I hope reasonable people can see the potential for incentives to impact various public health measurements in ways that cannot yet be detected or well accounted for. Surely some aspect of flu disappearing is impacted by the priorities of thinly stretched medical personnel, what with a pandemic and all why would anybody test for flu? Who even tests patients for flu in the first place? It’s not recommended.
How about the jokers at UMN make an effort to “help out”? Sheesh. If the publicly funded universities can’t lend a hand or do their fair share, what hopes have we that big tech will come in and save open source. Do the universities have money problems?
Define “air quality” as a single metric is crude at best, but arguably dishonest. The nature of pollution and the pollutants themselves have changed have they not?
Edit: To illustrate the point, assume that getting regular physical is more important now than 100 years ago, due to on average more sedentary contemporary lifestyles. Assume heavy air pollution decreases outdoor activity, which seems plausible if not certain. How long would it take for a body of scientific literature to develop to document the problem? Given measurement problems and the difficulty of doing simulation heavy research, we might never be able to prove such a linkage exists, even if it did.
“Air quality is a real threat in many countries but not anymore in the US”
Couldn’t be more wrong.
As the author casually admits, we know nothing without experiments. End of story.
What makes your statement so wrong is that it takes decades for the consequences to show up, if they are measurable at all, in non experimental studies. That is exactly the same reason that cigarettes were considered safe for so long. Health consequences take decades to show up and without experiments all we get are loose correlations. Air quality in many places in America is getting worse, the size of the population in these areas is massive. To declare to potential health consequences 60 years in the future without any solid experimental evidence is the same as the doctors of the 50’s telling patients to smoke up, there’s no evidence cigarettes are bad. Exactly the same.
Dry mucus membranes makes you more susceptible to a number of respiratory problems. If you have mold, everyone does to some extent, drying it out will just make the health problems worse as it aerosolizes the mold. Mold aside, for optimal health a level between 40-60% is advised. Allergy sufferers are especially sensitive to this.
Anybody that lives somewhere with heavy PM doesn’t need to fit test a mask. You instantly feel the difference when you put one on. They don’t block many types of pollution, but for heavy wildfire smoke they will instantly decrease the migraines when pm are above 200 or so.
They gave an irb waiver they should not have. The research was clearly unethical and they , the irb, gave it a rubber stamp. It’s likely there is a systemic problem and that this was not an isolated failure.
It’s common knowledge amongst most educated people. Sorry if you had to find out by googling. Probably a sickening feeling if you’ve been a subscriber or passed along any of their retracted news as fact. I too used to trust the nyt, but “show me incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.”
Used to think this but now I’m not so sure. If you aren’t already a skeptic I can’t imagine what else you need. People used to pay the national enquirer for fake news. People want to believe horrible things about other people and will not be encumbered by facts or rationality.
No government would agree to that. Better have your citizens die of covid and blame it on foreign governments than to take all the responsibility yourself while giving outsiders indemnity. Governments have to play politics.
A sincere written apology should be 3. You needn’t misrepresent your own intentions to do this, but it does require thinking about the specific harms you have caused (perhaps unintentionally) and enumerating them in a way that doesn’t minimize their import. That is the anatomy of a true apology. It requires taking the other perspective as fact.
So the NSF funded some wholly unethical research that does nothing other than prove as stated in the conclusion that the openness of open source means it’s doomed to be forever insecure. What a horrible moment.
It potentially has long term negative impact on the experimental subjects involved and has no research benefit. The researchers should be removed from university and the university itself should be sued and lose enough money that they act more responsible in the future. It’s a very slippery slope to from casual irb wavers to Tuskegee experiments.
There is sometimes an exception for things like interviews when n is only a couple of people. This was clearly unethical and it’s certain that at least some of those involved knew that. It’s common knowledge universities.
I think some of what you say is widely debated but it is disappointing that those who advocated better election security after 2016 did a 360 in 2020 and decided the same systems are now infallible. Election security shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Wholly suboptimal.
If more police _caused_ more crime to occur you would see it quite clearly in in small wealthy suburban communities where over policing is very real (think about places where the police mostly focus on truant high school kids and rich people with domestic disturbances). Rather, police violence is a problem in dangerous high crime areas like the Oakland Bart station, not in undeniably over policed areas like Beverly Hills. As long as a lot of violent crime is reported in these places, politicians will be obligated to have police there to protect the public. Bart without police won’t fly with anyone. You can defund the cops in Beverly Hills, for sure, but that seems counter productive if your concern is police violence. Private security will just move in a soak up those dollars with even less accountability to the public.
There is a lot of whataboutism in society lately. The what about in this case are the many posts claiming the 2016 election was fraudulent, stolen, etc... While I personally understand the differences (the 2016 election really was stolen, but the 2020 election was not), I also understand why others do not agree and instead see both claims of election fraud as sour grapes, consistent with similar claims of election fraud from every close election in American politics in the past century. Dangling chads?
Yes, a semantic disagreement: I don’t think of spurious findings as nonsense. Nonsense has negative connotations that I feel contributes to the real problem which is the competitive nature of research and misconceptions about “error.” Too often I hear people elevate the researcher in a sort of “great man” theory of scientific progress. Too rarely do I hear praise for those doing boring replication studies and the like. I worry that younger people hear someone published “nonsense” and think of it as an indication of the quality of the researcher. All of this leads to more p hacking, more avoidance of replication, and more inefficiency in the scientific process. The economic incentives are such that universities compete for big name researchers, those who don’t publish nonsense. That is the problem IMO.
Places without high crime (armed robbery, murder,etc) can decrease policing because those areas don’t have high crime. Those are not the areas where police violence is an issue. So your solution effectively does nothing.
Perhaps we’re subject to demoralization and whipped into fear and agitation by our own news media, goaded into street violence, justice warriors fighting law enforcement, our culture more or less in tatters. I doubt all that’s caused by over policing seems like cultural social problems to me. But if you believe that overpolicing is the root problem, the easiest way to reduce policing is not to call them. All it would take is a concerted effort in the high crime areas to boycott the police; fewer crimes reported leads to fewer cops.
Otherwise, politicians are always going to feel obligated to add police to areas where folks are getting robbed, raped, murdered, etc... Seems underreporting of crime, citizens boycotting 911, is the only way forward if the problem is overpolicing. Am I mistaken?
I don’t think consumer lust is to blame though I hear that often. Perhaps it’s the trade, and those who profit off it that are to blame? Why blame people and not apple, Foxconn or Huawei? Humans must come first, nations and corporations should be subservient. Laws should favor human freedoms over the business of multinational mega corporations. Mega corporations that are controlled directly by the military of a major global superpower, Huawei, should be the most suspect in terms of violating human rights. Yet the posters here in this thread want to blame consumers and defend Huawei and the Chinese military. Astounding to me so many here care more about the right of corporations, military controlled corporations at that, over the rights and dignity of the individual. Disgusting frankly.