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Wyoming delegation visits China province with much in common

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Wyoming delegation visits China province with much in common.

As a Wyoming delegation visits central China next week, it’ll spend time in Shaanxi province, a place with many similarities to Wyoming.

It’s not the food: Wyoming has top-notch steak, Shaanxi has gourmet noodles and dumplings.

Shaanxi is home to 37 million and is run by a centralized, socialist government. But, like Wyoming, Shaanxi is in its nation’s interior and is a major producer of fossil fuels — home to some of China’s biggest coal reserves and reservoirs of oil and natural gas.

Wyoming and Shaanxi find themselves working hard to find ways to limit or store greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal.

For Wyoming, such research is a chance to make sure the state’s coal will have buyers even amid stricter environmental regulations. For Shaanxi, similar research could open ways to limit the devastating levels of pollution in the province and in China from use of its natural resources.

Two very different places, but two coal-producing regions with some closely aligned goals.

“It’s so striking how similar they are with natural resources issues,” said Lynne Boomgaarden, a Cheyenne-based attorney on energy issues and a speaker at an international forum on coal.

Wyoming’s coal is pulled from the ground with few injuries and lives lost and shipped by rail. Shaanxi province isn’t so lucky. Coal is mined in sometimes deadly conditions by hand and trucked to China’s power-hungry industrial zones and growing urban areas. It’s an inefficient method that belches a lot of additional pollution into Shaanxi’s skies.

The province, which could produce 370 million tons of coal this year, is seeking a more environmentally friendly use of its coal resource, said a scientist from a university in Xi’an, Shaanxi’s capital, in a paper published this year in a Canadian scientific journal.

Shaanxi’s provincial government has said it’s seeking “wealthy people, graceful environment.” The Wyoming delegation will arrive in Xi’an for a coal forum aimed at the second half of that goal: cutting down pollution from coal and oil development, use and transportation in the province.

Shaanxi’s industrial users of coal must be asked to adopt “clean coal” technology to limit emissions, said Li Gou, of Xi’an University of Science and Technology’s Energy Economy and Management Research Center. Coal mines should adopt better production methods and the province should seek new uses for coal.

Only by doing all those things can Shaanxi “guarantee the sustainable development of economy,” Li wrote in the Jan. 1 edition of the Journal of Sustainable Development.

It’s a theme familiar in Wyoming, where state leaders and coal industry officials are also seeking new ways to cut emissions from burning coal and new ways to use Wyoming’s coal, boosting its value within the state.

The province government’s next five-year master plan, announced earlier this year, trumpeted the province’s success in cutting energy demand and called for more conservation of electricity, as well as cuts in pollutants including sulfur dioxide, holding the line in nitrogen oxide and strengthening monitoring of particulate matter.

The success of Shaanxi and Wyoming to limit pollution from the use of coal is something members of the Wyoming delegation recognize, even if they do it begrudgingly.

“At this point, they don’t probably care what anybody thinks,” said state Rep. Ed Buchanan, R-Torrington, speaker of the state House and a conference delegate. “But the more palatable you make burning coal to the international community, the more accepting they’ll be and the more you’ll be able to meet the demands of your population and industrial complex.”

Buchanan was referring to the Chinese, but it’s a thought many in Wyoming share.

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Famous Faces in Art May be Revealed « Passing Through . . . .

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Famous Faces in Art May be Revealed « Passing Through . . . ..

Californian university project will use facial recognition software to identify subjects of paintings

vermeer pearl earring

Detail from Jan Vermeer’s Girl With A Pearl Earring. Can forensic science help us find out who she was? Photograph: Corbis

A Californian university has won funding to use advanced facial recognition technology to try to solve the mysteries of some of the world’s most famous works of art.

Professor Conrad Rudolph said the idea for the experiment came from watching news and detective shows such as CSI which had a constant theme of using advanced computers to recognise unknown faces from murder victims to wanted criminals.

Rudolph, professor of medieval art history at the University of Californiaat Riverside, realised he might be able to apply that cutting-edge forensic science to some of the oldest mysteries in art: identifying the real people in paintings such as Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring,Hals’s The Laughing Cavalier or thousands of other portraits and busts where the identity of the subject has been lost. Work on the project should begin within a month or so.

Police and forensic scientists can use facial recognition software that identifies individuals by measuring certain key features. For example, it might measure the distance between someone’s eyes or the gap between their mouth and their nose. In real life such measurements should be almost as unique as a fingerprint. Rudolph is hoping that the same might be true of portraiture, whether it is a sculpted bust or a painting.

To start with, his team will use facial recognition software on death masks of known individuals and then compare them to busts and portraits. If the software can find a match where Rudolph and his team know one exists, then it shows the technique works and can be used on unknown subjects to see if it can match them up with known identities.

The identity of the subjects of some of the most famous pictures in the world are unknown, including Girl with a Pearl Earring, the 17th-century portrait that inspired a film starring Scarlett Johansson. The Imagined Lives exhibition now running at London’s National Portrait Galleryfeatures portraits of 14 unknown subjects. Many of those paintings were once thought to be of historical figures such as Elizabeth I, but the identities are now disputed. The truth behind several paintings of Shakespeare – such as the Chandos portrait and the Cobbe portrait – has also been much disputed. It is possible facial recognition software could help solve these mysteries.

