Group items tagged

Yet obviously something is deeply wrong with economics. While economists using textbook macro models got things mostly and impressively right, many famous economists refused to use those models — in fact, they made it clear in discussion that they didn’t understand points that had been worked out generations ago.

Moreover, it’s hard to find any economists who changed their minds when their predictions, say of sharply higher inflation, turned out wrong.

let’s grant that economics as practiced doesn’t look like a science. But that’s not because the subject is inherently unsuited to the scientific method. Sure, it’s highly imperfect — it’s a complex area, and our understanding is in its early stages.

And sure, the economy itself changes over time, so that what was true 75 years ago may not be true today — although what really impresses you if you study macro, in particular, is the continuity, so that Bagehot and Wicksell and Irving Fisher and, of course, Keynes remain quite relevant today.

No, the problem lies not in the inherent unsuitability of economics for scientific thinking as in the sociology of the economics profession — a profession that somehow, at least in macro, has ceased rewarding research that produces successful predictions and rewards research that fits preconceptions

A statement from the White House press secretary said the president “reassured the leaders that America remains committed to the trans-Atlantic alliance and to robust efforts to protect the environment.”

The president’s speech was his boldest and most sweeping assertion of an “America first” foreign policy doctrine since he assumed office four months ago.

“At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us as a country?” Mr. Trump said. “We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore. And they won’t be.”

said the decision would ultimately harm the economy by ceding the jobs of the future in clean energy and technology to overseas competitors.

In his remarks, Mr. Trump listed sectors of the United States economy that would lose revenue and jobs if the country remained part of the accord, citing a study — vigorously disputed by environmental groups — asserting that the agreement would cost 2.7 million jobs by 2025.

“Even in the absence of American leadership; even as this administration joins a small handful of nations that reject the future; I’m confident that our states, cities, and businesses will step up and do even more to lead the way, and help protect for future generations the one planet we’ve got,” Mr. Obama said.

In recent days, Mr. Trump withstood withering criticism from European counterparts who accused him of shirking America’s role as a global leader and America’s responsibility as history’s largest emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gasses.

shortsightedness about the planet and a reckless willingness to shatter longstanding diplomatic relationships.

“It undermines America’s standing in the world and threatens to damage humanity’s ability to solve the climate crisis in time.”

These confessions can be explained by the field of behavioral economics, which holds that human decision-making departs frequently, significantly and predictably from what would be expected if we acted in purely “rational” ways.

Rather, our behavior is powerfully influenced by our emotions, identity and environment, as well as by how options are presented to us.

(organ donation rates are over 90 percent in countries where citizens need to override a default and opt out of donation compared with 4 to 27 percent where they much choose to opt in)

Employees were randomly assigned to one of three groups. The first was “usual care,” in which they received educational materials and free smoking cessation aids. The second was a reward program: Employees could receive up to $800 over six months if they quit. The third was a deposit program, in which smokers initially forked over $150 of their money, but if they quit, they got their deposit back along with a $650 bonus.

Those in the lottery group were eligible for a daily lottery prize with frequent small payouts and occasional large rewards — but only if they clocked in at or below their weight loss goal.

We seem driven (so to speak) to transform cars, conveyances that show us the world, into machines that also see the world for

There is evidence that one’s cognitive map can deteriorate. A widely reported study published in 2006 demonstrated that the brains of London taxi drivers have larger than average amounts of gray matter in the area responsible for complex spatial relations. Brain scans of retired taxi drivers suggested that the volume of gray matter in those areas also decreases when that part of the brain is no longer being used as frequently. “I think it’s possible that if you went to someone doing a lot of active navigation, but just relying on GPS,” Hugo Spiers, one of the authors of the taxi study, hypothesized to me, “you’d actually get a reduction in that area.”

A consequence is a possible diminution of our “cognitive map,” a term introduced in 1948 by the psychologist Edward Tolman of the University of California, Berkeley. In a groundbreaking paper, Dr. Tolman analyzed several laboratory experiments involving rats and mazes. He argued that rats had the ability to develop not only cognitive “strip maps” — simple conceptions of the spatial relationship between two points — but also more comprehensive cognitive maps that encompassed the entire maze.

