Linklist: October 24, 2021
"But the promise of a better tomorrow is no excuse for the inequitable, unjust, and harmful deployment of technology today—a topic that I’ve written about previously for Public Books, with respect to both “smart” cities and “smart” medical devices. Let’s take one example, as a Type 1 diabetic, I’ve been living with a “smart” insulin pump and sensor system for the past three and a half years. During that time, I have only been able to sleep through the night a few times a week, due to the frequent need to calibrate the sensor in the middle of the night. I’ve come to believe that, “the AI system that is keeping me alive is also ruining my life.” While the next-version system is promised to be better, that does very little for the tens of thousands of people like me that are living with the current system.
Rather than continuing to cling to claims about a better future, Dourish and Bell suggest that perhaps it would be better to acknowledge that the future is already here, full of the kinds of technological problems that we experience every day—moving from the futures portrayed in science fiction to futures full of messiness and frictions. As we navigate the potential technological solutions that have been presented throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and the claims that they make about the world today, it’s useful to consider the ways in which “the future” is constructed as a social-technical frontier—one in which the social, political, and economic stakes are closely tied to our continued belief in the promise of technological progress —and how we might work towards other ways of understanding, practicing, and living with futures today.
How should we be thinking about the future, as well as about the practice of futuring?"
😌 Johns Hopkins Medicine receives first federal grant for psychedelic treatment research in 50 years
"Johns Hopkins Medicine was awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to explore the potential impacts of psilocybin on tobacco addiction. This is the first NIH grant awarded in over a half century to directly investigate the therapeutic effects of a classic psychedelic, consistent with a recent study published online that searched NIH funding and found zero grants were awarded between 2006 and 2020. Johns Hopkins Medicine will lead the multisite, three-year study in collaboration with University of Alabama at Birmingham and New York University. The study will be conducted simultaneously at the three institutions to diversify the pool of participants and increase confidence that results apply to a wide range of people who smoke. The grant, totaling nearly $4 million, is funded by NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse.
“The historical importance of this grant is monumental,” says principal investigator Matthew Johnson, Ph.D., Susan Hill Ward Professor in Psychedelics and Consciousness in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “We knew it was only a matter of time before the NIH would fund this work because the data are so compelling, and because this work has demonstrated to be safe. Psilocybin does have very real risks, but these risks are squarely mitigated in controlled settings through screening, preparation, monitoring and follow-up care.”
Over the last 20 years, there has been a growing renaissance of research with classic psychedelics, which are the pharmacological class of compounds that includes psilocybin and LSD. These studies have been largely funded by philanthropy, resulting in impressive clinical findings for cancer-related existential distress, major depressive disorder and substance use disorders."
"The team tested batteries with recycled NMC111 cathodes, the most common flavor of cathode containing a third each of nickel, manganese, and cobalt. The cathodes were made using a patented recycling technique that Battery Resourcers, a startup Wang co-founded, is now commercializing.
The recycled material showed a more porous microscopic structure that is better for lithium ions to slip in and out of. The result: batteries with an energy density similar to those made with commercial cathodes, but which also showed up to 53% longer cycle life.
While the recycled batteries weren't tested in cars, tests were done at industrially relevant scales. The researchers made 11 Ampere-hour industry-standard pouch cells loaded with materials at the same density as EV batteries. Engineers at A123 Systems did most of the testing, Wang says, using a protocol devised by the USABC to meet commercial viability goals for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. He says the results prove that recycled cathode materials are a viable alternative to pristine materials."
"One problem is definitions. The G7 and G20 countries have vowed to eliminate “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”, although they haven’t clearly defined what this phrase means. “It’s a very vague commitment,” says Ludovic Subran, chief economist at the multinational insurance firm Allianz, which published a report on eliminating subsidies in May.
Some countries don’t agree that they have any subsidies to remove. The UK government, for example, says it has none, although the IISD rates it as among the worst of the OECD-member nations, calculating that it gave $16 billion a year to support fossil fuels in 2017–19, on average. In large part, this is because the United Kingdom forgoes some tax revenue from the use of fossil fuels and directly funds its oil and gas industry. (Other analysts agree with the IISD; a 2019 European Commission report5 came to similar conclusions.)
“They reject the idea that they have any inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies,” says Angela Picciariello, senior research officer in climate and sustainability at the Overseas Development Institute in London. So “it’s quite hard to engage with them on this”. (The UK government did not reply to Nature’s request for comment.) The country did announce in 2020 that it would end support for fossil-fuel energy overseas.
What’s more, each nation has its own reasons for subsidizing fossil fuels, often intertwined with its industrial policies. There are three main barriers to removing production subsidies, Urpelainen says. First, fossil-fuel companies are powerful political groups. Second, there are legitimate concerns about job losses in communities that have few alternative employment options. And third, people often worry that rising energy prices might depress economic growth or trigger inflation."
