† Can We Be Adult About Stem Cell Research?: Scientists at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., have were able to coax skin cells into reverting to a pluripotent form and then to take these adult stem cells and convert them into functional retinal cells in the hopes of being able to create a treatment for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of vision loss among people aged 60 and older, reports HealthDay News:

Dr. Demetrios Vavvas, an attending physician in the retina service of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and an assistant professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, described the research results as a "major step forward."

"But this is still very early work," Vavvas noted. "This has been achieved only in-vitro. It is in-lab work with cell cultures. So it's still a question how this will work in person because there are still hurdles that need to be overcome," he added.

"For example, all of this work so far needs viruses to function as cell carriers, and this creates problems," he explained. "So, people are now trying to see if they can replicate this kind of lab work without the use of viruses. That will have to happen before we can go to human trials. And we're not there yet," Vavvas said.

"With the current know-how and technology, we're probably talking a minimum of three to five years before we can even go to clinical trials," he pointed out.

† The Media Love Obama, But He Doesn’t Love Them Back: In addition to the Internet and Twitter, the Obama administration's hit list of “unsanctioned” information sources apparently includes the Orlando Sentinel. During a recent $500-a-head fundraiser for Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) at the home of developer Alan Ginsburg, one of Vice President Joe Biden’s staffers shoved Orlando Sentinel reporter Scott Powers in a storage closet – and stood guard outside the door for at least 90 minutes - to keep him from talking to the attendees, reports the New York Daily News:

The staffer told Powers he could come out when the veep arrived to give a speech.

"When I'd stick my head out, they'd say, 'Not yet. We'll let you know when you can come out,'" Powers told Drudge.

During the wait, while the 150 guests noshed on caprese crostini and chicken Caesar wraps, Powers waited patiently, sipping bottled water and killing time at a makeshift desk set up amid the clutter.

"Sounds like a nice party," he emailed his editors, along with a picture of the temporary prison, the Orlando Sentinel wrote on Wednesday.

After about an hour and 15 minutes, Powers was let out to listen to Biden and Nelson speak.

After the speeches, though, he was supposedly dumped back in the closet for the rest of the event, Drudge reported.

The Daily Mail of London notes that under FL law kidnapping is defined as “forcibly, secretly or by threat confining, abducting or imprisoning another person against her or his will and without lawful authority” and that just days ago President Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney condemned the treatment of journalists trying to report in Libya (“‘journalists should be protected and allowed to do their work”).

For his part, Powers says that his imprisonment was “an extreme, and extremely inappropriate way of handling the press … it was essentially a rude and uncomfortable way to treat a reporter.”

† Pundits To The Left! Pundits To The Right!: Kathryn Schulz, author of “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error,” reviews “Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better” by Canadian journalist Dan Gardner. A snippet:

Gardner dips into the science of unpredictability and the psychology of certainty. And he provides case studies of failed prophets … in which the environmental scientist Paul Ehrlich, the historian Arnold Toynbee and the social critic James Howard Kunstler come in for a particularly hard time.

This schadenfreude-fest can be good fun. Gardner leaves plenty of prognosticators squirming on history’s thumbtack, like the British journalist H. N. Norman, who argued, in early 1914, that “there will be no more wars among the six Great Powers.”

† Updates To Previous Posts (penultimate item, Restorative Capital Punishment): AZ Corrections Director Charles Ryan says the state is dropping its three-drug lethal injection method in favor of using only the sedative pentobarbital. The last two injections using the three-drug protocol will occur within the next two weeks.

† Updates To Previous Posts (We Fight Them Over There So We Don’t Have To Fight Them Over Here?): Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, a Saudi national who was attending college in TX on a student visa pleaded not guilty at his arraignment on charges that he purchased chemicals and equipment to build a weapon of mass destruction n Monday at the federal courthouse in Lubbock. He could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, A To Z Approach On Illegal Immigration In AZ): The New York Times offers a snapshot of “[s]ome of the toughest bills in the nation aimed at illegal immigrants” that have been proposed in AL, GA and SC. Proponents of these laws, which “give police broader powers to identify and report illegal immigrants,” are meant to “better control the flow of people into the United States and be fair to those who have arrived through proper channels”:

[In GA] a version of a law pioneered in Arizona would allow local police officers to inquire about the immigration status of people they suspect of committing crimes, including traffic violations.

It allows people to sue local agencies if they believe the law is not being enforced and also requires that some businesses use E-Verify, a free federal employment eligibility database. …

The Georgia Senate also passed a bill this month that would charge an undocumented resident caught driving drunk with a felony. American citizens face only a misdemeanor charge. …

A similar bill is heading through the legislature in South Carolina. It would also make it illegal to transport immigrants anywhere, including a hospital or a church.

