Leettaschmidt

Postal boxes are typically filled with junk mail and dreaded bills, but late November through the end of the year actually gives you a reason to look forward to heading to the mailbox: holiday cards. From cute photos to beautiful greetings filled with family updates, checking the mailbox is perhaps one of my personal favorite holiday activities. However, what are you supposed to do with the cards once the season passes? READ MORE...

We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: it cannot make sense to extend copyright terms retroactively. The entire point of copyright law is to provide a limited monopoly on making copies of the work as an incentive to get the work produced. Assuming the work was produced, that says that the bargain that was struck was clearly enough of an incentive for the creator. They were told they’d receive that period of exclusivity and thus they created the work.

Going back and retroactively extending copyright then serves no purpose. Creators need no incentive for works already created. The only thing it does is steal from the public. That’s because the “deal” setup by governments creating copyright terms is between the public (who is temporarily stripped of their right to share knowledge freely) and the creator. But if we extend copyright term retroactively, the public then has their end of the bargain (“you will be free to share these works freely after such-and-such a date”) changed, with no recourse or compensation.

That makes no sense.

And yet, countries keep doing it.

Canada has quietly done it: extending copyrights on literary, dramatic or musical works and engravings from life of the author plus 50 years year to life of the author plus 70 years.

Quietly on November 17, 2022, and appearing online this morning, an Order in Council was issued on behalf of Her Excellency the Governor General, on the recommendation of the Minister of Industry and the Minister of Canadian Heritage to fix December 30, 2022 as the day Bill C-19, Division 16 of Part 5 comes into force. What does this all mean? With the passing of Bill C-19 this past June, the Copyright Act was amended to extend the term of copyright for literary, dramatic or musical works and engravings to life of the author plus a period of 70 years following the end of the calendar year in which that author dies. What was unclear at the time of royal assent was WHEN exactly this would come into force — if on or after January 1, 2023, one more year of works would enter the public domain. Unfortunately, we now know that this date has been fixed as December 30, 2022, meaning that no new works will enter the Canadian public domain for the next 20 years.

This should be a huge scandal. The public has been stripped of its rights to share information for twenty years. Based on what? Literally nothing, but demands from heirs of deceased authors to continue to receive subsidies from the very public they just stripped the rights from.

It is beyond ridiculous that any country in the world is extending copyright in this day and age, rather than decreasing it.

When the Biden administration announced in August 2022 that it was canceling up to $20,000 in student loan debt per borrower, it said the idea was to provide families with “breathing room as they prepare to start repaying loans after the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic.” But two federal courts recently blocked President Joe Biden’s student loan relief program, ruling it unconstitutional. Here, William Chittenden, a professor of finance at Texas State University, explains why and what’s next for student loan borrowers still hopeful that their loans can be forgiven.

1. Why was Biden’s student loan cancellation program blocked?

It was found to be unconstitutional. That determination was made on Nov. 10, 2022, by Judge Mark Pittman of the U.S. District Court of Northern Texas, who ruled that the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003 – or Heroes Act – “does not provide the executive branch clear congressional authorization” for a student loan forgiveness program. He said further that the program was “an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power and must be vacated.”

The judge’s ruling prevents any student loans from being forgiven “until a final verdict is made” in the case. Technically it could go to the Supreme Court, but it may also be settled at the appellate court level.

In a separate case, on Nov. 14, a three-judge panel with the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit temporarily blocked the program until the case is resolved in court. The 8th Circuit covers seven states, including Missouri, which is one of several Republican-led states seeking to block the program.

Both rulings effectively block Biden’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student loans per borrower.

2. Can it be unblocked?

Both court decisions could be reversed. The Biden administration has argued that the Heroes Act of 2003 allows the Secretary of Education to forgive student loans for those affected by the pandemic.

The Biden administration has already filed a notice to appeal the Nov. 10 ruling by Pittman.

On Nov, 18, the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to vacate the order by the Court of Appeals blocking student loan forgiveness. The Supreme Court has asked the plaintiffs in the case to provide their response by Nov. 23, 2022.

It is unclear how the full court might rule. However, in two previous instances, Justice Amy Coney Barrett has shot down attempts to block the student loan forgiveness plan.

3. What kind of relief can student loan borrowers get in the meantime?

Currently, student loan payments are paused but are scheduled to start again in January 2023. The Biden administration could extend the payment pause beyond December 2022. However, in August 2022 – when the most recent payment pause extension was announced – the White House stated that it was supposed to be the final extension.

Despite the setback for widespread student loan forgiveness, some borrowers may still qualify for one or more targeted student loan forgiveness programs. These groups include borrowers who attended a school that shut down. Student loans may also be forgiven for those who are totally and permanently disabled. Students who were defrauded by their school – such as by being misled about job placement rates for graduates or the true cost to attend the school – may also be eligible.

In November 2022, the Biden administration released new rules to make it easier for student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy. If a student loan borrower can prove their expenses are equal to or greater than their income, the student loan debt may qualify to be eliminated in bankruptcy.

William Chittenden does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Back-to-back hurricanes left an unnerving scene on the Florida coast in November 2022: Several houses, and even swimming pools, were left dangling over the ocean as waves eroded the property beneath them. Dozens of homes and condo buildings in the Daytona Beach area were deemed unsafe.

The destruction has raised a disturbing question: How much property along the rest of the Florida coast is at risk of collapse, and can it be saved?

As the director of iAdapt, the International Center for Adaptation Planning and Design at the University of Florida, I have been studying climate adaptation issues for the last two decades to help answer these questions.

Rising seas, aging buildings

Living by the sea has a strong appeal in Florida – beautiful beaches, ocean views, and often pleasant breezes. However, there are also risks, and they are exacerbated by climate change.

Sea level is forecast to rise on average 10 to 14 inches (25-35 cm) on the U.S. East Coast over the next 30 years, and 14 to 18 inches (35-45 cm) on the Gulf Coast, as the planet warms. Rising temperatures are also increasing the intensity of hurricanes.

With higher seas and larger storm surges, ocean waves more easily erode beaches, weaken sea walls, and submerge cement foundations in corrosive salt water. Together with subsidence, or sinking land, they make coastal living riskier.

The risk of erosion varies depending on the soil, geology and natural shoreline changes. But it is widespread in U.S. coastal areas, particularly Florida. Maps produced by engineers at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection show most of Florida’s coast faces critical erosion risk.

Aging or poorly maintained buildings and sea walls, and older or poor construction methods and materials, can dramatically aggravate the risk.

Designing better building codes

So, what can be done to minimize the damage?

The first step is to build sturdier buildings and fortify existing ones according to advanced building codes.

Building codes change over time as risks rise and construction techniques and materials improve. For example, design criteria in the Florida Building Code for South Florida changed from requiring some new buildings to be able to withstand 146 mph sustained winds in 2002 to 195 mph winds in 2021, meaning a powerful Category 5 hurricane.

The town of Punta Gorda, near where Hurricane Ian made landfall in October 2022, showed how homes constructed to the latest building codes have a much better chance of survival.

Many of Punta Gorda’s buildings had been rebuilt after Hurricane Charley in 2004, shortly after the state updated the Florida Building Code. When Ian hit, they survived with less damage than those in neighboring towns. The updated code required new construction to be able to withstand hurricane-force winds, including having shutters or impact-resistant window glass.

However, even homes built to the latest codes can be vulnerable, because the codes don’t adequately address the environment that buildings sit on. A modern building in a low-lying coastal area could face damage in the future as sea level rises and the shoreline erodes, even if it meets the current flood zone elevation standards.

This is the problem coastal residents faced during Hurricanes Nicole and Ian. Flooding and erosion, exacerbated by sea-level rise, caused the most damage – not wind.

The dozens of beach houses and condo buildings that became unstable or collapsed in Volusia County during Hurricane Nicole might have seemed fine originally. But as the climate changes, the coastal environment changes, too, and one hurricane could render the building vulnerable. Hurricane Ian damaged sea walls in Volusia County, and some couldn’t be repaired before Nicole struck.

How to minimize the risk

The damage in the Daytona area in 2022 and the deadly collapse a year earlier of a condo tower in Surfside should be a wake-up call for all coastal communities.

Data and tools can show where coastal areas are most vulnerable. What is lacking are policies and enforcement.

Florida recently began requiring that state-financed constructors conduct a sea-level impact study before starting construction of a coastal structure. I believe it’s time to apply this new rule to any new construction, regardless of the funding source.

A comprehensive sea-level impact study requirement should also allow for risk-based enforcement, including barring construction in high-risk areas.

Similarly, vulnerability audits – particularly for multistory buildings built before 2002 – can check the integrity of an existing structure and help spot new environmental risks from sea-level rise and beach erosion. Before 2002, the building standard was low and enforcement was lacking, so many of the materials and the structures used in those buildings aren’t up to the standards of today.

What property owners can do

There is a range of techniques homeowners can use to fortify homes from flood risks.

In some places, that may mean elevating the house or improving the lot grading so surface water runs away from the building. Installing a sump pump and remodeling with storm-resistant building materials can help.

FEMA suggests other measures to protect against coastal erosion, such as replenishing beach sand, strengthening sea walls and anchoring the home. Engineering can help communities, temporarily at least, through sea walls, ponds and increased drainage. But in the long term, communities will have to assess the vulnerability of coastal areas. Sometimes the answer is to relocate.

However, there’s a disturbing trend after hurricanes, and we’re seeing it with Ian: Many damaged areas see lots of money pouring in to rebuild in the same vulnerable locations. An important question communities should be asking is, if these are already in high-risk areas, why rebuild in the same place?

Zhong-Ren Peng receives funding from National Science Foundation, Florida Sea Grant, and Florida Department of Transportation.

We humans can’t stop playing with our food. Just think of all the different ways of serving potatoes – entire books have been written about potato recipes alone. The restaurant industry was born from our love of flavouring food in new and interesting ways.

My team’s analysis of the oldest charred food remains ever found show that jazzing up your dinner is a human habit dating back at least 70,000 years.

Imagine ancient people sharing a meal. You would be forgiven for picturing people tearing into raw ingredients or maybe roasting meat over a fire as that is the stereotype. But our new study showed both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had complex diets involving several steps of preparation, and took effort with seasoning and using plants with bitter and sharp flavours.

This degree of culinary complexity has never been documented before for Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers.

Before our study, the earliest known plant food remains in south-west Asia were from a hunter-gatherer site in Jordan roughly dating to 14,400 years ago, reported in 2018.

We examined food remains from two late Paleolithic sites, which cover a span of nearly 60,000 years, to look at the diets of early hunter gatherers. Our evidence is based on fragments of prepared plant foods (think burnt pieces of bread, patties and porridge lumps) found in two caves. To the naked eye, or under a low-power microscope, they look like carbonised crumbs or chunks, with fragments of fused seeds. But a powerful scanning electron microscope allowed us to see details of plant cells.

Prehistoric chefs

We found carbonised food fragments in Franchthi Cave (Aegean, Greece) dating to about 13,000-11,500 years ago. At Franchthi Cave we found one fragment from a finely-ground food which might be bread, batter or a type of porridge in addition to pulse seed-rich, coarse-ground foods.

In Shanidar Cave (Zagros, Iraqi Kurdistan), associated with early modern humans around 40,000 years ago and Neanderthals around 70,000 years ago, we also found ancient food fragments. This included wild mustard and terebinth (wild pistachio) mixed into foods. We discovered wild grass seeds mixed with pulses in the charred remains from the Neanderthal layers. Previous studies at Shanidar found traces of grass seeds in the tartar on Neanderthal teeth.

At both sites, we often found ground or pounded pulse seeds such as bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia), grass pea (Lathyrus spp) and wild pea (Pisum spp). The people who lived in these caves added the seeds to a mixture that was heated up with water during grinding, pounding or mashing of soaked seeds.

The majority of wild pulse mixes were characterised by bitter tasting mixtures. In modern cooking, these pulses are often soaked, heated and de-hulled (removal of the seed coat) to reduce their bitterness and toxins. The ancient remains we found suggest humans have been doing this for tens of thousands of years. But the fact seed coats weren’t completely removed hints that these people wanted to retain a little of the bitter flavour.

What previous studies showed

The presence of wild mustard, with its distinctive sharp taste, is a seasoning well documented in the Aceramic period (the beginning of village life in the south-west Asia, 8500BC) and later Neolithic sites in the region. Plants such as wild almonds (bitter), terebinth (tannin-rich and oily) and wild fruits (sharp, sometimes sour, sometimes tannin-rich) are pervasive in plant remains from south-west Asia and Europe during the later Paleolithic period (40,000-10,000 years ago). Their inclusion in dishes based on grasses, tubers, meat, fish, would have lent a special flavour to the finished meal. So these plants were eaten for tens of thousands of years across areas thousands of miles apart. These dishes may be the origins of human culinary practices.

Based on the evidence from plants found during this time span, there is no doubt both Neanderthals and early modern humans diets included a variety of plants. Previous studies found food residues trapped in tartar on the teeth of Neanderthals from Europe and south-west Asia which show they cooked and ate grasses and tubers such as wild barley, and medicinal plants. The remains of carbonised plants remains show they gathered pulses and pine nuts.

Plant residues found on grinding or pounding tools from the European later Palaeolithic period suggest early modern humans crushed and roasted wild grass seeds. Residues from an Upper Palaeolithic site in the Pontic steppe, in eastern Europe, shows ancient people pounded tubers before they ate them. Archaeological evidence from South Africa as early as 100,000 years ago indicates Homo sapiens used crushed wild grass seeds.

While both Neanderthals and early modern humans ate plants, this does not show up as consistently in the stable isotope evidence from skeletons, which tells us about the main sources of protein in diet over the lifetime of a person. Recent studies suggest Neanderthal populations in Europe were top-level carnivores. Studies show Homo sapiens seem to have had a greater diversity in their diet than Neanderthals, with a higher proportion of plants. But we are certain our evidence on the early culinary complexity is the start of many finds from early hunter-gatherer sites in the region.

