#Stephen Buranyi

[luxe-pauvre]

When scientists publish papers in journals, they release only the data they wish to share. Critical evaluation of the results by other scientists – peer review – takes place in secret and the discussion is not released publicly. Once a paper is published, all comments, concerns, and retractions must go through the editors of the journal before they reach the public. There are good, or at least defensible, arguments for all of this. But Hartgerink is part of an increasingly vocal group that believes that the closed nature of science, with authority resting in the hands of specific gatekeepers – journals, universities, and funders – is harmful, and that a more open approach would better serve the scientific method. [. . .] The current push for more open and accountable science, of which they are a part, has “only really existed since 2011”, he said. It has captured an outsize share of the science media’s attention, and set laudable goals, but it remains a small, fragile outpost of true believers within the vast scientific enterprise. [. . .] When I asked [Chris] Hartgerink what it would take to totally eradicate fraud from the scientific process, he suggested that scientists make all of their data public; register the intentions of their work before conducting experiments, to prevent post-hoc reasoning, and that they have their results checked by algorithms during and after the publishing process. To any working scientist – currently enjoying nearly unprecedented privacy and freedom for a profession that is in large part publicly funded – Hartgerink’s vision would be an unimaginably draconian scientific surveillance state. For his part, Hartgerink believes the preservation of public trust in science requires nothing less – but in the meantime, he intends to pursue this ideal without the explicit consent of the entire scientific community, by investigating published papers and making the results available to the public.

Stephen Buranyi, The high-tech war on science fraud

[st-just]

From  Stephen Buranyi’s wonderfully infuriating piece on the business of scientific publishing. Where 

“Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.“

[softroundpigeon]

some articles i've read recently

This culture of dissecting other people’s looks needs to end - Alex Peters

My Prison Gets So Hot, the Floors Sweat - Demetrius Buckley

The dreams of animals - David M Peña-Guzmán

Rise of the racist robots – how AI is learning all our worst impulses - Stephen Buranyi

On Reading and Translating Queer Literature - Allison Grimaldi Donahue

#FreeBritney and the problem with ‘well-meaning’ fan activism - Sean O'Neill

Covid in an Uneven World: Are We All in This Together - Suparna Bhaskaran, Madhumita Dutta, Sirisha Naidu

Shrinkflation: How manufacturers increase their profits but keep product prices ‘familiar’ - Alex Leeds Matthews

Climate Crisis: Why migrant justice is now more important than ever - Ravishaan Rahel Muthiah

A model’s prosthetic leg has been edited out of a ‘body positive’ campaign - Daniel Rodgers

‘Plant-Based Eating Is Probably One of the Blackest Things I Could Do’ - Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Face masks affect how children understand speech differently from adults – new research - Julia Schwarz

Queerying Translation - BJ Epstein

Climate change: why we can’t rely on regrowing coastal habitats to offset carbon emissions - Phil Williamson, Jean-Pierre Gattuso

Rethinking Prison Tourism - Hope Corrigan

[probablyasocialecologist]

What fuelled the rise of the air conditioning was not a sudden explosion in consumer demand, but the influence of the industries behind the great postwar housing boom. Between 1946 and 1965, 31m new homes were constructed in the US, and for the people building those houses, air conditioning was a godsend. Architects and construction companies no longer had to worry much about differences in climate – they could sell the same style of home just as easily in New Mexico as in Delaware. The prevailing mentality was that just about any problems caused by hot climates, cheap building materials, shoddy design or poor city planning could be overcome, as the American Institute of Architects wrote in 1973, “by the brute application of more air conditioning”. As Cooper writes, “Architects, builders and bankers accepted air conditioning first, and consumers were faced with a fait accompli that they merely had to ratify.”

Stephen Buranyi, The air conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world

[rjzimmerman]

This Op-Ed addresses the political situation and climate change in the UK, but it can equally apply to the US. Excerpt from this Op-Ed from The Guardian:

The most shocking political development of 2019 may be the end of the nearly three-decade old consensus that the public doesn’t care about the climate crisis. People were hopelessly and permanently apathetic, the argument went, or unable to see beyond the present. They were said to suffer what Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger memorably called “apocalypse fatigue”, a numbness brought on by years of scientific warnings about a dismal future. And this in turn meant they were uninterested in, if not outright hostile to, any kind of meaningful climate action.

All of this appeared to be backed up by data. Years of polling and other measures of public engagement showed that even as awareness of the crisis grew, there was no interest in changing anything.