"High-profile accidents like Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island have helped to make both policymakers and the general public skittish about nuclear energy, despite the fact that the number of combined fatalities from nuclear energy is dwarfed by fatalities caused by fossil fuel-derived energy. Researchers have estimated that about 1 in 5 deaths globally can be attributed to fossil fuels through air pollution alone: that’s about 8.7 million people each year. It would be impossible to calculate total historical deaths associated with fossil fuels, since fossilized carbon burned a century ago is still contributing to deaths today—often in indirect ways, including global warming and development—and the impact of carbon energy has undoubtedly caused extinctions of species that scientists never had time to describe. We can get a sense of the contrast between nuclear and fossil fatalities, however, by comparing their orders of magnitude. Though the total number of deaths associated with nuclear power is disputed, estimates vary from the low tens of thousands to the low hundreds of thousands. Deaths by fossil fuels, by contrast, probably reach into the tens or hundreds of millions, extrapolating backward on the basis of annual air pollution deaths alone—to say nothing of mining-related deaths, transportation-related deaths, and so on. Even taking into account the significantly greater proportion of energy generated by fossil fuels than nuclear, burning fossil fuels is still significantly more dangerous.
It is unsurprising that mass evacuations and skin-melting radiation poisoning from nuclear accidents would provoke more visceral fear than the slow violence of fossil fuels. Further encumbering nuclear energy is its unfortunate, inextricable association with weapons of mass destruction, and the fact that it operates on atomic principles more opaque than the logic of burning fossilized biomass. It’s college physics versus campfires. On top of all this, both ordinary citizens and policy experts have awful track records in assessing and mitigating complex risks. The massive investment in antiterrorism and simultaneous neglect of climate change mitigation measures in the early 2000s is perhaps the most vivid recent example of flawed risk assessment, but there are many others, from high tolerance for traffic deaths—about 38,000 in the U.S. and 1.3 million globally every year—to high-risk personal consumption habits like fast food, smoking, and drinking, along with widespread fear of relatively low-risk threats such as shark attacks, wolves, or vaccine complications. In many parts of the world, due to both unfounded fears and justified caution, public opinion can be deeply skeptical of nuclear energy."
🫂 Hugging
"At 4.30 p.m. on August 28th, 2021, for the first time after five hundred and twenty-five days spent in isolation, on account of the pandemic, in my small village 30 km from Coimbra, I hugged and was hugged by someone outside the circle of those few people I closely interact with on a daily basis. Words cannot begin to describe what I felt then. It was an unconditional gesture, a presence too strong to allow itself to be planned or taken for granted. To feel my hands slide down another body and press it against mine was both familiar and strange. The pleasurable sensation of another body against mine was more than erotic. It felt like the carnal truth of existence, a proof of being. Next came fear – but was it really fear, or was it punishment for the pleasure I had felt? Had this been a careless, needlessly perilous gesture? Did one need to restrain one’s senses and learn anew how to deal with the emotions of physical contact and the challenging reassurance they provide? Had I been deprived for too long of the touch and touching of living beings other than the humans, cats and dogs in my immediate household? Why is it that, during the long period of pandemic deprivation, I had never felt the urge to hug trees, which is something that many ecologists do to feel the energy that emanates from these wonderful living beings that link the earth to the skies in such a natural manner, but which is so difficult for us humans, shaped as we are by Western culture? Why is it that the hugging of a tree – and there are so many of them in my backyard, which I could have hugged without fear of getting the coronavirus – would never provoke the same indescribable emotion that swept over me as I embraced and felt the warm body of my human friend? Why is it that this carnal truth conveyed by the unrestrained vibration of an embrace eschews reflection and always comes as a surprise when we happen to become aware of it, like an irrational avalanche let loose, less predictable than a tsunami or an earthquake? We know that in certain cultures there are people who are not to be touched, because they are viewed as either superior or too lowly, but one is left to wonder what body vibration is like when there is no touching.
Although it is a constant in the life of every human being who does not treat the body (whether their own or other peoples’) and human relationships as a tool for scientific diagnosis, a source of financial gain or the object of philosophical speculation, only rarely does this carnal truth of bodies and human relationships occur to – much less engage the attention of – intellectuals and thinkers. This is a rare occurrence indeed, but whenever that happens the latter turn into very special beings."
⚗️ Stop equating “science” with truth (2017)
"Jefferson is remembered as a great thinker, but when one reads his writing about race, it becomes immediately evident that rather than being much of a scientist, he was a biased white supremacist who hid behind science as a shield.
