#journal of scientific and technical research

[biomedres]

Jung as a Fascist Theorist or Philanthropic Victim: A Second Look

Jung as a Fascist Theorist or Philanthropic Victim: A Second Look in Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research

Fascism is a system of government merging the most extreme features of both authoritarianism and totalitarianism and is classically considered to be at the far-right end of the political continuum, and sees racial hygiene, political violence, battle, and expansionism as means that can attain national rejuvenation. Emergence of Fascism in the last century in Europe, which had been raised up from somewhat democratic settings, has not been overlooked by intellectuals, who are in search of origins and physiognomies of Fascism. While many of researchers appreciate Fascism as a sociological phenomenon that demands psychological autopsy, there are investigators, as well, who are in search of developmental, biological, political, economic, or administrative backgrounds of Fascism. In this regard, the connection between Jung and Fascism, also, was an intricate story that has been reflected again in a number of new studies. In the present article, Fascism, as a political dogma in the spectrum of authoritarianism, though not an unfamiliar administrative scheme in the globe and history, has been looked over psychosocially, along with some remarkable standpoints of some of the most known intellectuals, who were studying Fascism, Fascists, and masses in close proximity.

For more articles in Journals on Biomedical Science click here bjstr

Follow on Twitter : https://twitter.com/Biomedres01 Follow on Blogger : https://biomedres01.blogspot.com/ Like Our Pins On : https://www.pinterest.com/biomedres/

[strawburry01]

Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby

Ford Pines x Fem! Reader (no Y/N mentions)

Summary: Ford and you are trying to find another cryptid but a thunderstorm causes some emotions.

AN: Thanks for liking the first one all! This is technically a Part 2, but doesn't rely on anything from the first part so don't worry.

Part 1

Word Count: 2k

 You stood in your dark room, humming along to the spinning vinyl as you painstakingly converted your camcorder footage to a VCR tape. Ford always noted that you could just save them to a computer, or just keep it on the camera itself- not understanding your insistence on saving it as physical media. Something in you liked the process though. It was meditative. Being able to uncap your marker and squeakily write the date and contents on the side, and then slide it alongside the rest of them in your growing library. It was rewarding to see the pile growing. Ford still had his growing notebooks, and you now had your growing video library. Between the two of you, both of your research had really been taking off.

As soon as the grant was passed, Ford and you shoved all your collective crap into his car and drove through the night, and then some, to make it to Gravity Falls. From the moment you crossed into town, you could tell he was right with his analysis. Something about the town felt so distinctly, well, weird. It was a quiet, small town, but everyone you met had been kind, although not very outwardly chatty. To be fair, two strangers from the east coast just moved in and were far too excited to be there. It was enough to confuse and freak out anyone.

But the two of you were fine with being the talk of the town. In fact you secretly thought Ford enjoyed the positive attention based on how much he convinced you to go to Greasy’s Diner for brunch. 

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, it’s scientifically proven,” Ford would always say trying to defend the addiction. As long as he paid, you weren’t complaining.

In the background your vinyl began to skip. You grumbled and flipped it over for the next side of songs as Ford entered, head deep in his notebook, not even acknowledging your presence.

“Knocking is considerate,” you commented as you focused on your work, glancing up at him as he sat in the chair nestled in the corner of the room. You had found it on the way into town on some random road with the word FREE spray painted on a sign nearby, so after mild convincing, Ford and you were able to balance it on top of the car.

“The door was open, you relinquished knocking privileges,” he said, without looking up,

“What if I was changing?” you said, “I could’ve been naked you perv,”. You watched as his face reddened and you couldn’t help but smile to yourself as he snapped out of his reading. 

You both liked each other. You felt like it was painfully obvious to everyone, even each other, but something kept you both from ever admitting it. Was it your scientific brains always insisting that it was some stupid imbalance of hormones and forced proximity? Both of your egos trying to constantly one up each other, never wanting to admit you liked the other? Perhaps the fact that if you actually admitted to liking each other, what would that mean for research? Or even worse, liking each other would mean you fell into the cliche.

But god, you had been around each other practically 24/7 for the past months now in Gravity Falls and it was only getting worse each day. Like a growing vine, only getting larger and larger. The only reason you were so confident Ford liked you back was the fact he never attempted to deflect your teasing. He was one to always correct you, or really anyone, if they said something incorrect, but whenever you taunted him, he would just redden and try to change the subject. 

Ford coughed in his chair and shifted as he uncapped his pen to continue an entry in his journal, trying to move past your teasing.

“Sounds like a safety hazard if you were in here without clothes,” he muttered. You threw a marker at him across the room.

“Don’t judge the artist, perhaps I was trying something new,” you said as you slid another tape, labeled “Gobblewonker Part 3” besides Part 1 and 2. 

“Let’s move from this hypothetical,” he said, firmly closing his journal, “there’s a storm coming in tonight according to weather reports. I wanted to try and see if we could catch the Thunderbird at some point,”.

“Pretty elusive fella, no?” you asked, scanning your tapes to see if you had anything on Thunderbirds.

“Yes, and unless you agree to a goat sacrifice this time we’ll just have to be patient and attentive,” he nodded. He really wanted you to agree to a sacrificial goat to draw one out. You crossed your arms and stared at him.

“Stanford Pines I’m not letting you go to hell for animal sacrifice,” you said.

“Fine, but don’t blame me when we can’t see one, because someone has strict morals all of the sudden,” he said as he stood up and left. 

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN ALL OF THE SUDDEN PINES?” you shouted after him.

It was no use. He disappeared into the small cabin you were both calling home for now. It was dark when the rain started. Big drops pelleted the roof, which didn’t enthuse you as Ford insisted on setting up outside. You bundled your rain slicker close, trying to create some warmth, but instead only making your clothes underneath damp. Ford on the other hand couldn’t be bothered it seemed. He was moving around his instruments too much for his hood to actually stay on, causing his hair and glasses to be drenched. 

“Do you need help?” you asked, not being able to watch him struggle for much longer.

“Can you just line up that telescope with the gap in the trees there?” he asked with a point towards the sky. You nodded and risked your fingers in the cold to swivel the telescope until it was centered on the break in foliage. You stood back up and saw Ford staring at you before he quickly looked away. He seemed stressed, so you spared a joke.

He let out a sigh as he stood back, looking over the set up. He dragged over two lawn chairs and held out his arms, gesturing for you to sit in one. Ford was damn lucky you believed in his confidence, you thought to yourself as you sat down. You couldn’t even use your camcorder out here because of the rain. You didn’t want to risk it. 

The two of you sat, listening to the rain fall off the trees for a while until you started dozing off, catching yourself every time and jolting up. Ford scooted his chair closer and put his arm on your chair. 

“Sorry it’s so late,” he said, “sleep on my arm if you need to. You’ll ruin your neck if you keep sleeping like that,” he noted. You smirked to yourself as you took him up on the offer, leaning onto his shoulder, not minding the drops that had accumulated on his coat.Before slipping into sleep you felt him put a hand on your leg, gently running over it with his thumb.

You weren’t sure how long you were out for when a crack of lightning lit up the sky and awoke you. Ford was instantly up and checking all his devices for the elusive Thunderbird, but you were frozen to your chair. The rumble of thunder filled your ears and paralyzed you in place. It was stupid, it was so stupid. You’re from the damn east coast, get over it, your brain chided, but your body couldn’t agree. You’d always been terrified of thunder, despite your knowledge that it was unlikely anything from a lightning storm would ever hurt you, you couldn’t help that loud noises from the sky scared you to death.

“Shit, are you okay?” Ford asked, realizing that you were not by his side. He turned and saw you, sitting down, but looking thousands of miles away. You wanted to nod your head yes, that everything was fine and you were over your dumb overreaction, but you couldn’t. You stared up at him through his dewy glasses and shook your head.

“I hate thunder,” you muttered, embarrassed, flinching as another rumble went overhead, “I thought I’d gotten over it…”. Ford stared at you and then turned back to his devices. 

“Let’s go inside. These will get any data and recordings I need,” he said as he pulled you up out of the chair. 

“I’m sorry-” you started to say before he cut you off.

“Don’t apologize. It’s a very understandable fear. It’s not worth your wellbeing,” he said as he continued leading you inside. 

Inside the house the noise from above only reverberated more it seemed, causing you to jump. You caught Ford almost commenting on it, before he closed his mouth and helped you out of your rain jacket instead. You kicked off your boots at the door and they thunked with mud against the wall. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you scared,” Ford quietly remarked as he hung up his own jacket. Before you can reply there’s another rumble of thunder, louder now, causing you to jump into Ford’s arms. You feel him seize up under the sudden touch, but he quickly wraps an arm around your back with the other on the back of your head, pressing you into his red-sweatered chest. You slowly let out a shaky breath as you tried to calm your nerves. Ford slowly started running his hand up and down your back trying to calm you as well. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he repeated.

