Linklist: October 6, 2024 – by Mukunth

most recommended: 1, 7, 10, 11, 13

links (links with excerpts below):

Through a glass darkly: race, thermal sensation and the nervous body in late colonial India (2022)
Life of Riley
Reflections on the responses to the sexual violence at RG Kar Hospital
Noah Lyles’ collapse with Covid: How not to manage health at the Olympics
When algorithms till the land: Speculative futures of AI in Indian agriculture (2023)
Alternative Geometries
The Ecological Poetry of Lichen
Freedom on a Damaged Planet
Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Blackmail, and the First Motion Pictures
What a visit to Nairobi taught me about Indira Gandhi’s environmentalism
Pavel Durov and Elon Musk are not free speech champions
China shows science is not dependent on liberal democracy
A scientific fraud. An investigation. A lab in recovery.

links with excerpts:

“How was knowledge about climate produced in and through the body? To begin to answer this question, this article turns to conversations in late nineteenth-century India about how climate specifically affected different kinds of bodies, and why these effects were so varied. I focus in particular on how late colonial meteorologists, scientists and physicians theorized about the body’s capacity to register or perceive its environment, as well as how ideas about race and racial difference were mapped onto these variably sensitive bodies. In closely attending to these colonial-era conversations about the sensory capacities of differently racialized bodies, I pay particular attention to the problem of heat – which, as I demonstrate, became at least partially reorganized as a problem of light. Given India’s geographical emplacement within a region of the world described as ‘tropical’, the problems posed by heat or light to colonial rule were far from minor. And as such, these climatic phenomena and their effects on the body were important to colonial physicians, scientists, meteorologists and even engineers, amongst others.

Certainly, the problems that arose in relation to registering heat were not limited to India, or to the colonies more broadly. Yet the area of the colonial world placed under the sign of tropicality represented a specific configuration of human–environment relations, one in which various kinds of bodies were understood to be differentially affected by heat, producing both biological variation and pathology. These bodily effects, I want to argue, emerged as a critical site for empirically knowing and theorizing both race and climate in late colonial India. This article focuses specifically on how the perceived sensory capacities of differently racialized bodies were deployed within late nineteenth-century debates about the effects of climate on human bodies.”

“LIMS was founded in 2011 and modelled a little on the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where Einstein spent his dotage. Academics can come here—including, recently, several on a joint scholarship for Ukrainians and Russians—and study in what is, for academia, luxury. The couple of dozen given fellowships don’t have to publish any work or teach. Their life isn’t dominated by grant applications and research metrics. They have a big Smeg fridge with beer and a sofa.

LIMS wanted Riley on its board because… Well, if you were a mathematician and you found out Talulah Riley was into maths, wouldn’t you put her on your board? Part of her role, as she sees it, is “bringing LIMS to a wider audience… So I’ve brought actors and directors to the Friday night symposiums. And it’s really fun, because you get a mix of people who wouldn’t usually interact with one another. And everyone has a good time.”

It can feel, initially, quite incongruous. At a talk two months earlier, Riley wasn’t there, but one of her friends was. In the drinks afterwards, the actress Natascha McElhone could be spotted. She strode amid the mathematicians like a dazzling, ethereal giraffe.

Our interview hasn’t been especially easy. It takes a while for Riley to warm up. She seems to like talking about the bees and Keith the cockerel, but less about other things. For the first 20 minutes of our allotted hour, she looks anywhere but at me. I get the sense that she wants to help the mathematicians by doing the interview but equally, understandably, doesn’t especially want to be that forthcoming about herself. When it ends, I apologise for the social awkwardness.”

“In contrast to these statements and demands, the Indian Medical Association has (once again) misused their prominence to make this all about doctors. Here’s, for example, an all-over-the-place statement by the IMA President, which manages to include the line “Doctors are a class apart in sacrifice”. It must also be noted that the IMA is insisting on bringing new legislation that they imagine will help curb violence against healthcare services personnel, even as so much of relevant existing legislation (like the ones cited in the statements of WGH, JSA, and MFC above) remains unimplemented or poorly implemented. Finally, not one of the statements, letters and tweets coming from the IMA has bothered to touch upon the structural and institutional factors which pave the path to sexual harassment and violence, especially those within the medical profession.”

