Shortly, I start talking and encouraging students to talk back and I don’t stop until, probably, around 3. This is unnatural and exhausting. I don’t even get a chance to spend some quiet time with some charming spiders. I’m gonna be done with this communicatin’ stuff at the end of the day.
The good news is that my course load is stacked up this way to leave me totally free on Fridays. I will recover overnight and withdraw into my laboratory lair and spend the whole day chittering with spiders.
I haven’t done this in ages. How about an open thread? Just talk about whatever you feel like, except politics –we already have a long-running thread dedicated exclusively to political topics. Go ahead and tell me about all the things I’ve been neglecting for ages.
This is David Surman. He’s the 32 year old owner of a chemical company who, with his girlfriend, drove around Bucks County in Pennsylvania throwing small bombs out of his car window, creating loud explosions and small craters. The two of them were finally caught, arrested, and convicted.
Surman pleaded guilty Monday to possession and manufacturing of a weapon of mass destruction and conspiracy to possessing and manufacturing a weapon of mass destruction. He also pleaded guilty to criminal use of a communication facility and unlawful use of a computer for a large cache of child pornography detectives found on an external hard drive while investigating the bombs.
Wow. Yikes. You might wonder what a fitting sentence for such a pair might be.
4½ years probation for the girlfriend, Surman got 1-2 years in county prison. He argued that he merely “acted with immaturity”.
Woohoo! White justice!
There is a Facebook event about our Victory over Carrier hangout that will be taking place on Sunday, 23 February, around 6pm Central. Sign up for notifications or to let us know you’re interested!
(That, by the way, is the USS Oriskany being sunk to form an artificial reef for sea life. The sinking of Richard Carrier will not be so useful.)
P.S. We have a GoFundMe.
The recent coronavirus outbreak is serious news and an important concern for world health. It seems there is no worry so great that someone won’t find a way to exploit it. Australians have been getting dire warnings to avoid certain places and certain foods because they have ‘positive readings’ for coronavirus; one clue is that they also try to paint Chinese immigrants as tainted, to get the clueless racists to bite. The Australian health service had to make a statement that these were bogus claims.
A spokeswoman for NSW Health said: “NSW Health has been made aware of a social media post that is being widely circulated warning people to not consume certain foods or visit certain locations in Sydney.
“This post has not originated from NSW Health or any entity relating to us. Further, there is no such entity as the ‘Department of Diseasology Parramatta’.
“NSW Health would like to assure the community that the locations mentioned in this post pose no risk to visitors, and there have been no ‘positive readings’ at train stations.”
Diseasology
? Seriously? I get the impression that the trolls don’t respect their victims at all.
Oh, wait! This isn’t the dumbest troll yet. QAnon is telling everyone they can stave off the coronavirus threat by drinking bleach.
As the global death toll from an alarming new coronavirus surged this week, promoters of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory were urging their fans to ward off the illness by purchasing and drinking dangerous bleach.
The substance—dubbed “Miracle Mineral Solution” or “MMS”—has long been promoted by fringe groups as a combination miracle cure and vaccine for everything from autism to cancer and HIV/AIDS.
It’s a wonder that conspiracy theorists and medical quacks haven’t already gone extinct. Maybe this will do it.
Charles Lieber, a Harvard chemist, has been arrested for working with the Chinese. My first thought was that this is terrible, science is an international enterprise, we value cooperation and the sharing of information, and working with the Chinese people and other international students is exactly what a respected scientist at a university ought to be doing. I have students from China in my classes, I think it’s great that they are here and learning.
I think that’s going to be part of the defense strategy. It’s government paranoia, part of a campaign of hostility against China.
Peter Zeidenberg, a lawyer who has represented Chinese Americans accused of espionage, said in an email that the Justice Department “has launched an all-out war on any U.S. scientist associated with the 1000 Talent or other Chinese Talent programs.”
He said that is a major shift in U.S. practice after years of lax scrutiny of the issue.
“The government is now expecting perfect compliance for scientists who received no training on how these forms needed to be filled out and no warnings about the dangers of submitting an inaccurate form,” Zeidenberg said. “Treating these mistakes as felonies is entirely inappropriate.”
Except, well, ‘not knowing how to fill out a form’ is a bad tactic when you’re defending one of the most successful scientists in the world, at one of the richest universities in the world. He can probably figure it out, and if not, there is certainly a team of well-paid administrators at Harvard who could figure it out for him.
Then I read the actual charges. He had a contract with the Wuhan University of Technology.
I about choked. He was personally paid $50K per month, handed $150K per year for personal expenses, and awarded a $1.5 million grant? All that was on top of his Harvard salary, which wasn’t stated, but is probably a healthy sum. Man, I’m wondering how I can get on the Chinese spy payroll all of a sudden, because those numbers are not what you get paid for academic work. Just the fact that he’s being given $750K per year as his own cash to swim around in in his vault is abnormal and suspicious, and then we learn that it was all under the table, and he didn’t tell anyone about his secret contract.
The Justice Department says Lieber, 60, lied about his contact with the Chinese program known as the Thousand Talents Plan, which the U.S. has previously flagged as a serious intelligence concern. He also is accused of lying about about a lucrative contract he signed with China’s Wuhan University of Technology.