You two stood like this for a few minutes as lightning lit up the sky outside.

“I-I’m sorry Ford, I’ll be okay, I’m just going to go to my room,” you said as you stepped back out of his arms, despite your brain screaming at you you were a fool for doing so. 

“Can you actually sleep like this?” Ford asked, watching you walk to your room only to get stopped by another thrum of thunder. You looked over your shoulder.

 Swallow your pride you idiot, you both thought.

“Would you-”

“I could-”

“-keep me company?”

“-stay with you?”

You bit your bottom lip as you laughed, Ford laughed too and rubbed the back of his neck. Both of you could’ve been mistaken for high schoolers in that moment. 

You changed into your flannel pajama pants and oversized t-shirt as Ford dutifully faced the wall before changing into his boxers and one of your other oversized shirts you threw at him. 

“I don’t need this,” he said, holding it up.

“I can’t handle this much skin on you yet,” you replied as you slowly got under the covers. You felt the weight of the bed as he got in behind you. He softly grumbled complaints about wearing a shirt as he snaked his arms around your waist. 

"Is this okay?" he asked into your hair.

“Yes, now hush Pines,” you mumbled back. You shuddered a little as thunder rolled overhead again, causing Ford to tighten his hold on you.

“It’s alright, it’s alright,” he repeated as you calmed down again. You sighed into your pillow as you began to close your eyes.

“So…” Ford said, causing you to open an eye, “does this mean you like me?”.

“Do you like me?” you asked, tilting your head so you could try to face him. Ford took his chance to quickly kiss your cheek before you hid your head back into the pillow.

“Of course I am, are you kidding me? I’ve liked you since the first week of knowing you,” he said, “people aren’t friends with me, let alone people like you. You’re really important to me,”. You could feel your face heating up at his compliments as you tried to hide in the pillow, “Are you blushing? I don’t know if I’ve ever seen you do that…” he said with a chuckle.

“For fucks sake of course I am Ford, I’ve liked you for so long now too,” you admitted. The two of you were silent as rain continued to patter on the roof.

“Damn,” Ford said before nestling his head into the back of your neck, “I guess my brother was right,”.

You smiled as you began to doze off, with Ford holding onto you. Neither of you knew that you wouldn’t sleep alone again as long as you were in this universe.

Part 2.5 up

[badcaninecemetery]

[a list of overhaul headcanons that i've been obsessed with + soft x reader imagines]

he's kind of low-energy, so i imagine a lot of his hobbies would be similar.

given his physique, he'd probably enjoy working out, exercise, and/or yoga. he'd listen to documentaries about scientific discoveries while doing the mindless and repetitive movements. he'd intently watch a creative recreation of the discovery of tiktaalik and then forget he'd been cycling for over an hour.

i definitely think he'd be into reading too. typically he reads autobiographical nonfiction, but i'm sure he could be swayed into more literary nonfiction. he'd also read academic/scholarly journals/publications. he'd spend hours reading and reading.

playing strategic/mentally stimulating board/card games would interest him too. it's to keep his wits sharp, and perhaps hone in his poker face more and more. he probably did this a lot when he was younger, but then it became a hobby so he just does it to keep his brain thinking.

he'd also be into things like wine making or custom metal work, something that he can build and create. chemistry is something he really would enjoy, and there are endless possibilities there. he probably brewed beer and things like that when he was younger to earn pocket money and get himself further out there, but it stuck around too.

along those lines, he spends a lot of his time studying and working on his technical skills. he has many things he has to practice and learn, and i don't think his hunger for knowledge is satiable. he'd dedicate time for learning languages that might help him one day. science and math become some of his favorite things to do to pass the time—it's like doing crossword puzzles to him.

when he was really little, i think he probably tinkered with model kits. he's a little too shy to show those off though, but they're still hidden away in a closet just in case he ever wants to attempt them once more.

—

imagine kai tells you that he has a surprise for you, so he leads you into the living room and reveals with a gesture a board game. his eyes are crinkled around the edges, so you know there's a smile underneath that mask of his. you'd play with him, only for him to obliterate you every. single. time. it's typically chess because he teases you that it's your skill level—and you should be glad he didn't pull out the checkers board (or worse, go fish).

imagine watching him fiddle around with experiments. he shows you the elephant toothpaste one and you both would watch in horror whenever it starts exploding out more than it was supposed to. whenever you ask what happened, kai admits that perhaps he shouldn't have been focusing on your reactions as much. but whenever he's not doing anything in particular for you (and he totally doesn't do those things to impress you), the two of you just parallel play in the same room. he's busy, writing notes down in that doctor's scrawl of his and staring down intently through his bulky jewelers loupes; while you're relaxing on the other side of the room, perhaps doing something quiet and easy like drawing, or knitting, or writing, or researching.

imagine soft jazz in the background during these things. kai slowly turns to face you with a hard stare whenever you start playing your mix of sad jazz. he shakes his head softly, telling you he's not going to examine the medicinal samples in his petri dishes to billie holiday's "the man i love" (which makes him shift from foot to foot awkwardly because of the lyrics). a sly grin starts to stretch across your face as you switch it to old german jazz (the kind that plays in those 1930s men's fashion instagram reels), and you start doing a little dance towards him, shaking your hips and shimmying. kai's eyes are wide, but he's unable to not succumb whenever you lightly grasp his hands and loosely swing his arms back and forth (he's imploding internally).

imagine making him a rap, rock rap, and/or nu metal playlist. it's sometimes heavy and emotional or bitter, and sometimes it's nice for him to lean back and grimace at the ceiling whenever he listens to the words. so you hook up your phone to a speaker, then hit shuffle. his head is leaned against the back of the couch, eyes closed while the playlist cycles through. one second cypress hill is playing, the next it's eminem's fack. kai's face contorts into dissatisfaction before his eyes open and he pointedly looks at you, but you just snicker and say it's like a game of russian roulette. i wonder just how many times this song is hidden in this playlist? kai just sighs in acceptance.

imagine kai gushing to you (in a definitely calm and composed manner) about some or the nonfiction/journals he reads, or documentaries he's watched. sometimes he'll throw a word out there that you don't know, but he's very willing to explain what it means. he's brief and precise whenever he elaborates the information, and he'll offer to let you read/watch the materials too. you'd definitely sit down and read/watch it (even if it doesn't particularly interest you, but you know kai enjoys it).

imagine the two of you getting into stuff to do together like reading theory (you wouldn't stop jokingly spamming links to the communist manifesto and industrial society and its future at three a.m. in the morning—but then you both dipped in émile durkheim and kai was immediately enthralled). or doing something like learning animal taxonomy (you wouldn't stop calling the centipedes little lovers). or something simple like drinking coffee (or whatever you'd prefer at that moment) in public and people watching.

so many little things to pass the time, just brief smiles and witty glances behind coffee steam.

[derpcakes]

Faeries and Footnotes: The Nerdy Fun of Scholarly Worldbuilding

I have an affection for stories that take a scholarly, dare I say nerdy, approach to their fantasy elements. I’ve recently devoured both books in Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde series, which follows a prickly academic on a field trip into Faerie, filling her journal with footnotes and references to in-universe research on magic along the way. My favourite character in Freya Marske’s The Last Binding trilogy is Edwin Courcey, who helps deliver much of the setting’s lore and magic system via his ceaseless curiosity and very academic and technical approach to how magic works. The scholarly book-within-a-book about portal worlds in The Ten Thousand Doors of January made me whoop for joy.

I can probably trace this back to reading Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell at a formative stage of my undergrad studies, at which point I reckon it did something to my brain chemistry. But what, exactly, is the appeal of a series that looks at its magic through the lens of research, and with all the scientific technicalities and academic in-fighting that come with that? It does something unique and very fun to the way these fictional worlds are built, and I want to play with that here.

Keep reading...

[max1461]

I've talked before about how scientific knowledge assumes a robust body of everyday knowledge. When you do a scientific measurement, you need to trust that your instrument is giving you the right reading instead of an error, for instance. You probably don't know the ins and outs of how the instrument works yourself—you're trusting technicians to be able to do their job and make the instrument work. They may use a mixture of formal knowledge and informal knowledge to do this. You hear all kinds of stories of technicians saying things like "this machine's a little finicky, if it doesn't give a reading just give it a couple of whacks" or whatever all the time.

You use everyday, "common sense" reasoning of various sorts to determine if your instruments work and if your technicians are trustworthy and capable and so on. You can bolster this knowledge in other ways—for instance, if another research group on the opposite side of the world gets the same result as you, that's some evidence that your readings weren't a technical error. But trusting this research group requires all sorts of other informal knowledge, which you get through e.g. your professional network as a scientist and so on, about whether they're working in a reputable lab and whether the journal they published in is reputable and so on and so forth.

