From the journal Science: Male circumcision to reduce incidence of HIV
Catching up on my podcasts, I heard this today on the Science Podcast of 9 may 2008:
Robert Frederick [host]
What’s the evidence that these established means of HIV prevention aren’t working?
Malcolm Potts [interviewee]
I had executive responsibility for the first large amount of U.S. money spent in AIDS prevention in Africa. And looking back on it, I don’t think that all the efforts that we put in, to countries with generalized epidemics, have made a measurable difference to the spread of this disease, and that’s a humbling thing to have to say.Robert Frederick
And now you’re looking towards male circumcision.
Malcolm Potts
That’s certainly something which has a very powerful impact, because unlike a condom, which can be left off in moments of passion, the foreskin doesn’t jump back on again in moments of passion – you don’t forget it when you go away for the weekend. So, it reduces the acquisition of the disease by about 50% every time you have intercourse – and it’s that “every time” that is so important.
Not to make light, but true that.
Check out the Science Podcast, the journal, and read the rest of the transcript.
Science 9 May 2008
Vol. 320. no. 5877, p. 815
DOI: 10.1126/science.320.5877.815b
Licensing a thesis with Creative Commons
A recent tweet from Dave Parry has me thinking:
@briancroxall I put a creative commons license on my dissertation (shows you how big a dork I am). No one said a thing …
about 3 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to briancroxall
When I asked which license he used, he replied:
@msanford I used attribution-noncommercial-share alike. afraid someone would axe it, I printed to sets of front matter, so i could swap out
about 3 hours ago from twitterrific in reply to msanford
Now that is not a bad idea at all. After all, what is academia if not a large creative commons itself? I’m considering licensing my master’s thesis under a similar license, if my unviersity allows it. There is a potential not to allow me to do so, as my unviersity participates in the National Archives of Canada thesis archive programme, authorizing the two may be somehow legally problematic for them.
Updated follower/following counts
We’re still in the process of recovering from the missing follower/following problem that occurred earlier today. Over the next several hours, you may see inaccurate counts or timeline inconsistencies as the correct data is propagated to all parts of the system.
One thing to note: Even after this recovery is complete, your counts may appear lower than previously. In almost all cases, this is not due to missing data. The counts we display on your profile page are not always up-to-date. For example, when we remove spammers from the system (which we’ve been doing a lot lately), the follower counts are not updated in real-time.
As we push out the changes to fix this afternoon’s problem, the counts will be updated to reflect the latest numbers.
Really, this is not such a problem. I prefer that spammers be removed, and that, hopefully, some mechanism preventing those trolling the public timeline can be implemented. I follow less than 30 people; what do I care if my displayed count is inconsistent with my real count? It’s really quite trivial, especially in the short term.
Now, people being randomly followed or unfollowed would be a big problem.
Taken through a Sigma DC 18-200 on a Canon EOS 20D.
