Reading.am | Chris Aldrich

🎧 Antibiotics and agriculture | Eat This Podcast

Listened to Antibiotics and agriculture by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast

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.

This excellent story reminds me of a great series of stories that PBS NewsHour did on the general topic earlier this year.

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👓 The Next Platform | Pierre Levy

Read The Next Platform by Pierre Levy (Pierre Levy's Blog)

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.

Annotations

The Next Platform

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.

👓 A 2017 Nobel laureate says he left science because he ran out of money and was fed up with academia | QZ

Read A 2017 Nobel laureate left science because he ran out of money (Quartz)

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!

👓 Las Vegas Is Only the Deadliest Shooting in US History Because They Don’t Count Black Lives | The Root

Read Las Vegas Is Only the Deadliest Shooting in US History Because They Don’t Count Black Lives by Michael Harriot (The Root)

News reporters and anchors have repeatedly referred to the recent tragedy in Las Vegas as the “worst mass shooting in U.S. history.” Like all things that are constantly repeated, the proclamation has become fact.

There’s some great history here. It reminds me about the podcast Seeing White which I’ve been listening to recently.

👓 Unverified | Hack Education

Read Unverified by Audrey Watters (Hack Education)

I’ve tried half a dozen times now to get my Twitter account verified. Each time, I’ve been rejected. “We reviewed the account, and unfortunately it is not eligible to be verified at this time.”

I’m surprised that Twitter wouldn’t verify Audrey, particularly given her body of written work and the journalistic nature of some of it. Most of the verified people I know are writers and/or journalists. I’m half tempted to create several impersonating accounts so she can claim to need verification for that reason.