Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to go up in smoke - The Verge
“The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature.”
Over the last five years the average open access article processing charge has gone up by 26% to AUD $4,945.
#research #openaccess
A sewage crisis in San Diego County reveals the unpolluted truth about the U.S.-Mexico border
Parts of NAFTA anticipated this dynamic; the agreement included a provision to set aside $100 million a year for environmental infrastructure along the border. As time went on, though, Congress lost its appetite for funding public health upgrades in Mexican cities. How about building a wall and making Mexico pay for it?
That’s the kind of solution that appeals to the American political psyche, but it suffers from a basic misunderstanding. You can draw the border as a line on a map, but you still have to deal with the world on the other side. A sewage crisis in Mexico can’t be solved with pipes in California any more than a migration crisis that spans the hemisphere can be solved with a wall across Texas and Arizona.
Shisha No Thanks! Five Years of Progress
Slides from a presentation to the Unpacking Vaping Cessation Special Interest Group.
More about the project at Shisha No Thanks and the Raising awareness of the harms of waterpipe smoking: Five years of progress report.
The post Shisha No Thanks! Five Years of Progress appeared first on Ben Harris-Roxas.
Deterritorialising a sport out of existence after one time in the Olympics is God-tier critical studies 🎓🫡
On the huge achievement that malaria vaccines represent
The vaccines — the first to target any human parasite — represent a feat of both scientific grit and fundraising ingenuity. Researchers took on a sophisticated biological adversary that eludes our immune systems’ schemes to identify and dispatch it. They also had to find ways to nudge forward products that would never result in blockbuster sales, a reality that sapped much of the biopharma industry’s interest.
Behind the malaria vaccines: A 40-year quest against one of humanity’s biggest killers
Return to office directives should be predicated on everyone having an office of their own. Forcing staff to hotdesk out of a backpack using lockers that are emptied every day, without even a desk of their own, isn’t an “office”.
Gigwork is a lie
Shawnta’s story exemplifies one of the reasons people turn to gig work: she lost her good union job at UPS as a data entry clerk because she had too many family health appointments to attend to. Her younger brother is autistic with a brain aneurysm. Her mother has problems with her knees and circulation. Her sister, after a bad accident, has a knee injury. She also sustains scoliosis and is currently managing an addiction to opioids. Shawnta herself has health issues to manage; she has Grave’s disease, a thyroid condition that causes her weight to fluctuate and brought on early menopause at the age of only thirty-three. While juggling medical appointments for four family members, including herself, it is no wonder that Shawnta cannot hold down a full-time job. That’s why she turned to the gig economy—though the twelve-hour warehousing shifts she picks up through the apps could hardly be called part time.
The Gig Is Up logicmag.io
From respected science journalism to LLM-generated click farming, an interesting analysis
While this is factual information (note: it’s actually rather hard to find the most up to date details about this) and so slightly harder to write in any other way, it raises another important issue: For what purpose are these explainers being written?
What business case is there to flood Google with new explainers when that information already exists, except to try and boost your website’s ranking? And if you’re trying to boost your website’s ranking with AI-generated content… let me tell you, you’re already tackling the problem the entirely wrong way.
Already 67 higher education institutions are undertaking redundancy and restructuring programmes. This number is expected to rise as softening demand from international students and high debt servicing costs risks put the sector under even more pressure.
Phillipson has said the government will not step in to prevent insolvencies and refused to commit to raising tuition fees for domestic students, which have, in effect, been frozen for more than a decade, despite pressure from the sector lobby group Universities UK.
UK universities regulator plans for looming insolvencies - Financial Times