Could society’s embrace of GPS be eroding our cognitive maps? For Julia Frankenstein, a psychologist at the University of Freiburg’s Center for Cognitive Science, the danger of GPS is that “we are not forced to remember or process the information — as it is permanently ‘at hand,’ we need not think or decide for ourselves.” She has written that we “see the way from A to Z, but we don’t see the landmarks along the way.” In this sense, “developing a cognitive map from this reduced information is a bit like trying to get an entire musical piece from a few notes.” GPS abets a strip-map level of orientation with the world.

We seem driven (so to speak) to transform cars, conveyances that show us the world, into machines that also see the world for us.

For Dr. Tolman, the cognitive map was a fluid metaphor with myriad applications. He identified with his rats. Like them, a scientist runs the maze, turning strip maps into comprehensive maps — increasingly accurate models of the “great God-given maze which is our human world,” as he put it. The countless examples of “displaced aggression” he saw in that maze — “the poor Southern whites, who take it out on the Negros,” “we psychologists who criticize all other departments,” “Americans who criticize the Russians and the Russians who criticize us” — were all, to some degree, examples of strip-map comprehension, a blinkered view that failed to comprehend the big picture. “What in the name of Heaven and Psychology can we do about it?” he wrote. “My only answer is to preach again the virtues of reason — of, that is, broad cognitive maps.”

living organisms concentrate carbon-12 in their cells—and when they die, that signature persists. When scientists find graphite that’s especially enriched in carbon-12, relative to carbon-13, they can deduce that living things were around when that graphite was first formed. And that’s exactly what the Tokyo team found in the Saglek Block—grains of graphite, enriched in carbon-12, encased within 3.95-billion-year-old rock.

the team calculated the graphite was created at temperatures between 536 and 622 Celsius—a range that’s consistent with the temperatures at which the surrounding metamorphic rocks were transformed. This suggests that the graphite was already there when the rocks were heated and warped, and didn’t sneak in later. It was truly OG—original graphite.

Still, all of this evidence suggests Earth was home to life during its hellish infancy, and that such life abounded in a variety of habitats. Those pioneering organisms—bacteria, probably—haven’t left any fossils behind. But Sano and Komiya hope to find some clues about them by analyzing the Saglek Block rocks. The levels of nitrogen, iron, and sulfur in the rocks could reveal which energy sources those organisms exploited, and which environments they inhabited. They could tell us how life first lived.

they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it.

What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries that threaten their interests.

“Our criticisms are founded in a confidence in science,” said Steven Goodman, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and a proponent of open science. “That’s a fundamental difference — we’re critiquing science to make it better. Others are critiquing it to devalue the approach itself.”

alls to base public policy on “sound science” seem unassailable if you don’t know the term’s history. The phrase was adopted by the tobacco industry in the 1990s to counteract mounting evidence linking secondhand smoke to cancer.

The sound science tactic exploits a fundamental feature of the scientific process: Science does not produce absolute certainty. Contrary to how it’s sometimes represented to the public, science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, it’s a process of uncertainty reduction, much like a game of 20 Questions.

Any given study can rarely answer more than one question at a time, and each study usually raises a bunch of new questions in the process of answering old ones. “Science is a process rather than an answer,” said psychologist Alison Ledgerwood of the University of California, Davis. Every answer is provisional and subject to change in the face of new evidence. It’s not entirely correct to say that “this study proves this fact,” Ledgerwood said. “We should be talking instead about how science increases or decreases our confidence in something.”

While insisting that they merely wanted to ensure that public policy was based on sound science, tobacco companies defined the term in a way that ensured that no science could ever be sound enough. The only sound science was certain science, which is an impossible standard to achieve.

“Doubt is our product,” wrote one employee of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company in a 1969 internal memo. The note went on to say that doubt “is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’” and “establishing a controversy.” These strategies for undermining inconvenient science were so effective that they’ve served as a sort of playbook for industry interests ever since

Doubt merchants aren’t pushing for knowledge, they’re practicing what Proctor has dubbed “agnogenesis” — the intentional manufacture of ignorance. This ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowing something; it’s a lack of comprehension deliberately created by agents who don’t want you to know,

In the hands of doubt-makers, transparency becomes a rhetorical move. “It’s really difficult as a scientist or policy maker to make a stand against transparency and openness, because well, who would be against it?

But at the same time, “you can couch everything in the language of transparency and it becomes a powerful weapon.” For instance, when the EPA was preparing to set new limits on particulate pollution in the 1990s, industry groups pushed back against the research and demanded access to primary data (including records that researchers had promised participants would remain confidential) and a reanalysis of the evidence. Their calls succeeded and a new analysis was performed. The reanalysis essentially confirmed the original conclusions, but the process of conducting it delayed the implementation of regulations and cost researchers time and money.

