Weekend Links

1) Gulag for Gaijin

2) The sustainability of sustainability (via Luke)

3) Ultramapping

4) US upgrades plant hardiness zone maps

5) "No Need to Panic About Global Warming" - a charateristically nuanced and objective WSJ op-ed

6) On the financial sector and public choice (via bb)

7) Potsdam, IASS, and the Santa Fe Institute are holding a summer school in Global Sustainability (via Sol)

8) Udacity and the future of online universities (via MR)

We are not an ‘eco-company’...

The use of sustainability-related buzz-words in corporate marketing can get pretty tiresome/silly, so when I ran across this Environment Policy statement by Whitelines, I found it refreshing.  Corporations, please take note.

Environment policy 

“Are you an ‘eco-company’?” 

We are not an ‘eco-company’ and have never looked at ourselves as ‘eco’. 

We just do what we think all companies­ should do: take all possible responsibility 
for the environment. Just that simple. 

We talk about the life of the planet here and it’s of course a no-brainer, we must all strive to eliminate the harm we cause! This statement shouldn’t be considered specifically ‘eco’ but just common sense. 

As some of you already know we were among the first, if not the very first paper company in the world to mark all our products with a Carbon Footprint label and later on also with Zero Carbon Footprint. 
We can’t do that now. 

Right now we are in a sourcing situation where we don’t have all data for the Life Cycle Analysis which is the foundation­ for a Carbon Footprint label. And as we don’t want to claim taking responsibility for something­ we can’t guarantee we will instead focus on other actions.­ 

Whitelines will continue for the time being to use a Swedish totally Carbon Free Paper in most of our products.­ (This means a paper where no Carbon Dioxide­ from fossil fuels is being emitted during production, a very good thing actually). 

No one would be happier than we if other companies would be comparable with us in terms of taking this responsibility. Imagine if we all make the resposibility for the environment an essential.

I found the Swedish site when I was looking at a statement on the back of one of their notebooks (which I recommend, btw) and was curious how they did their carbon accounting.

From a corporate social responsibility standpoint, this reads like it represents an interesting shift in focus.  Instead of giving companies extra brownie-points for having implemented some small program that reduces their environmental footprint by a tiny amount, perhaps we should simply expect that companies optimize their environmental performance and then penalize them heavily if they're not up to some minimal baseline-level of performance.  The current baseline expectation of 'no responsibility' means we reward pretty trivial production changes that probably don't have meaningful impacts.

I also thoroughly appreciate their acknowledgement of uncertainty in their carbon accounting.  If only we could all be that honest...

Global Policy Journal

I ran across a copy of this new journal in the lounge of the WWS.  It looks pretty interesting and boasts an impressive editorial board.  I like their approach of focusing on global issues while pursuing interdisciplinary and applied authors/readers (and I don't know any other journals that have had a contribution by General David Petraeus).

Here's the editorial statement:

Global Policy has a multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary and international outlook that is committed to developing the accuracy, forward lookingness and policy relevance of academic research. It will not privilege a particular ethnocentric approach but will reflect a multiplicity of approaches that are indicative of the emergence of a global system of multipolar governance and policymaking. 

The editors’ approach to selecting material will be:

Committed to advancing the academic study of global policy and the politics in which it is embedded; Open  to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary contributions; Reflexive in its consideration of diverse political discourses on global problems; Engaged in respect of its contribution to public debate and understanding of urgent global policy issues and; Serious in its commitment to the publication of only world class academic scholarship and the work of key public and private figures or authorities. 

The scope of Global Policy’s content can be specified by a number of criteria:

• 01. Globally relevant risks and collective action problems.
• 02. Policy challenges with global impact.
• 03. Competing and converging discourses of global policy and governance.
• 04. Case studies of policy with clear lessons for other countries and regions.
• 05. The interrelationship between policy, politics and institutions at the global level, with implications for institutional design. 
• 06. Conceptual, theoretical and methodological innovations needed to explain and develop global policy.