The problem is that science was just the shield he needed in the 18th century, and unfortunately, it seems that it continues to function that way today. In other words, pseudoscience has always been a core feature of post-Enlightenment scientific knowledge and it remains that way because scientists refuse to integrate contemporary science, technology, and society studies research into university curricula. And so too many of us get out of school and end up in a world where we are suddenly forced to grapple with the reality of how science, in practice, is not as objective as we hoped. Enough of us have heard a man, sometimes the president of our college, sometimes our research adviser, express the view that women’s brains “just work differently” and “aren’t suited to technical skills” the way men’s are. Nonbinary people don’t exist, and transgender people are de-normalized in these narratives. Women of color listen to white women normalize Europe as the birthplace of scientific intelligence while telling us that our curly hair isn’t professional-looking. Senior men who we would hope could be mentors turn out to be our sexual harassers, and with some frequency, senior women tell us to suck it up and lean in, rather than helping us.
…
Google bro would argue that we ought to consider the possibility that white women and racial minorities simply produce lower-quality work, which is why we struggle to be recognized as competent knowledge producers. It’s time to turn the tables on this debate. Rather than leaning in and trying endlessly to prove our humanity and value, people like him should have to prove that our inferiority is the problem. Eliminate structural biases in education, health care, housing, and salaries that favor white men and see if we fail. Run the experiment. Be a scientist about it."
"Global travelers, whether tourists or secret agents, are exposed to a smörgåsbord of infectious agents. We hypothesized that agents pre-occupied with espionage and counterterrorism may, at their peril, fail to correctly prioritize travel medicine. To examine our hypothesis, we examined adherence to international travel advice during the 86 international journeys that James Bond was observed to undertake in feature films spanning 1962–2021. Scrutinizing these missions involved ∼3113 min of evening hours per author that could easily have been spent on more pressing societal issues. We uncovered above-average sexual activity, often without sufficient time for an exchange of sexual history, with a remarkably high mortality among Bond's sexual partners (27.1; 95% confidence interval 16.4–40.3). Given how inopportune a bout of diarrhea would be in the midst of world-saving action, it is striking that Bond is seen washing his hands on only two occasions, despite numerous exposures to foodborne pathogens. We hypothesize that his foolhardy courage, sometimes purposefully eliciting life-threatening situations, might even be a consequence of Toxoplasmosis. Bond's approach to vector-borne diseases and neglected tropical diseases is erratic, sometimes following travel advice to the letter, but more often dwelling on the side of complete ignorance. Given the limited time Bond receives to prepare for missions, we urgently ask his employer MI6 to take its responsibility seriously. We only live once."
🧫 Science for the post-normal age (1993)
"Although this essay is about a new practice of science, the now familiar Post-Normal Science (PNS), the title of the paper refers to an ‘Age’. This substitution was deliberate, and in the light of the subsequent history of the idea, it was appropriate. The four destabilising features in the mantra “facts uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent”, although originally developed as defining a policy issue requiring a new problem-solving strategy, also relate to a condition of society. Indeed, when PNS was first published, well-intentioned critics suggested that it really applies to politics, and not to science. The implication was that real science involves facts that are certain, and can be expressed by precise numbers, and where values, stakes and decisions are seen as external to the scientific endeavour. Where science impinged on policy, it was assumed that effects were generally beneficial in the long term or through technological innovations by becoming, as in the post-WWII era, the main engine of the economy. All that comfortable background had already begun to change with the threat of nuclear annihilation, environmental degradation, leading finally to a reflexive critique of the practice of science itself.
As we write this during the COVID-19 pandemic, the PNS mantra has become the new obvious common sense by correctly defining the characteristics of both the world, and the relevant science. And the need for a new sort of scientific practice, designed to meet these challenges, becomes equally obvious. The PNS mantra might indeed have been designed around the COVID-19 experience. Working backwards, there have been desperately urgent decisions, as the exponential growth of the disease meant that every day’s delay would cost lives. The stakes have been as high as in a war, with the threat of an overwhelmed medical system balanced against the possibility of a collapsed economy, and against the diminution of hard-won civic freedoms. Navigating through these opposed (and perhaps irreconcilable) outcomes involved a dispute of values, even pitting generations against each other. And, so shocking for those raised on a faith in the certitudes of science, our crippling uncertainty, even ignorance, about the progress of the disease and the means for combatting it, was and still is, an outstanding feature of the crisis. Disagreements among experts, even in mature scientific disciplines, are aired publicly and, unlike other cases, there is no call to enforce consensus. During all this time, we have witnessed members of the scientific establishment discussing candidly and without embarrassment their various known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns."
"What is math?
As per Poh-Shen Loh it is one of the easiest subject you will ever take because there is little to memorize, you can deduce whatever it is you don't know using mathematical reasoning. The closest analogy would be lawyers, they deduce from statutes and case law new arguments. We will be doing the same thing using methods of reasoning. Once you start to get familiar with this logic then you can use it not only to manipulate models you build in math of real life things but in everyday life your thinking will change to become more rigorous. In math the model studies you while you study the model.
