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Brain Tapeworm Afflicts Californians Eating Pork

by iqu Islam

Brain Parasites, California’s Hidden Health Problem

By Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato | September 6, 2012 |  Comments13

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Sara Alvarez was afraid.

The doctors told her she needed surgery — brain surgery. Operations on such a complex organ are never simple, but this procedure was exceptionally difficult. There was a high risk of complications, of debilitation, of post-op problems. Alvarez might wake up paralyzed. She might wake up legally blind. Worse still, there was a chance she might not wake up at all.

Her mad dash to the emergency room had all begun with a walk in the park four days earlier. It was December 20, 2010, in Sunnyvale, Calif., a town that lives up to its name. The West Coast winter, not as long or as harsh as seasons in the East, gave her the opportunity to take her youngest child out for an afternoon stroll.

In the fading light of dusk, Alvarez, too, began to fade. She lost the feeling in her right leg. Her right foot followed suit. She couldn’t lift or move her right hand. She was weak, and her body was numb.

There was fear then, too.

At 10:15 p.m., Alvarez says her husband drove her to Redwood City. That night she became a patient at Kaiser Permanente Redwood City Hospital. She says the doctors batted diagnoses back and forth. It was a tumor. No, it was cancer.

It was Christmas, and Alvarez’s children cried and prayed, terrified that an unknown affliction would steal their mother away. Finally a CT scan revealed the malady. Alvarez had neurocysticercosis — a calcified tapeworm lodged in her brain.

Neurocysticercosis, which is common around the world but is not recognized as a major health concern in the U.S., has taken root in California, some health officials say. The disease is easy to prevent and relatively inexpensive to treat if caught early on. But once in the advanced stages, these brain parasites are costly to both patient and government.

The problem is that, due to a lack of education, most of the population doesn’t know that there’s a parasite wriggling within them, says Patricia Wilkins, a scientist with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Latinos, the community most afflicted by the disease, do not receive outreach or education about how to avoid or treat the potentially life-threatening organism, Wilkins adds.

Neurocysticercosis “primarily exists in marginalized populations, Hispanic immigrants,” Wilkins adds.

The National Institutes of Health classifies neurocysticercosis as the leading cause of epilepsy worldwide, and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that tapeworms infect 50 million people globally. The CDC says an estimated 1,900 people are diagnosed with neurocysticercosis within the United States yearly.

According to a January 2012 study in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, California bears much of the burden with 304 hospitalized cases in 2009, the most recent year for which statistics exist. Eighty-five percent of patients in California were identified as Latino, and 72 percent were reported in the southern half of the state.

The high percentage of Latino cases is not surprising. Neurocysticercosis is common within third-world countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The disease’s telltale symptoms of paralysis, extreme headaches and chronic seizures present themselves in mass form. Individuals contract neurocysticercosis after becoming infected by tapeworm carriers. Immigrants traveling between countries, such as migrant workers, are often unwitting tapeworm hosts, transporting the disease across borders in their guts.

Scientists aren’t quite sure how it works, but tapeworm larvae seem to have developed a chemical secretion that keeps the human body’s immune system from barging in on their banquet. People can live for decades without any symptoms of neurocysticercosis because the tapeworm larvae break down natural defenses. Unfortunately, tapeworm larvae can’t live forever.

“While it’s alive, it’s a problem, but when it starts to die it’s a bigger problem,” Despommier says.

When the larvae die, the chemical balance is restored, and the immune system begins to attack, causing headaches, seizures and paralysis. Alvarez says she experienced debilitating headaches for 20 years before her diagnosis, but she probably consumed tapeworm eggs much earlier than that. When Alvarez immigrated to the United States in
the late 1980s she complained to American doctors of a pain so absolute it blinded her and made her vomit.

They gave her Tylenol.

“That’s a very typical story,” says Darvin Scott Smith, chief of infectious disease at the Kaiser Hospital.

Many physicians, even those in highly populated areas sizable immigrant populations, are unaware of the disease and how to diagnose it, he adds. Even many of the health organizations that target Latinos had never heard of neurocysticercosis and said their institutions were not funding research or community outreach.

Nobody cares about this disease, and they should, if not from a humanitarian point of view than from a fiscal aspect, says Wilkins, a scientist with the CDC.

Drugs such as Ablendazole and certain steroids, which are used to treat tapeworms and brain swelling, are relatively inexpensive — a maximum of a few hundred dollars. Wait until it’s a serious problem, though, and the dollar amount rises dramatically.

The CDC reports the average cost of neurocysticercosis at $37,600 per hospitalization.

The most common form of payment is Medicaid, a tax-funded public service. In Los Angeles County, the economic impact is even more pronounced, costing $66,000 on average, the increase likely due to the high cost of health care in the state, says Frank Sorvillo, a University of Los Angeles professor of epidemiology.

Despite a marked decrease in immigration over the past few years, the number of neurocysticercosis cases has remained relatively constant since 2001, when there were 386 recorded hospitalizations in California. This suggests that the parasite has taken hold in the U.S., Sorvillo says.

These numbers are likely underestimated. Only five states — New York, California, Texas, Oregon and Illinois — report the disease, and the data is inconsistent. Oftentimes, departments rely on each other to deal with paperwork, and the numbers are never recorded, Smith says. As a result, not much is known about tapeworm outbreaks in the U.S. — or the parasites themselves. Scientists still consider much of their life cycle a mystery.

Pork tapeworms, or Taenia solium, are complex organisms. They exist in three life stages: egg, larvae and adult, but their growth is not a straight progression from one form to the next. Tapeworm larvae enter the body when humans eat contaminated pork.

The babies, about the size of peas, fight their way into the small intestine and attach, using rows of grappling hook-like teeth to make tiny slices into the soft flesh of the intestinal walls. The parasites cling to the slippery surfaces of their new homes and begin draining nutrients from their host. If all goes well, adults can grow up to 20 feet long.

It sounds unpleasant, but if you’re going to contract a tapeworm, dealing with 20 feet of invertebrate is really the way to go. Researchers say that adult Taenia solium is relatively harmless and asymptomatic. The real trouble starts when they begin to reproduce within their human host.

