Good news from the heartland

Morris, Minnesota has won a prize!

The Morris Model team was recently notified that they were among 67 winners in the first phase of the $6.7 million Energizing Rural Communities Prize. The competition was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and is focused on supporting innovative partnership and finance plans to help rural or remote communities develop clean energy demonstration projects.

The Morris Model will receive a $100,000 prize, in-kind-mentorship services, and eligibility to compete for another $200,000.

This prize, managed by DOE Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED), challenges individuals and organizations to develop partnership and financing strategies that support community-driven energy improvement projects in rural or remote communities.  The Morris Model Partnership seeks to make Morris a model rural sustainable community through clean energy and community resilience.

The DOE has a nice logo to go with it.

Yep, that looks like us. Except you’d have to erase the mountains and hills, and paste in a lot more cornfields.

The delusions have begun

In the long slow decline of Twitter, Elon Musk is now making the most superficial shufflings of the cosmetics: he’s renaming Twitter “X”. Just “X”. Except the name is still twitter, the url is still twitter.com, it’s just the bird logo is now a generic “X”.

OK, if you say so. People are still going to call it twitter until it implodes. We can’t call it “X” because that’s where we buried the treasure, marked the spot, crossed out a mistake.

Linda Yaccarino, the poor dupe Musk lured into taking over as nominal CEO, waxed rhapsodic over this change.

X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.

No, it won’t. You’re rearranging the deck chairs on the sinking ship. You’re tweaking the font on your CV. You are totally delusional.

Notice to anti-vaxxers and other quacks

You may not post here. I have a zero tolerance policy for quacks and cranks.

This announcement was prompted by an attempted comment on this thread (I did not approve it for publication) which was loaded with conspiracy theory signs:

What is the TRUE FINAL implication of all that, which is not mentioned here (or elsewhere typically by the alleged “truth-tellers”)?

ACTIVE resistance against the criminal establishments around the world will greatly increase the sooner someone TRULY understands that the ruling cabal and their minions (in governments, big corporations, big banks, big media, big science, big religions, etc), anywhere around the globe, are PSYCHOPATHS — the evidence is OVERWHELMINGLY ROBUST.

Links to the crank’s website followed. Nah, I’m not publishing that. He is one of those vitamin megadoses can treat everything guys, whose main sources of information are his own opinion pieces and crap published in the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. He’s mad because the BMJ wouldn’t publish his cranky letter.

A REALITY-BASED main approach to life –not an AUTHORITY-BASED main approach to life.

A LIFE-GROUNDED core alignment –not an EXPERT-CENTERED core alignment.

A TRUTH-BACKED main compass –not SPECIALIST-BACKED main compass.

A determined trust in EMPIRICAL PLANETARY REALITY –not HUMAN ANIMAL-PROCLAIMED “official science”, “consensus science”, or “evidence-based science”.

An overriding assimilation of NATURE-BASED evidence –not “civilized” HUMANS’ RATIFIED SCIENCE-BASED evidence (i.e., their self-serving science-BIASED evidence).

A primarily real life-VERIFIED personal modus vivendi versus a primarily authority-CERTIFIED personal modus vivendi.

Hint for self-proclaimed authorities in medicine: don’t complain about other self-proclaimed authorities in your manifesto, and lay off the caps-lock a bit.

I will continue to cheerfully suppress your wacko misinformation, so stuff that in your list of authorities who have silenced you.

You want my syllabus when?

The end is nigh. The university administration has requested that we submit our fall term syllabi on the 24th of July…that is, tomorrow. I am not prepared. I don’t want to think about this. I haven’t been thinking about this.

So that takes care of today, I guess. I’ve pulled up the academic calendar for the fall, and my previous version of the syllabus, and am going to sit down and reconcile lecture & exam dates and will get the damn things done today.

In other academic concerns, I’ve been invited to give an honors college lecture on the theme of…Michel de Montaigne, like I’d be qualified to discuss late Renaissance history. It’s OK, though, I’ve read his Essays, and since he was an exceptionally discursive writer, I figure I can get away with my own ramblings in the style of an old humanist. I did find a quote that might make for a good springboard:

Our utmost endeavors cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of the least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much as the web of a poor spider.

I’ll have to correct that back-handed compliment, but I also have a bunch of other ideas, not all spider-related, that I’ll assemble into a hodge-podge of a talk. The title: “Of boundaries and transgressions.” Should be fun. I have until October to pull it together, but I think I’d better have most of it in shape before September body-slams me.

He’s half right, you know

Mary and I saw Barbie last night. Ben Shapiro is partly right — it is the most woke movie I’ve ever seen. Although…we watched the whole thing, eagerly awaiting the gay orgy scene and the raging trans character stealing all the scenes, and were so disappointed. The closest we got to an orgy was two Kens kissing Ken on the cheek, and I guess we have to trust that there was a trans person there, but she was just playing Barbie like all the other Barbies.

