Contagious Shooting

Contagious shooting emphasises the dangers of
"Dumbing Us Down" by NY Teacher of the year, John Taylor Gatto. Dumbing us down, freedom without responsibility breeds a climate of fear, power, greed, belief in lies and denials. The 'street' in its own wisdom, coins it 'anal retentive retardation', 'I just couldn't control myself'.

Guns don't kill people; people kill people.
Contagious shooting blows that argument away. If cops fire reflexively, there's no moral difference between people and guns. They're both machines, and based on recent shootings, we should limit clips or firing speed to control their damage. No responsibility, no freedom.
Alternatively, we could reassert that police are free agents, to be trusted with weapons and held responsible—not excused with mechanical metaphors—when they abuse them. You can't have it both ways.

Thursday, Nov. 30, 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

"contagious shooting"

Human Nature - Catch and Shoot -The perils of "contagious shooting."By William Saletan

Fifty bullets fired at three unarmed men last Saturday. Forty-three fired at an armed man last year. Forty-one fired at Amadou Diallo. All by New York police; all cases fatal.

Why so many bullets? "Contagious shooting," proposed the New York Times in a front-page story on Monday. "An officer fires, so his colleagues do, too."

It's natural to grope for a rational or mechanical explanation in cases like these. But it's not clear which kind of explanation this contagion is. If it's rational, it should be judged like any rational process, and cops should be culpable for it. If it's mechanical, it should be controlled like any mechanical process, starting with the guns supplied to police. We can't keep doing what we've been doing: giving cops high-round semiautomatic weapons because we trust them not to blast away like robots, then excusing them like robots when they blast away.

Supposedly, contagious shooting was coined four decades ago to explain copycat police fire during riots. Once you start describing a behavioral phenomenon as a predictable sequence of events—"post-traumatic stress disorder," for example—people start reading it as an excuse.

Seven years ago, during the Diallo case, a lawyer for one of the accused officers pointed out that "contagious shooting" was in the New York Police Department patrol guide. "I suspect that this phenomenon may play an active role in this case for my client," he told reporters.

What makes contagious shooting a handy legal defense is its mechanical portrayal of behavior. You're not choosing to kill; you're catching a disease. In the Diallo era, the NYPD patrol guide explained that the first shot "sets off a chain reaction of shooting by other personnel." Officers "join in as a kind of contagion," said the Times. They "instinctively follow suit," said the Daily News, as one shot "sparks a volley from other officers." On Monday, the Times said contagious shooting "spreads like germs, like laughter." One former NYPD official called it the "fog of the moment." Another said "your reflexes take over." A third told CNN, "It's sort of like a Pavlovian response. It's automatic. It's not intentional."

This mess of metaphors is telling. Nothing can behave like germs, sparks, laughter, fog, instinct, and conditioning all at once. That's the first clue that "contagious" is being used not to clarify matters, but to confuse them. Another clue is that the same people who invoke it often point out that the number of shootings by police is low and has been falling. An urge that's so commonly resisted can't be irresistible.

Here's a third clue: Prior to Monday, "contagious shooting" had appeared in 25 articles in Nexis. Half of them were about cops or soldiers; the other half were about basketball. Three years ago, for example, contagious shooting "rubbed off" among Duke players; last year, it "spread" among the Philadelphia 76ers. Anyone who follows sports knows that writers reach for such silly metaphors when they have no idea why something happened.

Maybe cops can get off with this defense. But it carries a price. If lethal police reactions really are contagious, then the sensible response is to control them like a disease. As Al Sharpton—who says 10,000 things a year and is right at least twice—pointed out Monday, contagious shooting as an explanation for this week's tragedy is "even more frightening" than malice, since it implies that such incidents will recur. The most famous invocation of contagion in law enforcement, delivered eight decades ago by Justice Louis Brandeis, became a centerpiece of the 1966 Miranda case. "Crime is contagious," Brandeis wrote. "If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."