Tapeworm adults are made up of hundreds of segments called proglottids. The parasite grows like a fingernail, the newest addition at the head and old material at the tip. The senior proglottids contain eggs — thousands of them. During the course of a natural lifecycle, the proglottids are discarded through their host’s anus. A family member, friend or restaurant cook infected with an adult tapeworm can secrete tens of thousands of tapeworm eggs daily, which can be easily ingested by others.

Being infected with the eggs, however, doesn’t result in an adult tapeworm. The eggs just develop into larvae—and grow no further. According to parasitologist Judy Sakanari at the University of California, San Francisco, no one really knows why. Unlike most animals whose lifecycle follows a child-adolescent-adult pattern, these eggs will never mature into adulthood. Their development is stunted at the larvae stage, which allows them to ride the bloodstream. They use their hooks to rip apart tissue and gain access to nutrient-rich hotspots. Some of these miniature reapers ultimately find their way into the brain. That’s where the trouble starts — and stops.

While alive, the larvae are not as dangerous as they are when they’re dead. The brain calcifies the dead larvae, and, oftentimes, surgery is necessary to remove them. This ramps up costs for the hospital and drains Medicaid funds. The State of California is not responding to the issue, Wilkins says, because there isn’t enough funding to tackle every bug that infiltrates a community. Health officials must pick and choose which diseases require the most resources. So far, neurocysticercosis has not been one of them.

In a 2000 proposal filed by the WHO, doctors called for international monitoring of neurocysticercosis. They argued that surveillance was key to eradication, that statistics were paramount if governments across the globe had any hope of reducing epilepsy and increasing quality of life. So far, the petition has not experienced much success.

In early January 2011, Dr. Smith of Redwood City, Calif. celebrated his birthday in the operating room of Kaiser Hospital, observing Sara Alvarez’s brain surgery. Medical professionals trimmed Sara’s hair, gingerly peeled away layers of skin and cut through a portion of her skull. Hours later, the chief of infectious disease watched as a neurosurgeon plucked a calcified tapeworm larvae from Sara’s head.

Before she was diagnosed, Alvarez had never heard of neurocysticercosis, and she still isn’t sure who gave her the eggs. It could have been a chance encounter, or one of her loved ones might be a carrier. She’ll never know for sure. The host may remain undetected and contagious, spreading the disease — thousands of eggs at a time.

 

 Story and images by permission of Sara Alvarez and Dr. Darvin Scott Smith

Watch the video:

 

Brain Parasite Surgery from Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato on Vimeo.

Brain Parasite Surgery from Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato on Vimeo.

Mollie Bloudoff-IndelicatoAbout the Author: Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato is an environmental reporting fellow at E&E Publishing, covering the impact of climate change on everything from the international chocolate industry to methane hydrates in Antarctica. She has a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism with concentrations in science journalism and radio reporting. She is searching for a full-time position with a science-oriented publication that is interested in developing their social media presence and expanding their multimedia department. Contact her at news@mbloudoff.com, and follow her on Twitter at @mbloudoff. Follow on Twitter @mbloudoff.

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The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

 

Waiting for the Space Elevator

by iqu Islam

 

Space Elevator Enthusiasts Push On despite Lengthy Time Frames and Long Odds

A space-travel technology, simple in concept, has been frustratingly difficult to realize

By David Appell

 

 

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Space elevatorA LONG CLIMB: An artist’s conception shows a climber pod ascending a space elevator’s tether to deploy a satellite.Image: ISEC

SEATTLE—“I think building an elevator to space is maybe the best thing I could do in the world,” Michael Laine says.

His company, Liftport, has just raised over $62,000 on Kickstarter to build robot climbers on a skyward cable—an early step toward his eventual goal of putting a space elevator on the moon. A space elevator is just what it sounds like—a capsule that travels to and from space along a track or tether to provide reliable access to orbit.

Behind Laine is the cavernous Great Gallery at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, where dozens of aircraft are on display, chronicling the human adventure of flight. Meeting in a nearby conference room are about 40 space enthusiasts, in town for the annual Space Elevator Conference hosted by ISEC, the International Space Elevator Consortium. Some of them have sacrificed their careers, credit ratings or savings accounts—all in pursuit of a simple concept that has thus far proved impossible in practice.

None of the conference participants could be accused of thinking small, whether the discussion is about a 100,000-kilometer tether made of carbon nanotubes, space-based solar power, or man’s ultimate destiny to seed the galaxy.

Peter Swan, retired from over 40 years building space systems and now serving as ISEC’s vice president, calls a space elevator a way to “make the human condition better.” His altruism was shared by many of the conference attendees.

But it’s not all starry-eyed optimism. “I’m trying to tackle a project that a lot of people think is science fiction,” says Laine, who has gone into foreclosure seven times over nearly a decade to keep his company, and his dream, alive. “It’s appropriate to be skeptical, even at this stage.”

UNOBTAINIUM
The idea of a space elevator has set the heart of many engineers aflutter. But all eventually run into the same obstacle—the so-called unobtainium problem, or the need for a material that does not exist.

A space elevator is a theoretical structure that reaches from the Earth’s surface into space, balanced by its own mass and the outward centrifugal force from the spinning Earth. The physics is sweet—complicated enough to be interesting, simple enough to seem doable, and the space elevator’s intrigue has grown exponentially since Arthur C. Clarke gave it a fictional treatment in his 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise.

The problem is the construction material, which must be superstrong yet very light. Equations worked out decades ago by Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov and, independently, by American space scientist Jerome Pearson, found that the ideal tether should be tapered, widest at the geosynchronous orbit altitude of 35,800 kilometers, and narrowest at Earth’s surface and at its far end. The tether should extend far past geosynchronous orbit, where a counterweight would help provide the needed tension.

The rub is that the tether must have sufficient tensile strength to hold up its own large mass. Any material works in principle, but even for stainless steel the tether would need to be 1043 times wider at geosynchronous orbit than at the ground.

The only known material that offers the required strength-to-density ratio is a carbon nanotube, a cylindrical chickenwire lattice of carbon atoms. The problem is that nanotubes exist in a form akin to a pile of soot, and no one knows how to fashion them into an extended rope, braid, cable or ribbon. In the view of elevator enthusiasts, carbon nanotubes, or CNTs are the last major “if only.”

