ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು ಸ್ನ್ಯಾಪ್‌ಶಾಟ್⁹ [jatp]

climbing encounters

A nice if easy climbing morn on Éperon de Bouchier (à ne pas confondre avec Crochet de Boucher!) a week ago with a local guide, François, who happened to be a formidable character (even conditioning on him being guide). He left school at 14 to become a car mechanic, join the French Navy at 16, caught tuberculosis on a Navy basis, was sent to the Alps for recovery, caught a fatal and definite mountain attraction while there, got training supported by the Navy for an higher mechanic degree, took qualification courses to become a French mountain guide, started being interested in learning techniques and abilities through his training ski schools, experimented new teaching methods with kids from the Marseille suburbs,  eventually joined a Master in biomechanics and ergonomy at Orsay and ended up with a thesis on the topic, worked with French ski federation and a French ski brand, and is still guiding, training and researching despite having passed the retirement age! A wonderful chance encounter, with the facility of the route making chatting not an issue. (Except that some puritan ayatollah had recently removed most of the bolts, which did not make things harder in the end but exhibited an absurd degree of self-righteousness on a route that easy…)

And then an even more rewarding climb today with another local guide, Cathy, who gave me a great and profitable climbing lesson for over three hours, allowing me to reach a higher climbing level than I had previously achieved on an outside route. With a high degree of pedagogy and support. I ended up fairly tired, but exhilaratedly so!

unimaginable scale culling

Despite the evidence brought by ABC on the inefficiency of culling in massive proportions the British Isles badger population against bovine tuberculosis, the [sorry excuse for a] United Kingdom government has permitted a massive expansion of badger culling, with up to 64,000 animals likely to be killed this autumn… Since the cows are the primary vectors of the disease, what about starting with these captive animals?!

Einvígið [book review]

In Roissy (De Gaulle) airport, prior to catching my flight to Seattle, I noticed a “new” Indriðason‘s novel, Le Duel (Einvígið), that has not yet been translated into English. But just translated into French! This is a most unusual novel in the Erlendur series, in that the central character of the series only appears as a young cop in the final lines of the novel. Instead, the mentor of Erlendur, Marion Biem, is conducting an inquiry as to who had killed a young man in an almost empty Reykjavik cinema. Where almost all spectators seemed to have something to hide, if not always a murder… A classical whodunnit?! Not really because this happens in 1972, during the famous Fisher-Spassky duel, and that duel is unrelated to the murder, while the Icelandic police seems overwrought by the event and the presence of Russian and American double-agents in Reykjavik…

I found the whole exercise interesting, creating a sort of genealogy in the Erlendur series, with Marion’s mentor playing a side role and his early training in Glasgow (of all places!), with the re-creation of a 1972 Iceland and the chess match between Fisher and Spassky at the height of the Cold War. Plus a reminder about the tuberculosis epidemics of the 1930’s, where  The detective side of the novel is however less convincing than usual, with clues and fingerprints appearing at the most convenient times. And a fairly convoluted resolution. Still worth reading, especially on a long flight!

ABC [almost] in the front news

My friend and Warwick colleague Gareth Roberts just published a paper in Nature with Ellen Brooks-Pollock and Matt Keeling from the University of Warwick on the modelling of bovine tuberculosis dynamics in Britain and on the impact of control measures. The data comes from the Cattle Tracing System and the VetNet national testing database. The mathematical model is based on a stochastic process and its six parameters are estimated by sequential ABC (SMC-ABC). The summary statistics chosen in the model are the number of infected farms per county per year and the number of reactors (cattle failing a test) per county per year.

“Therefore, we predict that control of local badger populations and hence control of environmental transmission will have a relatively limited effect on all measures of bovine TB incidence.”

This advanced modelling of a comprehensive dataset on TB in Britain quickly got into a high profile as it addresses the highly controversial (not to say plain stupid) culling of badgers (who also carry TB) advocated by the government. The study concludes that “only generic measures such as more national testing, whole herd culling or vaccination that affect all routes of transmission are effective at controlling the spread of bovine TB.” While the elimination of badgers from the English countryside would have a limited effect.  Good news for badgers! And the Badger Trust. Unsurprisingly, the study was immediately rejected by the UK farming minister! Not only does he object to the herd culling solution for economic reasons, but he “cannot accept the paper’s findings”. Maybe he does not like ABC… More seriously, the media oversimplified the findings of the study, “as usual”, with e.g. The Guardian headline of “tuberculosis threat requires mass cull of cattle”.