“The idea of not competing in the 200 was never something Lyles seriously considered. After getting a second-place finish in his semifinal heat on Wednesday, he said he “still wanted to run,” and that doctors gave him permission to try.

I am not surprised that this young track star wanted to compete. But I can’t believe that his doctors, the International Olympic Committee, or any national Olympic organization would invoke the rationale that athletes get to decide whether to compete.”

(speculative fiction)

“As AI advisory platforms took over, the earlier plant doctors and Krishi Vikas Kendra extension workers who earlier frequented his village came less and less. No recourse to actual agricultural knowledge expansion, he became dependent on the minute to minute advisories provided by the numerous AI apps on his phone. The applications that provided farm advisories had also rolled out credit and financial incentives to adhere to the farming schedule. These platforms collected all kinds of data about his purchases, his farming activities, and other details. Pravesh now had to buy the inputs that were promoted and sold on credit (at high interest rates) by the AI apps on his phone, follow the ‘advice’ of the chatbot to qualify for crop insurance (which he must pay for), sell their crops to the company (at a non-negotiable price), and receive payments on a digital money app (for which there is a fee). Any missteps could affect his credit worthiness and access to finance and markets. At times he couldn’t stick to the schedule, he became worried that failure to adhere to the steps would impact his crops and ability to get credit.

The pressure on farmers like Pravesh to adopt precision agriculture and data-driven practices had created new dependencies. Smallholder farmers, already struggling with limited access to resources, found themselves at a disadvantage. As they accumulated debts to finance their technological investments, they became increasingly vulnerable to fluctuations in crop prices and external factors like climate change. Their rich wealthy neighbours and the dominant castes in the village often pressured them to sell their land.”

(part fiction)

“In the same month that I meet Valentina Tereshkova, my grandmother moves into an old people’s home. When I visit her there, I find her sitting at a table and cutting up used greeting cards to make new ones. I watch as she maneuvers the scissors, causing little pieces of colored card to flutter down before she assembles them into a collage. My grandmother chats to me as she does this but she never tells me anything about her past, and about what — or whom — she left behind in Vienna. The collage is such a perfectly constructed flat surface it has no tell-tale gaps.

After I show Valentina Tereshkova around the Observatory, I go home and boil an egg for my supper. I crack open the egg and eat it, and cup the pieces of broken shell in the palm of my hand. A shell that once protected its contents from the rest of the universe; a miniature spacecraft.

The name of Mileva Marić’s lost girl was Lieserl and she was born in 1902, somewhere in Serbia. It’s not known when she died. As space-time expands and carries us all away from each other into our own separate futures, let us remember.”

“When such different beings join themselves so closely, our first instinct seems to be to classify their relationship as either love or power. Over the last century, the relationship between mycobiont and photobiont have been lord and serf, enamored lovers, tentative business partners, and a shotgun marriage. It’s as if their proximity implies that the logical next move is intimacy or violence. (Acting classes refer to the distance between characters standing within arm’s reach from one another as the “kiss or kill” range.) Or, as singer Janelle Monae puts it in their song “Screwed”: “Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power./Power is just sex, so ask yourself: who’s screwing you?”

This dynamic of hierarchy and exploitation reflects the first recognition of lichens as composite organisms more than a century ago. Lichens were categorized as plants until 1869, when botanist Simon Schwendener proposed that they were in fact a form of controlled parasitism between a fungus and algae. Lichens were not “individuals in the usual sense of the term,” but “colonies.” Schwendener painted the association between fungus and algae in highly specific social imagery—the “master” fungus enslaved algal cells, compelling them to produce nutrients while being kept in perpetual captivity.”