In an affidavit unsealed Tuesday, FBI Special Agent Robert Plumb said Lieber, who led a Harvard research group focusing on nanoscience, had established a research lab at the Wuhan university — apparently unbeknownst to Harvard.
Universities care about this stuff. Every year I get a little form sent around that I have to fill out, which is basically asking if I’m moonlighting at anything, am I getting paid on the side. They are paying me a salary for full-time work 9 months out of the year; it’s OK if I’m bringing in summer salary, for instance, but they want to know about it, because they want to know that I regard them as my primary employer. If I were to mention that the Chinese government was paying me 10 times what the Minnesota state government was coughing up, they might suspect a conflict of interest.
Lieber lied about his affiliations. Further, and quite amusingly, when WUT started touting their connections to Harvard, Lieber was frantically contacting them to shush, that he was working with them, but Harvard was not, so ix-nay on the Arvard-hay talk, or they’ll catch on.
This ain’t about international cooperation and scientific values, it’s about a greedy American being bought by the Chinese government and lying about it. Throw the book at him.
Maybe the legal strategy of claiming that he was too stupid to fill out a form properly is his best bet after all.
I politely informed this little grass spider that I was not interested in a ménage à trois.
Tuesdays I have a morning class and an afternoon lab; sandwiched in between was a discipline meeting. I think I’m plum wore out today.
Just to make it more awful, the first genetics assignment is due tomorrow, and I made an awful hash of it, trying to juggle multiple textbook editions, so the students are all confused. So I made an announcement that the assignment is basically cancelled, ignore everything I said, and I’ll come in tomorrow with a whole new problem set that we’ll work on together. What a mess. I’m exhausted just thinking of sorting it all out.
Oh, this is going to be fun. Mark your calendar and keep the evening of Sunday 23 February open, because we’re doing a grand celebratory hangout, since we’re finally out from under that ridiculous law suit by Richard Carrier.
By now, you may know that Richard Carrier dropped his remaining SLAPP suits in November. If you read the settlement agreement, you’ll see he even explicitly said we are free to talk about the allegations and the suit without incurring more legal hassle from him. So we’re going to do that.
Save the date for the evening of February 23. We’ve rested, we’ve let the news sink in, and we’re ready to talk. We’ll bring you more news soon as we work out technical details for live streaming and confirm special guests. In the meantime, however, just know that our lips are legally unsealed. We can talk. We will talk.
Yes, we will. We are angry at the unjust and self-servingly stupid behavior by Richard Carrier, and we plan to vent. We have unfair debts imposed on us, and oh boy, are we ready to flame that jerk.
Related: Rebecca Watson has a few words to say about these abusive defamation lawsuits…in this case, about Lawrence Lessig. Fuck ’em all.
China has surpassed the US in the number of scientific publications. Unfortunately for China, it has achieved that landmark accomplishment by streamlining the process of publishing garbage. They have institutions dedicated to making up data, forging results, and writing up formulaic papers.
Apparently, the Chinese paper mills even handle submissions, peer review (if there is a peer review, that is) and sign the copyright consent forms while pretending to be the listed authors. This is evidenced by the fact that in some cases only bizarre Gmail addresses are provided for alleged corresponding authors in China. Gmail access, as all Google services, were blocked by the Great Chinese Firewall in 2014, on Party’s orders. It is theoretically possible to use Google via VPN, but the Party has criminalised this, so hardly anyone dares. Whoever answers the Gmail accounts like CaseyPeiffer8311@gmail.com is definitely not some doctor in China listed as paper’s author, but the paper mill operator.
They are assisted in this endeavor by obliging editors in Western journals, who seem to accept anything that follows the form of a scientific paper without regard for the content. Just keep churning out stuff that vaguely resembles the LPUs that get dumped on familiar journals, and it will be accepted.
The papers mills churning out masses of 100% fabricated, never performed science which only exists in Photoshop, are the secret of Chinese science output supremacy which we in the West so admire and strive to keep up with. Reality is: nobody cares if the published research is real, slightly falsified or entirely made-up. Fraudsters face little consequences if they are well-connected, and one can always denounce a western conspiracy. The good scientific practice lessons preached by Chinese science elites do not even apply to themselves, as the case of Xuetao Cao demonstrated.
Who?
As per official hagiography, Cao was awarded his PhD at the age of 26, because his Master thesis was so excellent that his examiners gave him a doctorate instead. At 28, Cao was made the youngest medical professor in China, at 40 he was appointed Vice President of the Second Military Medical University in Shanghai. In 2005, the 41 year old genius was elected as the youngest member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, of which the Medical Academy is part, and he simultaneously rose to the military rank of a general, the youngest in China.
Damn. I had to write a whole thesis to get my Ph.D., and I didn’t get a military rank, ever. I’m less than a private.
And what is all this furious scientific labor being applied to?
The extra joke on top is that many of these fake paper mill emissions tout the alleged powers of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to cure cancer and other maladies, all because the nation’s President Xi Jinping himself is such a big fan of TCM. The Communist Party of China is merely getting what it ordered, again and again.
Then all the quacks cite these fake papers that get published in “peer reviewed” journals to justify their belief in quackery. Thanks, China!
