The World’s Bees?

Since the alarm was first raised, many countries have created new monitoring methods to judge the status of their bee stocks. As a result we have much more data on bee populations, although coverage is still patchy and differences in survey methods make it hard to compare between continents.

It is clear that bees in the United States are still struggling. Beekeepers can tolerate up to 15% losses of colonies over winter, but the US is massively above this threshold, having lost 28.1% of colonies over the 2015-16 winter.

Canada, by contrast, reported 16.8% losses. This is better, but still above the level of losses at which beekeepers can easily restock.

Only recently have we had data from central Europe. There, honey bees seem to be doing better: 11.9% losses in 2015-16. Meanwhile, in New Zealand surveys only began in the last year and have reported winter loss of 10.7%. Australia does not yet have a countrywide survey of the state of bee colonies.

- More Here and paper - Death of the bee hive: understanding the failure of an insect society

Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

In short, only the duration of transmission matters in steady-state, which is the final L term in Drake’s famous equation. Start time does not matter.

Regarding Andrew’s predicate “given that we haven’t hard any such signals so far” in the OP: despite the high profile of SETI, almost no actual searching has occurred because the field is essentially unfunded (until Yuri Milner’s recent support). Jill Tarter analogizes the idea that we need to update our priors based on the searching to date as being equivalent to saying that there must not be very many fish in the ocean based on inspecting the contents of a single drinking glass dipped in it (that’s a rough OOM, but it’s pretty close). And that’s just searches for narrowband radio searches; other kinds of searches are far, far less complete.

And Andrew is not wrong that the amount of popular discussion of SETI has gone way down since the ’90’s. A good account of the rise and fall of government funding for SETI is Garber (1999).

I have what I think is a complete list of NASA and NSF funding since the (final) cancellation of NASA’s SETI work in 1993, and it sums to just over $2.5M (not per year—total). True, Barnie Oliver and Paul Allen contributed many millions more, but most of this went to develop hardware and pay engineers to build the (still incomplete and barely operating) Allen Telescope Array; it did not train students or fund much in the way of actual searches.

So you haven’t heard much about SETI because there’s not much to say. Instead, most of the literature is people in their space time endlessly rearranging, recalculating, reinventing, modifying, and critiquing the Drake Equation, or offering yet another “solution” to the Fermi Paradox in the absence of data.

The central problem is that for all of the astrobiological terms in the Drake Equation we have a sample size on 1 (Earth), and since that one is us we run into “anthropic principle” issues whenever we try to use it to estimate those terms.

The recent paper by Sandberg calculates reasonable posterior distributions on N in the Drake Equation, and indeed shows that they are so wide that N=0 is not excluded, but the latter point has been well appreciated since the equation was written down, so this “dissolution” to the Fermi Paradox (“maybe spacefaring life is just really rare”) is hardly novel. It was the thesis of the influential book Rare Earth and the argument used by Congress as a justification for blocking essentially all funding to the field for the past 25 years.

Actually, I would say that an equally valid takeaway from the Sandberg paper is that very large values of N are possible, so we should definitely be looking for them!

- More Here

Quote of the Day

We’re searching for intelligent, conscious, tool-making beings that have developed a language we’re capable of understanding. We’re searching for intelligent conscious, tool-making, communicative beings that live in social groups (so they can reap the benefits of civilization) and that develop the tools of science and mathematics. We’re searching for ourselves . . .

- Stephen Webb, If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... Where Is Everybody?: Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life 

Wisdom Of The Week

Asaf tried to explain. “It’s no one thing we do. It’s all of it,” he said. I found this unsatisfying. I pushed everyone I met at the clinic. How could seeing one of them for my—insert problem here—be better than going straight to a specialist? Invariably, the clinicians would circle around to the same conclusion.

“It’s the relationship,” they’d say. I began to understand only after I noticed that the doctors, the nurses, and the front-desk staff knew by name almost every patient who came through the door. Often, they had known the patient for years and would know him for years to come. In a single, isolated moment of care for, say, a man who came in with abdominal pain, Asaf looked like nothing special. But once I took in the fact that patient and doctor really knew each other—that the man had visited three months earlier, for back pain, and six months before that, for a flu—I started to realize the significance of their familiarity.

