Linklist: September 27, 2023
Links (links with excerpts below):
highly recommended: 5, 7, 8, 10, 14
The Medieval 23 cubic kilometre Sabche rockslide in Annapurna, Nepal
How a conservative, gun-toting doctor defended abortion access in Appalachia
Why article-level metrics are better than JIF if you value talent over privilege
You do not receive enough recognition for your influential science
"Larger associations of scientists formed—like the Federation of Atomic Scientists, the precursor to the Federation of American Scientists—to promote ideas like world government and arms control. Yet activism was a challenge, and the new role of scientist-qua-politician caused some scientists to feel that they had gone too far in abandoning the precept of scientific objectivity. Although some scientists wondered what right they had to speak about political issues, scientists like Harold Urey stressed their rights as citizens and their unique ability to think about post-war implications while the general public had yet to recover from the initial shock of the revelation of this power to the world. Urey also iterated the underlying fear and sheer necessity that brought scientists into politics: “We who have lived for years in the shadow of the atomic bomb are well acquainted with fear, and it is a fear you should share if we are intelligently to meet our problems.”
The scientists’ movement dazzled politicians. Senator Joseph H. Ball of Minnesota announced before the Cincinnati Foreign Policy Institute, “One of the most hopeful developments in the atomic bomb is that at long last the scientists, who have turned our world topsy-turvy, are becoming interested in politics, which has been following the same rut for a hundred and fifty years.” Politicians became enlightened to the gravity of the problem of military control of atomic weapons and sought out conferences and dinners with the scientists to hear their advice in a more informal setting. Some were simply intrigued by the strange spectacle of scientists in politics and gave them nicknames such as “The Lab Lobby” and “The League of Frightened Men.” The scientists were invited to speak to local business, civic, and religious groups, as the public sought out their expertise and listened to their promotion of atomic energy for peace."
"Peripheral Nerve Stimulation (PNS) has been recently introduced as a minimally invasive treatment for chronic pain and/or spasticity-related conditions. The current indications for PNS span across a multitude of disorders such as axial back pain, occipital neuralgia, post-herpetic neuralgia, persistent low back pain following lumbar spine surgery, and refractory angina [[1]]. Interestingly, the inception of PNS can be traced back to Scribonius Largus, a physician serving the Roman Emperor Claudius in the 1st century AD. Largus is renowned for treating chronic refractory pain by applying an electric eel to the patient's skin around 47 AD (Fig. 1). This pioneering technique was documented in his textbook, Compositiones, a compendium of disease-specific or symptom-targeted therapies. Scholars have attributed the development of PNS to Largus [[2],[3]]. Yet, his significant contribution to medical education during his time remains under-discussed. A retrospective review of PNS's origins can provide modern practitioners with valuable insights into medical education and professional ethics."
"A paper (Lavé et al. 2023) was published in the journal Nature last week that, perhaps surprisingly, garnered comparatively little attention. It describes an enormous landslide that occurred from the Annapurna mountain range in Nepal, effecively decaptitating one of the largest peaks. The authors estimate that the landslide had a volume of about 23 cubic kilometres.
That a very large mass movement occurred in the Annapurna area is not new. The city of Pokhara, the second largest in Nepal, is built on a series of enormous terraces that had previously been identified as being the aftermath of one or more catastrophic debris flows (see for example Fort 2010). These had been dated to about 500 years BP, but the origin of this landslide sequence was less clear.
Lavé et al. (2023) have examined the geology the area, concluding that the source was an enormous rock avalanche, which they are terming the Sabche rockslide, originating from the Annapurna Massif. They have dated this to about the year 1200."
🧑🏾🤝🧑🏾 The Social Function of Science (1938)
"The present situation, where a highly developed science stands almost isolated from the traditional literary culture, is altogether anomalous and cannot last. No culture can stand indefinitely apart from the dominating practical ideas of the time, without degenerating into pedantic futility. It need not be imagined, however, that the assimilation of science and culture is likely to take place without very serious modifications in the structure of science itself. Science of the present day owes its origin and much of its character, to the precise needs of material construction. Its method is essentially a critical one, the ultimate criterion being experimental, that is, practical verification. The really positive part of science, the making of discoveries, lies outside scientific method proper. Discoveries are usually unthinkingly attributed to the operations of human genius which it would be impious to attempt to explain. We have no science of science. Another aspect of the same defect of present day science is its inability adequately to deal with phenomena in which novelty occurs and which are not readily reduced to any quantitative mathematical description. The enlargement of science to cover this defect is needed for its extension to social problems, and will be more so the more science becomes assimilated with general culture. The dryness and austerity of science, which had led to its widespread rejection by those of literary culture and, among scientists themselves, to every kind of irrational and mystical addition, is something which must be removed before science can fully take its place as a common framework of life and thought."
