Mutant Coronavirus in the United Kingdom Sets Off Alarms

On 8 December, during a regular Tuesday meeting about the spread of the pandemic coronavirus in the United Kingdom, scientists and public health experts saw a diagram that made them sit up straight. Kent, in the southeast of England, was experiencing a surge in cases, and a phylogenetic tree showing viral sequences from the county looked very strange, says Nick Loman, a microbial genomicist at the University of Birmingham. Not only were half the cases caused by one specific variant of SARS-CoV-2, but that variant was sitting on a branch of the tree that literally stuck out from the rest of the data. “I've not seen a part of the tree that looks like this before,” Loman says.

Less than 2 weeks later, that variant is causing mayhem in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. Yesterday, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced stricter lockdown measures, saying the strain, which goes by the name B.1.1.7, appears to be better at spreading between people. The news led many Londoners to leave the city today, before the new rules take effect, causing overcrowded railway stations. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy announced they were temporarily halting passenger flights from the United Kingdom. The Eurostar train between Brussels and London will stop running tonight at midnight, for at least 24 hours.

Scientists, meanwhile, are hard at work trying to figure out whether B.1.1.7 is really more adept at human-to-human transmission—not everyone is convinced yet—and if so, why. They’re also wondering how it evolved so fast. B.1.1.7 has acquired 17 mutations all at once, a feat never seen before. “There's now a frantic push to try and characterize some of these mutations in the lab,” says Andrew Rambaut, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh.

Too many unknowns

Researchers have watched SARS-CoV-2 evolve in real time more closely than any other virus in history. So far, it has accumulated mutations at a rate of about one to two changes per month. That means many of the genomes sequenced today differ at about 20 points from the earliest genomes sequenced in China in January, but many variants with fewer changes are also circulating. “Because we have very dense surveillance of genomes, you can almost see every step,” Loman says.

But scientists have never seen the virus acquire more than a dozen mutations seemingly at once. They think it happened during a long infection of a single patient that allowed SARS-CoV-2 to go through an extended period of fast evolution, with multiple variants competing for advantage.

One reason to be concerned, Rambaut says, is that among the 17 mutations are eight in the gene that encodes the spike protein on the viral surface, two of which are particularly worrisome. One, called N501Y, has previously been shown to increase how tightly the protein binds to the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptor, its entry point into human cells. The other, named 69-70del, leads to the loss of two amino acids in the spike protein and has been found in viruses that eluded the immune response in some immunocompromised patients. (...)

In a press conference on Saturday, chief science adviser Patrick Vallance said that B.1.1.7, which first appeared in a virus isolated on 20 September, accounted for about 26% of cases in mid-November. “By the week commencing the ninth of December, these figures were much higher,” he said. “So, in London, over 60% of all the cases were the new variant.” Johnson added that the slew of mutations may have increased the virus’s transmissibility by 70%.

by Kai Kupferschmidt, Science | Read more:
Image: Stefan Rousseau/PA via AP Images

[ed. Uh, oh. See also: here and here (Bloomberg). Also: How The Hell Do We Deal With The Virus Mutating? (Sergey Alexashenko, Substack; and, What We Know About The New U.K. Variant Of Coronavirus — And What We Need To Find Out (NPR).]

Congress to Ban Surprise Medical Billing

After years of being stymied by well-funded interests, Congress has agreed to ban one of the most costly and exasperating practices in medicine: surprise medical bills.

Surprise bills happen when an out-of-network provider is unexpectedly involved in a patient’s care. Patients go to a hospital that accepts their insurance, for example, but get treated there by an emergency room physician who doesn’t. Such doctors often bill those patients for large fees, far higher than what health plans typically pay.

Language included in the $900 billion spending deal reached Sunday night and headed for final passage on Monday will make those bills illegal. Instead of charging patients, health providers will now have to work with insurers to settle on a fair price. The new changes will take effect in 2022, and will apply to doctors, hospitals and air ambulances, though not ground ambulances.

Academic researchers have found that millions of Americans receive these types of surprise bills each year, with as many as one in five emergency room visits resulting in such a charge. The bills most commonly come from health providers that patients are not able to select, such as emergency room physicians, anesthesiologists and ambulances. The average surprise charge for an emergency room visit is just above $600, but patients have received bills larger than $100,000 from out-of-network providers they did not select.

Some private-equity firms have turned this kind of billing into a robust business model, buying emergency room doctor groups and moving the providers out of network so they could bill larger fees. (...)

A survey published Friday by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 80 percent of adults want the practice banned. More than a dozen states, including Texas and California, have passed bans of their own on surprise billing.

Even so, the issue struggled to move through Congress as each policy proposal faced an outcry from some faction of the health care industry.

