Tackling the problem of antibiotic resistance at (one) source
In the past year or so there has been a slew of high-level meetings pointing to antibiotic resistance as a growing threat to human well-being. But then, resistance was always an inevitable, Darwinian consequence of antibiotic use. Well before penicillin was widely available, Ernst Chain, who went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work on penicillin, noted that some bacteria were capable of neutralising the antibiotic.
What is new about the recent pronouncements and decisions is that the use of antibiotics in agriculture is being recognised, somewhat belatedly, as a major source of resistance. Antibiotic manufacturers and the animal health industry have, since the start, done everything they can to deny that. Indeed, the history of efforts to regulate the use of antibiotics in agriculture reveals a pretty sordid approach to public health.
But while it can be hard to prove the connection between agriculture and a specific case of antibiotic resistance, a look at hundreds of recent academic studies showed that almost three quarters of them did demonstrate a conclusive link.
Antibiotic resistance – whether it originates with agriculture or inappropriate medical use – takes us back almost 100 years, when infectious diseases we now consider trivial could, and did, kill. It reduces the effectiveness of other procedures too, such as surgery and chemotherapy, by making it more likely that a subsequent infection will wreck the patient’s prospects. So it imposes huge costs on society as a whole.
Maybe society as a whole needs to tackle the problem. The Oxford Martin School, which supports a portfolio of highly interdisciplinary research groups at Oxford University, has a Programme on Collective Responsibility for Infectious Disease. They recently published a paper proposing a tax on animal products produced with antibiotics. Could that possibly work?
Here’s another great example of a negative externality. Too often capitalism brushes over these and creates a larger longer term cost by not taking these into account. It’s almost assuredly the case that taxing the use of these types of antibiotics across the broadest base of users (eaters) (thereby minimizing the overall marginal cost), would help to minimize the use of these or at least we’d have the funding for improving the base issue in the future. In some sense, the additional cost of eating organic meat is similar to this type of “tax”, but the money is allocated in a different way.
Not covered here are some of the economic problems of developing future antibiotics when our current ones have ceased to function as the result of increased resistance over time. This additional problem is an even bigger worry for the longer term. In some sense, it’s all akin to the cost of smoking and second hand smoke–the present day marginal cost to the smoker of cigarettes and taxes is idiotically low in comparison to the massive future cost of their overall health as well as that of the society surrounding them. Better to put that cost upfront for those who really prefer to smoke so that the actual externalities are taken into account from the start.
Confederate symbols are still celebrated despite the ugly history they symbolize. John Oliver suggests some representations of southern pride that involve less racism and more Stephen Colbert.
Based on the opening, I’m expecting some great examples many which are going to be as heavily biased as things like redlining seen in lending practices in the last century. They’ll come about as the result of missing data, missing assumptions, and even incorrect assumptions.
I’m aware that one of the biggest problems in so-called Big Data is that one needs to spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning up the data (often by hand) to get something even remotely usable. Even with this done I’ve heard about people not testing out their data and then relying on the results only to later find ridiculous error rates (sometimes over 100%!)
Of course there is some space here for the intelligent mathematician, scientist, or quant to create alternate models to take advantage of overlays in such areas, and particularly markets. By overlay here, I mean the gambling definition of the word in which the odds of a particular wager are higher than they should be, thus tending to favor an individual player (who typically has more knowledge or information about the game) rather than the house, which usually relies on a statistically biased game or by taking a rake off of the top of a parimutuel financial structure, or the bulk of other players who aren’t aware of the inequity. The mathematical models based on big data (aka Weapons of Math Destruction or WMDs) described here, particularly in financial markets, are going to often create such large inequities that users of alternate means can take tremendous advantage of the differences for their own benefits. Perhaps it’s the evolutionary competition that will more actively drive these differences to zero? If this is the case, it’s likely that it’s going to be a long time before they equilibrate based on current usage, especially when these algorithms are so opaque.
I suspect that some of this book will highlight uses of statistical errors and logical fallacies like cherry picking data, but which are hidden behind much more opaque mathematical algorithms thereby making them even harder to detect than simple policy decisions which use the simpler form. It’s this type of opacity that has caused major market shifts like the 2008 economic crash, which is still heavily unregulated to protect the masses.
I suspect that folks within Bryan Alexander’s book club will find that the example of Sarah Wysocki to be very compelling and damning evidence of how these big data algorithms work (or don’t work, as the case may be.) In this particular example, there are so many signals which are not only difficult to measure, if at all, that the thing they’re attempting to measure is so swamped with noise as to be unusable. Equally interesting, but not presented here, would be the alternate case of someone tremendously incompetent (perhaps who is cheating as indicated in the example) who actually scored tremendously high on the scale who was kept in their job.
Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia
Introduction
Do you see the paradox? An algorithm processes a slew of statistics and comes up with a probability that a certain person might be a bad hire, a risky borrower, a terrorist, or a miserable teacher. That probability is distilled into a score, which can turn someone’s life upside down. And yet when the person fights back, “suggestive” countervailing evidence simply won’t cut it. The case must be ironclad. The human victims of WMDs, we’ll see time and again, are held to a far higher standard of evidence than the algorithms themselves.
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction > Location xxxx Added on Sunday, October 9, 2017
[WMDs are] opaque, unquestioned, and unaccountable, and they operate at a scale to sort, target or “optimize” millions of people. By confusing their findings with on-the-ground reality, most of them create pernicious WMD feedback loops.
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction > Location xxxx Added on Sunday, October 9, 2017
The software is doing it’s job. The trouble is that profits end up serving as a stand-in, or proxy, for truth. We’ll see this dangerous confusion crop up again and again.
Highlight (yellow) – Introduction > Location xxxx Added on Sunday, October 9, 2017
History is too often reduced to stories of good versus evil. We get the impression that we are somehow different from the people who were bad, and we take for granted that we would never make similar
Our new book club reading is Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction. In this post I’ll lay out a reading agenda, along with ways to participate.
The way people read along in this book club is through the web, essentially. It’s a distributed experience.
It occurs to me while reading the set up for this distributed online book club that posting on your own site and syndicating elsewhere (POSSE) while pulling back responses in an IndieWeb fashion is an awesome idea for this type of online activity. Now if only the social silos supported salmention!
I’m definitely in for this general schedule and someone has already gifted me a copy of the book. Given the level of comments I suspect will come about, I’m putting aside the fact that this book wasn’t written for me as an audience and will read along with the crowd. I’m much more curious how Bryan’s audience will see and react to it. But I’m also interested in the functionality and semantics of an online book club run in such a distributed way.
Robert Langdon, Harvard professor of symbology and religious iconology, arrives at the ultramodern Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to attend a major announcement—the unveiling of a discovery that “will change the face of science forever.”
Purchased for $19.68 from Amazon.com via previous bookmark on 10/4/17.
We just wrapped up development on Lightwalk, an interactive art installation living at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. For a number of reasons, this has been one of the most interesting projects I've ever worked on. There is the obvious wow factor of the installation itself, but we also developed a whole suite of dev tools running behind the scenes that not only keep the installation running, but also enable engagement from ACU students in multiple ways. It's this tie between hardware and software that makes the project truly shine, it's taking art and making it sm-art, it's the internet of things but it's actually interesting, and it's what I'm going to be talking about today.
This is a cool art installation! I’d like to have one please… It’s like a miniature version of the installation at Los Angeles International Airport, but small enough to fit in my front yard. If only the LAX version was controllable like this one!
This mathematician died last week. He won the Fields Medal in 2002 for proving the Milnor conjecture in a branch of algebra known as algebraic K-theory. He continued to work on this subject until he helped prove the more general Bloch-Kato conjecture in 2010.
Proving these results — which are too technical to easily describe to nonmathematicians! — required him to develop a dream of Grothendieck: the theory of motives. Very roughly, this is a way of taking the space of solutions of a collection of polynomial equations and chopping it apart into building blocks. But the process of 'chopping up', and also these building blocks, called 'motives', are very abstract — nothing simple or obvious.
There’s some interesting personality and history in this short post of John’s.
What does this mean? My personal website both sends and accepts Webmentions, a platform independent “at mention” or @mention, including those from the fantastic, free service brid.gy which sends replies/comments, likes, reposts, and mentions to my site from silo services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and even Flickr.
As I’ve long known, and as someone noted at least once on my site, some of these likes, replies, and mentions, which provide some interesting social interaction and social proof of a post’s interest, don’t always contribute to the actual value of the conversation. Now with this wonderful facepiling UI-feature, I’m able to concatenate these types of interactions into a smaller and more concentrated section at the bottom of a post’s comments section, so they’re still logged and available, but now they just aren’t as distracting to the rest of the conversation.
Compare the before and after:
Before
A mention, a Facebook like, another mention and a repost on Twitter. Anil’s comment is pretty useful, but the others don’t add as much to the ideas in the post.Richard MacManus “liked” the post and subsequently wrote about it on AltPlatform (relatively useful) along with some tangential mentions, which don’t add as much to the conversation. The raw URL of Gisele’s Twitter post likely looked better natively on Twitter (as a Twitter Card), but translated onto my site as a mention like this, just isn’t as useful.
