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Hepatology. 2013 June; 57(6): 2164–2170.
Published online 2013 May 6. doi:  10.1002/hep.26218
PMCID: PMC3763475

Chronic Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) Disease Burden and Cost in the United States

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a leading cause of cirrhosis, hepatocellular carcinoma, and liver transplantation. A better understanding of HCV disease progression and the associated cost can help the medical community manage HCV and develop treatment strategies in light of the emergence of several potent anti-HCV therapies. A system dynamic model with 36 cohorts was used to provide maximum flexibility and improved forecasting. New infections incidence of 16,020 (95% confidence interval, 13,510-19,510) was estimated in 2010. HCV viremic prevalence peaked in 1994 at 3.3 (2.8-4.0) million, but it is expected to decline by two-thirds by 2030. The prevalence of more advanced liver disease, however, is expected to increase, as well as the total cost associated with chronic HCV infection. Today, the total cost is estimated at $6.5 ($4.3-$8.4) billion and it will peak in 2024 at $9.1 ($6.4-$13.3) billion. The lifetime cost of an individual infected with HCV in 2011 was estimated at $64,490. However, this cost is significantly higher among individuals with a longer life expectancy.

This analysis demonstrates that US HCV prevalence is in decline due to a lower incidence of infections. However, the prevalence of advanced liver disease will continue to increase as well as the corresponding healthcare costs. Lifetime healthcare costs for an HCV-infected person are significantly higher than for noninfected persons. In addition, it is possible to substantially reduce HCV infection through active management.

According to estimates from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), 1.6% of the US population was infected with the hepatitis C virus (HCV) in 1999-2002.1 In a recent study, over 15,000 deaths were attributed to chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection in 2007,2 already exceeding earlier estimates.3 HCV infection is associated with chronic, progressive liver disease. Chronic hepatitis C is a leading cause of cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC),4,5 which are major indications for liver transplantation.6 A better understanding of HCV disease progression and the associated baseline cost, which excludes the cost of antiviral treatment, can help the medical community manage HCV and develop treatment strategies in light of the emergence of several potent anti-HCV therapies.

Historically, researchers have studied HCV disease progression and cost using Markov models.3,714 In these models, a homogenous cohort of HCV-infected individuals are introduced, and the model is used to track their progression and cost over time. A recent study15 varied the age at infection, gender, and disease duration over time using six cohorts to estimate future disease burden. However, in a previous analysis16 it was found that the predictability of the HCV epidemiology model is very sensitive to the number of age and gender cohorts used, due to the large difference in new infections' incidence and mortality across cohorts. Thus, we set out to create a disease progression and cost model that was more refined than those used in previous studies.

The present study represents an improvement over previous work. A total of 36 cohorts composed of 17 5-year age cohorts and one age cohort for 85+ was used for each gender. A system dynamic model was developed to provide maximum flexibility in changing inputs (incidence rate, age at infection, background mortality, transplantation rate, treatment rate, and cost) over time. Finally, more recent healthcare cost data17 were used to estimate the HCV cost burden as compared to previous studies that relied on older data.18

The goal of this study is to describe the future disease and cost burden of HCV infection in the United States using a systems approach, assuming there is no incremental increase in treatment as the result of the new therapies.

Materials and Methods

A system dynamic modeling framework was used to construct the model in Microsoft Excel (Redmond, WA) to quantify the HCV-infected population, the disease progression, and the associated cost from 1950-2030. Uncertainty and sensitivity analyses were completed using Crystal Ball, an Excel add-in by Oracle. Beta-PERT distributions were used to model uncertainty associated with all inputs. Sensitivity analysis was used to identify the uncertainties that had the largest impact on the peak cost in 2025. Monte-Carlo simulation was used to determine the 95% confidence interval (CI) for cost and prevalence. When historical data were available, nonlinear polynomial extrapolation of historical data was used for future assumptions in 2012-2030. The Excel optimization add-in, Solver, was used to calibrate the model using reported National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) prevalence data1 as described below:

equation image

Populations in a given health state (incident HCV, cured, F1, F2, etc.) were handled as stocks, while annual transitions from one health state to another were treated as flows with an associated rate/probability (see Supporting Appendix A, Fig. 1). Historical data reporting the number and indications for liver transplantations from 1988 to 2010 were used to estimate the number of transplantations attributable to chronic HCV infection.6 Trended transplantation rates from 1988-2011 were used for 1971-1987 and 2011-2030.

The populations were tracked by age cohorts and gender. Five-year age cohorts were used through age 84, and those aged 85 and older were treated as one cohort. Each year, one-fifth of the population in each age group, except for 85 and older, was moved to the next age cohort to simulate aging, after accounting for mortality.

The model started in 1950 to track the prevalent population from the time of infection and forecasted the sequelae populations to 2030. The impact of individuals infected with HCV prior to 1950 was expected to be small and within the margin of error of our analysis. Prevalence of chronic HCV in any given year was calculated by the sum of viremic incidence of new infections (incidence) minus mortality and cured cases, up to that year, as shown below.

Annual background mortality rates by age and gender19 were adjusted for incremental increase in mortality due to injection drug use (IDU) and transfusion.16 These rates were applied to all populations. For individuals with decompensated cirrhosis (diuretic sensitive and refractory ascites, variceal hemorrhage, and hepatic encephalopathy), HCC, and those who required a liver transplantation, a separate mortality rate was also applied for liver-related deaths,8,10,20 as shown in Supporting Appendix A, Tables 1, 2.

The number of cured patients in 2002-2007 was estimated using published data for the number of treated patients21 and an average sustained viral response (SVR) of 34%, as shown in Supporting Appendix B, Table 1. The number of cured patients prior to 2002 was ignored. The number of patients cured in 2008-2030 was extrapolated using 2002-2007 data. The objective of this analysis was to estimate the HCV disease progression and the associated cost in the US when there was no incremental increase in treatment as the result of the new therapies. The launch of direct-acting antivirals in 2011, the increased number of treated patients, and the higher SVR of new therapies were not incorporated in this model. The impact and cost of new therapies were specifically excluded in order to establish a baseline for future comparisons. This, however, will lead to higher projections of advanced liver diseases and poor outcomes as compared to the real world.

With known annual mortality and cured population, annual incidence was calculated using a constant multiplied by the relative incidence. Relative incidence was calculated from the literature data15 by dividing each year's incidence by the 1950 incidence to result in a relative incidence of 1 in 1950, as shown in Supporting Appendix C, Table 1. Incidence in the US peaked in 1989 when it was 11.5 times higher than incidence in 1950. Solver was used to find the constant that resulted in a prevalence of 3.2 (95% CI, 2.7-3.9) million in 2000.1

The annual incidence was distributed among different age and gender cohorts using distributions reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)2225 from 1992-2007. Incidence distribution from 2007 was used for 2008-2030 based on the assumption that the future risk factors will remain the same. In 1967-1991, the incidence distribution by age and gender was changed every 5 years and the rates within each 5-year period (e.g., 1967-1971) were extrapolated linearly by age cohort and gender. The distribution was kept constant prior to 1966 based on the assumption that the risk factors remained the same. Solver was used to calculate the annual age and gender distributions, which minimized the difference between the forecasted prevalence age and gender distribution in 2000 and those reported by NHANES.1

Since the objective of this study was to determine healthcare costs associated with HCV infection, incremental costs derived from a matched cohort study were used. The cost by sequelae data came from previously published work by McAdam-Marx et al.17 The healthcare costs among chronic HCV individuals in F0-F3 stages were adjusted for the proportion not under care (see Supporting Appendix D). The 1950-2010 costs were inflation-adjusted using the Medical Care Services component of the Consumer Price Index.26 The 2011 annual medical inflation rate of 3.06% (2.88%-5.33%) was used to estimate future costs in 2012-2030.

