most recommended: 2, 6, 9, 10, 12
links (links with excerpts below):
What Can We Learn From Open Access Journals in the Arab States?
What is metascience? Issues, inclusion and future public value
How the myth that nicotine causes cancer is hurting public health
Seven reasons for keeping Elon Musk as a Fellow of the Royal Society
The Pizza Effect (2014)
This is not the quality of pseudoscience infotainment to which I have grown accustomed
links with excerpts:
“Perhaps most notably, the vast majority of the mapped journals—99 percent—are open access, due in part to the initial emphasis on DOAJ and PKP datasets. The Levant has the largest percentage of active open-access journals, at 100 percent of mapped journals. The North African bloc has the second largest percentage of open-access journals (at over 99.8 percent of active journals identified within the subregion). Open-access models account for about 98.4 percent of active journals in the Gulf and 96 percent of active journals mapped in the Sub-Saharan bloc. It is worth highlighting that the preeminence of open access publications across the Arab region has largely occurred without national or regional mandates or centralized advocacy.
Of course, some of these journals were launched with an eye on potential revenue streams for the organizations that own them. However, given the high rate of diamond open access journals in every Arab state—including 61 percent of the open access journals mapped in North Africa, 34 percent of those in the Gulf, 56 percent of those from Sub-Saharan African states, and 17 percent of those in the Levant—it is evident that, in many cases, the journal owners have simply internalized the cost, rightly viewing these publications as valuable assets that showcase their faculty research and enhance their institutional prestige.”
“To most people, the name Alfred Kinsey brings to mind a pair of groundbreaking and controversial books on human sexuality. With the 1948 publication of “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” followed by a companion volume on female behavior five years later, Kinsey firmly established himself as one of the most famous (and infamous) scientists of the 20th century.
To entomologists, on the other hand, “The Kinsey Reports” were an unfortunate diversion from an otherwise illustrious career. Before turning to sex research, Kinsey devoted decades of his life to the study of gall wasps, the tiny insects responsible for deforming my thimbleberry canes. It’s hard to overstate the scale of his contribution. While the 8,000 interviews that Kinsey personally conducted about sexuality may sound impressive, that’s nothing compared to the attention he showered upon wasps.
From the time he encountered his first gall, on a field trip while studying at Harvard University in 1917, to the end of his last collecting expedition in 1939, Kinsey and his student helpers gathered and processed over 7.5 million specimens.”
“Does this episode confirm the critique that metascience depoliticises questions of science and technology? In one sense, the answer is ‘yes’, at least in the sense that some people in this space would like to see it become, in the words of Bart Penders, an “operations research branch…stripped of its academic qualities”, a quote that proved a presage of Rees’s intervention.
Yet the fact remains that this highly instructive, if unsatisfying, encounter would not have taken place in a regular academic conference; I have certainly never seen the big tech establishment taken to task in person at an STS conference before. The extractive foundations of AI and the unaccountability of big tech in the question were met with a response crystallising both the politics of free speech and positionality and power in research. This brief moment surfaced key issues in the contemporary politics of science and technology which are all too rarely raised in this company.”
“Frugal science is a modern concept, yet it borrows from older traditions—particularly the philosophy of “appropriate technology” that economist E.F. Schumacher developed in his 1973 book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Schumacher challenged the “bigger is better” assumption and instead promoted equipment that was affordable, locally adaptable, and appropriate to human-scale requirements.
Written during post-colonial development initiatives and growing environmental concerns, the book shook off the hegemony of high-capital technologies, especially in the Global South. Schumacher advocated for ecologically friendly and culturally sensitive solutions—technologies that enabled people without placing them in the orbit of large, centralised systems.”
“The issue now faced by addiction and public health experts is how to correct the narrative about nicotine for the sake of harm reduction. They want people who smoke to know that switching to smoke-free nicotine products like vapes would likely benefit their health, without going so far as to encourage people who don’t currently use tobacco products from picking up a Zyn or Juul habit.
Recent headlines suggest there is potential for nicotine’s reputation to tip in the opposite direction. An article in Slate explored early research on nicotine as a treatment for people with long Covid dealing with brain fog. Meanwhile, social media users touting Zyn nicotine pouches as “gas station Ozempic” say it helps with weight loss.
Recovering nicotine’s reputation would also provide a clear commercial benefit to tobacco companies, many of which are betting on smoke-free products as their future given global declines in smoking rates.”