After
Likes and Reposts concatenated on my site now after converting them into facepiles. They still give the social “proof” and indicate the interaction, but don’t interfere in the conversation now–especially when there are hundreds of them.
A Prime Example
In particular, this functionality can best bee seen on my article The Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem, which has over 400 such interactions which spanned pages and pages worth of likes, reposts, and mentions. Many of my posts only get a handful of these types of interactions, but this particular post back in July was overwhelmed with them when it floated to the top of Hacker News and nearly crippled my website. Without the facepile functionality, the comments section of this post was untenably unreadable and unusable. Now, with facepiles enabled, the comments are more quickly read and more useful to those who are interested in reading them while still keeping the intent.
Implementing
For those who have already begun Indiewebifying their WordPress sites with plugins like Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks, the most recent 3.5.0 update to Semantic Linkbacks has the functionality enabled by default. (Otherwise you can go to your administrative dashboard and click on the checkbox next to “Automatically embed facepile” located under Settings » Discussion).
Settings interface for enabling or disabling facepiles in your comments section with Semantic Linkbacks (and Webmentions)
As a caveat, there’s a known bug for those who are using JetPack to “Let readers use WordPress.com, Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ accounts to comment”. If the facepiles don’t show up on your site, just go to your JetPack settings (at yoursite.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=jetpack#/discussion) and disable this feature. Hopefully, the JetPack team will have it fixed shortly.
If you haven’t begun using IndieWeb principles on your WordPress website, you might consider starting with my article An Introduction to the IndieWeb, which includes some motivation as well as some great resources for getting started.
Nota bene: I know many in the WordPress community are using the excellent theme Independent Publisher, which already separates out likes, mentions, etc. (though without the actual “facepiles”), so I’m not sure if/how this functionality may work in conjunction with it. If you know, please drop me a note.
Hopefully most WordPress themes will support it natively without any modifications, but users are encouraged to file issues on the plugin if they run across problems.
Using another platform?
I’m not immediately aware of many other CMSes or services that have this enabled easily out of the box, but I do know that Drew McLellan enabled it (along with Webmentions) in the Perch CMS back in July. Others who I’ve seen enabling this type of functionality are documented on the IndieWeb wiki in addition to Marty McGuire and Jeremy Keith, who has a modified version, somewhat like Independent Publisher’s, on his website.
There are certainly many in the IndieWeb community who can help you with this idea (and many others) in the IndieWeb’s online chat.
Give it a spin
Now that it’s enabled, if you’re reading it on my website, you can click on any of the syndicated copies listed below and like, retweet/repost, or mention this article in those social media platforms and your mention will get sent back to my post to be displayed almost as it would be on many of those platforms. Naturally comments or questions are encouraged to further the ongoing conversation, which should now also be much easier to read and interact with.
Thanks again to everyone in the IndieWeb community who are continually hacking away to allow more people to more easily own and control their content while still easily interacting with people on the internet.
UPDATE
Turning mentions into comments for native display
Following Aaron Davis’ comment, I thought I’d add a few more thoughts for those who have begun facepiling their likes, mentions, bookmarks, etc. As he indicates, it’s sometimes useful to call out a particular mention, a special like, or you might want to highlight one among the thousands for a particular reason. This is a feature that many are likely to want occasionally and code for it may be added in the future, but until then, one is left in the lurch a bit. Fortunately, as with all things IndieWeb, part of the point is having more control over your site to be able to do anything you’d like to it. So for those without the ability to write the requisite code to create a pull request against the Webmention or Semantic Linkbacks plugins (they’re more than welcome), here are a few quick cheats for converting that occasional (facepiled or not) webmention into a full comment within your WordPress site’s comment section.
Pro tip: This also works (even if you’re not using facepiles) to convert a basic mention into something that looks more like a native comment. It’s also useful when you’ve received a mention that you’d prefer to treat as a reply, but which wasn’t marked up as a reply by the sending site.
I’ll use an example from the Facebook Algorithm Mom Problem post referenced above. On that post, I’d received a webmention via Twitter from Anil Dash, a blogger and advocate for more humane, inclusive and ethical technology, with some commentary about usability. Here is his original tweet:
Can always tell things are going really well if your product forces people to explicitly exclude their mothers. https://t.co/lh41jVIU0E
That webmention is now hidden behind an avatar and not as likely to be seen by more casual readers. I’d like to change it from being hidden behind his avatar in that long mention list and highlight it a bit to make it appear as a comment in the full comments section.
On a post with a large number of mentions, you’re very unlikely to find some of the valuable nectar hiding in them. Do you see Anil Dash’s lovely mug hiding among all these avatars? (Hint, it’s not a “blank” avatar caused by someone having changed their Twitter, Facebook, etc. avatar.)