Delay is a time-tested strategy. “Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has,” said Marc Morano, a prominent critic of global warming research

which has received funding from the oil and gas industry. “We’re the negative force. We’re just trying to stop stuff.”

these ploys are getting a fresh boost from Congress. The Data Quality Act (also known as the Information Quality Act) was reportedly written by an industry lobbyist and quietly passed as part of an appropriations bill in 2000. The rule mandates that federal agencies ensure the “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” that they disseminate, though it does little to define what these terms mean. The law also provides a mechanism for citizens and groups to challenge information that they deem inaccurate, including science that they disagree with. “It was passed in this very quiet way with no explicit debate about it — that should tell you a lot about the real goals,” Levy said.

in the 20 months following its implementation, the act was repeatedly used by industry groups to push back against proposed regulations and bog down the decision-making process. Instead of deploying transparency as a fundamental principle that applies to all science, these interests have used transparency as a weapon to attack very particular findings that they would like to eradicate.

Now Congress is considering another way to legislate how science is used. The Honest Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas,3The bill has been passed by the House but still awaits a vote in the Senate. is another example of what Levy calls a “Trojan horse” law that uses the language of transparency as a cover to achieve other political goals. Smith’s legislation would severely limit the kind of evidence the EPA could use for decision-making. Only studies whose raw data and computer codes were publicly available would be allowed for consideration.

It might seem like an easy task to sort good science from bad, but in reality it’s not so simple. “There’s a misplaced idea that we can definitively distinguish the good from the not-good science, but it’s all a matter of degree,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science. “There is no perfect study.” Requiring regulators to wait until they have (nonexistent) perfect evidence is essentially “a way of saying, ‘We don’t want to use evidence for our decision-making,’

ost scientific controversies aren’t about science at all, and once the sides are drawn, more data is unlikely to bring opponents into agreement.

objective knowledge is not enough to resolve environmental controversies. “While these controversies may appear on the surface to rest on disputed questions of fact, beneath often reside differing positions of value; values that can give shape to differing understandings of what ‘the facts’ are.” What’s needed in these cases isn’t more or better science, but mechanisms to bring those hidden values to the forefront of the discussion so that they can be debated transparently. “As long as we continue down this unabashedly naive road about what science is, and what it is capable of doing, we will continue to fail to reach any sort of meaningful consensus on these matters,”

The dispute over tobacco was never about the science of cigarettes’ link to cancer. It was about whether companies have the right to sell dangerous products and, if so, what obligations they have to the consumers who purchased them.

Similarly, the debate over climate change isn’t about whether our planet is heating, but about how much responsibility each country and person bears for stopping it

While researching her book “Merchants of Doubt,” science historian Naomi Oreskes found that some of the same people who were defending the tobacco industry as scientific experts were also receiving industry money to deny the role of human activity in global warming. What these issues had in common, she realized, was that they all involved the need for government action. “None of this is about the science. All of this is a political debate about the role of government,”

These controversies are really about values, not scientific facts, and acknowledging that would allow us to have more truthful and productive debates. What would that look like in practice? Instead of cherry-picking evidence to support a particular view (and insisting that the science points to a desired action), the various sides could lay out the values they are using to assess the evidence.

For instance, in Europe, many decisions are guided by the precautionary principle — a system that values caution in the face of uncertainty and says that when the risks are unclear, it should be up to industries to show that their products and processes are not harmful, rather than requiring the government to prove that they are harmful before they can be regulated. By contrast, U.S. agencies tend to wait for strong evidence of harm before issuing regulations

the difference between them comes down to priorities: Is it better to exercise caution at the risk of burdening companies and perhaps the economy, or is it more important to avoid potential economic downsides even if it means that sometimes a harmful product or industrial process goes unregulated?

But science can’t tell us how risky is too risky to allow products like cigarettes or potentially harmful pesticides to be sold — those are value judgements that only humans can make.

What is it about a new year? How does our psychology influence how we think about that and making fresh starts? We do what social psychologists call temporal accounting -- that is, we have a ledger in our head of how we are spending our time. What we’re trying to do, in some cases, is relegate our previous selves to the past: This year we’re going to do a lot better.

breaks are much more important than we realize.

