For millions of people, malaria creates a grim drumbeat of death, heartbreak, and loss: Every seven seconds, someone gets a case of malaria, and every two minutes, the disease claims another victim under the age of five. That’s why public health experts rejoiced yesterday when the World Health Organisation made a landmark decision to endorse the first vaccine against malaria.
Years of clinical trials have shown that this vaccine—known as RTS,S/AS01, or Mosquirix—is safe and helps protect against the disease, especially in concert with other malaria-fighting tools. With a 12-month efficacy of 56 percent, RTS,S lacks the eye-popping effectiveness of other modern vaccines. However, the vaccine’s target—the parasite Plasmodium falciparum—is orders of magnitude more complex than a virus.
“We have a number of things in our toolkit to fight malaria, and they’re all used together: bed nets, spraying, chemoprevention,” says Sean Murphy, a malaria vaccine developer at the University of Washington in Seattle. “This vaccine cannot replace all those tools.”
Also, the WHO recommendation doesn’t immediately usher in the widespread use of RTS,S. Rather, it marks the beginning of the vaccine’s broader rollout and paves the way for individual African countries to issue their own approvals of the vaccine, with WHO assistance. Scaling up to the necessary tens of millions of annual doses will require billions of dollars of government and philanthropic donations to the international nonprofit GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, which coordinates the financing of vaccination programs in developing countries.
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A health worker prepares a dose of malaria vaccine in western Kenya’s lakeside town of Ndhiwa, Homabay County, on September 13, 2019.
Remember domino theory? One country going Communist was supposed to topple the next, and then the next, and the next. The metaphor drove much of United States foreign policy in the middle of the 20th century. But it had the wrong name. From a physical point of view, it should have been called the “sandpile theory.”
Real-world political phase transitions tend to happen not in neat sequences, but in sudden coordinated fits, like the Arab Spring, or the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. These reflect quiet periods punctuated by crises—like a sandpile. You can add grains of sand to the top of a sandpile for a while, to no apparent effect. Then, all at once, an avalanche sweeps sand down from the top in an irregular pattern, possibly setting off little sub-avalanches as it goes.
This analogy doesn’t necessarily get us anywhere. After all, real sand is hard to analyze, just like real politics. But here’s the miracle. A kind of abstraction of a sandheap, known as the “abelian sandpile model,” created by physicists Per Bak, Chao Tang, and Kurt Wiesenfeld in 1987, seems to capture some of the rich, chaotic features of real sandpiles, not to mention other complex systems from biology, physics, and social science—while remaining simple enough to study mathematically.
Tyler Henry was away from New York City on the night that Hurricane Sandy hit, in 2012, but he saw the storm unfold from a distance on social media. As Henry saw photos of Jane’s Carousel, in Brooklyn Bridge Park, being consumed by a flood, he thought of his studio, which was near there, in the basement of a nonprofit gallery and artists’ residency called Smack Mellon. When he drove back the next day, he realized that he had been right to worry: the artists’ studios had been submerged under seven feet of water. “It was not only completely submerged but also destroyed,” he said. “The power of the water was so strong that huge, heavy items had been tossed to the other side of the studio.”
The artists wouldn’t move back into the space for more than half a year owing to renovations. But, immediately, they began to take stock of what was damaged and lost. Henry and another artist, Adriane Colburn, began collecting some of the materials. She found a dollar bill floating in the hallway, ringed with rust; he found a VHS tape of Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” which his roommate had given him. There was a box of Kodak film that Henry had bought at a flea market in Philadelphia—maybe forty or fifty reels of local family history that he’d never ended up using—that was now waterlogged.
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The exhibition “A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting” collects objects, such as these tools from Anvers Island, Antarctica, to remember “places that may disappear because of the combined physical, political, and economic impacts of climate change.”Photograph by Mary Lou Saxon / Courtesy A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting
It’s May 1964 and, on a low hillside in New Jersey, the physicists Robert Woodrow Wilson and Arno Allan Penzias are listening in on the Universe. They are standing beneath what looks like a gargantuan ear trumpet attached to a garden shed: the Holmdel Horn Antenna, built by Bell Laboratories to investigate microwaves as an alternative to radio waves for telecommunication. When interest in microwave communication waned, Bell lent out the Holmdel horn to interested scientists.
