total bullXit

“Of course there will be an attempt to try to obfuscate the effect of this Act, but it does – the capitulation act, or the surrender act or whatever you want to call it – it does, I’m sorry, but it greatly enfeebles, it greatly enfeebles this government’s ability to negotiate.”

“But what I will say is that the best way to honour the memory of Jo Cox and indeed the best way to bring this country together would be, I think, to get Brexit done.”

“There’s a terrible kind of collaboration as it were, going on between people who think they can block Brexit in Parliament and our European friends.”

“What will synthetic biology stand for – restoring our livers and our eyes with miracle regeneration of the tissues, like some fantastic hangover cure? Or will it bring terrifying limbless chickens to our tables?”

“I can hardly condemn Ukip as a bunch of boss-eyed, foam-flecked euro hysterics, when I have been sometimes not far short of boss-eyed, foam-flecked hysteria myself.”

“We will leave the EU on 31 October, deal or no deal. The way to get a good deal is to prepare for a no deal.”

 

Sacrebleu!

led by donkeys out of the EU [not yet!]

Nature worries

In the 29 August issue, worries about the collapse of the Italian government coalition for research (as the said government had pledge to return funding to 2009 [higher!] levels), Brexit as in every issue (and the mind of every EU researcher working in the UK), facial recognition technology that grows much faster than the legal protections which should come with it, thanks to big tech companies like Amazon and Google. In Western countries, not China… One acute point in the tribune being the lack of open source software to check for biases. More worries about Amazon, the real one!, with Bolsonaro turning his indifference if not active support of the widespread forest fires into a nationalist campaign. And cutting 80,000 science scholarships. Worries on the ethnic biases in genetic studies and the All of Us study‘s attempt to correct that (study run by a genetic company called Color, which purpose is to broaden the access to genetic counseling to under-represented populations). Further worries on fighting self-citations (with John Ioannidis involved in the analysis). With examples reaching a 94% rate for India’s most cited researcher.

Nature snippets

In the August 1 issue of Nature I took with me to Japan, there were many entries of interest. The first pages included a tribune (“personal take on events”) by a professor of oceanography calling for a stop to the construction of the TMT telescope on the Mauna Kea mountain. While I am totally ignorant of the conditions of this construction and in particular of the possible ecological effects on a fragile altitude environment, the tribune is fairly confusing invoking mostly communitarian and religious, rather than scientific ones. And referring to Western science and Protestant missionaries as misrepresenting a principle of caution. While not seeing the contradiction in suggesting the move of the observatory to the Canary Islands, which were (also) invaded by Spanish settlers in the 13th century.

Among other news, Indonesia following regional tendencies to nationalise research by forcing foreign researchers to have their data vetted by the national research agency and to include Indonesian nationals in their projects. And, although this now sounds stale news, the worry about the buffoonesque Prime Minister of the UK. And of the eugenic tendencies of his cunning advisor… A longer article by Patrick Riley from Google on three problems with machine learning, from splitting the data inappropriately (biases in the data collection) to hidden variables (unsuspected confounders) to mistaking the objective (impact of the loss function used to learn the predictive function). (Were these warnings heeded in the following paper claiming that deep learning was better at predicting kidney failures?)  Another paper of personal interest was reporting a successful experiment in Guangzhou, China, infecting tiger mosquitoes with a bacteria to make the wild population sterile. While tiger mosquitoes have reached the Greater Paris area,  and are thus becoming a nuisance, releasing 5 million more mosquitoes per week in the wild may not sound like the desired solution but since the additional mosquitoes are overwhelmingly male, we would not feel the sting of this measure! The issue also contained a review paper on memory editing for clinical treatment of psychopathology, which is part of the 150 years of Nature anniversary collection, but that I did not read (or else I forgot!)

in a house of lies [book review]

While I found the latest Rankin’s Rebus novels a wee bit disappointing, this latest installment in the stories of the Edinburghian ex-detective is a true pleasure! Maybe because it takes the pretext of a “cold case” suddenly resurfacing to bring back to life characters met in earlier novels of the series. And the borderline practice of DI Rebus himself. Which should matter less at a stage when Rebus has been retired for 10 years (I could not believe it had been that long!, but I feel like I followed Rebus for most of his carreer…) The plot is quite strong with none of the last minute revelations found in some earlier volumes, with a secondary plot that is much more modern and poignant. I also suspect some of the new characters will reappear in the next books, as well as the consequences of a looming Brexit [pushed by a loony PM] on the Scottish underworld… (No,. I do not mean TorysTories!)

the unsinkable…