“There were a lot of things working in the legislation’s favor — it’s a relatively targeted problem, it resonates very well with voters, and it’s not a hyperpartisan issue among voters or Congress — and it was still tough,” said Benedic Ippolito, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who helped explain the issue to lawmakers early in the process. “It has almost everything going for it, and yet it was still this complete slog.”

Hospitals and doctors, who tend to benefit from the current system, fought to defeat solutions that would lower their pay. Insurance companies and large employer groups, on the other hand, have wanted a stronger ability to negotiate lower payments to the types of medical providers who can currently send patients surprise bills.

Legislation nearly passed last December, but was scuttled at the 11th hour after health providers lobbied aggressively against the deal. Private-equity firms, which own many of the medical providers that deliver surprise bills, poured tens of millions into advertisements opposing the plan. Committee chairs squabbled over jurisdictional issues and postponed the issue.

This year, many of the same legislators behind last year’s failed effort tried again, softening several provisions that had been most objectionable to influential doctor and hospital lobbies. The current version will probably not do as much to lower health care spending as the previous version, but will still protect patients.

After years of defeats, consumer advocacy groups cheered the new legislation.

by Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Anna Moneymaker

[ed. Give it a couple years, we'll see. See also: Why Ambulances Are Exempt From the Surprise-Billing Ban (NYT).]

Shark Bite Forensics

10 days ago, surfer Robin Warren was bitten by a shark in Honolua Bay. The 56-year-old died of his injuries the next day.

“I feel like when you lose somebody like that, you generally want to know as much information about the situation as you can,” Derek Kraft, of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. “So, this at least lets us give them the fullest picture to our ability.”

Researchers with the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology were able to extract DNA from mucus that the shark left behind on Warren’s surfboard. They entered it into a database to pinpoint the species.

“It tells you the percentage match to the reference samples, and we got 100% match on several, several hits,” Kraft said. “So it’s a tiger shark. If it was another species, that’s what the database would have shown.”

“These are powerful tools and they can take a very, very small amount of DNA and them amplify that so that we can get a result,” added Dr. Carl Meyers, who works at the same facility.

A second test measured the size of the bite mark. From that, researchers determined the creature was a whopping 14.3 feet.

“One of the witnesses said that the tail was four feet long, and in my mind was like, ‘Wow, that’s a big tail,’” said Adam Wong, a DAR Education Specialist. “And I asked Carl if it’s possible for a 14-foot shark to have a four foot tail, you know?”

The team can confirm the exact species & size, but it would take a more complicated test called DNA fingerprinting to possibly find the exact shark involved in the attack.

“They have used this technology with bears actually, up in Alaska,” Kraft said. “When there’s bear attacks on people. So the technology exists. We just haven’t applied it to sharks yet.”

by Mark Carpenter, Hawaii News Now |  Read more:

Image: HNN

Why mRNA Vaccines Could Revolutionise Medicine

Almost 60 years ago, in February 1961, two teams of scientists stumbled on a discovery at the same time. Sydney Brenner in Cambridge and Jim Watson at Harvard independently spotted that genes send short-lived RNA copies of themselves to little machines called ribosomes where they are translated into proteins. ‘Sydney got most of the credit, but I don’t mind,’ Watson sighed last week when I asked him about it. They had solved a puzzle that had held up genetics for almost a decade. The short-lived copies came to be called messenger RNAs — mRNAs – and suddenly they now promise a spectacular revolution in medicine.

The first Covid-19 vaccine given to British people this month is not just a welcome breakthrough against a grim little enemy that has defied every other weapon we have tried, from handwashing to remdesivir and lockdowns. It is also the harbinger of a new approach to medicine altogether. Synthetic messengers that reprogram our cells to mount an immune response to almost any invader, including perhaps cancer, can now be rapidly and cheaply made.

Katalin Karikó — the Hungarian-born scientist who doggedly pursued the idea behind this kind of medication for decades at the University of Pennsylvania before joining BioNTech — and her collaborator Drew Weissman may be the Watson and Brenner of this story. They figured out 15 years ago how to send a message in a bubble into a cell and have it read. For years they had tried putting in normal RNA and found it did not work; the body spotted it was an alien and destroyed it.

But by subtly modifying one of the four letters in the message (replacing uridine with pseudouridine, a chemical found in some RNAs in the body anyway), they made a version that escaped the attention of the cell’s MI5 agents. Further refinements five years ago produced a recipe that worked reliably when delivered to cells inside a tiny oily bubble. The pandemic is the first time the technique has been tried in anger, and it worked: the first two Covid vaccines, BioNTech’s and Moderna’s, rely on these messengers.

The message tells the cell to make part of one of the virus’s proteins which then alerts the body’s immune system. Once invented, the thing is like a general-purpose vaccine. You simply rewrite the message between the same opening and closing sequences, put it in the same kind of bubble, and fire it off — almost as easy for genetic engineers these days as writing a text is for teenagers. It is faster, cheaper, safer and simpler than the old ways of making vaccines.

