Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

🚨 Doug Ford killed the Science Centre but made a mistake: he forgot to hide the engineering report he’s using as an excuse.

Read it: https://www.infrastructureontario.ca/en/news-and-media/third-party-reports/

What does it say? Alex Bozokovic in the Globe: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/art-and-architecture/article-doug-ford-killed-the-ontario-science-centre/

“report does not say [immediate roof replacement] …replaced over a 10-year period, and all “high risk” and “critical risk” areas be reinforced and replaced before Oct. 31. Those areas [in 🔵blue & 🔴red] make up 7%, 6% and 3% of the centre’s 3 buildings”

#ONPoli

Wild that the #CDC can acknowledge long covid while denying #LongCovid at the same time.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/long-covid.htm

Extremely concerning data revealed by citizen science in waterways quality- incredible that post brexit rivers etc tested once per 3y instead of annually by environment agency and notably goals for proportion clean waters ⬇️ 🧪🌍 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/24/citizen-testing-rivers-britain-poor-ecological-health-pollution?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

There is a new lab at @Radboud_uni town: The Human Media Lab is our new multidisciplinary lab in human-computer interaction headed by Roel Vertegaal.

https://HumanMediaLab.org

'Displaced Syrian doctors train medical software that helps diagnose prostate cancer in Britain. Out-of-work college graduates in recession-hit Venezuela categorize fashion products for e-commerce sites. Impoverished women in Kolkata’s Metiabruz, a poor Muslim neighborhood, have labelled voice clips for Amazon’s Echo speaker. Their work couches a badly kept secret about so-called artificial intelligence systems—that the technology does not ‘learn’ independently, and it needs humans, millions of them, to power it. Data workers are the invaluable human links in the global AI supply chain.'
https://lithub.com/how-vulnerable-low-wage-workers-power-ai-algorithms/

Which begs the question... if Artificial Intelligence is causing so much havoc, is it intelligent?
If it isn't, it's just as we suspected. It's just... Artificial.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-ai-data-centers-power-grids/?accessToken=eyJh[%E2%80%A6]OEEwQjkzQzdGMiJ9.-P7yra8PL0AyX8jyTPjLw2iYHSh7QFnVtdFN4SzhyAc&leadSource=uverify%20wall
#AI

@cyrilpedia

As you probably know, we use word doc for our notebooks saved on a networked location.

Printing should happen monthly, spot-checks of the digital copy are incorporated into our workflow.

When someone shows me their data, they have to show the digital copy.

I spot check the hard copies the first week or so of the month, so people know its coming.

"Construction just began for the first high-speed rail line, which will connect LA and Las Vegas and reach 200mph. And it’s being built by 11,000 union workers."

Note the part about training lots of apprentices to expand America's ability to build more high speed rail faster.

Inside America’s First High Speed Rail
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUBy5PwJbKQ

@MorePerfectUnion

A very large number of the student applications I’m reading this year were written using AI. It’s so easy to see. Not least because the human-written ones are hugely noticeable by contrast. This is very demoralising and infuriating. Auto-writing your text (as opposed to simply correcting it) actually obscures how you think and talk, and therefore how suitable you are for an education program. And it makes you sound like everyone else using an AI. Don’t do it.

Europe is in the middle of a ‘greenlash.’ If Canada doesn’t put workers first in its green transition, we could be next #JustTransition #Canada #Europe #FarRight #populism #cdnpoli #GreenTransition
https://www.hilltimes.com/story/2024/06/19/europe-is-in-the-middle-of-a-greenlash-if-canada-doesnt-put-workers-first-in-its-green-transition-we-could-be-next/425656/

More than 500,000 books have been removed from the Internet Archive's lending library due to the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit, including more than 1,300 banned and challenged titles. 📚 Our patrons have shared powerful stories about how this loss has impacted them, and we need your help to make a change.

Sign our open letter to the publishers urging them to restore access to these books. 📖✍️ #LetReadersRead

👉 https://blog.archive.org/2024/06/17/let-readers-read/

'Arguably, communication-related problems impact all interdisciplinary research teams. Communication with differently trained people, including the uninitiated, is possible, but can fall victim to misunderstandings that are born out of the unwarranted assumption that we all speak the same language, when, in fact, we speak that language in ways that are discipline-specific.'
https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.1038/s44319-024-00173-y

'But if you pick fruit in a field, walk door to door delivering packages, stack boxes in an oppressively hot warehouse or do any number of other jobs without air-conditioning, you don’t have much legal protection against working under sweltering conditions.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/opinion/heat-wave-workers-climate.html

'At every one of the magazines I edited myself for the next four decades, the goal was to get Martin to write for me. And, loyally, he did. Whenever his copy arrived, it was Christmas Day in the office: so eagerly awaited, never a disappointment. Remember his unforgettable profile of Truman Capote? It appeared in one of my first issues of Tatler. “Never mind the interview. Let’s call an ambulance,” Martin wrote, on first sighting the ruined literary genius. “Or I can take him there in my briefcase, I thought, as I contemplated the childish, barefoot, nightshirted figure.” Who writes profiles like that today?'

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jun/10/martin-amis-tina-brown-memorial-service-novelist

'Science works slowly—for instance, it took years to understand the origin of HIV-1 in chimpanzees—and the arduous process of scientific discovery is being weaponized here to promote conspiracy theories and sinister motives without evidence to back them up.'
#Covid #Covid19 #SciComm
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/nyt-covid-opinion-coverage/

'The job of the P.B.M.s is to reduce drug costs. Instead, they frequently do the opposite. They steer patients toward pricier drugs, charge steep markups on what would otherwise be inexpensive medicines and extract billions of dollars in hidden fees, a New York Times investigation found.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/business/prescription-drug-costs-pbm.html

'David Rind, chief medical officer of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, an influential non-profit that assesses drug prices, wrote last month that it came with “an enormous price tag” despite failing its primary endpoint as measured by a motor function test.'

https://www.ft.com/content/d5a1f476-56e9-42c9-b029-cde1e11fa89e

'How can we make sense of the fact that animal studies and early clinical trials seem to show promise, yet there is very limited official approval for these therapies? There are 2 possible explanations: One scenario is that the strict requirements of RCTs and regulatory approval are causing many potentially valuable treatments to be left behind. The other scenario is that both animal studies and early clinical trials may have limitations in their design, such as a lack of proper randomization and blinding, which affects their internal validity'

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002667#sec027