#Find Utrecht Editors

[utrechtcentral]

Suzanne van Leendert Utrecht Award Winner

Suzanne van Leendert is an award-winning documentary maker, a writer and an English interpreter. As a documentary maker she has worked as an executive producer and researcher for many award-winning documentaries. She also specialized in project financing and writing documentary plans. The last couple of years she started directing documentaries herself as well. Her documentary Broken Dreams won the Docfeed award for Best Dutch Documentary.

As a writer, she wrote two English books, The Peace Within, the story behind a CD from Barry McCabe, and Broken Dreams, a book that accompanied the documentary with the same name. Recently she started to write poetry as well in Dutch, winning twice at the ‘Parade der Poëten’ with poems about Utrecht cultural heritage sites. She also gives creative writing workshops. Did you study creative writing? No, I did not. However, I have written two books and I have worked for over 15 years as a translator, interpreter and a copy editor. I’ve always been very interested in languages and the different ways to tell a story; not only in writing but also in films and documentaries. I started to teach creative writing after the Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts asked me to teach a minor to their students, which was a great experience.

Do you have heroes or is your work unique? I work a lot with other people, which means that everybody’s ‘uniqueness’ is constantly being intertwined, which leads to inspiring projects. I really like collaborations, because it’s wonderful to share creativity with others. When I am making documentaries or when I am writing, I tend to focus on the fleeting nature of life – I hope that doesn’t sound too depressing - but there often is a melancholic feel to my work. I can’t deny that. By putting events and situations into words, I’m somehow able to get to grips with them. I’m also intrigued by life stories. Why does someone decide to take one road instead of the other? Or do nothing at all? And why do I do what I do? Those are questions that keep me busy. I think everyone has a story to tell, in one way or the other. In everyone, there’s something beautiful, touching, powerful; a story to be told. I don’t know if I really have any ‘heroes’ but Werner Herzog and Louis Theroux are very inspiring as documentary makers. Billy Collins is my favourite poet in English and Maud Vanhauwaert in Dutch. What piece of work are you most proud of? The Broken Dreams documentary and book (co-written with Barry McCabe) is still one of my favourite projects and something I’m quite proud of. For this documentary, we filmed in the Netherlands, France and the United States.

Broken Dreams is the life story of a unique airplane that was supposed to be used for a musical in the Netherlands. But everything turned out different than planned when a terrible accident took place.

This accident is used as a starting point for the plane herself to reflect upon her life and the part she played in history, as if she is an old lady telling her story to her grandchildren. The plane and the hours it has flown are used as a metaphor for a human life and all the experiences that are part of that life. Will there still be a future for this plane or has her story come to an end?

The Broken Dreams documentary DVD is in English, Dutch and French and the book is written in English. For more information about the project, you can go to: www.brokendreams.eu The first chapter of the book can be downloaded for free there as well.

Are you working on anything new? I’m currently working on three new documentaries but it’s too early to give more information as they are still in the development stages. Is Utrecht a particularly poetic city? Well, I believe you can find poetry in anything and everything, but it helps that Utrecht has such a rich history dating back to Roman times. In Utrecht you also literally walk on poetry. The Letters of Utrecht, set up by the Utrecht Guild of Poets, is an endless poem in the cobblestones of the Oudegracht in Utrecht. One character per stone, one stone per week. Every Saturday a stone mason turns the next stone into the next letter. As a starting poet, it’s inspiring to live in a city with an actual Guild of Poets. Which is your favourite media and why? Although I like my work as an interpreter a lot, it’s different when I’m able to create myself, able to create my own ‘content’. I don’t really have a favourite medium, it all depends on what works best for the project that I’m busy with at that moment. I do like cross-fertilizations, such as a documentary that is complemented with an exhibition or a book. Does Utrecht inspire you? Absolutely! There are so many beautiful historic buildings scattered throughout the city. The Dom is always impressive, no matter how many times you’ve seen it. It’s a very vibrant city and there are always lots of things to do. The fact that is a student city helps as well. Where is your favourite place in Utrecht? I like the Ledig Erf, because my favourite cinema, the Louis Hartlooper Complex, is there. Also, the Soestbergen cemetery is close by. When I made a documentary about cemeteries in Utrecht, called Zielen van Utrecht (Souls of Utrecht), I really got to know Soestbergen. It’s an oasis of peace within the hustle and bustle of the city. It’s a miniature ‘Père Lachaise’ where numerous famous people from Utrecht are buried; Gerrit Rietveld, Nicolaas Beets, Dirkje Kuik. Just walking around there, you can really unwind and - strangely enough in that surrounding - I feel myself become more alive, energized even.

What would be a perfect day in Utrecht for you? I’d start off with a visit to the Centraal Museum. After that, I’d grab something to eat somewhere alongside the canals, then shop in the many little shops and second-hand shops on the Oudegracht. Catching a film at the Louis Hartlooper Complex would finish the day off perfectly. Does Utrecht do enough for creative arts? I think in general Utrecht wants to give everyone a chance to be creative and to offer possibilities and opportunities to the arts. Of course, if you’re a little proactive you can always organise something yourself. Would you like to see more activities? I think Utrecht is already a very active city. It would be a very good thing if the city council continues to value its local artists and if that leads to even more activities, then all the better. Suzanne’s website is at: www.uandeyemedia.nl The website for Broken Dreams is: www.brokendreams.eu   Read the full article

#BrokenDreams #Literature #Netherlands #poetry #SoulsofUtrecht #SuzannevanLeendert #uandeyemedia #Utrecht #ZielenvanUtrecht

[wsmith215]

Coronavirus Antibody Therapies Raise Hopes–and Skepticism

Jill Horowitz stood outside the Quaker Ridge Shopping Center in New Rochelle, N.Y.—an early COVID-19 hotspot—in March, stopping shoppers as they walked into the grocery store. She handed them blue pamphlets soliciting volunteers for a Rockefeller University antibody research study. “I would say, ‘Would you like to help us find a cure?’” says Horowitz, executive director of strategic operations at Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Molecular Immunology. “I didn’t even have to mention coronavirus. This neighborhood was completely subsumed.”

Within weeks—and after receiving more than 2,000 phone calls from volunteers—the university had selected more than 100 participants who had recovered from COVID-19 or had come into contact with someone who had the disease, says Michel Nussenzweig, head of the laboratory. From participants’ blood samples, he and his team isolated more than a dozen potent antibodies that “neutralized,” or deactivated, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in a lab dish. The study is one of a growing number showing the body produces antibodies against this deadly disease. The findings suggest that therapies based on these proteins could be a promising approach. But experts caution that such therapies must clear several hurdles before they can be deployed against COVID-19.

Our body naturally produces antibodies to help us fight infections. Many researchers believe that by isolating antibodies from people who have recovered from COVID-19 and then artificially reproducing them, we can develop therapies that could minimize symptoms and speed recovery from the disease. Some of the same scientists are also eyeing the prophylactic use of copied antibodies to stave off an infection in those who have not contracted the new coronavirus. (Therapies based on these so-called monoclonal antibodies are different from convalescent plasma treatments, which have also made headlines recently. In the latter, plasma is taken from people who have recovered from COVID-19 and transfused directly into those who are infected. The jury is still out on whether convalescent plasma is truly effective against the disease.)

Historical precedent supports the use of antibody therapies: there are dozens of antibody-based drugs approved for various conditions in the U.S. or Europe, according to the Antibody Society, a nonprofit organization that tracks research on the proteins. These drugs are most commonly used to treat cancer and HIV infection, but a few have been utilized against respiratory infectious diseases. Notably, there is an antibody treatment that fights respiratory syncytial virus in children. And a more recent therapy that can help people with Ebola is now under review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The treatment, called REGN-EB3, consists of three antibodies and was tested in a study during the Ebola outbreak that began in 2018 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That investigation showed that REGN-EB3 reduced mortality rates. The therapy was created by the Tarrytown, N.Y.–based biotechnology company Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, which is currently working on an antibody treatment for COVID-19.

Christos Kyratsous, vice president of research on infectious diseases and viral vector technologies at Regeneron, and his colleagues started developing antibodies against COVID-19 in January, when the genetic sequence for the disease was released. Using antibodies from genetically humanized mice—which carry functioning human genes—and people, Kyratsous has created an antibody cocktail that is set to enter clinical trials as early as June, he says. (In comparison, Horowitz says Rockefeller’s antibodies could begin clinical trials by August or September.)

Meanwhile Vanderbilt University researchers have collected antibodies from about a dozen of the earliest people in the U.S. to be infected with, and to recover from, COVID-19, says Robert Carnahan, associate director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center, who is leading the effort alongside James Crowe, the center’s director. In a preprint paper, Carnahan, Crowe and their colleagues reported they found about 40 potent antibodies against the novel coronavirus. The researchers are now working with multiple partners, including the Cambridge, England–based company AstraZeneca. Some of these partners are hoping to begin clinical trials of therapies using these antibodies as soon as this summer, Carnahan says.*

The studies from Rockefeller, Regeneron and Vanderbilt are just three among dozens with the same aim: finding antibodies that can help battle COVID-19. In the Netherlands, Erasmus Medical Center biologist Frank Grosveld and a team of researchers at Utrecht University and Harbour BioMed have isolated one antibody, called 47d11, that neutralizes SARS-CoV-2 and could be “developed at large scale,” he says. San Diego–based Sorrento Therapeutics has announced test results in a press release for the antibody STI-1499, which it plans to develop into a therapy. Eli Lilly, AbCellera, Distributed Bio and many other companies are also working on COVID-19 antibody therapies.

Even the most promising candidates are unlikely to be available before late this year, however. Clinical trials for therapeutics are smaller and faster than those for prophylactic treatments, and the FDA will probably approve the former quickly because “therapy is a dire need right now,” Horowitz says. Even so, such approval is expected to be at least six months away, she notes.

That time line coincides with the most ambitious estimates for when a vaccine could be available. On May 18 the Cambridge, Mass.–based company Moderna announced results from a clinical trial of a COVID-19 vaccine in a press release. The phase I trial (an early human trial that tests for safety) found that eight participants developed antibodies against the disease, Moderna says. The company has yet to release the trial data, however, and some scientists urge caution.

Moderna’s vaccine is one of more than 100 currently under development. Some scientists—including the company’s chief medical officer Tal Zaks—predict a vaccine could be available for widespread use later this year or in early 2021.

