The Political Page, T+23 -- February 12, 2018 -- Breaking News: Crisis At CNN

From Vanity Fair (I did not know that Vanity Fair was still alive and kicking -- alive perhaps, but not kicking) comes this story:

But despite the so-called Trump Bump, CNN appears to be re-thinking at least some elements of its digital strategy.

I’ve learned that CNN, a key property in AT&T’s planned takeover of CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, is targeting big savings on the digital side, with as many as 50 jobs around the globe scheduled to be eliminated this week, according to people familiar with the matter, who noted the exact number could still be in flux.

The cuts will affect employees who work in premium businesses including CNN Money, video, product, tech and social publishing, these people said.

Several high profile digital initiatives are being scaled back, including CNN’s virtual reality productions and its efforts on Snapchat, where CNN recently nixed a live daily webcast after just four months.

CNN’s business-oriented MoneyStream app, as BuzzFeed reported earlier this month, is in the gutter as well. A team that works on the digital extensions of documentary-style TV shows, such as Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown and Lisa Ling’s This is Life, as well as the Brooke Baldwin series American Woman, is also being reorganized.

The budget measures seem to take some heat off the ambitious digital futurism that CNN was preaching just under a year ago.

A March 2017 Hollywood Reporter cover story portrayed the network as taking on Vice and BuzzFeed in the battle for digital dominance. Just like with Vice and BuzzFeed, however, the past year has turned out to be a cruel one for just about any business that relies, in part, on revenue from digital advertising. Those three organizations fell short of their revenue projections—part of a larger industry reckoning that has hit digital brands from Mic to Mashable and many others. (CNN missed its target by tens of millions of dollars, according to a person with knowledge of the numbers, who noted that the business line was nonetheless still profitable.)

After all, a lot can change in a year. That Hollywood Reporter cover featured not only Zucker and Bourdain and Jake Tapper, but also You Tube star Casey Neistat, the founder of Beme, which CNN had just acquired for $25 million. Last month, CNN revealed that Neistat had left the company and that Beme was effectively shut down. One insider familiar with the digital strategy described these various changes as a “rightsizing” of resources.

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Notes to the Granddaughters

The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, Michael J. Behe, c. 2007

The malaria parasite is the center of Behe's argument in this book regarding the "limits" of Darwinism.

Behe certainly must be a thorn in the side of Richard Dawkins. Be that as it may, Behe said something about malaria piqued my interest.

Curious to "fact-check" Behe I came across this article:

In 1951, the criteria for eradication as put forth by the National Malaria Society was: "Malaria may be assumed to be no longer endemic in any given area when no primary indigenous case has occurred there for three years." Since then, the definition has evolved a bit. The term "elimination" is used when malaria transmission is no longer occurring in a specific geographic area. "Eradication" is used to describe elimination of malaria transmission worldwide.

CDC’s predecessor, the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas, had been established in 1942 to limit the impact of malaria and other vector-borne diseases (such as murine typhus) during World War II around military training bases in the southern United States and its territories, where malaria was still problematic.The center was located in Atlanta (rather than Washington, DC) because the South was the area of the country with the most malaria transmission.

These efforts were so successful that at the end of the war and at the founding of CDC, one of the initial tasks was to oversee the completion of the elimination of malaria as a major public health problem.

The National Malaria Eradication Program was a cooperative undertaking by state and local health agencies of 13 southeastern states and the Communicable Disease Center of the U. S. Public Health Service, originally proposed by Dr. L. L. Williams. The program commenced operations on July 1, 1947. It consisted primarily of DDT application to the interior surfaces of rural homes or entire premises in counties where malaria was reported to have been prevalent in recent years.

By the end of 1949, more than 4,650,000 house spray applications had been made. It also included drainage, removal of mosquito breeding sites, and spraying (occasionally from aircrafts) of insecticides. Total elimination of transmission was slowly achieved. In 1949, the country was declared free of malaria as a significant public health problem. By 1951, CDC gradually withdrew from active participation in the operational phases of the program and shifted its interest to surveillance, and in 1952, CDC participation in operations ceased altogether.

The role of CDC became one of surveillance within the U. S. and of assistance in the world-wide efforts to eliminate or control malaria in the economically underdeveloped areas of the world.

I was fact-checking the temperatures required for malaria propagation:

Once adult mosquitoes have emerged, the ambient temperature, humidity, and rains will determine their chances of survival. To transmit malaria successfully, female Anopheles must survive long enough after they have become infected (through a blood meal on an infected human) to allow the parasites they now harbor to complete their growth cycle ("extrinsic" cycle). That cycle takes 9-21 days at 25°C or 77°F.

Warmer ambient temperatures shorten the duration of the extrinsic cycle, thus increasing the chances of transmission. Conversely, below a minimum ambient temperature (15°C or 59°F for Plasmodium vivax, 20°C or 68°F for P. falciparum), the extrinsic cycle cannot be completed and malaria cannot be transmitted. This explains in part why malaria transmission is greater in warmer areas of the globe (tropical and semitropical areas and lower altitudes), particularly for P. falciparum.