The lifetime cost of an HCV-infected individual by age and gender was calculated by introducing 1,000 viremic incident cases in 2011 and using the model to track the progression of these cases and the annual cost over time. The annual healthcare costs for all sequelae and all years were summed and divided by 1,000 to calculate the individual cost. The average cost was calculated by distributing 1,000 new viremic incident cases using 2010 incidence age and gender distribution.27

The annual background and liver-related mortality are shown in Supporting Appendix E. Background mortality is forecasted to peak at 39,935 in 2022 as the HCV population ages, while liver-related deaths peak at 29,695 in 2019 as the number of deaths from decompensated cirrhosis reach their maximum.

Relative incidence and estimated incidence are shown in Supporting Appendix C, Table 1. The constant multiplier for incidence was estimated at 23,790 (20,070-28,990), resulting in a prevalence of 3.2 (2.7-3.9) million in the year 2000.1 Incidence values represent acute cases, and 82% (55%-85%)28 of these cases progressed to chronic HCV with a METAVIR score of F0, as shown in Supporting Appendix A, Table 1. Incidence for all sequelae is shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1
HCV sequelae incidence: US 1950-2030.

Peak viremic prevalence of chronic HCV infection was reached in 1994 with 3.3 (2.8-4.0) million infected individuals (Fig. 2). While the overall prevalence has been declining since, the prevalence of more advanced liver diseases has been increasing. The prevalent population with compensated cirrhosis is projected to peak in 2015 at 626,500 cases, while the population with decompensated cirrhosis will peak in 2019 with 107,400 cases. The number of individuals with HCC, caused by HCV infection, will increase to 23,800 cases in 2018 before starting to decline.

Fig. 2
HCV sequelae and total prevalence (millions): US 1950-2030.

In 2011, the total healthcare cost associated with HCV infection was $6.5 ($4.3-$8.2) billion. Total cost is expected to peak in 2024 at $9.1 billion ($6.4-$13.3 billion), as shown in Fig. 4. The majority of peak cost will be attributable to more advanced liver diseases—decompensated cirrhosis (46%), compensated cirrhosis (20%), and HCC (16%). The maximum cost associated with mild to moderate fibrosis (F0-F3) occurred in 2007 at nearly $780 million. The cost associated with compensated cirrhosis is expected to peak in 2022 at $1.9 billion, while the peak cost for decompensated cirrhosis and HCC is predicted to occur in 2025, with annual costs in excess of $4.2 billion and $1.4 billion, respectively (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3
Projected HCV sequelae cost: US 1950-2030.
Fig. 4
Total prevalence and healthcare costs with 95% CIs.

The lifetime cost of an individual infected in 2011 was estimated at $64,490 ($46,780-$73,190) in 2011 dollars. When medical inflation was applied, the lifetime cost increased to $205,760 ($154,890-$486,890). The lifetime cost estimate varies widely by age and gender due to life expectancy. As shown in Table 1, costs for HCV infections among younger individuals and females will be higher than among the elderly and males.

Table 1
Lifetime Cost by Age, HCV Infection, and Gender (in 2011 Dollars)

The predictive value of a model can be confirmed by comparing its forecasts with real-world observations. The model was calibrated using HCV prevalence by age and gender in the year 2000, as reported by NHANES.1 The incidence was back-calculated and the model was used to fit reported prevalence in 2000. Total prevalence in other years, prevalence and incidence by sequelae, and mortality were calculated. A 2010 incidence of 16,020 (13,510-19,510) was forecasted versus the reported incidence of 17,000.29 The wide CI for incidence was driven by the large uncertainty in reported prevalence.1 According to the study by Davis et al.,15 HCV incidence peaked in 1989 when it was 11.5 times higher than the incidence in 1950. This corresponded to a peak incidence of 274,000 in a single year. A 2010 prevalence of 2.5 (2.1-3.2) million cases was estimated, matching the most recent NHANES data that showed 2.5 million cases in the 2009-2010.30 In comparison, Davis et al.15 reported an HCV prevalence of about 3.3 million in the same period.

Our analysis predicted that HCV prevalence in the US peaked in 1994 at 3.3 million viremic cases. The overall prevalence is declining, and the 2030 prevalence is expected to be one-third of the peak prevalence. Incidence has dropped significantly since its peak in 1989 due to the implementation of HCV antibody screening of the blood supply in 1992, with full implementation of universal donation screening for viral RNA through nucleic acid testing (NAT) in 1999,31,32 and to a decline in IDU.33 However, disease burden continues to grow. The dichotomy of HCV is that, while the overall number of infections is projected to decline, the number of individuals experiencing advanced liver diseases, liver related deaths, and healthcare costs are expected to increase. This was a key insight provided by this analysis.

A recent study by the CDC2 reported an increased recorded mortality rate in the US HCV-infected population in 1999-2007. Consistent with this study, we forecast that mortality will continue to increase and peak in 2020 (Supporting Appendix E). After 2020, the decline in the number of HCV infections will outweigh the increase in background mortality, and liver-related deaths and the number of deaths will decrease. Mortality is projected to peak at ~69,440 deaths, with 29,650 deaths attributable to liver disease, including over 9,000 attributed to HCC in 2020.

As shown in Fig. 1, the incidence of more advanced liver diseases will continue to increase, with incidence of decompensated cirrhosis and HCC peaking in 2016-2017. However, not all infected individuals progress to the next stage, and the peak incidence is lower at each consecutive sequelae. The total prevalent population of each sequela is shown in Fig. 2. Over 50% of the HCV prevalent population resides in F0-F3 stage of the disease at any point in time. However, by 2030 compensated cirrhosis cases will account for 37% of all prevalent cases. The HCV compensated cirrhosis population is projected to peak in 2015, while the decompensated cirrhosis population will peak in 2019. A smaller portion of the HCV-infected population will go on to have HCC, but the size of this population does not grow substantially beyond 24,000 due to the very high mortality rate in this population.

A key observation was that peak healthcare costs lag peak prevalence by almost three decades. This is due to the time required for infected cases to progress to more advanced forms of liver disease, which are more expensive to treat.

Sensitivity analysis identified the key drivers of variance in peak healthcare cost. The incidence uncertainty (20,070-28,990), calculated from the uncertainty in NHANES 2000 prevalence, accounted for 52% of the variance in peak cost. Higher incidence led to more prevalent cases and higher cost. Uncertainty in the annual cost of diuretic sensitive ascites ($2,525-$29,860)17,18 accounted for 15% of the total variance. Finally, uncertainty in persistence (32%-80%)34,35 accounted for 13% of the variance. Higher persistence resulted in higher SVR and a greater number of cured patients, which in turn resulted in lower healthcare costs. This highlights the importance of SVR on future costs. In this study, the treatment cost was specifically excluded, and yet the SVR of historically treated cases still turned out to be important. The treated population had to be included in the disease progression portion of the model since it affected the size of prevalent populations. In 2002-2011, we estimated that 322,700 individuals were cured. If persistence in the real world were the same as observed in clinical trials (80%),35 the average SVR would be 46%, resulting in 430,000 cured cases in 2002-2011. This would result in a decrease of $1 billion dollars in peak healthcare costs.

Patients experiencing decompensated cirrhosis accounted for the majority of future costs. In 2011, it accounted for 40% of total costs, and by 2030 it accounted for 47%. This was followed by compensated cirrhosis (22% of 2011 and 19% of 2030 total cost) and HCC (15% of 2011 and 16% of 2030 total cost). The prevalence of decompensated cirrhosis was 20% of compensated cirrhosis, but the annual cost was 12 times higher.17

The average lifetime cost of a patient was estimated at $64,490 as compared to a recent study that reported an average cost of $19,660 per patient in 2002-2010 alone.17 The analysis of cost by age at infection demonstrates a link between life expectancy and healthcare cost. Individuals infected in the 1950s were expected to have lower lifetime costs due to lower life expectancy (and lower medical costs), while newly HCV-infected individuals are expected to cost the healthcare systems more due to the longer life expectancy. This highlights the continued importance of prevention as a means of managing future healthcare expenditure.

