TASK DEFINITION: Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.
PROBLEM: The Antarctic Sabbatical , as the travel company is dubbing it, will give five people the opportunity to study how widely micro plastics have infiltrated the region. Over a month’s time in December, they’ll be trained in lab work in Chile, collect snow samples in Antarctica, climb key glaciers and even visit the South Pole. Scientist Kirstie Jones-Williams, who will be helping to train and guide the volunteer researchers, says the goal of the program isn’t to create more scientists, but moreso global ambassadors on the dangers of pollution and more. “The science itself that we’re doing isn’t enough,” she told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “Actually, one of the biggest threats to our sort of natural environment isn’t necessarily the lack of information that we have ... but it’s more the disenfranchisement that can occur with policymakers and apathy and eco-fatigue. “One of the main things is to get a bunch of people that can take the messages that we learn back to their respective countries,” she said. It’s the second offering in Airbnb’s sabbatical program, which offers its users a chance to take time to do more than see the sights but actually do some good. Earlier this year, Airbnb selected five people to spend three months in Grottole in southern Italy to help preserve the way of life in the town, which is in danger of disappearing. Airbnb’s Chris Lehane says both sabbaticals are part of the company’s larger goal of more eco-friendly travel and to raise awareness of tourism’s global footprint. “Airbnb is not going to solve climate change, but we all have a responsibility to do what we can and use our capacity to help take steps forward,” said Lehane, senior vice president of global policy and communications. “A lot of travel in the world takes place in and around big events,” he said. “Can we find ways when people are going to travel around these big events, to make them much more sustainable?” No scientific background is required to be selected for the Antarctic trip: However, a love of the environment and the ability to complete some of the physical tasks, such as collecting samples, climbing glaciers and enduring bitter cold, is paramount. “It is hard to work in cold environments so people that ... perhaps work well under pressure, work well when they’re tired, that’s actually quite key,” Jones-Williams said,” and to actually ask questions, and people that are really hungry to get as much as they can out of this experience. “It’s really people that kind of respect the scientific process,” she added. The five will stay in Airbnb’s in Chile for their training for about two weeks and will stay at a camp provided by Antarctic Logistics & Expeditions in Antarctica for about a week or so. Airbnb will partner with Ocean Conservancy to use the research for advocacy. Nick Mallos, a conservation biologist and ocean debris specialist for Ocean Conservancy, called it an “incredible opportunity,” and noted that the group has long worked with “citizen science volunteers” to help clean up the environment. “We’ve seen the power of when you train and empower individuals to perform science, they can generate invaluable information and data that ultimately then can form solutions,” he said. ___ Online: http://airbnb.com/sabbatical

SOLUTION: Airbnb to train volunteers for science research sabbatical.

