Science 2.0

We now know that during the last election, a worldwide pandemic was also manipulated culturally for political gain. Just like in 2008, Democrats were early adopters with new tactics, viral internet campaigns, reneging on a promise to obey McCain-Feingold campaign finance rules so they could outspend Republicans 2:1, etc. 

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As I am waiting in Prague airport for my flight back home, after a few days spent discussing the options of the SWGO collaboration for the detectors we are going to build, I came across (through compulsive scrolling on twitter) a thread that caught my attention. It was about emails to academics on PhD openings. Since I found the discussion there a bit too forgiving on the academics, I wish to express my position here - possibly in a less toxic environment.

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A new analysis found an increasing trend in psychotropic medication dispensation for Swedish children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes. The results from from 2006 to 2019 showed consistent higher use than kids without type 1 diabetes. 

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Last week I received in my mailbox a copy of the Princeton University Press book "Machine Learning for Physics and Astronomy" by Viviana Acquaviva. They sent me a copy because I had reviewed its contents for Princeton Press.


I am happy with the book. When I accepted to review it, I was a bit hesitant because I am not a computer scientist. I might pass as an expert in machine learning because after all I have been developing such tools for 20 years now (or maybe I should say over 30, as my first attempt was in 1992, with a bootstrap-powered classification method), but I feel I still lack knowledge in some of the theoretical underpinnings, and there are holes in my knowledge base. 

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FDA has amended the emergency use authorization of the Novavax COVID-19 Vaccine, Adjuvanted for use in individuals 12 years of age and older to include the spike protein from the SARS-CoV-2 omicron variant lineage XBB.1.5.

That's a lot of letters but, just like the flu, if you have one of the big five co-morbidities, get it.

If you never had the prior vaccine, this will be two shots, three weeks apart. 

Spending on mental health for teens and younger rose by 26 percent from March 2020 to August 2022 - but it may be even higher because the analysis only saw families with employer-provided insurance from one group, Castlight Health, which managers employer-sponsored health insurance plans for about 200 companies. 

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When you get in that expensive electric car, you are exposing your age, gender, social security number, religious beliefs, marital status, your race, if you are a citizen, even if you have a disability. Tesla says they don't sell your information to outside companies but they were also busted for sharing videos of customers internally, including kids, including nudity, so it's not secure.

I am not just picking on electric cars, though they are a nationally-subsidized grift so they should at least be stealing from us less after the sale. Virtually any car made since 2006 uses its sensors, microphones, cameras, bluetooth, and vehicle telematics to spy on you and harvest everything it is allowed.

And it is allowed a lot. Because you said they could. 

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Health care in America is broken and the chief reason is the government. In 2009, when Obamacare became part of the President's agenda, I said we should just write out the check for trillions of dollars and nationalize the industry. My reasoning was that anything else would mean we have worse access and much higher cost.

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Bad faith science, outright modifying language to highlight benefit or harm for effect, is not new.

It's long been common in claims about food and chemicals - glyphosate in breast milk, endocrine disruption homeopathy beliefs, annual fad diets etc. - but because journalists will state anything authoritatively if it comes from a journal, it's even become common in claims about climate change and COVID-19.

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When it comes to denying science, California leads America, and sometimes the world. In early 2020, for example, when the President of the US said to cut travel from China due to SARS-CoV-2, Governor Newsom said he was xenophobic and racist and that since the World Health Organisation denied it was a pandemic, he was opposed to science also.

Prior to that it was a state where we had to hammer the legislature for 10 straight years to eliminate arbitrary exemptions from vaccines, because California schools on the coast had more unvaccinated kids than the rest of the US combined. Prior to that, they tried to ban modern agriculture, along with Happy Meals and Golf.

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Since the introduction of ‘dual treatment’ drugs, survival rates for men with metastatic prostate cancer have increased by an average of six months, according to National Prostate Cancer Register data of all Swedish men diagnosed between 2008 and 2020.

Dual treatment means that patients receive both standard hormone therapy (GnRH therapy) and chemotherapy or androgen receptor blockers. Research has previously shown that men receiving this treatment live approximately one year longer than those receiving GnRH treatment alone.

The results showed that in 2020 40 percent received dual treatment. The average survival rate among these men increased from 2.7 between 2008 and 2012 to 3.2 years in 2017–2020; equivalent to an increase of about six months.

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Today, elites like Robert Downey Jr. virtue signal their wealth by taking pristine older restored cars and paying to have them ripped apart so they run on vegetable oil. In the future, it may mean simply having an air conditioner.

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At the Hilazon Tachtit cave site, before it was Israel, before King David even fought the Philistines, the area north of Nazareth and west of the Sea of Galilee was populated by Natufians, an early settled people, and in 2008 archaeologists revealed details of a burial site unlike any other found in the Natufian period or the Paleolithic before it - instead of a mass grave, like those remains found nearby, it was a lone woman.

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If you have been in science media for any period of time, you have seen a predictable pattern; epidemiologists look through columns and rows of foods people claim they eat and diseases or lack thereof and if they get enough to declare "statistical significance" they write a paper noting down at the bottom that they can't show a causal relationship but then send press releases to New York Times journalists who believe in acupuncture absolutely suggesting causation.

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Both Neanderthal and early modern humans used birch tar - the first time in known history that a new material came into use.

Coming up with it is one thing, but finding a way to scale it is more challenging.

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Having spent the past 12 months coding up an end-to-end model of an astrophysics experiment, with the sole aim of searching for an optimal solution for its design by use of stochastic gradient descent, I am the least qualified person to judge the aesthetic value of the results I am finally getting from it. 
Therefore it makes sense to ask you, dear reader, what you think of the eerily arcane geometries that the system is proposing. I do not think that to be a good judge you need to know the details of how the model is put together, but I will nevertheless make an attempt at brief you about it, just in case it makes a difference in your judgment.

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Do you take fish oil supplements, believing they are boosting your brain power? A lot of people do, but they are a placebo; another in a long chain of Miracle Foods created by epidemiologists when they aren't using suspect statistical correlation to create Scary Chemical claims.

Yet journalists at places the New York Times and Washington Post love to create false balance by 'suggesting' epidemiologists are doing science - their work is in the EXPLORATORY pile, like with all computer models, mouse experiments, and findings from cells in Petri dishes.(1)

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Light is the most famous thing that is two distinct entities at once - a wave and a particle - but glass is nearly as mysterious. And not well understood.

We think of glass as being transparent and rigid, is a complex and intriguing material but that is only when cooled and its dynamics slow down significantly. This process, known as “glass transition”, is due to "dynamical heterogeneities," where the dynamics become increasingly correlated and intermittent as the liquid cools down and approaches the glass transition temperature.

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, chewing gum had a bit of a resurgence. Though gum companies disavow any health benefits - they like being in the candy aisle - people have always used it off-label for various benefits and did so to generate a response against possible virus exposures.  People have always had habits they like. If have a cold, for example, I like to eat a cheese sandwich. If I get nausea, I chew gum.

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The Victorian government, like many governments around the world, has announced new regulations on short-stay accommodation. The government says Victoria has more than 36,000 short-stay places, which are reducing the number of homes available for long-term rental.

Other states have capped the number of nights a dwelling can be used for short-stay accommodation. The Victorian response has been to introduce a levy set at 7.5% of the short-stay platform’s revenue.

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