“Once we have a vaccine, there’s probably not going to be a strong need for these therapeutics anymore,” says Florian Krammer, a microbiologist and infectious disease expert at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. But Michael Joyner, a physiologist who is leading the Mayo Clinic’s convalescent plasma project for COVID-19, says antibody therapies could be a reasonable stopgap until a vaccine is available. “If they work and are used intelligently, [such therapies] could put a finger in a number of holes in the dike,” he says.

Some scientists are also concerned that drug manufacturers may not have the capacity to produce antibody therapies. “Every factory that gets built has a reason,” Horowitz says. “And you can bet that all those factories are committed to [existing] drugs that we need.”

Both good will and pharmaceutical industry interest in antibodies are in high supply, however, she says. “There are some aspirational aspects of [antibody drug production],”  Horowitz admits, though the prospect is not out of the question. “I think everybody is stepping up to the plate.”

Another consideration is the fact that antibody therapies are most often given intravenously. It may be possible to deliver COVID-19 antibodies by injecting them under the skin, outside of a hospital setting. But Arthur Reingold, an epidemiologist and biostatistician at the University of California, Berkeley, warns that many low-income countries may not have the infrastructure in place to deliver such therapies via either route on a large scale. “These tend to be very expensive therapies,” he adds. Whereas vaccines can come with a two-digit out-of-pocket price tag for most consumers, antibody therapies can cost thousands of dollars, Reingold says.

These hurdles do not mean antibody therapies cannot aid in the fight against COVID-19. But the challenges should serve to temper our expectations, some experts say. “I think [researchers] should be careful about how they communicate and basically create hope in the population,” Krammer says. “I think it’s very dangerous to say, ‘Within [months], we will have [an] antibody therapeutic that works, and everybody will get it.’ That’s unrealistic.”

Read more about the coronavirus outbreak from Scientific American here. And read coverage from our international network of magazines here.

*Editor’s Note (5/29/20): This sentence was edited after posting at Robert Carnahan’s request. The revision clarifies his comments about the time line for clinical trials of antibody therapies he is developing with AstraZeneca and other partners.

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#Health Report

[t-baba]

Microsoft unveils first Chromium-based Edge builds

#386 — April 10, 2019

Read on the Web

Frontend Focus

(Image: Microsoft)

Microsoft Edge Preview Builds: The Next Step in Our OSS Journey — The first Canary and Developer builds of the new Edge (based on Google’s Chromium open source project) are now available to download on Windows 10 PCs. A Mac version is to follow.

Joe Belfiore (Microsoft)

Native Image Lazy-Loading for The Web: How loading Works — A look at the new loading attribute which brings native <img> and <iframe> lazy-loading to the web. Support for this is expected in Chrome 75.

Addy Osmani

New Course: TypeScript 3 Fundamentals — 🏎💨 TypeScript adoption has grown at an astounding rate. TypeScript allows you to catch bugs before they happen, and collaborate with your team more effectively by documenting your code.

Frontend Masters sponsor

How We Used WebAssembly to Speed Up Our Webapp by 20X — A case study exploring how to speed up web apps by replacing slow JavaScript calculations with compiled WebAssembly.

Robert Aboukhalil

Launching the Front-End Tooling Survey 2019 — Each year we link to this popular front-end developer survey as the results are pretty interesting. Take part to help us all find out how our collective front-end tooling habits are changing. There’s a recap of last year’s results here too.

Ashley Watson-Nolan

Digging Into The Display Property: The Two Values Of Display — Rachel Andrew takes a detailed look at Flexbox and CSS Grid Layout, two layout methods that are “essentially values of the CSS display property”.

Smashing Magazine

Chrome to Warn Users About Sensor Access — Until now, accessing light and motion sensors from Web pages has been easy and transparent, but Chrome Canary is now beginning to warn users.

Owen Williams on Twitter

Opera Introduces 'Reborn 3' Browser

Joanna Czajka

💻 Jobs

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📘 Articles, Tutorials & Opinion

How to Create Clipped, Blurred Background Images in CSS — How to apply blur effects to images using CSS filters, and how to confine these effects to specific image areas.

Sebastiano Guerriero

Chrome 74's prefers-reduced-motion Media Query — The prefers-reduced-motion media query detects whether the user has requested that the system minimize the amount of animation or motion it uses which then lets you take this into account in your CSS.

Thomas Steiner

Building A Dependency-Free Site in 2019 — Rebuilding a personal site using nothing but HTML and CSS — “It’s quite something when building a website using the most basic technologies imaginable has somehow become revolutionary”.

Michelle Barker

▶  How to Work With the Raw HTML for Emails You Receive — Receive an email and want to see the HTML? Here’s how, and how to convert the raw format into HTML you can edit in your own editor.

Peter Cooper

Accessibility for Vestibular Disorders: How My Temporary Disability Changed My Perspective — A temporary disability changed Facundo Corradini’s perspective on accessibility testing. He shares the impact.

A List Apart

Get the Fastest Website Deployments. Ever. — Learn the most effective way to build better apps faster.

Buddy sponsor

The Importance of Readability on the Web

Joanna Ngai

The Hidden Power of CSS Text Align

Ahmad Shadeed

🔧 Code and Tools

html2canvas: A JavaScript HTML Renderer — Take screenshots of pages or elements of pages and render them to canvas. The first release (a release candidate of v1.0) in over a year is just out. There’s also a live demo on its homepage.

Niklas von Hertzen

DropCSS: A Simple and Fast 'Unused CSS' Cleaner — We linked this two weeks ago but version 1.0 has since dropped.

Leon Sorokin

WordPressify: A Modern Workflow for WordPress Development — ..with integrated web server, auto-reload and style pre-processors. ES6 ready.

WordPressify

Shop Like a Developer – Discover and Experiment with Hot New Cloud Services 🔥

Manifold sponsor

Mouthful: Generate a Concatenated File of All CSS Used on a Given Site — It’s pretty neat just how short the code is for doing this.

Mikael Åsbjørnsson-Stensland

VexChords: JavaScript Guitar Chord Renderer — It’s niche, but well executed.

Mohit Muthanna Cheppudira

   🗓 Upcoming Events

IMAGECON, May 1–2 – San Francisco, CA — A two-day conference with a dozen workshops and seven speakers focused on all things images on the web.

CityJS Conference, May 3 — London, UK — Meet local and international speakers and share your experiences with modern JavaScript development.

Frontend United, May 16-18 — Utrecht, Netherlands — A yearly, non-profit, developer-first, community-focused conference.

CSSCamp 2019, July 17 — Barcelona, Catalunya — A one-day, one-track conference for web designers and developers.

by via Frontend Focus http://bit.ly/2P17DoY

#HTML5 Branding #HTML5 Weekly

[globalsource-blog]

Easter Bike Trip Disposables

At long last, some decent pictures of the Global Source Easter Getaway 2017. These were all taken on a trusty plastic disposable camera, which was mostly in the capable hands of Arthur Delamare. Hopefully these give more of a sense of the day-to-day vibe of the trip, they certainly bring back a lot of joyful memories for the three of us. The captions are taken from Stan’s daily notes which he kept on his phone, and which are a shining example of clear and concise expression. In my mind, they read like impressionist poetry. Enjoy.

Rotterdam journey rainy

 Through to Gouda chilled on sandy benches

Utrecht banging except miss piggy bit me 

Through to woods nice cous cous couple beers

Misty morning went amersfoort 

Sun sun sun gnome forest

Bit off road into appledoorn popped tire crashed with Harrison and sorted out by nice man

Camping with storks about and watching sunset

Deventer start soaking feet 

Reilte ate noodles played in park sun comes out 

Cycle 2 national parks great fields

Trampolines then wafers watching an eagle

Get across German border into Nordhorn

 Lidl then cheese sandwiches 

Camping in some woods by motorways

Woods wake up

 Long trip to Rheine lollipops in bad bentheim 

Caravans not meths

 Mozzarella sarnies and sorting Del's bike 

Down the river to Raalte finally found meths and twixes in German poundland

Full circle then google took us through farm lands

Down the river to Bramsche stock up at Aldi

Great food good beer and lakeside camping

Strawberries, sarnies and spirits for breakfast

Out by 10, 70 to Minden by 2 stopping to sort wheels and go fast

CcCooked lunch in woods with good slide

Nearly became roadkill trying to get to Hanover

Free plowin for farmer then bike paths to Bad Nenndorf

Vending machine eggs, Arthur needs a toilet break

Camping in park great food again [editor’s note - we ate at least a two-course meal that I prepared using a Trangia camp stove almost every night]

Slow start in Bad Nenndorf

Jelly legs and half a bottle of whiskey mean ing don’t leave till 11

Meet Elka the lovely chopping wood sorted us out with non alcoholic beers and plenty cookies

On to Hanover charged phones and chilled afternoon

Smashed 50k through to Eltze

Stop for first fast food in Turkish takeaway

Falafel chips and beers along with bottle of martini on the house for warmth great guys

Puncture in the dark on the way to find camp spot so stop in trees next to motorway

Wake up go fast

Smash it to Wolfsburgh big industrial city

Home of Volkswagen

Wrong turn down a canal leads us into the marshes otters about

Over the river Elbe and camp in more woods next to motorway

Sleep in then quick pack up and go Rathenow

Cycle through Berlin border

Still 10 miles to go

Arrive at Andy’s

Showers pizza sleep

Berlin

#global source #travel #cycling #disposables #fundraising #berlin #ishootfilm #fresh eggs

[catsbeforelads]

I was tagged by @whendoiturnbackintoapumpkin! :)

Five things you’ll find in my bag: - mints because I don’t want my breath to smell like shit when I talk to people - a GroenLinks pen (GroenLinks is like the Dutch Green Party) - earbuds because I want to be able to listen to music at all times - my phone - receipts n shit because I always just stuff them in my bag and never bother to take them out

Five things you’ll find in my bedroom: - my bed??? - shitloads of books that I either got from a friend or bought at a thrift store and that I want to read but haven’t yet because I am too fuckin lazy and also too busy to do so - a painting that a friend gave to me - dirty clothes scattered all over the floor - a guitar Five things I’ve wanted to do in life: - be a good person - travel on my own - go to a lot of concerts/festivals - learn about new things and broaden my horizon - have a pet cow because I love cows