But after an unprecedented wave of popular climate protests – centred around the latest and most terrifying scientific predictions – recent polling suggests that orthodoxy has suddenly and dramatically reversed. A YouGov poll found that more than half the country backs a national target of zero carbon emissions by 2030, a policy that as recently as a year ago was offered only by the Green party. Other polls suggest that two-thirds of the country believes the climate crisis is the biggest issue facing humankind, and that it has overtaken the economy on voters’ list of concerns. There have been suggestions that the climate crisis will be a central issue in the upcoming general election – it’s even being called “the climate election” – and a majority of Britons say that it will influence the way they vote.

[longform]

The warmer it gets, the more we use air conditioning. The more we use air conditioning, the warmer it gets. Is there any way out of this trap?

Stephen Buranyi | Guardian | Aug 2019

[jkottke]

Air Conditioning is Warming the Earth

Modern society has an air conditioning problem. One of the most popular responses by the world's population to global warming is to use air conditioning. Air conditioning is very greenhouse gas-intensive, which contributes to the warming of the planet. Which causes more people use air conditioning. And so on. In a long Guardian piece, Stephen Buranyi lays out how air conditioning came to be so ubiquitous and how we might escape this air conditioning trap we find ourselves in.

There are just over 1bn single-room air conditioning units in the world right now - about one for every seven people on earth. Numerous reports have projected that by 2050 there are likely to be more than 4.5bn, making them as ubiquitous as the mobile phone is today. The US already uses as much electricity for air conditioning each year as the UK uses in total. The IEA projects that as the rest of the world reaches similar levels, air conditioning will use about 13% of all electricity worldwide, and produce 2bn tonnes of CO2 a year - about the same amount as India, the world's third-largest emitter, produces today.

All of these reports note the awful irony of this feedback loop: warmer temperatures lead to more air conditioning; more air conditioning leads to warmer temperatures. The problem posed by air conditioning resembles, in miniature, the problem we face in tackling the climate crisis. The solutions that we reach for most easily only bind us closer to the original problem.

Weirdly, the article doesn't mention that most air conditioning units contain chemical refrigerants (CFCs and HCFCs) that, if released, "have 1,000 to 9,000 times greater capacity to warm the atmosphere than carbon dioxide". Phasing out the use of CFCs & HCFCs in new units and capturing the refrigerants in discarded units can prevent global warming to such a degree that it's the #1 way to mitigate the effects of climate change.

[mn2020]

Why the ‘lab-leak’ theory of Covid’s origins has gained prominence again | Stephen Buranyi | The Guardian

[haftaichinews]

Why the ‘lab-leak’ theory of Covid’s origins has gained prominence again | Stephen Buranyi

Why the ‘lab-leak’ theory of Covid’s origins has gained prominence again | Stephen Buranyi

Join Hafta-Ichi to Research the article “Why the ‘lab-leak’ theory of Covid’s origins has gained prominence again | Stephen Buranyi” Joe Biden wants to know if the coronavirus pandemic originated in a laboratory. On Thursday, the president ordered US intelligence agencies to “redouble” their efforts to find exactly when and how the virus jumped into humans, and the two scenarios he suggested…

[luxe-pauvre]

Many scientists also believe that the publishing industry exerts too much influence over what scientists choose to study, which is ultimately bad for science itself. Journals prize new and spectacular results – after all, they are in the business of selling subscriptions – and scientists, knowing exactly what kind of work gets published, align their submissions accordingly. This produces a steady stream of papers, the importance of which is immediately apparent. But it also means that scientists do not have an accurate map of their field of inquiry. Researchers may end up inadvertently exploring dead ends that their fellow scientists have already run up against, solely because the information about previous failures has never been given space in the pages of the relevant scientific publications. [. . .] Today, every scientist knows that their career depends on being published, and professional success is especially determined by getting work into the most prestigious journals. The long, slow, nearly directionless work pursued by some of the most influential scientists of the 20th century is no longer a viable career option. Under today’s system, the father of genetic sequencing, Fred Sanger, who published very little in the two decades between his 1958 and 1980 Nobel prizes, may well have found himself out of a job.

Stephan Buranyi, Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

[dailynewswebsite]

Coronavirus: Is the cure worse than the disease? The most divisive question of 2020

In 1968, on the top of the final nice influenza pandemic, a minimum of 1,000,000 individuals worldwide died, together with 100,000 People. That yr A.M.M. Payne, a professor of epidemiology at Yale College, wrote:

Within the conquest of Mount Everest something lower than 100% success is failure, however in most communicable ailments we’re not confronted with the attainment of such absolute targets, however fairly with making an attempt to scale back the issue to tolerable ranges, as rapidly as potential, throughout the limits of obtainable sources…

That message is price repeating as a result of the schism between these in search of “absolute targets” versus these in search of “tolerable ranges” may be very a lot evident within the present pandemic. On September 21, the BMJ reported that opinion amongst UK scientists is split as as to if it’s higher to deal with defending these most susceptible to extreme COVID, or imposing lockdown for all.