Steps to convert a mention to a comment
Caution: I recommend reading through all the steps before attempting this. You’ll be modifying your WordPress database manually, so please be careful so you don’t accidentally destroy your site. When doing things like this, it’s always a good idea to make a back up of your database just in case.
Search for the particular comment you want to change in the WordPress Admin UI.
Hover over the date in the “Submitted On” column to find the comment ID number in the URL, in this case it’s http://boffosocko.com/2017/07/11/the-facebook-algorithm-mom-problem/#comment-35281. Make a note of the comment ID: 35281.
Open up the mySQL database for your WordPress install (I’m using phpMyAdmin) to view the data for your site.
Go to the wp_comments table in the database. (Yours may be slightly different depending on how your site was set up, but it should contain the word “comments”.)
Use the search functionality for your table and input your comment ID number into the field for comment_ID.
We’ve identified the specific comment we want to modify in phpMyAdmin.
Now delete the word “webmention” from the comment_type field for the particular comment. This field should now be empty.
You should now be able to view your post (be sure to clear your cache if necessary) and see the mention you received displayed as a native comment instead of a mention. It should automatically include the text of the particular mention you needed.
Here’s what the modified mention from Anil Dash looks like in my comments section now. It appears as if it were a native comment.
If you need to convert a large number of mentions into comments, you may be better off searching for the particular post’s post_ID in the comments table and changing multiple comment_type fields at once. Be careful doing this in bulk–you may wish to do a database back up before making any changes to be on the safe side.
One percent of the human population was connected to the Internet at the end of the 20th century. In 2017, more than 50% is. Most of the users interact in social media, search information, buy products and services online. But despite the ongoing success of digital communication, there is a growing dissatisfaction about the big tech companies (the “Silicon Valley”) who dominate the new communication environment.
The big techs are the most valued companies in the world and the massive amount of data that they possess is considered the most precious good of our time. The Silicon Valley owns the big computers: the network of physical centers where our personal and business data are stored and processed. Their income comes from their economic exploitation of our data for marketing purpose and from their sales of hardware, software or services. But they also derive considerable power from the knowledge of markets and public opinions that stems from their information control.
Transparency is the very basis of trust and the precondition of authentic dialogue. Data and people (including the administrators of a platform), should be traceable and audit-able. Transparency should be reciprocal, without distinction between rulers and ruled. Such transparency will ultimately be the basis of reflexive collective intelligence, allowing teams and communities of any size to observe and compare their cognitive activity.
The trouble with some of this is the post-truth political climate in which basic “facts” are under debate. What will the battle between these two groups look like and how can actual facts win out in the end? Will the future Eloi and Morlocks be the descendants of them? I would have presumed that generally logical, intelligent, and educated people would generally come to a broadly general philosophical meeting of the minds as to how to best maximize life, but this seems to obviously not be the case as the result of the poorly educated who will seemingly believe almost anything. And this problem is generally separate from the terrifically selfish people who have differing philosophical stances on how to proceed. How will these differences evolve over time?
This article is sure to be interesting philosophy among some in the IndieWeb movement, but there are some complexities in the system which are sure to muddy the waters. I suspect that many in the Big History school of thought may enjoy the underpinnings of this as well.
I’m going to follow Pierre Levy’s blog to come back and read a bit more about his interesting research programme. There’s certainly a lot to unpack here.
Commonality means that people will not have to pay to get access to the new public sphere: all will be free and public property. Commonality means also transversality: de-silo and cross-pollination.
Openness is on the rise because it maximizes the improvement of goods and services, foster trust and support collaborative engagement.
We need a new kind of public sphere: a platform in the cloud where data and metadata would be our common good, dedicated to the recording and collaborative exploitation of our memory in the service of collective intelligence. According to the current zeitgeist, the core values orienting the construction of this new public sphere should be: openness, transparency and commonality
The practice of writing in ancient palace-temples gave birth to government as a separate entity. Alphabet and paper allowed the emergence of merchant city-states and the expansion of literate empires. The printing press, industrial economy, motorized transportation and electronic media sustained nation-states.
The digital revolution will foster new forms of government. We discuss political problems in a global public space taking advantage of the web and social media. The majority of humans live in interconnected cities and metropoles. Each urban node wants to be an accelerator of collective intelligence, a smart city.
Jeffrey Hall, a retired professor at Brandeis University, shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries elucidating how our internal body clock works. He was honored along with Michael Young and his close collaborator Michael Roshbash. Hall said in an interview from his home in rural Maine that he collaborated with Roshbash because they shared...
This is an all-too-often heard story. The difference is that now a Nobel Prize winner is telling it about himself!
