Links
“Malaria is as old as Egyptian civilization itself, but the disease that plagued pharaohs now belongs to its history and not its future” - Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.
The Verge 2004 - a fun selection of articles reflecting on why this year was a turning point for our online existence.
With the European Peace Facility, the EU is seeking greater flexibility that will allow it to bypass the African Union and directly fund national and sub-regional military initiatives.
The blockbuster film of the last few years has achieved a synthesis of these two trends: color-rich saturated imagery, hammer on the head straightforward storytelling. I think that the actual visual pleasure offered by these new films is such a breath of fresh air that they disarm people’s critical faculties (See also: Everything Everywhere All At Once, The Banshees of Inishiren, Saltburn). What has emerged reminds me most of the USSR’s most maligned aesthetic legacy, socialist realism.
tl;dr the big variation in non-GP specialist fees in Australia is largely due to differences between individual doctors, rather than factors such as patient complexity or structural costs.
Sources of specialist physician fee variation: Evidence from Australian health insurance claims data 🔒
Guizhou has been the target of successive visions of state-led sinofuturity, which have developed the province as unevenly as its karst landscape.
3.5 million Argentinians pushed into poverty this year
Argentina’s poverty rate has soared to almost 53% in the first six months of Javier Milei’s presidency, offering the first hard evidence of the far-right libertarian’s tough austerity measures are hitting the population
Poverty in Argentina soars to over 50% as Milei’s austerity measures hit hard
Israeli strikes kill 492 in heaviest daily toll in Lebanon since 1975-90 civil war
It’s awful that Israel’s “escape forward” strategy, at the cost of thousands of lives, faces no meaningful international censure.
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Catholicism, another flank in America's pernicious global influence?
Another interesting piece, though it cements my view that American Catholicism has far more in common with with the evangelical churches of their countrymen than what is understood to be Catholicism in the rest of the world. Another flank in America’s pernicious global influence?
Behind the Catholic Right’s Celebrity-Conversion Industrial Complex - Vanity Fair
Interesting piece on Vance and his antecedents.
Who Owns America? was the Agrarian-Distributists’ last hurrah. The American public — including, ironically, the very farmers and working men that the movement sought to “save” — was simply not attracted to the philosophy.
The Forebears of JD Vance and the New Right - Olivia Paschal in HNN
Worth a watch if you’ve never seen it.
In one of the University College Cork buildings they have a Mac (the same model that my Dad bought for our family and that I used as a kid) on display in a glass case, like it’s some sort of early hominid tool. I’ve rarely felt so old.
We crave assurance that intimacy can survive independent of convenience. We dream of friendship that is interminable, impervious to the passage of time or changes in geography or individual growth.
Scholarly communication infrastructure has been beyond its breaking point for a while. Generative pre-trained transformers look increasingly like an epistemological omnicidal weapon that we've failed to contain.
Two main risks arise from the increasingly common use of GPT to (mass-)produce fake, scientific publications. First, the abundance of fabricated “studies” seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardize the integrity of the scientific record. A second risk lies in the increased possibility that convincingly scientific-looking content was in fact deceitfully created with AI tools and is also optimized to be retrieved by publicly available academic search engines, particularly Google Scholar.
Worryingly it is free tools like Google Scholar, and fields like environmental and health sciences that have obvious policy and practice relevance, that seem particularly vulnerable.
Google Scholar is more busted than I thought. Pay for citations schemes exist and may be more widespread than we realise.
A fascinating long read about the origins of Gaia theory, the early influence of systems theory, and NASA and JPL’s sexist culture in the ’60s.
A cool flame: how Gaia theory was born out of a secret love affair