How can you control a contagion of police overreaction? By controlling the crucial mechanism: guns. The key number in the Diallo case wasn't 41; it was 16. Two of the four officers accounted for 32 of the 41 bullets, because each of them emptied his weapon. NYPD rules "require that the officers carry nine millimeter semi-automatic pistols with 16 shots in the magazine and the first trigger pull being a conventional trigger pull and all subsequent trigger pulls being a hair trigger pull," one defense lawyer told the jury. That's why the officers fired so many shots so fast: Their guns, loaded with 64 rounds, "were all capable of being emptied in less than four seconds."
Same thing this week. Thirty-one of the 50 bullets reportedly came from one officer's 16-round semiautomatic. One reload, two clips, total mayhem.

This is why Mayor David Dinkins and his police commissioners, including Ray Kelly, originally opposed giving cops semiautomatic weapons. In 1993, when they gave in, they put a 10-round limit on the clips. A year later, Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his commissioner lifted the cap. They argued that cops shouldn't be outgunned and would handle the weapons responsibly. It's the same argument the National Rifle Association makes for the freedom to use firearms: Guns don't kill people; people kill people.

Contagious shooting blows that argument away. If cops fire reflexively, there's no moral difference between people and guns. They're both machines, and based on recent shootings, we should limit clips or firing speed to control their damage. No responsibility, no freedom.
Alternatively, we could reassert that police are free agents, to be trusted with weapons and held responsible—not excused with mechanical metaphors—when they abuse them. You can't have it both ways.

William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2154631/
t 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Giant Sunshades in Space? Monster Bugs? for Global Warming

Lack of fundamental progress in science does seem to create helpless fantasy for Global Warming solutions. Anyone for a sneak preview of possibilities in advanced energy systems?