Many hard-core workplaces think of breaks as a deviation from performance, when in fact the science of breaks tells us they’re a part of performance.

Research shows us that social breaks are better than solo breaks -- taking a break with somebody else is more restorative than doing it on your own. A break that involves movement is better than a stationary one. And then there's the restorative power in nature. Simply going outside outside rather than being inside, simply being able to look out a window during a break is better. And there's the importance of being fully detached,

Every day I write down two breaks that I’m going to take. I make a 'break list,' and I try to treat them with the same reverence with which I’d treat scheduled meetings. We would never skip a meeting.

When you're giving feedback to employees, should you give good news or bad news first?

Here’s where you should go first: If you’re not the default choice

If you are the default choice, you’re better off not going first. What happens is that early in a process, people are more likely to be open-minded, to challenge assumptions. But over time, they wear out, and they’re more likely to go with the default choice.

Also, if you’re operating in an uncertain environment -- and this is actually really important -- where the criteria for selections are not fully fully sharp, you’re better off going at the end. In the beginning, the judges are still trying to figure out what they want.

In fact, what researchers have found is that at the beginning, project teams pretty much do nothing. They bicker, they dicker. Yet astonishingly, many project teams she followed ended up really getting started in earnest at the exact midpoint. If you give a team 34 days, they’ll get started in earnest on day 17. This is actually a big shift in the way organizational scholars thought about how teams work.

There are two key things a leader can do at a midpoint. One is to identify it to make it salient: Say "ok guys, it’s day 17 of this 35 day project. We better get going."

The second comes from research on basketball. It shows that when teams are ahead at the midpoint, they get complacent. When they’re way behind at the midpoint, they get demoralized. But when they’re a little behind, it can be galvanizing. So what leaders can do is suggest hey, we’re a little bit behind.

One of the issues you explore is when it pays to go first — whether you’re up for a competitive pitch or trying to get a job. When is it good to go first

If you ask people what they prefer, four out of five prefer getting the bad news first. The reason has to do with endings. Given the choice, human beings prefer endings that elevate. We prefer endings that go up, that have a rising sequence rather than a declining sequence.

Raising marine fish is a different proposition. The harsh ocean environment makes production risky, and the biology of these species makes many of them difficult and costly to breed and grow.

Improvements in technology have reduced, though not eliminated, the amount of fish used in feeds, especially for farmed salmon. It now takes half as much fresh fish to raise salmon as it did 20 years ago.

Marine fish farming is currently done in sheltered bays and sea lochs. But there is growing interest in a new high-tech method that raises fish in huge submersible cages anchored far from land in the open ocean. It’s risky business, with high operating costs. Expensive infrastructure is vulnerable to intense storms.

Worse still, the practice also impacts the ocean’s ability to absorb atmospheric carbon: if the water is already saturated from sources down below, it will be unable to absorb human-caused emissions from above, hamstringing one of our best assets in the fight against climate change.

Technological innovations such as green power generation and battery storage are vital for reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. But we still need to reduce atmospheric carbon, and so far technology has not been able to do that affordably and at scale.

But that hasn’t happened yet. A study published March 10 by the U.N. Environment Program, in partnership with the University of Oxford, found that of the $14.6 trillion committed by governments of the world’s 50 largest economies in 2020, just 2.5% was on programs likely to decrease greenhouse-gas emissions, lower pollution or restoring degraded natural systems.

Based on proportion of GDP, Spain, South Korea, and the U.K. led on green spending during the pandemic—though that is partly because these countries have announced the allocations of greater shares of their recovery plans than most countries so far. But when considering green spending as a proportion of recovery funds so far announced, Denmark, Finland, Germany, France, Norway, and Poland led.

“Trillions in fiscal spending [still to be announced] provide the greatest opportunity in decades to reorient for the future,” it reads. “Citizens, businesses, policy makers, and politicians must hold each other to account to ensure that the opportunity is not wasted.”

This process also generates byproducts that the cow’s body does not take up, such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Methane-producing microbes, called methanogens, use these compounds to form methane, which the cow’s body expels.

In that work, we showed that supplementing dairy cows’ feed with about 10 ounces of seaweed a day reduced methane emissions by up to 67%. However, the cattle that ate this relatively large quantity of seaweed consumed less feed. This reduced their milk production – a clear drawback for dairy farmers.

