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Weiye Loh

Studying the politics of online science « through the looking glass - 0 views

alicerosebell.wordpress.com/...the-politics-of-online-science

Online Science Blog Gender

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Mendick, H. and Moreau, M. (2010). Monitoring the presence and representation of  women in SET occupations in UK based online media. Bradford: The UKRC.
  • Mendick and Moreau considered the representation of women on eight ‘SET’ (science, engineering and technology) websites: New Scientist, Bad Science, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, Neuroskeptic, Science: So What, Watt’s Up With That and RichardDawkins.net. They also monitored SET content across eight more general sites: the BBC, Channel 4, Sky, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter.
  • Their results suggest online science informational content is male dominated in that far more men than women are present. On some websites, they found no SET women. All of the 14 people in SET identified on the sampled pages of the RichardDawkins.net website were men, and so were all 29 of those mentioned on the sampled pages of the Channel 4 website (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 11).
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • They found less hyperlinking of women’s than men’s names (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 7). Personally, I’d have really liked some detail as to how they came up with this, and what constituted ‘hyperlinking of women’s names’ precisely. It’s potentially an interesting finding, but I can’t quite get a grip on what they are saying.
  • They also note that the women that did appear, they were often peripheral to the main story, or ‘subject to muting’ (i.e. seen but not heard). They also noted many instances where women were pictured but remain anonymous, as if there are used to illustrate a piece – for ‘ornamental’ purposes – and give the example of the wikipedia entry on scientists, which includes a picture a women as an example, but stress she is anonymous (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 12).
  • Echoing findings of earlier research on science in the media (e.g. the Bimbo or Boffin paper), they noted that women, when represented, tended to be associated with ‘feminine’ attributes and activities, demonstrating empathy with children and animals, etc. They also noted a clustering in specific fields. For example, in the pages they’d sampled of the Guardian, they found seven mentions of women scientists compared with twenty-eight of men, and three of the these women were in a single article, about Jane Goodall (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 12-13).
  • The women presented were often discussed in terms of appearance, personality, sexuality and personal circumstances, again echoing previous research. They also noted that women scientists, when present, tended to be younger than the men, and there was a striking lack of ethnic diversity (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 14).
  • I’m going to be quite critical of this research. It’s not actively bad, it just seems to lack depth and precision. I suspect Mendick and Moreau were doing their best with low resources and an overly-broad brief. I also think that we are still feeling our way in terms of working out how to study online science media, and so can learn something from such a critique.
  • Problem number one: it’s a small study, and yet a ginormous topic. I’d much rather they had looked at less, but made more of it. At times I felt like I was reading a cursory glance at online science.
  • Problem number two: the methodological script seemed a bit stuck in the print era. I felt the study lacked a feel for the variety of routes people take through online science. It lacked a sense of online science’s communities and cliques, its cultures and sub-cultures, its history and its people. It lacked context. Most of all, it lacked a sense of what I think sits at the center of online communication: the link.
  • It tries to look at too much, too quickly. We’re told that of the blog entries sampled from Bad Science, three out of four of the women mentioned were associated with ‘bad science’, compared to 12 out of 27 of the men . They follow up this a note that Goldacre has appeared on television critiquing Greenfield,­ a clip of which is on his site (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 17-18). OK, but ‘bad’ needs unpacking here, as does the gendered nature of the area Goldacre takes aim at. As for Susan Greenfield, she is a very complex character when it comes to the politics of science and gender (one I’d say it is dangerous to treat representations of simplistically). Moreover, this is a very small sample, without much feel for the broader media context the Bad Science blog works within, including not only other platforms for Ben Goldacre’s voice but comment threads, forums and a whole community of other ‘bad science bloggers’ (and their relationships with each other)
  • Weiye Loh on 30 Jan 11
     
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Weiye Loh

Haidt Requests Apology from Pigliucci « YourMorals.Org Moral Psychology Blog - 0 views

www.yourmorals.org/...equests-apology-from-pigliucci

Science Politics Diversity Divergent Thinking

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Here is my response to Pigliucci, which I posted as a comment on his blog. (Well, I submitted it as a comment on Feb 13 at 4pm EST, but he has not approved it yet, so it doesn’t show yet over there.)
  • Massimo Pigliucci, the chair of the philosophy department at CUNY-Lehman, wrote a critique of me on his blog, Rationally Speaking, in which he accused me of professional misconduct.
  • Dear Prof. Pigliucci: Let me be certain that I have understood you. You did not watch my talk, even though a link to it was embedded in the Tierney article. Instead, you picked out one piece of my argument (that the near-total absence of conservatives in social psychology is evidence of discrimination) and you made the standard response, the one that most bloggers have made: underrepresentation of any group is not, by itself, evidence of discrimination. That’s a good point; I made it myself quite explicitly in my talk: Of course there are many reasons why conservatives would be underrepresented in social psychology, and most of them have nothing to do with discrimination or hostile climate. Research on personality consistently shows that liberals are higher on openness to experience. They’re more interested in novel ideas, and in trying to use science to improve society. So of course our field is and always will be mostly liberal. I don’t think we should ever strive for exact proportional representation.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • I made it clear that I’m not concerned about simple underrepresentation. I did not even make the moral argument that we need ideological diversity to right an injustice. Rather, I focused on what happens when a scientific community shares sacred values. A tribal moral community arises, one that actively suppresses ideas that are sacrilegious, and that discourages non-believers from entering. I argued that my field has become a tribal moral community, and the absence of conservatives (not just their underrepresentation) has serious consequences for the quality of our science. We rely on our peers to find flaws in our arguments, but when there is essentially nobody out there to challenge liberal assumptions and interpretations of experimental findings, the peer review process breaks down, at least for work that is related to those sacred values. (
  • The fact that you criticized me without making an effort to understand me is not surprising.
  • Rather, what sets you apart from all other bloggers who are members of the academy is what you did next. You accused me of professional misconduct—lying, essentially–and you speculated as to my true motive: I suspect that Haidt is either an incompetent psychologist (not likely) or is disingenuously saying the sort of things controversial enough to get him in the New York Times (more likely).
  • As far as I can tell your evidence for these accusations is that my argument was so bad that I couldn’t have believed it myself. Here is how you justified your accusations: A serious social scientist doesn’t go around crying out discrimination just on the basis of unequal numbers. If that were the case, the NBA would be sued for discriminating against short people, dance companies against people without spatial coordination, and newspapers against dyslexics
  • Accusations of professional misconduct are sensibly made only if one has a reasonable and detailed understanding of the facts of the case, and can bring forth evidence of misconduct. Pigliucci has made no effort to acquire such an understanding, nor has he presented any evidence to support his accusation. He simply took one claim from the Tierney article and then ran wild with speculation about Haidt’s motives. It was pretty silly of him, and down right irresponsible of Pigliucci to publish that garbage without even knowing what Haidt said.
  • I challenge you to watch the video of my talk (click here) and then either 1) Retract your blog post and apologize publicly for calling me a liar or 2) State on your blog that you stand by your original post. If you do stand by your post, even after hearing my argument, then the world can decide for itself which of us is right, and which of us best models the ideals of science, philosophy, and the Enlightenment which you claim for yourself in the header of your blog, “Rationally Speaking.” Jonathan Haidt
Weiye Loh