The editors are committed to developing both the highest standards of scholarship and evidence based reasoning by authors, with the scholarly articles subject to rigorous peer review. We are at the same time committed to the effective communication of research in the most accessible and professional fashion. We shall use a set of editorial conventions that do not compromise on accuracy and the proper explanation of methods, but that do systematically prioritise readers’ interests in the excellent presentation of data and complete clarity of exposition. We shall seek to engage meaningfully with the widest range of readers and contributors

spatial-analyst.net

While looking for some remote sensing data last week, I ran into spatial-analyst.net, which I think deserves the FE-website-discovery-of-the-month award.  The wiki has pages dedicated to things like "How to download and resample MODIS images".  It's geared towards R users, and I'm kind of a Matlab guy, but it's still clearly useful to both parties.  For example, I really like their page pointing to various global datasets, some interesting examples of which are here:

Lighting flash rate

Second principle component of recent population density changes

Commercial shipping density

Carbon density tones of C / ha.

Estimated travel time to major cities (>50k) in hours

Four data points, La Niña, and the flu

Columbia's Jerry Shaman* and Harvard's Marc Lipsitch have a new paper out in PNAS that argues that La Niña events may be driving the pandemic flu cycle by changing the pattern of bird migration:

We find that the four most recent human influenza pandemics (1918, 1957, 1968, and 2009), all of which were first identified in boreal spring or summer, were preceded by La Niña conditions in the equatorial Pacific. Changes in the phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation have been shown to alter the migration, stopover time, fitness, and interspecies mixing of migratory birds, and consequently, likely affect their mixing with domestic animals. We hypothesize that La Niña conditions bring divergent influenza subtypes together in some parts of the world and favor the reassortment of influenza through simultaneous multiple infection of individual hosts and the generation of novel pandemic strains. We propose approaches to test this hypothesis using influenza population genetics, virus prevalence in various host species, and avian migration patterns.

Here is a BBC article summarizing the paper. Aside from the fact that this paper is, to my eye, a great argument for robust interdisciplinary training (climate + public health + microbiology), it's also a good example of a fundamental statistical truism: just because the data are sparse doesn't mean you can't say something meaningful. There have been only four pandemic influenzas in the past century, but the likelihood that they would all start at the same point in the ENSO cycle is low (Shaman and Lipsitch estimate it at P=0.069). That on its own wouldn't necessarily be meaningful, but when combined with the fairly credible potential mechanism the authors outline one ends up with a pretty plausible hypothesis. Whether it holds remains to be seen (hence the apposition in the title) but it's a lovely first paper on what might end up being a very important phenomenon.

* Jerry Shaman presented a version of this paper at the session Sol coorganized at AGU (video here).

Weekend Links

1) 100 essays on economics in Africa via Udadisi

2) Am I wasting my time organizing email?

3) New, completely antibiotic-resistant TB strain discovered in India

4) Randomized control trials in social network research (something I've been arguing for for a while...) via @TheBrowser

5) “In nature, most of the normal signals are sparse.” - Faster fast Fourier transforms out of MIT

6) Groundbreaking or definitive? Journals need to pick one. via Andrew Gelman

Americans do care about their climate... they just might not realize it

Climate Change, Crop Yields, and Internal Migration in the United States
Shuaizhang Feng, Michael Oppenheimer, Wolfram Schlenker

We investigate the link between agricultural productivity and net migration in the United States using a county-level panel for the most recent period of 1970-2009. In rural counties of the Corn Belt, we find a statistically significant relationship between changes in net outmigration and climate-driven changes in crop yields, with an estimated semi-elasticity of about -0.17, i.e., a 1% decrease in yields leads to a 0.17% net reduction of the population through migration. This effect is primarily driven by young adults. We do not detect a response for senior citizens, nor for the general population in eastern counties outside the Corn Belt. Applying this semi-elasticity to predicted yield changes under the B2 scenario of the Hadley III model, we project that, holding other factors constant, climate change would on average induce 3.7% of the adult population (ages 15-59) to leave rural counties of the Corn Belt in the medium term (2020-2049) compared to the 1960-1989 baseline, with the possibility of a much larger migration response in the long term (2077-2099). Since there is uncertainty about future warming, we also present projections for a range of uniform climate change scenarios in temperature or precipitation.