The effects of new therapies were excluded from our model. However, if the number of treated patients is doubled and kept constant at 126,000 per year in 2012-2030 and the average SVR is increased to 70%, the 2030 prevalent population is projected to be fewer than 100,000 cases. This illustrates that it is possible to substantially reduce HCV infection in the US through active management.

There were a number of limitations in this study that impact the accuracy of our base projections. There is strong evidence that progression transition rates change with age and gender. A single transition rate was used for all ages and genders. This led to a higher incidence/prevalence in early years and among females, as well as higher liver-related mortality among the younger age groups. However, the CIs in our study did capture uncertainty in the above assumptions.

The model does not explicitly account for alcohol consumption and metabolic syndrome. Frequent heavy intake of alcohol significantly increases fibrosis progression,36,37 and accelerated disease progression has been associated with metabolic syndrome.38,39 The model implicitly takes these factors into account, as the transition probabilities and sequelae cost incorporate some level of alcohol consumption and metabolic syndrome. If an increasing proportion of the prevalent population experiences heavy alcohol intake or metabolic syndrome, progression to advanced liver disease, and the associated costs, will likely increase.

The model does not take into account the persistent risk of fibrosis progression and liver cancer in virologically cured patients. Observational studies have demonstrated that most patients who achieve SVR experience stabilization or regression of fibrosis. After SVR, episodes of cirrhosis decompensation are extremely rare, and instances of HCC are likely to be small in number and not greatly impact overall disease burden or costs.40

A limitation of prevalence measures used in this analysis is that high prevalence populations may be undersampled through the NHANES.41 In particular, undersampling of veterans, prisoners, and the homeless would result in underestimation of the current prevalence, future disease, and cost burden. In addition, while IDU has declined from a peak in the 1970s, there is some evidence of a recent increase in IDU among middle-aged adults, potentially leading to a higher incidence of HCV.33 In all cases, the sequelae prevalence and the healthcare costs will be higher than the estimated base value.

A further limitation is that the model does not consider recent recommendations42 to implement birth cohort screening for HCV. Such screening could reduce the future incidence of advanced liver disease and associated costs, when infected individuals identified through screening receive appropriate treatment and achieve SVR.43

Treatment of HCV prior to 2002 was also ignored. The first pegylated interferon was launched in August of 2001, and the number of patients treated with pegylated interferons was small in that year. Prior to that launch, patients were treated with nonpegylated interferon. The number of individuals cured prior to 2001 was small, and their exclusion did not have a material impact on the outcome of the model.

The rate of SVR used in the model was derived from studies of treatment-naïve patients; however, average SVR is lower in treatment-experienced patients. Because the majority of treated patients are naïve, it is unlikely that the use of a single rate for SVR substantially impacted estimates of treated and cured patients beyond our CIs.

A final limitation is that the future cost of liver transplants is based on the assumption that transplantation will remain at the same rate as today. All other sequelae costs were determined as the result of the disease progression. The number of liver transplants, however, is determined by the clinical guidelines and availability of donors. Thus, the future costs associated with liver transplants could be higher if transplantation rates increase.

In conclusion, our analysis demonstrated that overall HCV prevalence in the US is in decline due to lower incidence. However, the prevalence of advanced liver disease will continue to increase, as will the corresponding healthcare costs. Lifetime healthcare costs for an HCV-infected person are significantly higher than for noninfected persons, and the expected cost is higher among populations with a higher life expectancy. Finally, it is possible to substantially reduce HCV infection in the US through active management.

We thank Steven Wiersma of the World Health Organization (WHO) and Charles Gore of the World Hepatitis Alliance, who challenged us to develop a robust cost burden model for HCV. The authors also thank Scott Holmberg of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). His explanations of how to interpret the data published by CDC and feedback on our forecasts were critical in calibrating this model. In addition, we thank Greg Armstrong of CDC for proposing the methodology used to estimate incidence when prevalence, mortality, and cured populations are known. He developed this methodology and shared it with us as a way of estimating incidence. We thank Regina Klein of the Center for Disease Analysis (CDA) for the background research and Kim Murphy of CDA for developing the custom Excel codes to run the model. Finally, we thank Carrie McAdam-Marx of the University of Utah for explaining the methodology used by her group to calculate the incremental cost of HCV sequelae.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
confidence interval
hepatocellular carcinoma
hepatitis C virus
injection drug use
nucleic acid testing
National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey
sustained viral response.

Supporting Information

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4. El-Serag HB, Mason AC. Rising incidence of hepatocellular carcinoma in the United States. N Engl J Med. 1999;340:745–750. [PubMed]
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7. Siebert U, Sroczynski G. Effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of initial combination therapy with interferon/peginterferon plus ribavirin in patients with chronic hepatitis C in Germany: a health technology assessment commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of Health and Social Security. Int J Technol Assess Health Care. 2005;21:55–65. [PubMed]
8. Bennett WG, Inoue Y, Beck JR, Wong JB, Pauker SG, Davis GL. Estimates of the cost-effectiveness of a single course of interferon-alpha 2b in patients with histologically mild chronic hepatitis C. Ann Intern Med. 1997;127:855–865. [PubMed]
9. Sennfalt K, Reichard O, Hultkrantz R, Wong JB, Jonsson D. Cost-effectiveness of interferon alfa-2b with and without ribavirin as therapy for chronic hepatitis C in Sweden. Scand J Gastroenterol. 2001;36:870–876. [PubMed]
10. Bernfort L, Sennfalt K, Reichard O. Cost-effectiveness of peginterferon alfa-2b in combination with ribavirin as initial treatment for chronic hepatitis C in Sweden. Scand J Infect Dis. 2006;38:497–505. [PubMed]
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13. Kim WR, Poterucha JJ, Hermans JE, Therneau TM, Dickson ER, Evans RW, et al. Cost-effectiveness of 6 and 12 months of interferon-alpha therapy for chronic hepatitis C. Ann Intern Med. 1997;127:866–874. [PubMed]
14. Gerkens S, Nechelput M, Annemans L, Peraux B, Beguin C, Horsmans Y. A health economic model to assess the cost-effectiveness of pegylated interferon alpha-2a and ribavirin in patients with moderate chronic hepatitis C and persistently normal alanine aminotransferase levels. Acta Gastroenterol Belg. 2007;70:177–187. [PubMed]
16. Kershenobich D, Razavi HA, Cooper CL, Alberti A, Dusheiko GM, Pol S, et al. Applying a system approach to forecast the total hepatitis C virus-infected population size: model validation using US data. Liver Int. 2011;31(Suppl 2):4–17. [PubMed]
17. McAdam-Marx C, McGarry LJ, Hane CA, Biskupiak J, Deniz B, Brixner DI. All-cause and incremental per patient per year cost associated with chronic hepatitis C virus and associated liver complications in the United States: a managed care perspective. J Manag Care Pharm. 2011;17:531–546. [PubMed]
18. El Khoury AC, Wallace C, Klimack WK, Razavi H. Economic burden of hepatitis C-associated diseases in the United States. J Viral Hepat. 2012;19:153–160. [PubMed]
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36. Bellentani S, Pozzato G, Saccoccio G, Crovatto M, Croce LS, Mazzoran L, et al. Clinical course and risk factors of hepatitis C virus related liver disease in the general population: report from the Dionysos study. Gut. 1999;44:874–880. [PMC free article] [PubMed]
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We are all familiar with cross examination in trial—it seems to be the highlight of every legal TV show or televised trial. What you may not be aware of is that the constitution’s sixth amendment actually guarantees defendants a right to cross examine—that is, the right to question their accusers (or in criminal cases, the state and its witnesses).

Defendant has Probation Revoked

A recent Maryland appellate court case discusses the parameters of that right when it comes to a probation revocation hearing. The case involves a defendant who pleaded guilty to a robbery charge. His sentence involved probation. During his probation, he tested positive for marijuana,  thus violating his probation, and as a result was sentenced to serve prison time for the robbery.