I'm not saying that this makes scientific knowledge untrustworthy. Far from it, I think scientists' ability to manage these epistemic hurdles is generally quite good, although certainly not flawless. They're an occupational hazard of being a human and trying to collaborate with other humans to figure stuff out about the world, there's no way you can get around it. But I do think it means that if you want to consider yourself, you know... epistemically virtuous, a good skeptic, you need a working model of how everyday knowledge is and should be obtained, an epistemic theory applicable to "folk knowledge" not obtained through the scientific process. Not only because you use folk knowledge all the time in your everyday life and should probably be thoughtful about whether it's bullshit or not, but also because the scientific process itself relies on it in a straightforward way.

Anyway, I can't do a rigorous scientific study to figure out... how I should respond to my friend when they're down, or how to throw them a good birthday party, or whatever. And I would be dubious of any psychology study which claims to answer these questions in a general sense. But that doesn't mean that I don't know how to do these things for my friend! My specific, "folk psychological" understanding of who my friend is as an individual, what they care about, how they respond to things, these are more reliable guides than the psychological literature would be on this issue! That viewpoint is not "anti-science". The alternative view is so patently ridiculous that basically no one hews to it, not even scientists.

On second thought I'm sure there are like, some podcast guys who believe it...

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Leor Sapir and Colin Wright

Published: Jun 9, 2023

A federal court on Tuesday temporarily blocked enforcement of a Florida law that prohibits the administration of sex-change procedures on children under 18. The opinion, by Judge Robert L. Hinkle, leans heavily on medical and scientific rationales to argue that it is unconstitutional to ban the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery on teenagers who feel alienated from their bodies.

Twenty states maintain age restrictions on sex-change procedures, and the problem they face is explaining to judges that American medical associations aren’t following the best available evidence. This is known to European health authorities and has been reported in such prestigious publications as the British Medical Journal. But American judges need some way to evaluate conflicting scientific authorities—especially as institutions responsible for ensuring that medical professionals have access to high-quality research aren’t functioning as they should.

A case in point: Springer, an academic publishing giant, has decided to retract an article that appeared last month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. The retraction is expected to take effect June 12.

The article’s authors are listed as Michael Bailey and Suzanna Diaz. Mr. Bailey is a well-respected scientist, with dozens of publications to his name. The other author writes under a pseudonym to protect the privacy of her daughter, who suffers from gender dysphoria.

Their new paper is based on survey responses from more than 1,600 parents who reported that their children, who were previously comfortable in their bodies, suddenly declared a transgender identity after extensive exposure to social media and peer influence. Mr. Bailey’s and Ms. Diaz’s sin was to analyze rapid onset gender dysphoria, or ROGD. Gender activists hate any suggestion that transgender identities are anything but innate and immutable. Even mentioning the possibility that trans identity is socially influenced or a phase threatens their claims that children can know early in life they have a permanent transgender identity and therefore that they should have broad access to permanent body-modifying and sterilizing procedures.

Within days of publication, a group of activists wrote a public letter condemning the article and calling for the termination of the journal’s editor. Among the letter’s signatories is Marci Bowers, a prominent genital surgeon and president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, an advocacy organization that promotes sex changes for minors.

Nearly 2,000 researchers and academics signed a counter letter in support of the article. Springer nonetheless decided to retract the paper without disciplining its editor. Springer initially asserted that the study needed approval from an institutional review board. But it quickly abandoned that rationale, which was false.

The publisher now maintains that the retraction is due to improper participant consent. While the respondents consented to the publication of the survey’s results, Springer insists they didn’t specifically agree to publication in a scholarly or peer-reviewed journal. That’s a strange and retrospective requirement, especially considering that Springer and other major publishers have published thousands of survey papers without this type of consent.

Anyone familiar with the controversy over transgender medicine knows what is going on. Activists put pressure on Springer to retract an article with conclusions they didn’t like, and Springer caved in. We’ve become accustomed to seeing these capitulations in academia, media and the corporate world, but it is especially disturbing to see in a respected medical journal.

Rather than appreciate the long-term risk to itself and the scientific community from doing the bidding of activists, Springer has instead agreed to evaluate and retract all survey papers that lack the newly required consent. If Springer follows through on its promise, hundreds of authors who chose to publish in Springer’s journals may have their research retracted.

The publications that support what they call “gender-affirming care” rely heavily on surveys. The U.S. Transgender Survey of 2015, for instance, has generated several influential papers. As it happens, the USTS didn’t inform participants that their answers would be published in peer-reviewed journals.

This kind of double standard runs through gender-medicine research. Papers advocating “gender transition” are readily accepted by leading scientific journals despite having grave methodological flaws and biases. Work that questions gender-transition orthodoxy stands almost no chance of being published in the best-known journals. Every now and then, an errant research paper slips past the censors, but should it prove significant enough to threaten the settled science narrative, retribution is swift and merciless. The researcher Lisa Littman learned this lesson in 2018, when she was widely attacked after publishing on the topic. Mr. Bailey and Ms. Diaz are learning it now.

The idea is to manufacture the appearance of scientific consensus where there is none. The pseudo-consensus then allows such American medical associations as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society to recommend body-altering procedures for children.

While many Americans have heard news about the wave of states passing legislation that curbs sex changes for the young, few realize that an equally fierce, and arguably far more important, battle is raging: the battle for the integrity of the scientific process. It is a fight for the ability to have censorship-free scientific debate as a means to advance human knowledge.

==

Here's the thing: even if it's wrong, you refute it by making a better scientific case, with better evidence. You show where the flaws are. You don't throw a hissy-fit and cry until it goes away.

[emberfrostlovesloki]

Criminal Minds ABCs...

Hi all! I hope you are having a good week so far. I made a Criminal Minds ABCs for fun. All of the ABCs deal with characters or concepts from the show. This took a long time to make and I'm very proud of it, so I hope you enjoy it! See all of the ABCs under the cut and all photo credits are at the end! Please be kind to yourself today and I am sending you a hug. All likes, comments, and reblogs are appreciated - Love Levi <3

A stand for Aaron Hotchner: Unit chief of the BAU.

B is for the BAU a department of the FBI the researches cases on serial killers.

C is for Criminology: The scientific study of crimes and criminals.

D is for Derek Morgan: Former Chigaco cop and friend to Penelope Garcia and Spencer Reid.

E is for Evidence: The available body of facts indicating whether a belief is true or valid.

F is for Fingerprint: An impression made on a surface by a person's fingertip.

G if for Penelope Garcia: Spunky Technical Analyst of the BAU.

H is for Homicide: The killing of one person by another.

I is for Interrogation: The action of interrogation or the process of being interrogated.

J is for Jennifer Jareau: The Media Liason for the BAU.

K is for Kill shot: To shoot a gun with the purpose of killing someone.

L is for LDSK: The FBI's acronym for Long Distance Serial Killer.

M stands for Murder: The unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.

N stands for New Agent Training: The Basic Field Training Course is designed to train new special agents and intelligence analysts together to prepare them for the field.

O stands for Organized: Arranged in a systematic way.

P Stands for Prior Record: An individual's previous criminal record.

Q stands for Question: A sentence worded or expressed so as to elicit information.

R stands for Revenge: The act of inflicting hurt or harm on someone for an unjury or wrong suffered at their hands.

S stands for Spencer Reid: Eidetic genius and youngest member of the BAU.

T stands for Trophy: A souvenir or memento of a crime.

U stands for Unsub: The FBI's slang for Unknown Subject.

V stands for Victimology: The study of the victims of crime and the psychological effects on them of their experience.

W stands for Witness: A person who sees an event, typically a crime or accident, take place.

X stands for eXamination: A detailed inspection or investiation.

Y stands for Yellow Journalism: A style of newspaper reporting that emphasizes sensationalism over facts.

Z stands for ZZZ's on the jet home

Text Break Banner by @cafekitsune

Tag list: @geminitapestry @silk-spun @alicewonderao3 @ssahotchnerr @cumulo-stratus @criminalskies

Want to be added to my tag list? Please check out this post (linked) 

Want to send in a request? Please check out this post, CM Request Post (linked)

Photo Credits:

A @hotchs-big-hands B @bau-bitch02 C @elysianmuses D @pennyspearl E @sewertrashmax F @dienette-666 G @pinkiebieberpie H @baekkku I @magicbecameouragenda J @tokyocyborg K @animefan-2013 L @its-where-the-wild-things-are M @roting N @moodboardmix O @study-sphere P @finalchokehold Q @aurorasoleil R @bebs-art-gallery S @tokyocyborg T @wheresmyfuckintea U @lieutenant-bixbyV @thesorceresstemple W @shegetsburned X @cloverdaisies Y @dumblr Z @notoneofyouhere

[literallymechanical]

How do they keep up the fuel input into a fusion reactor? And how do they get the specified fuel mix into the reaction area if it’s sealed?