"Looking over the rest of Gino's papers, these studies seem like pretty standard examples of her research. I'll only speak for myself here: if I found out that every single one of these studies had been nothing more than Gino running create_fake_data.exe on her computer over and over again, I wouldn't believe anything different about the human mind than I already believe now.
This isn't specific to Gino and Ariely; I think you could It’s-a-Wonderful-Life most psychologists, even the famous ones, without any major changes to what we know. This was also true the last time we discovered a prolific fraudster. Diederik Stapel, a Dutch social psychologist, faked at least 58 papers. I mean really faked: the guy eventually admitted he would open up a blank spreadsheet and start typing numbers. Unlike Gino and Ariely, there's no ambiguity here—Stapel’s entire scientific career got wiped out.
So what was the scientific fallout of Stapel's demise? What theories had to be rewritten? What revisions did we have to make to our understanding of the human mind?
Basically none, as far as I can tell."
"Outside of applied work, the lack of a theoretical framework hampers progress of behavioral economics as a science. Primarily, it means you don’t understand what it is that you are observing. Further, many disciplines have suffered from what is now called the replication crisis, for which psychology is the poster child. If your body of knowledge is a list of unconnected phenomena rather than a theoretical framework, you lose the ability to filter experimental results by whether they are surprising and represent a departure from theory. The rational-actor model might have once provided that foundation, but the departures have become so plentiful that there is no longer any discipline to their accumulation. Rather than experiments that allow us to distinguish between competing theories, we have experiments searching for effects.
The collection of empirical phenomena can provide a building block for theory. The observed deviations from the geocentric model of the solar system supported the development of the heliocentric model. In genetics, the theory of particulate inheritance provided an explanation for the reappearance of inherited traits in later generations and the maintenance of phenotypic variation over time. Deviations from classical mechanics when objects are near the speed of light or of subatomic size provided the foundations for relativity and quantum mechanics. It is now time for those human biases that we consider to be robust deviations to serve a similar role."
"Thomas Bartholin’s reimagining of the narwhal as the “sea unicorn” was an important marketing gimmick. It protected the value of a medicine that the Bartholins, as physicians, could continue to administer at great cost to their patients. At the same time, it protected the valuable Scandinavian trade in narwhal horns, which was important to the Danish economy. The 1678 publication of an elaborately illustrated edition of De Unicornu by Thomas’ son, Caspar, helped to maintain the sea unicorn’s image in the public eye, and for decades after, Thomas’ ideas continued to have a place in scholarly discussions of alicorn.
This shift from terrestrial horse to sea beast is one of the many changes the meaning of “unicorn” has undergone over time. For a short while in the seventeenth century, the “Greenland Unicorn” — a strange northern sea creature that few Europeans had seen — displaced their obscure hoofed cousins in Asia as the source of the wonderful, spiralling tusks valued by collectors and physicians. Thomas Bartholin’s sleight of hand maintained popular faith in the potency of alicorn until the early eighteenth century, when pharmacists became disenchanted. More reliable experiments proved the powder was not all that useful for curing disease or protecting against poison. In his Systema Naturae (1735), the most prominent taxonomist in history, Carl Linnaeus, would reject the “Greenland Unicorn” once and for all (though the narwhal’s scientific name remains Unicornu groenlandicus). Still, there was a time when unicorns existed both in the sea and on the land, before the medicinal magic of their horns was dispelled and they retreated to the world of pure fable."
"Not everyone has Goyas to arrange. But between downing a glass of hot milk and immersing oneself in an icy bath, the rituals of insomniacs are often sadomasochistic: Quake in your boots, you wretch — now you’re going to sleep! André Gide, in his journal: “Insomnia, I am struggling as best I can; force myself to ‘take exercise’; to walk, to take a cold tub as soon as I return from a ‘health walk.’ … Nothing does any good; each night is a bit worse than the preceding one.”7 The protagonist in Mari Akasaka’s novel “Vibrator,” which I like a lot, makes herself vomit in order to sleep.8
I had never heard of that. Something to do with endorphins. And in Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club,” the narrator, haggard with insomnia, attends meetings of patients suffering from shocking illnesses he doesn’t have, invasive cancers, parasitic brain infections … and discovers that listening to them puts him to sleep.
