Nice people thread part 7 - a thread in its prime

zagubov

SingleSue wrote: »

Middle son's school are losing so many students to other 6th forms that they have offered to run any course my son and his bandmates want (music related that is) after they got wind that all 4 of them were looking at going to a different 6th form.

They see the lads as people who could be influential to others in their decisions (plus they are amongst the gifted and talented group), so are trying to stop the rot and being more creative in the type of courses available.

It actually suits middle son, after his initial look at the different 6th form, he discovered that he wouldn't be able to combine his love of music with his love of physics and maths due to the nature of courses available (he would only be able to do the music qualification), so despite this other 6th form being the best place to go to for music, it wouldn't give him the wide variety he wanted....oh and staying at his current school is a hell of a lot cheaper as no real travel expenses, can get up later and home earlier and no hassle with non running trains!

That's great news about your sons and the courses, sue. The mix of music and maths is more common than many people realise (I'm from a musical family, but not the Von Trapps).:D

The A level system seems to be a way of burying the first year of uni education in the school system. I suppose it must have made some kind of sense financially because I can't see what the advantage is educationally.

zagubov

chewmylegoff wrote: »

the vaccine works by putting a non-pathogenic strain of bacteria which is very similar to m. tuberculosis (the main cause of TB) into you, letting your immune system recognise the shape of the bacteria and make antibodies which bind onto it. in simple terms the antibodies mark the invading bacteria for destruction by your immune system. your body remembers how to make the antibodies so that if, in the future, the real pathogen comes along, it can destroy it before it takes hold.

there are a number of different mechanisms of antibiotic resistance - e.g. sometimes a bacterium becomes able to 'digest' the antibiotic, but in other cases the structure of the bacterium's cell wall evolves to be able to prevent the antibiotic penetrating it in the first place. theoretically it is possible that such a resistance mechanism may change the physical structure sufficiently that the antibodies created by the vaccine cannot bind to the cell wall.

the BCG vaccine that is used to vaccinate people against TB is actually pretty rubbish. it does not offer anything like 100% protection, and its effects decline over time - some trials reckon after 20 years the vaccine's effects are gone. it also, rather oddly, appears to only really work in colder climates.

people have been trying to develop a new vaccine for years, and more recently there has been intensive designer-drug research. i spent the third year of my university course trying to identify sites in the m. tuberculosis genome to attack with drugs. it was bloody boring, and as far as i know, 12 years later, no-one has really got anywhere with this sort of research.


antibiotic resistance is very worrying. and it's not like you can do anything personally. whilst you might refrain from running to the doctors to demand antibiotics every time you are ill, that matters not a jot if (a) everyone else is doing it around the world and (b) people are feeding antibiotics to livestock as a "dietary supplement".

When I was a student in the 70s they were already noticing that the Canadian fishing fleet were using antibiotics frozen into the ice they used to pack the fish in to bring back to the ports, to delay bacterial growth. This must have been before the North American fish stocks disappeared.

They couldn't have been doing this for many decades at that point but they were already beginning to report isolating bacteria from the water and marine life that were resistant to the antibiotics from the ice.

I gather half the world's antibiotics are now fed to livestock - can't begin to imagine how this will all end.

Vaccines don't encourage resistance to develop but thanks to high-profile idiots we're even starting to lose the benefits of vaccines. This cartoon strip covers it really well, so kudos to tallguywrites for putting the case so well.:beer:

Generali

vivatifosi wrote: »

Thanks Gen, wasn't aware so will keep my eye to. I think it is still south of them at the moment (more Brisbane-ish) but looks like it will hit more tomorrow. Really appreciate the update.

That's right, I remember now. They're in the valley north of Brissie. I had them in the Ipswich area, directly west of Brisbane.

I think the weather gets there tomorrow. It should have died down a bit by the time it gets there and a cool change is due to come through tomorrow pm.

I hope those guys aren't going to have another stormy time like before, lots of them are still doing it tough after the last storms.

vivatifosi

zag, your classes must be great fun if you cover blue people and cartoon strips of the MMR virus. I only wish we had teachers like you when I was at school, I might have learned a bit more science.

PasturesNew

vivatifosi wrote: »

NPs who missed going to Uni or who like to still take the odd unit to keep their skills up might find this article interesting. It is about the growth of good quality, free, uni-level content online:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/nov/11/online-free-learning-end-of-university

Long article but worth reading.