Five things that make me happy: - meaningful conversations with people whom I respect and whose opinion I value - cats - music - when people message me first - having no obligations and being alone so I can do whatever I want Five things I’m currently into: - American Horror Story. I’ve watched Asylum and am currently watching Hotel. - I really love the album ‘Brightly Painted One’ by Tiny Ruins and I’ve been listening to it a lot in the car lately. I’ve known and loved this album for over a year but every time I listen to it I love it a little more. - I’ve been reading more articles lately, I guess I’m into being informed? - wearing flannel lmao - buying organic products even though they’re expensive as hell Five things on my to-do list: - forward an email to my editor - bake a cake for my grandmother's birthday - wash my hair because that shit is greasy as fuck - clean my room but idk if that counts because that has literally been on my to-do list for months - go to the supermarket to get groceries Five things people may not know about me: - I work for a local newspaper - I am probably going to study in Utrecht - we have a total of 9 cats at home - I am a vegetarian and have been since I was like 7 or something (it was my own choice and I convinced my mother and grandmother to stop eating meat as well) - I have blue/greenish eyes

I’m tagging: @moonecoon @roslin @shirazqueen

#tag thingy

[daily-snitch]

The Daily Snitch - Weekend Edition, February 19, 2017

Joanne K. Rowling: • Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: 20th Anniversary to be celebrated at London Book Screen Week. • Harry Potter: The Exhibition comes to CineMec Utrecht from February 11 to June 30. Harry Potter – Actors and Movies: • Happy Belated Birthday to Bonnie Wright! (Ginny Weasley). • Robert Pattinson (Cedric Diggory) and cast talk about filming 'The Lost City of Z'. • Gary Oldman (Sirius Black): first posted unveiled for upcoming action thriller 'Hunter Killer'. • Warwick Davis (Professor Flitwick) visits Lumos Programmes in Moldavia. • Emma Watson (Hermione Granger) on the importance of Hermione as a female role model and superhero. • Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy) speculates about Lucius Malfoy's future after the war. • David Tennant (Barty Crouch Jr.) talks about the final season of 'Broadchurch'. • Emma Thompson (Professor Trelawney) talks about shooting the WWII movie 'Alone in Berlin'. • David Thewlis (Remus Lupin) stars as Ares, god of war, in the upcoming DC superhero franchise 'Wonder Woman'. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: • Broadway 'Cursed Child' auditions are scheduled for this upcoming week in New York. • HP and the Cursed Child won 8 What'sOnStage Awards, among them Best New Play, Best Direction, and Best Set Design. Fantastic Beasts And Where to Find Them – Movies and Actors: • Dan Folger (Jacob Kowalski) and Alison Sudol (Queenie Greengrass) hosts podcast to talk about "all manner of stories from set and the story"(free on iTunes). Prompt Challenges: • There's a new challenge at the HPFT Archive: The Mythical Challenge. (Challenge ends April 25) • hogwarts365 posted Prompt #180 (due on or before February 25): Do opposites really attract?, Desire/Erised and Enervate or Rennervate. • hp_humpdrabbles posted last week's drabble and the prompts for this week: 1. Fuzzy handcuffs (image), 2.Hot wax (image NSFW), and 3. Gryffindor Quidditch boys. Communities: • The Valentine's Day Comment Fest at hp_unfaithful will wrap up today • hp_3somes announced that Sign-ups for the 2017 Fest are open. • The If The Prompt Fits-challenge at Hawthorne & Vine has started. • lupin_snape has been collecting Romantic Wolfstar Recs since Valentine's Day. • ron_draco_fest posted a Reminder that submissions are past due! (for all who have not yet submitted) • hd_owlpost made a Mod Post: Apology and Stats. Masterlists and Weekly Round-ups: • hd_owlpost posted the Masterlist of All Owl Gifts 2016. • hogwarts365 posted the Prompt #179 Masterlist. Editor's Choice Rec: • Nerds by @upthehillart (Draco/Hermione; G; art) Fandom Recs: • capitu recced a Harry/Draco fic (NC-17). • fangqueen recced an Oliver Wood/Marcus Flint/Draco Malfoy fic (NC-17). • potteresque_ire recced a Harry/Draco fic and a H/D German translation (R and NC-17). • snowgall recced 6 Harry/Draco fics (3 x NC-17, 1 x R, 2 x PG) from hd_owlpost Fest. • toblass recced fanartist Joeyv7 (four pieces of art). • themightyflynn recced a Snape/Harry fic (NC-17). Searches: • daily_snitch is looking for your recs (fic, art, podfic, meta ...) for the Special Edition: Roxanne Weasley. Resources: • Schedule of Upcoming Events from February 19 to 25 at potterfests. • The SS/HP Prophet from February 12 to 18. Essay/Meta: • The Importance of Being Granger by Holly from Mugglenet. • John Granger wrote Harry Potter and Lolita: J. K. Rowling’s ‘Relationship’ with Vladimir Nabokov (Names, Politics, Alchemy, and Parody). (www.hogwartsprofessor.com) Community Spotlight: ♥ quibbler_report – a rarepair and genfic resource A "recsletter" specializing in reccing rare pairs and gen fic. A rarepair is defined "as a pairing that is unusual, unconventional, or has a significant lack of fanfic or art dedicated to it." The list of current rarepairs can be found on the profile page of the quibbler_report. Each edition features the categories "Crumple-Horned Snorkacks (Fics)", "Blibbering Humdingers (Art), and "Thestrals (Challenges, Communities and Discussion)". Please send your fandom news to the Daily Snitch.

#hp fandom #hp fandom news #hp fandom newsletter #hp fandom recs #hp news #quibbler report

[riffrelevant]

Article By: Leanne Ridgeway, Owner/Editor

On September 25th, THE OCEAN will release their eighth full-length, ‘Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic‘, via Metal Blade Records (CD / digital) and the band’s own Pelagic Records (vinyl). In 2018, THE OCEAN released ‘Phanerozoic I: Palaeozoic‘ – the first half of a sprawling, but superbly cohesive paleontology concept album. Now, the group is ready to release the eagerly-awaited concluding parts of the Phanerozoic journey.

For a preview of ‘Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic‘, a video for the new single “Oligocene” (filmed by band members Loic Rossetti, David Ahfeldt, and Robin Staps, plus edited and animated by Craig Murray) can be viewed at the end of this article. The video was shot in the Aragats mountains in Armenia, during the band’s “Siberian Traps” tour in the summer of 2019, which brought them to Russia, Kazachstan, Armenia, Georgia, and Japan.

“We found this place by accident: the dilapidated ruins of a soviet observatory & research station for cosmic radiation,” comments guitarist and founding member Robin Staps. “The building itself looked like a spaceship that had crash-landed up high in the mountains, but there were lots of interesting structures scattered across the landscape: concrete cubes, underground tunnels, rusted machinery, fallen power poles and watchtowers. It all looked like taken straight out of Andrej Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’ movie,” concludes Staps, referring to the ingenious classic that was also the backbone of The Ocean’s 2013 album ‘Pelagial‘.

The instrumental track was written by drummer Paul Seidel, but recorded with synth player Peter Voigtmann on drums. It serves as a transitional track from the busy and heavy first half of the record (Mesozoic) into the more relaxed, spacious and cold ambient vibes prevailing on the second half of the record (Cenozoic). For a preview of the ‘Mesozoic‘ part of the album, the previously released track, “Jurassic | Cretaceous” (featuring Katatonia’s Jonas Renkse), can also be heard below in audio via Bandcamp, along with pre-ordering options for ‘Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic‘.

  Tracklist:

01. Triassic 02. Jurassic | Cretaceous 03. Palaeocene 04. Eocene 05. Oligocene 06. Miocene | Pliocene 07. Pleistocene 08. Holocene

Widely hailed as their finest work to date, ‘Phanerozoic I‘ brimmed with moments of wide-eyed melodic brilliance, alongside the expected warping and weaving of post-metal conventions. “The first part of ‘Phanerozoic’ really is a ‘no-regrets’ album, which is quite rare,” says guitarist Robin Staps. “Maybe even the first time I can ever say that.“

In contrast with the compositional directness of ‘Phanerozoic I‘, the new album – ‘Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic‘ – is a vastly more progressive and perverse piece of work. “‘Phanerozoic II’ is more experimental, more eclectic in musical style and direction, and more varied in terms of tempos, beats, guitar work and the use of electronics,” notes Staps. “This was an intentional choice: we wanted Part I to feel rather streamlined and to have a strong cohesion between the individual songs. We wanted to create a certain vibe to linger from the first until the last note throughout the whole record. We kept the weirder, more daring and more progressive material for Part II.“

Tracked in Iceland, Spain, and Germany and produced by esteemed studio guru Jens Bogren, ‘Phanerozoic II‘ is underpinned by some of the most imaginative and challenging music that THE OCEAN – completed by drummer Paul Seidel, keyboard maestro Peter Voigtmann, bassist Mattias Hagerstrand, and guitarist David Ramis Åhfeldt – have made yet. Divided into two sections – Mesozoic and Cenozoic – the album once again showcases the detail and depth that have become two of THE OCEAN‘s most enduring trademarks. While ostensibly delving into the extraordinary realities of the Earth’s shifting temporal tides, Staps and his comrades have long drawn hazy parallels between their chosen subjects and the emotional experiences that their music strives to convey. ‘Phanerozoic II‘ is essentially an album about time, with some very poignant and pointed allusions to the modern world woven into the new music’s spiritual fabric.

Staps explains, “The outcome is a record that is a real journey. It starts in one place, and concludes in a totally different place. In a way, it relates to 2013’s ‘Pelagial’, which was similar in that it was also a journey: but a more guided, focused and predictable one. ‘Phanerozoic II’ on the other hand is closer to the experience of free fall.“

  #gallery-0-3 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-3 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 50%; } #gallery-0-3 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-3 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

– deluxe edition CD (tri-fold digipak) – instrumental CD (remus spine digipak w/ UV gloss) – box set completion (both vocal and instrumental versions) bundles * exclusive vinyl and various bundles with shirts and merch items, plus digital options also available

Pre-order various options [link]. 

THE OCEAN:

Loic Rossetti David Ahfeldt Robin Staps Paul Seidel Peter Voigtmann Mattias Hagerstrand

Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | Website | Spotify | YouTube | Bandcamp

Also find THE OCEAN 2021 tour information below the video for “Oligocene“.