Religion: Faith in science : Nature News - 0 views

www.nature.com/...470323a.html

Science Religion Faith Funding Academic Academic Research

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The Templeton Foundation claims to be a friend of science. So why does it make so many researchers uneasy?
  • With a current endowment estimated at US$2.1 billion, the organization continues to pursue Templeton's goal of building bridges between science and religion. Each year, it doles out some $70 million in grants, more than $40 million of which goes to research in fields such as cosmology, evolutionary biology and psychology.
  • however, many scientists find it troubling — and some see it as a threat. Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, calls the foundation "sneakier than the creationists". Through its grants to researchers, Coyne alleges, the foundation is trying to insinuate religious values into science. "It claims to be on the side of science, but wants to make faith a virtue," he says.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • But other researchers, both with and without Templeton grants, say that they find the foundation remarkably open and non-dogmatic. "The Templeton Foundation has never in my experience pressured, suggested or hinted at any kind of ideological slant," says Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic, a magazine that debunks pseudoscience, who was hired by the foundation to edit an essay series entitled 'Does science make belief in God obsolete?'
  • The debate highlights some of the challenges facing the Templeton Foundation after the death of its founder in July 2008, at the age of 95.
  • With the help of a $528-million bequest from Templeton, the foundation has been radically reframing its research programme. As part of that effort, it is reducing its emphasis on religion to make its programmes more palatable to the broader scientific community. Like many of his generation, Templeton was a great believer in progress, learning, initiative and the power of human imagination — not to mention the free-enterprise system that allowed him, a middle-class boy from Winchester, Tennessee, to earn billions of dollars on Wall Street. The foundation accordingly allocates 40% of its annual grants to programmes with names such as 'character development', 'freedom and free enterprise' and 'exceptional cognitive talent and genius'.
  • Unlike most of his peers, however, Templeton thought that the principles of progress should also apply to religion. He described himself as "an enthusiastic Christian" — but was also open to learning from Hinduism, Islam and other religious traditions. Why, he wondered, couldn't religious ideas be open to the type of constructive competition that had produced so many advances in science and the free market?
  • That question sparked Templeton's mission to make religion "just as progressive as medicine or astronomy".
  • Early Templeton prizes had nothing to do with science: the first went to the Catholic missionary Mother Theresa of Calcutta in 1973.
  • By the 1980s, however, Templeton had begun to realize that fields such as neuroscience, psychology and physics could advance understanding of topics that are usually considered spiritual matters — among them forgiveness, morality and even the nature of reality. So he started to appoint scientists to the prize panel, and in 1985 the award went to a research scientist for the first time: Alister Hardy, a marine biologist who also investigated religious experience. Since then, scientists have won with increasing frequency.
  • "There's a distinct feeling in the research community that Templeton just gives the award to the most senior scientist they can find who's willing to say something nice about religion," says Harold Kroto, a chemist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, who was co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and describes himself as a devout atheist.
  • Yet Templeton saw scientists as allies. They had what he called "the humble approach" to knowledge, as opposed to the dogmatic approach. "Almost every scientist will agree that they know so little and they need to learn," he once said.
  • Templeton wasn't interested in funding mainstream research, says Barnaby Marsh, the foundation's executive vice-president. Templeton wanted to explore areas — such as kindness and hatred — that were not well known and did not attract major funding agencies. Marsh says Templeton wondered, "Why is it that some conflicts go on for centuries, yet some groups are able to move on?"
  • Templeton's interests gave the resulting list of grants a certain New Age quality (See Table 1). For example, in 1999 the foundation gave $4.6 million for forgiveness research at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and in 2001 it donated $8.2 million to create an Institute for Research on Unlimited Love (that is, altruism and compassion) at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. "A lot of money wasted on nonsensical ideas," says Kroto. Worse, says Coyne, these projects are profoundly corrupting to science, because the money tempts researchers into wasting time and effort on topics that aren't worth it. If someone is willing to sell out for a million dollars, he says, "Templeton is there to oblige him".
  • At the same time, says Marsh, the 'dean of value investing', as Templeton was known on Wall Street, had no intention of wasting his money on junk science or unanswerables such as whether God exists. So before pursuing a scientific topic he would ask his staff to get an assessment from appropriate scholars — a practice that soon evolved into a peer-review process drawing on experts from across the scientific community.
  • Because Templeton didn't like bureaucracy, adds Marsh, the foundation outsourced much of its peer review and grant giving. In 1996, for example, it gave $5.3 million to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC, to fund efforts that work with evangelical groups to find common ground on issues such as the environment, and to get more science into seminary curricula. In 2006, Templeton gave $8.8 million towards the creation of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi), which funds research on the origins of the Universe and other fundamental issues in physics, under the leadership of Anthony Aguirre, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
  • But external peer review hasn't always kept the foundation out of trouble. In the 1990s, for example, Templeton-funded organizations gave book-writing grants to Guillermo Gonzalez, an astrophysicist now at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, and William Dembski, a philosopher now at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. After obtaining the grants, both later joined the Discovery Institute — a think-tank based in Seattle, Washington, that promotes intelligent design. Other Templeton grants supported a number of college courses in which intelligent design was discussed. Then, in 1999, the foundation funded a conference at Concordia University in Mequon, Wisconsin, in which intelligent-design proponents confronted critics. Those awards became a major embarrassment in late 2005, during a highly publicized court fight over the teaching of intelligent design in schools in Dover, Pennsylvania. A number of media accounts of the intelligent design movement described the Templeton Foundation as a major supporter — a charge that Charles Harper, then senior vice-president, was at pains to deny.
  • Some foundation officials were initially intrigued by intelligent design, Harper told The New York Times. But disillusionment set in — and Templeton funding stopped — when it became clear that the theory was part of a political movement from the Christian right wing, not science. Today, the foundation website explicitly warns intelligent-design researchers not to bother submitting proposals: they will not be considered.
  • Avowedly antireligious scientists such as Coyne and Kroto see the intelligent-design imbroglio as a symptom of their fundamental complaint that religion and science should not mix at all. "Religion is based on dogma and belief, whereas science is based on doubt and questioning," says Coyne, echoing an argument made by many others. "In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice." The purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to break down that wall, he says — to reconcile the irreconcilable and give religion scholarly legitimacy.
  • Foundation officials insist that this is backwards: questioning is their reason for being. Religious dogma is what they are fighting. That does seem to be the experience of many scientists who have taken Templeton money. During the launch of FQXi, says Aguirre, "Max and I were very suspicious at first. So we said, 'We'll try this out, and the minute something smells, we'll cut and run.' It never happened. The grants we've given have not been connected with religion in any way, and they seem perfectly happy about that."
  • John Cacioppo, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, also had concerns when he started a Templeton-funded project in 2007. He had just published a paper with survey data showing that religious affiliation had a negative correlation with health among African-Americans — the opposite of what he assumed the foundation wanted to hear. He was bracing for a protest when someone told him to look at the foundation's website. They had displayed his finding on the front page. "That made me relax a bit," says Cacioppo.
  • Yet, even scientists who give the foundation high marks for openness often find it hard to shake their unease. Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is willing to participate in Templeton-funded events — but worries about the foundation's emphasis on research into 'spiritual' matters. "The act of doing science means that you accept a purely material explanation of the Universe, that no spiritual dimension is required," he says.
  • It hasn't helped that Jack Templeton is much more politically and religiously conservative than his father was. The foundation shows no obvious rightwards trend in its grant-giving and other activities since John Templeton's death — and it is barred from supporting political activities by its legal status as a not-for-profit corporation. Still, many scientists find it hard to trust an organization whose president has used his personal fortune to support right-leaning candidates and causes such as the 2008 ballot initiative that outlawed gay marriage in California.
  • Scientists' discomfort with the foundation is probably inevitable in the current political climate, says Scott Atran, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The past 30 years have seen the growing power of the Christian religious right in the United States, the rise of radical Islam around the world, and religiously motivated terrorist attacks such as those in the United States on 11 September 2001. Given all that, says Atran, many scientists find it almost impossible to think of religion as anything but fundamentalism at war with reason.
  • the foundation has embraced the theme of 'science and the big questions' — an open-ended list that includes topics such as 'Does the Universe have a purpose?'
  • Towards the end of Templeton's life, says Marsh, he became increasingly concerned that this reaction was getting in the way of the foundation's mission: that the word 'religion' was alienating too many good scientists.
  • The peer-review and grant-making system has also been revamped: whereas in the past the foundation ran an informal mix of projects generated by Templeton and outside grant seekers, the system is now organized around an annual list of explicit funding priorities.
  • The foundation is still a work in progress, says Jack Templeton — and it always will be. "My father believed," he says, "we were all called to be part of an ongoing creative process. He was always trying to make people think differently." "And he always said, 'If you're still doing today what you tried to do two years ago, then you're not making progress.'" 
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Science Impact - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...science-impact.html

