Alfred Wegener: The Father of 20th Century Geoscience?

Since the industrial revolution of the 1900’s, the scientific world has progressed exponentially in terms of discovery and innovative theory. We have seen a cornucopia of impressive revelations which have aided our understanding of the formation of some of the most beautiful landforms our world has to offer, discovered magnetic fluctuations at our poles and in the upper-atmosphere, and painted a true picture of the inner-workings of our planet. Yet for many, the work of Alfred Wegener, an astronomer and meteorologist by trade, in devising the ‘draft’ Theory of Continental Drift was, and remains, the biggest advancement in geosciences to date.

   For me, it is not hard to see why many people would agree with the above statement, clearly, with ‘geoscience’ as an area explicitly referring to the study of the sciences of the earth, there can be no greater contribution to this field than actually devising why the world is as it is today. The implications of this hypothesis, that the Earth is composed of several large plates, as well as multiple other, smaller plates, gave a base for other gifted scientists, further down the timeline, to devise theories for the formation of landforms which were formerly a mystery. Without this first concept of continental drift, perhaps even today we would be mystified by the mid-ocean ridge, the birth of Surtsey in the 60’s would be ‘an act of God’, and the occurrence of earthquakes would continue to be a freakish unpredictability.

   However, we must remember that although Wegener fathered the initial key concept, he did not generate the full picture. In Wegener’s ‘Origins of Continents and Oceans’, he likened the continents to ice-breakers, ploughing through and splitting the oceanic plates apart on their path, and suggesting that the continents were driven by a ‘magnetic tide’ within the Earth. Since this was first laid out, the concept of ‘inner Earth tides’ has been irrefutably disproven, as have his ideas of the nature of the plates. Regardless, his early work laid out the foundations for the evolution of the theory over time, where the plates and upper mantle float and move via convection currents in the asthenosphere, providing a paradigm for geoscientific development in the years to follow.

   In the end, I suppose it is just important that we remember that although Wegener had somethings wrong, his initial ideas sowed the seeds for incredible geoscientific advancement in the years to come. Like Galileo, who laid out his first designs for the helicopter, he neither had everything right nor designed the final model, they both provided a platform from which future generations could take their ideas and bring them to life. 

UK Rioting: Causes of the Unrest?

It has been a while since my last post, but by no means has the world been quiet in this time period. In terms of conflict and civil unrest, there has been a lot to talk about. The Libyian overhaul of Gaddafi's government has seen the Colonel flee the capital in the wake of the rebel's advances, Israel and Turkey are going toe-to-toe over the raid and killing of the crew of the Turkish vessel which entered Israeli waters, but much closer to home are the mass events of rioting and looting across England's major cities.

It seems that the press have almost solely placed their blame on the police outfit which performed the shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham on the 4th of August, which saw him die due to a single gunshot wound to the chest. Mark Duggan is two sides to a coin, on one hand he is described as a 'gangster', 'drug dealer' and 'rebel', whilst his family and friends label him a 'family man', who, 'would always run rather than fire on police'. I am personally not of the belief that a man with whom very few people can indentify with based on these totally paradoxical descriptions can be the only reason these unnecessary acts of violence occured, but what, then, was the cause?

London is a massively diverse city which over seven million people call home. There are truly varied demographies in terms of race, religion, and perhaps most relevant for the riots, class. The boroughs of Ealing, Croydon and Kensington play host to the 'high-fliers' of the London society, boasting expensive houses, private schools, and a better quality of life there than in the boroughs of Tottenham, Lewisham and Lambeth. Some of the aforementioned wards are in the top 10% most deprived in the UK, whereas some of the others are in the top 10% least deprived. With such great local disparities in wealth and class, some level of resentment from the lower classes is understandable. Some psychology of 'it's us and them' between the 'haves and have nots' of London must have been ignited by the shooting of a relatively 'lower class' inhabitant of the city by the police, and from the peaceful protests which followed, those with nothing to lose went hell-for-leather on the city.

So you could put the rioting down to a resentment of the upper-classes of the city, but who is to say that the rioters gauged themselves against the richer inhabitants of London when they began their illegal 'supermarket sweep'. One thing to say is that a lot of the rioters had previous convictions, maybe some had done time, and saw the disturbances as a time where the normal rules don't apply. It is rare to see an honest citizen go off looting, this is usually because they have a career, a loving family set-up, and a future to consider, but for those who truly went all-out when rioting, it is fair to say a majority of them will have had no real concern for the consequences. The way in which the rioters were so keen to loot isn't just a message of anarchy, but moreso it screams; "how else am I going to get a TV like this?". In this case, it is an example of opportunism by those who feel they deserve more from life but lack either the opportunities or the will to earn it.