In 2013, Maryland revoked the death penalty. That may have been because trials are imperfect, and thus, the possibility of taking an innocent person’s life is too great a risk. That left Maryland’s highest penalty being life without parole.

But with the change came a new problem—unlike there was with the death penalty, there are few standards that a judge or jury need to abide by to sentence someone to life. This potentially leaves what is known as the second most severe penalty in our American justice system to chance, risking inconsistent standards and uncertainty in sentencing.

Bill Seeks to Create Standards

Sometimes it is interesting to see how issues that look like they have nothing to do with criminal justice end up affecting criminal justice. Such was the case this week, when the United States Supreme Court made a ruling based upon whether Puerto Rico was a sovereign state or not.

Can Puerto Rico Prosecute?

We know that Puerto Rico is not a U.S. State. In fact, it has its own constitution and its own government, a power given to it by the United States in 1950. Still, the country is tied to the U.S. Federal Government and its powers are provided to it by the U.S. Essentially, Congress makes the rules. So can Puerto Rico prosecute someone who has already been prosecuted by a federal court without running afoul of the double jeopardy clause?

The constitution guarantees us a jury of our peers in criminal matters. It is one of the most fundamental constitutional rights that we have. But our judicial system is also intended to be racially blind, and selecting jurors based on race or nationality is prohibited. Often these two seemingly contradictory principles collide, as they did recently in a case that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

African-American Jurors Stricken From Jury

The case involved an African-American man who was convicted in Georgia of murdering an elderly white woman. The jury was made up of jurors who were all white. The four African-American potential jurors, were eliminated from the jury before the trial. Twenty years after the conviction, the man’s attorneys argued to the Supreme Court that the selection of that jury was racially based.

Maryland is again looking to be one of the more progressive states in the nation when it comes to criminal justice reform, as legislators have agreed to pass a sweeping crime reform bill. The bill is unique in that it strengthens criminal penalties in some areas, but shifts the focus of criminal penalties in others.

The New Law

The new law, called the Justice Reinvestment Act, has a number of changes to Maryland’s criminal justice laws. The new law allows those who have finished 25% of sentences to be administratively released. The provision would only apply to nonviolent drug offenses, or thefts where the amount was less than $1,500. In some cases, if public safety is threatened, a parole commission can opt not to provide the early release.

Sometimes, the United States Supreme Court rules by declining to rule. When a case is appealed to the Supreme Court, the Court may opt to not accept the case. When that happens, the practical effect is that the law created by the lower court remains the law.

This was the case recently when the Supreme Court declined to get involved in a case involving the Eighth Amendment’s restriction on cruel and unusual punishment.

Severe Penalty for Drug Possession

Many people know, or at least are aware of the doctrine of causation. It means that someone’s negligence needs to cause the injury that was sustained by the victim. Causation—sometimes called proximate cause—is a crucial element in almost every personal injury case.

A lot of people may not be aware that causation can play a part in criminal cases as well, and that someone who breaks the law and causes an injury can be criminally charged even if they did not directly injure anyone.

The constitutional issues surrounding cell phones and due process continue to evolve. Stingrays are devices that track cellphones even when they are not in use. The devices emulate cell phone towers, thus prompting phones to connect to them, and thus revealing location information of the phones. Law enforcement has used these devices which can track someone’s location through their cell phone, even when the cell phone isn’t actually  being used.

Recently, there has been a new development in this issue. A court has determined that before law enforcement can use a Stingray device, they must in fact obtain a warrant.

Warrants Were Not Being Used

University Policies

We have previously kept you up to date on Maryland’s slow but steady legal changes, which represent a different approach to fighting the drug war. Maryland’s attempt to overhaul its drug laws is continuing, as the legislature is now reviewing proposed radical changes, which would make the state somewhat of a pioneer on the drug front.

Proposed Changes Take a Different Approach

The first proposed law is one that would provide for on-demand treatment at emergency rooms, for people admitted with drug-related problems. While this may seem counterintuitive, it stems from a study showing that for every dollar spent on treatment $12 is saved on healthcare and criminal justice costs. The law would require hospitals have a drug counselor available at all times, and require them to have pre-set arrangements to transfer patients to rehabilitation centers.


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Sciencegirl. Science. Science with Out of this World Info. Electric Weather. The following excerpts come from a report that appeared in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) magazine, SPECTRUM, for April.

Electric Weather

The report demonstrates that when science has lost its way, engineers must use their intuition to make progress. Electric Rainmaking Technology Gets Mexico’s BlessingBut for now, doubters prevail north of the border.From at least the early 1940′s to the end of the 20th century, it always rained more in the state of Jalisco, in central Mexico, than in its neighbor Aguascalientes. But in 2000, on a patch of parched pasture in Aguascalientes, workers from Mexico City-based Electrificación Local de la Atmósfera Terrestre SA (ELAT) erected a peculiar field of interconnected metal poles and wires somewhat resembling the skeleton of a carnival tent. Comment: This is the common phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in science. The Russians are performing a weather experiment which should fail according to accepted theory. Wal Thornhill. SCIENCE HOBBYIST: Top Page.

Nature Publishing Group : science journals, jobs, and information. sScienceMap. Baiget. Equations - Photonic > Light. Astro. Biology. Education Science. Physics.

The Nature of Reality. Scientific information. SciCentral: Gateway to the best science news sources. Science. ScienceDirect - Home. Ask any Science questions. Distributed Intelligence. Discover Magazine dark matter. Your hands are, roughly speaking, 360 million years old.

Discover Magazine dark matter

We know a fair amount about the transition from fins to hands thanks to the moderately mad obsession of paleontologists, who venture to inhospitable places around the Arctic where the best fossils from that period of our evolution are buried. A team of Spanish scientists has provided us with a glimpse of that story. Both fins and hands get their start in embryos. Discover Science Mag. Book Publishers. Matrix mechanics. Matrix mechanics is a formulation of quantum mechanics created by Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan in 1925.

Matrix mechanics

Matrix mechanics was the first conceptually autonomous and logically consistent formulation of quantum mechanics. It extended the Bohr Model by describing how the quantum jumps occur. It did so by interpreting the physical properties of particles as matrices that evolve in time. It is equivalent to the Schrödinger wave formulation of quantum mechanics, and is the basis of Dirac's bra-ket notation for the wave function. Development of matrix mechanics In 1925, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan formulated the matrix mechanics representation of quantum mechanics.

Epiphany at Helgoland In 1925 Werner Heisenberg was working in Göttingen on the problem of calculating the spectral lines of hydrogen. "It was about three o' clock at night when the final result of the calculation lay before me. The Three Papers Heisenberg's reasoning. Electricity and Magnetism. Science news.

7 Man-Made Substances that Laugh in the Face of Physics

A ferrofluid is a liquid that reacts to magnetic fields in trippy ways that make you think that science is both magical and potentially evil. Tell us that didn't look like the birth of the most sinister dildo ever. What happens is that when a magnetic field is applied to the fluid, the particles of iron compound inside align to it. Visual science. Scientific Network. Stock science and specialist images and footage. Museum of science, art and human perception. Exploratorium science museum art ,perception.


The first full moon of this month is on Thursday, August 2nd. This moon is most frequently called the Sturgeon Moon, Corn Moon, or Green Corn Moon. But there is no lack of names for this month’s moon: Barley moon, Dog Day’s Moon, Mating Moon, Grain Moon, Dog’s Day Moon, Woodcutter’s Moon, Chokeberry Moon, Summertime Moon,  Dispute Moon, Weodmonath (Vegetation Month), Harvest Moon.

The Dakotah Sioux call this the Moon When All Things Ripen and the  Cherokee people call it the Fruit Moon, Ga’loni, when the foods of the trees and bushes are gathered at this time. The various “Paint Clans” begin to gather many of the herbs used for medicines and the  “Wild Potato Clans” harvest foods growing along the streams, marshes, lakes and ponds.

North American fishing tribes called this the Sturgeon Moon because that species of fish was abundant during this month.