BETTING ON A LONG SHOT
Bryan Laubscher has staked his career on carbon nanotubes and the space elevator. A former physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, he formed Odysseus Technologies in 2009, and has four other investors, including Ted Semon, president of ISEC. From his garage shop Laubscher works with CNTs with the goal of drawing them into a tether. While he has mostly learned what does not work, he filed for a patent on a so-called nanotube detangler in May, and a second patent for a CNT growth technology that he keeps under wraps.

“The space elevator breaks the rocket paradigm” because it does not carry its own fuel, Laubscher says. He believes chemical technology is near its limit, bound by theTsiolkovsky rocket equation to deliver only about 5 percent of its initial mass into Earth orbit. Those inefficiencies meant that it cost $64,000 for the space shuttle to put one kilogram into low-earth orbit (LEO); an elevator, Laubscher calculates, could do it with 17.2 kilowatt-hours of electricity—about two dollars’ worth.

He sees the space elevator as the future analogue of the Transcontinental Railway that opened the American West—once the infrastructure has been put in place at great effort and expense, transport becomes cheap, and new opportunities abound. “Once you’re at LEO,” Laubscher says, “you’re half the way to anywhere.” Still, he was clear that “the space elevator is far in the future.”

Peter Swan sees space-based solar power as the ultimate savior of a world starved for energy, and the space elevator as the only way to economically place the required infrastructure in space. The vision is of satellites in orbit, above clouds, weather and the atmosphere, collecting sunlight and beaming power to small surface dishes via microwaves. “Africa could skip the 20th century for telecom and power wires,” he says, and emergency power could be beamed anywhere to the surface.

“The space elevator would be a nonlinear event in history,” Swan says. He and colleagues are even designing organization charts for elevator operations at its presumed ocean-based floating anchor station (the community favors a low-lightning spot near the equator in the eastern Pacific ocean) and its on-shore marine base in San Diego.

But not everyone is as confident about the elevator’s fruition. Brad Edwards, who co-authored the 2003 book, The Space Elevator, that has since served as a template for all elevator discussions, dropped out of the field after years spent trying to make it a reality. “Technologically we could do this in the next 10 or 15 years,” he recently told the magazine Seattle Met. “But realistically it’s going to take much longer, and I had to ask myself whether I wanted to do this for the rest of my life.”

DENTAL FLOSS
Arthur C. Clarke famously said the space elevator would be built 50 years after everyone stopped laughing. “I think we’ve quieted the people who are outright laughing,” says Laine, a former U.S. Marine and investment adviser who continues to put personal funds into his company. “We haven’t quieted the skeptics, and there should be people asking questions.”

Laine’s Liftport Group, formed in 2003 after he worked with Edwards on a NASA Innovative Advanced Studies (NIAC) grant to study the space elevator, once had 14 employees. Liftport unsuccessfully tried to produce carbon nanotubes and carried out some balloon and tether tests in an effort to sell weather data for revenue. The crash of the economy put them out of business for five years, but Laine sees the enthusiastic and unexpected response to his Kickstarter campaign—his goal was only $8,000—as a sign of optimism.

Like all the conference attendees, he is buoyed by the privatization of space, seen recently in SpaceX launches, Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch Systems, and the two test modules for expandable habitats that Bigelow Aerospace has placed in orbit. Laine is promoting an elevator from the lunar surface to a point in space between Earth and the moon, because the physics is kinder and at least five existing materials meet its requirements, including Zylon and Kevlar. A lunar tether would have the dimensions of dental floss, he says, and would be feasible with commercial, off-the-shelf technology—and perhaps $800 million.

One speaker at the conference said the elevator would be driven by those most prosaic of human motivations, greed and the opportunities to make money. Laine might once have agreed. “Eleven years ago when I started this, I was far more rational about it,” he says of his elevator quest. “But over time the making money part really dwindled, and it’s become a mission,” a way to change the global standard of living with ubiquitous energy and access to resources such as raw minerals from asteroids, helium-3 from the moon, or oxygen, water and other lunar materials for space- or Mars-based habitats.

“But,” he concedes, “I’m well past rational at this point.” That stubborn persistence may be just what it takes if an elevator is ever to ferry humans into outer space.

‘s Politricks Berated in Muslim Officer’s Book

by iqu Islam

Sharp Criticism for Mamata Banerjee in Muslim Officer’s Book

By ANURADHA SHARMA
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee addressing a gathering of Muslim community members in Kolkata, West Bengal in this April 3, 2012 file photo.Piyal Adhikary/European Pressphoto AgencyWest Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee addressing a gathering of Muslim community members in Kolkata, West Bengal in this April 3, 2012 file photo.

KOLKATA — In just over a week since its launch, Musalamander Koroniyo (What Muslims Should Do), a book in written in Bengali by a senior police officer, has attracted national attention and raised new questions about intolerance in West Bengal, where Mamata Banerjee is chief minister.

The police raided the College Street office of the book’s Kolkata publisher, Mitra & Ghosh, on Friday, closing it for hours and sparking fresh allegationsof Ms. Banerjee’s “autocratic style of functioning.”

The book cover of senior police officer Nazrul Islam's book "Musalamander Koroniyo" or "What Muslims Should Do."Anuradha SharmaThe book cover of senior police officer Nazrul Islam’s book“Musalamander Koroniyo“ or “What Muslims Should Do.”

The book, a mere 102 pages, written in a straightforward and proscriptive style, is unsparing in its criticism of the policies of Trinamool Congress, Ms. Banarjee’s party, regarding Muslims. It particularly criticizes new promises that Ms. Banerjee has made, including stipends for imams and muezzins, who give the call to prayer, and the state’s plan to recognize 10,000 madrasas , which would allow the religious schools to get some state benefits.

“She knows Muslims are uneducated, unaware and unorganized,” the book says of these policies. “Therefore, they will not be able to understand the trick.”

The author, Nazrul Islam, is a senior Indian Police Service officer, currently serving as the additional director general of the West Bengal police. (Check back with India Ink later today for an interview with Mr. Islam).

The government has “tried to intimidate us in different ways,” Indrani Roy, a director at Mitra & Ghosh, the book’s publisher, said in an interview at her Selimpur home. First, the head of a rival publisher, who publishes books by Ms. Banerjee, called up Ms. Roy’s father, who used to run the business, she said.