Science Academic Research Newspaper News Bias Representation Public Relations

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The Guardian has a blog post up by three neuroscientists decrying the state of hype in the media related to their field, which is fueled in part by their colleagues seeking "impact." 
  • Anyone who has followed recent media reports that electrical brain stimulation "sparks bright ideas" or "unshackles the genius within" could be forgiven for believing that we stand on the frontier of a brave new world. As James Gallagher of the BBC put it, "Are we entering the era of the thinking cap – a device to supercharge our brains?" The answer, we would suggest, is a categorical no. Such speculations begin and end in the colourful realm of science fiction. But we are also in danger of entering the era of the "neuro-myth", where neuroscientists sensationalise and distort their own findings in the name of publicity. The tendency for scientists to over-egg the cake when dealing with the media is nothing new, but recent examples are striking in their disregard for accurate reporting to the public. We believe the media and academic community share a collective responsibility to prevent pseudoscience from masquerading as neuroscience.
  • They identify an . . . . . . unacceptable gulf between, on the one hand, the evidence-bound conclusions reached in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and on the other, the heavy spin applied by scientists to achieve publicity in the media. Are we as neuroscientists so unskilled at communicating with the public, or so low in our estimation of the public's intelligence, that we see no alternative but to mislead and exaggerate?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Somewhere down the line, achieving an impact in the media seems to have become the goal in itself, rather than what it should be: a way to inform and engage the public with clarity and objectivity, without bias or prejudice. Our obsession with impact is not one-sided. The craving of scientists for publicity is fuelled by a hurried and unquestioning media, an academic community that disproportionately rewards publication in "high impact" journals such as Nature, and by research councils that emphasise the importance of achieving "impact" while at the same time delivering funding cuts. Academics are now pushed to attend media training courses, instructed about "pathways to impact", required to include detailed "impact summaries" when applying for grant funding, and constantly reminded about the importance of media engagement to further their careers. Yet where in all of this strategising and careerism is it made clear why public engagement is important? Where is it emphasised that the most crucial consideration in our interactions with the media is that we are accurate, honest and open about the limitations of our research?
  • Weiye Loh on 02 Mar 11
     
    The Guardian has a blog post up by three neuroscientists decrying the state of hype in the media related to their field, which is fueled in part by their colleagues seeking "impact." 
Weiye Loh

Meet the man who broke the vaccine-autism scandal - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

www.theglobeandmail.com/...singlepage

Truth Ethics Journalism Vaccine Medicine Health

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Brian Deer radiates a remarkably bland persona for someone who stunned the global medical community and unravelled what he calls “one of those Aristotelian stories where you have both pity and fear.” This is the journalist behind the series of stories that completely discredited the research linking the measles mumps rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. First published in The Lancet in 1998, it unleashed a worldwide public health scare and gave distressed parents of autistic children a place to lay blame for the devastation of the diagnosis.
  • Seven years ago, Mr. Deer, a freelance journalist who works mostly for The Sunday Times in London, began an investigation into research conducted in the 1990s, which had spawned a worldwide debate about the safety and well-being of children. The published research showed a link between the MMR vaccine, routinely given to children in the first years of life, to the onset of autism, a developmental disorder that appears in the first three years, and affects a child’s social behaviour and communication skills. Out of fear, many parents refused to immunize their children.The final outcome of Mr. Deer’s investigation came last month, when Andrew Wakefield, the lead researcher, as well as two of his colleagues, saw their reputations torn to shreds in a medical misconduct inquiry, the longest in history, by the General Medical Council in the United Kingdom. More than 30 charges, including four counts of dishonesty in regard to money, research and public statements, were proven against Dr. Wakefield. The Lancet retracted the paper in 2010.
  • The MMR research paper, which triggered a high-profile anti-vaccine campaign, led by such celebrities as actress Jenny McCarthy, involved 12 children between the ages of three and nine. All had brain disorders. The parents of eight of them reported that signs of autism arose within days of the children receiving the MMR vaccine.“It was just too cute,” Mr. Deer says of the findings. Through the Freedom of Information Act, he discovered that Dr. Wakefield’s research had been funded by the British Legal Aid fund, and that the children had been recruited through lawyers and anti-vaccine groups.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Dr. Wakefield sued him and The Sunday Times for libel, but later withdrew the charges and was forced to pay Mr. Deer’s legal costs, which amounted to £1.4 million (almost $3-million). In the subsequent medical inquiry, Dr. Wakefield was shown to have had “a callous disregard” for the “distress and pain” of the developmentally challenged children, some of whom were subjected to invasive “high risk” procedures, including lumbar punctures, without clinical reasons.After the first story ran in 2004, Mr. Deer, who is unmarried and has no children, also revealed that Dr. Wakefield had patented a single measles vaccine after creating fear about the standard MMR shot.
  • To this day, Dr. Wakefield remains unrepentant. He boycotted the legal inquiry just as he has avoided any interview with Mr. Deer. A father of four children, he has a large ranch in Austin, Texas. Some parents in the anti-vaccine community, enabled by the Internet, have falsely accused Mr. Deer of mounting a kangaroo court against Dr. Wakefield.
  • While the consequences of Dr. Wakefield’s research were serious – immunization rates in Britain dropped dramatically and measles outbreaks ensued – it also gave parents of autistic children a purpose (however ill-founded) in which to find solace. How does he feel about taking that away?“I can’t think through the consequences of trying to tell the truth,” he stutters, seemingly surprised by the question. After a thoughtful pause he adds: “I think those parents are freer for having the truth than being caught in denial and deception.”
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 21 Feb 11
       