Oh that is a very good question! So, yes, the vacuum vessel is sealed, but there are plenty of vacuum passthroughs and other equipment that sticks into the torus. In this case, fuel is added to the fusion plasma in a couple of ways: the old-school method where it is "puffed" in as a gas, or as is more common now, it is fired in at extremely high velocity as frozen pellets of hydrogen isotopes.

Here is how the frozen pellet injectors are set up on DIII-D, in San Diego. Some are fired directly at the midplane at extremely high speeds (like, 1000 m/s (over 2000 mph!)), whereas some take a more circuitous, slower route – you get better fuel penetration when launching from the inner wall of the torus, even with slower pellets. This is done with a burst of pressurized light gas, usually hydrogen.

Here's a 1.8 mm diameter deuterium pellet bursting into plasma as it is launched from the midplane of ASDEX-Upgrade at 800 meters per second (1800 miles per hour):

pchooo

However, traditional gas-pressurized systems have a problem with a slow rate of fire (tens of Hz) and introducing potentially unwanted gas from the launcher. How to solve these problems?

ASDEX-Upgrade in Germany has pioneered a new method of rapid pellet launch: extrude a cylinder of frozen fuel into a centrifuge, which slices off pellets and launches them into the reactor! No pressurized gas needed. This iteration can do it at 70 Hz, but future centrifuges could go much faster.

Pellet injectors have more uses than just fueling! These are the nozzles of a "shattered pellet injector," also in ASDEX-Upgrade.

Rather than launch a tiny pellet of fuel, these have a sharp angle at the end that shatters a giant pellet (3 or 4 cm wide) of frozen heavy gasses (neon, argon, etc) and/or deuterium just before it enters the plasma. The sudden burst of fragments will do all sorts of funky things, like stop the fusion plasma dead in its tracks. This is an important way to mitigate disruptions that might damage the reactor.

For a very thorough overview of pellet injection technology, check out this paper out of Oak Ridge National Lab. They are one of the leading pellet injection research labs, and their launchers are installed in tokamaks all over the world:

[nostalgebraist]

Am I right in suspecting that GPT-4 is not nearly as great an advance on GPT-3 as GPT-3 was on GPT-2? It seems a much better product, but that product seems to have as its selling point not vastly improved text-prediction, but multi-modality.

No one outside of OpenAI really knows how much of an advance GPT-4 is, or isn't.

When GPT-3 came out, OpenAI was still a research company, like DeepMind.

Before there was a GPT-3 product, there was a GPT-3 paper. And it was a long, serious, academic-style paper. It described, in a lot of detail, how they created and evaluated the model.

The paper was an act of scientific communication. A report on a new experiment written for a research audience, intended primarily to transmit information to that audience. It wanted to show you what they had done, so you could understand it, even if you weren't there at the time. And it wanted to convince you of various claims about the model's properties.

I don't know if they submitted it to any conferences or journals (IIRC I think they did, but only later on?). But if they did, they could have, and it wouldn't seem out of place in those venues.

Now, OpenAI is fully a product company.

As far as I know, they have entirely stopped releasing academic-style papers. The last major one was the DALLE-2 one, I think. (ChatGPT didn't get one.)

What OpenAI does now is make products. The release yesterday was a product release, not a scientific announcement.

In some cases, as with GPT-4, they may accompany their product releases with things that look superficially like scientific papers.

But the GPT-4 "technical report" is not a serious scientific paper. A cynic might categorize it as "advertising."

More charitably, perhaps it's an honest attempt to communicate as much as possible to the world about their new model, given a new set of internally defined constraints motivated by business and/or AI safety concerns. But if so, those constraints mean they can't really say much at all -- not in a way that meets the ordinary standards of evidence for scientific work.

Their report says, right at the start, that it will contain no information about what the model actually is, besides the stuff that would already be obvious:

GPT-4 is a Transformer-style model [33 ] pre-trained to predict the next token in a document, using both publicly available data (such as internet data) and data licensed from third-party providers. [note that this really only says "we trained on some data, not all of which was public" -nost] The model was then fine-tuned using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) [34 ]. Given both the competitive landscape and the safety implications of large-scale models like GPT-4, this report contains no further details about the architecture (including model size), hardware, training compute, dataset construction, training method, or similar.

As Eleuther's Eric Hallahan put it yesterday:

If we read further into the report, we find a number of impressive-looking evaluations.

But they are mostly novel ones, not done before on earlier LMs. The methodology is presented in a spotty and casual manner, clearly not interested in promoting independent reproductions (and possibly even with the intent of discouraging them).

Even the little information that is available in the report is enough to cast serious doubt on the overall trustworthiness of that information. Some of it violates simple common sense:

...and, to the careful independent eye, immediately suggests some very worrying possibilities:

That said -- soon enough, we will be able to interact with this model via an API.

And once that happens, I'm sure independent researchers committed to open source and open information will step in and assess GPT-4 seriously and scientifically -- filling the gap left by OpenAI's increasingly "product-y" communication style.

Just as they've done before. The open source / open information community in this area is very capable, very thoughtful, and very fast. (They're where Stable Diffusion came from, to pick just one well-known example.)

----

When the GPT-3 paper came out, I wrote a post titled "gpt-3: a disappointing paper." I stand by the title, in the specific sense that I meant it, but I was well aware that I was taking a contrarian, almost trollish pose. Most people found the GPT-3 paper far from "disappointing," and I understand why.

But "GPT-4: a disappointing paper" isn't a contrarian pose. It was -- as far as I can see -- the immediate and overwhelming consensus of the ML community.

----

As for the multimodal stuff, uh, time will tell? We can't use it yet, so it's hard to know how good it is.

What they showed off in the live demo felt a lot like what @nostalgebraist-autoresponder has been able to do for years now.

Like, yeah, GPT-4 is better at it, but it's not a fundamentally new advance, it's been possible for a while. And people have done versions of it, eg Flamingo and PaLI and Magma [which Frank uses a version of internally] and CoCa [which I'm planning to use in Frank, once I get a chance to re-tune everything for it].

I do think it's a potentially transformative capability, specifically because it will let the model natively "see" a much larger fraction of the available information on web pages, and thus enable "action transformer" applications a la what Adept is doing.

But again, only time will tell whether these applications are really going to work, and for what, and whether GPT-4 is good enough for that purpose -- and whether you even need it, when other text/image language models are already out there and are being rapidly developed.

[biomedres]

Mechanism of the Developed Sensorimotor Therapy Device: Synchronous Inputs of Visual Stimuli and Vibration to Improve Recovery of Distal Radius Fractures

Mechanism of the Developed Sensorimotor Therapy Device: Synchronous Inputs of Visual Stimuli and Vibration to Improve Recovery of Distal Radius Fractures in Biomedical Journal of Scientific & Technical Research

Each fracture requires immobilization following surgery. However, this immobilization impairs tactile perception and causes diminishing of cortical somatosensory maps [1]. This adverse event occurs not only among patients with undergoing immobilization for fracture, but also among their healthy counterparts [1,2]. Decreased limb use can lead to changes in the cortical representation of involved muscles [3]. These changes represent a disuse-dependent type of plasticity [4]. Because of the adverse effect arising from immobilization, we observed that some patients with distal radius fractures (DRFs) complained that prior sensation was not restored in the affected limb or that they forgot how to move the affected limb following immobilization phase, postoperatively. These patients are encouraged to further engage these limbs in active motion. Figure 1 illustrates the disuse-dependent plasticity from wrist fixation in the acute phase of patients with DRF. The process on the left illustrates insufficient coding. When joint movement of an upper limb is restricted for a certain period of time, brain activity is correspondingly reduced. As the illustration on the right shows, reduced brain activity precipitates a disuse-dependent type of plasticity that causes encoding failure, resulting in failed cerebral activation of pathways involved in the target movement or delayed recall of such movement pathways. To minimize such negative consequences of disuse-dependent plasticity during the immobilization phase, and to maintain tactile perception and somatosensory cortical maps, we developed a prototype device (development code: Ghost, Patent No. 6425355) that may be applicable to patients with DRF in the postoperative period.

For more articles in Journals on Biomedical Sciences click here bjstr

Follow on Twitter : https://twitter.com/Biomedres01 Follow on Blogger : https://biomedres01.blogspot.com/ Like Our Pins On : https://www.pinterest.com/biomedres/

[reasonsforhope]

"Scientists have created mice with two biological fathers by generating eggs from male cells, a development that opens up radical new possibilities for reproduction.