StarSteps

___________________________________________________________

Weird Science Getting New Respect, Just in Case
Giant Sunshades in Space? Monster Air Scrubbers? Far Fetched Plans for Controlling Earth's Fever
By BILL BLAKEMORE
Nov. 16, 2006 — - Some weird science is getting serious looks by leading climate experts who say it would be folly not to prepare emergency measures to try to stop global warming in its tracks. This is going on despite the well known risk of unintended consequences whenever humans meddle with nature.
The scientists' worry is that global temperatures are now rising steadily and the process may get beyond any hope of being stopped by cutting greenhouse gas emissions alone.
"These 'geo-engineering' ideas are something any serious scientist approaches with extreme caution," NASA earth studies expert James Hansen told ABC News.
"But we're at the hairy edge," he said. "We 've only got about 10 years to turn the carbon emissions around, and so you're finding more scientists thinking about these things."
Some astonishing ideas are popping up -- like a monster sunshade for planet Earth.
NASA has asked University of Arizona professor Roger Angel to flesh out his idea for a gigantic sunshade in space.
For only $3 trillion, says Angel, a "solar shield" could be made of mirrors that would span 1,200 miles of space, 950,000 miles away from the earth, to block some of the sun, making the earth cooler.
Angel argues that while $3 trillion may sound like a lot, it's less than 2 percent of the world's gross national product.
But what if the mirrors' tilt controls fail? Could mankind really build the necessary space vehicles needed to repair something so huge in time? And if runaway warming starts, would there even be enough time to build such a massive structure anyway? There are no clear answers.
Some scientists suggest turning the earth's blue skies a yellowish grey by injecting sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere with a vast fleet of planes.
The sulphur dioxide would reflect warming sunlight back into space.
But the psychological effect on humanity of a world without blue skies -- to say nothing of the effect on earth's plants and animals -- is clearly incalculable.
And what would all that sulphur dioxide do to the oceans into which it would soon settle?
Even though that part hasn't been worked out yet, climate scientist Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research is promoting the sulphur skies idea in the premier research journal Science.
Blanketing the Deserts
A number of scientists have suggested blanketing enormous sections of the planet 's deserts with plastic sheets to reflect sunlight straight back into space, preventing it from warming the earth.
That might work because sunlight, coming in or reflected back out to space, passes right through greenhouse gasses -- unlike the infrared heat a warmed earth gives off, which gets trapped in those gasses.
But scientists admit they're not sure how to maintain such immense reflectivity: would a few good dust storms -- already increasingly common on our warming planet -- dull the giant reflective sheets, requiring a huge cleaning staff ? How many vacuum cleaners would they need?
Sowing the Waves... But What About the Bugs?
Another idea being seriously debated among scientists is to send a fleet of ships into the world's oceans to sow the waves with iron particles.
The iron would stimulate massive growth of the sea's myriad tiny plankton, which flourish on a diet of iron.
The plankton, which also love carbon dioxide, would then suck up huge chunks of it -- the same CO2 which causes global warming.
Just a couple of problems for some scientists: When they die and sink to the ocean floor, will the plankton keep the CO2 there, or in dying will the plankton give up the CO2 along with their ghosts, releasing it back into the air?
Then there are the sea bugs.
Professor Eduoard Bard of the College de France in Paris points out that if the CO2 did sink with the dead plankton but then get released, it would turn some parts of the ocean acidic, starving it of oxygen.
That would create conditions loved by tiny sea bugs, different species of bacteria that would then proliferate, releasing untold tonnage of nitrous oxide which, as Bard told the French news agency AFP, "is a more powerful greenhouse gas that CO2."
That is to say, sowing the seas with iron might make the planet cooler -- at first -- then warmer.
Eye Grabbing Contraptions
Eye-grabbing artist's renderings of huge "geo-engineering" contraptions to battle global warming are appearing more frequently now in popular science magazines.
One showed a landscape dotted with skyscraper-sized, pitchfork-like structures whose louver panels, according to the caption, would capture carbon from the air and somehow hide it underground.
Impossibly expensive, according to some climate experts, several of whom added that it might reassure readers who assume technology will somehow just whisk the problem away, but it is only wishful thinking for now.
Experts say the problem of scale is one of the main obstacles -- the massive size of that space mirror array, the number of boats or planes needed to seed the sea or the sky.
But human daring is famous for disregarding such obstacles -- at least in fantasy.
Nuking Hurricanes
Former NOAA Hurricane research chief Hugh Willoughby recently reviewed for ABC News some of the "wild and crazy ideas" he received in the mail for stopping hurricanes.
One man suggested strategically placing a circular series of nuclear bombs in an advancing hurricane's eye-wall.
"It wouldn't work," Willoughby says. "And all you'd get would be a radioactive hurricane."
Such unintended consequences notwithstanding, preeminent climate scientists are now contemplating fast technological fixes for a problem far bigger than a hurricane.
NASA's James Hansen and several colleagues recently suggested, in Publications Of The National Academy of Sciences, that "seeding of clouds by ships plying selected ocean regions deserves investigation" -- because the particle-bearing "aerosols" they recommend using have already been shown to reflect sunlight back into space.
All these ideas are enormously controversial, and it's hard, say sceintists, to imagine how humanity could ever be convinced to shell out the resources in time -- especially given unintended consequences.
Think of that famous example in Australia.
Records tell of 13 domestic rabbits brought from England in 1859 to improve the quality of the hunting on one estate. A few escaped the gunshots, escaped, and bred like, well, rabbits.
The entire continent was soon covered with billions of them -- what Autralians call simply "the gray blanket."
A thousand-mile long "rabbit fence" was built in the early 1900s, but it did little good, and now Australia suffers $720 million a year in crop damage.
ABC News Internet Venture