More conventional vaccine designs may still make a vital contribution to defeating the pandemic, Oxford’s included. And the messenger method has its drawbacks, such as the need for extreme cold storage. But in the long run, messengers probably represent the future of vaccines. Now the principle has been approved by regulators, there may be no need to go through the same laborious and expensive three-phase clinical trials every time. Faced with a truly lethal pandemic — with a 10 per cent mortality rate, say — the vanishingly small likelihood that a new messenger vaccine would be unsafe pales into insignificance. You could deploy it in weeks or days.

What is more, at the cost of a few billion dollars, the world may now be able to build a library of messenger vaccines for every plausible coronavirus and influenza virus with pandemic potential we can find, test them in animals and store the recipes on a hard disk, ready to go at a moment’s notice. Moderna’s vaccine was first synthesised in mid-January, before we even knew the coronavirus was coming out of China.

by Matt Ridley, The Spectator |  Read more:

Image: iStock

[ed. See also: Politics, Science and the Remarkable Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine (NYT).]

Barry Lopez on the Wolf Biologist Who Changed His Life as an Environmentalist

In the fall of 1975 I read a scientific report that made me sit up straight in my chair. It was entitled “The Eskimo Hunter’s View of Wolf Ecology and Behavior” and appeared in a peer-reviewed volume of technical papers called The Wild Canids, edited by Michael Fox. At the time I was in the middle of researching a book about wolves, so I read carefully every paper in Fox’s book. The one I regarded as a watershed statement was co-authored by Bob Stephenson and a Nunamiut Eskimo hunter from the central Brooks Range named Bob Ahgook.

In the early 1970s, the notion that indigenous peoples had anything of substance to offer Western science about wild animals, any important contribution to make to the overall study of wildlife, was either scoffed at by professionals in wildlife science or gently dismissed because the indigenous information, purportedly, “lacked rigor.” The report by Stephenson and Ahgook flew directly in the face of this idea. In my mind, their observations on wolf behavior were far and away the most interesting in Fox’s volume, though few recognized the revolutionary nature of this piece back then.

From the beginning of the colonization of the New World, Western science has had an ingrained, cultural prejudice against the validity of what indigenous people know about wild animals, about what they have learned during their centuries of living with them in the same environment. Their observations on social dynamics, cooperative hunting, ecology, neo-natal behavior, and diet were considered “contaminated” by folk belief or to have been based too often on anecdotal evidence alone.

Immediately after reading the Stephenson/Ahgook paper I wrote to Stephenson, a wolf biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G), and asked if I could fly up to Fairbanks to speak with him. I’d not yet come across his perspective in the literature on wolves but very much wanted to listen to what he had to say, both about wolves and about his interactions with the Nunamiut. I arrived in Fairbanks in March 1976, which was late winter in interior Alaska. Bob picked me up at the airport and offered me a bed at his cabin outside the city, in Goldstream Valley. Three days later I was sitting next to him in the back seat of a Bell 206 JetRanger, a four-passenger helicopter, flying across Nelchina Basin, in the drainage of the Susitna River south of the Alaska Range. We were looking for wolves to radio collar. (...)

In June of 1979, Bob and I journeyed up to Anaktuvuk Pass—a village of just 110 people back then—where I finally met Bob Ahgook, Justus Mekiana, and some of the other hunters Bob had worked with in the early seventies. The afternoon our plane landed there, nearly every woman in the village rushed down to the airstrip to greet Bob. Some years before this, after Bob started living sporadically at Anaktuvuk in a sod house he purchased from Justus, a flu swept through the settlement. Bob nursed dozens of people through this epidemic, emptying honey buckets, changing and washing bed linen, and cooking meals. The senior women in particular never forgot his courtesy and allegiance.

I listened in on his conversations with the hunters during our time in Anaktuvuk as they caught up with each other’s lives. The regard in which they held Bob was obvious. Relations between ADF&G personnel and indigenous hunters in many of the villages back then were less than friendly. Bob, however, had not originally come to the village to lecture people about adhering to state hunting regulations; he’d come to hear what the local hunters had to say. He was eager to get their insights into the nature of amaguk, the wolf, especially about the parts of its life that had not yet made it into the professional journals. No wonder, when he initially approached them about it, they had welcomed him to travel with them as they set out in early summer to look for wolf dens.

Beyond his own empathetic personality, his obvious lack of racial prejudice, and his respect for people with backgrounds very different from his own, Bob had a sharp sense of humor. One day when we were all sitting around telling stories, especially about wolverines as I remember, Bob told a story about an arrogant man and his humiliating comeuppance. The Nunamiut men roared at the well-delivered punchline. One leaned so far sideways on his stool he fell over. Another man nearly spit his dentures.