        The Ocean Tour Dates 2021

w/ pg.lost, Hypno5e, Svalbard

“This tour has been planned for a long time already and despite the unprecedented situation we’re all currently going through, we decided to announce it and put tickets on sale. We hope that this will serve as a strong positive statement for bands, promoters and music fans alike.

As this develops, we have to assess, analyse and make the right decisions for everyone involved. The tour going ahead in early 2021 relies on many elements to fall into place, and if it can’t go ahead, then we have a backup routing in place already for later in the year, and all tickets purchased for this tour will be transferrable to that.

Be assured that we will keep assessing this situation as we head later into 2020, and be in communication with everyone. Much love and we hope to see you guys out there in January!”

Jan. 7 – Wiesbaden, Germany – Schlachthof Jan. 8 – Colmar, France – Grillen Jan. 9 – Paris, France – La Machine Jan. 10 – Nantes, France – Ferrailleur Jan. 11 – Toulouse, France – Le Rex Jan. 12 – Bilbao, Spain – Stage Live Jan. 13 – Lisbon, Portugal – LAV Jan. 14 – Madrid, Spain – Caracol Jan. 15 – Murcia, Spain – Gamma Jan. 16 – Barcelona, Spain – Boveda Jan. 17 – Bordeaux, France – Krakatoa Jan. 18 – Lyon, France – CCO Jan. 19 – Fribourg, Switzerland – Fri-Son Jan. 20 – Lucerne, Switzerland – Sedel Jan. 21 – Vienna, Austria – Viper Room Jan. 22 – Prague, Czech Republic – Nova Chelmnice Jan. 23 – Berlin, Germany – Festsaal Jan. 25 – Copenhagen, Denmark – Pumpehuset Jan. 26 – Hamburg, Germany – Bahnhof Pauli Jan. 27 – Leipzig, Germany – Conne Island Jan. 28 – Munich, Germany – Backstage Jan. 29 – Essen, Germany – Zeche Carl Jan. 30 – Osnabruck, Germany – Kleine Freiheit Jan. 31 – Zwolle, Netherlands – Hedon Feb. 01 – Cologne, Germany – Volta Feb. 02 – Brussels, Belgium – Botanique Feb. 03 – Utrecht, Netherlands – De Helling Feb. 04 – Bristol, UK – The Fleece Feb. 05 – Glasgow, UK – Slay Feb. 06 – Manchester, UK – Club Academy Feb. 07 – London, UK – 229 Feb. 08 – Brighton, UK – Patterns

Tickets: https://bit.ly/theoceanEU2021tickets

  THE OCEAN Share “Oligocene” Video From Upcoming ‘Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic’ Album Article By: Leanne Ridgeway, Owner/Editor On September 25th, THE OCEAN will release their eighth full-length, '

#2020 #Audio Stream #Bandcamp #Cover Art #Metal #Metal Blade Records #Official Video #Post-Metal #The Ocean #Tour Dates #Video Stream #YouTube

[biofunmy]

M.R.I.s Can Better Detect Cancer in Women With Dense Breasts, Study Finds

“The ultimate test of the value of M.R.I. screening” in these women will be “whether it improves survival — an answer that we will not have for a very long time,” cautioned Dr. Dan L. Longo, a deputy editor of the New England Journal and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, in an editorial accompanying the study.

For all the promise, there is also a downside to using M.R.I.s for breast cancer screening: They yield many false positive results that lead to unnecessary biopsies, and they can detect very early stage tumors that might never become life-threatening, said Carla van Gils, senior author of the study and a professor of clinical epidemiology at University Medical Center Utrecht.

Nevertheless, Dr. van Gils said, the significant reduction in interval cancers — cancers that are diagnosed after a negative mammogram — suggests supplementary M.R.I.s may be a lifesaving tool for women with dense breasts.

“It’s not the same as mortality, but it’s the first step. It’s a prerequisite,” she said, adding that the study is ongoing, and mathematical models will be run to make further predictions about mortality and overdiagnosis. “There are more questions that need to be answered.”

[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]

Only about 10 percent of women have extremely dense tissue like the women in the Dutch study. But having dense breast tissue generally makes it harder to see tumors on a mammogram because both the dense tissue and the tumors show up white on an X-ray. Fat, on the other hand, shows up black, so tumors are easily seen.

The Dutch study, called DENSE (Dense Tissue and Early Breast Neoplasm Screening), is a multi-center, randomized controlled trial of 40,373 women between the ages of 50 and 75 in the Netherlands, all of whom have extremely dense breast tissue and had a normal screening mammogram. Scientists randomly invited 8,061 of the women to undergo a supplemental M.R.I., while the remaining 32,312 had only the mammography.

Though only 59 percent of the women invited to have an M.R.I. accepted the offer and had the additional screening, 16.5 additional cancers were detected for every 1,000 women who had an M.R.I.

Sahred From Source link Health

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#IFTTT #WordPress

[jeki2011-blog]

Let’s move beyond the rhetoric: it’s time to change how we judge research

Stephen Curry

Declarations are bound to fall short. The 240-year-old United States Declaration of Independence holds it self-evident that “all men [sic] are created equal”, but equality remains a far-off dream for many Americans.

The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is much younger, but similarly idealistic. Conceived by a group of journal editors and publishers at a meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) in December 2012, it proclaims a pressing need to improve how scientific research is evaluated, and asks scientists, funders, institutions and publishers to forswear using journal impact factors (JIFs) to judge individual researchers.

DORA’s aim is a world in which the content of a research paper matters more than the impact factor of the journal in which it appears. Thousands of individuals and hundreds of research organizations now agree and have signed up. Momentum is building, particularly in the United Kingdom, where the number of university signatories has trebled in the past two years. This week, all seven UK research councils announced their support.

Impact factors were never meant to be a metric for individual papers, let alone individual people. They’re an average of the skewed distribution of citations accumulated by papers in a given journal over two years. Not only do these averages hide huge variations between papers in the same journal, but citations are imperfect measures of quality and influence. High-impact-factor journals may publish a lot of top-notch science, but we should not outsource evaluation of individual researchers and their outputs to seductive journal metrics.

Most agree that yoking career rewards to JIFs is distorting science. Yet the practice seems impossible to root out. In China, for example, many universities pay impact-factor-related bonuses, inspired by unwritten norms of the West. Scientists in parts of Eastern Europe cling to impact factors as a crude bulwark against cronyism. More worryingly, processes for JIF-free assessment have yet to gain credibility even at some institutions that have signed DORA. Stories percolate of research managers demanding high impact factors. Job and grant applicants feel that they can’t compete unless they publish in prominent journals. All are fearful of shrugging off the familiar harness.

So, DORA’s job now is to accelerate the change it called for. I feel the need for change whenever I meet postdocs. Their curiosity about the world and determination to improve it burns bright. But their desires to pursue the most fascinating and most impactful questions are subverted by our systems of evaluation. As they apply for their first permanent positions, they are already calculating how to manoeuvre within the JIF-dependent managerialism of modern science.

There have been many calls for something better, including the Leiden Manifesto and the UK report ‘The Metric Tide’, both released in 2015. Like DORA, these have changed the tenor of discussions around researcher assessment and paved the way for change.

It is time to shift from making declarations to finding solutions. With the support of the ASCB, Cancer Research UK, the European Molecular Biology Organization, the biomedical funder the Wellcome Trust and the publishers the Company of Biologists, eLife, F1000, Hindawi and PLOS, DORA has hired a full-time community manager and revamped its steering committee, which I head. We are committed to getting on with the job.

Our goal is to discover and disseminate examples of good practice, and to boost the profile of assessment reform. We will do that at conferences and in online discussions; we will also establish regional nodes across the world, run by volunteers who will work to identify and address local issues.

This week, for example, DORA is participating in a workshop at which the Forum for Responsible Metrics — an expert group established following the release of ‘The Metric Tide’ — will present results of the first UK-wide survey of research assessment. This will bring broader exposure to what universities are thinking and doing, and put the spotlight on instances of good and bad practice.

We have to get beyond complaining, to find robust, efficient and bias-free assessment methods. Right now, there are few compelling options. I favour concise one- or two-page ‘bio-sketches’, similar to those rolled out in 2016 by the University Medical Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands. These let researchers summarize their most important research contributions, plus mentoring, societal engagement and other valuable activities. This approach could have flaws. Perhaps it gives too much leeway for ‘spin.’ But, as scientists, surely we can agree that it’s worth doing the experiment to properly evaluate evaluation.

This is hard stuff: we need frank discussions that grind through details, with researchers themselves, to find out what works and to forestall problems. We need to be mindful of the damage wrought to the careers of women and minorities by bias in peer review and in subjective evaluations. And we need to join in with parallel moves towards open research, data and code sharing, and the proper recognition of scientific reproducibility.

Declarations such as DORA are important; credible alternatives to the status quo are more so. True success will mean every institution, everywhere in the world, bragging about the quality of their research-assessment procedures, rather than the size of their impact factors.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01642-w

[free-mormons-blog]

Foreword -- Mormonism and Early Christianity -- HUGH NIBLEY 1987

Foreword

Todd M. Compton

In 1978, Hugh Nibley wrote, after referring to Brigham Young University’s 1951 acquisition of the Greek and Latin Patrologiae, “here indeed was a treasure trove of hints. . . . At last we had something to work with in the Patrologiae.”1 Nibley has turned his scholarly attention in many directions throughout his career. He has dealt with Book of Mormon studies, LDS church history, Enoch, Abraham, Egyptology and the Book of Abraham, Jewish pseudepigrapha, the symbolism of statecraft and cosmology, Brigham Young, and the temple endowment. But from the outset of his career, he has been centrally concerned with primitive Christianity,2 especially the shadowy era between the New Testament era proper and the emergence and triumph of the Catholic Church and Holy Roman Empire. In those early centuries of persecution, unrest, syncretism, uncertainty, and heresy, the Christian church eventually took strong steps to effect doctrinal and administrative unity. While Christian historians have traditionally described this as a victory,3 Nibley, in the important series of articles contained in this book, has instead concentrated on what may have been lost in the transition from the New Testament church to the Christianity of Constantine’s era and beyond. While this perspective may not be immediately popular in all circles, everyone should agree that it is a valid, even necessary, avenue of inquiry.