Russia To Deliver Arms to Iran

Russia To Deliver Arms to Iran
Defense Official: Russia Has Begun Air Defense Missile System Deliveries to Iran
By JUDITH INGRAM
ABC News - The Associated Press 11/25/06
MOSCOW - Russia has begun delivery of Tor-M1 air defense missile systems to Iran, a Defense Ministry official said Friday, confirming that Moscow would proceed with arms deals with Tehran in spite of Western criticism.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue, declined to specify when the deliveries had been made and how many systems had been delivered.
Ministry officials have previously said Moscow would supply 29 of the sophisticated missile systems to Iran under a $700 million contract signed in December, according to Russian media reports.
The United States called on all countries last spring to stop all arms exports to Iran, as well as ending all nuclear cooperation with it to put pressure on Tehran to halt uranium enrichment activities. Israel, too, has severely criticized arms deals with Iran.
Tehran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but the United States and its allies suspect Iran is trying to develop weapons.
The U.N. Security Council, where Russia is a veto-wielding permanent member, is currently stalemated on the severity of sanctions on Iran for defying its demand to cease enrichment.
The Tor-M1 deal, involving conventional weapons, does not violate any international agreements.
Russian officials say the missiles are purely defensive weapons with a limited range.
According to the Interfax news agency, the Tor-M1 system can identify up to 48 targets and fire at two targets simultaneously at a height of up to 20,000 feet.
Russian media have reported previously that Moscow had conducted talks on selling even more powerful long-range S-300 air defense missiles, but Russian officials have denied that.
ABC News Internet Vent, The Associated Press 11/25/06 .

Income Soars on Wall St., Widening Gap

The Accumulated Financial Wealth of the Top One Percent of Households Exceeds the Combined Wealth of the Bottom 95 Percent

So...who is going to handle global warming and the traffic nightmare?

November 23, 2006

Income Soars on Wall St., Widening Gap
By PATRICK McGEEHAN
In Manhattan’s boom-or-bust financial businesses, the good times are rolling with no end in sight.
The average weekly pay for finance jobs in Manhattan was about $8,300 in the first quarter of 2006, up more than $3,000 per week in just three years, new federal data show. And with another year’s bounty from Wall Street about to be paid out in annual bonuses, that number is expected to jump again.
The 280,000 workers in the finance industry collect more than half of all the wages paid in Manhattan, although they hold fewer than one of every six jobs in the borough. The pay gap between them and the 1.5 million other workers in Manhattan continues to widen, causing some economists to worry about the city’s growing dependence on their extraordinary incomes.
Despite their recent success, the financial companies that have long formed the economic engine of New York City have not created many more jobs. More of the job growth in the city is occurring in lower-paying service jobs in restaurants, stores and home health care, but the pay for those jobs has been lagging, said Michael L. Dolfman, regional commissioner of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“We’re not seeing jobs being created to any great degree, but we are seeing significant increases in salaries,” said Mr. Dolfman, who published a study this week on how Manhattan’s economy has changed since Sept. 11, 2001.
Those high salaries have been contributing to job growth, but they are not translating into many jobs in highly paid areas, he explained. Pay has been rising at a healthy rate in professional areas like law and engineering, but is showing nowhere close to the gains in the finance industry.
For all of the 1.8 million jobs in Manhattan, the average weekly salary in the first quarter of this year was slightly more than $2,500, a rise of about 35 percent from the first quarter of 2003, the federal data show. But the raises are not spread evenly across Manhattan’s job market, economists said.
The average is skewed by the large number of high-paying jobs at investment banks, brokerage firms and hedge funds, they said. They also cautioned that much of the pay on Wall Street is doled out in the first quarter in the form of annual bonuses, so average weekly salaries are lower during the rest of the year.
Still, the figures illustrate how far ahead financial workers are. For example, at Merrill Lynch, the biggest brokerage firm, the expenses so far this year for employee pay and benefits are up about 25 percent, a company spokesman said.
At Goldman Sachs, the large investment bank, the increase has been even larger: The firm’s compensation expenses so far this year amount to more than $500,000, on average, for each of its 25,647 employees, from young secretaries to senior executives.
The rising pay in the financial industry “is certainly good news in the short run for state tax collections and city tax collections,” said James A. Parrott, chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute. “But it doesn’t do anything about the underlying challenge of trying to make the city less dependent on Wall Street.”
Reducing that dependence has been a goal of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration, but “that’s difficult when you have a sector like the finance sector, which throws off so much compensation,” Mr. Parrott said. He added, “If the city was really serious about diversifying the economy, it would focus more on how they could create middle-income jobs or better-paying jobs at the lower end of the job market.”
Most of the workers at those levels are struggling to obtain raises that keep pace with inflation, he said.
Mr. Dolfman, whose report is included in the bureau’s Monthly Labor Review, said one negative consequence of the unequal distribution of income gains is that “the middle class is being squeezed out of the city because of the tremendous purchasing power of the people in the global sectors of the economy.”
Joshua J. Sirefman, interim president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, said that city officials have had success in building up other areas of the local economy, like tourism and health care, but that some of those gains have been in other boroughs. Wall Street is “the single largest engine for the city, but it’s not the only one,” he said.
“Remember that this is a very cyclical industry,” Mr. Sirefman said. “We need to capture their growth when it happens and not be held hostage to it when it declines.”
Jason Bram, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, agreed that there were signs of growth in other areas, but said they had been overshadowed by the gains on Wall Street.
“In terms of dollars, you have this 400-pound gorilla, and it just dominates,” Mr. Bram said. “When you look at finance, it just goes off the charts.”
Health services, which has been one of faster-growing job categories in the city in the past year, is “a low-paying industry compared to finance, but I think of that as a big part of the middle class of New York,” Mr. Bram said.
Indeed, the health care industry looks like Wall Street in reverse: Its share of the jobs in Manhattan has been growing, but its share of wages has been shrinking.
In the first quarter of 2006, health care and social services accounted for 11.3 percent of the borough’s jobs, but just 4 percent of the pay, the federal data show. The average weekly pay for health care jobs was $903 in the first quarter, an increase of $49 a week in the last two years.