Ceren Kabukcu acknowledges funding from the Leverhulme Trust (Early Career Fellowship, ECF–284). She is currently employed as a Research Associate funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung. The research at Shanidar Cave, with a team led by Graeme Barker, has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust (Research Grant RPG–2013–105), Rust Family Foundation, British Academy, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Society of Antiquaries, McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge and Natural Environment Research Council’s Oxford Radiocarbon Dating Facility (grant NF/2016/2/14) and the Templeton Trust.

In mid-July 2008, I arrived in hot and sticky Alexandria. I had travelled to Egypt to attend Wikimania. As the name suggests, Wikimania is an event for those who share an all-consuming passion for the wiki. But not just any wiki … the most important wiki of all: Wikipedia – the online encyclopedia.

This annual conference for Wikipedians (Wikipedia’s volunteer editors) is a chance to celebrate the project, discuss important issues, and geek out on wiki lore.

I was one of 650 attendees from 45 countries that year. But the conference (held in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, an attempt to revive the Great Library of Alexandria) had been mired in controversy. There were calls to boycott the event because of Egypt’s censorship and imprisonment of bloggers. In his opening speech, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales highlighted the case of Abdel Kareem Nabil, a former university student sentenced to four years in prison on charges of insulting Islam and Egypt’s then President Hosni Mubarak, and inciting sectarian strife.

Although some governments tried to impede free speech, Wales said, this was pointless in the age of the internet, where people could share ideas on platforms like Wikipedia.

“Kareem Amer has become a cause around the world,” he said, showing Nabil’s English Wikipedia page on the screen. “Not the best strategy for keeping his ideas out of the public eye.”

Two and a half years on, in late January 2011, Egyptians took to the streets to demand the end of authoritarian rule. Less than two weeks after protests erupted, Egypt’s autocrat president Mubarak resigned. Some were calling this “the Facebook revolution,” others a “Twitter revolution”.

Sadly it was to be short-lived. In 2013 Egyptian army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi took over in a coup. He still rules today and has imprisoned an estimated 60,000 political prisoners, including those advocating democracy and free speech.

But at the end of January 2011, as Mubarak still clung to power, the Israeli Wikipedian Dror Kamir wrote a startling message to a mailing list about Wikipedia’s role in the Egyptian protests.

Kamir pointed out that the first draft of the article about the Egyptian revolution on English Wikipedia had been published at 3:26pm local time, just hours after the first protests began. An Egyptian democracy activist and Wikipedian with the username The Egyptian Liberal had published this article, apparently to influence public opinion. “It almost seems as if the article preceded the actual events,” he wrote.

To Kamir, this demonstrated that Wikipedia “was losing its encyclopedic characteristics”. Wikipedians pride themselves on neutrality. Neutral point of view (or NPOV), is a core content policy. Editors are called to merely summarise reliable sources rather than offering their own original analysis. Policy determines that Wikipedians should follow public opinion rather than lead it.

In a later blog post, Kamir argued Wikipedia had clearly played a significant role in the events of January 2011, but “who is going to remember…?”

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Read more: COP27 shines light on civil liberties in Egypt, but it'll take work to achieve real freedom

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Remembering the history-makers

In the coming months and years, I tried to do just that: documenting how Wikipedians wrote the story of the Egyptian revolution and whether, in doing so, they influenced the revolution itself.

It has been over a decade since I started studying this single article on English Wikipedia about the 2011 revolution. At the time of writing, it runs to almost 13,000 words and more than 400 citations.

Catalytic events have always been influenced by their mediation. But few had tried to understand Wikipedia’s role in history-making. When they did, they tended to present Wikipedia as hallowed ground where consensus is reached among a myriad alternative views.

The most important thing I have learned over this time is the truly subversive role of Wikipedia. Though the Egyptian revolution sputtered out, what I have gleaned from this example has a bearing on other history-making events playing out on Wikipedia now – from the war in Ukraine to the independence movement of Taiwan.

Wales was right when he gave that prescient speech. Wikipedia tends to be ignored because it is supposedly “neutral”. One of the world’s most popular platforms, maintained by a nonprofit organisation, its mirage of neutrality is sustained by the idea that individuals may be biased but all crowds are wise.

Wikipedia supposedly reflects “common knowledge” and “collective memory”. But there are many different ways of seeing the world. There will always be an inevitable conflict between those tasked with its representation, especially when the risks and rewards are so great. How, then, did editors of the Egyptian article resolve these differences? What kind of history is the result?

A typical Wikipedia article is put together by Wikipedians – the volunteer editors who are committed to Wikipedia’s long-term maintenance. Anyone can be a Wikipedian, as long as you abide by the rules of the project (many have a long history with the site). Wikipedians tend to use pseudonyms rather than their real names – there has been no policy requiring them to identify themselves.

As well as Wikipedians, entries are generally open to anyone else to edit. Many Wikipedians volunteer to watch over articles, receiving an alert when changes have been made to assess them.

A key Wikipedia rule is that Wikipedia is not “a crystal ball”. The rule stipulates that Wikipedians should not write about events until their significance is generally known or before the event has concluded.

Soon after the revolution in 2011, I began analysing countless “talk page” discussions where Wikipedia editors discussed the reliability of sources, how to source free images and how to best summarise these events. (These discussions take place in a tab next to the article labelled “talk”.)

Over the next decade, I reviewed hundreds of edits, and interviewed leading editors. These included The Egyptian Liberal, a university student in his twenties, and Ocaasi, a US-based college graduate in his late twenties. Ocaasi, who suffered from anxiety and agoraphobia, told me he was editing Wikipedia obsessively at the time of the protests while sitting in his bathtub in a Philadelphia attic.

Rather than rational negotiation and broad consensus, I learned that Wikipedia articles about historic events are often the result of passionate struggle over representing what happened to whom and its consequences.

I learned about the importance of Wikipedians themselves in shaping the narrative into which individual facts were made to fit. Wikipedians shaped the representation of the event not by inserting falsities but rather by framing and selecting facts that supported certain narratives rather than others.

The Wikipedians moved quickly to create a new article on English Wikipedia when crowds first swarmed into Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011, defending it from possible attack from sceptics arguing it was too soon to be covering events. They bolstered the article’s authority by quickly adding citations to source the evidence for the unfolding protests.

This first move was successful in determining that the protests were important enough to warrant their own article early on.

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Read more: Mubarak: a man who built on his talent for self-promotion while stifling opposition

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Writing the revolution into being

After the first 24 hours in the life of the article, it had been edited 130 times. Forty two editors had joined The Egyptian Liberal including two longtime Wikipedians, Dragons flight, a physicist educated at UC Berkeley now living in Switzerland and Heroeswithmetaphors, who has made over 18,000 contributions to articles on multiple topics.

Editors settled into a routine – with American editors handing over to those in Egypt and elsewhere when they went to sleep. For Ocaasi, it was a galvanizing moment. “Everything before that on Wikipedia was just playing around and this was not,” he told me.

It was also when my innocence about Wikipedia ended. It wasn’t just a hobby or escape […] There were hundreds of thousands of people reading the article and I knew that. There was a profound sense of responsibility […] I thought the world mattered so much those days and I thought I could play a part – not in an activist sense but by documenting what was happening.

As the violent protests continued, experienced editors resisted attempts by newcomers to continuously change the article’s title from “protests” to “revolution”. A move of this significance requires consensus from editors on the talk page.

But within minutes of Mubarak’s resignation at 4pm on February 11, a large crowd of Wikipedia editors again tried to change key facts to reclassify the article to “revolution.” In the hour after Mubarak resigned, the number of readers accessing the page tripled from about 4,000 to 12,500. It was being edited every two minutes in the following hours, as three experienced Wikipedians struggled to hold back the flood of editors attempting to make significant changes before consensus had been reached about the title.

While this was happening, a discussion began on the talk page, with editors asked to weigh in on whether the title of the article should be changed. But an editor, Tariqabjotu, made the change just two hours after Mubarak’s resignation – long before the discussion had run its course.

At this time also, the article on the Tunisian protests, which had unseated long-time President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali the month before, was still merely named as an uprising. Six hours after Mubarek’s resignation, another editor, Knowledgekid87, moved from editing the Egyptian article to the Tunisian one, changing its name to “Tunisian revolution”. This reinforced the Egyptian title change.

On February 11 alone, 125,000 readers accessed the Egyptian article. The number of editors working on it more than tripled from 25 to 84. Many were new editors from the United States, UK, Canada, the Netherlands, Portugal and Singapore, overwhelming those who had been editing it consistently from the beginning.

Other editors in the crowd repeatedly changed the date of the events in the infobox (the small fact box on the right hand side of a Wikipedia article) from “25 January – ongoing” to “25 January – 11 February”. They did this to cement the idea that the protests were over and revolution had been achieved.

In my interviews with Ocaasi, he reflected on how editors surrendered to the momentousness of the occasion. Any effort to resist changes to the article’s title would have been swimming against a tide of editors, one of whom declared that Wikipedia shouldn’t “deny history.”

The crowd centred their activity on the infobox and the page name. These elements are the most important parts of a Wikipedia article because they present summarised facts that appear authoritative and stable. These facts have always been prioritised by Google and other search engines’ algorithms, which often place Wikipedia at the top of search results. But the infobox came to matter even more the year after the Egyptian revolution.

In 2012, Google announced a major new project that would build a massive database of facts built from “public” information sources such as Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook.

Google’s algorithms selectively extract facts from Wikipedia’s infoboxes, divorcing them from the context in which they originated. Sources and citations are often removed. The facts appear more stable than they are on Wikipedia, where they are flanked by breaking news warnings and “citation needed” tags. Wikipedians have no control over Google’s process.

Over a decade after the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Wikipedia is still the authority for facts about the event. If you ask Google, Bing or Yahoo what happened in Egypt in 2011, they will present facts extracted from the English Wikipedia article.

But Google and other platforms extract them automatically and without understanding or debate. The result is a representation of capitalist logic embedded in the machines that have been programmed not to serve public meaning-making but rather to feed revenue sources.

For the past few years, Google’s knowledge panel about the revolution has contained the words, “Deaths section below” after facts about numbers killed during the revolution. This is material lifted from Wikipedia but not linked to further information – so it becomes a meaningless phrase. It shows how Wikipedians have lost control over some of the information they carefully provide. Yet many more people will view this material now in a search engine rather than on Wikipedia.

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Read more: Egypt: hopes for democratic future die as al-Sisi marches country towards dictatorship – with parliament's blessing

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A struggle for power

Popular accounts like The Wisdom of Crowds and the End of Theory present both crowds and algorithms as sources of truth and neutrality. By such accounts, crowds supposedly smooth out one anothers’ biases or ignorance and Big Data enables accuracy because of our access to huge datasets.

But I discovered a passion and feverish anticipation of revolution in Egypt from the very first entry on it, just hours after the protests began on January 25. Rather than rational consensus among dispassionate observers, Wikipedia mirrored the passion, emotion and violence of Tahrir Square.

Did Wikipedia shape the political events at the time, as suggested by Kamir? Ultimately, the story of this Wikipedia entry reiterates how young people (the leading Wikipedia editors) were able to win the information war in Egypt but not transform the government. Most of the article’s editors were people in favour of the revolution.

Nevertheless, Wikipedia articles about political events are important battlegrounds for interest groups vying for control over the historical record. Their impact lives on, courtesy of search engines’ algorithms and the global reach of the site itself. And such struggles for power are no doubt happening, elsewhere, in other Wikipedia articles today.

Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age is published by MIT Press.

Heather Ford receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

A story on gender inequity in scientific research industries. A deep dive into the daily rhythms of the immune system. A look at vaccine effectiveness for COVID-19 variants. These are a few examples of news stories based on preprints — research studies that haven’t been formally vetted by the scientific community.

Journalists have historically been discouraged from reporting on preprints because of fears that the findings could be exaggerated, inaccurate or flat-out wrong. But our new research suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic may have changed things by pushing preprint-based journalism into the mainstream.

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Read more: Preprints: how draft academic papers have become essential in the fight against COVID

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While this new normal offers important benefits for journalists and their audiences, it also comes with risks and challenges that deserve our attention.

Peer review and the pandemic

Traditionally, studies must be read and critiqued by at least two independent experts before they can be published in a scientific journal — a process known as “peer review.”

This isn’t the case with preprints, which are posted online almost immediately, without formal review. This immediacy has made preprints a valuable resource for scientists tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.

The lack of formal review makes preprints a faster way to communicate science, albeit a potentially riskier approach. While peer review isn’t perfect, it can help scientists identify errors in data or more clearly communicate their findings.

Studies suggest that most preprints stand up well to the scrutiny of peer review. Still, in some cases, findings can change in important ways between the time a study is posted as a preprint and the time it is published in a peer-reviewed journal, which can be on average more than 100 days.

A ‘paradigm shift’ in science journalism

As researchers of journalism and science communication, we’ve been keeping a close eye on media coverage of preprints since the onset of the pandemic. In one study, we found that a wide range of media outlets reported on COVID-19 preprints, including major outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian.

Unfortunately, many of these outlets failed to mention that these studies were preprints, leaving audiences unaware that the science they were reading hadn’t been peer reviewed.

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Read more: In the rush for coronavirus information, unreviewed scientific papers are being publicized

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We dug deeper into how and why journalists use preprints. Through in-depth interviews, we asked health and science journalists about the strategies they used to find, verify and communicate about preprints and whether they planned to report on them after COVID-19.

Our peer-reviewed, published study found that preprints have become an important information source for many journalists, and one that some plan to keep using post-pandemic. Journalists reported actively seeking out these unreviewed studies by visiting online servers (websites where scientists post preprints) or by monitoring social media.

Although a few journalists were unsure if they would continue using preprints, others said these studies had created “a complete paradigm shift” in science journalism.

A careful equation

Journalists told us that they valued preprints because they were more timely than peer reviewed studies, which are often published months after scientists conduct the research. As one freelancer we interviewed put it: “When people are dying, you gotta get things going a little bit.”

