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How Google made the world go viral - The Verge
And here is where you get into the circular nature of his argument against Google’s influence. Thousands of food bloggers are searching for advice on how to optimize their blogs for Google. The advice that sits at the top of Google is bad, but they’re using it anyway, and now, their blogs all look the same. Isn’t that, in a sense, Google shaping how content is made?
Is Doctor Pay Too High? NIH Pulls Plug on Misinfo Research; FDA and EPA Butt Heads | MedPage Today
Previous NIH Director Francis Collins, MD, PhD, publicly proposed the project idea in 2021, saying, "We basically have seen the accurate medical information overtaken, all too often, by the inaccurate conspiracies and false information on social media," and "I do think we need to understand better how -- in the current climate -- people make decisions."
Many Patients Take to Online Forum to Vent About SSRIs | MedPage Today
These mostly were related to mood disorders and disturbances, with apathy being a common complaint (64 people posting); sleep disorders and disturbances, especially insomnia (57 people posting); anxiety disorders and symptoms (48 people posting); and sexual dysfunction, disturbances, and gender identity disorders, particularly with loss of libido (38 people posting).
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - The Atlantic
The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension. […]The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - The Atlantic
Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous.
The chronic growing pains of communicating science online
The business-as-usual response to this challenge from many parts of the scientific community—especially in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields— has been frustrating to those who conduct research on science communication. Many scientists-turned-communicators continue to see online communication environments mostly as tools for resolving information asymmetries between experts and lay audiences (3). As a result, they blog, tweet, and post podcasts and videos to promote public understanding and excitement about science. To be fair, this has been driven most recently by a demand from policy-makers and from audiences interested in policy and decision-relevant science during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Overdiagnosis: it’s official | The BMJ
“The labeling of a person with a disease or abnormal condition that would not have caused the person harm if left undiscovered, creating new diagnoses by medicalizing ordinary life experiences, or expanding existing diagnoses by lowering thresholds or widening criteria without evidence of improved outcomes. Individuals derive no clinical benefit from overdiagnosis, although they may experience physical, psychological, or financial harm.”
Scammers impersonate guest editors to get sham papers published
Hundreds of articles published in peer-reviewed journals are being retracted after scammers exploited the processes for publishing special issues to get poor-quality papers — sometimes consisting of complete gibberish — into established journals. In some cases, fraudsters posed as scientists and offered to guest-edit issues that they then filled with sham papers.
The True Foucault | Dissent Magazine
His pronouncements on politics were made in a similar vein. He is commonly associated with a bleak assessment of modern society, in which power, far from being confined to the state and economics, is disseminated through a network of disciplinary institutions—schools, hospitals, social services, asylums, and prisons, among others. Many are familiar with Foucault’s claim that the authority wielded by such entities is derived from their claims to specialized knowledge, which he succinctly dubbed “power-knowledge.” But, to Foucault, this argument was just one part of a broader framework. He relentlessly insisted that, even if power is a pervasive force in our collective lives, it always manifests itself in concrete struggles. He wanted us to see practices such as the military regimentation of bodies or the relationship between therapists and patients as akin to hand-to-hand combat—judo matches, rather than Orwellian thought control. Power is always an effort to control someone’s conduct: finding the right hold, identifying vulnerabilities, creating incentives for compliance.
The 61-Year-Old Queen of Quarantine Karaoke Won’t Stop Singing From Her Living Room – Texas Monthly
If I’m going to be really honest, if it weren’t for Quarantine Karaoke, I don’t think I would be here. I was just so upset, just so depressed, it felt like there was nothing to live for. I actually went on to Quarantine Karaoke to leave a legacy of music for my kids and grandkids. I thought if I put some songs on there, they could always go back and look at them, because medically or mentally, I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d be around.
I have to give credit to all those Quarantine Karaoke people. I don’t know what it was—maybe the music, or people’s responses. There was just love from everywhere. It changed my life completely.
