punch [him] back, Britain!

more EU, another 50 years! [jatp]

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.”

 

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.

EU without education is like a bird without wings [apologies to ostriches]

[Reposting a call for keeping education and research in the EU commission denomination:]

The candidates for the new EU commissioners were presented last week. In the new commission the areas of education and research are not explicitly represented anymore and instead are subsumed under the “innovation and youth” title. This emphasizes economic exploitability (i.e. “innovation”) over its foundation, which is education and research, and it reduces “education” to “youth” while being essential to all ages.

We, as members of the scientific community of Europe, wish to address this situation early on and emphasize both to the general public, as well as to relevant politicians on the national and European Union level, that without dedication to education and research there will neither exist a sound basis for innovation in Europe, nor can we fulfill the promise of a high standard of living for the citizens of Europe in a fierce global competition.

President von der Leyen, in her mission letter to commissioner Gabriel, has emphasized that “education, research and innovation will be key to our competitiveness”.

With this open letter we demand that the EU commission revises the title for commissioner Gabriel to “Education, Research, Innovation and Youth” reflecting Europe’s dedication to all of these crucial areas. We also call upon the European Parliament to request this change in name before confirming the nominees for commissioner.

Please support this letter by signing up as a supporter via https://indico.uis.no/event/5/registrations/

Nature tidbits

Before returning a few older issues of Nature to the coffee room of the maths department, a quick look brought out the few following items of interests, besides the great cover above:

• France showing the biggest decline in overal output among the top 10 countries in the Nature Index Annual Tables.
• A tribune again the EU’s Plan S, towards funding (private) publishers directly from public (research) money. Why continuing to support commercial journals one way or another?!
• A short debate on geo-engineering towards climate control, with the dire warning that “little is known about the consequences” [which could be further damaging the chances of human survival on this planet].
• Another call for the accountability of companies designing AI towards fairness and unbiasedness [provided all agree on the meaning of these terms]
• A study that argues that the obesity epidemics is more prevalent in rural than urban areas due to a higher recourse to junk food in the former.
• A data mining venture in India to mine [not read] 73 million computerised journal articles, which is not yet clearly legal as the publishers object to it. Although the EU (and the UK) have laws authorising mining for non-commercial goals. (And India has looser regulations wrt copyright.)