Bob helped pioneer something new and unprecedented in Western wildlife science— the inclusion of traditional indigenous knowledge (TIK) in peer-reviewed wildlife publications. (There were a few others in the Fairbanks office of ADF&G at the time who sought out indigenous knowledge and gave it equal standing with Western-based knowledge. I think immediately of two marine mammalogists, John Burns and Bud Fay, and of Kathy Frost and Lloyd Lowry, both of whom I worked with later when I was researching another book, Arctic Dreams; but the road to advancing mutual cultural respect in Alaska was to be long and hard.)

On that first trip with Bob, to radio collar wolves in Nelchina Basin, I saw first-hand an exhibition of the knowledge Bob had acquired by choosing to turn first to the Nunamiut instead of investing his allotted ADF&G funds in flying aerial surveys. (He had been charged by ADF&G with learning how the Alyeska pipeline might be affecting the lives of wolves. He believed he’d learn much more by traveling with Nunamiut hunters first, questioning them about wolf behavior in general, before setting off to study wolves along the pipeline corridor.) One day we spotted a wolf trail in Nelchina Basin—seven wolves walking single-file across a frozen, snow-covered lake. They were more than a mile ahead of us when we sighted them nearing the edge of the taiga; when they heard the helicopter approaching, they bolted. We caught up with a group of three. Bob was able to dart two, one of whom entered a dense copse of trees before going down. As we got out of the helicopter in knee-deep snow, Bob said, “Female. Maybe six or seven.” In my naive way I jokingly said, “Oh, come on. You can’t sex and age that animal at this distance.”

“Well,” he answered. “That’s what those guys taught me to do, anyway.”

by Barry Lopez, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Barry Lopez on the Life of a True Naturalist (Richard Nelson) in Raven’s Witness: The Alaska Life of Richard K. Nelson by Hank Lentfer. At the time I started at ADF&G Jack Lentfer was one of the world's leading polar bear experts (I don't know if this is his son). I just missed meeting Nelson a few times out in the villages.]

Wuhan, China

People play with toy guns outside a bar at night, almost a year after the global outbreak of the coronavirus disease. Nightlife in Wuhan is back in full swing almost seven months after the city lifted its stringent lockdown and the city’s young partygoers are embracing the catharsis. In scenes unimaginable in many cities around the world reeling under a resurgence of the pandemic, young Wuhan residents during a recent night out crowd-surfed, ate street food and packed the city’s nightclubs as they looked to make up for lost time.
via:
Image: Aly Song/Reuters

[ed. See also: here and here (NPR).]

Fandango

[ed. An all time favorite. Music: Pat Metheny Group (with Lyle Mays). See also: It's for You. and this.]

Can We Do Twice as Many Vaccinations as We Thought?

It’s been a very good month for Covid-19 vaccines. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration provided an emergency authorization for a vaccine produced by Pfizer-BioNTech. On Thursday, an advisory committee recommended authorizing a vaccine by Moderna, and the F.D.A. is expected to authorize it soon.

These vaccines are a triumph. In large-scale trials with tens of thousands of participants, both demonstrated a stunning 95 percent efficacy in preventing Covid-19 — a number exceeding our best hopes.

Both vaccines are supposed to be administered in two doses, a prime and a booster, 21 days apart for Pfizer and 28 days for Moderna. However, in data provided to the F.D.A., there are clues for a tantalizing possibility: that even a single dose may provide significant levels of protection against the disease.

If that’s shown to be the case, this would be a game changer, allowing us to vaccinate up to twice the number of people and greatly alleviating the suffering not just in the United States, but also in countries where vaccine shortages may take years to resolve.

But to get there — to test this possibility — we must act fast and must quickly acquire more data.

For both vaccines, the sharp drop in disease in the vaccinated group started about 10 to 14 days after the first dose, before receiving the second. Moderna reported the initial dose to be 92.1 percent efficacious in preventing Covid-19 starting two weeks after the initial shot, when the immune system effects from the vaccine kick in, before the second injection on the 28th day

That raises the question of whether we should already be administrating only a single dose. But while the data is suggestive, it is also limited; important questions remain, and approval would require high standards and more trials.

First, the science. While the vaccine trials were designed to evaluate a two-dose regimen, some immunity might be acquired before a second dose is administered. We know, for instance, that a Covid-19 infection appears to yield protection for at least six months. While infections are not vaccinations, and while we need more data on this, it’s plausible that the immunity gained from a vaccination may turn out to be even stronger than what comes from an infection. The reason we do a second — booster — vaccination is that these later doses help to solidify immune memory, in part by giving extra training to the cells that produce antibodies, a process called affinity maturation. But this process begins with the single dose, and the evidence collected between the time of the first and second doses in tens of thousands of people in the Phase 3 trials suggests that the level of affinity maturation may provide enough protection to meet the standards we have set for vaccine approval during this pandemic even without the second dose.