August was originally called Sextilis by the Romans and was was later renamed Augustus in honor of Augustus Caesar.

I said it was the first full moon of the month because there will be a second “blue moon” on the 31st. More about that later this month.

Lunasa or Lughnassadh is a Celtic feast of the harvest and new grain for bread held on the full moon. In Old English this became Lammas, or “Loaf Mass.” In some English-speaking countries in the Northern Hemisphere, the Lammas Day festival of the wheat harvest is the first harvest festival of the year. On this day it was customary to bring to church a loaf made from the new crop, which began to be harvested at Lammastide. The loaf was blessed, and in Anglo-Saxon England it was considered to be magical. A book of Anglo-Saxon charms directed that the lammas bread be broken into four bits, which were to be placed at the four corners of the barn, to protect the grain. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it is called “the feast of first fruits”.

Culendom is the eleventh month for Druids and this moon is the Harvest Moon, a time of reaping and fruition. The first day of Culendom is the day of the full moon. Culendom (the month) is from the Harvest Moon to the next full moon which is known as the Moon of Claiming.


Surveillance Nation

Route 9 is an old two-lane highway that cuts across Massachusetts from Boston in the east to Pittsfield in the west. Near the small city of Northampton,the highway crosses the wide Connecticut River.The Calvin Coolidge Memorial Bridge, named after the president who once served as Northampton’s mayor, is a major regional traffic link.When the state began a long-delayed and still-ongoing reconstruction of the bridge in the summer of 2001, traffic jams stretched for kilometers into the bucolic New England countryside.

In a project aimed at alleviating drivers’ frustration, the University of Massachusetts Transportation Center, located in nearby Amherst, installed eight shoe-size digital surveillance cameras along the roads leading to the bridge. Six are mounted on utility poles and the roofs of local businesses. Made by Axis Communications in Sweden, they are connected to dial-up modems and transmit images of the roadway before them to a Web page, which commuters can check for congestion before tackling the road. According to Dan Dulaski, the system’s technical manager, running the entire webcam system—power, phone, and Internet fees—costs just $600 a month. The other two cameras in the Coolidge Bridge project are a little less routine. Built by Computer Recognition Systems in Wokingham, England, with high-quality lenses and fast shutter speeds (1/10,000 second), they are designed to photograph every car and truck that passes by. Located eight kilometers apart, at the ends of the zone of maximum traffic congestion, the two cameras send vehicle images to attached computers, which use special character-recognition software to decipher vehicle license plates. The license data go to a server at the company’s U.S. office in Cambridge, MA, about 130 kilometers away. As each license plate passes the second camera,the server ascertains the time difference between the two readings. The average of the travel durations of all successfully matched vehicles defines the likely travel time for crossing the bridge at any given moment, and that information is posted on the traffic watch Web page

To local residents, the traffic data are helpful, even vital: police use the information to plan emergency routes. But as the computers calculate traffic flow, they are also making a record of all cars that cross the bridge—when they do so, their average speed, and (depending on lighting and weather conditions) how many people are in each car.

Trying to avoid provoking privacy fears, Keith Fallon, a Computer Recognition Systems project engineer, says, “we’re not saving any of the information we capture. Everything is deleted immediately.” But the company could change its mind and start saving the data at any time. No one on the road would know

The Coolidge Bridge is just one of thousands of locations around the planet where citizens are crossing—willingly, more often than not—into a world of networked, highly computerized surveillance.According to a January report by J.P. Freeman, a security market-research firm in Newtown, CT, 26 million surveillance cameras have already been installed worldwide, and more than 11 million of them are in the United States. In heavily moni- tored London, England, Hull University criminologist Clive Norris has estimated, the average person is filmed by more than 300 cameras each day.

The $150 million-a-year remote digital-surveillance-camera market will grow, according to Freeman, at an annual clip of 40 to 50 percent for the next 10 years. But astonishingly, other, non-video forms of monitoring will increase even faster. In a process that mirrors the unplanned growth of the Internet itself, thousands of personal, commercial, medical, police, and government databases and monitoring sys- tems will intersect and entwine. Ultimately, surveillance will become so ubiquitous, networked, and searchable that unmonitored public space will effectively cease to exist.

This prospect—what science fiction writer David Brin calls “the transparent society”—may sound too distant to be worth thinking about. But even the far-sighted Brin underestimated how quickly technological advances—more powerful microprocessors, faster network transmissions, larger hard drives, cheaper electronics, and more sophisticated and powerful software—would make universal surveillance possible.

It’s not all about Big Brother or Big Business, either. Widespread electronic scrutiny is usually denounced as a creation of political tyranny or corporate greed. But the rise of omnipresent surveillance will be driven as much by ordinary citizens’ understandable—even laudatory—desires for security, control, and comfort as by the imperatives of business and government. “Nanny cams,” global-positioning locators, police and home security networks, traffic jam monitors,medical-device radio-frequency tags, small-business webcams: the list of monitoring devices employed by and for average Americans is already long, and it will only become longer. Extensive surveillance, in short, is coming into being because people like and want it.

“Almost all of the pieces for a surveillance society are already here,” says Gene Spafford, director of Purdue University’s Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security.”It’s just a matter of assembling them.” Unfortunately, he says, ubiquitous surveillance faces intractable social and technological problems that could well reduce its usefulness or even make it dangerous.As a result, each type of monitoring may be beneficial in itself, at least for the people who put it in place, but the collective result could be calamitous.

To begin with, surveillance data from multiple sources are being combined into large databases. For example, businesses track employees’ car, computer, and telephone use to evaluate their job performance; similarly, the U.S. Defense Department’s experimental Total Information Awareness project has announced plans to sift through information about millions of people to find data that identify criminals and terrorists.

But many of these merged pools of data are less reliable than small-scale, localized monitoring efforts; big databases are harder to comb for bad entries, and their conclusions are far more difficult to verify. In addition, the inescapable nature of surveillance can itself create alarm, even among its beneficiaries. “Your little camera network may seem like a good idea to you,” Spafford says. “Living with everyone else’s could be a nightmare.”

Today a company or agency with a $10 million hardware budget can buy processing power equivalent to 2,000 workstations, two petabytes of hard drive space (two million gigabytes, or 50,000 standard 40-gigabyte hard drives like those found on today’s PCs), and a two- gigabit Internet connection (more than 2,000 times the capacity of a typical home broadband connection). If current trends continue, simple arithmetic predicts that in 20 years the same purchasing power will buy the processing capability of 10 million of today’s workstations, 200 exabytes (200 million gigabytes) of storage capacity, and 200 exabits (200 million megabits) of bandwidth. Another way of saying this is that by 2023 large organizations will be able to devote the equivalent of a contemporary PC to monitoring every single one of the 330 million people who will then be living in the United States.

One of the first applications for this combination of surveillance and compu- tational power,says Raghu Ramakrishnan, a database researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will be continuous intensive monitoring of buildings,offices, and stores: the spaces where middle-class people spend most of their lives. Surveillance in the workplace is common now: in 2001, according to the American Management Association survey, 77.7 percent of major U.S. corporations electronically monitored their employees, and that statistic had more than doubled since 1997. But much more is on the way. Companies like Johnson Controls and Siemens, Ramakrishnan says, are already “doing simplistic kinds of ‘asset tracking,’as they call it.” They use radio frequency identification tags to monitor the locations of people as well as inventory. In January, Gillette began attaching such tags to 500 million of its Mach 3 Turbo razors. Special “smart shelves” at Wal-Mart stores will record the removal of razors by shop- pers, thereby alerting stock clerks whenever shelves need to be refilled—and effectively transforming Gillette customers into walking radio beacons. In the future, such tags will be used by hospitals to ensure that patients and staff maintain quarantines,by law offices to keep visitors from straying into rooms containing clients’ confidential papers,and in kindergartens to track toddlers.