A lot of the rioters were young males, between the ages of 14 and 18, this suggests that the age-old issue of youths feeling misunderstood has taken a new turn, and these young people feel so detatched from society they don't see anything wrong in taking a fire-bomb to their own city. A BBC interview in the wake of the third night of rioting was rudely interupted by a clear rioter, the man yelled into the camera that the riots were a good thing for independence or something equally feeble as a justification. When he was asked to qualify his reasoning he blurted something like 'foreigners took our jobs'. Now, as most people were saying that police injustice was their motivation to protest or riot, it seems that some people missed the memo, clearly some people didn't even know why they were commiting these crimes against society. That has to be a key reason for the rioting, sheer and unwavering ignorance by some members of society, to take to the streets in a wave of violence and not even question why you are doing it shows a blatent knowledge gap in UK society.

But if we throw away all this reasoning and brush it off as just young people enraged by the killing of a man of a similar age and class, how then can the rioters of Birmingham, Bristol, Nottingham, Manchester, and other major cities justify their actions? Yes maybe the killing of Mark Duggan struck a chord with them over their dislike for the police, but they didn't know the man, all of the people protesting in Tottenham at first knew or had connections to Duggan, the rioters of the other cities had no just cause other than the ideas reasoned above.

So in all, I would put the rioting down to more than the shooting of one man, really, he is just a statistic like us all. I have to think there is something deeper which incited this seemingly meaningless violence, be it a class resentment, a feeling of being wronged and deserving more, pure ignorance and selfishness, or just some on-the-spot opportunism with no fear of conviction.

A Disease of Poverty: Dengue Fever

Dengue fever is a tropical disease caused by the dengue virus. It is a communicative disease and is also known as 'breakbone fever'. Symptoms of it include fever, skin rash, muscle and joint pains, and headaches. Dengue is often transmitted by a strain of mosquitoes, it is then also very rarely passed from person to person, and by vertical transmission (mother to offspring), in Singapore the disease is endemic, and organ transplants and blood tranfusions carry a risk of dengue fever transmission.

As you can see from the above map, red denotes a country or region with a dengue fever epidemic, and the azure shows a country with a more minor problem. Clearly, the virus is far more prevalent in the southern hemisphere, where climate is warmer and more humid and mosquitoes thrive. Also, most of the areas with high rates of disease are relatively poor, or have high rates of depravity. Clearly, sub-saharan Africa is rife with the ailment, where health care is poor and medication scarse, and India has a high rate of it, where the dense population and high humidity promotes the spread of the infection. In southern USA resides probably the clearest anomaly, however the hot temperatures and high numbers of immigrants from the southern and central Americas with little money to access health care will probably have lead to the disease being in this area.
The disease currently has no known vaccines, hence to control the disease there has been attempts at killing off the mosquitoes that transmit it, and controlling their areas. The best advice given is just to avoid being bitten. There is a mortality rate of one in ten of all people who get the disease. Usually as treatment sufferers are told to take many fluids, and some are given them intravenously. Ibuprofen and all risky methods are avoided as bleeding can be highly fatal when infected.

Thailand 100% Condom Programme

The commercial sex trade in Thailand really was the cause for HIV to spread throughout the country. The first case was diagnosed there in 1984, three years after HIV hit the headlines in the MEDW. The virus spread rapidly from there, men who had the virus would then give it to their wives, and then onto the children, and would often blame visiting a brothel for them having the virus. The Thai government decided this could not go on and so sent officials to the brothels to get the 'ladies' within tested for HIV. By 1990 30% of all prostitutes tested had the virus.

The Thai government decided that although there are laws against prostitution they deemed it safer to promote safer sex, as it is hard enough to change peoples actions, let alone stop those actions and change their morals. They offered 60million condoms nationally to all brothels so that no brothel would feel like it were losing custom by requiring a condom for sex, and led hard hitting TV and radio propaganda talking of all commercial sexual exchanges to be conducted with a condom.

It was an incredibly effective program. Within 5 years, the percentage of commercial sex acts where condoms were used increased from 15% to over 90%, and the number of men coming in with STDs decreased enormously. The quickly spreading HIV epidemic was largely brought under control. Although the 100% condom program couldn't eliminate all HIV transmission, in its early years it was one of the most effective government-instituted HIV control programs in history.

However, as the condom programme was aimed at commercial sex workers, it never really entered the public eye, as a result most new cases of HIV nowadays are in married women.