Journalists also appreciated that preprints are free to access and use, while many peer-reviewed journal articles are not.

Journalists balanced these benefits against the potential risks for their audiences. Many expressed a high level of skepticism about unreviewed studies, voicing concerns about the potential to spread misinformation.

Some journalists provided examples of issues that had become “extremely muddied” by preprints, such as whether to keep schools open during the pandemic.

Many journalists said they felt it was important to label preprints as “preprints” in their stories or mention that the research had not been peer reviewed. At the same time, they admitted that their audience probably wouldn’t understand what the words “preprint” or “peer review” mean.

In addition, verifying preprints appeared to be a real challenge for journalists, even for those with advanced science education. Many told us that they leaned heavily on interviews with experts to vet findings, with some journalists organizing what they described as their “own peer review.”

Other journalists simply relied on their intuition or “gut” instinct, especially when deadlines loomed or when experts were unavailable.

Supporting journalists to communicate science

Recently, media organizations have started publishing resources and tip sheets for reporting on preprints. While these resources are an important first step, our findings suggest that more needs to be done, especially if preprint-based journalism is indeed here to stay.

Whether it’s through providing specialized training, updating journalism school curricula or revising existing professional guidelines, we need to support journalists in verifying and communicating about preprints effectively and ethically. The quality of our news depends on it.

Alice Fleerackers received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to conduct this research.

Lauren A Maggio does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Nutritionists will tell you to eat a rainbow of fruit and vegetables. This isn’t just because it looks nice on the plate. Each colour signifies different nutrients our body needs.

The nutrients found in plant foods are broadly referred to as phytonutrients. There are at least 5,000 known phytonutrients, and probably many more.

So what does each colour do for our body and our overall health?

Red

Red fruits and vegetables are coloured by a type of phytonutrient called “carotenoids” (including ones named lycopene, flavones and quercetin – but the names aren’t as important as what they do). These carotenoids are found in tomatoes, apples, cherries, watermelon, red grapes, strawberries and capsicum.

These carotenoids are known as antioxidants. You will have heard this name before, but you might not remember what it means. It has something to do with “free radicals”, which you’ve also probably heard of before.

Free radicals are formed naturally in our body as a byproduct of all our usual bodily processes such as breathing and moving, but they also come from UV light exposure, smoking, air-pollutants and industrial chemicals.

Free radicals are unstable molecules that can damage proteins, cell membranes and DNA in our body. This natural but damaging process is known as oxidation or oxidative stress. This contributes to ageing, inflammation and diseases including cancer and heart disease.

Importantly, antioxidants “mop up” the free radicals that form in our body. They stabilise the free radicals so they no longer cause damage.

Increasing antioxidants in your diet lowers oxidative stress and reduces the risk of many diseases including arthritis, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke and cancer.

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Read more: What are antioxidants? And are they truly good for us?

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Orange

Orange fruits and vegetables also contain carotenoids, but slightly different ones to red veggies (including alpha and beta-carotene, curcuminoids, and others). These are found in carrots, pumpkins, apricots, mandarins, oranges and turmeric.

Alpha and beta-carotene are converted to vitamin A in our bodies, which is important for healthy eyes and good eyesight. Vitamin A is also an antioxidant that can target the parts of your body made of lipids (or fats) such as cell membranes.

The vitamin A targets the free radicals building up around our cell membranes and other areas made of lipids, reducing the risk of cancers and heart disease.

Yellow

Yellow fruit and vegetables also contain carotenoids, but they also contain other phytonutrients including lutein, zeaxanthin, meso-zeaxanthin, viola-xanthin and others. These are found in apples, pears, bananas, lemons and pineapple.

Lutein, meso-zeaxanthin and zeaxanthin have been shown to be particularly important for eye health and can reduce the risk of age-related macular degeneration, which leads to blurring of your central vision.

These phytonutrients can also absorb UV light in your eyes, acting like a sunscreen for the eyes and protecting them from sun damage.

Green

Green fruits and vegetables contain many phytonutrients including chlorophyll (which you probably remember from high school biology), catechins, epigallocatechin gallate, phytosterols, nitrates and also an important nutrient known as folate (or vitamin B9). These are found in avocados, Brussels sprouts, apples, pears, green tea and leafy vegetables.

These also act as antioxidants and therefore have the benefits as described above for red veggies. But this group also provides important benefits in keeping your blood vessels healthy, by promoting something called “vasodilation”.

These phytonutrients help make our blood vessels more elastic and flexible allowing them to widen or dilate. This improves blood circulation and reduces blood pressure, reducing our risk of heart and other vessel complications and disease.

Folate is recommended before pregnancy because it helps reduce the risk of neural tube defects (such as spina bifida) in babies. Folate helps the development of the foetal nervous system during the first few weeks of pregnancy, as it has been shown to promote healthy cell division and DNA synthesis.

Blue and purple

Blue and purple produce contain other types of phytonutrients including anthocyanins, resveratrol, tannins and others. They are found in blackberries, blueberries, figs, prunes and purple grapes.

Anthocyanins also have antioxidant properties and so provide benefits in reducing the risk of cancer, heart disease and stroke, as explained under red fruit and veg.

More recent evidence has indicated they may also provide improvements in memory. It is thought this occurs by improving signalling between brain cells and making it easier for the brain to change and adapt to new information (known as brain plasticity).

Brown and white

Brown and white fruits and vegetables are coloured by a group of phytonutrients known as “flavones”, this includes apigenin, luteolin, isoetin and others. These are found in foods such as garlic, potatoes and bananas.

Another phytonutrient found in this colour of vegetables, particularly in garlic, is allicin. Allicin has been shown to have anti-bacterial and anti-viral properties.

Most of this research is still at the lab-bench and not many clinical trials have been done in humans, but lab-based studies have found it reduces microorganisms when grown under laboratory conditions.

Allicin has also been found in systematic reviews to normalise high blood pressure by promoting dilation of the blood vessels.

How can I get more veggies in my diet?

Coloured fruit and vegetables, and also herbs, spices, legumes and nuts provide us with a plethora of phytonutrients. Promoting a rainbow of fruit and vegetables is a simple strategy to maximise health benefits across all age groups.

However most of us don’t get the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables each day. Here are some tips to improve your intake:

1. when doing your fruit and vegetable shopping, include a rainbow of colours in your shopping basket (frozen varieties are absolutely fine)

2. try some new fruit and vegetables you haven’t had before. The internet has tips on many different ways to cook veggies

3. buy different colours of the fruit and vegetables you normally eat like apples, grapes, onions and lettuces

4. eat the skins, as the phytonutrients may be present in the skin in higher amounts

5. don’t forget herbs and spices also contain phytonutrients, add them to your cooking as well (they also make vegetables more appealing!)

Evangeline Mantzioris is affiliated with Alliance for Research in Nutrition, Exercise and Activity (ARENA) at the University of South Australia. Evangeline Mantzioris has received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, and has been appointed to the National Health and Medical Research Council Dietary Guideline Expert Committee.

Fresh from providing war-torn Ukraine with a series of murals, Banksy recently used his Instagram account to channel frustrations with a more domestic concern.

The elusive artist has accused fashion retailer Guess of exploiting his artwork without consent. He posted a picture of the brand’s flagship store, which showcased clothes incorporating some of his iconic pieces (including the Flower Thrower and Flying Balloon Girl), and invited shoplifters to attack it, saying, “They’ve helped themselves to my artwork without asking, how can it be wrong for you to do the same to their clothes?”

The fashion company has justified the new collection by emphasising that it was “inspired by Banksy’s graffiti” and that they had legally acquired rights over Banksy’s art.

It is very unlikely that Banksy, or his organisation Pest Control, has ever authorised an external company to manage the copyright over his art. This can be inferred from Banksy’s own website, which first claims that “neither Banksy or Pest Control licence the artist’s images to third parties” and then confirms that “Banksy doesn’t do merchandise”.

Some may argue that Banksy’s latest move is hypocritical, emphasising what the artist himself noted in the introductory page to his bestselling 2005 book, Wall and Piece: “Copyright is for losers.”

But a statement made almost 20 years earlier does not deprive the artist of the exclusive rights over his art. To allow otherwise would unduly restrict his freedom of expression.

As explained last year by the EU intellectual property (IP) office in the proceedings which led to the cancellation of one of Banksy’s trademarks, one cannot lose the right to a brand because of anti-copyright statements made in the past.

This was also highlighted by a decision of the same office a few weeks ago, which reversed a previous ruling invalidating Banksy’s trademark of the artwork Laugh Now But One Day We’ll Be In Charge. It was noted that anyone is free to express publicly their view and opinions, and that Banksy’s old statement, “Copyright is for losers”, does not mean that copyright should not be enforceable, as it was simply an ironic comment.

A strategic change from team Banksy

Artists can be anti-establishment and still take legal action to protect their intellectual property. And this is exactly what Banksy and Pest Control have started doing.

They have been planning a trademark filing strategy in several jurisdictions and even won a case of unauthorised merchandising in Italy in 2019, while leaving people free “to use Banksy’s images for non-commercial, personal amusement”.

Another issue is anonymity. Some commentators have claimed that Banksy would need to reveal his identity to be able to start a copyright suit, something the mysterious artist understandably wants to avoid.

But the idea that anonymous (or pseudonymous) artists cannot bring legal actions while keeping their real identity confidential is debatable. Many laws around the world, including in the US and UK, and the main international treaty on copyright (the Berne Convention), clearly protect anonymous works.

Also, several copyright offices allow the registration of anonymous works – the US copyright office being one of them. And in many countries it is possible to start legal actions while remaining anonymous or pseudonymous if certain tests are met – the aim being to protect the complainant’s privacy and personal data.

The EU IP Office stressed this point during the recent proceedings over Banksy’s trademark, saying: “As to Banksy’s need to stay anonymous, it must be stated that in proceedings a party may request to a certain extent to be treated in a confidential way in order to limit, to the extent that it is possible, the dissemination of his personal data, in case this is justified.”

Banksy’s anti-establishment ethos

Not only is copyright compatible with anti-establishment messages, it could also become the legal tool to maintain those messages. Copyright allows artists to object to and prevent what many of them do not accept: a commercial exploitation of their art which is antithetical to their message. Resorting to copyright laws may protect the reputation of artists who, like Banksy, don’t want to be associated with marketing and profit-oriented activities.

There have recently been several cases where street and graffiti artists brought copyright infringement claims precisely because they didn’t want to be linked to corporate and consumerist messages. This is the case of US artists Dash Snow, Ahol, Revok and Rime, among others.

But can Banksy be accused of selling-out because of his recent IP enforcement strategy?

As copyright regimes are neutral to the messages conveyed by the works, this accusation is weak. Banksy could earn much more money by regularly licensing his copyright and trademarks to commercial entities. He instead chooses to licence his art royalty-free to charity organisations. One of these is the London-based Loves Welcome, a creative social enterprise aiding refugee women.

Also, Banksy often donates proceeds from sales of his canvases to non-profit organisations. This happened in 2021 when the COVID-themed painting Game Changer, depicting a young boy playing with a superhero nurse doll, was sold for £16 million. Proceeds from the sale were used to support the Southampton Hospitals Charity among others.

Banksy’s relationship with intellectual property and copyright in particular has certainly been tumultuous. But denying him the ability to enforce rights over his art would be wrong. Even controversial figures like Banksy should take advantage of the tools the law offers to protect their artistic vision.

Enrico Bonadio does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

If you look back at the history of Atlantic hurricanes since the late 1800s, it might seem hurricane frequency is on the rise.

The year 2020 had the most tropical cyclones in the Atlantic, with 31, and 2021 had the third-highest, after 2005. The past decade saw five of the six most destructive Atlantic hurricanes in modern history.

Then a year like 2022 comes along, with no major hurricane landfalls until Fiona and Ian struck in late September. The Atlantic hurricane season, which ends Nov. 30, has had eight hurricanes and 14 named storms. It’s a reminder that small sample sizes can be misleading when assessing trends in hurricane behavior. There is so much natural variability in hurricane behavior year to year and even decade to decade that we need to look much further back in time for the real trends to come clear.

Fortunately, hurricanes leave behind telltale evidence that goes back millennia.

Two thousand years of this evidence indicates that the Atlantic has experienced even stormier periods in the past than we’ve seen in recent years. That’s not good news. It tells coastal oceanographers like me that we may be significantly underestimating the threat hurricanes pose to Caribbean islands and the North American coast in the future.

The natural records hurricanes leave behind

When a hurricane nears land, its winds whip up powerful waves and currents that can sweep coarse sands and gravel into marshes and deep coastal ponds, sinkholes and lagoons.

Under normal conditions, fine sand and organic matter like leaves and seeds fall into these areas and settle to the bottom. So when coarse sand and gravel wash in, a distinct layer is left behind.

Imagine cutting through a layer cake – you can see each layer of frosting. Scientists can see the same effect by plunging a long tube into the bottom of these coastal marshes and ponds and pulling up several meters of sediment in what’s known as a sediment core. By studying the layers in sediment, we can see when coarse sand appeared, suggesting an extreme coastal flood from a hurricane.

With these sediment cores, we have been able to document evidence of Atlantic hurricane activity over thousands of years.

We now have dozens of chronologies of hurricane activity at different locations – including New England, the Florida Gulf Coast, the Florida Keys and Belize – that reveal decade- to century-scale patterns in hurricane frequency.

Others, including from Atlantic Canada, North Carolina, northwestern Florida, Mississippi and Puerto Rico, are lower-resolution, meaning it is nearly impossible to discern individual hurricane layers deposited within decades of one another. But they can be highly informative for determining the timing of the most intense hurricanes, which can have significant impacts on coastal ecosystems.

It’s the records from the Bahamas, however, with nearly annual resolution, that are crucial for seeing the long-term picture for the Atlantic Basin.

Why The Bahamas are so important

The Bahamas are exceptionally vulnerable to the impacts of major hurricanes because of their geographic location.