By employing multiple, overlapping types of monitoring, Ramakrishnan says, managers will be able to “keep track of people, objects, and environmental levels throughout a whole complex.” Initially, these networks will be installed for “such mundane things as trying to figure out when to replace the carpets or which areas of lawn get the most traffic so you need to spread some grass seed preven- tively.”But as computers and monitoring equipment become cheaper and more powerful, managers will use surveillance data to construct complex, multidimensional records of how spaces are used. The models will be analyzed to improve efficiency and security—and they will be sold to other businesses or governments. Over time, the thousands of individual monitoring schemes inevitably will merge together and feed their data into large commercial and state-owned networks. When surveillance databases can describe or depict what every individual is doing at a particular time, Ramakrishnan says, they will be providing humankind with the digital equivalent of an ancient dream: being “present, in effect, almost anywhere and anytime.”

In 1974 Francis Ford Coppola wrote and directed The Conversation, which starred Gene Hackman as Harry Caul, a socially maladroit surveillance expert. In this remarkably prescient movie, a mysterious organization hires Caul to record a quiet discussion that will take place in the middle of a crowd in San Francisco’s Union Square. Caul deploys three microphones: one in a bag carried by a confederate and two directional mikes installed on buildings overlooking the area. Afterward Caul discovers that each of the three recordings is plagued by background noise and distortions, but by combining the different sources, he is able to piece together the conversation. Or, rather, he thinks he has pieced it together. Later, to his horror, Caul learns that he misinterpreted a crucial line, a discovery that leads directly to the movie’s chilling denouement.

The Conversation illustrates a central dilemma for tomorrow’s surveillance society. Although much of the explosive growth in monitoring is being driven by consumer demand, that growth has not yet been accompanied by solutions to the classic difficulties computer systems have integrating disparate sources of information and arriving at valid conclusions. Data quality problems that cause little inconvenience on a local scale— when Wal-Mart’s smart shelves misread a razor’s radio frequency identification tag—have much larger consequences when organizations assemble big databases from many sources and attempt to draw conclusions about, say, someone’s capacity for criminal action. Such problems, in the long run, will play a large role in determining both the technical and social impact of surveillance.

The experimental and controversial Total Information Awareness program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency exemplifies these issues. By merging records from corporate,medical,retail, educational, travel, telephone, and even veterinary sources, as well as such “biometric”data as fingerprints,iris and retina scans, DNA tests, and facial-characteristic measurements,the program is intended to create an unprecedented repository of information about both U.S. citizens and foreigners with U.S. contacts. Program director John M. Poindexter has explained that analysts will use custom data-mining techniques to sift through the mass of information, attempting to “detect, classify, and identify foreign terrorists” in order to “preempt and defeat terrorist acts”—a virtual Eye of Sauron, in critics’ view, constructed from telephone bills and shopping preference cards.

In February Congress required the Pentagon to obtain its specific approval before implementing Total Information Awareness in the United States (though certain actions are allowed on foreign soil). But President George W. Bush had already announced that he was creating an apparently similar effort, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, to be led by the Central Intelligence Agency. Regardless of the fate of these two programs, other equally sweeping attempts to pool monitoring data are proceeding apace.Among these initiatives is Regulatory DataCorp, a for-profit consortium of 19 top financial institutions worldwide. The consortium, which was formed last July, combines members’ customer data in an effort to combat “money laundering, fraud, terrorist financing, organized crime, and corruption.” By constantly poring through more than 20,000 sources of public information about potential wrongdoings—from newspaper articles and Interpol warrants to disciplinary actions by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission—the consortium’s Global Regulatory Information Database will, according to its owner, help clients “know their customers.”

Equally important in the long run are the databases that will be created by the nearly spontaneous aggregation of scores or hundreds of smaller databases. “What seem to be small-scale, discrete systems end up being combined into large databases,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center,a nonprofit research organization in Washington, DC. He points to the recent, voluntary efforts of merchants in Washington’s affluent Georgetown district. They are integrating their in-store closed-circuit television networks and making the combined results available to city police. In Rotenberg’s view, the collection and consolidation of individual surveillance networks into big government and industry programs “is a strange mix of public and private, and it’s not something that the legal system has encountered much before.”

Managing the sheer size of these aggregate surveillance databases, surprisingly, will not pose insurmountable technical difficulties. Most personal data are either very compact or easily com- pressible. Financial, medical, and shopping records can be represented as strings of text that are easily stored and transmitted; as a general rule, the records do not grow substantially over time.

Even biometric records are no strain on computing systems.To identify people, genetic-testing firms typically need stretches of DNA that can be represented in just one kilobyte—the size of a short e- mail message. Fingerprints, iris scans, and other types of biometric data consume little more. Other forms of data can be preprocessed in much the way that the cameras on Route 9 transform multi-megabyte images of cars into short strings of text with license plate numbers and times. (For investigators, having a video of suspects driving down a road usually is not as important as simply knowing that they were there at a given time.) To create a digital dossier for every individual in the United States—as pro- grams like Total Information Awareness would require—only “a couple terabytes of well-defined information” would be needed, says Jeffrey Ullman, a former Stanford University database researcher. “I don’t think that’s really stressing the capacity of [even today’s] databases.”

Instead, argues Rajeev Motwani, another member of Stanford’s database group, the real challenge for large surveillance databases will be the seemingly simple task of gathering valid data. Computer scientists use the term GIGO— garbage in, garbage out—to describe situations in which erroneous input cre-ates erroneous output.Whether people are building bombs or buying bagels, governments and corporations try to predict their behavior by integrating data from sources as disparate as electronic toll-collection sensors, library records, restaurant credit-card receipts, and grocery store customer cards—to say nothing of the Internet, surely the world’s largest repository of personal information. Unfortunately, all these sources are full of errors, as are financial and medical records. Names are misspelled and digits transposed; address and e-mail records become outdated when people move and switch Internet service providers; and formatting differences among databases cause information loss and distortion when they are merged. “It is routine to find in large customer databases defective records—records with at least one major error or omission—at rates of at least 20 to 35 percent,”says Larry English of Information Impact, a database consulting company in Brentwood, TN.

Unfortunately, says Motwani, “data cleaning is a major open problem in the research community. We are still struggling to get a formal technical definition of the problem.” Even when the original data are correct, he argues, merging them can introduce errors where none had existed before.Worse, none of these worries about the garbage going into the system even begin to address the still larger problems with the garbage going out.

Almost every computer-science student takes a course in algorithms. Algorithms are sets of specified, repeatable rules or procedures for accomplishing tasks such as sorting numbers; they are, so to speak, the engines that make programs run. Unfortunately, innovations in algorithms are not subject to Moore’s law, and progress in the field is notoriously sporadic.”There are certain areas in algorithms we basically can’t do better and others where creative work will have to be done,” Ullman says. Sifting through large surveillance databases for information, he says, will essentially be “a problem in research in algorithms. We need to exploit some of the stuff that’s been done in the data-mining community recently and do it much, much better.” Working with databases requires users to have two mental models. One is a model of the data. Teasing out answers to questions from the popular search engine Google, for example, is easier if users grasp the varieties and types of data on the Internet—Web pages with words and pictures, whole documents in a multiplicity of formats, downloadable software and media files—and how they are stored. In exactly the same way, extracting information from surveillance databases will depend on a user’s knowledge of the system. “It’s a chess game,” Ullman says.”An unusually smart analyst will get things that a not-so-smart one will not.”

Second, and more important according to Spafford, effective use of big surveillance databases will depend on having a model of what one is looking for. This factor is especially crucial, he says, when trying to predict the future, a goal of many commercial and government projects. For this reason, what might be called reactive searches that scan recorded data for specific patterns are generally much more likely to obtain useful answers than proactive searches that seek to get ahead of things. If, for instance, police in the Washington sniper investigation had been able to tap into a pervasive network of surveillance cameras, they could have tracked people seen near the crime scenes until they could be stopped and questioned: a reactive process.But it is unlikely that police would have been helped by proactively asking surveillance databases for the names of people in the Washington area with the requisite characteristics (family difficulties, perhaps, or military training and a recent penchant for drinking) to become snipers.