We wanted to know whether the seaweed was stable when stored for up to three years; whether microbes that produce methane in cows’ stomachs could adapt to the seaweed, making it ineffective; and whether the type of diet that the cows ate changed the seaweed’s effectiveness in reducing methane emissions. And we used less seaweed than in our 2019 study.

As we expected, the steers released a lot more hydrogen – up to 750% more, mostly from their mouths – as their systems produced less methane. Hydrogen has minimal impact on the environment.

We also found that seaweed that had been stored in a freezer for three years maintained its effectiveness, and that microbes in the cows’ digestive systems did not adapt to the seaweed in ways that neutralized its effects.

For example, we calculate that a producer finishing 1,000 head of beef cattle – that is, feeding them a high-energy diet to grow and add muscle – could reduce feed costs by US$40,320 to $87,320 depending on how much seaweed the cattle consumed.

We don’t know for certain why feeding cattle seaweed supplements helped them convert more of their diet to weight gain. However, previous research has suggested that some rumen microorganisms can use hydrogen that is no longer going into methane production to generate energy-dense nutrients that the cow can then use for added growth.

Commercializing seaweed as a cattle feed additive would involve many steps. First, scientists would need to develop aquaculture techniques for producing seaweed on a large scale, either in the ocean or in tanks on land.

Financing for the top 35 companies involved in tar sands — one of the most environmentally destructive fossil fuels to extract and process — decreased 27% since 2019, to $16 billion. 

“The policies and commitments that banks have put out so far give us no reason to believe they’re going to make these deep emissions cuts that the science demands,”

These communities, with generations of experience successfully protecting nature, have strong track records of guarding the forest, according to the report. They generally favor smaller-scale, more diverse farming, which extracts far less from the land than industrial operations do. 

“The forest provides us food, water and gives us a roof. It’s not something alien to us, but another living being,” said Rivas, who’s also been working to promote gender equality in the agroforestry sector. “We only take what we need, nothing more.”

“We need to center and take direction from Indigenous and tribal earth defenders in order to protect forests’ biodiversity and even prevent the next pandemic,”

“This scientific consensus [in the report] gives our world’s leaders a mandate to defend the rights of Indigenous and tribal communities,” said Recinos. “Otherwise, sensitive biomes and rainforests, such as the Amazon, will remain under threat or, worse, reach an irreversible tipping point.” 

“We remain committed, at all times, to providing a safe and inclusive working environment on our productions and for all employees.”

Mr. Spottiswood had previously been investigated for his treatment of the writing staff during the first season of the CBS procedural

“All Rise” has been celebrated by CBS after its prime-time lineup had been criticized for its lack of diversity

Five of the original seven members of the “All Rise” writing staff left the show because of his treatment of them and the way the show, under his direction, depicted race and gender,

“We had to do so much behind the scenes to keep these scripts from being racist and offensive,”

Mr. Spottiswood said he was aware of the problems with his leadership and pledged to do better.

The studio kept Mr. Spottiswood, who is white, in charge of the show, and provided him a corporate coach to advise him.

claiming he was interested only in having Mr. Nayar appear at public events with the title of executive producer but did not give him the duties to match that position.

The most recent investigation was again focused on statements Mr. Spottiswood was said to have made in the writers’ room.

There are many things that our colleagues in Korea did that allowed them to have a very effective initial response. Our public-private smorgasbord of clinical laboratories and testing, our regulatory environment for how new lab tests can be rolled out, the public health capacity [being] very weak in terms of ability to get the contact tracing done.

There were just many things that delayed us. That said, there was lots of great work in many communities. But I think as a nation, it wasn't a good performance.

The supply chain is very interdependent internationally. This was a really complex, systemwide assault.

Globally, the numbers can be even worse, and the stakes often higher. “Say a person comes into the hospital in Sierra Leone with a fever and flulike symptoms,” DeRisi says. “After a few days, or a week, they die. What caused that illness? Most of the time, we never find out. Because if the cause isn’t something that we can culture and test for” — like hepatitis, or strep throat — “it basically just stays a mystery.”

It would be better, DeRisi says, to watch for rare cases of mystery illnesses in people, which often exist well before a pathogen gains traction and is able to spread.

Based on a retrospective analysis of blood samples, scientists now know that H.I.V. emerged nearly a dozen times over a century, starting in the 1920s, before it went global.

Zika was a relatively harmless illness before a single mutation, in 2013, gave the virus the ability to enter and damage brain cells.

