Ben Harris-Roxas

A interesting challenge to the notion of field epideimiology, drawing heavily on the lessons from a case in Ghana in 2011. The “field” is often seen as a frontier into which experts are parachuted:

Despite the mounting evidence suggesting it was not a zoonotic outbreak, more likely explanations for the outbreak, specifically that it had a toxic aetiology, went unexplored. After 2 years, all of the investigations into the outbreak had petered out. No meaningful public health interventions had taken place nor a compelling explanation for the event developed. However, if you read the draft and published manuscripts describing the outbreak authored by the investigators during that time, you would be left with the opposite impression…

Early on in the BAR outbreak response, a district disease control officer had raised concerns about introducing elite foreign and national outsiders into the investigation, warning: ‘They will come in, sit down and they will take this one, and this, and then they will come out with a nice story of a nice thing’. In an email to his fellow local outbreak responders, he explained that the outsiders will ‘want to publish because it is an emerging disease, however, there is the need for deeper investigation’ and that instead, they themselves should ‘work as hard as possible to answer all the possible questions, irrespective of the years or months that it will take’. Regardless of the image of transnational outbreak responders might have cultivated among themselves and the upper echelons of the larger epistemic community, to have such a reputation on the ground with those who witness work directly, is a damning indictment of these practices and their effectiveness.

The lessons from the editorial are that local workers get there faster and have the contextual expertise that is required for useful hypothesis generation.

It’s worth considering what other aspects of public health practice need to learn these lessons too.

Stuck in ‘the field’: why applied epidemiology needs to go home - BMJ Global Health editorial

More on the Brong-Ahafo case in this 2023 article by the same author.

“It is the result of deliberately hiding actual work – designing, making, sorting, packing, cooking, farming, delivering – behind little icons on your smartphone screen, in order to devalue it. It is the systematic use of the fake robot trick to lower the value of labour, until people are reportedly sleeping in tents at the factory gates, then banking the difference”

So, Amazon’s ‘AI-powered’ cashier-free shops use a lot of … humans. Here’s why that shouldn’t surprise you - The Guardian

Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program that had programmed the jets to nose-dive in response to the input from a single angle-of-attack sensor. The software had already killed 189 people on a separate 737 MAX in Indonesia, but Boeing had largely deflected blame for that crash by exploiting the island nation’s reputation for aviation laxity. Now it was clear Boeing was responsible for all the deaths.

Suicide Mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

In Australia’s immigration detention centres, each detainee is given security risk ratings decided by an algorithm – but they’re not even told it exists.

Developed by Serco, the company tasked with running Australia’s immigration detention network, the Security Risk Assessment Tool – or SRAT – is meant to determine whether someone is low, medium, high or extreme risk for escape or violence.

Immigration insiders, advocates and detainees have told Guardian Australia the SRAT and similar tools used in Australia’s immigration system are “abusive”, “a blunt instrument” and “unscientific”. Multiple government reports have found that assessments can be littered with inaccuracies – with devastating consequences.

Revealed: the secret algorithm that controls the lives of Serco’s immigration detainees - The Guardian

Very interesting, detailed account of how the tobacco industry has shaped recent backwards changes to tobacco policy in New Zealand, more directly than you might guess.

RNZ’s attempts to follow up exactly who did write the notes, and where suggestions such as freezing excise tax on cigarettes came from, have only raised more questions. Costello’s office declined an OIA request for reports, briefings and communications on the issue, on the basis that it would breach officials’ ability to provide ‘free and frank’ advice to ministers.

RNZ compared notes Associate Health Minister Casey Costello sent to officials, with a range of documents produced by the tobacco industry and its supporters. Intentional or not, there are frequent – and striking – similarities between the language and the rnz.co.nz

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In the manner of mathematicians and physicists telling other academic fields how they’re doing it wrong, the computer guys have arrived to tell historical linguists how to study language.

Mainstream historical linguists remain skeptical, however — of computational phylogenetics in general and the new result in particular. The main criticism is that the approach relies mostly on vocabulary and ignores word sounds and structures, such as the stems, prefixes and suffixes that make up a word. And the critics say that word meanings by themselves don’t give enough information to draw firm conclusions, no matter how sophisticated the computation.

A very interesting long piece, well worth your time.

A new look at our linguistic roots knowablemagazine.org

Reader: knowablemagazine.org

Discord continues to be every troll’s favourite platform:

Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out ongoing spam attacks that were organized on Discord, and conducted using Discord applications.

Importantly these coordinated attacks seem to be targeting smaller fediverse instances according to Eugen Rochko, which may have less active moderation processes in place. These claims may be self-serving on Rochko’s part though, some of the best-run instances I know are smaller ones and mastodon.social is often a bin fire.

Discord took no action against server that coordinated costly Mastodon spam attacks | TechCrunch techcrunch.com

Reader: techcrunch.com

Eugen Rochko (@Gargron@mastodon.social) mastodon.social

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It used to be an acre of gorse, bramble, hawthorn, blackthorn, but someone got planning and had cleaned out the whole field to replace it with a garden. I stood there in horror – and I realized that I’d done this myself so many times in my career. They had nowhere else to go. We’re taking away their habitats, the agricultural land is poisoned, old growth forest decimated, and now the only hope they have is abandoned land or gardens. It just reminded me of Noah’s Arc, all those animals going onto the boat, but in reverse. So I decided to give up my job. I have to dedicate myself to righting the wrong I’ve done.

Interview with Mary Reynolds | Acts of Restorative Kindness (ARK) - ARC2020 via Metafilter