Essentially this is like the UK needle exchange, where drug users can exchange their dirty needles or syringes at the back door of most pharmacies in exchange for clean ones to prevent the spread of HIV. This is a lesson the MEDW is havaing to learn, just because you make something illegal, it does not mean that it will stop happening, as a result regulation and safety measures in illegal activities is making a more effective battle against HIV.

Health Insurance or Nationised Health Sevice?

In the news recently there have been two fairly contrasting stories running related to this issue, namely, the health reforms in the USA and ideas about privatising areas of the UK NHS. Currently the USA operate on an insurance based system, where in the case of minor ailments, the bare minimum is done untill the infermed are fit enough to walk, and then they are booted out of the hospital if their insurance either won't cover it or is inexistant. The UK works contrastingly, offer a service to all, church-goers, criminals, common people alike, in an attempt to provide a good which otherwise probably wouldn't be provided in sufficient quanitities by a free market.

Though we may complain about it, generally the NHS is widely considered one of the superior health systems in the world. Doctors from all shores come here to work in a busy and in the grand scheme of things, a good service. In the aftermath of the world recession our coalition government are looking to make savings on government spending, and it has recently been proposed as an idea to privatise certain areas of the service. This movement towards a health service where we pay for our care could prove to be very unpopular, especially with those who have paid their national insurance for many years only to be left now with no free health care.

Contrastingly, in the states Obama is trying to push through a bill which will see their system move towards a nationalised set up. What he wants is for people who do not have insurance due to poverty to still be able to have a high quality care, and therefore try to remove the disparity between the rich and the poor in terms of health.

It seems odd that both of these nations are motivated to do what they are doing in attempts to cut government spending. Obama argues that helping out the poor by charging the richer more for their health care amoung other methods, will cut their defecit as the state will not have to keep bailing out hospitals for fees induced by the uninsured. The UK government's idea is that by making people pay for some NHS services, the government will pay less and people will start to have to pay more, which will lead to additional income for the government coupled with lower spending.

It seems that these two health case studies are both driven by the state of the world economy, there is solely the hope that the governments involved will act in the interests of the citizens and not for short term gains.

Turkey To Germany Migration

Since Turkey's recent introduction to the EU passage for economic migrants to Western Europe has never been clearer, it is likely that many Turks will continue to head out into Europe in the forseeable future. In the UK we host around half a million Turks, roughly the same as The Nederlands, and over triple that of Italy, a nation I have previously blogged about needing more young workers to prevent a population collapse, yet it is in Germany where the most Turks have elected to make their home. Germany hosts in the region of 3,500,000 Turks, most of which have been migrating there steadily since the early 1960s.

There were a variety of reasons for this mass migration to Germany, the Berlin wall was erected in 1961, cutting off a host of unemployed East Germans from jobs they would otherwise have filled, leaving vast underemployment in Western Germany. At the same time, Turkey's population was growing, especially in urban areas, leading to high unemployment of professional Turks. This combination of circumstances incentivised an agreement between Germany and Turkey, to allow a large influx of young Turkish migrants into the German labour market, which couldn't source sufficient workers from the Mediterranian nations. The agreement was nearly not made at all due to fears about the cultural differences being too great, but pressure from the USA (who wanted to try and stablise Turkey's population growth) eventually caused Germany to agree.

Turks first began moving to Germany in 1961 (the year of the agreement), when roughly 7,000 Turks made the move as 'two year migrants', though the majority of these were allowed to stay due to pressure from German employers who were keen to keep these industrious workers. There have been times when Turks have made headway in returing to Turkey, namely in 1966-67, 1973, and 1981-84, due to a deep recession, the great oil crisis, and the joint scenario of high unemployment and a government policy offering grants for Turkish workers to return home for good respectively. Despite all this, the outflows have not matched the inflows, and nowadays Germany is still by far the greatest host for German migrants. After 1989 and the fall of the Berlin wall Neo-Nazi groups and hate crimes sprang up over the 'newly unified' country, targeting the Turkish migrants who had helped the country so much.

Nowadays, Germany has become far more tolerant of the Turkish people living there, the majority of Turks follow German culture, and their Turkish language has been modified into a German dialect, Turkish is now registered as a subject taught in most schools. Most Turks live in the biggest cities like Mainz, Stuttgart and Munich, whilst a smaller amount commute in from dormitory settlements, mostly the Turks are in what used to be West Germany. It appears fair to say that the input of the Turkish migrant workers has helped Germany in the last half century, and they must be somehow partially accredited with Germany's prior title as the 'Economic Hub of Europe', perhaps if British people grew to be as tolerant of Polish migrant workers as the Germans are now to the Turks, we could see an economic boom of a similar grandeur.

Its not an 'Atlantic Crossing', but it seems all these 'Young Turks' have found success in Germany!