Who should be held accountable for global economic disequilibrium?

relationships, relationships - halt scientific advances in energy and it backfires on economic disequilibrium - untold wealth & freedom for the few, untold wealth in corporate coffers - as traffic nightmares, global warming and resource wars accelerate and quality of life deteriorates

Who should be held accountable for global economic disequilibrium?
The global supply of deposits exceeding demand constitutes a basic phenomenon for the global economic disequilibrium at present. The United States, the world's first powerful nation, has been shifted from a net exporter of capital into a net importer, by the means of continuously borrowing capital from the developing countries and oil exporting countries to keep up its trade and economic growth. And varied disputes in trade and exchange rate with China and other countries have occurred during this process.
Analyzing the cause, there are two diametrically opposite explanations in the American academic circle. One viewpoint ascribes it to a steady drop of the US interest rate and a deterioration of the constant account, whereas the other viewpoint, mainly held by some US scholars in the administrative field, attributes it to changes in the global flow pattern of international capital and excessive US dollar reserves accumulated by the developing countries from the development of their export-oriented economy in order to respond to any possible global crises, and this facilitate or result in a huge US deficit, and it is owned to a non-American factor. The implication is that the global economic disequilibrium is caused by the factor of the developing countries.
The United States has sustained its economic growth with the use of capital from the developing countries, as some of these countries have reinvested the US market with fairly a large amount of dollar reserves they hold. Hence, it can be said that the cause for the present enduring global economic disequilibrium hinges on the basic identical equation between the amount of capital borrowed by the U.S. and the amount of capital lent by the developing countries (The oil dollar factor is excluded for the time being).
To step back a pace, under the circumstances of obvious inequality in economic strength of various countries in the contemporary world, in which GDP of the U.S. makes up one third of the global GDP, it seems unfair and inequitable to prompt the developing countries on the disadvantageous side to speed up the renunciation of restrictions on financial liberalization and restrictions on exchange rate one-sided while the U.S. still turns to its trade protectionist policy to reduce their exports and US dollar reserve.
Firstly, it is the last resort for those developing countries, the disadvantageous countries under the imperfect international monetary setup, to accumulate a relatively large amount of dollar reserves, and it should be allowed to have a steady process to change this situation and ensure and maintain the basic stability of their eco-social society amid economic restructuring. Otherwise, the global north-south contradictions and the development of the world economy will be more turbulent and unstable in case of repeated economic crises.
Secondly, if the export-oriented developing countries and oil exporting countries are asked to reduce their exports and the dollar reserves they hold, accelerate the pace for import and augment their own national investment within a short period of time, then it will be out and out impossible for the U.S. to retain a relatively low interest rate and a fairly high growth rate, and the unemployment issue and social contradiction will be more acute in the U.S. In a word, it is no good for the United States.
From what has been said, China should find ways and means to cope with the global economic disequilibrium and maintain the stable growth of global economy:
A. Appealing to those developing countries and new-emerging countries with relatively a large amount of US dollar reserve to beef up their domestic structural readjustment and reform and increase their domestic demand and, in line with their respective national conditions, to accelerate banking liberalization process, expand bilateral, multilateral trade cooperation, and particularly the bilateral and multilateral trade cooperation and currency cooperation among Asia nations (with emphases placed on China, Japan and the Republic of Korea).
B. Urging the U.S. to resume its accountability as the first powerful nation in resolving the global economic disequilibrium. It should first of all speed up its own policy adjustment and transfer some of its interests to ease contradictions in the world economy. With regard to its dollar policy, the US government should, take up its responsibility as the issuer of a leading currency with a high profile, and think of and seek for the steady growth of the global economy as much as it can.
C. Proposing to Asian countries to lessen a negative impact on the stable growth of the Asian economies from excessive fluctuations in US dollar exchange rate in the course of hastening the currency cooperation under the current international currency system of prioritizing the US dollar.
China, as a big developing country as well as an economy developing fairly rapidly with global attention, is duty bound to help maintain and advance the steady growth of the world economy. Hence, it should pace up its own reform in the course of self development on the one hand, including pushing ahead the market-oriented reform of the exchange rate mechanism. On the other hand, it should also voluntarily cooperate closely with other nations to build up their strategic trust in abiding by the rules of the WTO and other relevant world organizations and, in response to new challenges amid changes in the global economic setup, to partake actively and work jointly with them to safeguard its own development interests.
By People's Daily Online 11/24/06; The author is Xia Bin, director-general of the Institute of Financial Studies of the Development Research Center under the State Council, or the Chinese central government

Global Warming Said Killing Some Species

Inconvenient Truth of Global Warming - Consequence of a Stalemate in Physics, particularly Energy & E=MC2; As another Physicist, Lee Smolin questions in his book titled "The Trouble with Physics"