To be identified, the subject of a portrait would need to be matched to the identity of another named person in a separate picture. But Rudolph has some tricks up his sleeve. He believes that another forensic technique – whereby an “ageing” programme is run on a subject – could also help solve art mysteries. In fighting crime the software is usually used to produce “adult” pictures of children who have been missing for many years. But it could see if the Girl with a Pearl Earring had been painted again as a much older woman, whose identity might be known.

Away from the high-profile cases there are a legion of other unknown subjects that might be more easily identified. In many works from before the 19th century wealthy patrons often inserted themselves, their families or friends and business associates into crowd scenes.

Facial recognition technology could be used to identify some of these people from already known works and thus provide insight into personal, political and business relationships of the day. In other cases families in wealthy homes commissioned busts of relatives that were often sold when estates went bankrupt or families declined.

The new technique could identify many of these people by linking the busts to known portraits. “These are historical documents and they can teach us things. Works of art can show us political connections or business links. It opens up a whole new window into the past,” Rudolph said.

In order to transfer the process to analysing faces in works of art, some technical issues will need to be overcome. Portraits are in two dimensions and are also an artistic interpretation rather than a definitive likeness. In some cases, the painter might have simply not been very accurate, or attempted to flatter a subject, which would make recognition more difficult.

“It is different using this on art rather than an actual human,” said Rudolph, “But we are trying to test the limits of the technology now and then who knows what advances may happen in the future? This is a fast-moving field.”

Breaking News: Huge Scientific Free Speech Win! | The Alliance for Natural Health USA

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Breaking News: Huge Scientific Free Speech Win! | The Alliance for Natural Health USA.

In a 335-page ruling handed down today, an Administrative Law Judge with POM Wonderfuloversight of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has upheld the right of pomegranate juice manufacturer POM Wonderful to tell consumers about the health benefits of its juice.

Since 1996, POM has invested over $35 million to do scientific research on their pomegranate products at 44 top universities and scientific centers around the globe. Over 70 of their studies have been published in significant peer-reviewed journals, validating the health benefits of the pomegranate and pomegranate juice.

What makes this ruling significant is the fact that the judge said, “The greater weight of the persuasive expert testimony in this case leads to the conclusion that where the product is absolutely safe, like POM Products, and where the claim or advertisement does not suggest that the product be used as a substitute for conventional medical care or treatment, then it is appropriate to favor disclosure.” While we are still studying the ruling, it seems to indicate that other safe products may also be allowed to disclose scientifically validated studies about their health benefits.

The ruling also implies that Roll Global, POM Wonderful’s parent company, will not need to get FDA approval before making health claims about its food products, nor will it have to conduct the kind of double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled studies that are required of the pharmaceutical industry, and which the FTC was illegally insisting on.

As we reported last year, the FDA allows food and supplement producers to describe the role of a nutrient or dietary ingredient as it affects normal structure or function in humans—for example, “calcium builds strong bones” or “vitamin D boosts immune system function.” However, one cannot legally cite the science showing that vitamin D prevents and treats the flu. The flu is considered a disease, so this is forbidden.

The FTC, however, has been claiming that even structure/function claims cannot be made unless two random-controlled human clinical trials, or RCTs, are performed! And that’s two RCTs for each product, not each ingredient. Even one RCT is tremendously expensive, so to require two for each product before any health claim is made is a nearly impossible undertaking.

Both FDA and the FTC regulate health claims about food (and dietary supplements are defined as a food), but the FTC covers health claims in advertising, whereas the FDA is concerned with health claims on food product labeling. The difficulty here is that through a series of lawsuit settlement agreements (“consent decrees”) taken against food companies by the FTC, the lines between the FTC and the FDA jurisdictions are blurring, particularly in regard to health claims. In its consent agreements—under threat of severe sanction if not agreed to—the FTC has forced companies to agree that no advertising claims could be made unless (a) there was prior approval by the FDA, and (b) it was supported by two double-blind, placebo-controlled studies—a pharmaceutical standard.

In 2010, POM Wonderful sued the FTC for blurring those lines. POM alleged that the FTC was trampling on their first amendment rights to make claims about pomegranates and pomegranate juice—claims that they said were supported by reliable scientific evidence. POM argued that FTC was illegally trying to create a new standard, whereas the current legal standard is that a claim does not require FDA approval and must simply be supported by competent, reliable, scientific evidence.

Constitutional lawyer Jonathan Emord put it this way:

The [FTC] cannot make unencumbered commercial speech dependent upon anything other than the requirement that the speech be non-misleading. Speech not approved by FDA may be true. Speech not supported by a set number and kind of human trials may also be true. The constitutional burden of proof is on FTC to prove falsity in each specific case based on the precise content of the claim.

As another article in this issue makes clear, the battle for free speech about science is still far from won. We are only in the early days. But the POM case is a major step forward and worth celebrating.