It was loaded full of the Feminizms, though. And the Kens were patriarchal assholes, kinda incel-like, but the movie was also sympathetic to them and tried provide solutions to their problems. There was all this talk of autonomy and independence and freedom and positivity and kindness, though, and I can see why Shapiro would think it was garbage — he doesn’t like any of that stuff. There’s even a Shapiro joke, with one Barbie saying that she’s comfortable with both logic and emotion at the same time.

There were also some good jokes about the Snyderverse, and the last line of the movie is a killer. I felt sorry for Alan, Ken’s Buddy, and poor permanently pregnant Midge.

Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie were perfectly cast. (You should google their names right now: Google will give you a pink fireworks show.) Both were energetic and entertaining.

Recommended.

I know everyone is talking about the contrast between Barbie and Oppenheimer, but unfortunately the latter movie isn’t scheduled for a showing at my local theater. Once they get done showing that lying waste of time, Sound of Freedom, next week, maybe I’ll get to see it.

Oh, and here’s a more thorough review, if you want that.

Science relies on honest observation

Elisabeth Bik is getting mad. She has spent the better part of a decade finding examples of scientific fraud, and it seems to be easy pickings.

Although this was eight years ago, I distinctly recall how angry it made me. This was cheating, pure and simple. By editing an image to produce a desired result, a scientist can manufacture proof for a favored hypothesis, or create a signal out of noise. Scientists must rely on and build on one another’s work. Cheating is a transgression against everything that science should be. If scientific papers contain errors or — much worse — fraudulent data and fabricated imagery, other researchers are likely to waste time and grant money chasing theories based on made-up results…..

But were those duplicated images just an isolated case? With little clue about how big this would get, I began searching for suspicious figures in biomedical journals…. By day I went to my job in a lab at Stanford University, but I was soon spending every evening and most weekends looking for suspicious images. In 2016, I published an analysis of 20,621 peer-reviewed papers, discovering problematic images in no fewer than one in 25. Half of these appeared to have been manipulated deliberately — rotated, flipped, stretched or otherwise photoshopped. With a sense of unease about how much bad science might be in journals, I quit my full-time job in 2019 so that I could devote myself to finding and reporting more cases of scientific fraud.

Using my pattern-matching eyes and lots of caffeine, I have analyzed more than 100,000 papers since 2014 and found apparent image duplication in 4,800 and similar evidence of error, cheating or other ethical problems in an additional 1,700. I’ve reported 2,500 of these to their journals’ editors and — after learning the hard way that journals often do not respond to these cases — posted many of those papers along with 3,500 more to PubPeer, a website where scientific literature is discussed in public….

Unfortunately, many scientific journals and academic institutions are slow to respond to evidence of image manipulation — if they take action at all. So far, my work has resulted in 956 corrections and 923 retractions, but a majority of the papers I have reported to the journals remain unaddressed.

I’ve seen some of the fraud reports, and it amazes me how stupid the scientists committing these fakes must be. It’s as if they think jpeg artifacts don’t exist, and can be an obvious fingerprint when chunks of an image are duplicated; they don’t realize that you can reveal cheating by just tweaking a LUT and seeing all the duplicated edges light up. The only reason it’s done is to adjust your data to make it look like you expected it to look, which is an obvious act against the most basic scientific principles: you’re supposed to use science to avoid fooling yourself, not to make it easy to fool others.

This behavior ought to be harshly punished. If image fakery became in issue when one of my peers came up for tenure or promotion, I’d reject them without hesitation. It’s not even a question: this behavior is a deep violation of scientific and ethical principles, and would make all of their work untrustworthy.

Also, this is a problem with the for-profit journal publication system. Those scientists paid money for those pages, how can we possibly enforce honesty? The bad actors wouldn’t pay us for journal articles anymore!

But guess what happens when Elisabeth Bik takes a principled stand?

Most of my fellow detectives remain anonymous, operating under pseudonyms such as Smut Clyde or Cheshire. Criticizing other scientists’ work is often not well received, and concerns about negative career consequences can prevent scientists from speaking out. Image problems I have reported under my full name have resulted in hateful messages, angry videos on social media sites and two lawsuit threats….

Things could be about to get even worse. Artificial intelligence might help detect duplicated data in research, but it can also be used to generate fake data. It is easy nowadays to produce fabricated photos or videos of events that never happened, and A.I.-generated images might have already started to poison the scientific literature. As A.I. technology develops, it will become significantly harder to distinguish fake from real.

Science needs to get serious about research fraud.