“He said that the book has not gone down well with the higher-ups,” she said. On Thursday evening, an officer from the enforcement branch of the police called her father and asked him not to circulate the books. On Friday a team from the enforcement branch raided the College Street shop, she said, forcing it to shut for three hours, “manhandled our staff” and demanded copies of the books. We asked them to give us a seizure list, they offered to buy the books and took with them five copies.”

Ms. Roy said she believes the raid, the first in the publisher’s 80-year history, stems from Ms. Banerjee’s intolerance to criticism. “It is rather unnerving,” she said. “We are actually very scared. Our freedom is at stake and who knows what will happen tomorrow.”

Still, it has been good for business. Already, the book has sold over 450 copies, a high figure for this type of publication.

Here are some translated excerpts from “What Muslims Should Do:”

Chapter: What Needs to Be done?
Page 54

We need to form one society that will include not just Muslims, but also the low-caste Hindus—those belonging to the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and others. It needs to be given a name that is easy, concise and acceptable to all, such as Adhijan Samity, Bhupiputra Samity and Mulnibasi Samity.

We will have to take the organization from the state level to the district level, from the district level to the block, and from block level to the village level. Our principal focus will be education. We have to lay stress on proper education at the pre-primary and primary levels. If the government can set up schools in the villages, then it’s fine. Otherwise, we must build private schools in the villages.

Chapter: Why Government Doles for Imams and Muezzins?
Page 78

The announcement of the leader of the ruling party will deprive the namazis of their right to decide who will be the imam at a particular time. To get the allowance the imam’s name has to be registered in the government records. Those who have seen the activities of the leaders of the ruling party will have no doubt that they will not select the eligible person, but the one who supports them. This supporter can be the most detestable person in the eyes of the namazis, and worse, once his name is registered, whether he remains an imam or not will not depend on the namazis but the leaders of the ruling party through the government employees. Even if he commits a thousand sins and loses the right to be imam, it will not be possible to remove him without the wish of the ruling party leaders. Such a situation is not desirable for devoted Muslim namazis. 

Page 81

For a government, to use the taxpayer’s money to financially help practitioners of a particular religion violates the fundamental right to equality guaranteed by Articles 16, 15 and 14 [of the Indian Constitution].

So, this announcement is bound to overruled. In that case, why did the leader of the ruling party make this announcement? The announcement’s immediate aim is Muslim votes. Muslims respect imams. The aim is to win Muslim votes by supporting imams.

Even if the announcement is overruled, it’s not a loss to them. Rather, it’ll be good. Government funds will not have to be given out. And you can even tell the Muslims: “See, we really wanted to give. The opposition conspired to foil the plans. So identify those who opposed the move.” 

The long-term aim of the announcement is even more damaging. Let Muslims get stuck on grants of  2,500 rupees per month. Let them send their children to the madaras. Brahmin-Baidya-Kayasthas [Hindu upper castes] do not want Muslim children to be educated under a modern system and compete for jobs with monthly salaries of 250,000 rupees. They want Muslims to concentrate more on reading namaz, performing roza and sending their children to the madrasas so that they produce more and more imams or madrasa employees, earn 2,000 to 3,000 rupees in salary and live unfed or half-fed. While, the children of the Brahmin-Baidya-Kayasthas become leaders and ministers, join services such as the I.A.S [Indian Administrative Service], I.F.S [Indian Foreign Service], I.P.S. [Indian Police Service] and I.R.S. [Indian Revenue Service] to become cabinet secretary, chief secretary, home secretary, D.G. [director general], C.P. [chief commissioner], D.M. [district magistrate] and S.P. [superintendent of police]. Then someday, we’ll all say: “Madrasas are breeding grounds of terrorists.” And then before the elections, we’ll give recognition to one or two madrasas, instead of opening schools, in the Muslim areas. And we’ll say: “They did not do anything for the Muslims in the past 34 years. We will do.” And after coming to power, without having done anything, within a few days, we will say: “We’ve accomplished 90 percent of the work. That has to be accepted.” Do the Muslims understand all this? That something needs to be done for them? We’ve punctuated our speeches with ‘Khuda-Hafiz-Inshallah’ at all the wrong places, we’ve been to the iftaar parties. We’ve posed for pictures with Haj-bound pilgrims. If all this is not enough, should we need, we have some people on hire; two or three bearded men. We will make them come in their [skull] caps to some function. We have designers to ensure appropriate clothing at such a function. And we will pull a cloth over our heads and say, ‘Khuda-Hafiz-Inshallah’. That will surely do it!

Page 84

On the other hand, such announcements give [pro-Hindu communal] outfits like R.S.S. [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] a chance to say that the ruling party is appeasing the Muslims. “Hindus second class citizens in Hindustan.” This has to be stopped. Hindus must protest. And this leads to communal riots. As a result, the Brahmin-Baidya-Kayastha leaders gain from both sides.

Chapter: Why Government Recognition for 10,000 Madrasas?

Page 86

Actually, the one who is making these announcements does not know much. She does not think it is necessary to know. She knows Muslims are uneducated, unaware and unorganized. Therefore, they will not be able to understand the trick. As it is Muslims have a soft corner for the word “madrasa.” The announcement of 10,000 madrasas, with a sprinkling of Khuda-Hafiz-Inshallah is sure to buy off a Muslim and make him a slave.

Therefore, Muslims must become aware and organized. They must say:

  1. Publish the list of 10,000 madrasas.
  2. How many of them have been recognised? Which institution has recognized them?
  3. How many more will be recognized? Who will do that?
  4. What are the terms of recognition?
  5. What is the gain from the recognition?
  6. What is the loss for not being recognized?
  7. Without doing anything really for Muslims, why is so much song and dance over recognizing 10,000 madrasas?

 

Researchers discover “Anternet”

by iqu Islam

Stanford researchers discover the ‘anternet’

A collaboration between a Stanford ant biologist and a computer scientist has revealed that the behavior of harvester ants as they forage for food mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet.

BY BJORN CAREY

Katherine DecktarHarvester ant foragers waiting inside the nest

Harvester ant foragers waiting inside the nest.

On the surface, ants and the Internet don’t seem to have much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data. The researchers are calling it the “anternet.”

Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at Stanford, has been studying ants for more than 20 years. When she figured out how the harvester ant colonies she had been observing in Arizona decided when to send out more ants to get food, she called across campus to Balaji Prabhakar, a professor of computer science at Stanford and an expert on how files are transferred on a computer network. At first he didn’t see any overlap between his and Gordon’s work, but inspiration would soon strike.