In the North Atlantic, 85% of all major hurricanes form in what is known as the Main Development Region, off western Africa. Looking just at observed hurricane tracks from the past 170 years, my analysis shows that about 86% of major hurricanes that affect the Bahamas also form in that region, suggesting the frequency variability in the Bahamas may be representative of the basin.

A substantial percentage of North Atlantic storms also pass over or near these islands, so these records appear to reflect changes in overall North Atlantic hurricane frequency through time.

By coupling coastal sediment records from the Bahamas with records from sites farther north, we can explore how changes in ocean surface temperatures, ocean currents, global-scale wind patterns and atmospheric pressure gradients affect regional hurricane frequency.

As sea surface temperatures rise, warmer water provides more energy that can fuel more powerful and destructive hurricanes. However, the frequency of hurricanes – how often they form – isn’t necessarily affected in the same way.

The secrets hidden in blue holes

Some of the best locations for studying past hurricane activity are large, near-shore sinkholes known as blue holes.

Blue holes get their name from their deep blue color. They formed when carbonate rock dissolved to form underwater caves. Eventually, the ceilings collapsed, leaving behind sinkholes. The Bahamas has thousands of blue holes, some as wide as a third of a mile and as deep as a 60-story building.

They tend to have deep vertical walls that can trap sediments – including sand transported by strong hurricanes. Fortuitously, deep blue holes often have little oxygen at the bottom, which slows decay, helping to preserve organic matter in the sediment through time.

Cracking open a sediment core

When we bring up a sediment core, the coarse sand layers are often evident to the naked eye. But closer examination can tell us much more about these hurricanes of the past.

I use X-rays to measure changes in the density of sediment, X-ray fluorescence to examine elemental changes that can reveal if sediment came from land or sea, and sediment textural analysis that examines the grain size.

To figure out the age of each layer, we typically use radiocarbon dating. By measuring the amount of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope, in shells or other organic material found at various points in the core, I can create a statistical model that predicts the age of sediments throughout the core.

So far, my colleagues and I have published five paleohurricane records with nearly annual detail from blue holes on islands across the Bahamas.

Each record shows periods of significant increase in storm frequency lasting decades and sometimes centuries.

The records vary, showing that a single location might not reflect broader regional trends.

For example, Thatchpoint Blue Hole on Great Abaco Island in the northern Bahamas includes evidence of at least 13 hurricanes per century that were Category 2 or above between the years 1500 and 1670. That significantly exceeds the rate of nine per century documented since 1850. During the same period, 1500 to 1670, blue holes at Andros Island, just 186 miles (300 kilometers) south of Abaco, documented the lowest levels of local hurricane activity observed in this region during the past 1,500 years.

Spotting patterns across the Atlantic Basin

Together, however, these records offer a glimpse of broad regional patterns. They’re also giving us new insight into the ways ocean and atmospheric changes can influence hurricane frequency.

While rising sea surface temperatures provide more energy that can fuel more powerful and destructive hurricanes, their frequency – how often they form – isn’t necessarily affected in the same way. Some studies have predicted the total number of hurricanes will actually decrease in the future.

The compiled Bahamian records document substantially higher hurricane frequency in the northern Caribbean during the Little Ice Age, around 1300 to 1850, than in the past 100 years.

That was a time when North Atlantic surface ocean temperatures were generally cooler than they are today. But it also coincided with an intensified West African monsoon. The monsoon could have produced more thunderstorms off the western coast of Africa, which act as low-pressure seeds for hurricanes.

Steering winds and vertical wind shear likely also affect a region’s hurricane frequency over time. The Little Ice Age active interval observed in most Bahamian records coincides with increased hurricane strikes along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard from 1500 to 1670, but at the same time it was a quieter period in the Gulf of Mexico, central Bahamas and southern Caribbean.

Records from sites farther north tell us more about the climate. That’s because changes in ocean temperature and climate conditions are likely far more important to controlling regional impacts in such areas as the Northeastern U.S. and Atlantic Canada, where cooler climate conditions are often unfavorable for storms.

A warning for the islands

I am currently developing records of coastal storminess in locations including Newfoundland and Mexico. With those records, we can better anticipate the impacts of future climate change on storm activity and coastal flooding.

In the Bahamas, meanwhile, sea level rise is putting the islands at increasing risk, so even weaker hurricanes can produce damaging flooding. Given that storms are expected to be more intense, any increase in storm frequency could have devastating impacts.

Tyler Winkler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The field of genomic science is rapidly advancing, with commercial genetic tests becoming affordable and popular.

Taking these tests is simple. The company sends you a collection kit. You send it back with a saliva sample or cheek swab. The sample is sequenced and analysed, and before long you have your results.

However, upon a closer look you’ll find commercial genetic tests come with several hidden risks, and consumers often don’t understand what they’re signing up for. Here are some important factors to consider if you’re thinking of getting one.

Ancestry tests

The most common personal genomics tests are ancestry tests, offered by companies including Ancestry, 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and MyHeritage.

Ancestry tests are marketed as a way to explore your ancestral origins. But since different companies use different methods, and even different “ethnicity” categorisations, you may get inconsistent results. For example, Kristen V. Brown wrote for Gizmodo about how her saliva sample produced three different results from AncestryDNA, 23andMe and National Geographic.

In another example, a 2019 CBC Marketplace experiment involved sending the DNA of identical twins to five different companies. Each company returned surprisingly different results. Mark Gerstein, a Yale University bioinformatics expert, suspected the differences came down to different algorithms being used to process the raw data.

Health tests

The industry also offers tests for a variety of health conditions. A test may claim to provide you with predictions of your risk of developing breast cancer or Alzheimer’s. Carrier tests indicate whether you’re likely to pass on a particular condition to your child.

But users can get contradictory results here too. One company might indicate you’re at a heightened risk of colon cancer, while another might say you have reduced risk. Not to mention genes are only one factor in most complex diseases.

In an investigation by the US Government Accountability Office, tests from four companies delivered highly varied results. The report concluded:

The test results we received are misleading and of little or no practical use to consumers. […] The experts we spoke with agreed that the companies’ claims and test results are both ambiguous and misleading.

A genetic test in a medical clinic is governed by many rules and laws. A commercial test bought online is mostly subject to the company’s own terms and conditions and privacy policy. And, as we all know, these terms and conditions are often too long and unreadable for most people.

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Read more: Research shows most online consumer contracts are incomprehensible, but still legally binding

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Low predictive value

Another type of test is a “talent test”, which purports to tell parents whether their child will have a high IQ, or excel in certain activities such as music or sport. These tests aren’t validated – and for many talents there’s no strong evidence genes play a key role in their development.

Regarding talent tests for “sporting ability,” a consensus statement published in the British Medical Journal of Sports Medicine said:

[…] the consensus is that the predictive value of such tests in the context of training responses or talent identification in sport is virtually zero.

Yet talent tests are growing in popularity, especially in China. What’s particularly concerning is these tests may promote ideas of genetic determinism – a flawed theory that suggests genes are the only reason we have certain abilities.

So-called “infidelity” tests are also highly problematic. With these, users can discreetly send in DNA samples of other people without their consent to supposedly find out whether their partner might be cheating.

Apart from being unethical and illegal in many countries (including Australia), the samples sent in would likely be taken from objects such as bed sheets or wine glasses, and are unlikely to be reliable.

Inaccurate results are just the start of the problem

Once your genetic data are in the hands of a company – with most market leaders based in the US – there’s a good chance they will stay there indefinitely. And unlike a bank PIN, you can’t just change your genetic code if something goes wrong.

Since we share a lot of our DNA with our relatives, disclosing our genomic data can create privacy risks for relatives, too. One 2018 study found many US citizens of European descent could be identified if their third cousin or closer had their DNA on an open-access or commercial database.

Then there’s the risk of data breaches at DNA testing companies. AncestryDNA, MyHeritage and the genetic genealogy site GedMatch have already been afflicted by such attacks.

Genetic information can also be used in criminal investigations, which means your data could be shared with law enforcement agencies. FamilyTreeDNA has shared data with the FBI in the past. Data can also be shared with immigration authorities and other government entities that may use your (or your relative’s) data against you.

Additionally, insurance companies may use someone’s genetic data to determine risks, coverage and premiums. In 2018 US biotech Orig3n partnered with Chinese e-insurance company ZhongAn Insurance.

Similarly, 23andMe has partnered with at least 14 pharmaceutical companies to research a range of diseases and develop new drugs. Through such partnerships, businesses benefit from consumers’ data without compensating them.

6 questions before clicking the purchase button

The lack of regulation in the personal genomics industry means it’s impossible to predict how your genetic data might be used. Before you buy a test, or if you know someone who plans to, consider these questions:

1. Given the sensitivity of the information and the risks involved, are you comfortable accepting the terms and conditions you (probably) haven’t read?

2. Many third parties may be interested in your genetic information. Are you happy for it to be shared with them?

3. Do you realise you don’t have the legal right to decide how long your personal data will be stored?

4. If you’re considering a test because of a health concern, did your doctor recommend it?

5. How would you respond if your ancestry results don’t match your sense of identity?

6. How would you feel if the company changed its policy and restricted your access to your own data?

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Read more: Cousin took a DNA test? Courts could use it to argue you are more likely to commit crimes

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Andelka M. Phillips has received funding from the Borrin Foundation to research the legal and policy implications of Consumer Data Rights in the context of genetic testing services. This article represents the authors views; the Borrin Foundation is not responsible for the content of this article and has not endorsed it.

Samuel Becher has received funding from the Borrin Foundation to research the legal and policy implications of Consumer Data Rights in the context of genetic testing services. This article represents the authors views; the Borrin Foundation is not responsible for the content of this article and has not endorsed it.

Almost three years into the pandemic, myths and misinformation remain widespread. Here we, a virologist and a public health researcher, debunk some common misconceptions about COVID.

Myth 1: The virus is becoming milder

There’s a prevailing myth in the omicron era that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is becoming “milder”.

It’s true that earlier omicron variants (BA.1 and BA.2) were less likely than delta to cause severe illness, partly because they were more likely to infect the upper airway than the lower airway. This means omicron infections didn’t infect the lungs as aggressively as delta did.

But disease outcomes are critically dependent on immunity and the UK is privileged in this regard. When BA.2 hit Hong Kong in spring 2022, poorer vaccination coverage meant a devastating outbreak.

Even in England’s well-vaccinated population there have been almost 29,000 COVID deaths between January and early November 2022, and tens of thousands of hospitalisations.

Individual risk may have fallen, but high omicron infections and reinfections have considerable impact at population level. Subvariants continue to escape antibody immunity, and some (like BA.5) appear to have reacquired a preference for the lower airway. This, along with other factors, increased the risk of hospitalisation with BA.5 compared to BA.2.

So SARS-CoV-2 is not inherently mild, or necessarily becoming milder. We must also remember that millions of people can’t respond effectively to vaccines or are at heightened risk. Effective public health should combine updated vaccines against this moving target with limiting infections to slow viral evolution.

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Read more: I have COVID symptoms. Should I do a test?

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Myth 2: COVID only affects older and vulnerable people

One common reason people don’t get vaccinated is perceiving a low personal risk from infection. Again, high prevalence inflates smaller individual risks. For younger people, even a mild infection can lead to long COVID, which affects up to one in five adults aged 18-64.

This myth is particularly problematic in relation to children. Kids are far less prone to severe COVID than adults, but among paediatric infectious diseases, COVID is a significant cause of death and illness. Children can also develop long COVID. Despite lacklustre UK government messaging, many healthcare agencies around the world recommend vaccinating kids against SARS-CoV-2.

Myth 3: Washing hands is enough to prevent COVID spread

SARS-CoV-2 spreads via tiny particles of moisture suspended in the air called aerosols. Droplets (for example from sneezing) and fomites (droplet-contaminated objects) play a role, but are not the major route of spread.

As such, ventilation and masks are key to reducing COVID transmission. But hand washing and sanitising have been more popular anti-COVID measures.

Some organisations were slow to accept airborne transmission. So messaging at the start of the pandemic, including from the UK government, over-emphasised the importance of hand washing.

A psychological phenomenon known as a “primacy effect” describes when people are more influenced by the first things they experience, and retain these concepts. It appears the early focus on droplets and fomites stuck in people’s minds, even once we knew SARS-CoV-2 was airborne.

Hand hygiene is important for reducing transmission of other diseases, but is not sufficient for airborne viruses.

Myth 4: Masks don’t work

Face masks work by protecting the wearer and others. But as with all mitigation strategies, this is never 100%. Masks work best alongside other measures and must be worn properly.

Masks range from cloth face coverings, to surgical masks, up to FFP2/N95 and FFP3/N99 respirators. Any barrier helps, but cloth masks mainly limit droplets and do little to protect the wearer from aerosols. Surgical masks with non-woven layers are significantly better, yet still offer limited protection compared with respirators.

Worn properly, FFP2 and FFP3 respirators filter 95% and 99% of particles respectively, down to the size of aerosols. In this way they protect the wearer and others.

Myth 5: Vaccines don’t reduce transmission

Delta caused noticeable breakthrough infections in people who had been vaccinated and reinfection is now common with omicron. This is due to the evolution of antibody-evasive mutations within SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein, along with natural antibody waning.

Research consistently supports that vaccination reduces omicron transmission as well as severity. Studies show that, while not eliminating the risk entirely, vaccinated people with breakthrough infections are less likely to spread the virus to others.

Myth 6: Vaccines were rushed through

COVID vaccine trials were not rushed. Remarkable cooperation, ample funding and innovative design accelerated things. But what’s usually the greatest bottleneck – patient recruitment – was bypassed by the sheer abundance of people exposed to SARS-CoV-2.

Vaccines saved an estimated 20 million lives globally in 2021. But as effective as they are, vaccines, like all medicines, are not perfect.

Up to October 2022, the UK’s Office for National Statistics recorded 56 deaths in England and Wales involving COVID vaccines. All these deaths are tragedies. Patient reporting systems like the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency yellow card scheme show higher numbers before investigations.