      Truth hurts. That's why people prefer to live in denial. 
Weiye Loh

Cancer resembles life 1 billion years ago, say astrobiologists - microbiology, genomics, genetics, evolution, cell biology, cancer, astrobiology - Australian Life Scientist - 0 views

www.lifescientist.com.au/..._years_ago_say_astrobiologists

Cancer Evolution Life

shared by Weiye Loh on 17 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • astrobiologists, working with oncologists in the US, have suggested that cancer resembles ancient forms of life that flourished between 600 million and 1 billion years ago.
  • Read more about what this discovery means for cancer research.
  • The genes that controlled the behaviour of these early multicellular organisms still reside within our own cells, managed by more recent genes that keep them in check.It's when these newer controlling genes fail that the older mechanisms take over, and the cell reverts to its earlier behaviours and grows out of control.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The new theory, published in the journal Physical Biology, has been put forward by two leading figures in the world of cosmology and astrobiology: Paul Davies, director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Arizona State University; and Charles Lineweaver, from the Australian National University.
  • According to Lineweaver, this suggests that cancer is an atavism, or an evolutionary throwback.
  • In the paper, they suggest that a close look at cancer shows similarities with early forms of multicellular life.
  • “Unlike bacteria and viruses, cancer has not developed the capacity to evolve into new forms. In fact, cancer is better understood as the reversion of cells to the way they behaved a little over one billion years ago, when humans were nothing more than loose-knit colonies of only partially differentiated cells. “We think that the tumours that develop in cancer patients today take the same form as these simple cellular structures did more than a billion years ago,” he said.
  • One piece of evidence to support this theory is that cancers appear in virtually all metazoans, with the notable exception of the bizarre naked mole rat."This quasi-ubiquity suggests that the mechanisms of cancer are deep-rooted in evolutionary history, a conjecture that receives support from both paleontology and genetics," they write.
  • the genes that controlled this early multi-cellular form of life are like a computer operating system's 'safe mode', and when there are failures or mutations in the more recent genes that manage the way cells specialise and interact to form the complex life of today, then the earlier level of programming takes over.
  • Their notion is in contrast to a prevailing theory that cancer cells are 'rogue' cells that evolve rapidly within the body, overcoming the normal slew of cellular defences.
  • However, Davies and Lineweaver point out that cancer cells are highly cooperative with each other, if competing with the host's cells. This suggests a pre-existing complexity that is reminiscent of early multicellular life.
  • cancers' manifold survival mechanisms are predictable, and unlikely to emerge spontaneously through evolution within each individual in such a consistent way.
  • The good news is that this means combating cancer is not necessarily as complex as if the cancers were rogue cells evolving new and novel defence mechanisms within the body.Instead, because cancers fall back on the same evolved mechanisms that were used by early life, we can expect them to remain predictable, thus if they're susceptible to treatment, it's unlikely they'll evolve new ways to get around it.
  • If the atavism hypothesis is correct, there are new reasons for optimism," they write.
  • Weiye Loh on 17 Feb 11
     
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Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Bringing it Home - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...bringing-it-home.html

Journalism Science Climate Science Disaster

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Writing at MIT's Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Charles Petit breathlessly announces to journalists that the scientific community has now given a green light to blaming contemporary disasters on the emissions of greenhouse gases
  • We recently published a paper showing that the media overall has done an excellent job on its reporting of scientific projections of sea level rise. I suspect that a similar analysis of the issue of disasters and climate change would not result in such favorable results. Of course, looking at the cover of Nature above, it might be understandable why this would be the case.
  • Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 11
     
    An official shift may just have occurred not only in news coverage of climate change, but the way that careful scientists  talk about it. Till now blaming specific storms on climate change has been frowned upon. And it still is, if one is speaking of an isolated event. But something very much like blaming global warming for what is happening today, right now, outside the window has just gotten endorsement on the cover of Nature. Its photo of a flooded European village has splashed across it, "THE HUMAN FACTOR." Extreme rains in many regions, it tells the scientific community, is not merely consistent with what to expect from global warming,  but herald its arrival. This is a good deal more immediate than saying, as people have for some time, that glaciers are shrinking and seas are rising due to the effects of greenhouse gases. This brings it home.
Weiye Loh

Fake tweets by 'socialbot' fool hundreds of followers - tech - 23 March 2011 - New Scientist - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...ool-hundreds-of-followers.html