While we know that the single dose can protect against disease, we don’t yet know how long this immune protection will last, and at what level. However, there is no rule that says that vaccines must be boosted within weeks of each other. For measles, the booster dose is given years after the first dose. If the booster dose could be given six months or a year after the first dose, while maintaining high efficacy before the second dose, that would allow twice as many people to get vaccinated between now and later next year, accelerating herd immunity — greatly helping end the crisis phase of the pandemic in the United States.

by Zeynep Tufekci and Michael Mina, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times

Tiger Woods, Playing Partner and Parent

Tiger Woods, Playing Partner and Parent (NY Times)

Image: Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press
[ed. Check out the swing video with Charlie and his dad. Like mirror images.]

Up to 3 Million Devices Infected by Malware-Laced Chrome and Edge Add-Ons

As many as 3 million people have been infected by Chrome and Edge browser extensions that steal personal data and redirect users to ad or phishing sites, a security firm said on Wednesday.

In all, researchers from Prague-based Avast said they found 28 extensions for the Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers that contained malware. The add-ons billed themselves as a way to download pictures, videos, or other content from sites including Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, and Spotify. At the time this post went live, some, but not all, of the malicious extensions remained available for download from Google and Microsoft.

Avast researchers found malicious code in the JavaScript-based extensions that allows them to download malware onto an infected computer. In a post, the researchers wrote:

Users have also reported that these extensions are manipulating their internet experience and redirecting them to other websites. Anytime a user clicks on a link, the extensions send information about the click to the attacker’s control server, which can optionally send a command to redirect the victim from the real link target to a new hijacked URL before later redirecting them to the actual website they wanted to visit. User’s privacy is compromised by this procedure since a log of all clicks is being sent to these third party intermediary websites. The actors also exfiltrate and collect the user’s birth dates, email addresses, and device information, including first sign in time, last login time, name of the device, operating system, used browser and its version, even IP addresses (which could be used to find the approximate geographical location history of the user).

The researchers don’t yet know if the extensions came with the malicious code preinstalled or if the developers waited for the extensions to gain a critical mass of users and only then pushed a malicious update. It’s also possible that legitimate developers created the add-ons and then unknowingly sold them to someone who intended to use them maliciously.

[ed. Keep reading for full list:] (...)

The list Avast provides in its blog post includes links to download locations for both Chrome and Edge. Anyone who has downloaded one of these add-ons should remove it immediately and run a virus scan.

by Dan Goodin, ArsTechnica |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. See also (on a national scale): U.S. Cyber Agency: Computer Hack Poses 'Grave Risk' (NPR).]

Katherine Bernhardt, Untitled 2020
via:

[ed. It's been that kind of year.]

A Response to the Demise of Universities

[ed. Based on this Dec 7 post on the demise of universities.]

Universities have become far more profit-oriented, and corrupted by administrative bloat and bullshit jobs (Graeber)/make-work (like “assessment” mandates), as well as by the customer service mentality of pleasing and placating students to the detriment of standards and solid education. There are plenty of books about various facets of academe, including satirical novels. The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed are useful, but there are plenty of silly articles there too, often written by well-intentioned administrators or English faculty. Parkinson’s Law and all his other insights should be rigorously imposed on the whole mess.

Standards have declined precipitously, which no one admits except curmudgeon tenured senior faculty. Grade inflation is a related problem. There is cheating and lack of study skills, lack of attention span, lack of discipline. A Harvard professor, Harvey Mansfield, has denounced grade inflation publicly, which is excellent, but most cannot do that. The high schools do not teach much, so students cannot handle college work, and there is a lot of partying and dysfunction and anxiety and superficial learning, often done in groups. The pseudoscientific obsession with metrics instead of the hard work of engagement and informed judgment means that student course evaluations (numbers) are important, and that corrupts the teacher-student relationship.

On tenure. Tenure can be legally revoked, but it is rare, and usually due to gross misconduct or something serious. Probably every college and university faculty handbook has a boilerplate section on emergency situations in which the administration can eliminate academic departments and lay off tenured faculty – this has happened. It has been rare up to now, but we will probably see more of it. The Medaille place mentioned in the post is a nothing school, but it is ominous.

Legally the university is a corporation, and you can usually find the faculty handbook on its website. Interesting reading. There are business/executive types on boards of trustees who don’t understand and/or don’t care about university customs and would love to eliminate all tenure. It is happening incrementally, with tenured faculty retirements being replaced with low-wage, contingent adjuncts, lecturers, “clinical” faculty, “assistant teaching professors”, and the like. Gigs instead of stable positions with the traditional ranks: assistant, associate, and full professor. In the UK a lecturer is a higher status than in the US system. Germany and France and Italy have their own systems. Of course, as you would expect, the Italian system (today) is the nuttiest, and unfortunately there is a lot of nepotism there, to the detriment of serious research and teaching. Italy gave us Vico and Eco and others though, so there’s that.

