The 89th Block: Look up, por favor
This issue is heavy with links, be warned.
This week…
A brief look at how science is faring in the news. (Spoiler: Not so well.)
Also, a post by friend and doctor, Prof Sargunan Sockalingam on post-vaccine myocarditis, is worth a read. He was featured as the first guest on The Starting Block, speaking about public engagement in a pandemic, where he said, “We’ll be lucky if we see the end of this [pandemic] at the end of 2022”.
And now, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Are we witnessing the dawn of post-theory science?
“Does the advent of machine learning mean the classic methodology of hypothesise, predict and test has had its day?” asks Laura Spinney for The Guardian:
Somewhere between Isaac Newton and Mark Zuckerberg, theory took a back seat. In 2008, Chris Anderson, the then editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, predicted its demise. So much data had accumulated, he argued, and computers were already so much better than us at finding relationships within it, that our theories were being exposed for what they were – oversimplifications of reality. Soon, the old scientific method – hypothesise, predict, test – would be relegated to the dustbin of history. We’d stop looking for the causes of things and be satisfied with correlations.
How fake science is infiltrating scientific journals ($)
Harriet Alexander for The Sydney Morning Herald:
In 2015, molecular oncologist Jennifer Byrne was surprised to discover during a scan of the academic literature that five papers had been written about a gene she had originally identified, but did not find particularly interesting.
“Looking at these papers, I thought they were really similar, they had some mistakes in them and they had some stuff that didn’t make sense at all,” she said. As she dug deeper, it dawned on her that the papers might have been produced by a third-party working for profit.
Experts warn of violence as demonstration ushers in new era of anti-vaccine fervour
Caroline Orr for Canada’s National Observer:
The anti-vaccine movement in Canada has direct ties to violent far-right groups in the U.S., including those involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Alberta-based street preacher Artur Pawlowski, who was charged for breaching public health orders when he organized an anti-mask rally in Calgary in December, spent much of the latter part of 2021 travelling around the U.S. on a tour organized by a religious group that has its own militia. The organizers and participants involved with the tour have close ties to Donald Trump and the “Stop the Steal” movement that motivated the Jan. 6 insurrection, including insiders like Steve Bannon and Gen. Michael Flynn.
Canadian Frontline Nurses, one of the main groups responsible for organizing the protests outside of hospitals across Canada, also has links to the Capitol riot. Two of its founders spoke at a rally organized by Trump supporters on the day of the deadly Capitol attack.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading a paper on AI technology in the newsroom by Nicolas St-Germain and Patrick White. (C’est le premier article scientifique que j’ai lu en français!)
I’m watching Don’t Look Up. It’s bad.
I’m listening to Changing Behavior, Not Beliefs, an episode of Hidden Brain, a podcast by Shankar Vedantam about human behavior.
More stray links:
The second part of the incredible Tek Fog investigation by Ayushman Kaul and Devesh Kumar for The Wire is out. Tek Fog is an app used by cybertroopers to manipulate social media trends in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Indian PM Narendra Modi’s party.
As I said, furries run the Internet. Dylan Reeve of The Spinoff had his article on that funded by New Zealand’s Ministry for Culture and Heritage Public Interest Journalism Fund, which irked the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union. But the comments under their tweet show you that the furries really do run the Internet. (Yes, this is now a ‘pro-furry propaganda’ newsletter.)
Chart of the week
"Look Up" is a bad film, call me cynical, but!!