Social Media Spam Twitter Bots Persona

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Socialbots 2011, a competition designed to test whether bots can be used to alter the structure of a social network. Each team had a Twitter account controlled by a socialbot. Like regular human users, the bot could follow other Twitter users and send messages. Bots were rewarded for the number of followers they amassed and the number of responses their tweets generated.
  • The socialbots looked at tweets sent by members of a network of Twitter users who shared a particular interest, and then generated a suitable response. In one exchange a bot asks a human user which character they would like to bring back to life from their favourite book. When the human replies "Jesus" it responds: "Honestly? no fracking way. ahahahhaa."
  • When the experiment ended last month, a before-and-after comparison of connections within the target community showed that the bots were "able to heavily shape and distort the structure of the network", according to its organiser, Tim Hwang, founder of the startup company Robot, Robot and Hwang, based in San Francisco. Some members of the community who had not previously been directly connected were now linked, for example. Hwang has not revealed the identities of the entrants, or of the members of the 500-person Twitter network that the bots infiltrated.
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  • The success suggests that socialbots could manipulate social networks on a larger scale, for good or ill. "We could use these bots in the future to encourage social participation or support for humanitarian causes," Hwang claims. He also acknowledges that there is a flip side, if bots were also used to inhibit activism.
  • The military may already be onto the idea. Officials at US Central Command (Centcom), which oversees military activities in the Middle East and central Asia, issued a request last June for an "online persona management service". The details of the request suggest that the military want to create and control 50 fictitious online identities who appear to be real people from Afghanistan and Iraq.
  • It is not clear, however, if any of the management of the fake identities would be delegated to software. A Centcom spokesperson told New Scientist that the contract supports "classified blogging activities on foreign language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US".
  • Hwang has ambitious plans for the next stage of the socialbot project: "We're going to survey and identify two sites of 5000-person unconnected Twitter communities, and over a six-to-12-month period use waves of bots to thread and rivet those clusters together into a directly connected social bridge between those two formerly independent groups," he wrote in a blog post on 3 March. "The bot-driven social 'scaffolding' will then be dropped away, completing the bridge, with swarms of bots being launched to maintain the superstructure as needed," he adds.
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » Litigation gone wild! A geologist's take on the Italian seismology manslaughter case - 0 views

skepticblog.org/...litigation-gone-wild

Climate Science Earthquake Law Politics Seismology

shared by Weiye Loh on 01 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Apparently, an Italian lab technician named Giampaolo Giuliani made a prediction about a month before the quake, based on elevated levels of radon gas. However, seismologists have known for a long time that radon levels, like any other “magic bullet” precursor, are unreliable because no two quakes are alike, and no two quakes give the same precursors. Nevertheless, his prediction caused a furor before the quake actually happened. The Director of the Civil Defence, Guido Bertolaso, forced him to remove his findings from the Internet (old versions are still on line). Giuliani was also reported to the police for “causing fear” with his predictions about a quake near Sulmona, which was far from where the quake actually struck. Enzo Boschi, the head of the Italian National Geophysics Institute declared: “Every time there is an earthquake there are people who claim to have predicted it. As far as I know nobody predicted this earthquake with precision. It is not possible to predict earthquakes.” Most of the geological and geophysical organizations around the world made similar statements in support of the proper scientific procedures adopted by the Italian geophysical community. They condemned Giuliani for scaring people using a method that has not shown to be reliable.
  • most the of press coverage I have read (including many cited above) took the sensationalist approach, and cast Guiliani as the little “David” fighting against the “Goliath” of “Big Science”
  • none of the reporters bothered to do any real background research, or consult with any other legitimate seismologist who would confirm that there is no reliable way to predict earthquakes in the short term and Giuliani is misleading people when he says so. Giulian’s “prediction” was sheer luck, and if he had failed, no one would have mentioned it again.
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  • Even though he believes in his method, he ignores the huge body of evidence that shows radon gas is no more reliable than any other “predictor”.
  • If the victims insist on suing someone, they should leave the seismologists alone and look into the construction of some of those buildings. The stories out of L’Aquila suggest that the death toll was much higher because of official corruption and shoddy construction, as happens in many countries both before and after big quakes.
  • much of the construction is apparently Mafia-controlled in that area—good luck suing them! Sadly, the ancient medieval buildings that crumbled were the most vulnerable because they were made of unreinforced masonry, the worst possible construction material in earthquake country
  • what does this imply for scientists who are working in a field that might have predictive power? In a litigious society like Italy or the U.S., this is a serious question. If a reputable seismologist does make a prediction and fails, he’s liable, because people will panic and make foolish decisions and then blame the seismologist for their losses. Now the Italian courts are saying that (despite world scientific consensus) seismologists are liable if they don’t predict quakes. They’re damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. In some societies where seismologists work hard at prediction and preparation (such as China and Japan), there is no precedent for suing scientists for doing their jobs properly, and the society and court system does not encourage people to file frivolous suits. But in litigious societies, the system is counterproductive, and stifles research that we would like to see developed. What seismologist would want to work on earthquake prediction if they can be sued? I know of many earth scientists with brilliant ideas not only about earthquake prediction but even ways to defuse earthquakes, slow down global warming, or many other incredible but risky brainstorms—but they dare not propose the idea seriously or begin to implement it for fear of being sued.
  • Weiye Loh on 01 Jun 11
     
    In the case of most natural disasters, people usually regard such events as "acts of God" and  try to get on with their lives as best they can. No human cause is responsible for great earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hurricanes, or floods. But in the bizarre world of the Italian legal system, six seismologists and a public official have been charged with manslaughter for NOT predicting the quake! My colleagues in the earth science community were incredulous and staggered at this news. Seismologists and geologists have been saying for decades (at least since the 1970s) that short-term earthquake prediction (within minutes to hours of the event) is impossible, and anyone who claims otherwise is lying. As Charles Richter himself said, "Only fools, liars, and charlatans predict earthquakes." How could anyone then go to court and sue seismologists for following proper scientific procedures?
Weiye Loh

Skepticblog » Seismologists Charged with Manslaughter - 0 views

skepticblog.org/...ists-charged-with-manslaughter

Climate Science Uncertainty Earthquake

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 May 11 - No Cached
  • On it’s surface the story is pretty sensational and downright silly: Judge Giuseppe Romano Gargarella said that the seven defendants had supplied “imprecise, incomplete and contradictory information,” in a press conference following a meeting held by the committee 6 days before the quake, reported the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. That may have something to do with the fact that earthquake science is imprecise, incomplete, and often produces contradictory information. The scientists and their colleagues are calling this a witch hunt and warn that it will have a chilling effect on scientists, a very real concern.
  • how should experts be held accountable for their performance. We often call upon experts to give us their expert opinion, and sometimes the stakes are very high. This happens in medicine every day – in any applied science. We cannot fault experts for not being perfect, for not foreseeing the unforeseeable, and for not having crystal balls. We do expect them to be honest and transparent about their uncertainty.
  • We can require that they meet minimal standards of competence.
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  • did the top seismologists of Italy commit scientific malpractice in their assessment of the risk of a large quake?
  • Another relevant issue here is the balance between warning the public about credible risks, while not panicking them. In this case the Italian seismologists said, in effect, that the recent tremors were not necessarily sign of a big quake in the near future. There still might not be a big quake for years. But, they warned, a big quake is coming eventually. That sounds like a fair assessment of the science.
  • Apparently, the judge did not like the balance that these scientists struck: The charges filed by the prosecution contends that this assessment “persuaded the victims to stay at home”, La Repubblica newspaper reported. But defense for the scientists claim that they never said anything akin to – there is no risk.
  • scientists, especially a consensus of recognized experts, should be free to express their scientific assessment to the public, without fear of being the target of later litigation (unless they really did commit scientific malpractice).
  • Politicians and regulatory agencies should take their cue from the scientific community, but may want to also add their own spin in order to tweak the balance between reassurance and preparedness.
  • Weiye Loh on 30 May 11
     