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Read more: We measured vaccine confidence pre-pandemic and in 2022 – it's declined considerably

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When millions of people are vaccinated, serious and potentially fatal reactions do occur on rare occasions. This is partly due to our genetic diversity, but other factors also contribute.

Rare reactions include anaphylaxis (allergic responses to vaccine ingredients), blood clots and myocarditis and pericarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle or surrounding sac).

It became clear after millions of inoculations that the AstraZeneca vaccine could cause rare blood clots in the veins. Untreated, this can be fatal. These occur more in younger adults, but the UK now uses mainly mRNA vaccines.

Myocarditis after mRNA vaccination has caused concern, mainly in adolescent males, but is generally rare, mild, and gets better on its own. By contrast, myocarditis from a COVID infection is more common, long-lasting, and far more likely to require intensive care. In other words, the benefits of COVID vaccination clearly outweigh the risks.

Simon Nicholas Williams has received funding from Senedd Cymru, Public Health Wales and the Wales COVID-19 Evidence Centre for research on COVID-19. However, this article reflects the views of the author only and no funding bodies were involved in the writing or content of this article.

Stephen Griffin is affiliated with Independent SAGE.

On Feb. 19, 1906, the mail steamer China pulled into the harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii. It had made the voyage from San Pedro, California, many times before, but this trip made front-page news. Local newspapers heralded the arrival of “one hundred and ten white men, women and children, the vanguard of what promises to be an influx of settlers for the Hawaiian Islands.”

A reporter from the Hawaiian Gazette recorded that they “looked to be a healthy, moral, God-fearing people.” By contrast, in 1856, some of the first Chinese contract laborers to work in Hawaii had been described as a “turbulent, stubborn, reckless class” in need of “influences tending to their improvement and conversion to Christianity” so that there might be “a blessing in store for the Chinese in the Sandwich islands,” a former name for Hawaii.

These white Christians were originally from central southern Russia and were part of a decadelong effort by the wealthy white men who owned Hawaii’s sugar plantations to find laborers who would work hard for little money. But as I have learned during my research into Russian migration to the U.S. in the early 20th century, their racial background was key to their arrival in Hawaii: They were white immigrants whom the supporters could liken to American Colonial-era settlers and those expanding west across the Great Plains.

Shifting power in the islands

Since the 1830s, white planters had run massive sugar plantations on the Hawaiian Islands. At first they employed Native Hawaiians. However, the demand for labor grew fast, and as some of the Native population died from European-introduced diseases, there were not enough workers for the industry. In addition, Hawaiians began to organize against meager pay and harsh working conditions as early as 1841. Faced with a possibility of large-scale unrest, the planters started to recruit contract laborers from Asia in the thousands, especially from China.

White elites, like those who overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, wanted Hawaii to eventually become a state. But opponents, like Humphrey Desmond, editor of the Catholic Citizen newspaper, feared that the Asians living there would become U.S. citizens and “dilute the citizenship” of the rest of the white-dominated U.S.

Since the 1880s, Hawaiian elites had tried bringing in workers from Portugal and Norway. They received much higher wages than the Asian laborers and were promoted to skilled occupations faster. A few white farmers also made it on their own to Hawaii, but most of them quickly gave up, their efforts defeated by the harsh tropical climate.

In 1898, the U.S. agreed to annex Hawaii, whose population was just over one-fifth European or American in ethnic background. But that meant the plantations could no longer import Asian workers. They were banned under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which now applied to Hawaii as a U.S. territory.

In addition, the planters now came under pressure from the growing power of the Asian workers already in the islands. In 1904 and 1905, Japanese laborers led strikes on several plantations across Hawaii, in some cases winning increased pay and other concessions such as firing of negligent overseers.

Enter the Russians.

Moving from the Caucasus

The new arrivals to Hawaii were known as Molokans. A Christian group that had emerged in the 18th century in central southern Russia, they rejected the teachings of the Orthodox Church, which was closely tied to the Russian government.

Starting in the 1830s, they were exiled to the Caucasus region, where Russia had been expanding its empire through conquest. Though they were considered dangerous heretics in Russia itself, in the Muslim-majority borderlands they became indispensable allies of the czar’s government.

Their rejection of alcohol, their strong work ethic and their considerable skill as farmers won the admiration of officials, travelers and scholars. But in the 1880s they were subjected to a military draft for the first time. They objected and in 1900 began a campaign to leave for North America – where, again, they became viewed as ideal settlers, once they started arriving in 1904-1905. The Molokans found a temporary home in Los Angeles.

But then, as I have learned by studying contemporary press accounts and primary sources from the Hawaii State Archives, they caught the attention of the Hawaiian planters.

One of their champions, Peter Demens, a California lumber merchant with Russian roots, described their life in the Caucasus to Hawaiian planters and media audiences as one of unending triumph of industry over nature: “In every place they had to do the work of primitive pioneers; to acclimatize themselves, to acquire the knowledge of local conditions, of local customs, usages, and agricultural methods. From the fertile black earth Steppes of central Russia they were moved into the dry, salty deserts of Crimea, which they quickly transformed into blooming gardens.”

Comparing them to European settlers in early America, Demens further highlighted their moral qualities, such as prohibitions on liquor, tobacco and divorce. He exhorted them as “the only part of the masses who know how to think and who do think.”

In January 1906, the archives reveal, the territorial government and the Molokan leaders signed a land deal. It allowed the Molokans to come to Hawaii to work on a plantation in a land subdivision called Kapa'a on the island of Kauai, learning to cultivate sugar cane and bringing their relatives to join them. When the current plantation company’s lease expired in 1907, the deal pledged that the Molokans could take over, not as wage laborers but as settlers with their own lease rights to 5,000 acres on which to live and work.

Starting to work the land

Within a few hours of landing in Honolulu in February 1906, the advance party of 39 families of Molokan settlers set out for Kauai. Once there, they began building houses. The archives show the manager of the Kapa'a plantation was hopeful, calling their effort “a good augury.”

But once they began to learn to farm sugar cane, trouble followed. The hundreds of longtime Japanese, Hawaiian and Portuguese employees were angry that these strangers, fresh off the boat, were in line to receive a lease over the whole plantation. The longtime workers began to find employment elsewhere, leaving the plantation short of labor.

For the Japanese workers, in particular, being displaced by Russians stung: They had won the Russo-Japanese War just months before. Some Japanese workers refused to work with the Russians, citing the recent conflict as the reason in conversations with the plantation manager. Others reported being the objects of Russian aggression, even saying they had been told, “You Japs drove us out of Manchuria, but we will now drive you out of Kapa’a.”

As indicated by plantation manager George Fairchild’s letters to the settlement’s chief supporter, James B. Castle, the Russian settlers then started to act as if they already owned the lease to the Kapa’a lands. They even told other laborers that the other laborers would soon be working for the Russians and tried to sublease local rice paddies to small farmers.

Making matters worse, the Molokans were used to the cool, arid mountains of the Caucasus, not the hot, humid slopes of Hawaii. Archival records show they also resented the strict labor discipline the sugar cane plantation managers required and refused to work more than 10 hours a day, earning derision from the locals, who were accustomed to 12-to-14-hour days. And they tried to plan for their eventual takeover of the lease, proposing to the manager that each family work a separate section of cane.

A short-lived effort

Having hoped for a peaceful and prosperous settlement, the Molokans faced open resentment by other plantation workers, who likely feared being displaced as more Molokans arrived, and constant complaints from managers about the quality of their work.

Most of them left Kauai, and even Hawaii altogether, by early July 1906 – less than six months after their much-heralded arrival. The failed experiment laid bare the flawed concept of Americanizing the islands by increasing the white population. While other labor migrants, such as Portuguese, earned a better reputation with the planters and remained in numbers sufficient to establish a significant cultural presence in the islands, the demographic makeup of the islands would change little in the coming decades.

The plantations went back to relying on the labor of people already in Hawaii, as well as people arriving from the Philippines, which had recently become a U.S. colony.

But for a brief moment, thanks to widely shared notions of white supremacy and colonization as a positive force, even people as different as the Russian Molokans could be likened to the Pilgrim fathers of American settler myth: people who simply by virtue of their looks and background symbolized civilization, progress and a powerful connection with an imagined past.

Stepan Serdiukov does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Southern Living magazine once described “y’all” as “the quintessential Southern pronoun.” It’s as iconically Southern as sweet tea and grits.

While “y’all” is considered slang, it’s a useful word nonetheless. The English language doesn’t have a good second person plural pronoun; “you” can be both singular and plural, but it’s sometimes awkward to use as a plural. It’s almost like there’s a pronoun missing. “Y’all” fills that second person plural slot – as does “you guys,” “youse,” “you-uns” and a few others.

I’m interested in “y’all” because I was born in North Carolina and grew up saying it. I still do, probably a couple dozen times a day, usually without intention or even awareness. As a historian who has researched the early history of the word, I’m also interested in how the word’s use has changed over the years.

Like something a ‘hillbilly redneck’ would say

“Y’all” might serve an important function, but it has acquired negative connotations.

Back in 1886, The New York Times ran a piece titled “Odd Southernisms” that described “y’all” as “one of the most ridiculous of all the Southernisms.”

That perception has persisted. Like the Southern dialect in general, the use of “y’all” has often been seen as vulgar, low-class, uncultured and uneducated. As someone noted in Urban Dictionary, “Whoever uses [y’all] sounds like a hillbilly redneck.”

In a more recent New York Times essay, writer Maud Newton said that she associated the word with her father, who “defended slavery, demanded the subservience of women and adhered to ‘spare the rod and spoil the child.’” He also demanded that his children say “y’all” rather than “you guys.” She grew up hating the word.

At a time when many Americans are calling for the removal of Confederate monuments and opposing the Lost Cause mythology, “y’all,” with its Southern overtones, might make some people uncomfortable – a misguided reaction, perhaps, but one that has been felt by both those who hear it and those who say it.

Imagine ‘y’all’ with a British accent

The word has not always had such negative connotations.

The etymology of “y’all” is murky. Some linguists trace it back to the Scots-Irish phrase “ye aw”; others suggest an African American origin, perhaps from the Igbo word for “you” brought over by Nigerian-born slaves. According to the “Oxford English Dictionary,” the word first appeared in print in 1856, and all of its examples are sources connected to the American South. Michael Montgomery, a noted linguist, said that early use of the word “is unknown in the British Isles.”

But recently I used some of the new digital literary databases to search for older uses of the word, and I found over a dozen examples. They were all in dramatic or poetic works dating back to the 17th century and published in London. The earliest “y’all” that I uncovered was in William Lisle’s “The Faire Æthiopian,” published in 1631 – “and this y'all know is true.”

My examples push “y’all” back 225 years before the citation in the “Oxford English Dictionary,” and they show that the word appeared first in England rather than the United States.

I think it’s important to point out that it originated in a more formal context than what’s commonly assumed. There are none of the class or cultural connotations of the later American examples.

I should also note that there is almost a centurylong gap between the last known usage of this British version of “y’all” and the first known usage of the American version. Scholars may well decide that these versions of “y’all” are essentially two different words.

Still, there it is, in an English poem written in 1631.

‘Y'all means all’

Ironically, at the same time that some people have shied away from using “y’all,” the word seems to have grown in popularity. An article on exactly this topic, published in the Journal of English Linguistics in 2000, was titled “The Nationalization of a Southernism”; based on scientific polling, the authors suggested that “y’all” will soon be seen as an American, rather than Southern, word.

There might be several reasons for this. One is that African American use of the word in music and other forms of popular culture has made it more familiar – and, therefore, acceptable – to those who didn’t grow up with it.

Second, “you guys,” another common alternative for the second-person plural pronoun, is losing support because of its sexist connotations. Are females included in you guys? How about those who identify as nonbinary?

Maud Newton eventually came to embrace “y’all.” When she moved to Tallahassee, Florida, after law school, she found that “in grocery stores and coffee shops, on the street and in the library, everyone – Black and white, queer and straight, working-class and wealthy – used y’all, and soon I did, too.”

“Y’all means all” – that’s a wonderful phrase that seems to be popping up everywhere, from T-shirts and book titles to memes and music. A song written by Miranda Lambert for Netflix’s “Queer Eye” beautifully captures the spirit of the phrase:

  You can be born in Tyler, Texas,
  Raised with the Bible Belt;
  If you’re torn between the Y’s and X’s,
  You ain’t gotta play with the hand you’re dealt ...
  Honey, y’all means all.

David B. Parker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The ancient world of the Mediterranean has long permeated American society, in everything from museum collections to home furnishings. The design of the nation’s public monuments, buildings and universities, as well as its legal system and form of government, show the enduring influence of Mediterranean antiquity on American culture.

Until the late 19th century, Americans encountered the ancient world almost exclusively through reproductions – in books, artwork and even popular plays. Very few could afford to travel abroad to encounter Mediterranean artifacts firsthand.

Yet despite barriers to access, many Americans forged personal connections with the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean – not only the Greeks and Romans, but also the Egyptians and Israelites. Perhaps the newness of American culture inspired this deep interest in the ancient past.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Mediterranean antiquity’s influence on America, even before it officially became a country, is how it cut across cultural lines of race, class and gender. Far from being the preserve of a privileged few, the art and literature of the ancients was often embraced by Americans of all stripes – including the enslaved Black poet Phillis Wheatley (circa 1753-1784) and Black and Native American sculptor Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907). But the circumstances of these encounters and the way individual Americans thought about antiquity varied greatly.

I’m an art historian specializing in ancient Mediterranean art and culture. I am particularly fascinated by the way Americans, from the earliest days, made creative connections between past and present, despite being separated by thousands of miles and millennia of history.

In researching and selecting works of art for the exhibit “Antiquity and America,” on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, I was excited to show an exceptionally diverse range of American encounters with the ancient world, especially in portrait painting.

Marker of education

Take, for example, Samson Occom (1723-1792), a member of the Mohegan nation, Presbyterian minister and one of the first Native Americans to pen an autobiography in English.