One group of 40 scientists wrote a letter to the chief medical officers of the UK suggesting that they need to purpose to “suppress the virus throughout your complete inhabitants”.

In one other letter, a bunch of 28 scientists urged that “the massive variation in threat by age and well being standing means that the hurt attributable to uniform insurance policies (that apply to all individuals) will outweigh the advantages”. As a substitute, they referred to as for a “focused and evidence-based strategy to the COVID-19 coverage response”.

Every week later, science author Stephen Buranyi wrote a bit for the Guardian arguing that the positions within the letter with 28 authors characterize these of a small minority of scientists. “The overwhelming scientific consensus nonetheless lies with a common lockdown,” he claimed.

Just a few days later, over 60 docs wrote one other letter saying: “We’re involved because of mounting knowledge and actual world expertise, that the one-track response threatens extra lives and livelihoods than Covid-lives saved.”

This backwards and forwards will undoubtedly proceed for a while but, though these concerned will hopefully start to see opposing scientific views and opinions as a present and a possibility to be sceptical and study, fairly than as a “rival camp”.

Scientific consensus takes time

There are points, resembling world warming, the place there’s scientific consensus. However consensuses take a long time, and COVID-19 is a brand new illness. Uncontrolled experiments in lockdown are nonetheless ongoing, and the long-term prices and advantages should not but identified. I very a lot doubt that the majority scientists within the UK have a settled view on whether or not pub gardens or universities campuses must be closed or not. Individuals I discuss to have a spread of opinions: from those that settle for that the illness is now endemic, to those that surprise if it might nonetheless be eradicated.

Some counsel that any epidemiologist who doesn’t toe a specific line is suspect, or has not performed sufficient modelling and that their views mustn’t carry a lot weight. They go on to dismiss the views of different scientists and non-scientist teachers as irrelevant. However science will not be a dogma, and views usually have to be modified within the mild of accelerating information and expertise. I’m a geographer, so I’m used to seeing such video games of educational hierarchy performed above me, however I do fear when individuals resort to insulting their colleagues fairly than admit that information and circumstance have modified and reappraisal is critical.

A grim calculus

Is the remedy worse than the illness? That is the query that presently divides us, so it’s price contemplating the way it may be answered. We must understand how many individuals would die of different causes, for instance, of suicide (together with baby suicides) that may not have in any other case occurred, or liver illness from the rise in alcohol consumption, from cancers that weren’t recognized or handled, to find out the purpose at which specific insurance policies have been taking extra lives than they have been saving. After which what worth must you placed on these misplaced or broken lives in opposition to the financial penalties?

We don’t dwell in an ideal world with good knowledge. For youngsters, for whom the chance of dying from COVID is nearly zero and the dangers of long-term results are regarded as very low, it’s simpler to weigh up the detrimental results of not going to highschool or of being trapped in households with rising home abuse.

For college college students, who’re largely younger, the same set of calculations could possibly be made, together with estimating the “price” of getting the an infection now, versus the price of having it later, probably when the scholar is with their older kin at Christmas. With older individuals, although, the calculus – even in an ideal world – would change into more and more complicated. When you’re very previous and have little or no time left, what dangers would you be keen to take? One aged man famously claimed: “No pleasure is price giving up for the sake of two extra years in a geriatric residence in Weston-super-Mare.”

Security, however at what price? Solarisys/Shutterstock

A current paper, printed in Nature, means that even in Hong Kong, the place compliance with mask-wearing has been over 98% since February, native elimination of COVID will not be potential. If it’s not potential there, it is probably not potential wherever.

On the brighter aspect, elsewhere, aged individuals have been protected even when transmission charges are excessive and general sources are low. In India, a current examine discovered that “it’s believable that stringent stay-at-home orders for older Indian adults, coupled with supply of necessities by social welfare applications and common neighborhood well being employee interactions, contributed to decrease publicity to an infection inside this age group in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.”