Ask an economist

Or, more aptly, ask 40 of the top economists alive what they think about a given policy statement. I found out about the IGM Forum's Economic Experts Panel from Luke Stein while at the American Economic Association meeting last weekend. The responses are best for yielding insight into what is and is not considered an open question from the point of view of economics. It's only been going on for a little while as far as the website seems to indicate, but the responses are illuminating. A sampling:

• "In general, using more congestion charges in crowded transportation networks — such as higher tolls during peak travel times in cities, and peak fees for airplane takeoff and landing slots — and using the proceeds to lower other taxes would make citizens on average better off."
• "A tax on the carbon content of fuels would be a less expensive way to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions than would a collection of policies such as “corporate average fuel economy” requirements for automobiles."
• "Public school students would receive a higher quality education if they all had the option of taking the government money (local, state, federal) currently being spent on their own education and turning that money into vouchers that they could use towards covering the costs of any private school or public school of their choice (e.g. charter schools)."

The diversity of opinions on that last one make it particularly worthwhile.

Weekend Links

1) Catch limits now exists for all 528 federally managed fish species

2) On the value of context

3) The bottom end of the income distribution in Hong Kong is poorer than one might think

4) Tesla's letterhead strictly dominated Edison's (h/t Sol)

5) Applications to Harvard's Sustainability Fellowships are due this Sunday

6) Michael Pollan on The War on Meat

7) Game Theory 101

Climate and conflict con't

I never really made good on the promise to explain our paper from this summer (Hsiang, Meng and Cane, Nature 2011), but I've spent effort making it accessible elsewhere, so I'm cross-referencing here.

• A short summary that I wrote for Earth Magazine is here.
• I present the results in a 30 min non-technical talk to policy-makers at the Woodrow Wilson Center here (starting at 43:00, but the other talks are also interesting).
• The original article is un-pay-walled here
• Reposting this Nature Climate Change article discussing the literature (not mine).

Second Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development

This is put together by folks at Columbia and was a big success last year.  I would definitely encourage PhD students to apply.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Second Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable DevelopmentApril 20^th-21^st, 2012: Columbia University in the City of New York, USA The graduate students in sustainable development at Columbia University are convening the second Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Workshop in Sustainable Development (IPWSD); scheduled for April 20th-21st, 2012, at Columbia University in New York City. 

The IPWSD is a conference open to graduate students working on or interested in issues related to sustainable development.  It is intended to provide a forum to present and discuss research in an informal setting, as well as to meet and interact with similar graduate student researchers from other institutions.  In particular, we hope to facilitate a network among students pursuing in-depth research across a range of disciplines in the social and natural sciences, to generate a larger interdisciplinary discussion concerning sustainable development.  If your research pertains to the field of sustainable development and the linkages between natural and social systems, we encourage you to apply regardless of disciplinary background. 

For details, please see the call for papers, or visit our conference website where a detailed list of topics, conference themes and other information is available. 

Please share this information widely with graduate students and other interested parties. We look forward to seeing you in New York City in April! 

With kind regards,The Second IPWSD Planning Committee,website: http://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/sdds/schedule-events/ipwsd_2012/contact: cu.sdds.ipwsd@gmail.com

"Boxplot regression" - my new favorite non-parametric method

I like non-parametric regressions since it lets you see more of what's going on in data (see this post too).    I also like when people plot more than just a mean regression, since seeing the dispersion in a conditional distribution is often helpful.  So why don't people combine both to make a suped-up graph with the best of both worlds?  Probably because there's no standard command in software packages (that I know of, at least).  So I decided to fix that.  Introducing boxplot regression! I'm not the first to do this, but I'm giving this code away for free, so I'm taking the liberty of making up a name since I haven't seen one before (heaven knows that I may be way off here...).