    The Italian Government has charged their top seismologists with manslaughter because they failed to predict the devastating 2009 earthquake, which killed 308 people. The scientists, and the seismology community, are stunned - primarily because it's impossible to predict earthquakes.
Weiye Loh

journalism.sg » Tin Pei Ling's baptism of fire: Should bloggers have lit the match? - 0 views

journalism.sg/...tin-pei-ling

Democracy Gender Stereotype Singapore Privacy

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • That is nothing, though, compared with the attack by Temasek Review, the anonymously-run website with lofty ambitions “to foster an informed, educated, thinking and proactive citizenry.” The website delved into her personal life – even questioning her motives for marrying her husband – to present her as a materialistic, social climbing monster. Such attacks have also been flying around social media.
  • Never mind that Tin (unlike most high-flying PAP candidates) has several years’ grassroots experience; sections of the online community have dismissed the possibility that someone so young – she is in her 20s – could serve in the highest forum in the land. (I recall feeling similarly skeptical when Eunice Olsen was put up as an NMP. She proved me wrong and I have learnt not to prejudge.)
  • Siew Kum Hong, hardly a PAP apologist, has had the intellectual honesty and moral courage to come out swiftly in his blog against this distasteful turn of events.
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  • some others have argued that election candidates should expect such a baptism of fire. One blogger, while agreeing that the incident was “unfortunate”, said with Nietzsche-like logic, “If Ms. Tin is made of sterner stuff, she’ll live through this. If our future political leaders don’t have the tenacity to look past the Glee-like slushies and take the hit for the citizens of Singapore, then I don’t think they deserve my vote in the first place.”
  • how Tin and her party leaders respond to this episode will say a lot about their preparedness for the new terrain.
  • This, however, doesn’t really excuse those who have chosen to corrupt that terrain.
  • Some online posters have argued that the PAP is just reaping what it has sown: it has made life ugly for those who dare to enter Opposition politics, deterring many able individuals from joining other parties; now it’s payback time, time for the PAP can get a taste of its own medicine. Certainly, the online world should help to level what is undoubtedly a tilted offline playing field. This imperative is what motivates some of Singapore’s best online journalism.
  • Websites that say they want to help raise the level of Singapore’s political discourse shouldn’t go lower than the politicians themselves.
  • Weiye Loh on 30 Mar 11
     
    Never mind that Tin (unlike most high-flying PAP candidates) has several years' grassroots experience; sections of the online community have dismissed the possibility that someone so young - she is in her 20s - could serve in the highest forum in the land. (I recall feeling similarly skeptical when Eunice Olsen was put up as an NMP. She proved me wrong and I have learnt not to prejudge.)
Weiye Loh

Politics and self-confidence trump education on climate change - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...ucation-for-climate-change.ars

Politics Climate Science Education Climate Change

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • One set of polls, conducted by the University of New Hampshire, focused on a set of rural areas, including Alaska, the Gulf Coast, and Appalachia. These probably don't reflect the US as a whole, but the pollsters had about 9,500 respondents. The second, published in the The Sociological Quarterly, took advantage of a decade's worth of Earth Day polls conducted by Gallup.
  • Both surveys asked similar questions, however, including whether climate change has occurred and whether humans were likely to be the primary cause. The scientific community, including all the major scientific organizations that have issued statements on the matter, has said yes to both of these questions, and the authors interpret their findings in light of that.
  • The UNH poll shows that a strong majority—in the 80-90 percent range—accepts that climate change is happening. The Gallup polls explicitly asked about global warming and got lower percentages, although it still found that a majority of the US thinks the climate is changing. Those who label themselves conservatives, however, are notably less likely to even accept that basic point; less than half of them do, while the majority of liberals and independents do.
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  • Although there was widespread acceptance that climate change was occurring, Democrats were much more likely to ascribe it to human causes (margins ranged from 20 to 50 percent). Independents were somewhere in the middle. Among those who claimed to understand the topic well, the gap actually increased.
  • Republicans with a high degree of confidence in their knowledge of the climate were more likely to dismiss the scientific community's opinion; the highly confident Democrats were more likely to embrace it. The authors caution, however, that "The survey answers thus reflect self-confidence, which has an untested relation to knowledge."
  • The people working with Gallup data performed the same analysis, and found precisely the same thing: the more registered Republicans and those who describe themselves as conservatives thought they knew about anthropogenic climate change, the less likely they were to accept the evidence for it. For Democrats and independents, the opposite was true (same for self-styled moderates and liberals). This group also did a slightly different check, and broke out opinions on global warming based on education and political leanings. For Democrats and independents, increased education boosted their readiness to accept the scientific community's conclusions. For self-styled conservatives, education had almost no effect (it gave a slight boost in registered Republicans).
  • Because this group had temporal data, they could track the progression of this liberal/conservative gap. It existed back in the first year they had data, 2001, but the gap was relatively stable until about 2008. At that point, acceptance among conservatives plunged, leading to the current gap of over 40 percentage points (up from less than 20) between these groups.
  • Both groups also come to similar conclusions about why this gap has developed. The piece in The Sociological Quarterly is appropriately sociological, suggesting that modernizing forces have compelled most societies to deal with the "negative consequences of industrial capitalism," such as pollution. Climate change, for these authors, is a case where the elites of conservative politics have convinced their followers to protect capitalism from any negative associations.
  • The UNH group takes a more nuanced, psychological view of matters. "'Biased assimilation' has been demonstrated in experiments that find people reject information about the existence of a problem if they object to its possible solutions," they note, before later stating that many appear to be "basing their beliefs about science and physical reality on what they thought would be the political implications if human-caused climate change were true."
  • neither group offers a satisfying solution. The sociologists simply warn that the culture wars have reached potentially dangerous proportions when it comes to climate science, while the group from New Hampshire suggests we might have to wait until an unambiguous consequence, like the loss of Arctic ice in the summer, for some segments of society to come around.
  • Weiye Loh on 20 Apr 11
     
    when it comes to climate change, politics dominates, eclipsing self-assessed knowledge and general education. In fact, it appears that your political persuasion might determine whether an education will make you more or less likely to believe the scientific community.
Weiye Loh