“The next day it occurred to me, ‘Oh wait, this is almost the same as how [Internet] protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for transferring a file!'” Prabhakar said. “The algorithm the ants were using to discover how much food there is available is essentially the same as that used in the Transmission Control Protocol.”

Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is an algorithm that manages data congestion on the Internet, and as such was integral in allowing the early web to scale up from a few dozen nodes to the billions in use today. Here’s how it works: As a source, A, transfers a file to a destination, B, the file is broken into numbered packets. When B receives each packet, it sends an acknowledgment, or an ack, to A, that the packet arrived.

This feedback loop allows TCP to run congestion avoidance: If acks return at a slower rate than the data was sent out, that indicates that there is little bandwidth available, and the source throttles data transmission down accordingly. If acks return quickly, the source boosts its transmission speed. The process determines how much bandwidth is available and throttles data transmission accordingly.

L.A. CiceroDeborah Gordon

Biologist Deborah Gordon has been studying ants for more than 20 years.

It turns out that harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) behave nearly the same way when searching for food. Gordon has found that the rate at which harvester ants – which forage for seeds as individuals – leave the nest to search for food corresponds to food availability.

A forager won’t return to the nest until it finds food. If seeds are plentiful, foragers return faster, and more ants leave the nest to forage. If, however, ants begin returning empty handed, the search is slowed, and perhaps called off.

Prabhakar wrote an ant algorithm to predict foraging behavior depending on the amount of food – i.e., bandwidth – available. Gordon’s experiments manipulate the rate of forager return. Working with Stanford student Katie Dektar, they found that the TCP-influenced algorithm almost exactly matched the ant behavior found in Gordon’s experiments.

“Ants have discovered an algorithm that we know well, and the
y’ve been doing it for millions of years,” Prabhakar said.

They also found that the ants followed two other phases of TCP. One phase is known as slow start, which describes how a source sends out a large wave of packets at the beginning of a transmission to gauge bandwidth; similarly, when the harvester ants begin foraging, they send out foragers to scope out food availability before scaling up or down the rate of outgoing foragers.

Another protocol, called time-out, occurs when a data transfer link breaks or is disrupted, and the source stops sending packets. Similarly, when foragers are prevented from returning to the nest for more than 20 minutes, no more foragers leave the nest.

Prabhakar said that had this discovery been made in the 1970s, before TCP was written, harvester ants very well could have influenced the design of the Internet.

Gordon thinks that scientists have just scratched the surface for how ant colony behavior could help us in the design of networked systems.

There are 11,000 species of ants, living in every habitat and dealing with every type of ecological problem, Gordon said. “Ants have evolved ways of doing things that we haven’t thought up, but could apply in computer systems. Computationally speaking, each ant has limited capabilities, but the collective can perform complex tasks.

“So ant algorithms have to be simple, distributed and scalable – the very qualities that we need in large engineered distributed systems,” she said. “I think as we start understanding more about how species of ants regulate their behavior, we’ll find many more useful applications for network algorithms.”

The work is published in the Aug. 23 issue of PLoS Computational Biology.

Media Contact

Deborah Gordon, Biology:  (650) 725-6364, dmgordon@stanford.edu

Balaji Prabhakar, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science: To arrange an interview with Prabhakar, contact Andrea Kuduk:  (650) 723-4731, akuduk@stanford.edu

Bjorn Carey, Stanford News Service:  (650) 725-1944, bccarey@stanford.edu

Dan Stober, Stanford News Service:  (650) 721-6965, dstober@stanford.edu

Indo-European Languages came from Turkey?

by iqu Islam

Tracing the Origins of Indo-European Languages – Graphic – NYTimes.com

Tracing the Origins of Indo-European Languages

A new study suggests that the sprawling Indo-European family of languages originated in Anatolia, or modern-day Turkey. Related Article »

Anatolian

Tocharian

Armenian

Greek

Albanian

Balto-

Slavic

Italic

Germanic

Insular
Celtic

RUSSIA

FRANCE

Black Sea

UKRAINE

CHINA

ANATOLIA

EGYPT

INDIA

IRAN

Indo-Iranian

Researchers studied the evolution of words across 103 modern and extinct languages from the Indo-European language family, and created a tree showing the relationships among the different languages, at right.

 

The map above shows where each major branch probably arose, before spreading and diversifying to other regions.

 

A competing hypothesis places the point of origin in the steppes of modern-day Ukraine and Russia, north of the Black Sea.

Slovenian

Armenian

Tadzik

Lithuanian

Friulian

Lusatian

Waziri

Old Church Slavonic

Scots Gaelic

Persian

Macedonian

Breton

Italian

Afghan

Belarusian

Icelandic

Provençal

Bihari

Oscan

Greek

Swedish

Danish

Luxembourgish

Old Irish

Ossetic

Kashmiri

Polish

Old English

Welsh

Latin

Flemish

Riksmal

Old Norse

Hittite

Classical Armenian

Slovak

Romansh

Urdu

Marwari

Romanian

Avestan

Ukrainian

Bengali

Czech

Spanish

German

Dutch

Kurdish

Vlach

Nepali

Gujarati

Ancient Greek

Albanian

Lahnda

Russian

Hindi

French

Irish

Cornish

Umbrian

Bulgarian

Luvian

Lycian

Oriya

Catalan

Vedic Sanskrit

Old Prussian

Marathi

Old High German

Romani

Faroese

Sindhi

Latvian

Serbo-Croatian

Ladin

Assamese

Gothic

Indo-

Iranian

Insular
Celtic

Italic

Germanic

Balto-Slavic

Albanian

Greek

Armenian

Anatolian

Tocharian

Tocharian

Singhalese

Wakhi

Frisian

Old Persian

Sardinian

Portuguese

Baluchi

ENGLISH

Walloon

8,000

years ago

7,000

6,000

5,000

4,000

3,000

2,000

1,000

TODAY

Source: Science

Terran Radioactivity and the Sun? What is the connection?

by iqu Islam

From the Annals of the Impossible (Experimental Physics)

Posted on September 1, 2012 by Henning Dekant

Updated below.

Photons only slowly emerge from the Sun’s core. Neutrinos just pass through once produced.