PROBLEM: Chances are low the situation will imperil other cattle herds or people, particularly since the herd in southeastern North Dakota’s Sargent County has been quarantined. But it could delay solving the mystery of how a strain of bovine TB similar to cases associated with cattle south of the U.S. border surfaced in cows near the northern border. “We are the workforce right now in the field, and we have limited staff,” State Veterinarian Susan Keller said Wednesday of the North Dakota Agriculture Department’s Animal Health Division, which has only a handful of workers. She said federal officials wanted to help but couldn’t because of the shutdown tied to a dispute over funding a southern border wall. President Donald Trump and congressional leaders on Friday struck a short-term deal to reopen the government for three weeks, ending a record, 35-day partial shutdown. Two cows from the Sargent County herd tested positive for bovine TB at slaughter plants in South Dakota and Minnesota, and the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Iowa confirmed the diagnosis late last year. The herd was then tested, and five more cows were confirmed to have the infectious disease that can be passed between cattle and people. The source is still unknown. The ranchers have not bought any cattle from Mexico, have no ties to the country and have no workers from south of the border, according to Keller. “It’s a very slow-growing organism. It could have been there (in the herd) for quite a while. We don’t know when it was introduced or where it came from,” she said. “Maybe it’s a strain that has been here (U.S.) for a while but it’s mutated.” Bovine TB is a public health concern worldwide, though the risk to people in developed countries is low given advances in prevention and control measures such as testing, culling of diseased animals and pasteurizing of milk, according to the National Institutes of Health. North Dakota is not alone in recently identifying a new strain of bovine TB — officials in Canada are investigating cattle infections in the province of British Columbia that involve a strain not previously documented in that country, according to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. “You can have mutations of TB, similar to influenza,” Keller said, stressing that a new strain is not comparable to a new disease — it doesn’t change measures in place to guard against bovine TB. The new case is still a concern to ranchers, according to Julie Ellingson, executive vice president of the North Dakota Stockmen’s Association. “The livestock industry is concerned about any and all cases of TB, no matter what the strain,” she said. “We have worked hard to maintain a healthy herd in our state, and identifying and addressing the situation as quickly as possible is our highest priority.” Responses to such animal disease cases are a cooperative effort of state and federal agencies, particularly the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and its Veterinary Services and Wildlife Services components. North Dakota’s Animal Health Division has received only limited help so far from those agencies and in particular is waiting on information that will help determine whether the entire herd of about 100 animals is slaughtered or whether the owners can continue managing the rest of the herd with ongoing testing. Officials also are working to determine where all of the animals in the herd originated, and to ensure that none ended up in other herds over the past five years. Keller said the likelihood of that is remote given that the ranchers raise cattle for beef, not to provide seed stock to other ranchers. It wasn’t clear how many APHIS officials have been available to work on the case. Agency spokeswoman Lyndsay Cole, who was herself furloughed but on call, said only that the agency “is assisting with diagnostic testing” and would provide further help “once the lapse in appropriations is over.” The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which represents more than 175,000 cattle ranchers and feeders around the country, did not directly comment on the federal shutdown’s impact on the North Dakota investigation. Chief Veterinarian Kathy Simmons in a statement to The Associated Press expressed confidence that Keller and other North Dakota officials working in conjunction with federal officials “can manage a successful disease response.” Keller said the investigation could stretch out for several months, but she hopes to be able to say definitively by early summer that officials have taken all necessary actions to ensure no spread of the disease. “Neighbors, people in the community, neighboring states, they want to know — do you have things tied up?” she said. ___ Follow Blake Nicholson on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/NicholsonBlake

SOLUTION: Federal shutdown affected probe into unique bovine TB case.

PROBLEM: Costs are not discussed, as this is an investigational procedure. The article provides n values and quantifies the results from the first stage of the study. The potential benefits of the test have to do with its ability to rule out malignancy based on X-ray results; thus, the specificity and sensitivity data are particularly relevant. We wish the paragraph on subjects with stage I disease would have quantified the results. It provides no sensitivity or specificity rates to justify the conclusion of the technique’s potential application in early stage disease. Quantified harms are not as pertinent since this a blood test. However, one could infer indirect harms, the false positives and false negatives, from the data provided. The story is up-front about these results being preliminary and from a conference. Ideally, the story should have further described the preliminary nature of these findings, in a way that would have made sense to a lay audience. The results have not been peer-reviewed, and the technique is only being developed based on these data. In other words, the study didn’t assess a technique, they built one to match the data. The strategy hasn’t been tested in a realistic population.As this report was all about a new diagnostic test, is it particularly important to define the groups clearly and the sensitivity/ specificity (and positive predictive value/ negative predictive value). This is where independent expert assessment of these results would have helped clarify their significance and early status. Regarding SomaDX, mentioned offhand, this evidence and its 90% sensitivity isn’t evaluated at all. At the time of this article, the report hadn’t even been officially released by the company, and not independently vetted. The article does not exaggerate the burden of lung cancer, accurately citing ACS statistics and the enormous importance of the disease. It also does not overstate the problem of false positives. An independent source was cited, a meeting attendant, and the SomaLogic quotes were added for context. The latter were good for illustrating that the Dubinett group is not the only game in town working on this type of blood test. Ideally, the article would have had more independent analysis of the specific results. No independent source was used to assess the SomaLogic employee’s claims of their experimental test’s sensitivity. Although the MedPage Today coverage of the study is aimed at a professional medical audience, it provides a good example of some of the critical points outside sources can provide about these type of very early results. Although the article does not identify conflicts of interest, from the MedPage Today article it’s not clear that the investigators disclosed any conflicts of interest in their abstract.

SOLUTION:
Blood Test for Lung Cancer in the Works