The beauty of this approach” — running blood samples from people hospitalized all over the world through his system, known as IDseq — “is that it works even for things that we’ve never seen before, or things that we might think we’ve seen but which are actually something new.”

In this scenario, an undiscovered or completely new virus won’t trigger a match but will instead be flagged. (Even in those cases, the mystery pathogen will usually belong to a known virus family: coronaviruses, for instance, or filoviruses that cause hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola and Marburg.)

And because different types of bacteria require specific conditions in order to grow, you also need some idea of what you’re looking for in order to find it.

The same is true of genomic sequencing, which relies on “primers” designed to match different combinations of nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA and RNA).

Even looking at a slide under a microscope requires staining, which makes organisms easier to see — but the stains used to identify bacteria and parasites, for instance, aren’t the same.

The practice that DeRisi helped pioneer to skirt this problem is known as metagenomic sequencing

Unlike ordinary genomic sequencing, which tries to spell out the purified DNA of a single, known organism, metagenomic sequencing can be applied to a messy sample of just about anything — blood, mud, seawater, snot — which will often contain dozens or hundreds of different organisms, all unknown, and each with its own DNA. In order to read all the fragmented genetic material, metagenomic sequencing uses sophisticated software to stitch the pieces together by matching overlapping segments.

The assembled genomes are then compared against a vast database of all known genomic sequences — maintained by the government-run National Center for Biotechnology Information — making it possible for researchers to identify everything in the mix

Traditionally, the way that scientists have identified organisms in a sample is to culture them: Isolate a particular bacterium (or virus or parasite or fungus); grow it in a petri dish; and then examine the result under a microscope, or use genomic sequencing, to understand just what it is. But because less than 2 percent of bacteria — and even fewer viruses — can be grown in a lab, the process often reveals only a tiny fraction of what’s actually there. It’s a bit like planting 100 different kinds of seeds that you found in an old jar. One or two of those will germinate and produce a plant, but there’s no way to know what the rest might have grown into.

Such studies have revealed just how vast the microbial world is, and how little we know about it

“The selling point for researchers is: ‘Look, this technology lets you investigate what’s happening in your clinic, whether it’s kids with meningitis or something else,’” DeRisi said. “We’re not telling you what to do with it. But it’s also true that if we have enough people using this, spread out all around the world, then it does become a global network for detecting emerging pandemics

One study found more than 1,000 different kinds of viruses in a tiny amount of human stool; another found a million in a couple of pounds of marine sediment. And most were organisms that nobody had seen before.

After the Biohub opened in 2016, one of DeRisi’s goals was to turn metagenomics from a rarefied technology used by a handful of elite universities into something that researchers around the world could benefit from

metagenomics requires enormous amounts of computing power, putting it out of reach of all but the most well-funded research labs. The tool DeRisi created, IDseq, made it possible for researchers anywhere in the world to process samples through the use of a small, off-the-shelf sequencer, much like the one DeRisi had shown me in his lab, and then upload the results to the cloud for analysis.

he’s the first to make the process so accessible, even in countries where lab supplies and training are scarce. DeRisi and his team tested the chemicals used to prepare DNA for sequencing and determined that using as little as half the recommended amount often worked fine. They also 3-D print some of the labs’ tools and replacement parts, and offer ongoing training and tech support

The metagenomic analysis itself — normally the most expensive part of the process — is provided free.

But DeRisi’s main innovation has been in streamlining and simplifying the extraordinarily complex computational side of metagenomics

IDseq is also fast, capable of doing analyses in hours that would take other systems weeks.

“What IDseq really did was to marry wet-lab work — accumulating samples, processing them, running them through a sequencer — with the bioinformatic analysis,”

“Without that, what happens in a lot of places is that the researcher will be like, ‘OK, I collected the samples!’ But because they can’t analyze them, the samples end up in the freezer. The information just gets stuck there.”

Meningitis itself isn’t a disease, just a description meaning that the tissues around the brain and spinal cord have become inflamed. In the United States, bacterial infections can cause meningitis, as can enteroviruses, mumps and herpes simplex. But a high proportion of cases have, as doctors say, no known etiology: No one knows why the patient’s brain and spinal tissues are swelling.

When Saha and her team ran the mystery meningitis samples through IDseq, though, the result was surprising. Rather than revealing a bacterial cause, as expected, a third of the samples showed signs of the chikungunya virus — specifically, a neuroinvasive strain that was thought to be extremely rare. “At first we thought, It cannot be true!” Saha recalls. “But the moment Joe and I realized it was chikungunya, I went back and looked at the other 200 samples that we had collected around the same time. And we found the virus in some of those samples as well.”