For one of our projects, Michael Roberts (his blog is solid) suggested we mimic this plot from one of his earlier papers.  This seemed like such a good idea, I wrote a Matlab function up so I can make a similar plot for every paper I write from here on out.

The function takes a continuous independent variable and bins it according to an arbitrary bin-width.  It then makes a boxplot for values of the dependent variable over each bin in the independent variable.  The result is basically a non-parametric quantile regression showing the median, 25th and 75th percentiles.  I then plot the mean for each bin overlaid as a line, so one can see how more traditional non-parametric mean regressions will compare.  Simple.

I'm not the first, but I'm not sure why this isn't done more often. Boxplots are usually used to compare distributions over qualitatively different groups, like races, sexes or treatment groups.  But it's not a huge conceptual leap to discretize an independent variable so we can apply the approach to standard regression. It's just annoying to code up.

My boxplot regression function is here (along with a utility to bin any variable without making the plot).  Now making this plot takes a single command.

Example: We take a globally gridded dataset from the SAGE group (Google Earth file of it here) and do a boxplot regression of area planted with crops on the agriculture suitability index of that grid cell:

We get a bi-variate graph packed full of information, right?  I hope Tufte would approve.  If you specify >25 bins, I've set the function to switch to a slightly more compact style for the boxplots.

Enjoy!

[If you like this, see this earlier post too. Help-file cut and pasted below the fold.]

Weekend Links

1) Is the height wage premium driven by increased cognitive ability? (via @bakadesuyo)

2) Why have commodities futures not been converging to spot prices?

3) Kelvin-Helmholtz waves (via @WanderingGaia)

4) Scientists behaving badly (via bb)

5) Banana ripening facilities in New York City

6) The best data visualization projects of 2011

7) Tyler Cowen has a new book on food

8) Nature Physics: "What is a pattern? How do we come to recognize patterns never seen before?"

Global tropical deforestation slowing down

Our colleague Jan Christoph von der Goltz points us to this new working paper by Wheeler, Kraft, and Hammer at the Center for Global Development:

This report summarizes recent trends in large-scale tropical forest clearing identified by FORMA (Forest Monitoring for Action). Our analysis includes 27 countries that accounted for 94 percent of clearing during the period 2000–2005. We highlight countries with relatively large changes since 2005, both declines and increases. FORMA produces indicators that track monthly changes in the number of 1-sq.-km. tropical forest parcels that have experienced clearing with high probability. This report and the accompanying spreadsheet databases provide monthly estimates for 27 countries, 280 primary administrative units, and 2,907 secondary administrative units. Countries’ divergent experiences since 2005 have significantly altered their shares of global clearing in some cases. Brazil’s global share fell by 11.2 percentage points from December 2005 to August 2011, while the combined share of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Myanmar increased by 10.8. The diverse patterns revealed by FORMA’s first global survey caution against facile generalizations about forest clearing in the pantropics. During the past five years, the relative scale and pace of clearing have changed across regions, within regions, and within countries. Although the overall trend seems hopeful, it remains to be seen whether the decline in forest clearing will persist as the global economy recovers.

CGD blog link here. While the overall trend is good news, the point about heterogeneity is well taken. See, for example, this time series map of Borneo's forest cover, and in particular the jump between 2000 and 2010:

Source: UNEP GRID

The limits of expert credibility

Jesse Shapiro has a pretty great working paper out: On the Limits of Expert Credibility: Theory and an Application to Climate Change

Abstract: A neutral expert sends an informative message to an uninformed voter. An interested party can pay a cost to replace the expert’s message with its own. The more informed is the expert, the greater is the interested party’s incentive to replace the expert’s message. In equilibrium, making the expert more informed has no effect on the voter’s beliefs and strictly reduces social welfare. The model thus implies an endogenous limit on how credible a purported expert can be. I apply the model to public skepticism about climate change.

