Fun Stuff > CHATTER
Things you know about AIDS
jhocking:
Don't forget the Middle East.
Patrick:
You're depressing me. Stop it.
pilsner:
--- Quote from: CNN ---Once, Hutus and Tutsis lived in harmony in Central Africa. About 600 years ago, Tutsis, a tall, warrior people, moved south from Ethiopia and invaded the homeland of the Hutus. Though much smaller in number, they conquered the Hutus, who agreed to raise crops for them in return for protection.
Even in the colonial era -- when Belgium ruled the area, after taking it from Germany in 1916 -- the two groups lived as one, speaking the same language, intermarrying, and obeying a nearly godlike Tutsi king.
Independence changed everything. The monarchy was dissolved and Belgian troops withdrawn -- a power vacuum both Tutsis and Hutus fought to fill. Two new countries emerged in 1962 -- Rwanda, dominated by the Hutus, and Burundi by the Tutsis -- and the ethnic fighting flared on and off in the following decades.
It exploded in 1994 with the civil war in Rwanda in which hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed. Tutsi rebels won control, which sent a million Hutus, fearful of revenge, into Zaire and Tanzania.
In Burundi, the Tutsis yielded power after a Hutu won the country's first democratic election in 1993. He was killed in an attempted coup four months later, and his successor in a suspicious plane crash in 1994, in which the Hutu leader of Rwanda was also killed.
--- End quote ---
dennis:
--- Quote from: pilsner on 25 Mar 2008, 21:04 ---
--- Quote from: dennis on 25 Mar 2008, 18:20 --- If a coffee producer is getting less for his coffee, he can't afford to pay the people who grow, transport, and sell more of it; nor does it mean that the demand for more coffee is there even if the producer could produce more.
--- End quote ---
That's all supposition on your part. More importantly, if you look at it the other way, greater volume (supply) would generally lower commodity prices. Or so every Econ 101 text in the country seems to suggest.
--- End quote ---
How is this supposition? This is basic economics. Farmers have a fixed amount of raw product that is determined at the beginning of the growing season, which after the crop is in, they need to process and transport and market. If the price for their product drops, where are they going to get the money to stay in business? The numbers back this up, you know. Coffee prices drop, export value goes down, export volume goes down. Coffee makes up the majority of Uganda's exports.
And yes. Greater supply sates demand which lowers prices, but you are the one making the supposition here that you can turn coffee supply up like a knob. You can't sell more coffee than you grow. Remember, this is a seasonal, perishable commodity.
--- Quote ---
--- Quote ---There was virtually no testing and definitely no reliable testing for AIDS in Uganda (and Africa) during the period of time Oster studied. Oster spent a good portion of her talk explaining how she had to derive the disease rate from death distributions and how she validated those figures.
--- End quote ---
Good point. Where did the new infections by year in Uganda figures come from? If she's working backward from the mortality figures that she derived from her age group analysis (which I don't believe she was), her results are even more skewed by false specificity than I believed. But Oster stated in the talk that there were infected numbers in Uganda for certain populations, but not for the country at large. I would hope that she would attempt to extrapolate from those numbers.
--- End quote ---
The derived the figures from age-group mortality data, which she checked against known profiles from similar countries that have reliable testing. Also, you can't "extrapolate" figures for the population at large from figures for particular groups.
--- Quote ---
--- Quote ---She presented the graph comparing value to HIV incidence because it was the better match to the incidence curve, not because it predicted a higher proportion of new infections.
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Your insight into Oster's motivations is remarkable. I'm amazed that you don't find it suggestive that she produced wildly different "explanation" rates in her study but only presented the higher numbers in her talk. If the Orioles batting average by season presented an even closer curve, should she have put that data up? I'm thinking no -- because there's no basis for arguing causation. Then why work off of export value?
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There's no "insight" here to speak of. She tested three related hypotheses and picked to present the one that made the best model. Also, the curves weren't "wildly" different. Significantly different, but considering the limited data set, they all say the same thing. You keep harping on correlation does not imply causation, which is true, but you are ignoring the supporting evidence that does imply causation. You can't argue that Ugandan economic data is just as arbitrary as Orioles baseball statistics in this case.
--- Quote ---
--- Quote ---Higher value could mean that producers are paying workers and drivers more, or are hiring more drivers, or buying more trucks (Oster actually analyzed truck imports against this data and got a positive correlation).
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Higher export value means paying workers and drivers which spreads more HIV. Dude, I am just amazed. This is fantastic stuff. Maybe they're hiring more hookers with their extra money. We could call it the governor theory of HIV epidemiology. You should definitely write a paper.
--- End quote ---
Don't be asinine.
Your bias is clear. If you're not actually going to read the paper, perhaps you should lay off the armchair criticism.
Patrick:
Chill for a second, dude this is a forum on the internet, it's not the bloody G8.
Besides, I think it's all crap anyway. People are bored and life is difficult, full of fear, and depressing. What's one fun thing they can do? Have sex with each other. It's like college, except with more fatal STDs.
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