In my view, it is a massive, systemic fail of the faculty to not stand up to the bad decisions and greed of administrators and prevent a lot of this. Faculty governance is a pleasant myth, but faculty have lost a lot of ground over the decades. Some faculty are in denial and believe that what is customary will prevail. They do not understand the difference between custom and law. The faculty handbook is a ratified document, in force for making decisions.

Most faculty are cowards and careerists and sycophants who just want to be comfortable or gain status with peers, but this neglects the institution. They are politically inept, like the progressives (as Matt Stoller has observed). Most of them do not know how to get anything done. They do not understand power. It used to be that mediocre faculty tended to go into administration, but now there is an expanding administrative class that rules over the budget and faculty, and this is detrimental to the institution. Tenured faculty have not prevented the exponential growth in the use (exploitation) of adjuncts for undergraduate teaching. I say this as a person with a PhD from a public university that has had a unionized faculty for decades. It didn’t make much difference. My institution was the only one in the US charging tuition to PhD students teaching on its undergrad campuses – taking back money paid for teaching in the system (extremely low-paid, of course). This is one reason why I will never donate. (...)

One insidious practice I have seen is the notion of “collegiality” being a factor in tenure decisions. The traditional categories, usually weighted, are teaching, research, and service. People have been sabotaged and denied tenure due to collegiality issues, which can hide bullying and nasty dept politics or bigotry. There are legal cases about it. It is vague and subjective, and there is no way for it to be imposed fairly as a standard. 

by Erasmus, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Image: via

Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

The doomsday machine was never supposed to exist. It was meant to be a thought experiment that went like this: Imagine a device built with the sole purpose of destroying all human life. Now suppose that machine is buried deep underground, but connected to a computer, which is in turn hooked up to sensors in cities and towns across the United States.

The sensors are designed to sniff out signs of the impending apocalypse—not to prevent the end of the world, but to complete it. If radiation levels suggest nuclear explosions in, say, three American cities simultaneously, the sensors notify the Doomsday Machine, which is programmed to detonate several nuclear warheads in response. At that point, there is no going back. The fission chain reaction that produces an atomic explosion is initiated enough times over to extinguish all life on Earth. There is a terrible flash of light, a great booming sound, then a sustained roar. We have a word for the scale of destruction that the Doomsday Machine would unleash: megadeath.

Nobody is pining for megadeath. But megadeath is not the only thing that makes the Doomsday Machine petrifying. The real terror is in its autonomy, this idea that it would be programmed to detect a series of environmental inputs, then to act, without human interference. “There is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision,” wrote the military strategist Herman Kahn in his 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War, which laid out the hypothetical for a Doomsday Machine. The concept was to render nuclear war unwinnable, and therefore unthinkable.

Kahn concluded that automating the extinction of all life on Earth would be immoral. Even an infinitesimal risk of error is too great to justify the Doomsday Machine’s existence. “And even if we give up the computer and make the Doomsday Machine reliably controllable by decision makers,” Kahn wrote, “it is still not controllable enough.” No machine should be that powerful by itself—but no one person should be either.

The Soviets really did make a version of the Doomsday Machine during the Cold War. They nicknamed it “Dead Hand.” But so far, somewhat miraculously, we have figured out how to live with the bomb. Now we need to learn how to survive the social web.

People tend to complain about Facebook as if something recently curdled. There’s a notion that the social web was once useful, or at least that it could have been good, if only we had pulled a few levers: some moderation and fact-checking here, a bit of regulation there, perhaps a federal antitrust lawsuit. But that’s far too sunny and shortsighted a view. Today’s social networks, Facebook chief among them, were built to encourage the things that make them so harmful. It is in their very architecture.

I’ve been thinking for years about what it would take to make the social web magical in all the right ways—less extreme, less toxic, more true—and I realized only recently that I’ve been thinking far too narrowly about the problem. I’ve long wanted Mark Zuckerberg to admit that Facebook is a media company, to take responsibility for the informational environment he created in the same way that the editor of a magazine would. (I pressed him on this once and he laughed.) In recent years, as Facebook’s mistakes have compounded and its reputation has tanked, it has become clear that negligence is only part of the problem. No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made. I’ve come to realize that Facebook is not a media company. It’s a Doomsday Machine.