Online Intergroup of Alcoholics Anonymous | Building an AA fellowship anytime, from anywhere, for everyone
The first AA meetings online used Bulletin Boards and were around 1986. Email groups started forming in the early nineties and the development of the worldwide internet rapidly fueled the growth and variety of groups. The first online AA group, Lamp-lighters, was formed in 1990, and has met by email continuously since then. Now there are hundreds of AA groups with thousands of members, connected together through this Online Intergroup. Using various mechanisms such as video conferencing, phone conferencing, message boards, email listserve, and chatrooms; the AA community is constantly connecting and finding new, creative ways to communicate the experience, strength and hope of recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Artificial intelligence in longevity medicine | Nature Aging
In order for these tools to be adopted by clinicians and accepted by the medical community, they need to be integrated into the current framework of clinical practice, ranging from primary through to secondary prevention, treatment and monitoring. Such integration requires the convergence of modern AI and medicine through a symbiotic collaboration between clinicians, geroscientists and AI researchers. Physicians should be encouraged and have the chance to be involved in AI-based longevity research. At the same time, AI-powered longevity biotechnology and AI-based biomarker-driven science should be promoted and seek close clinical and metaclinical collaborations. Doctors first need to have the access to tailored, validated and credible education on AI-based biogerontology sciences, such as accredited courses, that would further allow longevity physicians to build their networks and ultimately create a separate medical discipline. A basic knowledge of AI-driven geroscience is essential to bring relevant scientific discoveries to trials, and study outcomes to the clinic.
Vaccinology in the post−COVID-19 era | PNAS
Reverse vaccinology, structural vaccinology, synthetic biology, and vaccine adjuvants, that so far had been used independently to develop vaccines, were combined in an unprecedented worldwide effort to design and develop COVID-19 vaccines.
Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine - The Atlantic
Facebook is an agent of government propaganda, targeted harassment, terrorist recruitment, emotional manipulation, and genocide—a world-historic weapon that lives not underground, but in a Disneyland-inspired campus in Menlo Park, California.
Maybe Freedom is Having No Followers to Lose - Insight
One of the reasons for this discrepancy is that, on social media, the dynamic for in-group status assertions and status competition is strong—and getting stronger for this topic as the pandemic rages on. I’m no stranger to this dynamic, as it is something that’s very common among social movements (something I’ve studied at length) and, well, pretty much any human group. Who’s in and who’s out of the group is a key force for group-based species like ours and thus “stay-in-your-lane” assertions and wagon-circling against criticisms from perceived outsiders is forceful in any human group or profession. As the pandemic progresses, and as the field feels more and more under attack (and much of it quite unfair and terrible) the dynamic strengthens, often to the detriment of the field.
The Corruption of Evidence Based Medicine — Killing for Profit | by Dr. Jason Fung | Medium
“The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful”
Coca-Cola’s work with academics was a “low point in history of public health” | The BMJ
An analysis of thousands of emails has shown the extent to which Coca-Cola sought to obscure its relationship with scientists, minimise perception of its role, and use researchers to promote industry friendly messaging. The findings represented a “low point in the history of public health,” said one of the authors.
Academics the UK and Italy worked with US Right to Know, an investigative public health and consumer group, to obtain and analyse more than 18 000 pages of email correspondence between the Coca-Cola Company, West Virginia University, and the University of Colorado.1
Both universities were part of a “front group” funded by Coca-Cola called the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN), a global network of scientists1 said to have been created by Coke to downplay links between obesity and sugary drinks.2
Bill Moyers and Heather Cox Richardson on Her Daily Letters – BillMoyers.com
They were absolutely not trying to do anything other than create a narrative to be edited. They were looking for sound bites to edit into their own story. And that, the realization, I still remember I was driving my car and listening to it. And all of a sudden, I thought, they’re not even trying to participate in this system. You can sort of assume that politicians will skew things in their direction. That’s fine. That’s the way the system works. But you could tell they didn’t care. They didn’t care what the truth was. They didn’t care about getting to what had happened. All they cared about was getting sound bites so that they could cut them into a video that they could convince people of something that wasn’t true. And I found that the most chilling moment of this entire episode of the last four years. The realization that elected representatives weren’t even trying to spin things. They were simply trying to write their own reality.
Eva Amsen, also an ex-scientist, current epic science communicator and Outreach Manager for F1000Research.
Next up, Eva gave an account of how F1000 is pushing the boundaries of the current publishing models by allowing fast publication combined with post-publication peer review. She gave a nice historical overview of publishing, pointing out that since the first publication in 1665, and the first instance of peer review as we currently know it in the mid-20th Century, nothing much has changed about how we publish until recently. Journals used to act as the gatekeepers for science, when research was published in paper issues, and this is what made it restrictive – page limits. Now though, we don’t have those limits thanks to the online world, but still these limits are often still imposed.