Radioactive decay is supposed to be the ultimate random process, immutably governed by an element’s half life and nothing else.  There is no way to determine when a single radioactive atom will spontaneously decay, nor any way to speed-up or slow down the process.  This iron clad certainty has always been the best argument of opponents to conventional nuclear fission power generation, as it means that the inevitable nuclear waste will have to be kept isolated from the biosphere for million of years (notwithstanding recent research attempts at stimulated transmutation of some of the longer lasting waste products.)

When plotting the activity of a radioactive sample you expect a graph like the following, a smooth decrease with slight, random variations .

Detected activity of the 137Cs source. The first two points correspond to the beginning of data taking. Dotted lines represent a 0.1% deviation from the exponential trend. Residuals (lower panel) of the measured activity to the exponential fit. Error bars include statistical uncertainties and fluctuations.

(This graph stems from a measurement on the Beta decay of 137CS and was takendeep underground).

What you don’t expect are variations that follow a discernible pattern in the decay rate of a radioactive element, nor any correlation with outside events. But this is exactly what Jere H. Jenkins et al. found:

Plot of measured 36Cl decays taken at the Ohio State University Research Reactor (OSURR). The crosses are the individual data points, and the blue line is an 11-point rolling average. The red curve is the inverse of the square of the Earth–Sun distance. (Error bars are only shown for a limited number of points).

And now this surprising result of the sun’s influence has been corroborated.

The latest research was a collaboration of Stanford and Purdue University with the Geological Survey of Israel, rather reputable research power-houses that make these results difficult to dismiss. Their paper contains the following contour graph for the  measured gamma decay during the day plotted over several years. When comparing this with the same kind of graph of the sun’s inclination during the observed date range the correlation is quite obvious:

Gamma measurements as a function of date and time of day. The
color-bar gives the power, S , of the observed signal (top).
Solar elevation as a function of date and time of day. The color-bar
gives the power, S , of the observed signal (bottom).

There is a video talk on this phenomenon available online.  It takes some patience to sit through, but gives a more complete picture in explaining how these observed patterns can be correlated to the the Sun’s core activity with surprising accuracy.

The evidence for the reality of this effect is surprisingly good, and that is rather shocking. It does not fit into any established theory at this time.

Update and Forums Round-Up

This was the second blog post from this site that has been picked up on slashdot (this was the first one). Last time around WordPress could not handle the load (dubbed slashdot effect). Subsequently I installed the W3 Total Cache plug-in. So before getting back to the physics, I want to use this space to give them a big shout-out.  If you operate a WordPress blog I can highly recommend this plug-in.

This article received almost 30,000 views over two days, the resulting discussions fleshed out some great additional information, but also highlighted what can be easily misread or misconstrued. Top of the list was the notion that this might undermine carbon dating.  For all practical purposes, this can be categorically ruled out. For this to have a noticeable effect, this phenomenon would have to be much more pronounced.  The proposed pattern is just slightly outside the error bars and only imposes a slight variation on top of the regular decay pattern.  Archaeologists should not lose sleep over this. An unintended side-effect was that this attracted creationists. If you adhere to this belief please don’t waste your time commenting here.  This is a site dedicated to physics, and off-topic comments will be treated like spam and deleted.

Another source of confusion was the difference between induced radioactive reactions and spontaneous decay. The latter is what we are supposed to see when measuring the decay of a radioactive isotope in the lab and this is what these papers address. Induced transmution is what can be observed when matter is, for instance, irradiated with neutrons.  This process is pretty well understood and happens as a side effect within nuclear reactors (or even a nuclear warhead before the fission chain reaction overwhelms all other neutron absorption).  The treatment of nuclear waste with a neutron flux is what I hinted at in the last sentence of the first paragraph.  This emerging technology is very exciting and merits its own article, but it is an entirely different story. The news buried in the papers discussed here is that there may be a yet unknown neutrino absorption reaction influencing decay rates that were believed to be only governed by the half-life time interval.  At this point an inverse beta decay is known to exist, but the reaction rate is much smaller than what is required to explain the phenomenon that these papers claim.

The spontaneous decay of a radioactive isotope is regarded as the gold standard for randomness in computer science, and there are some products that rely on this (h/t toDennis Farr for picking up on this).  I.e. if the decay rate of a lump of radioactive material is no longer governed by the simple function N(t)=N02−t/t1/2 then the probability distribution that these random number generators rely on is no longer valid (the decay constant used in the distribution function at the link relates to the half-life time vie t1/2=ln2λ.

There were various thoughtful critical comments on the methodology and experimental set-up. The most prominent point that came up was the contention that this was essentially the outcome of data-mining for patterns and then hand-picking results that showed some discernible patterns.  Ironically, this approach is exactly the kind of data processing that spawned a billion dollar industry catering to the commercial Business Intelligence market.  To me, this actually looks like a pretty smart approach to get some more mileage out of old data series (assuming the authors didn’t discard results detrimentally opposed to their hypothesis). The downside of this is the lack of information on the care that went into collecting this data in the first place.  I.e. it was repeatedly pointed out that experimenters should run a control to capture the background radiation and needed to understand and control for the environmental impact on their measuring devices. Relying on third party data means also relying on the reputation of the researchers who conducted the original experiments.

When the original claims were made they triggered follow-up research. Some of it was inconclusive, some of it contradicted the findings and a measurement performed on the Cassini probe’s 238Pu thermonuclear fuel clearly ruled out any sun-distance related influence on that alpha emitter.

Inevitably with controversial results like this the old moniker that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” is repeatedly dragged out.

I always thought this statment was cut off a bit short and should really read: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and merit extraordinary attention.“

Because without the latter, sufficient proof may never be acquired even if it is out there.  The experiments required to test this further are not expensive. An easy way to rule out seasonality it to perfom these measurements closer to the equator or have them performed at the same time in a north and south American lab as one slashdot poster suggested.

Ultimately, a Beta emitter measurement on another space probe could lay this to rest and help to conclusively determine if this is a real effect.  It would be very exciting if this can be confirmed but it is certainly not settled at this point.