Until recently, chikungunya was a comparatively rare disease, present mostly in parts of Central and East Africa. “Then it just exploded through the Caribbean and Africa and across Southeast Asia into India and Bangladesh,” DeRisi told me. In 2011, there were zero cases of chikungunya reported in Latin America. By 2014, there were a million.

Chikungunya is a mosquito-borne virus, but when DeRisi and Saha looked at the results from IDseq, they also saw something else: a primate tetraparvovirus. Primate tetraparvoviruses are almost unknown in humans, and have been found only in certain regions. Even now, DeRisi is careful to note, it’s not clear what effect the virus has on people. “Maybe it’s dangerous, maybe it isn’t,” DeRisi says. “But I’ll tell you what: It’s now on my radar.

it reveals a landscape of potentially dangerous viruses that we would otherwise never find out about. “What we’ve been missing is that there’s an entire universe of pathogens out there that are causing disease in humans,” Imam notes, “ones that we often don’t even know exist.”

“The plan was, Let’s let researchers around the world propose studies, and we’ll choose 10 of them to start,” DeRisi recalls. “We thought we’d get, like, a couple dozen proposals, and instead we got 350.”

Metagenomic sequencing is especially good at what scientists call “environmental sampling”: identifying, say, every type of bacteria present in the gut microbiome, or in a teaspoon of seawater.

“When you draw blood from someone who has a fever in Ghana, you really don’t know very much about what would normally be in their blood without fever — let alone about other kinds of contaminants in the environment. So how do you interpret the relevance of all the things you’re seeing?”

Such criticisms have led some to say that metagenomics simply isn’t suited to the infrastructure of developing countries. Along with the problem of contamination, many labs struggle to get the chemical reagents needed for sequencing, either because of the cost or because of shipping and customs holdups

we’re less likely to be caught off-guard. “With Ebola, there’s always an issue: Where’s the virus hiding before it breaks out?” DeRisi explains. “But also, once we start sampling people who are hospitalized more widely — meaning not just people in Northern California or Boston, but in Uganda, and Sierra Leone, and Indonesia — the chance of disastrous surprises will go down. We’ll start seeing what’s hidden.”

The quality of mathematics research in the United States today is the envy of the scientific world. This is a direct result of the openness and inclusivity of the profession.

Can Americans maintain this unmatched excellence in the future? There are worrisome signs that suggest not.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development compares mathematical proficiency among 15-year-olds by country worldwide. According to its 2018 report, America ranked 37th while China, America’s main competitor for world leadership, came in first.

This is despite the fact that the United States is the fifth-highest spender per pupil among the 37 developed OECD nations

This massive failure of our K-12 education system trickles through the STEM pipeline.

At the undergraduate level, too few American students are prepared for higher-level mathematics courses. These students are then unprepared for rigorous graduate-level work

According to our own experiences at the universities where we teach, an overwhelming majority of American students with strong math backgrounds are either foreign-born or first-generation students who have additional support from their education-conscious families. At all levels, STEM disciplines are more and more dependent on a constant flow of foreign talent.

There are many reasons for this failure, but the way that we educate and prepare teachers is particularly influential. The vast majority of K-12 math teachers are graduates of teacher-preparation programs that teach very little substantive mathematics

This has led to a constant stream of ill-advised and dumbed-down reforms. One of the latest fads is anti-racist mathematics. Promoted in several states, the bizarre doctrine threatens to further degrade the teaching of mathematics.

Another major concern is the twisted interpretation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Under the banner of DEI, universities are abandoning the use of standardized tests like the SAT and GRE in admissions, and cities are considering scrapping academic tracking and various gifted programs in schools, which they deem “inequitable.”

such programs are particularly effective, when properly implemented, at discovering and encouraging talented children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The new 2021 Mathematics Framework, currently under consideration by California’s Department of Education, does away “with all tracking, acceleration, gifted programs, or any instruction that involves clustering by individual differences, without expressing any awareness of the impact these drastic alterations would have in preparing STEM-ready candidates.”

These measures will not only hinder the progress of the generations of our future STEM workforce but also contribute to structural inequalities, as they are uniquely detrimental to students whose parents cannot send them to private schools or effective enrichment programs.