A number of themes that Nibley has focused on in these essays anticipated and received support from later scholarship. For instance, Nibley has frequently emphasized the importance of secrecy in early Christianity, showing that there were levels of esoteric and exoteric doctrine and ritual in the structure of the New Testament church.4 A recent collection of essays entitled Secrecy in Religions5 has shown that secrecy is an important component in all religions. Speaking of Christianity specifically, Kees Bolle, the editor of that volume, writes, “It does not take much of an effort to find examples for the notion of secrecy in Christianity, and the examples do not occur on the fringes of the doctrine of God’s revelation; rather they point to the center.” 6 Nibley’s treatment of secrecy in early Christianity is valuable and persuasive.

Another issue that these essays are centrally concerned with, and that has been widely discussed in recent years, is orthodoxy and heresy in the Christianity that immediately followed apostolic Christianity.7 Faced with the challenge of a Hellenized, ascetic Gnostic Christianity, how much did the more centralized and originally Judaic Christianity become like its enemy in order to compete? The very idea of a centralized Christianity has given way to a picture of early Christianity diverse and fragmented, where it is hard to define what is orthodox and what is heretical, what is Gnostic and what is “mainstream.” For instance, William Phipps has recently argued that Augustine’s influential doctrine of original sin derived from his Gnostic background and was, in reality, heretical, while Pelagius’ opposition to the idea was orthodox. But it was Augustine’s doctrine that won the day historically and has continued to influence Western theology and culture.8

One of the most remarkable things about these essays—”The Passing of the Primitive Church,” “The Forty-day Mission of Christ,” “Christian Envy of the Temple,” and “Jerusalem in Early Christianity”—is that they were published in non-Mormon scholarly publications. Instead of being content to write only for a sympathetic if occasionally uncritical Mormon audience, Nibley subjected these essays to the scrutiny of non-Mormon editors and scholars in leading, influential journals (and one of the articles, “The Passing of the Primitive Church,” spurred a brief, interesting debate in the pages of Church History).9 In doing this, Nibley has set a valuable example for other Mormon scholars; such publication in non-Mormon journals enables a dialogue to be opened up between Mormon and non-Mormon scholars, and it will encourage Mormon scholarship to measure up to the highest possible standards of historical inquiry.

In other important essays in this book—”What is a Temple?” “Baptism for the Dead in Ancient Times,” “The Early Christian Prayer Circle”—Nibley turns to another persistent concern in his writing—the temple and temple ritual. However we interpret the details of these articles (along with “Christian Envy of the Temple”), they show clearly that the earliest Christianity had strong ties to the temple, and that the earliest Christians had rituals that did not survive in subsequent Christianity, just as the Jerusalem temple did not survive. For instance, some important scholars have recently treated baptism for the dead as an authentic, if enigmatic, ritual of the earliest Christians. Wayne Meeks, in a widely respected book on the church in Paul’s era, The First Urban Christians, describes baptism for the dead as “mystifying” but includes it in his section on ritual in the early Christian church.10 Another commentator, Grosheide, is puzzled by the ritual but concludes that Paul could not have disapproved of the ritual if he used it as support for the resurrection of the dead.11

These essays and the others in this book are pioneering works, sharing both the virtues and the drawbacks of the pioneering vision. Nibley is the first to agree that they do not contain the final word on their subjects; they await further revision and refinement in the wake of new evidence and thought. We will be sifting for years through the sources that Professor Nibley has viewed from a Mormon perspective for the first time. As we evaluate and re-evaluate these important primary sources, we should remember that Dr. Nibley has continually described scholarship not as final and absolute proof, but as open-ended discussion. 12 Many of the conclusions and arguments in these articles will stand in future scholarship; others will be discarded. But Hugh Nibley’s work has laid the foundation for all further discussion. These studies are an inspiring invitation to learning and thought and scholarly inquiry; they will deepen our interest in and our understanding of the apostolic church, and the church in the troubled centuries that immediately followed New Testament times.

I have edited “The Passing of the Primitive Church,” “Evangelium Quadraginta Dierum: The Forty-day Mission of Christ—The Forgotten Heritage,” “Christian Envy of the Temple,” “The Way of the Church,” and “The Early Christian Prayer Circle.” The rest of the essays in this book have been edited under the direction of Stephen Ricks. I have, on the whole, merely checked footnotes, leaving the text untouched except where a direct quotation was involved, sometimes tightening up the citation or adding bibliographic data. On occasion, I have disagreed with the conclusions Nibley has drawn from his evidence, but this is only to be expected when two opinionated readers examine the same material. Readers interested in exploring Nibley’s sources will find translations of many of them in two series, The Ante-Nicene Fathers and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. A supplemental volume of Ante-Nicene Fathers (volume 9) contains a valuable bibliography that also serves as a table of contents for the series. Other works can be found translated in the series The Fathers of the Church (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, starting 1947), and in Ancient Christian Writers (Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, starting 1961). The original Greek and Latin texts of these writings can be found in the two extensive series of books, Patrologiae Graecae and Patrologiae Latinae, both edited under the direction of Jacques-Paul Migne. Many of these same writings, in vastly improved editions, can be found in the series Corpus Christianorum (CC) and Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL). An indispensable guide to editions and translations of the early Fathers is Johannes Quasten’s Patrology (Utrecht: Spectrum, 1950), in four volumes; see also Berthold Altaner, Patrologie, 5th ed., (Freiburg: Herder, 1958), and Clavis Patrum Graecorum (Turkhout: Brepols 1983; in CC), four volumes.

The Christian apocrypha can be found in Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963), in two volumes; see also M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), and James Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); Bentley Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures (New York: Doubleday, (1987). The Old Testament apocrypha, most of them used and adapted by the Christians, can be found in James Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983—85), in two volumes.

We wish to acknowledge our appreciation to the many individuals who helped us prepare this volume for publication, particularly John Gee, Gary Gillum, Gary Keeley, Jill Keeley, Brent McNeely, Mari Miles, Phyllis Nibley, Don Norton, Robert F. Smith, Morgan Tanner, and John W. Welch. We also wish to thank the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (F.A.R.M.S.) for their continued support in readying for publication The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley.

Todd M. Compton

1.   Hugh W. Nibley, Nibley on the Timely and the Timeless (Provo, Ut.: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1978), xxv.

2.   One of his first books was the patristic-oriented The World and the Prophets (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1954), republished as volume 3 in these Collected Works of Hugh Nibley.

3.   For example, William H. C. Frend describes “The Emergence of Orthodoxy” in the second century A.D. in The Rise of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 250.

4.   See, for example, in this volume, “The Forty-Day Mission of Christ—the Forgotten Heritage,” nn. 48—59 and 80; “The Passing of the Primitive Church,” nn. 50, 105; “Baptism for the Dead in Ancient Times,” nn. 1—16 and 46—50, with text.

5.   Kees Bolle, ed., Secrecy in Religion (Leiden: Brill, 1987, projected date of publication). See also Joachim Jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus (New York: Scribner, 1966), 125—37.

6.   Kees Bolle, “Secrecy in Religions,” ch. 1 of Secrecy in Religions, preliminary typescript, p. 10. Some scholars have passed off ritual secrecy in the early church as influence from Hellenistic mystery religions, but Bolle shows that this oversimplification underrates the necessity for secrecy in any valid religious tradition; ibid., 16.

7.   See “The Forty-day Mission of Christ,” n. 60; “The Passing of the Primitive Church”; and “Christian Envy of the Temple.”

8.   William Phipps, “The Heresiarch: Pelagius or Augustine?” Anglican Theological Review 62 (1980): 130—31; cf. the treatment by E. Buonaiuti, “Manichaeism and Augustine’s Ideas of ‘Massa Perditionis’,” Harvard Theological Review 20 (1927): 117—27. See also Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, tr. and ed. by R. Kraft and G. Krodel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971); H. E. W. Turner, The Pattern of Christian Truth: A Study in the Relations between Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Early Church (London: Mowbray, 1954)—a response to Bauer; James D. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977); J.M. Robinson and Helmut Koester, Trajectories through Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971); Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, tr. Neil Buchanan, 7 vols. (New York: Dover, 1961), 1:128, n. 3 (Basilides influences Augustine); 263, n. 2 (Valentine influences Clement and Origen); 261, n. 1 (Gnostic Christology and the later church); Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis, the Nature and History of Gnosticism, tr. and ed. by Robert Wilson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 368—73, 390 n. 187, 369, 372, which shows the influence of Gnosticism on the later Christian church.

9.   Hans J. Hillerbrand, “The Passing of the Church: Two Comments on a Strange Theme,” Church History 30 (December 1961): 481—82; Robert M. Grant, “The Passing of the Church: Comments on Two Comments on a Strange Theme,” Church History 30 (December 1961): 482—83.

10.   Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians (New Haven: Yale, 1983), 162. Meeks notes that this is virtually the only reference to ritual relating to death found in the Pauline letters, which points up its importance.

11.   F. W. Grosheide, Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953), 372—74. “If this type of baptism was actually practiced and if Paul had disapproved of it he probably would have written more about it than what this one reference contains. In any case the apostle could hardly derive an argument for the resurrection of the body from a practice of which he did not approve.” Ibid., 372. This logical argument disposes convincingly of the view that Paul thought baptism for the dead was a heretical practice, a view that anti-Mormon polemic has understandably tried to put forth as fact. See also Herman Ridderbos, Paul(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 25, 540; Richard Lloyd Anderson, Understanding Paul (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1983), 127, 403—16.

12.   See, for example, Hugh W. Nibley, Since Cumorah (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1967), v—vii.

[artsinsociety-blog1]

Real or Fiction

Earlier this week Nick, Zlil and I met to discuss and work on the catalogue. We were planning on finalising the layout and design of the zine but went on a tangent discussing the depth of the task we had embarked on. It was discussed that perhaps it would be beneficial to stage a fictional exhibition, that shows hypothetically what we would do rather than stage a full-blown exhibition which would allow us to utilizes all the practical and theoretical information we had collected whilst not going overboard developing a professional week-long exhibition. I suggested that for a real or fictional exhibition, we could break the components into roles and each team member could complete the tasks for that role. We would have departments and each be responsible for one:

Logistics/ Curatorial/ Editor/ Audio Visual/  Design/ Programming & Eduction/ Marketing/ Finance

This suggestion aimed to accommodate for the massive task we had set ourselves. Even in a group of eight developing, programming, installing, running and staffing an exhibition is an extremely laborious and dedicated task, not one that can be taken lightly or developed at whim. From now, we have around 1 week and as we wish to make a real catalogue to feature the content we have each written, we need to reserve some time for this.