The advance could ultimately pave the way for treatments for severe forms of infertility, as well as raising the tantalising prospect of same-sex couples being able to have a biological child together in the future.

“This is the first case of making robust mammal oocytes [a.k.a. egg cells] from male cells,” said Katsuhiko Hayashi, who led the work at Kyushu University in Japan and is internationally renowned as a pioneer in the field of lab-grown eggs and sperm.

Hayashi, who presented the development at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing at the Francis Crick Institute in London on Wednesday, predicts that it will be technically possible to create a viable human egg from a male skin cell within a decade. Others suggested this timeline was optimistic given that scientists are yet to create viable lab-grown human eggs from female cells.

Previously scientists have created mice that technically had two biological fathers through a chain of elaborate steps, including genetic engineering. However, this is the first time viable eggs have been cultivated from male cells and marks a significant advance. Hayashi��s team is now attempting to replicate this achievement with human cells, although there would be significant hurdles for the use of lab-grown eggs for clinical purposes, including establishing their safety.

“Purely in terms of technology, it will be possible [in humans] even in 10 years,” he said, adding that he personally would be in favour of the technology being used clinically to allow two men to have a baby if it were shown to be safe.

“I don’t know whether they’ll be available for reproduction,” he said. “That is not a question just for the scientific programme, but also for [society].”

The technique could also be applied to treat severe forms of infertility, including women with Turner’s syndrome, in whom one copy of the X chromosome is missing or partly missing, and Hayashi said this application was the primary motivation for the research.

Others suggested that it could prove challenging to translate the technique to human cells. Human cells require much longer periods of cultivation to produce a mature egg, which can increase the risk of cells acquiring unwanted genetic changes.

Prof George Daley, the dean of Harvard Medical School, described the work as “fascinating”, but added that other research had indicated that creating lab-grown gametes from human cells was more challenging than for mouse cells. “We still don’t understand enough of the unique biology of human gametogenesis to reproduce Hayashi’s provocative work in mice,” he said.

Study Methods

The study, which has been submitted for publication in a leading journal, relied on a sequence of intricate steps to transform a skin cell, carrying the male XY chromosome combination, into an egg, with the female XX version.

Male skin cells were reprogrammed into a stem cell-like state to create so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. The Y-chromosome of these cells was then deleted and replaced by an X chromosome “borrowed” from another cell to produce iPS cells with two identical X chromosomes.

“The trick of this, the biggest trick, is the duplication of the X chromosome,” said Hayashi. “We really tried to establish a system to duplicate the X chromosome.”

Finally, the cells were cultivated in an ovary organoid, a culture system designed to replicate the conditions inside a mouse ovary. When the eggs were fertilised with normal sperm, the scientists obtained about 600 embryos, which were implanted into surrogate mice, resulting in the birth of seven mouse pups. The efficiency of about 1% was lower [although not THAT much lower] than the efficiency achieved with normal female-derived eggs, where about 5% of embryos went on to produce a live birth.

The baby mice appeared healthy, had a normal lifespan, and went on to have offspring as adults. “They look OK, they look to be growing normally, they become fathers,” said Hayashi.

Going Further

He and colleagues are now attempting to replicate the creation of lab-grown eggs using human cells.

Prof Amander Clark, who works on lab-grown gametes at the University of California Los Angeles, said that translating the work into human cells would be a “huge leap”, because scientists are yet to create lab-grown human eggs from female cells.

Scientists have created the precursors of human eggs, but until now the cells have stopped developing before the point of meiosis, a critical step of cell division that is required in the development of mature eggs and sperm. “We’re poised at this bottleneck at the moment,” she said. “The next steps are an engineering challenge. But getting through that could be 10 years or 20 years.”

-via The Guardian (US), 3/8/23

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Massive dino from Brazil ate 'like a pelican,' controversial new study finds. Why is it causing an uproar?

The study reveals new information about the carnivorous dinosaur Irritator challengeri, but the research has been criticized because the fossils may have been illegally removed from Brazil.

A large predatory dinosaur related to Spinosaurus may have scooped up prey "like a pelican" by extending its lower jaw, European researchers propose in a new study. But the findings have upset some paleontologists who contest that the fossils were illegally taken from Brazil and should be returned to their country of origin.

The dinosaur at the center of the controversy is Irritator challengeri, a member of the family Spinosauridae — a group of bipedal, carnivorous dinosaurs with long, crocodilian-like snouts. The species, which grew to a max length of around 21 feet (6.5 meters), was first described in 1996 from 115 million-year-old fossils uncovered in the Araripe Basin of northeastern Brazil and later shipped to Germany, where they now reside in the Stuttgart Museum of Natural History in the state of Baden-Württemberg. 

In the new study, which was published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, researchers digitally reconstructed the skull from the I. challengeri specimen housed in Stuttgart and discovered that the species' lower jaw could spread out to the sides, widening the animal's pharynx, the area behind the nose and mouth. This is similar to how a pelican widens its lower beak to scoop up small fish, suggesting that I. challengeri likely fed in the same way, the researchers wrote in a statement.

The new analysis also revealed that, due to its eye placement, I. challengeri would have naturally inclined its snout at a 45-degree angle and been capable of rapid-yet-weak bites. When combined, these features suggest that the snout would have been well suited to quickly scooping prey out of shallow water, the researchers wrote.

I. challengeri's journey from Brazil to Germany is a contentious one. The fossils were unearthed by nonscientific commercial diggers and were sold to the Stuttgart Museum before 1990, when Brazil began restricting scientific exports to other countries. As a result, the study's researchers believed that the fossils legally belonged to the Baden-Württemberg state.

However, an older Brazilian law dating to 1942 states that Brazilian fossils are federal property and cannot be sold, meaning that the fossil was technically stolen by the commercial diggers who exported it, Juan Carlos Cisneros, a paleontologist at the Federal University of Piauí in Brazil who was not involved in the new study, told Live Science in an email. "And buying something stolen does not make you its owner," he said.

Continue reading.

[blueiscoool]

Scientists Identify Secret Ingredient in Leonardo da Vinci Paintings

"Old Masters" such as Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli and Rembrandt may have used proteins, especially egg yolk, in their oil paintings, according to a new study.

Trace quantities of protein residue have long been detected in classic oil paintings, though they were often ascribed to contamination. A new study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications found the inclusion was likely intentional — and sheds light on the technical knowledge of the Old Masters, the most skilled European painters of the 16th, 17th, or early 18th century, and the way they prepared their paints.

Scientists confirm long held theory about what inspired Monet

"There are very few written sources about this and no scientific work has been done before to investigate the subject in such depth," said study author Ophélie Ranquet of the Institute of Mechanical Process Engineering and Mechanics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, in a phone interview. "Our results show that even with a very small amount of egg yolk, you can achieve an amazing change of properties in the oil paint, demonstrating how it might have been beneficial for the artists."

Simply adding some egg yolk to their works, it turns out, could have long-lasting effects that went beyond just aesthetics.

Eggs vs. oil

Compared with the medium formulated by ancient Egyptians called tempera — which combines egg yolk with powdered pigments and water — oil paint creates more intense colors, allows for very smooth color transitions and dries far less quickly, so it can be used for several days after its preparation. However, oil paint, which uses linseed or safflower oil instead of water, also has drawbacks, including being more susceptible to color darkening and damage caused by exposure to light.

Because making paint was an artisanal and experimental process, it is possible that the Old Masters might have added egg yolk, a familiar ingredient, to the newer type of paint, which first showed up in the seventh century in Central Asia before spreading to Northern Europe in the Middle Ages and Italy during the Renaissance. In the study, the researchers recreated the process of paint-making by using four ingredients — egg yolk, distilled water, linseed oil and pigment — to mix two historically popular and significant colors, lead white and ultramarine blue.

"The addition of egg yolk is beneficial because it can tune the properties of these paints in a drastic way," Ranquet said, "For example by showing aging differently: It takes a longer time for the paint to oxidize, because of the antioxidants contained in the yolk."

The chemical reactions between the oil, the pigment and the proteins in the yolk directly affect the paint's behavior and viscosity. "For example, the lead white pigment is quite sensitive to humidity, but if you coat it with a protein layer, it makes it a lot more resistant to it, making the paint quite easy to apply," Ranquet said.

"On the other hand, if you wanted something stiffer without having to add a lot of pigment, with a bit of egg yolk you can create a high impasto paint," she added, referring to a painting technique where the paint is laid out in a stroke thick enough that the brushstrokes are still visible. Using less pigment would have been desirable centuries ago, when certain pigments — such as lapis lazuli, which was used to make ultramarine blue — were more expensive than gold, according to Ranquet.

A direct evidence of the effect of egg yolk in oil paint, or lack thereof, can be seen in Leonardo da Vinci's "Madonna of the Carnation," one of the paintings observed during the study. Currently on display at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Germany, the work shows evident wrinkling on the face of Mary and the child.