The social web is doing exactly what it was built for. Facebook does not exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its existence. The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning. The rise of QAnon, for example, is one of the social web’s logical conclusions. That’s because Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences. Facebook is an agent of government propaganda, targeted harassment, terrorist recruitment, emotional manipulation, and genocide—a world-historic weapon that lives not underground, but in a Disneyland-inspired campus in Menlo Park, California.

The giants of the social web—Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram; Google and its subsidiary YouTube; and, to a lesser extent, Twitter—have achieved success by being dogmatically value-neutral in their pursuit of what I’ll call megascale. Somewhere along the way, Facebook decided that it needed not just a very large user base, but a tremendous one, unprecedented in size. That decision set Facebook on a path to escape velocity, to a tipping point where it can harm society just by existing.

Limitations to the Doomsday Machine comparison are obvious: Facebook cannot in an instant reduce a city to ruins the way a nuclear bomb can. And whereas the Doomsday Machine was conceived of as a world-ending device so as to forestall the end of the world, Facebook started because a semi-inebriated Harvard undergrad was bored one night. But the stakes are still life-and-death. Megascale is nearly the existential threat that megadeath is. No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.

by Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Adam Maida

[ed. See also: We’re Never Going Back to the 1950s (Atlantic).]

Whale Jail

When Pushki was brought to his new home on 12 November, he was scared, dangerously skinny and severely dehydrated. The two-week-old sea otter pup had been found crying on the beach in Homer, Alaska, seemingly having been separated from his mother. He needed help, fast.

Now, nearly a month later, he’s running the show at the Alaska SeaLife Center (ASLC), an aquatic rehabilitation, scientific research and education facility in Seward, Alaska. The young sea otter, whose name captures his mischievous spirit (Pushki is another name for the Alaskan plant known as a cow parsnip, which can sometimes cause burns), has been keeping his veterinary team busy with his playful baby antics.

“He’s incredibly lucky to have this second chance at life,” said Lisa Hartman, the ASLC husbandry director. “If we weren’t here, he likely wouldn’t be either.”

But earlier this year, the research center seemed like the one in trouble. The ASLC is the only facility in the state that rehabilitates aquatic animals, and has a zoo and aquarium that are open to the public; in a normal summer, the center sees more than 160,000 visitors, largely from out of state. This year – because the vast majority of Alaska’s summer tourists come in on cruise ships, all of which were canceled due to the pandemic – it saw only a fourth of it normal numbers.

The future of the 22-year-old center – and the more than 4,000 creatures it houses – appeared uncertain. On 13 July, the ASLC announced they would be forced to close permanently unless they were able to raise $2m by the end of September.

Their plea resonated: by 1 October they had raised $4m, over half of which came from individual donors. Tara Riemer, CEO and president, said while they’re not yet operating at their prior level, at least they will remain open and be able to continue caring for their animals and conducting important research through the winter.

With several species of seals, a few sea lions, myriad fish and an assortment of marine birds, the ASLC has made a name for itself as a bustling aquarium in small-town Seward (population: 2,700). But it also punches well above its weight in the global conservation and science arenas.

The animals cared for at the center – some of which, like Pushki, have just been rescued and others which have been living there for much longer – have helped inform the greater aquatic and arctic research.

One of the center’s newest studies is looking at ice seals, who historically haven’t been studied as rigorously by the scientific community as some of their aquatic peers. Studying the seals, as the ice they reside on melts due to global warming, helps give researchers an understanding of “what’s happening with our environment and our ecosystems in real time”, according to Hartman.

“We’ve been able to gather information that nobody else has been able to gather before,” said Hartman.

by Bailey Berg, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Bailey Berg
[ed. Puff piece (with obligatory sea otter). Sounds great, right? What the article doesn't mention is that the Seward SeaLife Center was funded mostly by Exxon Valdez oil spill settlement monies (to the tune of approximately $38 million), as a sop to the City of Seward and Southcentral Alaska tourism industry. Widely derided as a "Whale Jail" at the time it was approved, it has never contributed greatly to marine research, especially for ice seals (see papers by J.J. Burns, Lloyd Lowry, Kathy Frost, Bob Nelson et al - AK Dept. of Fish and Game - for that). In fact, one might reasonably ask why it's involved in research outside the EVOS spill area at all, given the focus of settlement funds, which were to be used to restore injured resources within the oil spill impacted area. Ackk.]

Victor Burgin, In Lyon 1980

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Needles Rain From Ceiling Of FDA Headquarters In Celebration Of Vaccine Approval

via: The Onion

Image: uncredited

Lobbyists Mobilize for Priority Access to Coronavirus Vaccine

Industry lobbyists, representing everyone from pesticide manufacturers to factory farms and aquarium and zoo operators, are pushing regulators to allow their workers to jump the line for the coronavirus vaccine.

