1 Wanted – A US job market fix (Khaleej Times) US
labour markets remain hampered by the effects of the Great Recession and the
Federal Reserve should move cautiously in determining when interest rates
should rise, Fed Chair Janet Yellen has said. Yellen said she felt the
unemployment rate alone was inadequate to evaluate the strength of the US job
market.
The jobless rate has fallen faster than expected,
but Yellen said the economic disruption of the last five years has left
millions of workers sidelined, discouraged, or stuck in part time jobs — facts
that are not captured in the unemployment rate alone.
Judging whether the economy is close to full
employment is “complicated by ongoing shifts in the structure of the labour
market and the possibility that the severe recession caused persistent changes
in the labour market’s functioning”, Yellen said.
The Fed has held benchmark rates near zero since
December 2008, and has said it would wait a “considerable time” after winding
down a stimulative bond-buying programme in October before raising them.
Financial markets currently expect rates to raise around the middle of next
year.
2 A start-up seeks to crowd fund Ebola cure
(Stephanie M Lee in San Francisco Chronicle) With the death toll from the Ebola
outbreak at 1,350, one biotechnology company after another is jumping into the
fray to develop drugs for the fatal, infectious disease. Now add to the list a
tiny, seed-stage startup spun out of UCSF, which has said it wants to crowdfund
cash to turn its experimental cancer drug into an Ebola treatment.
OncoSynergy is headquartered in San Francisco’s
Mission Bay neighborhood, in one of the life science incubators that make up
the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). Founded in 2011,
the six-employee company has an experimental drug, OS2966, that’s designed to
attack highly aggressive cancers. The Food and Drug Administration has
recognized it as an “orphan drug” that could treat glioblastoma, a coveted
designation that earns drug makers some tax credits and other incentives.
So what could cancer have to do with Ebola? OS266
apparently inhibits a cell adhesion molecule, CD29, that plays a major role in
cancer progression. And scientists also think that CD29 is hijacked by the
Ebola virus during infection (and blocking CD29 with monoclonal antibodies
similar to OncoSynergy’s drug has been shown in some studies to inhibit Ebola
infections).
So on the science crowdfunding site Experiment, the
privately held company wants to raise $10,000 in 30 days for a study that will
examine if OS2966 can block Ebola infection in human vascular cells. But the
company is so small, it can’t actually do the work itself. It’ll hand off the
project to scientists across the country through The Science Exchange, an
online marketplace that allows researchers to outsource experiments for a fee.
3 Music, math and the school curriculum (Namita
Devidayal in The Times of India) As math wizard Manjul Bhargava points out
there is an organic link between music and maths. Is it time schools rethink
their curriculum? When musician Taufiq Qureshi was a little boy, he was
perenially paranoid about his school maths until, one day, his father, the
tabla master Alla Rakha said, "Why are you so fearful? We do maths all the
time in our music.We are adding, subtracting, multiplying..." And he
proceeded to show his son, through a series of tabla compositions, how maths
was actually their second language - after music.
There is an organic connection between maths and
music - contrary to the perception that one is a cold rational subject and the
other a soft emotional one. Just as music is more than a collection of notes,
mathematics is more than numbers. Both are about structure, pattern,
abstractions and about connecting with the nature - the rhythmic movement of
the tides, of our breath, or that there being exactly the same number of petals
in daisies sprinkled across a field, which also corresponds to the Fibonacci
numbers in mathematics.
This is why Manjul Bhargava, the Princeton-base
mathematician, says he keeps a photograph of a field of daisies in his office. Bhargava,
who just won the world' most prestigious math prize, the Field Medal, is a
concert-level tabla player trained by Zakir Hussain. In his interviews, he
talks about the connection between math, music and poetry which, if taught
well, could produce an entirely different generation of creative thinkers.
"Why are people who are into exact sciences
like math and physics, also into music?" asks Suvarnalata Rao, a musicologist
with a background in physics "Because both require abstract thinking - to
be able to fathom that abstraction and its organization. That's why children
who trained in music will be able to organize thoughts much more
logically."
Why do our schools classify math in the core
curriculum and music as `extra-curricular'? Math, music, the study of daisies -
they all have to somehow filter into our classrooms and imagination.
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