Global Warming Said Killing Some Species
Global Warming Already Killing Some Species, Causing Adaptations in Others, New Analysis Says
By SETH BORENSTEIN
The Associated Press 11/21/06
WASHINGTON - Animal and plant species have begun dying off or changing sooner than predicted because of global warming, a review of hundreds of research studies contends.
These fast-moving adaptations come as a surprise even to biologists and ecologists because they are occurring so rapidly.
At least 70 species of frogs, mostly mountain-dwellers that had nowhere to go to escape the creeping heat, have gone extinct because of climate change, the analysis says. It also reports that between 100 and 200 other cold-dependent animal species, such as penguins and polar bears are in deep trouble.
"We are finally seeing species going extinct," said University of Texas biologist Camille Parmesan, author of the study. "Now we've got the evidence. It's here. It's real. This is not just biologists' intuition. It's what's happening."
Her review of 866 scientific studies is summed up in the journal Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics.
Parmesan reports seeing trends of animal populations moving northward if they can, of species adapting slightly because of climate change, of plants blooming earlier, and of an increase in pests and parasites.
Parmesan and others have been predicting such changes for years, but even she was surprised to find evidence that it's already happening; she figured it would be another decade away.
Just five years ago biologists, though not complacent, figured the harmful biological effects of global warming were much farther down the road, said Douglas Futuyma, professor of ecology and evolution at the State University of New York in Stony Brook.
"I feel as though we are staring crisis in the face," Futuyma said. "It's not just down the road somewhere. It is just hurtling toward us. Anyone who is 10 years old right now is going to be facing a very different and frightening world by the time that they are 50 or 60."
While over the past several years studies have shown problems with certain species, animal populations or geographic areas, Parmesan's is the first comprehensive analysis showing the big picture of global-warming induced changes, said Chris Thomas, a professor of conservation biology at the University of York in England.
While it's impossible to prove conclusively that the changes are the result of global warming, the evidence is so strong and other supportable explanations are lacking, Thomas said, so it is "statistically virtually impossible that these are just chance observations."
The most noticeable changes in plants and animals have to do with earlier springs, Parmesan said. The best example can be seen in earlier cherry blossoms and grape harvests and in 65 British bird species that in general are laying their first eggs nearly nine days earlier than 35 years ago.
Parmesan said she worries most about the cold-adapted species, such as emperor penguins that have dropped from 300 breeding pairs to just nine in the western Antarctic Peninsula, or polar bears, which are dropping in numbers and weight in the Arctic.
The cold-dependent species on mountaintops have nowhere to go, which is why two-thirds of a certain grouping of frog species have already gone extinct, Parmesan said.
Populations of animals that adapt better to warmth or can move and live farther north are adapting better than other populations in the same species, Parmesan said.
"We are seeing a lot of evolution now," Parmesan said. However, no new gene mutations have shown themselves, not surprising because that could take millions of years, she said.

Attending to Sick Children Along a Gulf Coast Still in Tatters

How much was donated for Katrina?

