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Re: A Better Way to Build a Face
By Kristen Philipkoski
From: Spiros Manolidis MD, Associate Professor, Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery, Columbia University
Very interesting article and certainly a most interesting topic. Here are my comments on the facial transplantation issue: facial nerve, facial nerve and facial nerve. It turns out that when we put together the facial nerve (either due to trauma, tumors, cancer, infection) our results are pretty poor. This aspect of things has not surfaced in any of the transplantation issues that I have seen.
In short, the issue of function has not been discussed. The human face has 27 muscles on either side and the combination of expressions is limitless. The problem with the facial nerve is that the fibers that go into these muscles don't particularly have any topographic orientation. (Once the nerve is sectioned and brought together with the transplant side, fibers that used to innervate a certain muscle go to another one.)
This results in the problem of synkinesis. The surgical literature is littered with this problem and a group out of San Francisco has done some amazing work on facial expression. (The reference was in a New Yorker article.)
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Re: Let Post-Election Debugging Begin
By Jennifer Granick
From: Anonymous
Voter disenfranchisement is the tip of the iceberg. The bottom line is that the way the system has been implemented makes it inherently non-verifiable. Nobody has any idea whether or not any given election result is accurate, period. Whether or not everyone who is eligible is allowed to vote, there's no way to be sure that authentic votes are ever recorded, let alone preserved all the way through the process.
HAVA has replaced one flavor of human incompetence with an overwhelming opportunity for fraud. Control of the electoral process is now effectively in the hands of a very few largely unaccountable, for-profit corporations. No citizen of a democratic republic should take any comfort in that fact.
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