How about instantly firing people who do this? Our tenure contracts generally have a moral turpitude clause, you know. This counts.

“Barbie crotch”?

Uh-oh. I’m contributing to the Barbie mania a little more. Sorry.

But this was interesting, and I hadn’t thought about it before! The Vagina Museum posted a thread about the long history of portrayals of the female genitalia, and I was surprised to realize that Greek sculpture did the same thing — Praxiteles was sculpting Aphrodite with a Barbie crotch in the 4th century BCE. It was a whole trend for centuries: male nudes get the anatomically correct treatment, while female nudes get a smooth featureless curve.

This says something about Western cultures different attitudes towards men and women. I wonder what effect this has had on women’s ideas about their bodies.

At least we took a step towards gender equality in 1961 when Mattel castrated Ken and made his crotch identical to that of Barbie.

Barbenheimer will be an improvement over the latest hot conspiracy theory fraud

My wife actually asked me if we could see the Barbie movie, which is opening at our local theater this weekend. Of course we can! I was looking forward to it already. It looks to be trippy and fun.

As the media have frequently mentioned lately, because they do love a contrast, the Oppenheimer movie also opens this weekend (but not at our theater.) Cool, I’d like to see that one, too, even more than Barbie. They’re different movies, there isn’t any real conflict between them. Here’s an article that says ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ tell the same terrifying story.

The underlying premise of all the jokes — that these films come out on the same day but are about hilariously different subjects and have wildly different tones — is misguided. The two movies actually have a fundamental, and disturbing, common ground. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man behind our nuclear age, and Barbie — a toy that takes over three cups of oil to produce before it lingers in landfills around the world — both tell the story of the dawn of our imperiled era.

“Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” each offer a window into the creation of the Anthropocene, the suggested term for our present geological epoch, in which human beings have become the most significant influence on the natural environment at a planetary scale.

That’s an interesting connection: how do we define the anthropocene, by all the piles of plastic or the global dusting of radioactive isotopes?

Either works for me, they all coexist in a narrow slice of time, only a century long. On a geological scale, either one provides a sharp boundary.

Like I said, I’d like to see both movies. Unfortunately, Oppenheimer isn’t booked locally in the near future. Instead, we’re getting served Sound of Freedom after Barbie, a conspiracy-theory fueled abomination of a movie (see Rebecca Watson for why it’s bad). I predict it’ll clean up at the box office in our little corner of Red America.

I always wondered how you can be a university president & on the board of pharmaceutical companies & run a gigantic research lab

I know that guy! That’s Marc Tessier-Lavigne! He’s about my age, and we shared similar interests — we were both interested in axon guidance, and I followed his work avidly some years ago. He was publishing about netrins, signaling molecules that affect the trajectory of growing neurons, while I was studying growing neurons in grasshopper embryos. I met him several times, I attended talks he gave at various meetings, it was hard to avoid Tessier-Lavigne.

Our careers followed very different paths, though. I ended up teaching at a small liberal arts college, while he got a position at UCSF, and then was CSO at Genentech, and then was president of Rockefeller University, was on the boards of various pharmaceutical companies, and finally was president of Stanford University. He was a major go-getter, running gigantic factory-style labs, getting regularly published in Science and Nature and Cell. It was a life that looked horrible to me, just as my life of obscurity and teaching would have looked horrible to him, if ever he had deigned to notice me.

Why would I have disliked the prestigious path he took in science? Because he turned himself into a manager, a guy who was disconnected from the science that was being done in his massively well-funded labs. Ick. I’d rather play at the bench and help students get enthusiastic about doing science.

I may have chosen wisely, because now Tessier-Lavigne has been compelled to resign as an investigation found evidence of fraud in his work. Yikes. This is bad.

The Board of Trustees’ inquiry stopped short of accusing Tessier-Lavigne — who has been Stanford’s president since 2016 — of fraud, saying there’s no evidence he “personally engaged in research misconduct.”

However, it was concluded that five papers on which Tessier-Lavigne was a principal author included work from “some members of labs overseen by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne” who had “either engaged in inappropriate manipulation of research data or engaged in deficient scientific practices, resulting in significant flaws in those papers.”

When the issues emerged, “Tessier-Lavigne took insufficient steps to correct mistakes in the scientific record,” the board’s report said.

This is what happens when you become an over-worked administrator with your fingers in too many pies. That does not excuse him — he has his name on so many papers, and getting an authorship entails significant responsibilities — and it just tells you the kind of peril ambition can put you in.

I’ve been teaching about netrins and robo and neuropilins and all these molecules in neurodevelopment for years. Am I going to have to put an asterisk by the source papers and review their validity now? I’m hoping the descent into sloppiness was a late-career problem that doesn’t call into question all the fundamental stuff he did.