Scholarly publishing is broken. Here’s how to fix it | Aeon Ideas
Researchers are still forced to write ‘papers’ for these journals, a communication format designed in the 17th century. Now, in a world where the power of web-based social networks is revolutionising almost every other industry, researchers need to take back control.
21st Century Physician: Triaging the Tsunami of Medical Information
CME run by experts taking tens of thousands of dollars from the sponsoring company isn't going to do it for you. The FDA stamp of approval doesn't mean what it used to. This is the job of the 21st century physician. Participate in the discussion. Timing is everything because of what happens in the hours and the days after the results drop. Doctors will be talking about this paper. The first volley will be on Twitter. Follow doctors, statisticians, patients, and others in cancer medicine, and see what they think of the study in real time. Days later, blogs and podcasts will discuss the topic. My podcast Plenary Session attempts to take a deep dive on at least one oncology paper each week. Some of these posts will be more insightful, fresh, interesting, and thoughtful than the editorial that accompanies the original study. […]At first, it's okay to simply listen to others on social media, but over time, muster the courage to chime in. If you think a trial is good, give your 2 cents and say why. What's stopping you? If you get corrected, so much the better—it's how we learn.
21st Century Physician: Triaging the Tsunami of Medical Information
Participate in the discussion. Timing is everything because of what happens in the hours and the days after the results drop. Doctors will be talking about this paper. The first volley will be on Twitter. Follow doctors, statisticians, patients, and others in cancer medicine, and see what they think of the study in real time. Days later, blogs and podcasts will discuss the topic. My podcast Plenary Session attempts to take a deep dive on at least one oncology paper each week. Some of these posts will be more insightful, fresh, interesting, and thoughtful than the editorial that accompanies the original study.[…] At first, it's okay to simply listen to others on social media, but over time, muster the courage to chime in. If you think a trial is good, give your 2 cents and say why. What's stopping you? If you get corrected, so much the better—it's how we learn.
Biotech millionaire funds free drugs for ultra-rare diseases
Patients will connect to n-Lorem via academics working through the Undiagnosed Diseases Network and beyond. The foundation will identify eligible patients and Ionis will develop the ASOs, perform preclinical testing and submit Investigational New Drug (IND) applications along with investigators.
To formalize the ASO development process, Ionis will need buy-in from regulators. The usual safety studies will necessarily apply, and Arthur Krieg, a cofounder of the Oligonucleotide Therapeutics Society, says the largest cost in developing therapies is toxicology studies. “This is where it will be tough for FDA and academic medical centers: how far back can we safely cut? You don’t want to endanger patients.”
Given the frequently dire circumstances of ultra-rare disease patients, n-Lorem is counting on flexibility from the FDA when it comes to preclinical requirements, which would save both time and cost. But it is unclear what that flexibility would entail. Crooke’s early interactions with the FDA gave him a “general sense” that toxicology testing requirements would be manageable but expects it will be some time before he receives definitive answers from the agency.
The Truth About “Dramatic Action” | China Media Project
The scientific results could not be clearer, and the authorities likely had a decent grasp of the real situation. But nevertheless they could not speak the truth, and they spared no effort in keeping the outbreak under wraps. Front-line doctors who spoke up about the outbreak were taken in for questioning. Eight Wuhan citizens who dared to post about the outbreak online were summoned by the police and singled out in public announcements through official media in order to terrify the public and force people to remain quiet.
The Truth About “Dramatic Action” | China Media Project
China is a society closely monitored by the government, and the shadow of Big Brother is everywhere. Social media in particular are subject to very close surveillance. So when the authorities detected chatter about the re-emergence of SARS, or of a similar unknown outbreak, they took two major steps initially. First, they tried to ensure that this new outbreak remained a secret; second, they put the stability preservation system into effect (启动稳控机制). On December 30, the Wuhan Health Commission (武汉市卫建委) issued an order to hospitals, clinics and other healthcare units strictly prohibiting the release of any information about treatment of this new disease. As late as December 31, the government in Wuhan was still saying publicly that there were no cases of human-to-human transmission, and that no medical personnel had become infected.
The role of social media in cardiology - ScienceDirect
Social media may offer a way to distinguish and disseminate medical information much more rapidly. A few examples show the speed with which digital media can influence patient care.