Response to Guardian's Article on Singapore Elections | the kent ridge common - 0 views

kentridgecommon.com/?p=11639&page=2

Orientalism News media bias Ethnocentrism Singapore Post-Colonialism

shared by Weiye Loh on 07 May 11 - No Cached
  • Further, grumblings on Facebook accounts are hardly ‘anonymous’. Lastly, how anonymous can bloggers be, when every now and then a racist blogger gets arrested by the state? Think about it. These sorts of cases prove that the state does screen, survey and monitor the online community, and as all of us know there are many vehement anti-PAP comments and articles, much of which are outright slander and defamation.
  • Yet at the end of the day, it is the racist blogger, not the anti-government or anti-PAP blogger that gets arrested. The Singaporean model is a much more complex and sophisticated phenomenon than this Guardian writer gives it credit.
  • Why did this Guardian writer, anyway, pander to a favourite Western stereotype of that “far-off Asian undemocratic, repressive regime”? Is she really in Singapore as the Guardian claims? (“Kate Hodal in Singapore” is written at the top) Can the Guardian be anymore predictable and trite?
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  • Can any Singaporean honestly say the she/he can conceive of a fellow Singaporean setting himself or herself on fire along Orchard Road or Shenton Way, as a result of desperate economic pressures or financial constraints? Can we even fathom the social and economic pressures that mobilized a whole people to protest and overthrow a corrupt, US-backed regime? (that is, not during elections time) Singapore has real problems, the People’s Action Party has its real problems, and there is indeed much room for improvement. Yet such irresponsible reporting by one of the esteemed newspapers from the UK is utterly disappointing, not constructive in the least sense, and utterly misrepresents our political situation (and may potentially provoke more irrationality in our society, leading people to ‘believe’ their affinity with their Arab peers which leads to more radicalism).
  • Weiye Loh on 07 May 11
     
    Further, grumblings on Facebook accounts are hardly 'anonymous'. Lastly, how anonymous can bloggers be, when every now and then a racist blogger gets arrested by the state? Think about it. These sorts of cases prove that the state does screen, survey and monitor the online community, and as all of us know there are many vehement anti-PAP comments and articles, much of which are outright slander and defamation. Yet at the end of the day, it is the racist blogger, not the anti-government or anti-PAP blogger that gets arrested. The Singaporean model is a much more complex and sophisticated phenomenon than this Guardian writer gives it credit.
Weiye Loh

Net neutrality enshrined in Dutch law | Technology | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...s-enshrines-net-neutrality-law

Net Neutrality Law

shared by Weiye Loh on 23 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The measure, which was adopted with a broad majority in the lower house of parliament, will prevent KPN, the Dutch telecommunications market leader, and the Dutch arms of Vodafone and T-Mobile from blocking or charging for internet services like Skype or WhatsApp, a free text service. Its sponsors said that the measure would pass a pro forma review in the Dutch senate.
  • The Dutch restrictions on operators are the first in the EU. The European commission and European parliament have endorsed network neutrality guidelines but have not yet taken legal action against operators that block or impose extra fees on consumers using services such as Skype, the voice and video service being acquired by Microsoft, and WhatsApp, a mobile software maker based in California.
  • Advocates hailed the move as a victory for consumers, while industry officials predicted that mobile broadband charges could rise in the Netherlands to compensate for the new restrictions.
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  • Only one other country, Chile, has written network neutrality requirements into its telecommunications law. The Chilean law, which was approved in July 2010, took effect in May.
  • In the US, an attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to impose a similar set of network neutrality restrictions on American operators has been tied up in legal challenges from the industry.
  • Weiye Loh on 23 Jun 11
     
    The Netherlands has become the first country in Europe to enshrine the concept of network neutrality into national law by banning its mobile telephone operators from blocking or charging consumers extra for using internet-based communications services.
Weiye Loh

Are the Open Data Warriors Fighting for Robin Hood or the Sheriff?: Some Reflections on OKCon 2011 and the Emerging Data Divide « Gurstein's Community Informatics - 0 views

gurstein.wordpress.com/...1-and-the-emerging-data-divide

Open Government Open Data

shared by Weiye Loh on 05 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • The ideal that these nerdy revolutionaries are pursuing is not, as with previous generations—justice, freedom, democracy—rather it is “openness” as in Open Data, Open Information, Open Government. Precisely what is meant by “openness” is never (at least certainly not in the context of this conference) really defined in a form that an outsider could grapple with (and perhaps critique). 
  • the “open data/open government” movement begins from a profoundly political perspective that government is largely ineffective and inefficient (and possibly corrupt) and that it hides that ineffectiveness and inefficiency (and possible corruption) from public scrutiny through lack of transparency in its operations and particularly in denying to the public access to information (data) about its operations.
  • further that this access once available would give citizens the means to hold bureaucrats (and their political masters) accountable for their actions. In doing so it would give these self-same citizens a platform on which to undertake (or at least collaborate with) these bureaucrats in certain key and significant activities—planning, analyzing, budgeting that sort of thing. Moreover through the implementation of processes of crowdsourcing this would also provide the bureaucrats with the overwhelming benefits of having access to and input from the knowledge and wisdom of the broader interested public.
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  • A lot of the conference took place in specialized workshops where the technical details on how to link various sets of this newly available data together with other sets, how to structure this data so that it could serve various purposes and perhaps most importantly how to design the architecture and ontology (ultimately the management policies and procedures) of the data itself within government so that it is “born open” rather than only liberated after the fact with this latter process making the usefulness of the data in the larger world of open and universally accessible data much much greater.
  • t’s the taxpayer’s money and they have the right to participate in overseeing how it is spent. Having “open” access to government’s data/information gives citizens the tools to exercise that right. And (it is argued), solutions are available for putting into the hands of these citizens the means/technical tools for sifting and sorting and making critical analyses of government activities if only the key could be turned and government data was “accessible” (“open”).
  • it matters very much who the (anticipated) user is since what is being put in place are the frameworks for the data environment  of the future and these will include for the most part some assumptions about who the ultimate user is or will be and whether or not a new “data divide” will emerge written more deeply into the fabric of the Information Society than even the earlier “digital (access) divide”.
Weiye Loh

Merchants of Doubt - Home - 0 views

www.merchantsofdoubt.org

Book Doubt Uncertainty Science Politics Climate Change Climate Science

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 30 Sep 12
     
    "n their new book, Merchants of Doubt, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway explain how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists, with extensive political connections, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. In seven compelling chapters addressing tobacco, acid rain, the ozone hole, global warming, and DDT, Oreskes and Conway roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how the ideology of free market fundamentalism, aided by a too-compliant media, has skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era. "
Weiye Loh

The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond | Philosophy Now - 0 views

www.philosophynow.org/...th_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond

Postmodernism Foucault Philosophy Modernism Spectacle Reality Reality TV

shared by Weiye Loh on 28 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before the students were born: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture. Some of the texts (‘The Library of Babel’) were written even before their parents were born. Replace this cache with other postmodern stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It’s all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every house powerful enough to put a man on the moon – which today’s undergraduates take for granted.
  • somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.
  • Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far).
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Pseudo-modernism also encompasses contemporary news programmes, whose content increasingly consists of emails or text messages sent in commenting on the news items. The terminology of ‘interactivity’ is equally inappropriate here, since there is no exchange: instead, the viewer or listener enters – writes a segment of the programme – then departs, returning to a passive role. Pseudo-modernism also includes computer games, which similarly place the individual in a context where they invent the cultural content, within pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the game varies according to the particular player.
  • The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the internet. Its central act is that of the individual clicking on his/her mouse to move through pages in a way which cannot be duplicated, inventing a pathway through cultural products which has never existed before and never will again. This is a far more intense engagement with the cultural process than anything literature can offer, and gives the undeniable sense (or illusion) of the individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/her involvement with the cultural product. Internet pages are not ‘authored’ in the sense that anyone knows who wrote them, or cares. The majority either require the individual to make them work, like Streetmap or Route Planner, or permit him/her to add to them, like Wikipedia, or through feedback on, for instance, media websites. In all cases, it is intrinsic to the internet that you can easily make up pages yourself (eg blogs).
  • Where once special effects were supposed to make the impossible appear credible, CGI frequently [inadvertently] works to make the possible look artificial, as in much of Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if they have only ever happened in cyberspace.
  • Similarly, television in the pseudo-modern age favours not only reality TV (yet another unapt term), but also shopping channels, and quizzes in which the viewer calls to guess the answer to riddles in the hope of winning money.
  • The purely ‘spectacular’ function of television, as with all the arts, has become a marginal one: what is central now is the busy, active, forging work of the individual who would once have been called its recipient. In all of this, the ‘viewer’ feels powerful and is indeed necessary; the ‘author’ as traditionally understood is either relegated to the status of the one who sets the parameters within which others operate, or becomes simply irrelevant, unknown, sidelined; and the ‘text’ is characterised both by its hyper-ephemerality and by its instability. It is made up by the ‘viewer’, if not in its content then in its sequence – you wouldn’t read Middlemarch by going from page 118 to 316 to 401 to 501, but you might well, and justifiably, read Ceefax that way.
  • A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty Towers, reality TV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form, since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in they become a different and far less attractive entity.
  • If scholars give the date they referenced an internet page, it is because the pages disappear or get radically re-cast so quickly. Text messages and emails are extremely difficult to keep in their original form; printing out emails does convert them into something more stable, like a letter, but only by destroying their essential, electronic state.
  • The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal
  • Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters.
  • A triteness, a shallowness dominates all.
  • In music, the pseudo-modern supersedingof the artist-dominated album as monolithic text by the downloading and mix-and-matching of individual tracks on to an iPod, selected by the listener, was certainly prefigured by the music fan’s creation of compilation tapes a generation ago. But a shift has occurred, in that what was a marginal pastime of the fan has become the dominant and definitive way of consuming music, rendering the idea of the album as a coherent work of art, a body of integrated meaning, obsolete.
  • To a degree, pseudo-modernism is no more than a technologically motivated shift to the cultural centre of something which has always existed (similarly, metafiction has always existed, but was never so fetishised as it was by postmodernism). Television has always used audience participation, just as theatre and other performing arts did before it; but as an option, not as a necessity: pseudo-modern TV programmes have participation built into them.
  • Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-modernism defines the real implicitly as myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts. Thus, pseudo-modernism suggests that whatever it does or makes is what is reality, and a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form: the docu-soap with its hand-held cameras (which, by displaying individuals aware of being regarded, give the viewer the illusion of participation); The Office and The Blair Witch Project, interactive pornography and reality TV; the essayistic cinema of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock.
  • whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety
  • pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – as in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cross-fire. But this fatalistic anxiety extends far beyond geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life; from a general fear of social breakdown and identity loss, to a deep unease about diet and health; from anguish about the destructiveness of climate change, to the effects of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which yield TV programmes about how to clean your house, bring up your children or remain solvent.
  • Pseudo-modernism belongs to a world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment of the United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel, and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in its rubble.
  • pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable of the “disbelief of Grand Narratives” which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists
  • Weiye Loh on 28 Apr 12
     
    Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge. This is often expressed in postmodern art as a concern with representation and an ironic self-awareness. And the argument that postmodernism is over has already been made philosophically. There are people who have essentially asserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not any more, and from now on we're going to believe in critical realism. The weakness in this analysis is that it centres on the academy, on the practices and suppositions of philosophers who may or may not be shifting ground or about to shift - and many academics will simply decide that, finally, they prefer to stay with Foucault [arch postmodernist] than go over to anything else. However, a far more compelling case can be made that postmodernism is dead by looking outside the academy at current cultural production.
Weiye Loh

Secrecy in the age of WikiLeaks - 1 views

www.lowyinterpreter.org/...y-in-the-age-of-WikiLeaks.aspx

Open Government Open Information Security Social Media

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 14 Mar 12
     
    As government agencies look to leverage new technologies to communicate with the public, move more citizen services online, share services amongst agencies, share intelligence for national security purposes and collaborate with other nations and private industry, they will need to take a more open stance to secrecy and information sharing. But to mitigate risks, they need to take a more solid security stance at the same time. It is imperative for leaders at all levels within government (agencies, departments, contractors, etc.) to weigh the risks and benefits of making information more accessible and, once decided, put strong safeguards in place to ensure only those who need access can get access. Information leaks imply failures across multiple areas, particularly risk management, access control and confidentiality. The ongoing WikiLeaks exposé clearly shows that the threat is not always from external groups; it can be far more insidious when it stems from trusted individuals within an organisation.
Weiye Loh

TODAYonline | Singapore | Straits Times, Zaobao challenge Low's remarks - 0 views

www.todayonline.com/...-Zaobao-challenge-Lows-remarks

News Journalism Singapore Politics

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 May 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 30 May 12
     
    Speaking to TODAY, PAP Member of Parliament Baey Yam Keng, who sits on the Government Parliamentary Committee for Information, Communications and the Arts, reiterated that "no one can control the media and any responsible media would want full editorial independence".
Weiye Loh

Justice At Last For Paul Chambers! #twitterjoketrial « Quiet Riot Girl - 0 views

quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/...paul-chambers-twitterjoketrial

Twitter Joke Law Freedom of Speech

shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 29 Jul 12
     
    This morning it was announced that Paul Chambers who had been convicted of making a 'menacing' tweet under the 2003 Communications Act, has had his conviction quashed. He was found innocent of all charges by three Appeal Court judges. To most people reading this the news is not only brilliant for Paul, his partner Sarah (@crazycolours) and their families. It is also a victory for freedom of speech and expression, especially online. So it is with extra joy that the news was first reported and now is being celebrated on our favourite social media platform.
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