"Oil paint starts to dry from the surface down, which is why it wrinkles," Ranquet said.

One reason for wrinkling may be an insufficient quantity of pigments in the paint, and the study has shown that this effect could be avoided with the addition of egg yolk: "That's quite amazing because you have the same quantity of pigment in your paint, but the presence of the egg yolk changes everything."

Because wrinkling occurs within days, it's likely that Leonardo and other Old Masters might have caught onto this particular effect, as well as additional beneficial properties of egg yolk in oil paint, including resistance to humidity. The "Madonna of Carnation" is one of Leonardo's earliest paintings, created at a time when he might have been still trying to master the then newly popular medium of oil paint.

New understanding of the classics

Another painting observed during the study was "The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ," by Botticelli, also on display at the Alte Pinakothek. The work is mostly made with tempera, but oil paint has been used for the background and some secondary elements.

"We knew that some parts of the paintings show brushstrokes that are typical for what we call an oil painting, and yet we detected the presence of proteins," Ranquet said. "Because it's a very small quantity and they are difficult to detect, this might be dismissed as contamination: In workshops, artists used many different things, and maybe the eggs were just from the tempera."

However, because adding egg yolk had such desirable effects on oil paint, the presence of proteins in the work might be an indication of deliberate use instead, the study suggested. Ranquet hopes that these preliminary findings might attract more curiosity toward this understudied topic.

Maria Perla Colombini, a professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Pisa in Italy, who was not involved in the study, agreed. "This exciting paper provides a new scenario for the understanding of old painting techniques," she said in an email.

"The research group, reporting results from molecular level up to a macroscopic scale, contributes to a new knowledge in the use of egg yolk and oil binders. They are not more looking at simply identifying the materials used by Old Masters but explain how they could produce wonderful and glittering effects by employing and mixing the few available natural materials. They try to discover the secrets of old recipes of which little or nothing is written," she added.

"This new knowledge contributes not only to a better conservation and preservation of artworks but also to a better comprehension of art history."

By Jacopo Prisco.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Footnotes, 101-150

[101] Joost A. M. Meerloo, Mental Seduction and Menticide: The Psychology of Thought Control and Brain-Washing (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), 163–164, 184.

[102] B. A. Robinson, “Promise Keepers, Pro and Con: Part 1,” Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, November 2, 2003, www.religioustolerance.org.

[103] Jena Recer, “Whose Promise Are They Keeping?” National NOW Times, August 1995, www.now.org.

[104] James Dobson, “Building Moral Character in Kids,” radio broadcast, Focus on the Family International, February 8, 2006, www.oneplace.com =2/8/2006.

[105] Tony Kushner, Angels in America (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 46.

[106] James Dobson, Marriage under Fire: Why We Must Win This Battle (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2004), 41.

[107] “Focus on the Family,” Citizen Magazine January 2003, quoted in Jeff Lutes, A False Focus on My Family (Lynchburg, VA: Soulforce, 2004), 8.

[108] Dobson, Marriage Under Fire, 49.

[109] James Dobson, Bringing Up Boys (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2001), 127.

[110] Robert Knight, “The Homosexual Agenda in Schools,” Family Research Council, quoted in Matthew Shepard, “Nazi Anti-Jewish Speech vs. Religious Right Anti-Gay Speech,” Hatecrime.org, www.hatecrime.org.

[111] P. Gibson, “Gay Males and Lesbian Youth Suicide,” in M. R. Feinleib, ed., Report of the Secretary’s Task Force on Youth Suicide, Volume 3: Prevention and Interventions in Youth Suicide(Rockville, MD: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Public Health Service; Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration, 1989; DHHS publication ADM 89–1623), 110.

[112] Pat Robertson, quoted in Richard K. Fenn, Dreams of Glory, 8.

[113] Kavan Peterson, “Washington Gay Marriage Ruling Looms,” Stateline.org, March 7, 2006, cms.stateline.org; “Same-Sex Marriage Measures on the 2004 Ballot,” National Conference of State Legislatures, November 2004, www.ncsl.org.

[114] Mel White, Stranger at the Gate (New York: Penguin, 1995), 25.

[115] Ibid., 22–23.

[116] Ibid., 29.

[117] Ibid., 14.

[118] Ibid., 49–50.

[119] Ibid., 96.

[120] Ibid., 107.

[121] Ibid., 142.

[122] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism(New York: Harcourt, 1979), 353.

[123] Scott LaFee, “Local Scientists, Doctors and Professors Talk About ‘Intelligent Design,’” San Diego Union Tribune, June 8, 2005, F-1.

[124] Frank Newport, “Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin’s Evolution Theory,” Gallup Poll, November 19, 2004, poll.gallup.com.

[125] Keith Graham, Biology: God’s Living Creation (Pensacola, FL: A Beka, 1986), 404.

[126] Alfred M. Rehwinkel, The Wonders of Creation (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 1974), in Graham, Biology, 133.

[127] Graham, Biology, 163.

[128] Graham, Biology, 351.

[129] Carl Wieland, “Darwin’s Bodysnatchers: New Horrors,” Creation 14:2 (March 1992), 16–18.

[130] Carl Wieland, “Apartheid and ‘The Cradle of Humankind,’” Creation 26:2 (March 2004), 10–14.

[131] “What Happened When Stalin Read Darwin?” Creation 10:4 (September 1998), 23.

[132] Jerry Bergman, “Darwinism and the Nazi Race Holocaust,” Technical Journal 13:2, 101–111.

[133] “Evolution and the Hutu-Tutsi Slayings,” Creation 21:2 (March 1999), 47.

[134] Graham, Biology, 347.

[135] Jerry Bergman, “Was Charles Darwin Psychotic? A Study of His Mental Health,” Impact (January 2004).

[136] Raymond Hall, “Darwin’s Impact—The Bloodstained Legacy of Evolution,” Creation 27:2 (March 2005), 46–47.

[137] Graham, Biology, 347.

[138] Ibid., 349.

[139] Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 371.

[140] “Intelligence Report,” Southern Poverty Law Center (Spring 2005), 4. www.splcenter.org.

[141] Union of Concerned Scientists, “Scientific Integrity in Policy Making: An Investigation into the Bush Administration’s Misuse of Science,” March 2004, 2; 32, www.ucsusa.org.

[142] This lecture was taped and transcribed by Timothy Nunan of Princeton University.

[143] Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 1:96.

[144] Max Blumenthal, “Justice Sunday Preachers,” The Nation, May 9, 2005 (Web edition only), www.thenation.com.

[145] Ibid.

[146] Ibid.

[147] David Kirkpatrick, “Club of the Most Powerful Gathers in Strictest Privacy,” The New York Times, August 28, 2004.

[148] Ibid.

[149] Max Blumenthal, “Who Are Justice Sunday’s Ministers of Ministry?” Talk To Action, January 6, 2006, www.talk2action.org.

[150] Quoted in Daniel Lev, The Terrorist Next Door (New York: Thomas Dumae/St. Martin, 2002), 27.

[scifigeneration]

The Galactica AI model was trained on scientific knowledge – but it spat out alarmingly plausible nonsense

by Aaron J. Snoswell, Queensland University of Technology and Jean Burgess, Queensland University of Technology

Earlier this month, Meta announced new AI software called Galactica: “a large language model that can store, combine and reason about scientific knowledge”.

Launched with a public online demo, Galactica lasted only three days before going the way of other AI snafus like Microsoft’s infamous racist chatbot.

The online demo was disabled (though the code for the model is still available for anyone to use), and Meta’s outspoken chief AI scientist complained about the negative public response.

So what was Galactica all about, and what went wrong?

What’s special about Galactica?

Galactica is a language model, a type of AI trained to respond to natural language by repeatedly playing a fill-the-blank word-guessing game.

Most modern language models learn from text scraped from the internet. Galactica also used text from scientific papers uploaded to the (Meta-affiliated) website PapersWithCode. The designers highlighted specialised scientific information like citations, maths, code, chemical structures, and the working-out steps for solving scientific problems.

The preprint paper associated with the project (which is yet to undergo peer review) makes some impressive claims. Galactica apparently outperforms other models at problems like reciting famous equations (“Q: What is Albert Einstein’s famous mass-energy equivalence formula? A: E=mc²”), or predicting the products of chemical reactions (“Q: When sulfuric acid reacts with sodium chloride, what does it produce? A: NaHSO₄ + HCl”).

However, once Galactica was opened up for public experimentation, a deluge of criticism followed. Not only did Galactica reproduce many of the problems of bias and toxicity we have seen in other language models, it also specialised in producing authoritative-sounding scientific nonsense.