“Green nationalism and the prospect of “avocado politics” have shown how a keen interest in planetary-scale issues like climate change, migration, renewable energy and electric vehicles can fold into more narrow nationalist agendas. These are often spearheaded by right-leaning or autocratic politicians and result in competitive forms of eco-oriented nationalism, with no supranational governing bodies in view. Prioritizing climate change and adopting mitigation policies often appears to be a means to reduce migration and build national strength, to the detriment of other countries and the human community as a whole. (In other words, the result is essentially: If we win, they lose — but so do we all.) Consider the 2019 statement by Jordan Bardella, the president of France’s far-right National Rally party and protégé of Marine Le Pen: “Borders are the environment’s greatest ally. … [I]t is through them that we will save the planet.”
It is possible that these planetary nationalist scenarios, where nations compete with one another for various forms of climate-induced hegemony, might yet give rise to something that approximates a distributed form of planetary action (if not governance institutions). Each nation pursuing its interests in isolation could collectively result in something at least akin to planetary politics (or Gaiapolitik), even if these developments are not motivated by a quest for a unified planetary front. As Nathan Gardels, this magazine’s editor-in-chief, has suggested: “Though each [nation] may be going it alone, all are going in the same direction.” This is not ideal, but it’s better than nothing.”
“The main bad consequence that goes beyond name-calling (see 5) would be if Musk decided to mount a legal challenge to his expulsion. No doubt the legal counsel that the Royal Society has employed will have judged how likely this is to happen, and how likely it could be successful if it did happen. Nobody wants to get embroiled in legal battles, which can be expensive and arduous. My personal view is that the Royal Society would have a stronger defence against legal action if it polled the whole Fellowship and the result turned out in favour of expelling Musk. I suggested that the Fellowship should be consulted last Summer but was told that was not in line with the Statutes. (I should add that I’m not confident that the Fellowship would vote to expel Musk - many of them seem swayed by arguments 2-6, but with every day that passes, his malign influence on science and society increases, and so I think it’s possible he might be voted out).
Personally, I think the Royal Society should take the risk of a legal challenge. They are a wealthy organisation, and they represent the voice of scientists in the UK. Our fellow scientists in the USA are now under a level of pressure that even the most pessimistic of us had not anticipated. It is hard for individual scientists to resist. But the Royal Society has the clout and the resource to weather the storm. If they would take a stand, this would show solidarity with our friends across the pond, by confirming that the Brits aren’t going to honour someone who is playing a major role in dismantling scientific research in the USA.”
🍕 The Pizza Effect (2014)
“I’d never heard of the pizza effect. That is, until Bob Lucky commented on my Cornish pasty post. The Cornish pasty’s export to other parts of the world with emigrants, its transformation, and its reintroduction to Cornwall, he said, was an example of the pizza effect.
Bob went on to mention that the anthropologist Agehananda Bharati had introduced the concept of the pizza effect in religious and Asian studies in the 1970s. So off I went to Wikipedia and Google Scholar, and came across a strange tale.”
“It matters because these ‘normal’ injuries and deaths are not accidental. They’re part of a pattern of traffic violence, a type of structural violence repeated at every junction, every country lane, and every driveway. This structural violence is caused by mass car ownership – with the car manufacturers as the protagonists and the state as the willing assistant making car usage as easy as possible. After the state’s sight was locked onto cars, it was easy for inertia to carry the country into a position of car (and oil) dependency. A state’s transport system built for cars easily muscles out all other transport modes, because – once the state has adopted a neoliberal capitalist mindset wherein public services must ‘pay their way’ – it makes public transport financially unviable. Add some neat propaganda associating cars with adulthood and freedom, and the country’s position of car dependency has secured itself. When the same types of collisions are happening to the same types of road users, even at the same junction, year after year, it would be naïve to call them accidents. Common-sense opinion chalks them up to a collection of unfortunate, but isolated, events which have randomly occurred in the empty space between buildings. While it’s true that the specific individuals who are hurt and killed may not be predetermined, the structural bias that turns cars into weapons for use against other road users makes this pattern of violence inevitable.”
“Watching from afar was her father, Kangujam Kanarjit Singh, known to many in Indian climate activist circles as KK Singh. Singh had not traveled abroad in years due to his arrest and imprisonment in India on charges of fraud, cheating, impersonation, and forgery for his role in running elaborate scams targeting young activists in India and abroad. Singh lived with his family in the city of Noida in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where he had for years carefully orchestrated his daughter’s activism and image through public protests, well documented on her social media account. At the age of eight, she held a sit-in protest outside the Indian parliament urging Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to pass a climate change law, and she attended COP25 in Madrid in a trip reportedly sponsored by the Government of Spain and the European Climate Foundation.