In Alabama, legislators are working on similar bills in the House and the Senate, which would also make it a crime to knowingly rent to an illegal immigrant.

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race): New census data reveals that the number of multiracial children increased almost 50 percent, to 4.2 million, since 2000, reports The New York Times:

Census 2010 is the first comprehensive accounting of how the multiracial population has changed over 10 years, since statistics were first collected about it in 2000. It has allowed demographers, for the first time, to make comparisons using the mixed-race group - a segment of society whose precise contours and nuances were largely unknown for generations. …

Across the country, 9 million people - or 2.9 percent of the population - chose more than one race on the last census, a change of about 32 percent since 2000. But in the South and parts of the Midwest, the growth has been far greater than the national average. In North Carolina, for instance, the multiracial population grew by 99 percent. In Iowa, Indiana and Mississippi, the group grew by about 70 percent. …

There are 57 racial combinations on the census. But of the population that chose more than one race, most chose one of the four most common combinations: 20.4 percent marked black and white; 19.3 percent chose white and “some other race.” The third most common pairing was Asian and white, followed by American Indian and white. These four combinations account for three-fourths of the total mixed race population.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, The Mother Of All Bailouts: Part II: Normally sensible Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson was replaced by a pod person who argues that the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) “achieve[d] its main goals at a tiny fraction of its estimated costs” and that, “Without TARP, we’d be worse off today. No one can say whether unemployment would be 11 percent or 14 percent; it certainly wouldn't be 8.9 percent.”

The American Spectator, for one, is aghast (“Robert Samuelson has a long track record of independent thinking, making it so disappointing that he's fallen for the official line on TARP in his latest column”) and presents the counter-argument that the government bank bailout was an opportunity cost and that the effect of TARP on unemployment levels is unknowable:

Suppose the government lent me $1 trillion for 10 years at 1 percent annual interest. In the Robert Samuleson world, the government is earning a $100 billion profit on this investment ($10 billion a year for 10 years). Economists familiar with opportunity costs would instead see this as a huge loss to the government, since it is giving me an enormous loan at an interest rate that is several percentage points below the market rate. …

[T]he claim that we'd have 11 or 14 percent unemployment without TARP or any other kind of legislative intervention is reasonable, but it's evidence-free; we simply can't know what would have happened if the government had simply ignored the problem.

Business Insider offers an analogy to explain this second point:

Samuelson's analysis would be comparable to noting that a particular fire hose was used to put out a school fire, saving dozens of children. Samuelson would then tell us that this fire hose saved dozens of children. While this would literally be true, if that particular fire house did not exist the firefighters would have extinguished the fire with the other one they had on the truck. In other words, the alternative was not that the children would die, the alternative was that they would use a different hose.

In the same vein, the alternative to TARP was not that we sit around with a collapsed banking system waiting for the economy to sort itself out on its own. The alternative was a different set of monetary actions to boost the economy. It is silly to tout this no hose story as the counter-factual to TARP.

† Updates To Previous Posts (seventh item, Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II): Former NYC Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz, who is the founder and chief executive of the Success Charter Network of charter schools in Harlem and The Bronx, makes the case that the “obsession” with smaller class sizes is “causing many public schools to look like relics” and is “particularly unconscionable in tough fiscal times”:

At Harlem Success Academy Charter School, where we’ve gotten some of the best results in New York City, some classes are comparatively large because we believe our money is better spent elsewhere. In fifth grade, for example, every student gets a laptop and a Kindle with immediate access to an essentially unlimited supply of e-books. Every classroom has a Smart Board, a modern blackboard that is a touch-screen computer with high-speed Internet access. Every teacher has a laptop, video camera, access to a catalogue of lesson plans and videotaped lessons.

Outfitting a classroom this way costs about $40,000, or $13,500 amortized over three years. That’s how much New York charter schools receive per pupil annually, so we can afford this by just increasing class size by a single student.

Add just one more student per class schoolwide, and Harlem Success Academy I gets another $300,000 in total. With that, we can afford headhunters to find the best principals in the country, business managers to handle the non-instructional administration that would otherwise distract these great principals from driving high-quality instruction, ample professional development for teachers, museum trips for students, etc.

In other words, a 19th-century school can be transformed into a well-managed 21st-century school by adding just two students per classroom. Reducing class size is expensive because most costs vary with class size. Decrease a class from 25 to 24 students and you need to hire 4 percent more teachers as well as build and maintain 4 percent more buildings. …

[W]hile employees become more expensive every year, technology and intellectual property become cheaper and better. Instructional software improves, computers become more powerful, good children’s books multiply.