His unfinished portrait, painted by Nathaniel Smibert (1735-1756) in the mid-18th century, alluded to Occom’s Indigenous identity in the coloring of his skin and the styling of his hair. Simultaneously, it also referenced his training in classical literature and oratory, acquired by studying with Eleazar Wheelock (1711-1779), a Connecticut Congregational minister.

Occom’s pose and draped cloak recall those found on ancient statues of Roman senators – a portrait convention familiar in early America from prints circulating at the time – and one that would later become quite popular in American society.

While his learning in Greek and Latin was undoubtedly a source of great pride for Occom – and a way for him to level the playing field with the European colonists – it was used by others to demonstrate the “civilizing” effect of European culture and education in the British Colonies.

In 1776, Eleazar Wheelock sent his former pupil Occom to Great Britain to raise money for a Native American school – funds that were ultimately repurposed for the founding of Dartmouth College. Occom would later charge Wheelock with using him as a “gazing stock” in Europe while planning all the while to use the funds for the benefit of white settlers.

Shaping public opinion

A portrait of Sengbe Pieh, also known as Cinqué, who led the 1839 Amistad slave ship revolt, is an example of Black Americans’ use of the classical world for political purposes.

Commissioned by Robert Purvis (1810-1898), a Black Philadelphian and prominent abolitionist, this striking portrait by John Sartain (1808-1897) was intended to shape the popular image of Pieh and his fellow Africans during their Supreme Court trial for mutiny and murder in 1840-1841.

Pieh’s African identity is made evident not only in the tone of his skin, but in the bamboo staff he holds and the landscape in background depicting his homeland. The white cloak draped over his shoulder would have called to mind the white robes worn by Roman senators and, by extension, the Roman virtues of honor and dignity.

Pieh and his fellow Africans were ultimately acquitted and returned to the Sierra Leone Colony in 1842.

Feminist icon

Caroline Sanders Truax (1870–1940), one of the first women admitted to the New York state bar, was so enamored by the ancient past she was portrayed as the Greek lyric poet Sappho by painter Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904).

This was a bold choice for a representation of an American woman in 1899. Sappho, whose writing is among the only surviving sources of female authorship from antiquity, was already an icon of the first-wave feminist movement, and the homoerotic themes of her poetry were well understood. Was the choice the artist’s – or the sitter’s? The most likely answer is it was by mutual agreement, perhaps inspired by Truax’s knowledge of classical language and literature – and her own interest in composing lyric poetry.

The portrait was a sensation in New York society when it arrived from the artist’s studio in Paris. It was featured in several portrait exhibitions and newspaper articles – and was hung with pride by Truax and her husband in their home.

For generations of Americans, the history and literature of Mediterranean antiquity was fertile ground for contemporary comparisons. It was universal enough to be brought into debates about the Constitution and founding principles of democracy, slavery and abolition, and women’s rights and suffrage. It was also of great individual significance for Americans of many different backgrounds – a past they were on intimate terms with, despite the millennia and miles separating the United States from the ancient Mediterranean.

Sean Burrus previously worked for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. He received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Covid-19 cases are on the upswing in Los Angeles County again, and officials are asking people to voluntarily wear masks while indoors. The county is reporting approximately 1500 new cases a day, compared to 1300 per day last week, and a 52% jump since the beginning of the month. — Read the rest

Turtles and Teamsters was one rallying cry during the 1999 protests against the WTO in Seattle, WA. In other words, a coalition between environmental activists and labor organizers.

In 2022 across the University of California University system, some 48,000 academic workers across ten campuses went on strike, the largest labor action in higher education history. — Read the rest

Faculty and staff are the backbone of USF and deserve to be treated as such. Instead, they are nickel-and-dimed by the university for parking and amenities.

Expecting staff members to pay extra for parking and access to the Recreation and Wellness Center is unfair. The university needs to take better care of its staff and reduce or even revoke these fees.

Faculty pay significantly more than students just for parking, according to USF Parking and Transportation Services. USF offers several different options for parking permits, and staff are able to choose between two: an E or GZ permit.

E permits are valid in any of the designated employee parking spaces. GZ permits are also valid in these spaces, as well as what the university calls “prime” parking spaces.

A regular E parking permit costs faculty and staff up to $270 annually, whereas a non-resident student permit is $183. Even resident students, who take up parking spots on campus day and night, pay $226 per year for their parking permits.

That is just the rate for basic parking spaces. If employees want “prime” parking, they can purchase a GZ permit for $450 per year.

University staff shouldn’t have to pay to be at work, much less be forced to pay higher fees than students.

This doesn’t just apply to parking permits — staff also have to pay to use the Recreation and Wellness Center. Students have free access to the center, as it’s covered by their tuition. Faculty and staff, however, have to pay $316.20 per year for access, according to the Recreation and Wellness Center website.

For comparison, Planet Fitness offers a yearly membership for $199, according to its website. 

Asking faculty and staff to pay over $300 for a year of access to the Rec is completely unreasonable, especially when other gyms in the area offer memberships for so much less.

This is not exclusive to USF. FSU staff pay $299 per year to use their Rec facilities. For UF faculty, the price is $400 annually, as stated by the Membership Fee Schedule. Students at both universities also have access to these facilities covered by their tuition, so they don’t pay any membership fees. 

Universities need to reduce, if not fully remove these fees. Making faculty and staff pay hundreds of dollars to be at work and hundreds more to use campus amenities is unfair.

Faculty and staff give so much of their time and energy to the university. It’s time for USF to step up, set an example for other public universities and show our faculty and staff some gratitude.

Netflix’s enormously popular new show, Ancient Apocalypse, is an all out attack on archaeologists. As an archaeologist committed to public engagement who strongly believes in the relevance of studying ancient people, I feel a full-throated defence is necessary.

Author Graham Hancock is back, defending his well-trodden theory about an advanced global ice age civilisation, which he connects in Ancient Apocalypse to the legend of Atlantis. His argument, as laid out in this show and in several books, is that this advanced civilisation was destroyed in a cataclysmic flood.

The survivors of this advanced civilisation, according to Hancock, introduced agriculture, architecture, astronomy, arts, maths and the knowledge of “civilisation” to “simple” hunter gatherers. The reason little evidence exists, he says, is because it is under the sea or was destroyed by the cataclysm.

“Perhaps,” Hancock posits in the first episode, “the extremely defensive, arrogant, and patronising attitude of mainstream academia is stopping us from considering that possibility”.

The pseudo fish defence

In the opening dialogue of Ancient Apocalypse, Hancock rejects being identified as an archaeologist or scientist. Instead, he calls himself a journalist who is “investigating human prehistory”. A canny choice, as the label “journalist” helps Hancock rebut being characterised as a “pseudo archaeologist” or “pseudo scientist”, which, as he puts it himself in episode four, would be like calling a dolphin a “pseudo fish”.

From my perspective as an archaeologist, the show is surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) lacking in evidence to support Hancock’s theory of an advanced, global ice age civilisation. The only site Hancock visits that actually dates to near the end of the ice age is Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey.

Instead, Hancock visits several North American mound sites, pyramids in Mexico, and sites stretching from Malta to Indonesia, which Hancock is convinced all help prove his theory. However, all of these sites have been published on in detail by archaeologists, and a plethora of evidence indicates they date thousands of years after the ice age.

Hancock argues that viewers should “not rely on the so-called experts”, implying they should rely on his narrative instead. His attacks against “mainstream archaeologists”, the “so-called experts” who “practice censorship” are strident and frequent. After all, as he puts in in episode six, “archaeologists have been wrong before and they could be wrong again”.

Steph Halmhofer, a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta who studies the use of pseudo archaeology and erasure of indigenous heritage by far-right groups, suggests that these attacks on archaeologists function to increase his sense of authority with viewers. As Halmhofer explains:

It’s about conspiracism and the positioning of Hancock as the victim of a conspiracy. The repeated disparaging remarks about archaeologists and other academics in every episode of Ancient Apocalypse is needed to remind the audience that the alternative past being proposed is true, regardless of the lack of conclusive evidence for it. And the vagueness of who this supposed advanced civilisation was, combined with the credence given to it by being in a Netflix-produced series, is going to make Ancient Apocalypse an easily mouldable source for anyone looking to fill in a fantasied mythical past.

Dangers of pseudo archaeology

In the last decade we have seen how conspiracy theories and distrust in experts impacts the world around us. And research has shown how pseudo archaeology – especially when couched in anti-intellectual rhetoric – can overlap with more dangerous conspiracy thinking.

Of course, archaeologists frequently admit when we have been wrong. Any academic teaching “Archaeology 101” or applying to fund a new study points out how new evidence updates our picture of the past. Despite the fact that every scientific field updates its thinking with new evidence, according to Hancock, any rewrites to history mean that archaeologists, his “so-called experts,” should not be relied upon.

Despite repeated claims made by Hancock, no archaeologists today see stone age hunter-gatherers or early farmers as “simple” or “primitive”. We see them as complex people. Priming viewers to distrust archaeologists, also allows Hancock to use circular logic to re-date these sites.

The murky origins of Hancock’s theories

Hancock claims in his book Magicians of the Gods that as the “implications” of his theories “have not yet been taken into account at all by historians and archaeologists, we are obliged to contemplate the possibility that everything we have been taught about the origins of civilisation could be wrong”. However, archaeologists have repeatedly addressed his theories in academic publications, on TV and in mainstream media.

Most glaring to scholars investigating the history of Hancock’s pseudo archaeology is that while claiming to “overthrow the paradigm of history,” he doesn’t acknowledge that his overarching theory is not new.

Scholars and journalists have pointed out that Hancock’s ideas recycle the long since discredited conclusions drawn by American congressman Ignatius Donnelly in his book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, published in 1882.

Donnelly also believed in an advanced civilisation – Atlantis – that was wiped out by a flood over 10,000 years ago. He claimed that the survivors taught Indigenous people the secrets of farming and monumental architecture.

Like many forms of pseudo archaeology, these claims act to reinforce white supremacist ideas, stripping Indigenous people of their rich heritage and instead giving credit to aliens or white people.

Hancock even cites Donnelly directly in his 1995 book Fingerprints of the Gods, claiming: “The road system and the sophisticated architecture had been ‘ancient in the time of the Incas,’ but that both ‘were the work of white, auburn-haired men’.” While skin colour is not brought up in Ancient Apocalypse, the repetition of the story of a “bearded” Quetzalcoatl (an ancient Mexican deity) parrots both Donnelly’s and Hancock’s own summary of a white and bearded Quetzalcoatl teaching native people knowledge from this “lost civilisation”.

Hancock’s mirroring of Donnelly’s race-focused “science” is seen more explicitly in his essay, Mysterious Strangers: New Findings About the First Americans. Like Donnelly, Hancock finds depictions of “caucasoids” and “negroids” in Indigenous American art and (often mistranslated) mythology, even drawing attention to some of the exact same sculptures as Donnelly.

This sort of “race science” is outdated and long since debunked, especially given the strong links between Atlantis and Aryans proposed by several Nazi “archaeologists”.

These are the reasons why archaeologists will continue to respond to Hancock. It isn’t that we “hate him” as he claims, it is simply that we strongly believe he is wrong. His flawed thinking implies that Indigenous people do not deserve credit for their cultural heritage.

Netflix labels Ancient Apocalypse a docuseries. IMDB calls it a documentary. It’s neither. It’s an eight-part conspiracy theory that weaponises dramatic rhetoric against scholars.

Flint Dibble ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

Are there wasps in figs? I've heard this for years and always just assumed it to be true. I've never laid eyes on one, and have just sort of quietly hoped that the crunch inside the figs I've eaten were seeds and not wasps. — Read the rest

The "Stop WOKE" act limited how schools in Florida taught slavery, racism, gender trouble and the rest of it. A Florida judge yesterday put the brakes on it, describing it as "positively dystopian" and comparing it from the outset to the pervasive censorship of the regime fictionalized in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. — Read the rest

The latest developments in Capybara science.

The post Important Capybara Update appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

Last week, DeviantArt announced the launch of its new artificial intelligence (AI) art creation tool, DreamUp. However, that launch was not greeted the way that they had hoped.

Rather than excitement, DeviantArt’s DreamUp was greeted with user backlash. Many users took to Twitter, in addition to forums on DeviantArt itself, to express their frustration and to condemn the new tool.

Specifically, users were upset that that their artwork would be used to train the new system and that, if they wanted to opt out, their options were limited. 

That’s because, while DeviantArt provided a button to opt out of inclusion in AI, it had to be enabled per-work and was opt-in by default. If users wanted to opt out their entire account, they had to fill out a web form that required a human review and, according to reports, up to 10 days to take effect.

However, more recent reporting has cast some nuance on this, both in good and bad ways for DeviantArt. According to a post on The Verge, DeviantArt CEO Moti Levy says that the site isn’t doing any DeveintArt-specific training for DreamUp and that the tool is Stable Diffusion, an image AI tool that already has a controversial history for scraping artwork without permission for the purpose of training.

According to DeviantArt, the opt-out toggle simply adds a pair of flags to the pages, “noai” and/or “noimageai”, that is designed to block third parties from using the image in their training. The aforementioned opt-out form is meant to prevent DreamUp from creating works based upon their names or the titles of specific works.

However, those efforts may be too little too late. Stable Diffusion was already trained on what is being described as “unethically sourced data”, likely including DeviantArt content, and there’s no way for the system to unlearn that. 

In short, users are likely attempting to opt out of a system that their work is already a permanent part of. To that end, DeviantArt changing all works to be opt-out by default may not carry much meaning.  

To that end, the controversy (and confusion) are not poised to end. DeviantArt has made it very clear that it intends to move forward with its AI projects, despite user objections. Meanwhile, artists, including DevinatArt members, are still very wary and unsure of how such technology users their images.

The Good DeviantArt Was Trying to Do

On the surface, DeviantArt was trying to do several good things. 

The company, feeling that AI is more or less inevitable at this stage, wanted to try and find a way to make it more fair to artists. To that end, they wanted to do three things when launching DreamUp.