“Should my freedom to travel by plane be removed, or at least rationed, to limit carbon emissions? As a matter of current technological necessity, flying causes world-destroying emissions. One can minimise these – air travel ‘only’ causes 2.5 per cent of all emissions – but that 2.5 per cent still counts given how close we are to exhausting the carbon ‘budget’. So if you say that such restrictions are not reasonable in principle, you’re once more putting a very high price on the freedom for the estimated 4 per cent of the world’s population who take international flights. This figure conceals inequalities. For example, while the average person in the US is said to emit a total of seven metric tons of CO2 annually, the owners of private jets have emitted on average 3,300 metric tons from those jets alone. Further, the profitable core of the airline industry is business travellers – members of a growing transnational capitalist class involved in finance, tech and global governance. Still, most flights are for leisure, or to see family.

How many might lose all freedom for this to continue? A pandemic is a relatively discrete event, in which deaths are measurable. Is it possible to safely measure how many will die of drought, flooding, storms, overheating, wildfires and the decimation of the food chain in the coming years? Probably not with any precision, but we can’t make big political decisions without at least some sort of idea. According to a recent study, extreme weather currently accounts for 9.4 per cent of global deaths each year, which is about 5 million people. Not all of this is driven by climate change. But it’s a reasonable inference that as extreme weather becomes more recurrent, it will account for a lot more death worldwide.

So let’s have some bids: how many more excess deaths triggered by this single variety of ecological disaster is worth the uninhibited right to fly? Five million? Ten million? Remember, it’s good and edifying to be well-travelled, there are places to see, families to visit, cultures to experience. I hear twenty million: can I get fifty million? How much of other people’s freedom and flourishing, and our own in future, shall we, the 4 per cent, burn?”

“As early as the 1830s, inventors such as Noble and Donisthorpe were patenting small improvements to existing machines. Donisthorpe’s work caught the attention of Lister; the two men began working together. In 1845, Lister patented a design that was essentially a modification of Donisthorpe’s existing work. In 1846, Lister and Holden worked together to solve the defects in the design and came up with the square motion comb. Additionally, Noble and Donisthorpe collaborated on improvements to the Noble comb. On top of that, Donisthorpe invented another process that became known as the nip comb, which Lister bought and patented under his own name. Whose name went on what patent was often a financial or political arrangement as much as an indication of the actual inventor. It remains very difficult to know exactly who did what on all of these mechanisms. However, Wordsworth Donisthorpe obviously felt that his father had done enough on Lister’s machines to warrant asking for £10,000 to further his motion picture efforts.

Donisthorpe did not press his point unduly at first. He reassured Lister: “I know that I have no claim upon you of any kind.”12 A strange gambit, though reminiscent of Donisthorpe’s chess strategy in the epigraph above: “(He) frequently starts with a disadvantage in the Opening.” Lister and Donisthorpe corresponded about who had contributed what to the patented mechanisms, and the discussion quickly escalated into an argument waged in newspapers. Among a stream of vicious pedantry were some choice insults:

“Foiled in your own vile purpose” (Donisthorpe to Lister)13 “You were doing your best to backbite me” (Lister to Donisthorpe)14 “(Lister) is regarded as a sort of comic old man of the mountain, ready to stab anybody in the back” (Donisthorpe)15″

At one point, the editor of the Bradford Telegraph had enough: “This correspondence must now cease”, he wrote, but instead, it spilled onto the pages of more papers, creating an ill-humoured and, in places, accidental deconstruction of the history of the textile industry. Lister, for example, claimed that in 1848, the square comb was “invented and patented by me, and laughed at by Mr. Donisthorpe”.16 Wordsworth objected and insisted that the square motion had been invented by his father in 1844, and that he had also improved the Noble patent and invented the nip comb. Lister was appalled by this. “I can rend in pieces the robe of friendship, and show that it covered little more than a skeleton”, he wrote.17 Suggesting that Donisthorpe’s work on the nip comb was merely an improvement on a French patent by Josué Heilman, Lister makes reference to Newton’s phrase about standing on the shoulders of giants: “So Donisthorpe, the dwarf, saw further than Heilman the giant. Not much credit in that, is there?”18 He goes on to claim that Donisthorpe’s work on the Lister patent was simply a modification of an existing patent by Edward Cartwright. The public accusations continued until, in the midst of an apparent stalemate, Wordsworth Donisthorpe announced that the correspondence was at a close, although he added in a private letter: “I am a ‘great document and letter keeper’. I shall make use of my collection.””