Henri Michaux: “All night long, I push a wheelbarrow … it’s so cumbersome. And on this wheelbarrow sits a huge toad … it’s so heavy, and its body gets bigger as the night goes on.”9"
"Among the English, the word “science” does not by any means cover all the branches of knowledge it covers among us and the other continental nations. By science the English mean mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, geography — the branches of knowledge we call the “exact” sciences and those closely allied to them in character. But they do not apply this term to history, psychology, moral philosophy, or metaphysics. It must be said that there is, indeed, a tremendous difference between these two halves of learning as regards the quality of the concepts that prevail in each of them. From one half, every man who is in the least enlightened has already expelled all groundless prejudices, and all rationally minded people already adhere to the same fundamental conceptions in these fields. Our knowledge about these departments of existence is very incomplete, but, at all events, everybody agrees as to what we know definitely in these departments, what we do not yet know, and, lastly, what has been definitely refuted by exact research.
For example, if you say that the human organism needs food or needs air nobody will dispute it. If you say that we do not yet know whether the substances that now serve as man’s food are the only things that can nourish man and that other substances may, perhaps, be found that will be useful for this purpose, no enlightened person will dispute it. He will only add that although new foodstuffs may be found, and in all probability will be found, they have not been found yet; and that for the time being man can only use the known substances, such as cereals, meat, milk, or fish. You, in your turn, will fully agree with this observation, and no dispute can possibly arise. The only point of dispute you can raise is whether the probability of the speedy discovery of new nutritive substances is great or small, and to what category of things these new, as yet undiscovered, substances are likely to belong. But in this dispute, you and your opponent will both know and admit that you are merely expressing assumptions which lack full validity, which may be more or less useful to science in the future (for assumptions, hypotheses, give direction to scientific research and lead to the discovery of truths which confirm or refute them), but are not yet scientific truths. If, finally, you say that man cannot live without food, here again everybody will agree with you and understand that this negative statement has an inseparable logical connection with the positive statement: “The human organism needs food.” Everybody will understand that if one of these two statements is accepted, the other must also be accepted.
It is entirely different in moral philosophy, for example. No matter what you say, some clever and educated men will always come forward and say the opposite."
"To be a physician who performs abortions in a small southern town is to be in a state of rational hypervigilance, a whisper of worry pervading the everyday. That has persisted even after Adams was cornered into retirement last summer — itself another reminder of the not-normal-ness of his life. He is his own security detail: That day, he had one gun in his pocket, another in his jacket, and a third in his car. At a town meeting earlier this year, some locals compared his work to the Holocaust, while an elected official mentioned him by name, called him a serial killer, and talked about how easy it was to look up the tax records for his home.
His wife, he said, has been called a “blonde Botox baby-killing f—cking whore” while out around town. Other unpleasant incidents, which he chalks up to plain old jerks or just bad luck, have caused people in his circle to speculate about “the antis.” He’s had to be in near-constant touch with a small army of attorneys. After Roe fell, he ordered himself a custom bumper sticker. “ABORT SCOTUS,” it said, in all-caps, red on black. He checked with his lawyers before sticking it on his truck."
"The purpose of this study is to investigate the validity of tweets about scientific publications as an indicator of societal impact by measuring the degree to which the publications are tweeted beyond academia. We introduce methods that allow for using a much larger and broader data set than in previous validation studies. It covers all areas of research and includes almost 40 million tweets by 2.5 million unique tweeters mentioning almost 4 million scientific publications. We find that, although half of the tweeters are external to academia, most of the tweets are from within academia, and most of the external tweets are responses to original tweets within academia. Only half of the tweeted publications are tweeted outside of academia. We conclude that, in general, the tweeting of scientific publications is not a valid indicator of the societal impact of research. However, publications that continue being tweeted after a few days represent recent scientific achievements that catch attention in society. These publications occur more often in the health sciences and in the social sciences and humanities."