1. Opt Out Tags: First, DeviantArt developed a series of meta tags that it hopes will become standards to let other AI scrapers know what content they can and cannot access. These are similar to the tags that search engines use to know what pages to index or not index.  
2. A More Limited AI: According to DeviantArt, the main difference between DreamUp and vanilla Stable Diffusion is that Dream Up places limits on the queries it will respond to and will block queries that involve specific names or work titles to prevent the AI from too closely mimicking the work of any one artist.
3. Flagging AI Art: Also, all works created by DreamUp will be automatically flagged as AI generated, making it easier to identify it is uploaded elsewhere or, as in one case with a different AI, submitted to a contest. 

These steps are ostensibly good, if weak. The tags, for example, are only useful if other AI tools adhere to them. Going back to the search tags, those are only useful because all major search engines follow them. So far, no AI company has agreed to adhere to those tags.

Likewise, the limitations placed on DreamUp don’t mean that users won’t be able to game it to mimic the works of other creators. It may make it more difficult, but almost certainly not impossible. Finally, the automated flags are only useful if they can’t be removed by humans, which they almost certainly can.

These are clearly good steps and, if DeviantArt had just introduced these changes, they likely would be lauded for at least doing something to help their users. However, these changes cannot be taken in a vacuum. 

Instead of announcing these changes by themselves, they announced them at the same time they were launching their own AI project, one that partners with an already-controversial service. Couple that with the toggle being set to opt-in by default, and it’s easy to see why creators quickly assumed the worst. 

Lessons from DeviantArt’s Mistakes

AI has a horrible reputation with artists right now. AI projects, by in large, have been very cavalier about their use of works created by human artists to train their work. 

That, in turn, has created a copyright gray area that has caused many services, including Getty Images, to ban AI-generated content from their services. As we saw with the dispute over GitHub’s Copilot program, there are many ethical and legal challenges to sort out in this space, but AI companies have simply continued to race ahead, hoping that it is better to seek forgiveness rather than ask permission.

This has left a bad taste in the mouths of many artists, who have felt powerless to stop the use of their work.

And that points to the problem DeviantArt has. While many of the steps that they are taking should be seen as giving artists more control over their work when it comes to AI, they made the announcement at the same time that they launched their own AI art tool.

DeviantArt has been repeatedly forced to clarify their stance and modify their actions, for two reason:

1. Buried Message: DeviantArt horribly buried their message under promotional material they were launching their own AI service. Nearly all the marketing focuses on using the new service rather than what it means for existing artists. Those artists, rightly, feel as if they are viewed as unimportant by DeviantArt.
2. Confusing Messaging: DeviantArt, at least on their first few attempts, failed to answer a simple question: When and how is DreamUp trained on DeviantArt images? In fact, that question is still unclear. While the answer to this question is complicated, and it’s likely DeviantArt doesn’t actually know since it’s using Stable Diffusion, the lack of clarity creates serious problems.

A smarter move for DeviantArt would have been to introduce the tags and the opt-out tool in one move (providing the opt-out list as a tool for other AI makers). That would have given them time to explain those tools, hone them, let users set them to their liking and make the point that they are trying to give artists more control. 

Then, after that was done, they could have introduced the AI tool. While any AI tool released by DeviantArt was going to be met with controversy, this would at least have helped clarify the role of those tools and how DreamUp will use works but their own members.

That, in turn, is the lesson for others in this space. Artists are, for good reason, wary of AI image generation systems. If you are going to launch one, it is crucial to communicate clearly whose work it will be trained upon, how artists can opt out and what steps you’re taking to ensure that output works do not infringe or unethically copy the work of human artists.

DeviantArt failed at that task. Their message was, and still is, very confusing. Furthermore, releasing it at the same time as their new AI system only harbored mistrust and confusion. That’s made even worse by partnering with an AI system that is already deeply mistrusted by artists.

Regardless of DeviantArt’s intentions, the response they were met with is both understandable and deserved.

Bottom Line

I actually have a strange history of defending DeviantArt from panics that have surrounded the site. The most prominent one was the “they’re selling your images” one from 2017, where users were afraid that the site’s terms of service made it possible for their artwork to appear on t-shirts for sale without their explicit permission.

However, this is a time DeviantArt created their own mess. While they may be right that AI art is inevitable and ignoring it is not a winning strategy, it still is a space they should enter into with care and caution. That’s not what happened.

DeviantArt partnered with an already-controversial AI system to launch an AI product on their service. Though they launched it alongside tools to help users protect their works, those tools were not properly highlighted and were poorly explained, especially as they related to their own tool.

DeviantArt wants to be known as “the only platform giving creators the ability to tell third-party AI datasets and models whether or not their content can be used for training.” However, if that’s the case, that’s the message they should have led with. Instead, they focused on trying to get people to use DreamUp.

Hopefully others entering this space will take some notes and lessons from this debacle. Artists are understandably wary of AI generators and if you want them to not turn on your project, it’s important to consider their wants and wishes, communicate with them clearly and effectively, and move slowly in the space.

Sadly, that’s something that is very unlikely to happen given the rapid pace in this field. 

The post Lessons from DeviantArt’s AI Debacle appeared first on Plagiarism Today.

For most people, the word Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious has exactly one context, the 1964 film Mary Poppins and the famous hybrid live action/animated scene that it was featured in.

The word and the song that it titles has remained a part of our lexicon for nearly sixty years and, despite being a famous tongue-twister (so much so, it was featured in a recent Mental Floss episode on the topic), has been on the tongues of generations.

However, in 1965, there was a very different conversation about the song. Life Music Inc, representing songwriters Gloria Parker and Barney Young, filed a lawsuit against Disney and others involved in the film alleging that the Disney version of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious violated the copyright of their 1951 song Supercalafajalistickespeealadojus. 

According to the original claim, Young had invented the word in 1921, though he did not compose their version of the song until 1949.

They further claimed that the Disney songwriters, Richard and Robert Sherman, gained access to their version of the song either from a club where Parker used to perform at, including their version of the song, or via a copy they sent to Disney. They went on to claim that the Disney version was based on their work, infringing their copyright.

However, the case didn’t make it very far. The plaintiffs in the case asked for an injunction, but were denied one by the district court judge. According to the judge, the plaintiffs were unlikely to succeed on their claims for two main reasons.

First, even though the songs had similar names and were upbeat tunes, musically they had nothing in common other than having the same starting and ending notes, keys and tempo. According to the judge, and an expert witness who filed a report for the defendants, these are similarities shared by many songs.

Second, even though short phrases can be copyright protected under certain circumstances, the court found that there were many instances of the word Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or similar variations being used well before the plaintiff’s version of the song was written.

This included a 1931 mention of a similar word in the Syracuse Daily Orange, as student journalist Helen Herman claimed to have coined the word “Supercaliflawjalisticexpialadoshus.” 

In short, the court found that it was known to the public before the plaintiff’s version was released and was already a common “nonsense phrase.”

With the injunction defeated, the lawsuit seems to have died out. However, that is hardly a surprise as the judge, when denying the injunction, made it extremely clear that their chances of success were extremely low.

In the end, the case is more of a footnote in both the film’s history and the history of copyright. However, it’s an important case to keep in mind, especially litigation over music seems to be on the rise.

Why It’s Worth Remembering

Though the novelty of the case is clear, there’s also a serious reason to look back at this case.

In 2022, we seem to be in a time when litigation over music is ever-present. Whether it’s Mariah Carey being sued over All I Want for Christmas is You, Dua Lipa being sued twice over her song Levitating or Disney once again finding itself in the defendant’s chair over a Frozen 2 song, these lawsuits seem to be coming at least weekly.

Tons of reasons are cited for this rise. Would-be plaintiffs feeling emboldened after the Blurred Lines verdict in 2015 and new technology that makes detecting both samples and similarities easier have been pointed at and likely have contributed.

However, it’s important to remember that these kinds of cases have always been with us. For as long as there has been a recorded music industry, there have been lawsuits where lesser-known creators have claimed infringement and, in the vast majority of those cases, were unsuccessful.

While there are high-profile cases where the plaintiff won, in general, those deal with battles between two relatively well-known musicians, such as Chuck Berry’s victory over John Lennon or The Rolling Stones lawsuit against The Verve. 

Part of that is because the issue of access is much easier to prove with already-famous performers, but it’s also where actual copying, either accidental or intentional, is more likely to take place.

Though the narrative of the small artist being ripped off by the big corporation or the big musical act is a compelling one, it rarely pans out to be true.

Bottom Line

Obviously, this story is an amusing one. That especially true given the thought of me repeatedly typing (or more realistically pasting) Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious into this article.

But, as unimportant as the case may seem to be both legally and culturally, it’s still a good one to keep in mind. If Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious can face a copyright infringement lawsuit, almost any song can.

This isn’t to imply that the plaintiffs were acting in bad faith. As with most such cases, their belief that they were copied is, most likely, completely genuine. 

As we’ve seen before, it’s easy, when looking only at the similarities, to see plagiarism and/or copyright infringement where there is none. 

Still, the next time you hear about a musician being sued for copyright infringement, just remember that this is nothing new and, for better or worse, is part of a long tradition that goes back decades, if not for over a century. 

The post The Bizarre Copyright Battle Over Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious appeared first on Plagiarism Today.

Antisemitism has been in the news a lot lately. Hip-hop megastar Ye – formerly known as Kanye West – tweeted Oct. 8, 2022 that he would “go death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” and then made antisemitic comments during a series of interviews. Basketball star Kyrie Irving has been embroiled in scandal after promoting a film that accuses Jews of controlling the trans-Atlantic slave trade and worshiping the devil. And former U.S. President Donald Trump posted on his social media platform that Jews must “get their act together” and show more appreciation for Israel “before it is too late” – a suggestion some read as a veiled threat.

While Ye and Irving’s actions were widely condemned, Trump’s received much less rebuke. Partisan politics, especially in the run-up to the midterm elections, are likely one reason why Trump has not been ostracized like Ye and Irving. But it’s also because many people, including some prominent conservative Jews, do not see anything antisemitic in Trump’s words.

Accusations of antisemitism often seem like a kind of Rorschach test. Where some people see antisemitism, others see a legitimate opinion or statement. Arguments ensue, and even more accusations fly.

As a political scientist studying contemporary antisemitism and the current arguments about it, I believe this pattern stems from fundamental misunderstandings about what antisemitism is and how it works. People often think that antisemitism just means hating Jews. But this is too simplistic. It is more useful to think of antisemitism as a kind of racism. There are different varieties of racism, each with their own history and distinctive characteristics.

Anti-Jewish racism

Just as much of American society has come to recognize that anti-Black racism is more than a matter of personal prejudice, this is true of antisemitism as well. Antisemitism is “anti-Jewish racism,” and, like anti-Black racism, it can operate in multiple ways. It can involve overt hostility, or covert bias. It can be intentional or unintentional. It can be expressed in stereotypes, in coded language, and in conspiracy theories.

Hating Jews, or having other kinds of negative feelings toward them, is certainly one form of antisemitism. But antisemitism can also be an unconscious bias, a form of “implicit racism.”

Probably the most common form of antisemitism consists of negative stereotypes about Jews, such as the idea that they are rich, greedy, scheming or more loyal to other Jews or to Israel than to the countries in which they live. These stereotypes are embedded in many cultures, and they can be unconsciously internalized. People can therefore express antisemitic stereotypes without knowing their racist origins, or harboring hostility toward Jews.

Many people have excused the numerous times Trump has trafficked in Jewish stereotypes on the grounds that his daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren are Jewish, and that he was avowedly pro-Israel when he was president. This is sufficient proof for some people that he cannot be antisemitic.

But having Jewish friends or family members, or even being Jewish oneself, does not give you immunity from having antisemitic beliefs or ideas any more than having Black friends or being a Black person gives you immunity from anti-Black racism – just look at Ye, who has said, for example, that 400 years of slavery seems like “a choice” by African Americans.

The trope that doesn’t die

Like other kinds of racism, antisemitism can also be expressed obliquely, in a “coded” manner: when Jews or “the Jews” are not named, but antisemitic tropes are invoked.

For example, people disagree over whether it is antisemitic to vilify the billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros, who is Jewish, as Republican politicians and Fox TV hosts regularly do.

Not all criticism of Soros is antisemitic, but accusing him of masterminding all sorts of national or international events draws on the old antisemitic trope that wealthy Jews are puppet-masters, secretly pulling the strings of governments, media and banks around the world to serve their own nefarious ends.

The most enduring and perhaps most distinctive feature of antisemitism is the central role it often plays in conspiracy theories. Take the so-called great replacement theory and the related idea of “white genocide,” which falsely claim that Jews are covertly trying to replace white, Christian populations in white-majority countries with people of color and non-Christians.

These conspiracy theories drive much of white nationalism, and are why white supremacists and neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 chanted “Jews will not replace us!” The perpetrators of some of the worst racist violence in the United States in recent years, such as the mass shootings in Buffalo, El Paso, and Pittsburgh were all motivated by these antisemitic ideas.

Changing the conversation

Recognizing that antisemitism can take different forms – not just hostility toward Jews – will not automatically resolve disagreements about what is or isn’t antisemitic, particularly when they concern criticisms of Israel. But it can help the conversation by focusing on whether what someone said or did was antisemitic, rather than focusing on their intentions or feelings.

It can also refocus the conversation on explaining why something is antisemitic, rather than just denouncing it. Most people do not know the long history of malicious myths and conspiracy theories about Jews that have circulated for centuries. Nearly half of Americans told pollsters they do not even know what the word antisemitism means.

Countering antisemitism, therefore, requires more than “calling it out” – it requires educating people about antisemitism. As the number of reported antisemitic incidents in the United States surges to record levels, there is an urgent need to do so.

Dov Waxman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Join us for this episode of Don’t Call Me Resilient as we speak with Margot Gage Witvliet who has insights into long COVID both as a patient and an epidemiologist.

If you don’t pay close attention to news about COVID, you might think the pandemic is nearly over. But for the millions of people worldwide suffering from long COVID, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

And the number of those experiencing long-term symptoms keeps growing: At least one in five of us infected with the virus go on to develop long COVID.