The explanation of the intuition behind the model is particularly great:

The intuition for the result is simple. In equilibrium there must be some chance the message is from the expert or the voter would ignore it entirely. Therefore any equilibrium must involve mixing on the part of the informed parties. As a result, the informed parties must be indifferent to hiring an advocate. At the point of indifference, the cost of hiring an advocate must equal the benefit. The benefit to hiring an advocate is proportional to the credibility the voter assigns to the message. The credibility of the message is therefore pinned down, not by the information of the expert, but by the cost of hiring an advocate. The model thus implies an endogenous limit on how informed the voter can be, determined entirely by the market for credentialed advocates. Improved expert information makes society worse off, because it has no impact on voter information and results in greater use of costly advocates.

...as is the specific explanation of results as they apply to the climate change debate:

I apply the model to the climate change debate. As I show in the paper, each side of the debate wields credentialed, credible-sounding experts. Each side accuses the other of exaggerating or falsifying evidence to suit its agenda. It is difficult for the public at large to independently review the scientific evidence on climate change or determine who speaks for the scientific community. The model predicts that under such circumstances the public’s belief will not converge to the scientific consensus. Consistent with this prediction, I show that even highly educated survey respondents express persistent (and growing) skepticism both about climate change itself and about the strength of the scientific consensus.

Year-end Links: Fight Entropy Classic Edition

Fight Entropy's a bit quiet right now given our general end-of-the-year schedules, so today we're calling attention to a few of our most popular posts from the past. We hope you enjoy them, and look forward to writing more in 2012.

Sol
What empirical social science should aim for: lessons from physics
Reconsidering the War on Drugs
How we know what we know about the climate
The Lorax: did Dr. Seuss get sustainable development right? [coming to a theater near you]
Quotes for the discouraged researcher


Jesse
The impact of piracy on general circulation models
Weather, stock market returns, and subtlety in causal inference
The causal effect of going to my high school
Complexity and rent-seeking in the non-productive industry
The Long Island Express

Not just us humans

I saw this BBC video from Planet Earth on a flight to Asia. Very startling.

Geoengineering research goes mainstream

The results of this paper are not very surprising, but what is surprising is that it was published in Nature Climate Change.  This is not because the article is bad, but because the politics of publishing research on geoengineering has been remarkably hostile.

In 2007, colleagues and I (lead by Andy Lacis) wrote this paper which was well-executed and extremely interesting, but nobody would touch it.

In 2009, David Victor wrote in Foreign Affairs

Despite years of speculation and vague talk, peer-reviewed research on geoengineering is remarkably scarce. Nearly the entire community of geoengineering scientists could fit comfortably in a single university seminar room, and the entire scientific literature on the subject could be read during the course of a transatlantic flight. Geoengineering continues to be considered a fringe topic.  

Many scientists have been reluctant to raise the issue for fear that it might create a moral hazard: encouraging governments to deploy geoengineering rather than invest in cutting emissions. Indeed, geoengineering ventures will be viewed with particular suspicion if the nations funding geoengineering research are not also investing in dramatically reducing their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Many scientists also rightly fear that grants for geoengineering research would be subtracted from the existing funds for urgently needed climate-science research and carbon-abatement technologies. But there is a pressing need for a better understanding of geoengineering, rooted in theoretical studies and empirical field measurements. The subject also requires the talents of engineers, few of whom have joined the small group of scientists studying these techniques.

And last year (2010) I wrote a fellowship grant to look at geoengineering impacts and, perhaps not surprisingly, it did not get funded (of course, I'd like to blame that on the politics and not my lousy writing...).

Anyway, enough prologue. Here's the actual article that came out.  No real surprises, but still worthy of note for the reasons above.

