US science is being wrecked, and its leadership is fighting the last war https://arstechni.ca/KRF5#NationalAcademies #sciencebudget#Sciencepolicy #researchcuts#Science

@UlrikeHahn
We as researchers are just super naive. If you ask me, those things go back to Big #Tabacco vs #Science
Ironically, they demanded what we in #OpenScience demand nowadays, but with a very different aim... :(

I touch upon that in a recent #preprint on open data: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/hk786_v1

"Long before today’s #Open #Science movements, the Executive Committee of the Sound Science Coalition (1994; cited in Ong & Glantz, 2001) published guidelines that align with what Open Science practices advocate today. For example:
(1) The study design should inform about all hypotheses,
(2) after the study was conducted, the data should be analyzed as described in the study design, and
(3) if the data does not support the hypotheses, no further analyses are necessary.
Shockingly, in #1994 these recommendations were motivated by the fact that parts of the #tobacco industry aimed to #discredit research and researchers on a large scale, with the goal that it could not be legally established that smoking increases the risk of lung #cancer (Drope, 2001; Muggli et al., 2001; Ong & Glantz, 2001). Along this line, one may accuse researchers as having been naive to the vested interests aligning with scientific rigour by non-researchers."

It's easy to see what a terrible mess we are in.

Some have called it the 'polycrisis', a confluence of breakdowns in the environment, the climate, and in our social and political structures. The future certainly looks grim.

But there is a way out. It won't be easy, and it may not happen at all, but it is possible...
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Earth will only remain able to provide even a basic standard of living for everyone in the future if economic systems and technologies are dramatically transformed and critical resources are more fairly used, managed and shared, according to an international research team.

Their report, published in the journal Planetary Health, found the planet's ability to provide and protect is being stretched past its limits, although it remains possible for humans to escape poverty and harm caused by these changes if urgent action is taken.

It found the only way to provide for everyone and ensure societies, businesses and economies thrive without destabilizing the planet is to reduce inequalities in how critical Earth system resources, such as freshwater and nutrients, are accessed and used, and how responsibilities, such as reducing carbon emissions, are shared, alongside economic and technological transformation.

By 2050, unless urgent transformations are made, the researchers argue that Earth's climate will deteriorate to the point where there will be no "safe and just space" left.

The researchers say Earth systems face the risk of crossing dangerous tipping points, which would cause further significant harm to people around the world unless energy, food, and urban systems are urgently transformed.
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They don't call their plan #degrowth but it looks very similar to me.

The point is, we can't go on the way we are. We *must* have system change, or we will lose everything.

FULL ARTICLE -- https://phys.org/news/2024-09-outlines-path-prosperity-planet-people.html

#Economics#Science#Environment#Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis

Over 700 and $1.7 billion in previously undisclosed grant terminations published by NIH – Grant Watch
https://grant-watch.us/posts/700-new-terminations/

#NIH#Funding#Science#Research

Beatrix Potter is best remembered for her charming tales of Peter Rabbit, but did you know she also studied #science?

Potter collected & examined beetles, butterflies, plants, bird eggs, shells, rocks, fossils & especially fungi. She conducted experiments & wrote a scientific paper with her own illustrations, presented at the Linnean Society of London. However, as a woman in the Victorian era, she couldn’t even attend the meeting. #history #art #books

Here's one way of expressing Illich and Latour's challenges to modernism, as interpreted by Cayley;

The Science(TM) is modernism's totalitarian claim of unchallengeable correctness. But the sciences are not so much bodies of certain knowledge, as ways of finding and mapping the limits to what we know, and what can be known. Undermining and eroding any and all systems of totalitarian certainty, in favour of contingent if/then claims.

#science#PhilosophyOfScience

"[#Science] is not universal, and it is not the voice of a displaced God called Nature. The sciences are therefore obliged to argue their case rather than to claim that it is beneath their dignity as sciences to enter into vulgar contests of opinion. They must stake their claim in the political arena and reveal the grounds on which their claim rests. These grounds, according to Latour, are persuasive and compelling but they are not beyond argument."

#DavidCayley, 2021

https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2021/4/1/gaia-and-the-path-of-the-earth

"Things that have no voice still speak. The ravaged wetland that once absorbed spring runoff speaks, often without anyone hearing, as a downstream flood. Microbial antibiotic resistance transforms agriculture and health care. But these matters have no political representation, so long as the sciences believe that their standing, authority and integrity rest on their having nothing to do with politics."

#DavidCayley, 2021

https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2021/4/1/gaia-and-the-path-of-the-earth

#science #politics

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#Research#Researchers#AcademicChatter#Academic#AcademicLife#Science#GlobalResearch#ResearchCulture