For one thing, it made the man willing to seek medical attention for potentially serious symptoms far sooner, instead of putting it off until it was too late. There is solid evidence behind this. Studies have established that having a regular source of medical care, from a doctor who knows you, has a powerful effect on your willingness to seek care for severe symptoms. This alone appears to be a significant contributor to lower death rates.

[---]

Like the specialists at the Graham Center, the generalists at Jamaica Plain are incrementalists. They focus on the course of a person’s health over time—even through a life. All understanding is provisional and subject to continual adjustment. For Rose, taking the long view meant thinking not just about her patient’s bouts of facial swelling, or her headaches, or her depression, but about all of it—along with her living situation, her family history, her nutrition, her stress levels, and how they interrelated—and what that picture meant a doctor could do to improve her patient’s long-term health and well-being throughout her life.

Success, therefore, is not about the episodic, momentary victories, though they do play a role. It is about the longer view of incremental steps that produce sustained progress. That, such clinicians argue, is what making a difference really looks like. In fact, it is what making a difference looks like in a range of endeavors.

[---]

The federal government launched a standard inspection system and an inventory of public bridges—six hundred thousand in all. Almost half were found to be either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, meaning that critical structural elements were either in “poor condition” or inadequate for current traffic loads. They were at a heightened risk of collapse. The good news was that investments in maintenance and improvement could extend the life of aging bridges by decades, and for a fraction of the cost of reconstruction.

Today, however, we still have almost a hundred and fifty thousand problem bridges. Sixty thousand have traffic restrictions because they aren’t safe for carrying full loads. Where have we gone wrong? The pattern is the same everywhere: despite knowing how much cheaper preservation is, we chronically raid funds intended for incremental maintenance and care, and use them to pay for new construction. It’s obvious why. Construction produces immediate and visible success; maintenance doesn’t. Does anyone reward politicians for a bridge that doesn’t crumble?

[---]

Recently, I called Bill Haynes’s internist, Dr. Mita Gupta, the one who recognized that the John Graham Headache Center might be able help him. She had never intended to pursue a career in primary care, she said. She’d planned to go into gastroenterology—one of the highly paid specialties. But, before embarking on specialty training, she took a temporary position at a general medical clinic in order to start a family. “What it turned into really surprised me,” she said. As she got to know and work with people over time, she saw the depth of the impact she could have on their lives. “Now it’s been ten years, and I see the kids of patients of mine, I see people through crises, and I see some of them through to the end of their lives.” Her main frustration: how little recognized her abilities are, whether by the insurers, who expect her to manage a patient with ten different health problems in a fifteen-minute visit, or by hospitals, which rarely call to notify her, let alone consult her, when a patient of hers is admitted. She could do so much more for her patients with a bit more time and better resources for tracking, planning, and communicating. Instead, she is constantly playing catch-up. “I don’t know a primary-care physician who eats lunch,” she said.

The difference between what’s made available to me as a surgeon and what’s made available to our internists or pediatricians or H.I.V. specialists is not just shortsighted—it’s immoral. More than a quarter of Americans and Europeans who die before the age of seventy-five would not have died so soon if they’d received appropriate medical care for their conditions, most of which were chronic. We routinely countenance inadequate care among the most vulnerable people in our communities—including children, the elderly, and the chronically ill.

- Atul Gawande, The Heroism of Incremental Care

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

You are the community now. Be a lamp for yourselves. Be your own refuge. Seek for no other. All things must pass. Strive on diligently. Don’t give up.

- Buddha

Quote of the Day

UNODC is registering new alarming trends on drug trafficking in West and Central Africa with disruptive and destabilizing effects on governance, security, economic growth, and public health. This is largely due to rising use of tramadol, an opioid painkiller that is widely trafficked for non-medical use in the region.

- UN: Crime and Drugs in West and Central Africa ‘alarming’

Quote of the Day

Don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education.

- Mark Twain

Why We Learn? Should I Fall Forward or Backward - Sherlock

Only thing matters now is to stop blood loss. So Sherlock, fall backwards !

Life long of learning, understanding and wisdom cumulates to 3 seconds of decision making.

Happy "Active Learning in 2019"

Quote of the Day

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations