Month: December 2024

Opinion
December 19, 2024
4 min read
Trump’s Pick for NIH Director Could Harm Science and People’s Health
With a possible bird flu outbreak looming, Donald Trump’s choice of Jay Bhattacharya, a scientist critical of COVID policies, for the NIH is the wrong move for science and public health
By Steven M. Albert edited by Tanya Lewis
Jay Bhattacharya speaks during a roundtable discussion with members of the House Freedom Caucus on the COVID-19 pandemic at The Heritage Foundation on Thursday, November 10, 2022.
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump wants Jay Bhattacharya, a physician-scientist and economist at Stanford University, to lead the National Institutes of Health. The NIH is a global powerhouse of science. Its mission is “to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.”
Most politicians, even when criticizing the agency, recognize the good it has done in building effective public health measures. Cancer death rates continue to decline, for example, because of the work NIH investigators have done around prevention, detection and treatment.
Bhattacharya does not see the agency’s successes this way. In his podcast Science from the Fringe, Bhattacharya recently said he is amazed by “the authoritarian tendencies of public health.” He struck a similar theme in a Newsmax interview: “[We need] to turn the NIH from something that’s [used] to control society into something that’s aimed at the discovery of truth to improve the health of Americans.”
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The scientists who apply for NIH funding, sit on peer review panels and administer grants would be surprised to hear they control society. They do science. The claims of authoritarianism are a screen for pushing a particular agenda that is likely to damage the NIH. Bhattacharya’s science agenda is political: to set concerns for personal autonomy against evidence-based public health science. This is not appropriate for NIH leadership.
Bhattacharya has never explained how the NIH controls society, given its role as a research institution, and it is hard to see how it does except perhaps in setting research priorities and awarding funding based on expert review. Is he against public health legislation that has controlled lead emissions in vehicles, enforced vaccine requirements for children attending public schools, and promoted folate fortification in bread and fluoride in drinking water? This legislation has improved population health in terms of cognitive performance, infectious disease burden, neural tube defects in pregnancy, and oral health, respectively. Is this the kind of control he fears?
Public health authorities decide on a health promotion measure for a population based on the science, often for people vulnerable and unaware of health risks, when health benefits are clear. NIH research provides the evidence for these public health measures. It is fair to debate the quality of scientific evidence and benefit to population health relative to restrictions on autonomy and choice, but establishing mechanisms for population health risk and making recommendations based on this evidence are not authoritarianism, and making such a comparison is not the way to do good science or build trust.
Bhattacharya’s views are one more unfortunate legacy of the COVID pandemic, when he argued against supposed public health overreach in the Great Barrington Declaration back in 2020. The declaration claimed that isolating only people at highest risk and allowing continued spread of COVID among more healthy people would build herd immunity without substantial increases in COVID mortality. In response, public health officials and NIH leaders criticized Bhattacharya based on the science: In the setting of asymptomatic viral transmission, high contagiousness and inescapable population mixing, such a strategy of “focused protection” was unlikely to protect vulnerable populations. Bhattacharya called this censorship and unsuccessfully tried to convince the Supreme Court to weigh in against social media venues that dropped his messaging.
This personal pique is a distraction and should not obscure the central focus of U.S. public health policy during the pandemic. Science supported school closures, work-from-home policies, large gathering restrictions in public spaces, and face mask requirements as effective ways to lower hospital surges and buy time for vaccine development. You can challenge the science, as many have; but it is not authoritarian to use science for policy. Likewise, you may value personal autonomy and resist vaccination or face mask mandates, but drawing on scientific evidence to support these measures does not mean scientists “have engaged in censorship, data manipulation, and misinformation,” as Trump has falsely claimed to justify his nominees.
Authoritarianism in science or public health was not responsible for the pandemic’s heavy toll in the U.S. Structural factors such as income inequality and access to health care were the key drivers of COVID mortality. To prepare the country for the next pandemic as NIH director, it would be far more effective to invest in pandemic preparedness and infectious disease research and, beyond that, to ensure everyone has access to health care.
Indeed, the proposed remedies for making science less authoritarian, such as shifting NIH grant funding to states in the form of “block” grants (recommended by the conservative policy agenda Project 2025), will not promote “nonauthoritarian” public health but will almost certainly degrade the quality of American science. Will states be able to match the NIH peer review system, which is regarded worldwide as the exemplar of transparent, confidential, impartial evaluation based on merit and scientific consensus? It is hard to imagine how a decentralized state-level effort would produce a more fair review or science with greater impact. Will scientists in some states be barred from funding for research on family planning or women’s health, for example?
We don’t know what other policies Bhattacharya might propose. Banning viral gain-of-function research? Eliminating research involving fetal tissue and restricting studies using animal models? Shifting funding away from infectious disease research, as RFK, Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has proposed? Giving peer review panels less influence in determining scientific merit?
The best way to “depoliticize science,” if that is your concern, is to get out of the way and let scientific inquiry drive investigation and peer review determine priority for funding. The “authoritarianism” Bhattacharya rails against is often just the application of science to improve population health. Pitting personal autonomy against the application of science to policy is fine for vanity webcasts and think tanks, but inappropriate for NIH leadership. If he would rather focus on promoting personal autonomy in pandemic policy, perhaps he is being nominated to the wrong agency. Bhattacharya is not what the NIH needs.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Steven M. Albert is a professor and the Hallen Chair of Community Health and Social Justice in the faculty in behavioral and community health sciences at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Public Health
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El Salvador is in the process of securing a $3.5 billion deal with the International Monetary Fund, but is making some concessions around bitcoin (BTC) to get the funding.
Stacey Herbert, director of the Bitcoin Office in El Salvador, posted on Thursday that the government-issued Chivo wallet — launched in 2021 in a bid to spread bitcoin adoption across the country — will be "sold off or wound down" as part of the deal. Other bitcoin wallets operated by private companies will "continue serving El Salvador," Herbert said.
The IMF stated on Wednesday that, under the agreement, El Salvador will also make bitcoin acceptance by the private sector voluntary, and that taxes will only be paid in U.S. dollars (not bitcoin). "For the public sector, engagement in bitcoin-related economic activities and transactions in and purchases of bitcoin will be confined," the document also said, without going into further detail.
Herbert, however, wrote in her post that El Salvador will continue to add bitcoin to its reserves — possibly, even, at an "accelerated pace." The Central American nation is currently buying one bitcoin per day; at press time, it held 5,968.77 bitcoin, worth almost $596 million. Herbert said that many of El Salvador's bitcoin-related projects, including the development of bitcoin capital markets and the offering of bitcoin educational programs, will continue to occur. The cryptocurrency's legal tender status will likewise not be impacted.
The IMF has had misgivings about El Salvador's bitcoin initiatives ever since President Nayib Bukele made bitcoin legal tender in the country in September 2021, giving it the same status as the U.S. dollar, the nation’s official currency. In 2022, the agency warned that El Salvador was incurring "large risks associated with using Bitcoin as legal tender, especially given the high volatility of its price."
"The potential risks of the Bitcoin project will be diminished significantly in line with Fund policies," the IMF stated on Wednesday.
Salvadorans were offered $30 in bitcoin to sign up on Chivo, but national adoption never really took off. By mid-2022, more than 60% of recipients had yet to make a transaction, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. A survey from the Central American University found in January that 88% of surveyed Salvadorans hadn't used bitcoin in 2023.
The IMF itself will only provide $1.4 billion as part of the deal with El Salvador. Funds from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and regional development banks are expected to bring the total amount to $3.5 billion as part of the same program.
Tom was sucked into crypto in 2020 and is very much enjoying the ride. Now a markets reporter for CoinDesk, he previously wrote for DL News about bitcoin ETFs, the Federal Reserve, bitcoin mining and crypto adoption in Latin America. He has a bachelor's degree in English literature from McGill University and can usually be found in Costa Rica. He holds BTC, ETH and SOL above CoinDesk's disclosure threshold of $1,000.
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Five Books From The Maple Staple Spotlight Shelf Challenge Conventional Beliefs and Illuminate Spiritual  EIN News
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Google plans on a handy fix for all those duplicate Chrome tabs, but it’s only for Android  TechRadar
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It was an idea that probably never stood a chance in the long run. Since 2005, the Internet Archive, a nonprofit entity devoted to providing “universal access to all knowledge,” has been digitizing physical books and posting copies to its website, where users may read them for free. In 2018, the Internet Archive began partnering with various libraries around the country to offer online access to their respective physical holdings as well.
“Not everyone has access to a public or academic library with a good collection,” the Internet Archive argued, “so to provide universal access we need to provide digital versions of books.” Such thinking led to the creation of the Internet Archive’s “Free Digital Library” and “Open Library Project,” in which “one reader at a time can read a digitized copy of a legally owned library book.”
Sounds like a safe and noncontroversial idea, right? Not exactly.
In September 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit found the Internet Archive to be in violation of federal law over its “large scale copying and distribution of copyrighted books without permission from or payment to the Publishers or authors.” To allow such behavior to continue, the 2nd Circuit declared in Hachette Book Group v. Internet Archive, “would allow for widescale copying that deprives creators of compensation and diminishes the incentive to produce new works.”
Copyright law is a jagged rock on which many seemingly promising ideas have been wrecked. In this particular case, the perilous legal provision turned out to be Section 107 of the Copyright Act, which governs “the fair use of a copyrighted work.” According to that provision, a copyrighted work may be fairly used without permission from the copyright holder “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research.”
According to the Internet Archive, that language should be read to fully protect both the collecting and lending practices of its free digital library. “The record is replete,” the group pointed out, “with examples of IA facilitating access to books needed for classroom use and academic research that would not have been possible otherwise.”
That the Internet Archive has been a great boon to students, teachers, and scholars is undoubtedly true. Indeed, I can personally testify to the fact. When I was researching my recent book about Frederick Douglass and the Constitution, I was grateful for the many dusty old volumes that the Internet Archive effectively placed at my fingertips. Innumerable other writers and researchers would surely say something similar.
But the problem for the Internet Archive is that Section 107 also states that certain other factors must be considered “in determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use.” And one of those factors is “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.” In other words, fair use does not include undercutting the commercial viability of the copyrighted work.
That is where the Internet Archive’s legal troubles really originated. In 2020, a coalition of four book publishing giants—Hachette Book Group, Harper Collins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House—filed suit, alleging that the Internet Archive’s “unauthorized copying and distribution of Plaintiffs’ works include titles that the Publishers are currently selling commercially and currently providing to libraries in ebook form, making Defendant’s business a direct substitute for established markets.”
Unlike traditional public libraries, which “buy print books and license ebooks (or agree to terms of sale for ebooks) from publishers,” the four publishers stated in their lawsuit, the Internet Archive commits “willful mass copyright infringement” and then distributes “digital bootleg versions online.”
Unfortunately for the Internet Archive, the 2nd Circuit basically shared that negative assessment of the situation. “Is it ‘fair use’ for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or author,” asked the 2nd Circuit. “We conclude the answer is no.”
In the 2nd Circuit’s view, the Internet Archive “does not perform the traditional functions of a library.” Instead, it “prepares derivatives of Publishers’ Works and delivers those derivatives to its users in full.” In other words, the court said, the Internet Archive offers illegal free versions of what publishers and authors alone have the exclusive legal right to sell or otherwise distribute.
Furthermore, the appellate court declared, “were we to approve IA’s use of the Works, there would be little reason for consumers or libraries to pay Publishers for content they could access for free on IA’s website.” All of which made it “self-evident” to the 2nd Circuit, “that if IA’s use were to become widespread, it would adversely affect Publishers’ markets for the Works.” 
It was for these reasons that the Internet Archive failed the fair use test, as interpreted by the 2nd Circuit. Of course, the Internet Archive is likely to appeal its loss, but that is no guarantee of a better outcome. In fact, given the thoroughness of the 2nd Circuit’s judgment, combined with the unforgiving language of the Copyright Act, the Supreme Court might not even bother to hear an appeal in this matter.
That outcome may be good news for publishers who want to sell more ebooks. But is it good news for authors and readers in general? 
The writer Virginia Postrel, who specializes in the intersection of culture and technology, once observed that the rise of the web has taken us from “a world in which reading material was relatively scarce and expensive to one in which it’s overabundant and nearly free.” 
For many authors, that has made it much more difficult to even get their books noticed in the first place. Furthermore, Postrel noted, “for increasing numbers of readers, a book that doesn’t show up in a Google search or can’t be linked to in some way online might as well not exist.”
The Internet Archive has stood as a sort of bulwark against that particular trend. Its free digital library grabbed hold of such titles and helped to ensure that future readers might someday discover them online. As a result of the judgment in this case, however, that bulwark has been weakened, if not fatally undermined.
“The knowledge embodied in books deserves preservation, not destruction, and particularly not destruction at the behest of authors and publishers,” Postrel told me about the 2nd Circuit’s decision. “The ruling could hardly be worse. Forcing the Internet Archive to destroy digital copies—to burn digital books—goes far beyond protecting authors’ rights to profit from their copyrighted work. By destroying the ability to search those books, it potentially depresses sales. When you discover that a book discusses a topic you’re interested in you’re more likely to buy it.”
And yet, Postrel added, “if I’d been on the Internet Archive’s board, however, I would have argued against the Free Digital Library.” Why? “Not because the archive’s case was wrong,” she says, “but because its definition of fair use was aggressive and extremely risky for the institution.”
The damage arising from that risk has certainly been done now. Whether the Internet Archive ever fully recovers from the legal loss remains to be seen.
In the Davos session, “Technology in a Turbulent World,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman explained where he sees AI heading.

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5 Explosive Altcoins to Load Up On Before the Christmas Bull Market Delivers 10,000% Gains  CryptoDaily
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December 19, 2024
10:27 AM
(Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images)

Lil Wayne has been named among other artists who reportedly squandered pandemic-relief profits during COVID-19.

In a new report from Business Insider, the 5-time Grammy winner was found to have received an $8.9 million grant as a payout from the Shuttered Venue Operations Grant, administered by the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Office of Disaster Assistance. President Donald Trump signed the $200 million Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) into law in 2020. Still, it was made available to affluent individuals in the music industry through “loan-out companies,” or corporations that plan tours for musicians.

The pandemic funding was intended to support independent event spaces and art organizations. Still, rather than using it towards his music, the BI article detailed $1.3 million in private flights, $460,000 in clothes and accessories and charging taxpayers $175,000 in music festival expenses, to promote his GKUA cannabis brand.
BI also revealed that Wayne’s spending wasn’t limited to himself, as $15,000 in flights and rooming were covered for at least two women. Other expenses included $2.14 million and $1.71 million payments to his former managers, Cortez Bryant and Mack Maine, respectively; $590.7 million to his lawyers and $589.7 to his accountants.
Other artists mentioned in the report included Chris Brown and Rae Sremmurd, the latter of whom were said to have gotten a hefty portion of their $7.7 million grant through Sremm Touring. As for Brown, the singer received a $10 million grant, with $5.1 million going to him personally, while taxpayers were billed $80,000 for his 33rd birthday party.
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Experience everything you love about 'Thursday Night Football' on Prime Video, this time during the NFL playoffs.
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(RNS) — A report by Pew Research Center on international religious freedom named Egypt, Syria, Pakistan and Iraq as the countries where both government restrictions and social hostility most limit the ability of religious minorities to practice their faith.
Governmental attacks and social hostility toward various religions usually “go hand in hand,” said the report, the 15th annual edition of a report that tracks the evolution of government restrictions on religion.
“Government restrictions on religion around the world in 2022” (Graphic courtesy of Pew Research Center)
The report uses two indexes created by the center in 2007, the Government Restrictions Index and the Social Hostilities Index, to rank countries’ levels of government restrictions on religion and attitudes of societal groups and organizations toward religion.
The GRI focuses on 20 criteria, including government efforts to ban a faith, limit conversions and preaching, and preferential treatment of one or many religious groups. The SHI’s 13 criteria take into account mob violence, hostilities in the name of religion and religious bias crimes.
The study looks at the situation in 198 countries in 2022, the latest year for which data are available from such agencies as the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the U.S. Department of State and the FBI. The report also contains findings from independent and nongovernmental organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Anti-Defamation League, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
In total, 24 countries were given high or very high GRI scores (4.5 or higher on a scale of 10) and high or very high SHI scores (higher than 3.6 out of 10). Close behind the four countries that scored very high on both scales were India, Israel and Nigeria.
“Countries with ‘high’ or ‘very high’ GRI and SHI scores, 2018-2022” (Graphic courtesy of Pew Research Center)
Thirty-two other countries, including Turkistan, Cuba and China, scored high or very high on government restrictions, but low or moderate on social hostility. Most were rated as “undemocratic” and “authoritarian” by The Economist magazine’s Democracy Index.
“Such regimes may tightly control religion as part of broader restrictions on civil liberties,” reads the report. Many Central Asian countries and post-Soviet countries fell into that category, noted Samirah Majumdar, the report’s lead researcher.
Besides ranking countries where religions were under the most pressure, the team that put together the report, part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project, tried to determine “whether countries with government restrictions tend to be places where they also have social hostilities; Do countries with relatively few government restrictions also tend to be places where they have relatively few social hostilities?” explained Majumdar.
Majumdar said that the results were inconclusive. “We can’t exactly determine a causal link, but there are some patterns we were able to observe in the different groupings,” she said. “A lot of those countries have had sectarian tensions and violence reported over the years. In some cases, government actions can go hand in hand with what is happening socially in those countries.”
Countries with low or moderate scores on both indexes — a GRI no higher than 4.4 out of 10 and an SHI between 0 and 3.5 — usually had populations under 60 million inhabitants.
The index factors the same criteria over the years, and the team relies on the same sources, allowing for comparisons from one year to another. From 2021 to 2022, median GRI and SHI scores stayed the same, but in sub-Saharan Africa, the GRI rose from 2.6 to 3.0 out of 10. In Middle Eastern and North African countries, the index went from 5.9 to 6.1.
Among the 45 countries that presented high or very high SHI scores, Nigeria was the first of the seven countries with very high levels, a result linked to gang violence against religious groups and violence by militant groups Boko Haram and ISIS-West Africa, which rages in the Sahel desert.
Iraq, which ranks among the countries with both high GRI and SHI, also finds itself among the countries with the highest social hostilities, and has seen its social hostility score increase. The report attributed this to violence against religious minorities imprisoned by Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces. It also cited a 2024 Amnesty International report on outbreaks of gender-based violence in Iraqi Kurdistan, with many occurrences of women being killed by male family members, sometimes for converting to another religion. 
“Religious groups faced at least 1 type of physical harassment in almost three-quarters of countries around the world in 2022” (Graphic courtesy of Pew Research Center)
According to the report, physical harassment against religious groups by government or social groups peaked in 2022. This category covered acts from verbal abuse to displacements, killings, or damage to an organization’s property. The study highlighted 26,000 displaced people from Tibetan communities in China and continued gang violence targeting religious leaders by Haitian gangs.
Overall, the number of countries where physical harassment took place increased to 145 in 2022, against 137 countries in 2021.
Christi Harlan talks with Word&Way President Brian Kaylor about her new books Mr. President, The Class Is Yours: Jimmy Carter's Sunday School Lessons in Washington, D.C. and Normal Lives: President Jimmy Carter and His Church. She also discusses Carter's teaching style and humor, as well as the church's history. Note: Don't forget to subscribe to…

Samuel Perry, a professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma, talks with Word&Way President Brian Kaylor about his new book Religion for Realists: Why We All Need the Scientific Study of Religion. He also discusses issues of religious identity, partisanship, and Christian Nationalism. He previously appeared on episode 46. Note: Don't forget to subscribe…

This episode features a conversation originally recorded in May 2020 for the podcast Baptist Without An Adjective. In it, Word&Way President Brian Kaylor interviewed author and sociologist Tony Campolo. The author of 35 books and a longtime professor at Eastern University, Campolo died on Nov. 19 at the age of 89. This conversation is being…

Grace Ji-Sun Kim, a professor of theology at Earlham School of Religion, talks with Word&Way President Brian Kaylor about her new book When God Became White: Dismantling Whiteness for a More Just Christianity. She also discusses issues of racism, patriarchy, and Christian Nationalism. She previously appeared on episode 145. She writes a Substack newsletter and…

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