Yesterday we met as a team to discuss the project and we raised the suggestion of developing a mock-exhibition; forfeiting the display of the work all together. For me, this was a little problematic as I had told Ceci that her work would be on display in Utrecht and further, as a team we were aiming for the exhibition! Estelle echoed my concerns and we discussed the possibility of doing both aspects, presenting the concept for our class presentation and then installing the exhibition. It was welcome news to find out we have also been granted a space at the Uni that we can use for three days straight, so a mini exhibition can be mounted and uninstalled at the end of three days. 

Being head of logistics, I have tallied the equipment that we know of so far and it seems we need four or five screens! Luckily, we went to see the room that Toine has reserved for us and it is filled with (not only awesome rotating chairs) but also floor-standing plasma screens that can be hooked up to either USB or laptop. We will however need to provide a table to put the book on and headphones for some of the plasmas. Photos below: 

So the group decided that we will produce two versions of the same project: a virtual/concept exhibition and a mini exhibition of the work entitled Carried Over (derived from the greek root of Translate)

#production

[viralhottopics]

The high-tech war on science fraud

The Long Read: The problem of fake data may go far deeper than scientists admit. Now a team of researchers has a controversial plan to root out the perpetrators

One morning last summer, a German psychologist named Mathias Kauff woke up to find that he had been reprimanded by a robot. In an email, a computer program named Statcheck informed him that a 2013 paper he had published on multiculturalism and prejudice appeared to contain a number of incorrect calculations which the program had catalogued and then posted on the internet for anyone to see. The problems turned out to be minor just a few rounding errors but the experience left Kauff feeling rattled. At first I was a bit frightened, he said. I felt a bit exposed.

Kauff wasnt alone. Statcheck had read some 50,000 published psychology papers and checked the maths behind every statistical result it encountered. In the space of 24 hours, virtually every academic active in the field in the past two decades had received an email from the program, informing them that their work had been reviewed. Nothing like this had ever been seen before: a massive, open, retroactive evaluation of scientific literature, conducted entirely by computer.

Statchecks method was relatively simple, more like the mathematical equivalent of a spellchecker than a thoughtful review, but some scientists saw it as a new form of scrutiny and suspicion, portending a future in which the objective authority of peer review would be undermined by unaccountable and uncredentialed critics.

Susan Fiske, the former head of the Association for Psychological Science, wrote an op-ed accusing self-appointed data police of pioneering a new form of harassment. The German Psychological Society issued a statement condemning the unauthorised use of Statcheck. The intensity of the reaction suggested that many were afraid that the program was not just attributing mere statistical errors, but some impropriety, to the scientists.

The man behind all this controversy was a 25-year-old Dutch scientist named Chris Hartgerink, based at Tilburg Universitys Meta-Research Center, which studies bias and error in science. Statcheck was the brainchild of Hartgerinks colleague Michle Nuijten, who had used the program to conduct a 2015 study that demonstrated that about half of all papers in psychology journals contained a statistical error. Nuijtens study was written up in Nature as a valuable contribution to the growing literature acknowledging bias and error in science but she had not published an inventory of the specific errors it had detected, or the authors who had committed them. The real flashpoint came months later,when Hartgerink modified Statcheck with some code of his own devising, which catalogued the individual errors and posted them online sparking uproar across the scientific community.

Hartgerink is one of only a handful of researchers in the world who work full-time on the problem of scientific fraud and he is perfectly happy to upset his peers. The scientific system as we know it is pretty screwed up, he told me last autumn. Sitting in the offices of the Meta-Research Center, which look out on to Tilburgs grey, mid-century campus, he added: Ive known for years that I want to help improve it. Hartgerink approaches his work with a professorial seriousness his office is bare, except for a pile of statistics textbooks and an equation-filled whiteboard and he is appealingly earnest about his aims. His conversations tend to rapidly ascend to great heights, as if they were balloons released from his hands the simplest things soon become grand questions of ethics, or privacy, or the future of science.

Statcheck is a good example of what is now possible, he said. The top priority,for Hartgerink, is something much more grave than correcting simple statistical miscalculations. He is now proposing to deploy a similar program that will uncover fake or manipulated results which he believes are far more prevalent than most scientists would like to admit.

When it comes to fraud or in the more neutral terms he prefers, scientific misconduct Hartgerink is aware that he is venturing into sensitive territory. It is not something people enjoy talking about, he told me, with a weary grin. Despite its professed commitment to self-correction, science is a discipline that relies mainly on a culture of mutual trust and good faith to stay clean. Talking about its faults can feel like a kind of heresy. In 1981, when a young Al Gore led a congressional inquiry into a spate of recent cases of scientific fraud in biomedicine, the historian Daniel Kevles observed that for Gore and for many others, fraud in the biomedical sciences was akin to pederasty among priests.

The comparison is apt. The exposure of fraud directly threatens the special claim science has on truth, which relies on the belief that its methods are purely rational and objective. As the congressmen warned scientists during the hearings, each and every case of fraud serves to undermine the publics trust in the research enterprise of our nation.

But three decades later, scientists still have only the most crude estimates of how much fraud actually exists. The current accepted standard is a 2009 study by the Stanford researcher Daniele Fanelli that collated the results of 21 previous surveys given to scientists in various fields about research misconduct. The studies, which depended entirely on scientists honestly reporting their own misconduct, concluded that about 2% of scientists had falsified data at some point in their career.

If Fanellis estimate is correct, it seems likely that thousands of scientists are getting away with misconduct each year. Fraud including outright fabrication, plagiarism and self-plagiarism accounts for the majority of retracted scientific articles. But, according to RetractionWatch, which catalogues papers that have been withdrawn from the scientific literature, only 684 were retracted in 2015, while more than 800,000 new papers were published. If even just a few of the suggested 2% of scientific fraudsters which, relying on self-reporting, is itself probably a conservative estimate are active in any given year, the vast majority are going totally undetected. Reviewers and editors, other gatekeepers theyre not looking for potential problems, Hartgerink said.

But if none of the traditional authorities in science are going to address the problem, Hartgerink believes that there is another way. If a program similar to Statcheck can be trained to detect the traces of manipulated data, and then make those results public, the scientific community can decide for itself whether a given study should still be regarded as trustworthy.

Hartgerinks university, which sits at the western edge of Tilburg, a small, quiet city in the southern Netherlands, seems an unlikely place to try and correct this hole in the scientific process. The university is best known for its economics and business courses and does not have traditional lab facilities. But Tilburg was also the site of one of the biggest scientific scandals in living memory and no one knows better than Hartgerink and his colleagues just how devastating individual cases of fraud can be.

In September 2010, the School of Social and Behavioral Science at Tilburg University appointed Diederik Stapel, a promising young social psychologist, as its new dean. Stapel was already popular with students for his warm manner, and with the faculty for his easy command of scientific literature and his enthusiasm for collaboration. He would often offer to help his colleagues, and sometimes even his students, by conducting surveys and gathering data for them.

As dean, Stapel appeared to reward his colleagues faith in him almost immediately. In April 2011 he published a paper in Science, the first study the small university had ever landed in that prestigious journal. Stapels research focused on what psychologists call priming: the idea that small stimuli can affect our behaviour in unnoticed but significant ways. Could being discriminated against depend on such seemingly trivial matters as garbage on the streets? Stapels paper in Science asked. He proceeded to show that white commuters at the Utrecht railway station tended to sit further away from visible minorities when the station was dirty. Similarly, Stapel found that white people were more likely to give negative answers on a quiz about minorities if they were interviewed on a dirty street, rather than a clean one.

Stapel had a knack for devising and executing such clever studies, cutting through messy problems to extract clean data. Since becoming a professor a decade earlier, he had published more than 100 papers, showing, among other things, that beauty product advertisements, regardless of context, prompted women to think about themselves more negatively, and that judges who had been primed to think about concepts of impartial justice were less likely to make racially motivated decisions.

His findings regularly reached the public through the media. The idea that huge, intractable social issues such as sexism and racism could be affected in such simple ways had a powerful intuitive appeal, and hinted at the possibility of equally simple, elegant solutions. If anything united Stapels diverse interests, it was this Gladwellian bent. His studies were often featured in the popular press, including the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, and he was a regular guest on Dutch television programmes.

But as Stapels reputation skyrocketed, a small group of colleagues and students began to view him with suspicion. It was too good to be true, a professor who was working at Tilburg at the time told me. (The professor, who I will call Joseph Robin, asked to remain anonymous so that he could frankly discuss his role in exposing Stapel.) All of his experiments worked. That just doesnt happen.

A student of Stapels had mentioned to Robin in 2010 that some of Stapels data looked strange, so that autumn, shortly after Stapel was made Dean, Robin proposed a collaboration with him, hoping to see his methods first-hand. Stapel agreed, and the data he returned a few months later, according to Robin, looked crazy. It was internally inconsistent in weird ways; completely unlike any real data I had ever seen. Meanwhile, as the student helped get hold of more datasets from Stapels former students and collaborators, the evidence mounted: more weird data, and identical sets of numbers copied directly from one study to another.

In August 2011, the whistleblowers took their findings to the head of the department, Marcel Zeelenberg, who confronted Stapel with the evidence. At first, Stapel denied the charges, but just days later he admitted what his accusers suspected: he had never interviewed any commuters at the railway station, no women had been shown beauty advertisements and no judges had been surveyed about impartial justice and racism.

Stapel hadnt just tinkered with numbers, he had made most of them up entirely, producing entire datasets at home in his kitchen after his wife and children had gone to bed. His method was an inversion of the proper scientific method: he started by deciding what result he wanted and then worked backwards, filling out the individual data points he was supposed to be collecting.

On 7 September 2011, the university revealed that Stapel had been suspended. The media initially speculated that there might have been an issue with his latest study announced just days earlier, showing that meat-eaters were more selfish and less sociable but the problem went much deeper. Stapels students and colleagues were about to learn that his enviable skill with data was, in fact, a sham, and his golden reputation, as well as nearly a decade of results that they had used in their own work, were built on lies.

