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"Hvistendahl, Mara"
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Unnatural selection : choosing boys over girls, and the consequences of a world full of men
\"Lianyungang, a booming port city, has China's most extreme gender ratio for children under four: 163 boys for every 100 girls. These numbers don't seem terribly grim, but in ten years, the skewed sex ratio will pose a colossal challenge. By the time those children reach adulthood, their generation will have twenty-four million more men than women. The prognosis for China's neighbors is no less bleak: Asia now has 163 million females \"missing\" from its population. Gender imbalance reaches far beyond Asia, affecting Georgia, Eastern Europe, and cities in the U.S. where there are significant immigrant populations. The world, therefore, is becoming increasingly male, and this mismatch is likely to create profound social upheaval. Historically, eras in which there have been an excess of men have produced periods of violent conflict and instability. Mara Hvistendahl has written a stunning, impeccably-researched book that does not flinch from examining not only the consequences of the misbegotten policies of sex selection but Western complicity with them\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
My Microbiome and Me
In 2004, microbiologists showed a link between obesity and gut microbiota in mice. To find out whether that link extended to humans, microbiologist Zhao Liping adopted a regimen involving Chinese yam and bitter melon-fermented prebiotic foods that are believed to change the growth of bacteria in the digestive system-and monitored not just his weight loss but also the microbes in his gut. When he combined these prebiotics with a diet based on whole grains, he lost 20 kilograms in 2 years. His blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol level came down. Faecalibacterium prausnitzii-a bacterium with anti-inflammatory properties-flourished, increasing from an undetectable percentage to 14.5% of his total gut bacteria. The changes persuaded him to focus on the microbiome's role in his transformation. He started with mice but has since expanded his research to humans.
Journal Article
CRIME FORECASTERS
Police are turning to big data to stop crime before it happens. But is predictive policing biased—and does it even work?
Many police departments, both in the United States and abroad, have adopted or are interested in predictive policing, an approach that seeks to predict where and when crime is likely to occur or identifies people most at risk of becoming a perpetrator or a victim. Supporters say predictive policing—which uses large data sets and algorithms borrowed from fields as diverse as seismology and epidemiology—can help bring down crime rates while also reducing bias in policing. But civil liberties groups and racial justice organizations argue that the algorithms perpetuate racial prejudice and they worry about privacy issues. To what degree predictive policing actually prevents crime, meanwhile, is still up for debate.
Journal Article
China's Publication Bazaar
A Science investigation has uncovered a smorgasbord of questionable practices including paying for author's slots on papers written by other scientists and buying papers from online brokers.
Science has exposed a thriving academic black market in China involving shady agencies, corrupt scientists, and compromised editors—many of them operating in plain view. The commodity: papers in journals indexed by Thomson Reuters' Science Citation Index, Thomson Reuters' Social Sciences Citation Index, and Elsevier's Engineering Index.
Journal Article
China Takes Aim at Rampant Antibiotic Resistance
The Chinese government is leading a crusade to warn its people against the perils of frivolous antibiotic consumption in hopes of warding off calamitous outbreaks of drug-resistant strains.
The Chinese government is leading a crusade to warn its people against the perils of frivolous antibiotic consumption. The campaign culminated last week in a Health Ministry directive laying out stricter regulations for prescription drugs. Bacteria that cannot be stopped by common drugs are proliferating around the world. But a health care system that encourages doctors to churn out prescriptions, intensive marketing by pharmaceutical companies, and heavy use of antibiotics in animal husbandry and fisheries make China a special case. China's health ministry hopes to ward off calamitous outbreaks of drug-resistant strains.
Journal Article
Master planner
China's revered rocket scientist, Qian Xuesen, set in motion a system for engineers to control Chinese society.
Qian Xuesen is revered in China for having spearheaded the rapid ascent of China's nuclear weapons program. But his legacy is still unfolding in a second area that could have great consequences for the country—and for the world. Qian, who passed away in 2009 at the age of 97, helped lay the groundwork for China's modern surveillance state. Early in his career, he embraced systems engineering, an interdisciplinary field focused on understanding the general properties common to all physical and societal systems, including weapons systems—and using that knowledge to control specific systems. Systems engineers have had a hand in projects as diverse as hydropower dam construction and China's social credit system, a vast effort aimed at using big data to track citizens' behavior. By applying systems engineering to challenges such as maintaining social stability, the Chinese government, as one scholar says, aims to \"not just understand reality or predict reality, but to control reality.\"
Journal Article
China pursues fraudsters in science publishing
China's main basic research agency is cracking down on scientists who used fake peer reviews to publish papers in international journals, demanding that many return research funding. A separate Chinese scientific organization released the results of an investigation revealing the role of China's many unscrupulous paper brokers, which peddle ghostwritten or fraudulent papers, in the peer-review scandal. In some cases brokers suggested reviewers for their clients' papers, provided email addresses to accounts they controlled, and then reviewed the authors' work themselves. The National Natural Science Foundation is now revoking funding from authors found to have committed egregious offenses. But critics say the measures don't go far enough to stave off fraud.
Journal Article