There've been many promises and false starts like this over the past 10 years.... it's interesting somebody else is having a go.

vivatifosi

Generali wrote: »

That's right, I remember now. They're in the valley north of Brissie. I had them in the Ipswich area, directly west of Brisbane.

I think the weather gets there tomorrow. It should have died down a bit by the time it gets there and a cool change is due to come through tomorrow pm.

I hope those guys aren't going to have another stormy time like before, lots of them are still doing it tough after the last storms.

Thanks Gen. My cousin lives on some acreage outside of Hervey Bay. It's slightly off-grid, so she harvests her own water and does some microgeneration. If the town gets hit hard, she gets it a bit worse because there's less infrastructure where she is. Also the rain run-off carries poisonous snakes.

My uncle is in Maryborough. He's about 2 streets higher than where the flood got to last time, so should be ok, plus he's in a Queenslander so on stilts anyway (though not so good if there's a hurricane force wind). The kids work away in the mines, driving those bl**dy great yellow things (like a digger only much much bigger). Needless to say, they think we are total softies lacking the pioneering spirit over here.

misskool

LydiaJ wrote: »

You seem to be craving various things ATM, missk. Anything you want to tell us about....????

My addiction to sugar is quite depressing

I did manage to find the last can of libby's pumpkin in waitrose this morning :cool:

misskool

vivatifosi wrote: »

NPs who missed going to Uni or who like to still take the odd unit to keep their skills up might find this article interesting. It is about the growth of good quality, free, uni-level content online:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/nov/11/online-free-learning-end-of-university

Long article but worth reading.

The contents of these online courses are exceptional. I'm a big big fan of Coursera, I tried to do the statistical course a few weeks ago but it was above my depth so I didn't finish it.

It's interesting how the new websites are gaining much more interest. In contrast, MIT released a number of their courses for the general public but their uptake wasn't as high as the new websites.

PasturesNew

I've never had pumpkin - and I won't. There is no way I'd buy one, then do something with it, because: If I don't like it, it's a waste of time/money... and I'm still hungry, would have a raft of washing up to do and so it's just a waste.

misskool

zagubov wrote: »

When I was a student in the 70s they were already noticing that the Canadian fishing fleet were using antibiotics frozen into the ice they used to pack the fish in to bring back to the ports, to delay bacterial growth. This must have been before the North American fish stocks disappeared.

They couldn't have been doing this for many decades at that point but they were already beginning to report isolating bacteria from the water and marine life that were resistant to the antibiotics from the ice.

I gather half the world's antibiotics are now fed to livestock - can't begin to imagine how this will all end.

Vaccines don't encourage resistance to develop but thanks to high-profile idiots we're even starting to lose the benefits of vaccines. This cartoon strip covers it really well, so kudos to tallguywrites for putting the case so well.:beer:

Personally, it's all an evolutionary arms race. We make drugs and the pathogen we are trying to treat needs to evade or create a mechanism to survive.

I can't remember who did it now but there is an elegant experiment where scientists prepared a jelly with a gradient of antibiotic concentrations and spread a large population of bacteria across the bottom. The top concentration had enough antibiotic to kill the naive bacteria immediately. Leave the bacteria growing across the jelly for months and you soon begin to have resistant colonies. Perhaps evolutionary selection can happen faster when forced (ie antibiotic/pathogen theory).

It's also interesting to see that older drugs for treatment of cancer ie tamoxifen have increased rates of resistance in patients and new treatments are being designed to target a different part of the tumor.

In a sort of roundabout 30 second way, perhaps antibiotic resistance will increase studies into other ways of killing bacteria (using bacteriophages?/other lytic mechanisms) rather than working on different variants of the same drug?

The bugs will do anything to survive and we will do the same. It's a close call who will come out top.

(also, note on the cartoon. I think the main point he was trying to make is that sensationalistic science journalism doesn't help. We need educated scientists to help write/edit and present the stories otherwise the nuances get lost. Everyone though the completion of the human genome project meant that scientist could now cure every disease and everything would have a genetic component. In fact, all we've done is manage to discover quite how elegant and complicated humans are as there are multiple layers of complexity driving our development and diseases)

Right, back to the loft and making pumpkin pie.