"COVID-19’s deadliest phase appears to be over. But low-income countries are still rocked by aftershocks. During the pandemic, high-income countries introduced stimulus funding to buoy their economies and provide social services. On average, G-20 countries committed 20 percent of GDP to these priorities. But low-income countries were able to commit just three percent. To fund essential services in 2020, low-income countries borrowed billions of dollars to keep the lights on while their urgent needs only grew.
Even as the worst of the pandemic’s threat has abated, low-income countries still must spend large sums servicing that debt instead of investing in health, development, education, and climate resilience. In 2021, among the more than 70 lower-income countries eligible for the World Bank International Development Association’s assistance, debt service as an average share of GDP jumped to a level not seen since 1997. According to a recent United Nations report, nearly half the world’s people now live in countries that spend more on servicing foreign debt than they do on health care, a 25 percent rise since before 2020. These debt hangovers are stunting growth. And they contribute to a sense, among the populations of low-income countries, that the world has a double standard."
"Some background will be useful. The decision to not use JIF for the evaluation of researchers and their work is evidence-based. There is a lot of work in bibliometry and beyond showing that a 2-year average of a skewed citation distribution is an imperfect measure of journal quality, a driver for perverse incentives, and a misleading proxy for the quality of individual papers. Indeed Clarivate itself, the for-profit provider of the JIF metric, has this to say about it: “In the case of academic evaluation for tenure, it is inappropriate to use a journal-level metric as a proxy measure for individual researchers, institutions, or articles”.
Despite this evidence, JIFs have long been widely used across the sciences not just as a way to tell librarians which journals are making waves (= what they were designed for) but also as a quick heuristic to judge the merits of work appearing in them or people publishing in them. As they say, ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover, but do judge scientific work by its JIF’. There is a considerable halo-effect attached to JIFs, whereby an article that ends up in a high IF journal (whether by sheer brilliance or simply knowing the right editor, or both) is treated, unread, with a level of veneration normally reserved for Wunderkinder. Usually this is done by people totally oblivious to network effects, gatekeeping and institutional biases.
It appears that the decision to explicitly outlaw the use of JIFs now has people coming out of the woodwork to protest."
"During career advancement and funding allocation decisions in biomedicine, reviewers have traditionally depended on journal-level measures of scientific influence like the impact factor. Prestigious journals are thought to pursue a reputation of exclusivity by rejecting large quantities of papers, many of which may be meritorious. It is possible that this process could create a system whereby some influential articles are prospectively identified and recognized by journal brands but most influential articles are overlooked. Here, we measure the degree to which journal prestige hierarchies capture or overlook influential science. We quantify the fraction of scientists’ articles that would receive recognition because (a) they are published in journals above a chosen impact factor threshold, or (b) are at least as well-cited as articles appearing in such journals. We find that the number of papers cited at least as well as those appearing in high-impact factor journals vastly exceeds the number of papers published in such venues. At the investigator level, this phenomenon extends across gender, racial, and career stage groupings of scientists. We also find that approximately half of researchers never publish in a venue with an impact factor above 15, which under journal-level evaluation regimes may exclude them from consideration for opportunities. Many of these researchers publish equally influential work, however, raising the possibility that the traditionally chosen journal-level measures that are routinely considered under decision-making norms, policy, or law, may recognize as little as 10-20% of the work that warrants recognition."
"Afghanistan has suffered more than 40 years of rarely interrupted war. The evidence is everywhere, some of it static and buried, some of it still very much alive. The chemicals of war poisoned the land in ways that are still not well understood. Before the U.S. military arrived in Afghanistan, the Soviet forces had been accused of deploying chemical weapons, including napalm. Their bases were then repurposed by the Americans. Today, left behind, are layers upon layers of medical, biological and chemical waste that will likely never be cleaned up.
From the first post-9/11 airstrikes aimed at the Taliban and al Qaeda in 2001 through the Pentagon’s chaotic withdrawal from the country two decades later, the U.S. military dropped over 85,000 bombs on Afghanistan. Most of these contained an explosive called RDX, which can affect the nervous system and is determined to be a possible human carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Attributing specific illnesses to contamination in the air, water and soil is often extremely difficult, but villagers who lived in close proximity to major U.S. bases — and the Afghan doctors and public health officials who treated them — say the Pentagon’s unwillingness to employ even minimal environmental protections caused serious kidney, cardiopulmonary, gastrointestinal and skin ailments, congenital anomalies and multiple types of cancer."