Bedankt, Nederland – L'archivio di Oca Sapiens

Trump Watch, cont. Ieri accennavo alla “global gag rule” (la regola del bavaglio globale), uno dei molti divieti di informare che il Potus sta imponendo in questi giorni, e non solo negli USA. Scriveva ieri la BBC

But on Monday, the president signed an executive order – known as the global gag rule – which takes that a step further, prohibiting organisations that receive US family planning assistance from using non-US funding to provide abortion services, information, counselling or referrals.

Lo avevano fatto anche Reagan e Bush Jr. Però mercoledì

Lilianne Ploumen, a Dutch minister [per il commercio estero e la cooperazione allo sviluppo], said [che il governo neerlandese] would set up “a well-financed fund” to allow other governments, businesses and charities to donate. The Netherlands would do everything in its power to help women “remain in control of their own bodies”, she said.

Negli USA, i media indipendenti resistono alla censura imposta da Trump alle agenzie federali. Da Media Matters

On January 24, two anonymous sources at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told Reuters that the Trump administration had instructed EPA officials to remove the data-heavy climate change page from the agency’s website, and that the page could be taken down as soon as the following day. A public backlash quickly ensued, and the Trump administration at least temporarily backed away from its plan to shut down the website on January 25, as E&E News reported.

(Fra le informazioni che andavano cancellate, c’erano quelle sul mercurio nell’acqua.)
Telefonate e tweet agli eletti federali e statali sono servite. Nella sua conferenza stampa quotidiana però, Sean “la Voce del Padrone” Spicer non ha risposto alle domande dei giornalisti in merito, aveva altri “fatti alternativi” da propalare. Quindi

Associated Press science writer Seth Borenstein reminded government scientists and officials that they can “securely and confidentially” send tips and documents to the AP via its SecureDrop service. The Washington Post also ran through its version of SecureDrop in a January 25 article titled, “Here’s how to leak government documents to The Post.”

Salvo “classificazione”, i documenti del governo sono pubblici per legge.

Meanwhile, the staff at InsideClimate News (ICN) provided whistleblowers with a list of do’s and don’ts for revealing internal documents and information to ICN without compromising themselves.

I ricercatori hanno reagito al divieto e alla censura degli account federali con account privati collettivi, come Rogue NASA, Alt National Parks Service ecc., ne trovate altri qui. Anche Sarcastic Rover resiste. Ma gli scienziati che presentano i propri risultati alla National Conference and Global Forum on Science, Policy, and the Environment non parlano con la stampa.
Prima sono venuti a prendere i giornalisti…

A proposito di fatti non alternativi, Decan Butler scrive su Nature:

The world’s premier centre for health metrics — the science of measuring and analysing global health problems, and how they relate to healthcare and biomedical research funding — will receive a US$279-million cash injection from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) in Seattle, also home town to the Gates Foundation, announced the funding boost on 25 January.

Non è l’unica iniziativa del genere, c’è anche Data for Health, finanziata con 100 milioni da Bloomberg Philantropies. Ah, se ci fossero più dati e fossero affidabili…, lamentano tutti.

Già, garbage in garbage out. Se ne preoccupa anche l’etnografo Aaron Shapiro a proposito della detenzione di massa, un altro problema degli Stati Uniti:

Criminologists, crime analysts and police leaders are excited about the possibilities for experimentation using predictive analytics. Surveillance technologies and algorithms could test and improve police tactics or reduce officer abuses. But civil-rights and social-justice groups condemn both models. Offender-based predictions exacerbate racial biases in the criminal justice system and undermine the principle of presumed innocence. Equating locations with criminality amplifies problematic policing patterns.

Tema affine in un paper – in libera lettura – di Dražen Prelec del MIT et al. Un loro algoritmo “corregge” gli errori commessi dalla “saggezza della folla” se ai partecipanti si chiede la risposta a una domanda e delle due risposte possibili quale sarebbe la più diffusa (più “popolare”). Dall’abstract

Here we propose the following alternative to a democratic vote: select the answer that is more popular than people predict. We show that this principle yields the best answer under reasonable assumptions about voter behaviour, while the standard ‘most popular’ or ‘most confident’ principles fail under exactly those same assumptions.

Like traditional voting, the principle accepts unique problems, such as panel decisions about scientific or artistic merit, and legal or historical disputes. The potential application domain is thus broader than that covered by machine learning and psychometric methods, which require data across multiple questions.

Erin Ross riassume così il paradosso:

Nella maggior parte dei casi, le risposte che superavano le aspettative erano quelle corrette.

Angela Falciatore e Antonio Fortunato della Sorbona-CNRS, Maria Ferrante e Remo Sanges della Stazione Anton Dohrn di Napoli, e decine di altri analizzano il genoma della Fragilariopsis cylindrus e raccontano come circa un quarto degli alleli sia evoluto perché la diatomea possa prosperare nell’Oceano Meridionale

These divergent alleles were differentially expressed across environmental conditions, including darkness, low iron, freezing, elevated temperature and increased CO2.

Rispetto alle altre diatomee, è un po’ bruttina ma l’articolo è bello e pure in open access, complimenti e grazie.

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