The effects of long COVID are staggering. Researchers say it can lead to: blood clots, heart disease, damage to the blood vessels, neurological issues, cognitive impairment, nerve damage, chronic pain and extreme fatigue.

And there is no treatment for long COVID.

So why don’t we hear more about long COVID? Why haven’t governments warned people about the risks we face with infection?

It might be that this debilitating disease is largely overlooked because of who gets it: Almost 80 per cent of longhaulers are women.

And in the United States, where our guest on this episode is from, many of those suffering from the prevailing conditions of COVID are women of colour, with Black and Latinx people most likely to get the illness.

Our insightful guest for this conversation on long COVID is Margot Gage Witvliet, assistant professor at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. Margot is a social epidemiologist who studies health disparities, including as they relate to long COVID and has presented her research findings to the United States Health Equity Task Force on COVID-19.

Margot is also a Black woman living with long COVID and has created a support and advocacy group for women of colour.

Listen and Follow

You can listen to or follow Don’t Call Me Resilient on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts. We’d love to hear from you, including any ideas for future episodes. Join The Conversation on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok and use #DontCallMeResilient.

Also in The Conversation

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À lire aussi : I'm a COVID-19 long-hauler and an epidemiologist – here's how it feels when symptoms last for months

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À lire aussi : Even mild COVID raises the chance of heart attack and stroke. What to know about the risks ahead

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À lire aussi : Ivermectin, blood washing, ozone: how long COVID survivors are being sold the next round of miracle cures

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À lire aussi : Long COVID should make us rethink disability – and the way we offer support to those with 'invisible conditions'

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À lire aussi : Being stressed out before you get COVID increases your chances of long COVID. Here's why

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À lire aussi : How COVID-19 damages lungs: The virus attacks mitochondria, continuing an ancient battle that began in the primordial soup

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À lire aussi : Influenza and COVID-19: What's in store for the fall/winter respiratory virus season?

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Sources

The Long COVID Survival Guide: How to Take Care of Yourself and What Comes Next, Stories and Advice from Twenty Long-Haulers and Experts Edited by Fiona Lowenstein

The Long Haul: Solving the Puzzle of the Pandemic’s Long Haulers and How They Are Changing Healthcare Forever By Ryan Prior

Transcript

For an unedited transcript of this episode, go here.

Don’t Call Me Resilient was produced in partnership with the Journalism Innovation Lab at UBC and with a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Living on the North Shore in Boston in the fall brings the gorgeous turning of the leaves and pumpkin patches. It is also a time for people to head to nearby Salem, Massachusetts, home of the 17th century infamous witch trials, and visit its popular museum.

Despite a troubled history, there are people today who consider themselves witches. Often, modern witches share their lore, craft and stories on TikTok and other social media platforms.

As a scholar who works on myth and poetry from ancient Greece – and as a native of New England – I have long been fascinated by the cultural conversations about witches. Witch trials in the Americas and Europe were in part about enforcing power structures and persecuting the weak. From ancient Greece through Puritan New England, witches functioned as easy targets for cultural anxieties about gender, power and mortality.

Ancient witches: gender and power

While modern witchcraft is inclusive of many different genders and identities, witches in ancient myth and literature were almost exclusively women. Their stories were in part about navigating gender roles and power in a patriarchal system.

Fear about women’s power was an essential part of ancient anxiety about witchcraft. This fear, moreover, relied on traditional expectations about the abilities innate to a person’s gender. As early as the creation narrative in Hesiod’s “Theogony” – a poem hailing from a poetic tradition between the eighth and fifth centuries B.C. – male gods like Cronus and Zeus were depicted with physical strength, while female figures were endowed with intelligence. In particular, women knew about the mysteries of childbirth and how to raise children.

In the basic framework of Greek myth, then, men were strong and women used intelligence and tricks to cope with their violence. This gendered difference in traits combined with ancient Greek views of bodies and aging. While women were seen to move through stages of life based on biology – childhood, adolescence via menstruation, childbearing and old age – the aging of men was connected to their relationship to women, particularly in getting married and having children.

Both Greek and Latin have a single word for man and husband – “aner” in Greek and “vir” in Latin. Socially and ritually, men were essentially seen as adolescents until they became husbands and fathers.

Female control over reproduction was symbolized as a kind of ability to control life and death. In ancient Greece, women were expected to bear all responsibilities during early child rearing. They also were the ones to exclusively take on special roles in mourning the dead. Suspicion, anxiety and fear about mortality were then put on to women in general.

Powerful women

This was true especially for women who did not fit into typical gendered roles like the virtuous bride, the good mother or the helpful old maid.

While ancient Greek does not have a word that directly translates as “witch,” it does have “pharmakis” (someone who gives out drugs or medicine), “aoidos” (singer, enchantress) and “graus” or “graia” (old woman). Of these names, graus is probably closest to later European stereotypes: the mysterious old woman who is not part of a traditional family structure.

Much like today, foreignness invited suspicion in the ancient world as well. Several of the characters who may qualify as mythical witches were women from distant lands. Medea, famous for killing her children when her husband, Jason, proposes marrying someone else in Euripides’ play, was a woman from the east, a foreigner who did not adhere to the expectations for a woman’s behavior in Greece.

She started her narrative as a princess who used concoctions and spells to help Jason. Her powers increased male virility and life.

Medea allegedly learned her magical craft from her aunt, Circe, who shows up in Homer’s “Odyssey.” She lived alone on an island, luring men to her cabin with seductive food and drink to turn them into animals. Odysseus defeated her with an antidote provided by the god Hermes. Once her magic failed, Circe believed she had no choice but to submit to Odysseus.

Witches over time

Elsewhere in the “Odyssey” there are similar themes: the Sirens who sing to Odysseus are enchantresses who try to take control of the hero. Earlier in the epic, the audience witnesses Helen, whose departure with the Trojan prince Paris was the cause of the Trojan War, add an Egyptian drug called nepenthe to the wine she gives to her husband, Menelaos, and Odysseus’ son, Telemachus. This wine was so strong, it made people forget about the pain of losing even a loved one.

In each of these cases, women who practice magic threaten to exert control over men with tools that can also be part of a pleasurable life: songs, sex and families. Other myths of monstrous women reinforce how misogynistic stereotypes animate these beliefs. The ancient figure Lamia, for example, was a once beautiful woman who stole and killed infants because her children had died.

Empousa was a vampiric creature who fed on the sex and blood of young men. Even Medusa, well-known as the snake-haired Gorgon who turned men to stone, was reported in some sources to have actually been a woman so beautiful that Perseus cut her head off to show it off to his friends.

These examples are from myth. There were many living traditions of women’s healing and song cultures that have been lost over time. Many academic authors have traced the modern practices of witchcraft to ancient cults and the survival of pagan traditions outside of mainstream Christianity. Recent studies of ancient magical practices show how widespread and varied they were.

While ancient women were likely subject to suspicion and slander for witchcraft, there is no evidence that they faced the kind of widespread persecution of witches that swept Europe and the Americas a few centuries ago. The later 20th century, however, saw renewed interest in witchcraft, often in concert with movements empowering women.

Modern witches are crossing international borders and learning from each other without leaving their homes by creating communities on social media, like TikTok. If fear about women’s power led to paranoia in the past, exploring and embracing witchcraft has become part of reclaiming women’s histories.

Joel Christensen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Rebranding programs have been asked to do a lot of things. But this Kat had never, until now, encountered a rebranding program whose goal is no less than to bring about fundamental culinary and ecological changes.

The feline species is not known for its aversion to enjoying fish at a meal. But even Kats may have their limits. Take the carp. There are few piscine varieties less liked at the dinner table than the carp. Compared with other types of fish that are bottom feeders, i.e., fish that tend to feed at the bottom of body of water (such as halibut, flounder, sole, cod, haddock, bass, and snapper), the carp's approval rating lies at the lowest trenches of popularity. Indeed, the carp has its own pejorative verb ("to carp", as in "to complain, often incessantly").

But what happens when the carp's low approval ratings run up against the reality of a variety that is considered nutritious, mild in taste, and delicate in texture, itself running up against ecologcal concerns fueled by the threat that the variety poses as an invasive species in important waterways in the US? The answer: rebrand the carp.

You may not like Norma Jeane Mortenson, but you love Marilyn Monroe. You may not like Archibald Alec Leach, but will love Cary Grant. You may not like Bernie Schwartz, but you will love Tony Curtis. You may not love Asian carp, but you will hopefully love copi (and will give the fish a try at your favorite restaurant, thereby preventing ecological disaster). There may be a lot to this change of name.

As for Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, and Tony Curtis, the rebranding resulted from the machinations of image-obsessed Hollywood. But for the Asian carp, the story, see The Economist here, was an ecological version of unintended consequences, good intentions gone awry. It turns out that there are several varieties of carp. The maligned variety is referred to as European carp, but there is also an Asian carp.

The latter found its way to the US in the 1970's as part of a plan to help clean acquafarms in the state of Arkansas, located in the south-central part of the US. The Asian carp has a prodigious talent for removing plankton and algae from the water. Score 1 for the Asian carp, even earning it the nickname –"filter feeders". All seemed well and good, until it wasn't.

The Asian carp was a resourceful creature, and took to traveling, reaching the Mississippi River. For anyone who has read Mark Twain (himself rebranded from Samuel Langhorne Clemens ), and even one who has not, it takes little imagination what happens when a fish makes its way to the Mississippi River (see map above) namely—it propagates and spreads the length of the waterway. In this case, the movement was northward reaching the State of Illinois and a tributary of the Mississippi River, the Illinois River.

The Asian carp also is a voracious eater, and it outcompeted other types of fish for food, leading to a reduction of fish ecological diversity. The score was now 1-1, with some dubious help from Charles Darwin, accompanied by the threat that the Asian carp would circumvent the waterways around Chicago and find its way into the Great Lakes, the greatest fresh water system in the world.

Dealing with the unwanted results of an invasive species is always a challenge. In the Asian carp situation , the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) came up in 2018 with a Hollywood solution—in the words of The Economist, it would "recast" the Asian carp. This recasting was done by a Chicago marketing company, Span Studio, which came up with a new name for the fish—"copi".

For Kat readers wondering whence the new name, it derives from "copious" (apparently referring to the fact that the Asian carp was over-thriving in the inland Illinois waterways—and then shortened and refashioned to convey a positive meaning). The Economist continued—

…the goal was to shed the fish's reputation as one only for adventurous eaters. Focus groups described copi as 'cute' and 'manageable'.

With the new name having been selected, the underlying goal of the State of Illinois was stated, here, namely—

…to make the fish sound more appealing, so people will eat it and stop the invasive species from further damaging Lake Michigan and other waterways.

Nothing modest about this: the rebranding is viewed as the linchpin to bringing about a fundamental ecological change. Thus--

'Enjoying Copi in a restaurant or at home is one of the easiest things people can do to help protect our waterways and Lake Michigan,' John Goss, former White House invasive carp adviser, said in a statement. 'As home to the largest continuous link between Lake Michigan and the Copi-filled Mississippi River system, Illinois has a unique responsibility in the battle to keep invasive carp out of the Great Lakes. I’m proud of Illinois, its partners and other states for rising to this challenge'.

See also choosecopi.com.

Apparently the idea is that by increasing consumption of copi-based food products (as the Director of the IDNR observed—"What diner won’t be intrigued when they read Copi tacos or Copi burgers on a menu?”), the number of copi fish in the river will decrease, resulting in a smaller population in the waterways, leading to more food for other fish, leading to greater fish diversity, and diminishing the likelihood that copi fish will enter the Great Lakes.

The story of the rebranded copi is notable for two reasons. First is the adoption of the new name that would fall under the category of fanciful within trademark parlance. More typical is the renaming of Patagonian toothfish as Chilean sea bass, although it is neither a bass (which is a fellow piscine bottom feeder) nor native to Chile. Deceptively misdescriptive, anyone?

Even the renaming of the slimehead fish to orange roughy was more a change of description and image that a fanciful remake of nomenclature. See here. To the contrary was the rebranding of the Asian carp to copi.

Second, this Kat does not remember a rebranding program that has ever been tasked with such ambitious goals—changing eating patterns and altering the ecological balance, at least of waterways in Illinois and the environs.

But let's start modestly—are there any Kat readers who have tasted the copi in whatever form? If so, is it, as claimed, a fish with a "mild, with a clean, light taste"?

Picture in center top is by Shannon 1 and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

Picture in center bottom is by Miyuki Meinaka and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Tampa is a city of film lovers, and a brand new microcinema in historic Ybor City has just debuted to bring beloved cult classics back to life. Screen Door is noted as Tampa’s first Microcinema, and it’s located in the Historic Kress building located at 1624 E. 7th Ave. 2nd Floor #228. This puts it on Ybor’s main corridor near spots such as Revolve Clothing Exchange, Blind Tiger, NYNY Pizza, and the main Centro area.

Screen Door debuted during Halloween Weekend in Ybor City and showcased top tier horror classics. This 38-seat cinema is for anyone looking to reengage with the titles that made them fall in love with the medium, or for anyone looking to dive deep beyond the Criterion Collection.

Here’s a quick look at the upcoming November film schedule:

• Thursday 11/10 Cracker Crazy: Invisible Histories of the Sunshine State (2007)
• Friday 11/11 Deathdream(1974)
• Saturday 11/12 My First Movie: Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket(1996)
• Sunday 11/13 One-Eyed Jacks(1961)
• Thursday 11/17 Home for the Holidays(1995)
• Friday 11/18 Haxan(1922) w/ live music accompaniment
• Saturday 11/19 Planes, Trains and Automobiles(1987)
• Sunday 11/20 Addams Family Values(1993)
• Friday 11/25 Black Christmas(1974)

You can keep up with the full film schedule by following Screen Door on Facebook.

What to read next

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The post Tampa’s first microcinema, Screen Door, enchants cinephiles in Historic Ybor City appeared first on That's So Tampa.