Chris Hartgerink was studying late at the library when he heard the news. The extent of Stapels fraud wasnt clear by then, but it was big. Hartgerink, who was then an undergraduate in the Tilburg psychology programme, felt a sudden disorientation, a sense that something solid and integral had been lost. Stapel had been a mentor to him, hiring him as a research assistant and giving him constant encouragement. This is a guy who inspired me to actually become enthusiastic about research, Hartgerink told me. When that reason drops out, what remains, you know?

Hartgerink wasnt alone; the whole university was stunned. It was a really difficult time, said one student who had helped expose Stapel. You saw these people on a daily basis who were so proud of their work, and you know its just based on a lie. Even after Stapel resigned, the media coverage was relentless. Reporters roamed the campus first from the Dutch press, and then, as the story got bigger, from all over the world.

On 9 September, just two days after Stapel was suspended, the university convened an ad-hoc investigative committee of current and former faculty. To help determine the true extent of Stapels fraud, the committee turned to Marcel van Assen, a statistician and psychologist in the department. At the time, Van Assen was growing bored with his current research, and the idea of investigating the former dean sounded like fun to him. Van Assen had never much liked Stapel, believing that he relied more on the force of his personality than reason when running the department. Some people believe him charismatic, Van Assen told me. I am less sensitive to it.

Van Assen who is 44, tall and rangy, with a mop of greying, curly hair approaches his work with relentless, unsentimental practicality. When speaking, he maintains an amused, half-smile, as if he is joking. He once told me that to fix the problems in psychology, it might be simpler to toss out 150 years of research and start again; Im still not sure whether or not he was serious.

To prove misconduct, Van Assen said, you must be a pitbull: biting deeper and deeper, clamping down not just on the papers, but the datasets behind them, the research methods, the collaborators using everything available to bring down the target. He spent a year breaking down the 45 studies Stapel produced at Tilburg and cataloguing their individual aberrations, noting where the effect size a standard measure of the difference between the two groups in an experiment seemed suspiciously large, where sequences of numbers were copied, where variables were too closely related, or where variables that should have moved in tandem instead appeared adrift.

The committee released its final report in October 2012 and, based largely on its conclusions, 55 of Stapels publications were officially retracted by the journals that had published them. Stapel also returned his PhD to the University of Amsterdam. He is, by any measure, one of the biggest scientific frauds of all time. (RetractionWatch has him third on their all-time retraction leaderboard.) The committee also had harsh words for Stapels colleagues, concluding that from the bottom to the top, there was a general neglect of fundamental scientific standards. It was a real blow to the faculty, Jacques Hagenaars, a former professor of methodology at Tilburg, who served on the committee, told me.

By extending some of the blame to the methods and attitudes of the scientists around Stapel, the committee situated the case within a larger problem that was attracting attention at the time, which has come to be known as the replication crisis. For the past decade, the scientific community has been grappling with the discovery that many published results cannot be reproduced independently by other scientists in spite of the traditional safeguards of publishing and peer-review because the original studies were marred by some combination of unchecked bias and human error.

After the committee disbanded, Van Assen found himself fascinated by the way science is susceptible to error, bias, and outright fraud. Investigating Stapel had been exciting, and he had no interest in returning to his old work. Van Assen had also found a like mind, a new professor at Tilburg named Jelte Wicherts, who had a long history working on bias in science and who shared his attitude of upbeat cynicism about the problems in their field. We simply agree, there are findings out there that cannot be trusted, Van Assen said. They began planning a new sort of research group: one that would investigate the very practice of science.

Illustration by Bratislav Milenkovic.

Van Assen does not like assigning Stapel too much credit for the creation of the Meta-Research Center, which hired its first students in late 2012, but there is an undeniable symmetry: he and Wicherts have created, in Stapels old department, a platform to investigate the sort of sloppy science and misconduct that very department had been condemned for.

Hartgerink joined the group in 2013. For many people, certainly for me, Stapel launched an existential crisis in science, he said. After Stapels fraud was exposed, Hartgerink struggled to find what could be trusted in his chosen field. He began to notice how easy it was for scientists to subjectively interpret data or manipulate it. For a brief time he considered abandoning a future in research and joining the police.

Van Assen, who Hartgerink met through a statistics course, helped put him on another path. Hartgerink learned that a growing number of scientists in every field were coming to agree that the most urgent task for their profession was to establish what results and methods could still be trusted and that many of these people had begun to investigate the unpredictable human factors that, knowingly or not, knocked science off its course. What was more, he could be a part of it. Van Assen offered Hartgerink a place in his yet-unnamed research group. All of the current projects were on errors or general bias, but Van Assen proposed they go out and work closer to the fringes, developing methods that could detect fake data in published scientific literature.

Im not normally an expressive person, Hartgerink told me. But I said: Hell, yes. Lets do that.

Hartgerink and Van Assen believe not only that most scientific fraud goes undetected, but that the true rate of misconduct is far higher than 2%. We cannot trust self reports, Van Assen told me. If you ask people, At the conference, did you cheat on your fiancee? people will very likely not admit this.

Uri Simonsohn, a psychology professor at University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School who gained notoriety as a data vigilante for exposing two serious cases of fraud in his field in 2012, believes that as much as 5% of all published research contains fraudulent data. Its not only in the periphery, its not only in the journals people dont read, he told me. There are probably several very famous papers that have fake data, and very famous people who have done it.

But as long as it remains undiscovered, there is a tendency for scientists to dismiss fraud in favour of more widely documented and less seedy issues. Even Arturo Casadevall, an American microbiologist who has published extensively on the rate, distribution, and detection of fraud in science, told me that despite his personal interest in the topic, my time would be better served investigating the broader issues driving the replication crisis. Fraud, he said, was probably a relatively minor problem in terms of the overall level of science.

This way of thinking goes back at least as far as scientists have been grappling with high-profile cases of misconduct. In 1983, Peter Medawar, the British immunologist and Nobel laureate, wrote in the London Review of Books: The number of dishonest scientists cannot, of course, be known, but even if they were common enough to justify scary talk of tips of icebergs, they have not been so numerous as to prevent sciences having become the most successful enterprise (in terms of the fulfilment of declared ambitions) that human beings have ever engaged upon.

From this perspective, as long as science continues doing what it does well as long as genes are sequenced and chemicals classified and diseases reliably identified and treated then fraud will remain a minor concern. But while this may be true in the long run, it may also be dangerously complacent. Furthermore, scientific misconduct can cause serious harm, as, for instance, in the case of patients treated by Paolo Macchiarini, a doctor at Karolinska Institute in Sweden who allegedly misrepresented the effectiveness of an experimental surgical procedure he had developed. Macchiarini is currently being investigated by a Swedish prosecutor after several of the patients who received the procedure later died.

Even in the more mundane business of day-to-day research, scientists are constantly building on past work, relying on its solidity to underpin their own theories. If misconduct really is as widespread as Hartgerink and Van Assen think, then false results are strewn across scientific literature, like unexploded mines that threaten any new structure built over them. At the very least, if science is truly invested in its ideal of self-correction, it seems essential to know the extent of the problem.

But there is little motivation within the scientific community to ramp up efforts to detect fraud. Part of this has to do with the way the field is organised. Science isnt a traditional hierarchy, but a loose confederation of research groups, institutions, and professional organisations. Universities are clearly central to the scientific enterprise, but they are not in the business of evaluating scientific results, and as long as fraud doesnt become public they have little incentive to go after it. There is also the questionable perception, although widespread in the scientific community, that there are already measures in place that preclude fraud. When Gore and his fellow congressmen held their hearings 35 years ago, witnesses routinely insisted that science had a variety of self-correcting mechanisms, such as peer-review and replication. But, as the science journalists William Broad and Nicholas Wade pointed out at the time, the vast majority of cases of fraud are actually exposed by whistleblowers, and that holds true to this day.

And so the enormous task of keeping science honest is left to individual scientists in the hope that they will police themselves, and each other. Not only is it not sustainable, said Simonsohn, it doesnt even work. You only catch the most obvious fakers, and only a small share of them. There is also the problem of relying on whistleblowers, who face the thankless and emotionally draining prospect of accusing their own colleagues of fraud. (Its like saying someone is a paedophile, one of the studentsat Tilburg told me.) Neither Simonsohn nor any of the Tilburg whistleblowers I interviewedsaid they would come forward again. There is no way we as a field can deal with fraud like this, the student said. There has to be a better way.

In the winter of 2013, soon after Hartgerink began working with Van Assen, they began to investigate another social psychology researcher who they noticed was reporting suspiciously large effect sizes, one of the tells that doomed Stapel. When they requested that the researcher provide additional data to verify her results, she stalled claiming that she was undergoing treatment for stomach cancer. Months later, she informed them that she had deleted all the data in question. But instead of contacting the researchers co-authors for copies of the data, or digging deeper into her previous work, they opted to let it go.

They had been thoroughly stonewalled, and they knew that trying to prosecute individual cases of fraud the pitbull approach that Van Assen had taken when investigating Stapel would never expose more than a handful of dishonest scientists. What they needed was a way to analyse vast quantities of data in search of signs of manipulation or error, which could then be flagged for public inspection without necessarily accusing the individual scientists of deliberate misconduct. After all, putting a fence around a minefield has many of the same benefits as clearing it, with none of the tricky business of digging up the mines.

As Van Assen had earlier argued in a letter to the journal Nature, the traditional approach to investigating other scientists was needlessly fraught since it combined the messy task of proving that a researcher had intended to commit fraud with a much simpler technical problem: whether the data underlying their results was valid. The two issues, he argued, could be separated.

Scientists can commit fraud in a multitude of ways. In 1974, the American immunologist William Summerlin famously tried to pass a patch of skin on a mouse darkened with permanent marker pen as a successful interspecies skin-graft. But most instances are more mundane: the majority of fraud cases in recent years have emerged from scientists either falsifying images deliberately mislabelling scans and micrographs or fabricating or altering their recorded data. And scientists have used statistical tests to scrutinise each others data since at least the 1930s, when Ronald Fisher, the father of biostatistics,used a basic chi-squared test to suggest that Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, had cherrypicked some of his data.