November 21, 2006 NYT
A Conversation With Persharon M. Dixon
Attending to Sick Children Along a Gulf Coast Still in Tatters
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. — For most Americans, Hurricane Katrina is a distant nightmare, nearly 15 months in the past. But for Dr. Persharon M. Dixon, a pediatrician and the director of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Children’s Health Project, the storm and its consequences are at the heart of a distinctive medical practice.
Every weekday morning, Dr. Dixon boards a blue Winnebago that goes to schoolyards in the Katrina-ravaged towns along Mississippi’s coast. From the Winnebago — which is staffed with a nurse, a social worker and two aides — Dr. Dixon, 42, dispenses routine health care to thousands of youngsters who still suffer the aftereffects of the hurricane.
Her mobile clinic is financed by the Children’s Health Fund of New York and co-sponsored by Coastal Family Health Center of Biloxi.
“This is the kind of pediatrics I’ve always wanted to do,” Dr. Dixon said on a recent morning as her clinic-on-wheels sat outside the Pass/DeLisle Elementary School, not far from where Hurricane Katrina made landfall. “Here I can treat children who really need my help, and I can also be an advocate for them. This is what real medicine is about.”
Q. What was life like in coastal Mississippi before Katrina?
A. It used to be an up-and-coming place. This wasn’t the Mississippi of the history books. It was casinos, resorts, high-tech. In a state with awful schools, the schools here were pretty good. But, of course, there were disparities.
For the people living in the more depressed areas, all the problems they had before Katrina have been compounded by the storm. Beyond that, the hurricane created a whole group my project manager calls “the newly poor.” I’ve seen people who were teachers and now they’re in a FEMA trailer.
Nobody likes the FEMA parks, those makeshift encampments of trailers where a lot of people have been forced to live. But everyone is terrified about what’s going to happen in February when Washington stops paying for them. With housing costing double what they were before the storm, nobody wants to even think about it.
Q. What sorts of health problems are you seeing among the children you’ve been treating?
A. Asthma, allergies, wheezing, respiratory illnesses. You hear a lot about the FEMA trailers having mold.
Nutrition is a big problem. Some parents say their kids aren’t eating enough. Others say the kids are gaining weight. If the family is living in a FEMA park in a very remote location, the parents have a hard time obtaining healthy foods. Sometimes, people can’t cook in the trailers. If they’re in a FEMA camp with a lot of crime, the parents won’t let the kids go outside to exercise. The school nurses say they’re seeing more obesity than before.
You see an unusual number of kids with headaches, stomachaches. And the parents wonder whether these things are real or something else. You see kids being very clingy, not sleeping at night.
Q. Why, more than a year after the storm, are you encountering so many mental health problems?
A. Some of it is post-traumatic stress. For many families, the storm touched off a succession of disasters that keep continuing.
The man who drives this van, Anthony Jackson, he was hurt in the storm. His family swam out to safety. Afterward, his niece was murdered. Then a cousin’s FEMA trailer burned down. Anthony’s son started feeling afraid of being alone. For a while, the boy had problems in school.