Authoritative, but subtly wrong bullshit generator

Galactica’s press release promoted its ability to explain technical scientific papers using general language. However, users quickly noticed that, while the explanations it generates sound authoritative, they are often subtly incorrect, biased, or just plain wrong.

We also asked Galactica to explain technical concepts from our own fields of research. We found it would use all the right buzzwords, but get the actual details wrong – for example, mixing up the details of related but different algorithms.

In practice, Galactica was enabling the generation of misinformation – and this is dangerous precisely because it deploys the tone and structure of authoritative scientific information. If a user already needs to be a subject matter expert in order to check the accuracy of Galactica’s “summaries”, then it has no use as an explanatory tool.

At best, it could provide a fancy autocomplete for people who are already fully competent in the area they’re writing about. At worst, it risks further eroding public trust in scientific research.

A galaxy of deep (science) fakes

Galactica could make it easier for bad actors to mass-produce fake, fraudulent or plagiarised scientific papers. This is to say nothing of exacerbating existing concerns about students using AI systems for plagiarism.

Fake scientific papers are nothing new. However, peer reviewers at academic journals and conferences are already time-poor, and this could make it harder than ever to weed out fake science.

Underlying bias and toxicity

Other critics reported that Galactica, like other language models trained on data from the internet, has a tendency to spit out toxic hate speech while unreflectively censoring politically inflected queries. This reflects the biases lurking in the model’s training data, and Meta’s apparent failure to apply appropriate checks around the responsible AI research.

The risks associated with large language models are well understood. Indeed, an influential paper highlighting these risks prompted Google to fire one of the paper’s authors in 2020, and eventually disband its AI ethics team altogether.

Machine-learning systems infamously exacerbate existing societal biases, and Galactica is no exception. For instance, Galactica can recommend possible citations for scientific concepts by mimicking existing citation patterns (“Q: Is there any research on the effect of climate change on the great barrier reef? A: Try the paper ‘Global warming transforms coral reef assemblages’ by Hughes, et al. in Nature 556 (2018)”).

For better or worse, citations are the currency of science – and by reproducing existing citation trends in its recommendations, Galactica risks reinforcing existing patterns of inequality and disadvantage. (Galactica’s developers acknowledge this risk in their paper.)

Citation bias is already a well-known issue in academic fields ranging from feminist scholarship to physics. However, tools like Galactica could make the problem worse unless they are used with careful guardrails in place.

A more subtle problem is that the scientific articles on which Galactica is trained are already biased towards certainty and positive results. (This leads to the so-called “replication crisis” and “p-hacking”, where scientists cherry-pick data and analysis techniques to make results appear significant.)

Galactica takes this bias towards certainty, combines it with wrong answers and delivers responses with supreme overconfidence: hardly a recipe for trustworthiness in a scientific information service.

These problems are dramatically heightened when Galactica tries to deal with contentious or harmful social issues, as the screenshot below shows. Galactica readily generates toxic and nonsensical content dressed up in the measured and authoritative language of science. Tristan Greene / Galactica

Here we go again

Calls for AI research organisations to take the ethical dimensions of their work more seriously are now coming from key research bodies such as the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. Some AI research organisations, like OpenAI, are being more conscientious (though still imperfect).

Meta dissolved its Responsible Innovation team earlier this year. The team was tasked with addressing “potential harms to society” caused by the company’s products. They might have helped the company avoid this clumsy misstep.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Leor Sapir

Published: May 8, 2024

On Wednesday, the Dartmouth Political Union hosted a debate on sex and gender between MIT philosopher Alex Byrne, University of California at San Francisco psychiatrist Jack Turban, and Aston University emerita neuroscientist Gina Rippon.

An interesting moment came when Byrne asked Turban what he thought of the recently published Cass Review, the 388-page comprehensive report on youth gender medicine, authored by British physician Hilary Cass and her colleagues. Turban claimed that the report found “moderate” quality evidence for “gender-affirming care,” and that, contrary to its reception, the review’s findings did not lend support to restrictions on puberty blockers and other medical interventions for pediatric gender dysphoria.

Turban’s characterization is at odds with that of Cass and her team. Cass’s report, published alongside seven new systematic evidence reviews on several issues associated with youth gender transition, concludes that the evidence for the safety and efficacy of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones as treatments for gender-related distress in adolescents is “remarkably weak.” Youth gender medicine, Cass writes in the prestigious British Medical Journal, “is built on shaky foundations.”

Here, I want to respond to Turban’s comments about evidence quality in the Cass Review. These issues are technical but important for those following the debate over pediatric gender medicine.

First, some background. Jack Turban is one of the nation’s most prominent defenders of pediatric sex-trait modification (“gender-affirming care”). He has garnered a reputation outside of his circle of followers for pursuing agenda-driven research, evading scientific debate, launching ad hominem attacks on scientific critics, and misrepresenting research findings—including his own.

In a recent deposition in a lawsuit over Idaho’s Vulnerable Child Protection Act, which bans sex-trait modification in minors, Turban demonstrated under oath his lack of understanding of, or failure to be honest about, basic principles of evidence-based medicine (EBM). He seemed unaware, for example, that systematic reviews of evidence are meant not only to assess the available research but also to score the quality of that research. Gordon Guyatt, a professor of health research methods, world-renowned expert in EBM, and a founder of the field, has said that when it comes to systematic reviews, Turban has shown he “does not understand what it’s all about.”

The studies Turban and other gender clinicians cite in support of “gender-affirming care” often suffer from high risk of bias and show inconsistent findings regarding mental-health outcomes. Further, these studies often are conducted by gender clinicians with ideological, professional, and even financial stakes in administering drugs and surgeries to minors.

The benefit of systematic reviews is that they do not take authors’ conclusions at face value. Instead, they allow independent experts in research methods and evidence evaluation to scrutinize studies’ designs and conclusions. The research on youth gender medicine interventions generally lacks adequate follow-up time, has high drop-out rates, fails to control for potential confounding factors, and regards as homogeneous a patient population with significantly different clinical presentations.

Because systematic reviews are EBM’s gold standard for furnishing clinicians and guideline developers with reliable information, it’s necessary to respond directly to Turban’s claim in the Dartmouth debate that the new systematic reviews associated with the Cass report found “moderate quality” evidence that puberty blockers improve mental health. (I will focus here on the puberty blockers review, although the analysis applies to the cross-sex hormone review as well.)

Turban’s claim is false, for three reasons. First, he ignores the crucial distinction in EBM between quality of studies and quality of evidence—an admittedly non-obvious distinction, but one that any competent clinician who opines on EBM issues should comprehend. Second, he fails to distinguish between the mental-health and non-mental-health-related research cited in the report. Third, he ignores the fact that the authors of the systematic reviews used a scoring tool that already sets a lower bar for evaluating research. In effect, the reviewers (and the Cass team) performed affirmative action for youth-gender-medicine research and still found it wanting.

Quality of Studies v. Quality of Evidence. To evaluate the quality of studies on puberty suppression, the authors of the systematic review used a modified version of the Newcastle–Ottawa Quality Assessment Scale (NOS), a tool for evaluating nonrandomized studies. Studies assessed by the scale receive one of three grades: low, moderate, or high. Of the 50 studies on puberty suppression the authors identified as relevant, 24 (including one by Turban) were excluded for being low quality. Of the remaining 26, one was determined to be high quality, and 25 moderate quality. Turban’s confusion is therefore understandable: wouldn’t the finding that most of the research is moderate quality mean that the evidence overall is moderate quality?

Not exactly. In EBM, “quality of study” refers to a given study’s risk of bias. “Risk of bias” is a technical term, which Cochrane defines as “systematic error, or deviation from the truth, in results.” To give an obvious example, if you want to test the effects of puberty blockers on mental health and give them to patients who are already receiving psychotherapy, any positive outcomes may be attributable to the drugs, the therapy, or some combination of the two. A study design that is incapable of isolating the effects of puberty blockers from confounding variables like psychotherapy is at high risk of bias.

Quality of evidence, on the other hand, refers to the confidence we can have in our estimate of an intervention’s effect, based on the entire body of information. Quality of studies (based on risk of bias) is one factor that determines quality of evidence; others include publication bias (when, for example, a journal declines to publish an unfavorable study); inconsistency (when studies addressing the same question come to significantly different results); indirectness (when the studies do not directly compare interventions of interest in populations of interest, or when they do not report outcomes deemed important for clinical decisions); and imprecision (when studies are subject to random error, often due to small sample sizes).

Gender medicine research, and youth gender medicine research in particular, suffers from these problems. To give one example, inapplicability is a form of indirectness in which the subjects of a study are different from the patients to whom an intervention is being offered. The gold standard of research in youth gender medicine is the Dutch study. That study suffers from high risk of bias, but it is also inapplicable to the majority of minors now seeking “gender-affirming care” because it was done on patients with a different clinical presentation than the group responsible for the sudden and dramatic rise in gender dysphoria diagnoses and referrals: teen girls with no prepubertal history of gender issues and with high rates of psychiatric and/or neurocognitive challenges.