Effectiveness of stratospheric solar-radiation management as a function of climate sensitivityKatharine L. Ricke, Daniel J. Rowlands, William J. Ingram, David W. Keith & M. Granger Morgan

Abstract: If implementation of proposals to engineer the climate through solar-radiation management (SRM) ever occurs, it is likely to be contingent on climate sensitivity. However, modelling studies examining the effectiveness of SRM as a strategy to offset anthropogenic climate change have used only the standard parameterizations of atmosphere–ocean general circulation models that yield climate sensitivities close to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project mean. Here, we use a perturbed-physics ensemble modelling experiment to examine how the response of the climate to SRM implemented in the stratosphere (SRM-S) varies under different greenhouse-gas climate sensitivities. When SRM-S is used to compensate for rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, its effectiveness in stabilizing regional climates diminishes with increasing climate sensitivity. However, the potential of SRM-S to slow down unmitigated climate change, even regionally, increases with climate sensitivity. On average, in variants of the model with higher sensitivity, SRM-S reduces regional rates of temperature change by more than 90% and rates of precipitation change by more than 50%.

a,b, Five-year running-mean global mean near-surface (1.5 m) air temperature (a) and five-year running-mean global mean precipitation rate (b), all shown over the length of the 80 model-year simulations. Copyright: Nature Climate Change.

New tool for interfering with malaria transmission

Geoff Johnston, a doctoral candidate at Columbia's PhD in Sustainable Development, is on the team behind this recent study in PNAS.  He's promised us a non-technical summary soon.

Quantitative assessment of Plasmodium falciparum sexual development reveals potent transmission-blocking activity by methylene blue

Sophie H. Adjalleya, Geoffrey L. Johnston, Tao Li, Richard T. Eastman, Eric H. Ekland, Abraham G. Eappen, Adam Richman, B. Kim Lee Sim, Marcus C. S. Lee, Stephen L. Hoffman, and David A. Fidock

Abstract: Clinical studies and mathematical models predict that, to achieve malaria elimination, combination therapies will need to incorporate drugs that block the transmission of Plasmodium falciparum sexual stage parasites to mosquito vectors. Efforts to measure the activity of existing antimalarials on intraerythrocytic sexual stage gametocytes and identify transmission-blocking agents have, until now, been hindered by a lack of quantitative assays. Here, we report an experimental system using P. falciparum lines that stably express gametocyte-specific GFP-luciferase reporters, which enable the assessment of dose- and time-dependent drug action on gametocyte maturation and transmission. These studies reveal activity of the first-line antimalarial dihydroartemisinin and the partner drugs lumefantrine and pyronaridine against early gametocyte stages, along with moderate inhibition of mature gametocyte transmission to Anopheles mosquitoes. The other partner agents monodesethyl-amodiaquine and piperaquine showed activity only against immature gametocytes. Our data also identify methylene blue as a potent inhibitor of gametocyte development across all stages. This thiazine dye almost fully abolishes P. falciparum transmission to mosquitoes at concentrations readily achievable in humans, highlighting the potential of this chemical class to reduce the spread of malaria.

From the author summary:

The scale of the malaria epidemic remains vast, causing up to 225 million symptomatic infections and ∼780,000 deaths each year, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite this sobering backdrop, there are encouraging signs that treating infected individuals with antimalarial therapies and combating the Anopheles mosquito vector with insecticides can substantially reduce the burden of disease. First-line therapies rely on pairing potent derivatives of the Chinese plant extract artemisinin with longer-lasting partner drugs in regimens referred to as artemisinin-based combination therapies. Clinical reports and mathematical models indicate that additional reductions in disease incidence will require treatments that not only cure patients but also decrease the transmission of malarial parasites to Anopheles mosquitoes (1). Here, we have investigated the ability of various antimalarial agents to inhibit transmission. This work reveals that methylene blue (MB), the first synthetic compound ever used in clinical therapy (2), has potent transmission-blocking activity superior to current first-line therapies. 