“Gandhi’s speech is considered so important that scholars such as Pakistani economist Tariq Banuri call it one of the four pivotal moments in the global environmental discourse (the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1968, and the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth in 1972 are the other three).

She was one of the strongest supporters of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), which eventually led to the creation of the IPCC. She argued for the UN to have an office in the global south. The UNEP headquarters in Nairobi is the only one in the Global South, but it could have been in New Delhi. Former environment minister and Congress leader Jairam Ramesh recounted the incident in The Hindu in 2022. He recalled that the choice for a UNEP headquarters was between New Delhi and Nairobi; particularly since the momentum Gandhi’s speech generated. However, India did not press its case and withdrew in November 1972 citing fraternal links with Kenya.

What were Gandhi’s environmental policies in India? Mudaliar and Kashwan explore this question in detail in their insightful paper. Their main argument contrasts her rhetoric on the global stage with her domestic policies. Yes, Gandhi was “a staunch environmentalist and an avid naturalist” but her actions also raise several red flags.”

“Internet politics have been shaped by a cyberlibertarian framing best exemplified by the writings of Electronic Frontier Foundation cofounder John Perry Barlow, whose Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace became a key statement of principles for digital activists. His manifesto targeted its ire at governments, telling them, “You have no sovereignty where we gather.” He made no mention of the harmful influence corporations could have on online spaces, which was a reflection of Barlow’s personal politics. He was not only a speechwriter for Dick Cheney in the 1970s, but the Declaration itself was published at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 1996.

This cyberlibertarian framing of digital politics and its focus on speech over political economy has proved beneficial for tech companies for many years. As US tech firms went global, digital activists frequently opposed government efforts to regulate or restrict tech platforms as threats to their citizens’ digital rights and freedom of expression, largely ignoring the economic impacts of US economic imperialism in those countries. In the process, US companies were able to dominate international markets and few countries were able to establish the necessary economic protections to develop serious competitors to the American giants.”

“Many have argued that science and democracy are natural partners (perhaps even co-dependent), but China’s success puts that into question. Why has China succeeded without the accompanying liberalization that so many expected? I argue that China lacked the state functions, provided in the West, that would create the conditions for science and technology to flourish. Since 1980, China has since put these policy mechanisms in place, to spectacular effect.

Since reopening to the West, and with carefully crafted imitation, China made four strategic decisions to propel them forward in science and technology: investment in research and development, changes to intellectual property laws, growth of educational investments (including student mobility), and active, targeted procurement of industrial and military products. Let’s take these apart.”

“Framed in this way, it can seem implausible for scientists to ever fake data. But the scientific world is not powered by curiosity alone: It also runs on a credit system, Merton argued. The scientists who create new knowledge are rewarded with recognition. Jobs, funding, and sometimes awards and fame, follow. Under the credit system, misconduct starts to make more sense.

And when misconduct does occur, it creates a fallout zone in the lab. Certainly it did for Bloodgood’s group. That’s because misconduct is not just a scientific betrayal; it’s a personal one as well, says C.K. Gunsalus, director of the National Center for Principled Leadership and Research Ethics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “It’s very hard for a lab to recover.”

This article is about that recovery, and what happens to the people left behind. So we won’t name the person who committed fraud in the Bloodgood Lab, or in any others. (The postdoc did not respond to requests to comment for this story.) Fraud happens every year, in labs all over the world. This story could be about anyone.”