Terence Tao believes mathematics is complex, high-dimensional (as in moving in any direction, like the depiction of an ancient deity with many arms) and evolving in unexpected and adaptive ways."
"There are many different conceptual vehicles throughout science fiction, but Dune by Frank Herbert presents a very unique one, the ornithopter, a jet powered flapping wing aircraft. Like many modern technologies, this aircraft derives its characteristics from nature, who has spent thousands of years evolving, and perfecting its technologies. The ornithopter follows the natural form of a bird, which flaps its wings to fly as opposed to current aircraft designs that rely on engine thrust and aerodynamic lift. Original inception dates back to Leonardo da Vinci, but it is not until recently that we have been able to achieve these flight characteristics on small scales. This aircraft is used throughout Dune, both on Caladan and Arrakis, as a primary transportation aircraft, but the actual application of recreating nature's flapping wings has many complications, primarily material science and the inefficiency associated with this type of aircraft.
Benjamin J. Goodheart, a researcher at Embry Riddle for Aerospace Technologies, defines an ornithopter as a flapping winged aircraft that is generally designed after birds and insect's natural movement. This aircraft has been a dream of aviators for centuries, dating back as far as its original inventor, Leonardo da Vinci. Before him, the only flight attempted was gliding which had no introduction of thrusting forces that would allow the aircraft to sustain flight. In 1485, da Vinci began studying the flight characteristics of birds and figured that humans were too heavy and did not possess the strength required to flap wings and hence needed some type of machinery to make up for this lack of strength. Following this, he invented the ornithopter, which essentially used pulleys to translate hand and foot movement into movement of the wings. This device wasn't built until centuries later and proved to be ineffective at sustaining flight, but da Vinci's understanding of fluid mechanics and flight, gained from his observations, built the foundation for manned flight in the future."
"Chronicling the story of NASA’s Cassini mission, this is the latest in our series of documentaries, “JPL and the Space Age.” These films use rare archival footage and interviews with pioneering engineers and scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in retelling the stories of many of humanity’s first steps into the cosmos."
"The Duck-Rabbit double illusion was first published in Fliegende Blätter, a German humor magazine (Oct. 23, 1892, p. 147). The ambiguous figure in which the brain switches between seeing a rabbit and a duck was "originally noted" by American psychologist Joseph Jastrow (Jastrow 1899, p. 312; 1900; see also Brugger and Brugger 1993). Jastrow used the figure, together with such figures as the Necker cube and Schröder stairs, to point out that perception is not just a product of the stimulus, but also of mental activity (Kihlstrom 2002). Jastrow's cartoon was based on one originally published in Harper's Weekly (Nov. 19, 1892, p. 1114) which, in turn, was based on the earlier illustration in Fliegende Blätter,*Mathworld.Wolfram.com."
"With a dramaturgical structure shaped by intensity of speed and scale, an epidemic, in the words of Charles Rosenberg (who was writing about HIV/AIDS) “takes on a quality of a pageant—mobilizing communities to act out propitiatory rituals that incorporate and reaffirm fundamental social values and modes of understanding.” Responses to HIV/AIDS and to Covid-19, however, also reveal how the propitiatory rituals of a pandemic may be just as focused on disrupting and challenging social values—whether acting up or unmasking instead of affirming unitary values.
When The Immanent Frame editors invited me to reflect on a TIF essay I wrote to introduce my 2011 book Spirits of Protestantism, I quickly realized that when writing that book I was not thinking with the lived experience of a pandemic. I did begin the book with questions about the “mysteries of transmission,” asking: “How does a virus pass into or over one person and not another; how does healing come to this patient and not that one? How can a mother cradle her feverish child all night and escape the flu . . .?” The flu epidemic of 1918-19, however, did not even rate a mention in the chapter focused on the early twentieth century, where I discussed the rise of medical missionaries and the irate critiques that liberal Protestants heaped on Christian Science and Pentecostal faith healing. And while I was trying to reveal the connections between Protestant “anthropologies of the spiritual body” and the inequity and racism of health-care systems in North America, I was not doing so at the scale or depth that the Covid-19 pandemic, combined with movements for racial justice and Indigenous sovereignty, has provoked among scholars of religion and Indigenous studies today.
It is not as if there were not pandemics to think with, including HIV/AIDS and SARS. One of my most vivid memories of research for that book was working in the Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity, attached to the Mother Church of Christian Science in Boston. I was noticeably pregnant, with a terrible and noisy cold, and it was in the middle of the 2003 SARS pandemic. My hometown, Toronto, was the subject of a travel alert. As I worked in the archives, I felt acutely the theologically attuned discomfort of coughing and blowing my nose in the sacred space of a denomination that believes that matter is error and that the “divine Mind” is the true source of healing."