Turban’s claim that the systematic reviews on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones found “moderate” quality evidence is therefore incorrect. The reviews found moderate and a few high-quality studies, but they did not find moderate quality evidence. In fact, the University of York authors of the systematic reviews did not even evaluate the quality of evidence using widely accepted and standardized tools such as Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluations (GRADE). Instead, they summarized their findings in narrative form. “There is a lack of high-quality research assessing puberty suppression in adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria/incongruence,” they wrote. “No conclusions can be drawn about the impact on gender dysphoria, mental and psychosocial health or cognitive development. Bone health and height may be compromised during treatment.”

Quality With Regard to What Outcomes? Turban’s second mistake is to suggest that the “moderate-quality evidence” was about “improvements in mental health.” A look at the chart included in the systematic review on puberty blockers, however, reveals that of the 25 moderate-quality studies, most appear in four columns: puberty suppression (17 studies), physical health (14), bone health (5), and side effects (3) (most studies examine more than one domain). Many of the studies do not examine mental-health outcomes.

It’s not possible for me to give a detailed account here of what each of the moderate-quality studies examined, but a few examples should be enough to show why Turban’s suggestion is misleading. One moderate-quality study included in the “puberty suppression” category tested whether Histrelin implants (a puberty blocker) are still effective at disrupting the puberty-inducing mechanism of the pituitary gland after one year. Another moderate-quality study, in the “physical health” category, was about the effects on body composition (in terms of height and lean mass) from sudden withdrawal of sex hormones in late-pubertal adolescents. Neither study examined participants’ mental-health outcomes.

Lowering the Bar for “Gender-Affirming Care.” To assess the strength of various studies, the University of York systematic review authors used a scoring tool specifically designed for nonrandomized studies. Such studies already face a higher risk of bias, since their proctors do not randomly assign comparable participants into treatment and control groups. The field of youth gender medicine lacks even a single randomized controlled study—the gold standard for testing causal claims about the safety and efficacy of medical interventions.

I asked Yuan Zhang, an assistant clinical professor of health research methods, evidence, and impact at McMaster University, home of EBM, for his impression of the Cass-linked systematic review’s methods. “With regard to the question of the effects of puberty blockers on mental health, even if the University of York team had done a quality of evidence scoring, it would not have been better than low quality.” Zhang is referring to the lowest score on GRADE. “If you want to produce credible evidence of cause and effect, for instance in order to be able to say that puberty blockers are responsible for improvement in mental health, there is no alternative to a randomized controlled trial.”

Advocates of puberty blockers like Turban argue that conducting a RCT in the gender-medicine context would be unethical, as we already know that puberty blockers are “medically necessary” interventions and that withholding them would cause harm. Of course, this claim assumes the very thing that’s in dispute. Proponents also argue that conducting a double-blinded RCT would be impossible, as there is no way to hide from participants (and their physicians) whether puberty blockers or placebos were being administered. This second objection is more reasonable, but it’s possible to design a non-blinded RCT with active comparators. Non-puberty-suppressed participants can be given antidepressants or psychotherapy, for instance. The passage of time alone may have an effect on mental health (a phenomenon known as “regression to the mean”).

As James Cantor, a psychologist and author of important articles and expert reports on gender medicine, told me, “Even if one accepted, for arguments’ sake, that RCTs couldn’t be done, it still wouldn’t justify barreling ahead as if they had been done and always showed unmitigated success.” The reason should be obvious: drugs and surgeries pose real and potentially serious risks to a person’s physical and mental health. Because in this case they are being given to adolescents who are physically healthy, the burden is on proponents of hormonal interventions to prove their safety and efficacy.

How do reviewers assess the quality of non-randomized studies, which inherently are more prone to bias? The most common tool is “Risk of Bias in Non-randomized Studies—Interventions” (ROBINS-I). It’s not clear why the authors of the Cass systematic reviews chose not to use this tool, but one possible reason is that ROBINS-I is very rigorous in assessing risk of bias in non-randomized research. Applying it to existing gender-medicine research would likely have resulted in all available studies being found to be at “serious” or “critical” risk of bias.

The NOS, which the Cass researchers used, has separate scoring scales for pre-post, cohort, and cross-sectional studies. Pre-post studies examine the effects of an intervention in a single cohort with no comparator group. Cohort studies follow a group of patients over a period of time but also lack adequate controls. Cross-sectional studies capture data at a single point in time, through methods such as surveys or medical-chart reviews.

The only high-quality study of puberty blockers included in the systematic review was a cross-sectional study from the Netherlands. A cross-sectional design is definitionally incapable of ascertaining causal relationships, so how could this study come out above other types of nonrandomized studies? The answer is that the NOS scale scores each type of study differently. A high-quality cross-sectional study means that it is high quality for cross-sectional design, not high quality for nonrandomized research in general.

Turban’s misperceptions about quality in medical research lead to similarly misguided policy conclusions. He claimed in the Dartmouth debate, for example, that moderate-quality evidence “is not particularly unusual in medicine,” adding, “I can’t think of another example in medicine where you have that quality of evidence, and you ban the care. The report also doesn’t say to ban care.”

Turban is correct that this area of medicine has been singled out for special treatment, but not in the way he thinks. Indeed, Hilary Cass, author of the Cass Review, claims that pediatric gender medicine has been “exceptionalised”—too many clinicians in this field have “abandoned normal clinical approaches to holistic assessment” and instead deferred to their patient’s self-diagnosis and desire for medical intervention. No other area of medicine has been allowed to proceed so quickly, with so little evidence, on such vulnerable patients, and with such little follow-up.

Advocates like Turban point out that many medical treatments and protocols in pediatrics are still used despite low-quality evidence. This fact, they claim, shows that gatekeepers are prejudicially motivated to restrict gender transition. An influential Yale report from 2022, for example, cited the recommendation against giving children aspirin for fevers due to risk of developing Reye’s syndrome—a progressive and potentially fatal neurological disease—despite there being only low-quality evidence linking aspirin to Reye’s.

A rule of thumb in EBM is that strong recommendations require strong evidence. In some cases, however, low-quality evidence can justify strong recommendations. Examples of such “discordant recommendations” are when the alternative to nontreatment is death, and when alternative interventions can achieve the same effects with less risk. The Yale team conveniently neglected to mention that kids can be given Tylenol, which isn’t linked to Reye’s, instead of aspirin.

When Turban says that moderate-quality evidence is “not particularly unusual” in medicine, he is thus misleading his audience on two counts. First, he falsely implies that the quality of evidence (rather than of studies) is moderate, and confuses NOS’s use of “moderate” with the use of this term in GRADE (where quality of evidence is at issue). Second, he suggests that puberty blockers fall under one of the exceptional scenarios in EBM where discordant recommendations are appropriate.

It’s noteworthy that this marks a shift in Turban’s public position, which has been that “the body of research indicates that these interventions result in favorable mental health outcomes.” In his expert witness reports, Turban has claimed that “Existing research shows gender-affirming medical treatments for adolescents with gender dysphoria are consistently linked to improved mental health.” Yet at Dartmouth, he appeared to make a different claim: the evidence is not strong, but it’s common practice in pediatrics to offer medical interventions based on uncertain evidence.

As for banning “care,” Turban is correct that the Cass Review does not recommend a blanket prohibition on puberty blockers. But if Cass’s recommendations were to be implemented in the U.S., most of the kids currently getting them would no longer be eligible, and those who would be eligible would be able to receive them only as part of research. Turban, like other gender clinicians, has conveniently but disingenuously latched on to age restriction laws (“bans”) as a way to avoid acknowledging this important implication.

Advocates of hormonal interventions frame the choice as one between only two alternatives: their own “affirmative” approach or total prohibition. They then use Europeans’ allowance for at least some instances of pubertal suppression as evidence that European countries have rejected the prohibitionist approach, and that, by implication, they agree with advocates’ “affirming” approach.

The only real disagreement between health-care authorities in places like England, Sweden, and Finland, and those in U.S. red states is whether these drugs should be allowed within research settings and administered in exceptional cases. England’s National Health Service has officially ended the routine use of puberty blockers for adolescents with gender dysphoria. Turban, by contrast, has seemed to agree that these drugs should be given out for free, on-demand, without parental consent.

At Dartmouth, Turban warned against “conflating very technical terms from the grading scale, like for medical evidence, with lay terminology saying it’s all low-quality evidence.” I agree. But Turban appears not to understand the technical terms. Perhaps someone should explain them to him in lay terminology.