These are just a few examples of an unprecedented fervor for revolutionary change in the name of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a doctrine that views the world as a fierce battleground for the narratives of various identity groups.

This will only lead to a further widening of racial disparities in educational outcomes while lowering American children’s rankings in education internationally.

Ill-conceived DEI policies, often informed by CRT, and the declining standards of K-12 math education feed each other in a vicious circle

Regarding minorities, in particular, public K-12 education all too often produces students unprepared to compete, thus leading to large disparities in admissions at universities, graduate programs, and faculty positions. This disparity is then condemned as a manifestation of structural racism, resulting in administrative measures to lower the evaluation criteria. Lowering standards at all levels leads eventually to even worse outcomes and larger disparities, and so on in a downward spiral.

A case in point is the recent report by the American Mathematical Society that accuses the entire mathematics community, with the thinnest of specific evidence, of systemic racial discrimination. A major justification put forward for such a grave accusation is the lack of sufficient representation of Black mathematicians in the professio

the report, while raising awareness of several ugly facts from the long-ago past, makes little effort to address the real reasons for this, mainly the catastrophic failure of the K-12 mathematical educational system.

The National Science Foundation, a federal institution meant to support fundamental research, is now diverting some of its limited funding to various DEI initiatives of questionable benefit.

Meanwhile, other countries, especially China, are doing precisely the opposite, following the model of our past dedication to objective measures of excellence. How long before we will see a reverse exodus, away from the United States?

The present crisis can still be reversed by focusing on a few concrete actions:

Improve schools in urban areas and inner-city neighborhoods by following the most promising education programs. These programs demonstrate that inner-city children benefit if they are challenged by high standards and a nurturing environment.

Follow the lead of other highly successful rigorous programs such as BASIS schools and Math for America, which focus on rigorous STEM curricula, combined with 21st-century teaching methods, and recruit talented teachers to help them build on their STEM knowledge and teaching methods.

Increase, rather than eliminate, tailored instruction, both for accelerated and remedial math courses.

Reject the soft bigotry of low expectations, that Black children cannot do well in competitive mathematics programs and need dumbed-down ethnocentric versions of mathematics.

Uphold the objective selection process based on merit at all levels of education and research.

When Arcola Elementary School reopened in person in mid-March, Barksdale's students had to adjust to a very different classroom. The reading corner was gone. The carpet squares the kids usually sat on? Packed away.

And for the first time, Barksdale had to encourage her first-graders not to share. "An aspect for social and emotional learning that they really need to gain is how to share and how to collaborate," she says. "And right now, the safest thing for them is to not share their materials."

22% of elementary students and 26% percent of middle school students are still learning completely virtually.

A recent NPR/IPSOS poll shows that 29% of parents polled are considering keeping their kids in remote learning indefinitely. This could be for a myriad of reasons, such as home being a better environment to focus in, or not having to feel the impacts of an unsupportive education system.

"This definitely is the hardest thing I've ever done... trying to teach students virtually and in person through a mask."

"Kids don't learn from someone they don't like," he explains. "I've just learned to tap into their desires, how they want to see themselves, and their interests... and that works virtually or in person."

"I feel like we've gone backwards in education," she says. "Now the desks are in rows, you know, spaced out six feet apart – it's just really sterile. With this form of in-person learning, I don't know that they're getting a good education."

Nevertheless, Higgins believes that in-person learning is better than being completely virtual when it comes to the mental health and social development of her students.

Unionization rates in the U.S. have declined for decades. "Unionization is highest in the public sector, but this has been challenged by state and local austerity since the recession in 2008-09," Warner said.

Warner said that the role of the federal government is to provide funds to states and local governments to support critical public services, such as schools and roads

While the federal government can play a redistributive role, as with the recent COVID relief package, this is less likely in states that have more corporate influence in their legislative policymaking,

"In the new political economy of place, the corporate interests undermine the potential for inclusive economic growth."

The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world's languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.

In the past decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of experience as space, time and causality could be constructed by language.

About a third of the world's languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space.

As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.

People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions.

And many other ways to organize time exist in the world's languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.

Beyond space, time and causality, patterns in language have been shown to shape many other domains of thought. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.

Patterns in language offer a window on a culture's dispositions and priorities.

Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs

Simply showing that speakers of different languages think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the causal role of language, what's needed are studies that directly manipulate language and look for effects in cognition.