In many cases, invalid answers are harmless. If Victoria’s Secret mistakenly mails 1 percent of its spring catalogs to people with no interest in lingerie, the price paid by all parties is small. But if a national terrorist-tracking system has the same 1 percent error rate, it will produce millions of false alarms, wasting huge amounts of investigators’ time and, worse, labeling many innocent U.S. citi- zens as suspects.”A 99 percent hit rate is great for advertising,”Spafford says,”but terrible for spotting terrorism.”

Because no system can have a success rate of 100 percent, analysts can try to decrease the likelihood that surveillance databases will identify blameless people as possible terrorists. By making the criteria for flagging suspects more stringent, officials can raise the bar, and fewer ordinary citizens will be wrongly fingered. Inevitably, however, that will mean also that the “borderline” terrorists—those who don’t match all the search criteria but still have lethal intentions—might be overlooked as well. For both types of error, the potential consequences are alarming.

Yet none of these concerns will stop the growth of surveillance, says Ben Shneiderman, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland.Its potential benefits are simply too large. An example is what Shneiderman, in his recent book Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies, calls the World Wide Med: a global, unified database that makes every patient’s complete medical history instantly available to doctors through the Internet,replacing today’s scattered sheaves of paper records.”The idea,”he says, “is that if you’re brought to an ER anywhere in the world, your medical records pop up in 30 seconds.” Similar programs are already coming into existence. Backed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a team based at Harvard Medical School is planning to monitor the records of 20 million walk-in hospital patients throughout the United States for clusters of symptoms associated with bioterror agents.Given the huge number of lost or confused medical records, the benefits of such plans are clear. But because doctors would be continually adding information to medical histories,the system would be monitoring patients’ most intimate personal data.The network, therefore, threatens to violate patient confidentiality on a global scale.

In Shneiderman’s view, such trade-offs are inherent to surveillance. The collective by-product of thousands of unexceptionable,even praiseworthy efforts to gather data could be something nobody wants: the demise of privacy.”These networks are growing much faster than people realize,” he says.”We need to pay attention to what we’re doing right now.”

In The Conversation, surveillance expert Harry Caul is forced to confront the trade-offs of his profession directly. The conversation in Union Square provides information that he uses to try to stop a murder. Unfortunately, his faulty interpretation of its meaning prevents him from averting tragedy. Worse still, we see in scene after scene that even the expert snoop is unable to avoid being monitored and recorded.At the movie’s intense, almost wordless climax, Caul rips his home apart in a futile effort to find the electronic bugs that are hounding him.

The Conversation foreshadowed a view now taken by many experts: surveillance cannot be stopped.There is no possibility of “opting out.” The question instead is how to use technology, policy, and shared societal values to guide the spread of surveillance—by the government, by corporations, and perhaps most of all by our own unwitting and enthusiastic participation—while limiting its downside.

Click here for part II.

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Up to three dozen journalists and activists still remain outside the building of the Donetsk court of the Rostov region of the Russian Federation as they are denied access.

Censor.NET correspondent reports from the scene.

Watch more: Russian court starts passing sentence to Savchenko, denies her final plea. VIDEO

The anti-riot policemen, who refused to identify themselves, told Censor.NET reporter that no more people would be let into the building. "The courtrooms are overcrowded," a masked man said.

The picture shows one of the two courtrooms provided for the media. There are plenty of empty seats there. One is free to leave the building, but the policemen warn that they may not let one in again.


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Abstracts submitted to previous conferences

(2015) Keynote: Why do Intermediate Magmas Stall?
Jagoutz O & Caricchi L

(2011) Keynote: Magma Emplacement Durations and Rates and the Dynamics of Magmatism and Volcanism
Annen C, Blundy J, Caricchi L, Menand T, de Saint-Blanquat M, Schöpa A & Sparks S

(2011) The Origin of Carbonate Globules in Silicate Melts: Solids or Liquids?
McMahon S, Bailey K, Walter M & Caricchi L


Serotech Laboratories Ltd. - DNA Testing and Analysis
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Who's the dad?  Don't just guess, know.

About DNA Testing

What is DNA and what does Paternity Testing look at?

DNA, the genetic blueprint, is composed of a string of 3 billion individual units called nucleic acids, of which there are four kinds.  The exact order of these units, called the sequence, is unique to all individuals except identical twins.  DNA is subdivided into 23 paired structures called chromosomes. One of each pair of the child’s chromosomes is derived from the mother and one from the father.  DNA is the same from cell to cell in any given person and is passed along from parent to child according to the principles of Mendelian genetics, whereby one of each pair of chromosomes passes from parent to child in an independent fashion.

In the laboratory sixteen different paired regions of DNA are individually examined from the mother, child and presumed father.

These regions have been carefully chosen because they show great variability in size (number or units) from person to person.  Thus the sequence inherited by a child from its mother usually differs from that from its father in each of these variable regions.

Testing delineates which half of the child’s DNA derives from the mother and the other half is examined to see if it matches that of the putative father.

How are Paternity Test results reported?

Exclusion from paternity is indicated when the child’s DNA does not match that of the presumed father.  In this case the probability of paternity is given as 0%.

If the analysis does not exclude the presumed father, it does not necessarily indicate that he is the genetic father.  His genetic makeup may be identical to that of another man in the general population, who may be the genetic father.  In this case, Serotech computes the statistical probability that the accused is the true genetic father of the child.  This statement of probability is based on the frequencies of the regional chromosomal sequences studied in large, randomly selected population of a given race. The laboratory will calculate how many other men in the population possess the combination of regional chromosomal sequences of the specified DNA marker regions paternally inherited by the child, and express the result as a percentage that indicates the probability of paternity of the accused man compared to that by a group of randomly chosen men in the population.

The statistical probability of paternity for a man not excluded from being the biological father of the child is typically greater than 99%.

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Mississippi State University Deer Lab - Antlers

Although antlers would appear to be used for combat against predators, it's unlikely deer antlers evolved for this purpose. If antlers are a defense against ...

About Deer Antlers

W. Matt Knox Deer Project Coordinator. Antlers are found on all members of the deer family (Cervidae) in North America including deer, elk, caribou, and moose.

ADW: Horns and Antlers


The Hollywood toy story

Films based on children's toys are proving popular in Tinseltown, but are the commercial gains super

Earlier this week Warner Brothers announced that it is set to bring a film adaptation of Lego to the big screen in 2014. The Lego film will, excuse the pun, build on Hollywood's proven track record of making films based on children's toys. Michael Bay's Transformers trilogy has grossed a staggering $2.6 billion since the first film was released in 2007. While toy manufacturer Hasbro and Spyglass Entertainment studio will be hoping that next year's follow-up to the 2009 G.I. Joe film can match the $300 million box office takings of the first.

Though it would do both the film-makers and marketeers a disservice to assume that making money from films based on toys is child's play, Hollywood is certainly enthusiastically tapping a fruitful resource.

Next year will see the release of perhaps the strangest of these toy adaptations to date with Battleships. Liam Neeson may have "acquired a certain set of skills" throughout his acting career , but it is questionable quite how many of them he will need to draw on when he stars alongside Rihanna in John Berg's interpretation of a game many of us associate with long car journeys.

With a budget of $250 million dollars, headline writers may already be perfecting their variations on a box office sinking pun, but Hollywood's major studios seem to think they are onto a winner with the boardgames on the big screen formula. So much so in fact that a strategic partnership between Hasbro and Universal has put film versions of Risk, Candy land and Monopoly purportedly in the pipeline. Indeed the latter has even managed to get Ridley Scott on board as director.

Dorothy Parker is once thought to have said "the only 'ism' Hollywood believes in is plagiarism". It is certainly true that Hollywood has a voracious appetite for adapting certain genres to cinema and it is also true that over time the source of Hollywood's inspirations regularly changes. Books (Lord of the Rings, The Godfather), plays (Driving Ms Daisy, Romeo and Juliet), TV programmes (Star Trek, Naked Gun), comics (Batman, Superman, Spiderman), video-games (Tomb Raider, Resident Evil) even theme park rides (Pirates of the Caribbean) have all at one time or another been the stimulus du jour, and now it seems, it's children's toys and boardgames.

