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Things you know about AIDS
öde:
I doubt anyone would have and that's a weak excuse besides. There are plenty of threads to be an idiot in, and this isn't really one of them.
On topic: does anyone think this will have serious effects on the spread of contagious illnesses? Will we have border quarantines for humans?
a pack of wolves:
That's an interesting question. Within Africa I doubt it, since border quarantines would require a massive scaling up of the governmental resources used in border control and most African countries wouldn't be able to afford, that particularly since such a measure would damage their revenue from trade. Or at least not the countries worst hit by HIV/AIDS. Outside Africa is a different story, I can easily see Western European governments using something like that to increase already tight border controls, particularly in somewhere like the UK.
pilsner:
Borders in sub-Saharan Africa aren't like borders in the West. Three countries were walking armies right into the capital of DR Congo for most of the past 10 years. Ethiopia and Eritrea have been in a state of war or near war for a similar period. Every time there's a major upheaval, hundreds of thousands cross borders en masse seeking to escape violence. Tight border controls for many of these countries are about as realistic as magic HIV curing pixie dust.
The video was provocative, but you have to take a lot of what was said with several grains of salt. Partly this is because the presenter obviously had to omit a lot of context to deliver a talk in 16 minutes. But partly this was because her interest was less in making rational and well-grounded arguments and more on stirring the pot.
To whit wit: HIV causes AIDS. HIV is transmitted sexually, through shared needles, blood transfusion, or during pregnancy/birth. Obviously an ABC (abstinence, faithfulness, condoms) program would cut down on HIV transmission to the extent that in the context of the local customs and culture it actually convinced people to have sex with fewer new partners. Her point of the effectiveness of this program in one country given the impact of coffee imports is somewhat mooted by the fact that, for instance, Togo may be set up with a government, clergy and local custom that makes a "faithfulness/condom" drive attractive to the locals whereas Ghana may not. Furthermore she consistently fails to mention what factors she excluded to derive causation from correlation.
The correlation of coffee prices to new HIV transmissions (which was far from a perfect match, observe the bump at the beginning in coffee prices that wasn't matched in HIV transmissions) might be explained by something other than causation. For instance, what if while coffee prices are high, there's more money for HIV testing, and more new cases are identified. Furthermore, her analysis omitted a major step -- she assumes that higher coffee prices means more trade, means more people from outside the country spreading HIV inside the country. That's a major leap of logic -- why should we assume that as coffee prices go up, the total quantity of coffee traded goes up? It's just as plausible that as coffee goes down, more coffee must be exported to make up for the shortfall in profits per unit of coffee. Without verifying which is the case, the causation link is nothing more than an unsubstantiated assumption.
I could go on but it would be rather pointless -- the presenter might have anticipated and explained away everything I'm saying and simply not had time to raise these issues in a 16 minute talk. My point is that with pop presentations which fail to approach a complex issue with anything resembling rigor, it pays to exercise a healthy level of skepticism.
jhocking:
Well I'll be a monkey's uncle, I went to highschool with her. We had a math class together. Man, I thought I was pretty good at math, finishing calculus my junior year, until I found out she was a sophomore. Also, she was a track star (captain of the team I think.) I'm pretty sure she was valedictorian of my sister's class.
Adding to pilsner's points, note that she is totally being influenced by Steven Levitt, the real star of the economics department at the University of Chicago. He's the guy who wrote Freakonomics, and her whole talk very much smacks of Levitt's approach in that book. In short, she is setting herself up to write a me-to book and hopefully get a lucrative publishing deal.
calenlass:
Am I allowed to have an internet-crush on someone based on how they write? Like, is that even ok?
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