Penzias and Wilson were interested. Both aged around 30, they planned to map the sky with microwaves. But they were baffled: when they pointed the horn at a dark region beyond the galaxy and only sparsely populated with stars, instead of the silence they expected, they detected a kind of background hiss – a hiss that filled the entire sky.
Meanwhile, the physicist Robert H Dicke was working on a related puzzle. Two decades earlier, Dicke had invented the microwave detector. Now he and his lab were trying to develop sensitive instruments to test the cosmological predictions that emerged from Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, particularly how it related to Edwin Hubble’s astonishing discovery that the Universe is expanding. The reigning, steady-state theory claimed that the Universe had always been expanding, balanced by a continuous creation of new matter. The rival theorists, including Dicke, took expansion at its face value, running it backwards in time to propose that, about 14 billion years ago, the Universe burst into existence in a cataclysmic explosion from a very tiny point.
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The Holmdel Horn Antenna in New Jersey, United States. Courtesy Wikipedia
It’s no secret that employee-employer tensions about heading back to the workplace are growing. As more employers push to get employees back in-house, the workers themselves are taking a harder stand. An April 2021 survey by FlexJobs found that 60% of women and 52% of men would quit if they weren’t allowed to continue working remotely at least part of the time. Sixty-nine percent of men and 80% of women said that remote work options are among their top considerations when looking for a new job.
The “official” reasons that they don’t want to head back to the workplace are well-documented. They’re more productive. It’s easier to blend work and life when your commute is a walk down the hallway. But, for some, the reasons are more personal and difficult to share. Who will walk the dog they adopted during the pandemic? They gained weight and need to buy new work clothes. The thought of being trapped in a cubicle all day makes them want to cry.
We spoke with several people who shared their very personal reasons why they don’t want to return to work. (Because of the sensitive nature of some of the comments, Fast Company has allowed some of the individuals to use a pseudonym to protect their identities.)
Recruiters are on a tear to fill a growing number of open roles as the U.S. hiring market rebounds this summer. As companies re-staff their workforces to meet rising consumer demand, workers who’ve spent the pandemic thinking of changing jobs are striking out into the job market, too.
Jennifer Shappley, LinkedIn’s vice president of global talent acquisition, tells CNBC Make It that news of the so-called Great Resignation, and surveys showing as many as 40% of workers are thinking of quitting their jobs, has made for a lot of work for recruiting teams like her own.
Employers are responding to the tight market by making their jobs more appealing, too, such as by offering hiring bonuses, higher salaries, additional time off, and the ability to work flexibly from home.
“If a candidate brings up the Great Resignation in their interview and wants to explore what’s out there, that’s not a red flag,” Shappley says. However, “while there are lots of opportunities out there, there’s obviously still competition for roles.”
There is perhaps no better experience for a hiring manager than seeing the resume of an outstanding internal candidate land on their desk. You can fill the job immediately and because current employees know the organization and its quirks, they require less handholding in order to get up to speed quickly. You also rarely have to pay the premium typically required to lure in external candidates. As an added bonus, hiring an internal candidate signals to other employees that they too have a future in the organization, making it more likely that they will look internally when contemplating their next career move.
Given these benefits, firms have been expanding their efforts to make it easier for current employees to learn about and apply for new internal opportunities. Creating more open internal talent markets certainly increases the odds that a hiring manager will find that perfect internal candidate, but it also means that hiring managers more often find themselves in the unenviable position of having to tell other employees that they did not get the job. While good data on internal application patterns is hard to come by, recent estimates suggest that managers can expect to receive an average of 10 internal applications for every open job, a number that was confirmed in our conversations with talent acquisition leaders across more than two dozen large organizations. That means it is often the case that 9 employees — 10 if you hire an external candidate — hear “no” each time a job is posted.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
[Source photo: Solovyova/iStock]