But isn't this latest development slightly different? Isn't Hollywood now fishing for ideas in such shallow waters, not because of their artistic merit, but because of their potential for commercial gains?

Professor Thomas Leitch, Director of Film Studies at the University of Delaware and author of Film Adaptation and its Discontents, believes this was always the case.

"I'd question the assumption that Hollywood used to be abrim with creative energy but has lately run dry, since it seems to me that Hollywood has always quite deliberately chosen to be in the business of manufacturing reliably reproducible mass entertainment, an enterprise in which originality is neither sought nor welcomed except insofar as original concepts can be readily replicated."

If Hollywood's methods haven't changed, what of its purpose? The overt messages in films like G.I Joe or Transformers seems more mass marketing than mass entertainment. What was once an ancillary function, even a necessary evil to fund a project - the merchandising - now seems to be the sole intention of some films.

This Leitch concedes to be true in some cases, but notes that it is not as recent a phenomenon as we might suspect.

"I think the pivotal figure here is Walt Disney and the crucial period the mid-1950s, when Disney was launching both his television program and Disneyland, the first of his theme parks. Each of these endeavours was clearly designed to promote the others, and to showcase both Disney's forthcoming projects and his impressive back list as well."

In 1995, another American professor, Janet Wasko, wrote:

"It is not inconceivable that in the future...manufacturers and joint promoters will demand more knowledge of the film and may even try to influence the production in order to maximise the benefits accruing to them."

Writing at a time when films sold commemorative toys and weren't based on them, Wasko's comments seem almost innocent now. Although avarice has probably always trumped art in mainstream cinema, it has never done so in a more apparent way than now, leaving the marketing tail well and truly wagging the Hollywood dog.

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The Wood Wide Web: the world of trees underneath the surface

Mycorrhizal networks, better known as the Wood Wide Web, have allowed scientists to understand the social networks formed by trees underground.

In 1854, Henry David Thoreau published Walden, an extensive rumination on his two years, two months and two days spent in a cabin in the woodlands near Walden Pond. It was situated on a plot of land owned by his friend, mentor and noted transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Thoreau’s escape from the city was a self-imposed experiment - one which sought to find peace and harmony through a minimalistic, simple way of living amongst nature. Voicing his reasons for embarking on the rural getaway, Thoreau said, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.”

Walden cemented Thoreau’s reputation as a key figure in naturalism; his reflections have since been studied, his practices meticulously replicated. But in the knowledge that Thoreau’s excursion into the woods was a means to better understand how to integrate into society, curious minds are left to wonder what essays and aphorisms Thoreau would have produced had he known what the botanists of today know of nature’s very own societal networks.

As scientists have now discovered, what lies beneath the ground Thoreau walked upon, and indeed beneath the ground anyone walks upon when near trees, is perhaps the most storied history and study of collaborative society in something which is now known as the mycorrhizal network or the “Wood Wide Web”.

Coined by the journal Nature, the term Wood Wide Web has come to describe the complex mass of interactions between trees and their microbial counterparts underneath the soil. Spend enough time among trees and you may get a sense that they have been around for centuries, standing tall and sturdy, self-sufficient and independent. But anchoring trees and forestry everywhere, and therefore enjoining them into an almost singular superoganism, is a very intimate relationship between their roots and microbes called mycorrhizal fungi.

Understanding the relationship between the roots of trees and mycorrhizal fungi has completely shifted the way we think about the world underneath them. Once thought to be harmful, mycorrhizal fungi are now known to have a bond of mutualism with the roots – a symbiotic connection from which both parties benefit.

Despite the discovery being a recent one, the link between the two goes as far back as 450 million years. A pinch of soil can hold up to seven miles worth of coiled, tubular, thread-like fungi. The fungi release tubes called hyphae which infiltrate the soil and roots in a non-invasive way, creating a tie between tree and fungus at a cellular level. It is this bond which is called mycorrhiza. As a result, plants 20m away from each other can be connected in the same way as plants connected 200 metres away; a hyphal network forms which brings the organisms into connection.

At the heart of the mutualistic relationship is an exchange; the fungi have minerals which the tree needs, and the trees have carbon (which is essentially food) which the fungi need. The trees receive nitrogen for things such as lignin – a component which keep the trees upright, and various other minerals such as phosphorus, magnesium, calcium, copper and more. In return, fungi get the sugars they need from the trees’ ongoing photosynthesis to energise their activities and build their bodies. The connection runs so deep that 20-80% of a tree’s sugar can be transferred to the fungi, while the transfer of nitrogen to trees is such that without the swap, trees would be toy-sized.

It’s a bond that has resulted in some remarkable phenomena. Suzanne Simard, an ecologist at the University of British Columbia, has researched into these back and forth exchanges and has found that rather than competing against one another as often assumed, there is a sort of teamwork between the trees facilitated by the mycorrhizal fungi.

In one particular example, Simard looked at a Douglas fir tree planted next to a birch tree. Upon taking the birch tree out, there was a completely unexpected result: the fir tree – instead of prospering from the reduced competition for sunlight – began to decay and die. The trees were connected underground via the mycorrhizal system, transferring carbon, nitrogen and water to one another, communicating underground, talking to each other. As Simard says in her TED talk, “it might remind you of a sort of intelligence.”

It has been documented that trees share food not just with trees of the same species, but with trees of all kinds of species, forming a social network which some have come to describe as a socialist system. Growth rates are positively affected while seedlings face greater chances of survival. There is in fact a group of plants – the mycoheterotrophic plants of which there are around 400 species – which wouldn’t survive without the mycorrhizal network. These plants are unable to photosynthesise and are therefore heavily dependent on other plants for carbon and minerals.

Over the years, Thoreau has had his fair share of critics who deemed his trip to the woods nothing more than an exercise in self-indulgence and narcissism. Perhaps if Thoreau had the chance to head back to Walden Pond with the knowledge of the Wood Wide Web at hand, he would fully understand that no one man is an island, as no one tree is a forest.


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Adolescent subthreshold-depression and anxiety: psychopathology, functional impairment and increased suicide risk

  • Conflicts of interest statement: No conflicts declared.

Background:  Subthreshold-depression and anxiety have been associated with significant impairments in adults. This study investigates the characteristics of adolescent subthreshold-depression and anxiety with a focus on suicidality, using both categorical and dimensional diagnostic models.

Methods:  Data were drawn from the Saving and Empowering Young Lives in Europe (SEYLE) study, comprising 12,395 adolescents from 11 countries. Based on self-report, including Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), Zung Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS), Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and Paykel Suicide Scale (PSS) were administered to students. Based on BDI-II, adolescents were divided into three groups: nondepressed, subthreshold-depressed and depressed; based on the SAS, they were divided into nonanxiety, subthreshold-anxiety and anxiety groups. Analyses of Covariance were conducted on SDQ scores to explore psychopathology of the defined groups. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to explore the relationships between functional impairments, suicidality and subthreshold and full syndromes.

Results:  Thirty-two percent of the adolescents were subthreshold-anxious and 5.8% anxious, 29.2% subthreshold-depressed and 10.5% depressed, with high comorbidity. Mean scores of SDQ of subthreshold-depressed/anxious were significantly higher than the mean scores of the nondepressed/nonanxious groups and significantly lower than those of the depressed/anxious groups. Both subthreshold and threshold-anxiety and depression were related to functional impairment and suicidality.

Conclusions:  Subthreshold-depression and subthreshold-anxiety are associated with an increased burden of disease and suicide risk. These results highlight the importance of early identification of adolescent subthreshold-depression and anxiety to minimize suicide. Incorporating these subthreshold disorders into a diagnosis could provide a bridge between categorical and dimensional diagnostic models.