ScienceChanges

Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture begins with the intriguing question: how can one account for the remarkable transvaluation of the computer from a Cold War accessory to omnicide and 'soul murder' into a convivial tool of personal liberation, all within 30 years? Specifically, in Berkeley in 1964, 'disembodiment - that is, the transformation of the self into data on an IBM card - marked the height of dehumanization', while for the digital utopians of the 1990s, 'it marked the route to new forms of equality and transformation.'

Self-knowledge and effective relationships are the foundations on which good care, quality improvement, and organizational change occur.

"You are told: use policies that work. And you are told: RCTs - randomized controlled trials - will show you what these are. That's not so. RCTs are great, but they do not do that for you. They cannot alone support the expectation that a policy will work for you" [i.e., here, not there where the RCT was done].

Proponents of such programs, including President Obama, have contended secretly collecting our internet and phone metadata-when, where and with whom we connect-is about our protection. I must say that as an evolutionary epidemiologist I find it a fascinating defense, if only because there have been several efforts aimed at producing geographies of deadly influenzas for which it has been nearly impossible to get governments worldwide, including the U.S., to provide the locales and dates of livestock and poultry outbreaks.

"Explaining the ecosystemic dependencies out of which new pathogens arise isn't nearly enough, however. Quammen rarely touches the processes occurring farther upstream. Pathogens are embedded in circuits of capital in such a way as to reverse conclusions based on ecology alone."

"We are a growing community of researchers devoted to designing scalable solutions that drive better care at the most critical moments in people's lives everywhere. Our goal is not a grant or publication, but simple discoveries that actually produce better outcomes, greater value, and more caring across the world."

Fully funded -- no need for scientists to chase grants No responsibilities besides research -- no teaching load, no administration All scientists have to be hands-on -- at the bench A focus on a fairly narrow set of difficult, high-payoff research challenges No tenure -- senior scientists have a five year term and then may or may not be re-signed (My favorite) Research groups can have no more than 6 members. This means that they cannot possibly have all the skills they need inside their team and so will have to get out of their own lab and get to know the other people in the place so they can get the help they need. All of this is nestled in a facility with amenities intended to increase mingling, interaction and ultimately collaboration.