Muslim Ulama support save Ganges campaign

by iqu Islam

Muslim clerics support save Ganga campaign

 , TNN | Sep 2, 2012, 08.14PM IST

 

LUCKNOW: Muslim clerics and scholars in Lucknow have offered their full support to save river ganga campaign. The assurance was given at a meeting of Hindu seers with Muslim leaders. Another meeting will be called soon to draft joint working plan and visit the areas on the banks of the river to create public awareness. Convenor of Ganga Mukti Sangram Acharya Pramod Krishnan told reporters that he has got assurance from various Muslim leaders of their full support in save ganga campaign. He said that various projects to make river ganga pollution-free have failed because of rampant corruption in government machinery.

He said involvement of common people of the country and their pressure on the government can save the river and the support of Muslims in this task is equally important. Pledging support in save ganga campaign, member of All India Muslim Personal Law Board Maulana Khalid Rashid Firangimahli said that Ganga is a national river. Both and Muslims live on its banks and earn livelihood, hence it is the duty of all to protect and save it, he added. He also appealed Muslims to support and contribute in campaign. He demanded the central government to create a new ministry for conservation of rivers.

Describing the drive to clean the river as a holy campaign, Maulana Saeedur Rehman, principal of Centre of Islamic Studies, said that ganga is associated with the faith of Hindus but it is not any less important for Muslims. He said that he would do whatever was required to save ganga. 

Telepathy with a device?

by iqu Islam

iBrain to allow Stephen Hawking to communicate through brainwaves alone

By

11:52 July 4, 2012

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Professor Stephen Hawking (Photo Credit: NASA/Paul Alers)

Professor Stephen Hawking (Photo Credit: NASA/Paul Alers)

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Tech startup Neurovigil announced last April that Stephen Hawking
was testing the potential of its iBrain device to allow the
astrophysicist to communicate through brainwaves alone. Next week
Professor Hawking and iBrain inventor, Dr Philip Low from Stanford
University, present their findings at the Francis Crick Memorial
Conference in Cambridge, England. In anticipation, Gizmag spoke to Dr
Low about the potential applications of the iBrain.

When Dr Low first met Stephen Hawking, he asked when the renowned
astrophysicist would like to begin trialing his new product. Low waited a
moment as Hawking entered his response through the pair of infra-red
glasses he uses to send messages via the muscles in his cheek. Then the
reply came back: “Right now.”

At 70-years-old, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (A.L.S) or Lou
Gehrig’s Disease has deteriorated Stephen Hawking’s condition to the
point where it takes several minutes for him to communicate a simple
message. The pair of glasses dubbed the “cheek-switch” has been his
primary way of communicating ever since the 1980’s when the disease
robbed him of his ability to speak. The “cheek-switch” utilizes one of
the only muscles Hawking still has use of – but for how much longer,
doctors can’t be sure. For this reason, finding a new method of
communication has become essential for the astrophysicist.

The iBrain was devised as the first EEG headset to monitor brainwaves
through a single-channel only (though it is no longer the only
single-channel EEG on the market). It consists of a simple fabric
headband that holds a tiny device containing a small electrode to the
skull, and it weighs less than a pack of cigarettes.

iBrain reads brainwave activity and transmits it wirelessly back to a computer

Through the use of an algorithm formulated by Low, the iBrain reads
brainwave activity and transmits it wirelessly back to a computer. As
Dr. Low points out, the iBrain can collect data regardless of where a
person is or what they are doing. For this reason it is a welcome
alternative to the masses of electrodes and wires that hospitals and
sleep labs generally use when assessing a patients brain activity.

Hawking was fitted with the head-band device and asked to “imagine
that he was scrunching his right hand into a ball.” While he can’t
actually move his hand, the motor cortex in his brain can still issue
the command and generate electrical waves in his brain. The algorithm
then translates these thoughts into signals, which show up on the
monitor as spikes on a grid.

“We were looking for a change in the signal,” says Dr Low. “In January this year, we found it.”

The Francis Crick Memorial Conference, which takes place on July 7,
discusses the topic of “Consciousness in humans and non-human animals”
and will be the first time Hawking and Low deliver their findings to the
public.

While many are hoping to see the famed astrophysicist speaking to us
“through his brain” for the first time, it is unlikely that the
technology has been refined to the point where this can be easily
demonstrated. Instead, much of the research will be presented through
video documentation.

While much of the publicity that Neurovigil has gained has been due
to its close work with Stephen Hawking, Dr Low is quick to point out
that the technology has been developed for everybody. That’s because the
concept of “mind-mapping” with the iBrain is not limited to its use as
an augmented communication device. In fact, the applications are so
varied that it led to Dr Low refusing initial funding from venture
capitalists.

“I knew that if they funded us they would want to concentrate only on
one specific use for the device, like monitoring apnea,” says Low.

Instead, Dr Low funded the startup on his own, putting himself
US$240,000 in credit card debt in the process. “I didn’t pay myself for
three years,” says Low. “I wanted to build a better telescope – one that
could be pointed all around the universe.”

Dr Low wearing the iBrain device

Dr Low wearing the iBrain device

Currently the iBrain is being used to monitor such conditions as
autism, depression and sleep apnea. It is also being used as a
revolutionary new way to monitor drug trials through brain-wave
analysis.

Due to the portability of the device, hospitalization is no longer a
requirement of the testing procedure. Patients can use the iBrain to
record their brainwave patterns while going about everyday tasks. The
data collected is analyzed by researchers, who conclude whether a drug
is working effectively, while also monitoring for side effects. The U.S
Military has also taken an interest in the device, hoping to monitor
their soldiers for conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder and
traumatic brain Injury.

The team at Neurovigil are currently hard at work on the iBrain 2,
which Dr Low says will be even smaller, have better battery life, and
can also monitor the subject’s heart rate. Low says that while the
iBrain 2 is about 35 percent complete and plans are already underway for
the iBrain 3, which is set to be Neurovigil’s first device sold
directly to the public. Low says that the iBrain’s third incarnation
will also feature an electrocardiogram (EKG) and be capable of
connecting wirelessly through iPhones and Android phones. The estimated
cost of the iBrain 3 is around US$100.

Despite plans to release the iBrain 3 commercially, Low is quick to
point out that Neurovigil will remain a medical company first and a
consumer company second.

“We feel that a nice outcome of this would be to get patients the
help they need sooner and recognize the pathology before they
are
symptomatic,” he says.

The Francis Crick Memorial Conference will be held on July 7.