Interruption of transmission can be achieved with drugs that inhibit the development of parasite sexual forms, termed gametocytes, within red blood cells. In the case of the most lethal human malaria pathogen, Plasmodium falciparum, these gametocytes progress through five developmental stages over 10–12 d before becoming infectious to mosquitoes (Fig. P1A). Prior studies have found that some drugs that target the disease-causing asexual blood stages also inhibit early stage gametocytes (3). However, identifying compounds that inhibit the metabolically less active mature stages has proven considerably more difficult, in part because of a lack of robust experimental tools. To address this concern, we have developed recombinant parasite lines and analytical methods that enable precise measurements of drug action against gametocytes as they mature and attain infectivity. 

To investigate the abilities of known antimalarials to affect gametocyte viability at different stages, we genetically modified P. falciparum parasite lines to express GFP-luciferase reporters from gene promoters known to be active in early, mid, or late stage gametocytes. The production of gametocytes was triggered by starvation-induced stress, and their subsequent development and gametocyte maturation were monitored by quantifying luciferase activity. Measurements of the rate of action of antimalarial compounds, tested at different doses in vitro, revealed the remarkable potency of the thiazine dye MB against all developmental stages (Fig. P1A). Subsequent experiments revealed that MB almost fully blocked transmission of P. falciparum gametocytes to Anopheles mosquitoes (Fig. P1B), reducing parasite infectivity by 78–100%. The small proportion of mosquitoes that were infected had a >98% reduction in the numbers of parasites developing in the midgut. Most of the effect of MB on parasite transmission can be attributed to its potent activity against mature stage V gametocytes. Parallel studies also observed a potent effect with dihydroartemisinin, the active metabolite of artemisinin compounds, with inhibition occurring primarily against early stage gametocytes. Comparable activity against early stages was observed with key partner drugs, including amodiaquine and lumefantrine (4). 

The experimental system that we developed for these studies will enable high-throughput screening to identify additional transmission-blocking compounds. Our study also provides experimental tools to further probe gametocyte biology, including studies on the cellular processes and molecular components that dictate the formation of gametocytes and promote transmission (5). A renewed emphasis on this phase of the malarial parasite life cycle, using reporter systems such as the one described here, promises to further aid expanding efforts to roll back malaria.

Annual Review of Resource Economics

The Annual Reviews have come out with a new journal (a few issues old) that will be extremely useful resource for many FE readers: Annual Review of Resource Economics.

ABOUT THIS JOURNAL: The Annual Review of Resource Economics, provides authoritative critical reviews evaluating the most significant research developments in resource economics, focusing on agricultural economics, environmental economics, renewable resources, and exhaustible resources.

To get a sense of the journal, I just cut and pasted the most recent table of contents below (authors aren't listed, but many of them are quite distinguished).

Plowing Through the Data
Methods for Performance Evaluations and Impact Measurement
Green National Income and Green National Product
Behavior, Robustness, and Sufficient Statistics in Welfare Measurement
The Challenges of Improving the Economic Analysis of Pending Regulations: The Experience of OMB Circular
Commodity Booms and Busts
Food Quality: The Design of Incentive Contracts
Nutritional Labeling and Consumer Choices
Efficiency Advantages of Grandfathering in Rights-Based Fisheries Management
Game Theory and Fisheries
Natural Resource Management: Challenges and Policy Options
The New Economics of Evaluating Water Projects
Management of Hazardous Waste and Contaminated Land
The Economics of Infection Control
The Economics of Natural Disasters
Valuing Mortality Risk Reductions: Progress and Challenges
Pricing Nature
The Economics of Non-Point-Source Pollution
Microeconometric Strategies for Dealing with Unobservables and Endogenous Variables in Recreation Demand Models
The Environment and Trade
The Social Cost of Carbon
Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards and the Market for New Vehicles