In 2021, however, Singh was arrested and jailed for eight months, and his family went underground to escape media attention on the young activist. After securing bail, Singh receded from view. But he continued to position his young daughter as the face of Indian climate activism. He lurked in the background of his daughter’s achievements, raising questions about the degree to which he was using her to advance his own agenda and the potential costs he was inflicting on her.”
“This prompts a deeper question—why did men driven by fear and hatred of women seize on printing technology to destroy independent femininity and defiance of religious patriarchy? It seems like they had long awaited a tool of mass mesmerism, capable of shaping collective belief and fear. The press delivered that power—but only to elites who controlled its capital-intensive production and distribution. It became a weapon of domination, a brain-hacking machine cloaking violence in the authority of faith and reason.
The first three and a half centuries of print capitalism amounted to nothing less than the brutal suppression of global wisdom and freedom—forms of knowledge and autonomy that had long resisted the tyranny of centralised authority during the so-called “dark ages”. Across continents, print capitalism targeted vibrant systems that defied domination—the midwives and herbalists of early modern Europe, the Iroquois confederacies of the New World, the communal matriarchies and spiritual practices of African societies, and the grassroots resistances in Asia that challenged caste hierarchies embedded in Brahmanical ideology.
Who made the print-capitalist technology of the early printing press more democratic? Originally, the printing press was an instrument of power and wealth centralisation. It spread incendiary propaganda and bigotry, which shattered society into broken shards—like sharp, pointed glass. But eventually, someone transformed this technology. They turned it into a small, easily handled, room-sized machine. Now, thousands of pamphlets, leaflets, and notices could be produced for the commons—the ordinary working people who suffered in the highly polluted workplaces of the early 19th century.”
“So, we’ve grown accustomed to the excitement and promise of aliens that comes from Loeb regularly misquoting the literature or warping statistics, and we expected nothing less after the announcement of the discovery of the third interstellar object, 3I/ATLAS. Like clockwork, “Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?”, by Hibberd, Crowl & Loeb, dropped on the arXiv on July 17. But it’s not bold or inspiring.
It starts with a tired rehash of ‘Oumuamua. They claim “various anomalous features of this object have yet to be clarified”, especially the non-gravitational acceleration without observed outgassing. Actually we [Jackson & Desch (2021) ; Desch & Jackson (2021,2022)] have clarified the crap out of these features and there is not a single observation of ‘Oumuamua not explained by it being a chunk of N2 ice like that seen on the surface of Pluto. ‘Oumuamua was vaporizing but was simply too small for outgassing to be detectable. Interstellar space should have more than enough N2 ice fragments, especially from plutos around low-mass stars. But they decry the “bitter controversy” on the subject and sniff that their solar sail hypothesis wasn’t pursued (it was). Let it go, Drake. It’s just ice.”
“What the Jacobs family didn’t know — couldn’t have known — was that they were now involved in what would become one of the worst medical research scandals of this century. Prominent scientists would see their careers derailed. Duke, an emerging biomedical powerhouse, would be disgraced. Patients would die of their cancers not knowing their final months of treatment had been compromised by scientific fraud.
The scandal would also prove a crucial test for a leader quickly rising through the ranks of academia. The dean overseeing clinical research at Duke Medical School at the time was Sally Kornbluth. Today, she is the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is helming one of the top research institutions in the world during a period of unprecedented upheaval in science, at a time when President Trump and his allies have precipitated — and celebrated — the ouster of at least five leaders of elite universities, four of them women.”
“We can learn a lot from colleagues who work in the commercial sector because they ask different kinds of questions. My own first contact was with John Rarity and Paul Tabster at the UK Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, which became QinetiQ after privatization. Those guys were absolutely amazing and much more optimistic than I was about the future of quantum technologies. Paul in particular is an unsung hero of quantum tech. He showed me how you can think not in terms of equations, but devices – blocks you can put together, like quantum LEGO.
Over time, I saw more and more of my colleagues, students and postdocs going into the commercial world. Some even set up their own companies and I have a huge respect for my colleagues who’ve done that. I myself am involved with Speqtral in Singapore, which does satellite quantum communication, and I’m advising a few other firms too.
Most efforts to build quantum devices are now outside academia. In fact, it has to be that way because universities are not designed to build quantum computers, which requires skills and people not found in a typical university.”