Nevertheless, minimising mortality will not be the one purpose. For individuals who don’t die, the result can nonetheless be extended and extreme debility. That, too, have to be taken into consideration. However until you might be positive {that a} specific measure for locking down will do extra good than hurt, within the spherical, you shouldn’t do it. In 1970, shortly earlier than he grew to become dean of the London College of Hygiene and Tropical Drugs, C.E. Gordon Smith wrote:

The important prerequisite of all good public well being measures is that cautious estimates must be manufactured from their benefits and drawbacks, for each the person and the neighborhood, and that they need to be applied solely when there’s a vital steadiness of benefit. On the whole, this ethic has been a sound foundation for determination in most previous conditions within the developed world though, as we ponder the management of milder ailments, fairly totally different issues such because the comfort or productiveness of trade are being introduced into these assessments.

Present beliefs of the place the steadiness of benefits and drawbacks lie are altering. The “rival camps” rhetoric wants to finish. No particular person or small group represents the view of the bulk.

Danny Dorling doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or organisation that may profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their educational appointment.

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/coronavirus-is-the-cure-worse-than-the-disease-the-most-divisive-question-of-2020/ via https://growthnews.in

[probablyasocialecologist]

The US uses as much electricity for air conditioning each year as the UK uses in total.

Stephen Buranyi, The air conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world

[lollipoplollipopoh]

Who holds WHO accountable? | The Listening Post (Feature) by Al Jazeera English Much of the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic treats the World Health Organization (WHO) as an authoritative, impartial source of information. But should it? From the advent of COVID-19, the WHO's press conferences have been a fixture in global news coverage. They serve as a touchstone for journalists and, given that the WHO has 194 member states, the pressers have become a primary source of information for global context. "The WHO does shape information globally quite significantly," says Lawrence Gostin, a professor in global health law at Georgetown University who has worked closely with the WHO in the past, "because it is a trusted and objective science adviser to the world". However, the organisation's objectivity has been called into question. It started in early January when China media analysts started observing a similarity between what the WHO was saying and official statements coming out of China. For example, on January 14, the WHO tweeted: "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus". That same day, the Wuhan Health Commission's public bulletin declared, "We have not found proof for human-to-human transmission." The question is, why would the WHO repeat - almost verbatim - the claims made by China when news outlets, in Hong Kong and elsewhere, were already comparing the novel coronavirus to SARS and saying that it could very well be transferred from person to person? The answer comes down to access. China only granted the WHO access to Wuhan in February 2020, nearly three months after the first case was detected. "WHO's reporting, by virtue of its governance, is highly dependent on every member country's ability, honesty and willingness to share data and issue notifications of epidemics," says Osman Dar, director of the Global Health Programme at Chatham House. "Its verification systems can only be as good as the access their member states provide." Which is the crux of the issue. Member states are not beholden to the WHO but rather the WHO is beholden to them. Not only is the organisation's access, in large part, determined by its member states, but they also make up most of the WHO's funding. On April 15, US President Donald Trump threatened to halt his country's funding to the WHO, accusing the organisation of being China-centric. The president's critics say the threat was an attempt to deflect criticism of Trump's own mishandling of this crisis; however, his actions highlight a key vulnerability in the WHO. The US is, by far, the organisation's biggest funder and if Washington follows through with Trump's threat, then that would severely hinder its operational capacity. Which begs the question - how can the WHO speak truth to power when those powers largely control its access and its funding? "It's not totally neutral. If you're seeing something coming from the WHO, it's something that its member states wanted to be released, it is something that a member state consented to be released," says Stephen Buranyi, a journalist at The Guardian newspaper, "to see the full picture, you have to go beyond what states are telling it." Produced by: Nicholas Muirhead Contributors: Lawrence Gostin - Director, O'Neill Institute, Georgetown University Osman Dar - Global Health Programme, Chatham House Stephen Buranyi - Journalist, The Guardian Rana Mitter - Director, China Centre, Oxford University - Subscribe to our channel: https://ift.tt/291RaQr - Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish - Find us on Facebook: https://ift.tt/1iHo6G4 - Check our website: https://ift.tt/2lOp4tL

[kareem66]

Greta Thunbergs enemies are right to be scared of her message. Her new political allies should be too | Stephen Buranyi

Greta Thunbergs enemies are right to be scared of her message. Her new political allies should be too | Stephen Buranyi

Liberal leaders line up to praise her. Yet their inaction shows they are not really listening, says science writer Stephen Buranyi

Greta Thunberg has made a lot of enemies. They are easy to recognise because their rage is so great they cannot help making themselves look ridiculous. Thunbergs arrival in the US earlier this month set off rightwing pundits and then the president himself. The…