In 2014, Hartgerink and Van Assen started to sort through the variety of tests used in ad-hoc investigations of fraud in order to determine which were powerful and versatile enough to reliably detect statistical anomalies across a wide range of fields. After narrowing down a promising arsenal of tests, they hit a tougher problem. To prove that their methods work, Hartgerink and Van Assen have to show they can reliably distinguish false from real data. But research misconduct is relatively uncharted territory. Only a handful of cases come to light each year a dismally small sample size so its hard to get an idea of what constitutes normal fake data, what its features and particular quirks are. Hartgerink devised a workaround, challenging other academics to produce simple fake datasets, a sort of game to see if they could come up with data that looked real enough to fool the statistical tests, with an Amazon gift card as a prize.

By 2015, the Meta-Research grouphad expanded to seven researchers, and Hartgerink was helping his colleagues with a separate error-detection project that would become Statcheck. He was pleased with the study that Michle Nuitjen published that autumn, which used Statcheck to show that something like half of all published psychology papers appeared to contain calculation errors, but as he tinkered with the program and the database of psychology papers they had assembled, he found himself increasingly uneasy about what he saw as the closed and secretive culture of science.

When scientists publish papers in journals, they release only the data they wish to share. Critical evaluation of the results by other scientists peer review takes place in secret and the discussion is not released publicly. Once a paper is published, all comments, concerns, and retractions must go through the editors of the journal before they reach the public. There are good, or at least defensible, arguments for all of this. But Hartgerink is part of an increasingly vocal group that believes that the closed nature of science, with authority resting in the hands of specific gatekeepers journals, universities, and funders is harmful, and that a more open approach would better serve the scientific method.

Hartgerink realised that with a few adjustments to Statcheck, he could make public all the statistical errors it had exposed. He hoped that this would shift the conversation away from talk of broad, representative results such as the proportion of studies that contained errors and towards a discussion of the individual papers and their mistakes. The critique would be complete, exhaustive, and in the public domain, where the authors could address it; everyone else could draw their own conclusions.

In August 2016, with his colleagues blessing, he posted the full set of Statcheck results publicly on the anonymous science message board PubPeer. At first there was praise on Twitter and science blogs, which skew young and progressive and then, condemnations, largely from older scientists, who feared an intrusive new world of public blaming and shaming. In December, after everyone had weighed in, Nature, a bellwether of mainstream scientific thought for more than a century, cautiously supported a future of automated scientific scrutiny in an editorial that addressed the Statcheck controversy without explicitly naming it. Its conclusion seemed to endorse Hartgerinks approach, that criticism itself must be embraced.

In the same month, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI), an obscure branch of the US National Institutes of Health, awarded Hartgerink a small grant about $100,000 to pursue new projects investigating misconduct, including the completion of his program to detect fabricated data. For Hartgerink and Van Assen, who had not received any outside funding for their research, it felt like vindication.

Yet change in science comes slowly, if at all, Van Assen reminded me. The current push for more open and accountable science, of which they are a part, has only really existed since 2011, he said. It has captured an outsize share of the science medias attention, and set laudable goals, but it remains a small, fragile outpost of true believers within the vast scientific enterprise. I have the impression that many scientists in this group think that things are going to change. Van Assen said. Chris, Michle, they are quite optimistic. I think thats bias. They talk to each other all the time.

When I asked Hartgerink what it would take to totally eradicate fraud from the scientific process, he suggested that scientists make all of their data public; register the intentions of their work before conducting experiments, to prevent post-hoc reasoning, and that they have their results checked by algorithms during and after the publishing process.

To any working scientist currently enjoying nearly unprecedented privacy and freedom for a profession that is in large part publicly funded Hartgerinks vision would be an unimaginably draconian scientific surveillance state. For his part, Hartgerink believes the preservation of public trust in science requires nothing less but in the meantime, he intends to pursue this ideal without the explicit consent of the entire scientific community, by investigating published papers and making the results available to the public.

Even scientists who have done similar work uncovering fraud have reservations about Van Assen and Hartgerinks approach. In January, I met with Dr John Carlisle and Dr Steve Yentis at an anaesthetics conference that took place in London, near Westminster Abbey. In 2012, Yentis, then the editor of the journal Anaesthesia, asked Carlisle to investigate data from a researcher named Yoshitaka Fujii, who the community suspected was falsifying clinical trials. In time, Carlisle demonstrated that 168 of Fujiis trials contained dubious statistical results. Yentis and the other journal editors contacted Fujiis employers, who launched a full investigation. Fujii currently sits at the top of the RetractionWatch leaderboard with 183 retracted studies. By sheer numbers he is the biggest scientific fraud in recorded history.

Carlisle, who, like Van Assen, found that he enjoyed the detective work (it takes a certain personality, or personality disorder, he said), showed me his latest project, a larger-scale analysis of the rate of suspicious clinical trial results across multiple fields of medicine. He and Yentis discussed their desire to automate these statistical tests which, in theory, would look a lot like what Hartgerink and Van Assen are developing but they have no plans to make the results public; instead they envision that journal editors might use the tests to screen incoming articles for signs of possible misconduct.

It is an incredibly difficult balance, said Yentis, youre saying to a person, I think youre a liar. We have to decide how many fraudulent papers are worth one false accusation. How many is too many?

With the introduction of programs such as Statcheck, and the growing desire to conduct as much of the critical conversation as possible in public view, Yentis expects a stormy reckoning with those very questions. Thats a big debate that hasnt happened, he said, and its because we simply havent had the tools.

For all their dispassionate distance, when Hartgerink and Van Assen say that they are simply identifying data that cannot be trusted, they mean flagging papers and authors that fail their tests. And, as they learned with Statcheck, for many scientists, that will be indistinguishable from an accusation of deceit. When Hartgerink eventually deploys his fraud-detection program, it will flag up some very real instances of fraud, as well as many unintentional errors and false positives and present all of the results in a messy pile for the scientific community to sort out. Simonsohn called it a bit like leaving a loaded gun on a playground.

When I put this question to Van Assen, he told me it was certain that some scientists would be angered or offended by having their work and its possible errors exposed and discussed. He didnt want to make anyone feel bad, he said but he didnt feel bad about it. Science should be about transparency, criticism, and truth.

The problem, also with scientists, is that people think they are important, they think they have a special purpose in life, he said. Maybe you too. But thats a human bias. I think when you look at it objectively, individuals dont matter at all. We should only look at what is good for science and society.

Main Illustration: Bratislav Milenkovic

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  Article By: Pat ‘Riot’ Whitaker, Senior Writer/Journalist ‡ Edited By: Leanne Ridgeway, Owner/Chief Editor

Pennsylvania’s groove powered, heavy funk rockers CROBOT are inching ever closer to the August 23rd arrival of their new studio album for Mascot Records/Mascot Label Group, ‘Motherbrain‘.

The band’s much anticipated fourth studio album is the follow-up to 2016’s ‘Welcome To Fat City‘. The imminent release is the first CROBOT record to materialize since the departure of the band’s previous rhythm section in 2017, brothers Jake and Paul Figueroa. At the time, fans questioned how the departure might ultimately affect things for the band, one seemingly dependent on the chemistry of the brothers with singer Brandon Yeagley and guitarist Chris Bishop.

Those concerns were effectively squashed once the band recruited new blood with drummer Dan Ryan and bassist James Lascu. CROBOT worked closely with Corey Lowery (Stuck Mojo, Stereomud, Dark New Day) in producing ‘Motherbrain‘, while revealing a dynamic shift in the substance and subject matter of their latest offering. In a press release for the album, Yeagley stated the following about the new record:

“[Motherbrain is]… less about wizards and dragons and more about everyday turmoil and the struggles of life. I think it’s a much darker record, musically, lyrically, and thematically.”

When people hear this, I hope they say, ‘Yeah, that’s Crobot.’ We want to maintain our identity from record to record. We always want to be genuine. It’s going to evolve, but it will always be Crobot.”

There is no suspicion that ‘Motherbrain‘ might somehow be anything but that, a realization now hammered home. This is something listeners will discover for themselves, as they unveil the new single “Low Life” and its official video. The song is the second to be shared from the record, following this past May’s “Keep Me Down“, and both are streaming below. Accompanying them are the album artwork and tracklist, along with details of some looming live actions.

  ‘Motherbrain‘ Tracklist:

01. Burn 02. Keep Me Down 03. Drown 04. Low Life 05. Alpha Dawg 06. Stoning The Devil  07. Gasoline 08. Destroyer 09. Blackout 10. After Life 11. The Hive

  CROBOT are currently on tour in the U.K. and Europe with support from Wolf Jaw; find all remaining dates listed below. Also included are a handful of album release shows set to take place in the U.S. this August.

Excitement is building for the return of CROBOT via ‘Motherbrain’, set for release from Mascot Records / Mascot Label Group on August 23rd. Available on CD, dark purple vinyl, marble pink/purple vinyl, and digital download.

Pre-order is active now at this LINK.

  – CROBOT U.K. Tour 2019 (w/ Wolf Jaw) –

Jul. 26: London – Underworld Jul. 27: Ebbw Vale – Steelhouse Festival Jul. 28: Milton Keynes – Craufurd Arms

European Tour:

Jul. 30: Utrecht, NL – De Helling (w/ Life Of Agony) Jul. 31: Bremen, DE – Schlachthof (w/ Life Of Agony) Aug. 01: Wacken, DE – Wacken Festival Aug. 02: Dusseldorf, DE – Tube (w/ Firewind) Aug. 04: Eindhoven, NL – The Jack Aug. 06: Pratteln, CH – Z7 (w/ Monster Magnet) Aug. 08: Bielefield, DE – Lokschuppen (w/ Monster Magnet) Aug. 09: Kortrijk, BE – Alcatraz Festival Aug. 10: Leeuwarden, NL – Into The Grave Festival

– U.S. Album Release Shows –

Aug. 21: Brooklyn, NY – Duffs ‘Motherbrain‘ Album Release Party *No Cover* Aug. 22: Brooklyn, NY – Saint Vitus  Aug. 23: Teaneck, NJ – Debonair Music Hall Aug. 24: Andreas, PA – Skookstock Aug. 25: Asbury Park, NJ – Asbury Lanes Aug. 28: Columbus, OH – Ace of Cups Aug. 30: Ringle, WI – Q&Z Expo Center

    CROBOT Unveil “Low Life” Video From ‘Motherbrain’ Album; EU. & U.S Tours Article By: Pat 'Riot' Whitaker, Senior Writer/Journalist ‡ Edited By: Leanne Ridgeway, Owner/Chief Editor Pennsylvania's groove powered, heavy funk rockers…

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