Source: Neurovigil

Navy SEALS taking target practice at hijabi Muslim women

by iqu Islam

Navy SEALS taking target practice at hijabi Muslim women

Omid Safi

|
Jun 29, 2012
|
Comments (27)

Here is a very curious story from a paper in Virginia Beach:

The story talks about the difficult conditions under which the Navy
special warfare community (Navy SEALs) have to train, including
simulated conditions in which they go through rooms that are designed to
resemble “a mosque, bank, post office, market and residential compound.
In one section, nine chairs painted in primary hues sit behind desks in
an elementary school classroom.”

The story doesn’t mention it, but something caught my eye:  the image
that they are using for target practice is unmistakably that of a Muslim
woman wearing hijab, with what looks like Qur’anic inscriptions behind
her on the wall.

These houses are called “kill houses.”

The person who designed these so-called “kill houses” touts their high
technology:  Larry Pacifico, “who manages the complex, said instructors
will control each scenario using an iPad to adjust the lighting and
movement of the targets. Cameras will record the action, so SEALs will
find out where the bullets they fired came to rest, he said, down to
specific bones and organs.”

Apparently the Navy has enough concern about technology to want to know
which bones and which organs the Navy SEALs would be hitting, but not
enough concern to know that they are taking target practice shooting at
Muslim women.

Yeah, we are not at war with Islam, they keep telling us.

We just train our most skilled soldiers to kill Muslim women.

God have mercy on us.

It’s not so much that this looks bad.

This is bad.    It’s rotten to the core.

Can the folks in charge at the NAVY not see how this contributes to the
dehumanizing of Muslims, not just Muslim women, not just Muslim
civilians, but all Muslims?

Anti-Muslim bias lawsuit against the US Commission on International Religious Freedom !!

by iqu Islam

Anti-Muslim bias lawsuit against the US Commission on International Religious Freedom

By  (about the author)

A Muslim woman has filed a lawsuit against the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) alleging that she was sacked by the commission because of her religion. Ironically, the commission is assigned to advocate religious freedom globally.

Safiya Ghori-Ahmad filed the lawsuit on June 7, 2012 in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia saying that USCIRF rescinded a job offer after learning that she was Muslim and worked for a group promoting Muslims’ civil rights in the United States.

Ghori-Ahmad was hired to work as an analyst and immediately was asked to produce a report on religious freedom in Pakistan to test if she could write “objectively.” Ghori-Ahmad said a commissioner detected no sign of bias in her report but still objected to hiring her.   “Passing these tests (which she did) made no difference to the commissioners who opposed working with a Muslim,” said the lawsuit, which seeks a jury trial.

The suit quotes Commissioner Nina Shea as writing that “hiring a Muslim like Ms. Ghori-Ahmad to analyze religious freedom in Pakistan would be like “hiring an IRA activist to research the UK twenty years ago.'”

Ghori-Ahmad, a 26-year-old American born and educated in Arkansas, is seeking damages for distress as well as back pay, saying she was unemployed after the job offer was rescinded. She was later hired by the State Department.

According to a Washington Post report the commission’s six researchers signed a letter unsuccessfully urging their bosses to keep Ghori-Ahmad because of what they described as her strong résumé and the need for an analyst to cover the key region of South Asia. One researcher, Bridget Kustin, quit in protest, saying in her resignation letter that she would not “remain part of an organization that would be willing to engage in such discrimination.

 

The incident took place in 2009. Three commissioners whose actions were questioned in the lawsuit have since left after a shakeup last year led by Senator Dick Durbin, the second highest-ranking Democrat in the Senate. Speaking in December, Durbin said he “strongly” supported the group’s work but added: “I have been deeply troubled by allegations of misconduct, misuse of funds and discrimination at the Commission.”

Durbin spearheaded an amendment that limited terms of commissioners and subjected them to federal regulations on discrimination and expenses, amid charges that some had flown first class and stayed in expensive hotels.

The commission was set up under a 1998 law to advise the US government on religious freedom. It has strongly advocated for the rights of minorities around the world.

Its statements on the Islamic world have sometimes been controversial. In its latest annual report, it called for the State Department to put Turkey — a secular state and US ally — on a blacklist over religious freedom that includes countries such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Rejecting the USCIRF’s 2012 annual report Turkey said on April 5: “The report, which is prepared by politicians representing some interest groups, contradicts the findings of U.S. State Department’s annual reports so far.” In a written statement the Turkish Foreign Ministry also criticized the report for failing to address incidents in Europe based on Islamophobia, with many mosques having been attacked and religious leaders being appointed by the state. The statement thus said that “the report [had been] prepared for political reasons.”

Shea and several other commissioners have long been accused of criticizing aspects of the Islamic faith in a way that unfairly stigmatizes all Muslims.

The allegations in the suit are the most explicit in a years-long series of allegations that commission leaders are biased against Muslims, specifically people associated with groups critical of U.S. foreign policy and who work for groups that fight anti-Muslim discrimination. Questions about the Ghori-Ahmad EEOC complaint — which commission lawyers had argued the body was exempt from — and how the commission uses its resources led some lawmakers last year to almost let USCIRF close for lack of reauthorization. Its budget was ultimately cut by a quarter and long-serving commissioners were forced out by retroactive term limits.

The anti-bias of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom is also reflected in the recent appointment of its commissioners. Last March Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) appointed well-known anti-Islam activist Dr. Zuhdi Jasser as a commissioner.

A broad national coalition of more than 60 civil advocacy organizations and individuals have sent a joint letter to Senators Inouye, McConnell and Durbin expressing “deep concern” at the controversial appointment of Zuhdi Jasser. The coalition asked that Jasser’s appointment be rescinded because he has been a vocal opponent of religious freedom for American Muslims.

The coalition noted that Jasser’s organization, the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, “applauded” an amendment to Oklahoma’s constitution that both a federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals 10th Circuit have held is in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by clearly favoring all other religions over Islam. That amendment specifically targeted      Islam for official censure.

The letter also cited Jasser’s opposition to the constitutionally-protected construction of a Muslim community center in lower Manhattan, his support for the New York Police Department’s blanket surveillance of Muslims based on religion rather than evidence or suspicion of wrongdoing and his ties to virulently anti-Muslim groups and individual Islamophobes.

Why the USCIRF has appointed a controversial commissioner, the reason one can see is the anti-Islam bias of the Commission reauthorized on Dec. 16, 2011 by the Congress through 2018, just hours before it was scheduled to go out of existence?