A child we’ve treated was approached for sex by an adult at the FEMA camp where his family lives. The boy tells us whenever he comes out of his trailer now, he runs; wherever he goes, he’s afraid. In school, he acts out, and they want to expel him.
Frankly, we’re overwhelmed by the number of children needing mental health services. There are quite a few kids where the parents were forced to take jobs elsewhere. We’re seeing 4- or 5-year-olds on the verge of being expelled. I mean, who gets expelled from Head Start? We think this is because of all the separations.
Q. How are the parents doing?
A. That’s the thing. The kids don’t feel secure because the parents aren’t. When I examine kids, I always ask, “How is your family doing?” It leads to things I need to know, like, “My dad is upset because he doesn’t have his job anymore,” or “My brother’s upset because he has to sleep in a room with Grandma.”
You see a lot of depression with the parents. I recall one who couldn’t hear that her child was having problems. When the casino she’d worked in was destroyed, her employer offered her a job in Las Vegas. To support the children, she took it, and left the kids with grandparents. One child was having trouble in school. “What more can happen?” she asked. The parents feel like they have no control over their lives.
Q. What happened to the local health care system?
A. In many towns, it got washed away. A lot of the doctors, their offices got flooded out. Estimates are that the three counties we serve, 20 percent of the physicians have closed up shop. We’ve been doing a lot of basic care because — over and over again — it’s, “Our doctor is gone.”
One doctor I’ve just met in Bay St. Louis is Scott Needle. He’s just got his practice back. He did it with the help of the local hospital and the American Academy of Pediatrics. There needs to be more of that because some of the local doctors just don’t have the means to rebuild their practices.
Q. To change the subject, we can’t help but notice that you wear your hair short, exposing what seems to be a birth defect on your right ear. Do you show it deliberately?
A. I wear my hair short so that my young patients can ask me about the ear. That gives the kids a chance to discuss children they might meet at some point who have defects or disabilities. “They are not weird,” I tell my patients. “They’re going to be fine.” Then I add, “It’s O.K. to ask questions. What bothers a child with a handicap is when you just stare and don’t ask questions.”
Q. Are you from Mississippi?
A. No, Atlanta. I was the medical director of an urgent care center there. When Katrina hit, my friends from the Morehouse School of Medicine were concerned about our old schoolmate, Dr. Belinda Alexander. She’s an internist in Biloxi.
When we couldn’t locate her, two of us drove here. Belinda’s house was O.K., but her parents and her brother lost everything. We stayed on a bit to help out.
A few months later, people from the Children’s Health Fund asked Belinda if she knew of anyone to head this project. She said, “I have this crazy girlfriend in Atlanta who really thinks outside of the box, but I don’t know if she’ll leave.”
Q. What was “crazy” about taking this job?
A. Some people might think it crazy to uproot your family and move them to a storm-ravaged place. And frankly, it was a big step. My husband and I had to give up our house, our jobs and move three kids. In Atlanta, we had a 3,000-square-foot home. Here, because of the housing shortage, we’re in a trailer, though it’s a nice one.
But this job really appealed. You know the phrase “make a difference”? Well, in coastal Mississippi, you can.