A coronavirus vaccine, one of which could be cleared for use as early as today, is set to be distributed first to those in health care facilities, essential workers, and individuals most vulnerable to the virus. This has set off an influence blitz as various industry groups petition the government for inclusion on the list of professions most crucial to keeping the country running.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, through a panel known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, has established a framework for individuals to receive the first available doses of approved Covid-19 vaccines. The framework is nonbinding but expected to shape state agencies and other institutions that will govern distribution of the vaccines.

The first to receive the vaccine, through a process the ACIP has called Phase 1a, will likely be health care personnel and residents of long-term care facilities, who have been hit especially hard by the virus. The second deployment, Phase 1b, will include essential workers. The following group, Phase 1c, includes adults with high-risk medical conditions and senior citizens over the age of 65.

The category of essential work has been the focus of furious lobbying this year as various businesses and professional groups have pressed to be certified as essential in order to stay open. Each state has its own guidelines for who is considered essential, but the CDC provides broad guidance. Many industry groups have asked the CDC to rely on a memo from the Department of Homeland Security on critical infrastructure workers, a document published in August, to determine whether a worker is deemed essential for vaccination — a list that was itself the focus of intense lobbying.

Earlier this year, dozens of industry associations lobbied Homeland Security to be on the critical infrastructure list, including gun manufacturers, coal mines, stock exchanges, and the Fragrance Creators Association, the trade group for the makers of perfumes, colognes, and scented candles. The DHS memo, notably, includes the production of “fragrances” as essential work.

Homeland Security claimed the categories were determined to be “so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof.”

The vaccine’s rollout has only intensified the campaign to shape the list of what type of workers are counted as critical to the economy. Now truck drivers, bus drivers, Uber drivers, the restaurant industry, grocery stores, school nurses, and other associations have similarly petitioned the CDC, arguing that their members should count as essential workers. Earlier this week, MarketWatch reported that the American Bankers Association asked that bank tellers, given their close contact with the public, should be given priority for receiving the vaccine.

by Lee Fang, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Samuel Corum/The New York Times/Bloomberg/Getty Images
[ed. See also: Q&A with Dr. Larry Corey: With a coronavirus vaccine on the way, clinical trials leader reflects on what’s next (Seattle Times).]

Back to Back Hurricanes in Central America

Even disaster experts are stunned by the devastation in the Honduras this fall.

"I've been to too many disasters all over the world," says Vlatko Uzevski, who arrived in Honduras last week from Macedonia to lead an emergency response team for Project Hope.

"And I have never been to a place that was struck by two hurricanes in two weeks," says Uzevski, a physician who has been doing this type of work for 15 years.

The two Category 4 hurricanes – Eta and Iota — made landfall in Central America on Nov. 3 and Nov. 17 respectively. Even today, the region continues to dig out from mudslides. Aid agencies say nearly 7 million people in a zone stretching from Colombia to Mexico are in need of assistance.

Despite both hurricanes initially coming ashore in Nicaragua, neighboring Honduras appears to have suffered the most damage and the most deaths from landslides and flooding caused by the intense rainfall. The cyclones slowed over Honduras and being the last two named-storms of a record-breaking hurricane season, they dumped precipitation on already saturated hillsides.

This week in a nationally broadcast address, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández assured his people, "No están solos" meaning "You are not alone."

The storms destroyed bridges, roads, schools and health clinics. Families lost their homes, farms and businesses to floodwaters. Landslides packed small downtown plazas with mud.

Hundreds of thousands of Hondurans remain homeless. Many are crowded into shelters. Others are staying with friends and relatives.

President Hernández announced a plan to invest 4 times the nation's annual budget in infrastructure and social programs to help Hondurans recover from the devastating storms. (...)

Aid officials say that the damage from hurricanes Eta and Iota rival the damage caused by Hurricane Mitch one of the deadliest Atlantic storms of all time. Mitch hit Honduras in 1998, left 3 million people homeless and prompted tens of thousands of Hondurans to migrate to the United States.

"The damage in terms of costs, destruction, damage to agriculture is just as high," as from Mitch, says Hugo Rodriguez, deputy assistant secretary of state for Central America, about Eta and Iota. "This is Mitch-scale if not bigger." The U.S. through USAID has pledged millions of dollars to help respond to the crisis.

And it's not just Honduras. The record-breaking hurricane season displaced even more people in Guatemala.

Steve McAndrew, deputy regional director, for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies says his agency has relief operations in response to Eta and Iota now in seven countries.

"Hurricane Eta affected almost all of Central America, including Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and Nicaragua," he says. "And then the second hurricane Iota also had a direct hit on the San Andreas Islands, which are part of Colombia. There's heavy damage and the region's been heavily affected."

by Jason Beaubien, NPR | Read more:
Image: Jose Cabezas/Reuters

Dave Grohl & Greg Kurstin

[ed. Mississippi Queen. See also: here.]

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