The US will share unused vaccines

While the US has a glut of vaccines and many people have to be coaxed in to getting it with various offers of gifts and lotteries, many other countries are desperately short of vaccines even as their covid-19 cases surge. So I was glad to see Joe Biden announce that the US will share some of the unused vaccines. The move is long overdue.

President Joe Biden announced Thursday the U.S. will donate 75% of its unused COVID-19 vaccines to the U.N.-backed COVAX global vaccine sharing program, acting as more Americans have been vaccinated and global inequities have become more glaring.

Of the first tranche of 25 million doses, the White House said about 19 million will go to COVAX, with approximately 6 million for South and Central America, 7 million for Asia and 5 million for Africa. The doses mark a substantial — and immediate — boost to the lagging COVAX effort, which to date has shared just 76 million doses with needy countries.

Overall, the White House aims to share 80 million doses globally by the end of June, most through COVAX. But 25% of the nation’s excess will be kept in reserve for emergencies and for the U.S. to share directly with allies and partners.

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Women’s athletics and the Simone Biles controversy

I do not watch sports much at all and almost never events like gymnastics or figure skating. But I do know that in those events, winners are decided by judges who weigh various subjective factors like the level of difficulty involved in what was attempted and the grace and style with which it was achieved. And this had led to a controversy in women’s gymnastics involving Simone Biles. She seems to have superior athletic abilities and has done things that no woman before has done in competition. So you would think that she would score highly. But in fact the judges seem to actually penalize her for her ambition. The latest example occurred last week when she did what had been thought to be impossible, something that is called the ‘Yurchenko double pike’. You can see her do it here during Olympic training.
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Return to hugging

Even though the CDC has said that it is now fine for vaccinated people to gather together without masks, it does feel a little strange for those us who closely followed the guidelines during the height of the pandemic (avoiding indoor settings outside out homes, wearing masks, keeping physical distancing, washing hands frequently, and even using hand sanitizer) to feel completely comfortable relaxing all or even some of those habits.
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National Academy of Sciences expels scientist

The National Academy of Sciences is the most prestigious body of scientists in the US and being elected to membership is highly prized. So it becomes news when for the first time in its history a member was expelled for misconduct violations, as was the case a few days ago with astronomer Geoffrey Marcy for a pattern of sexual harassment.

The action is the first since the 158-year-old NAS revised its bylaws 2 years ago to allow members to be expelled for documented misconduct violations. No actions were taken on the policy until fall 2020, when, after reading news accounts, a French scientist filed a complaint against Marcy and three other NAS members who had been investigated for sexual harassment.
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The next fight: Vaccine passports

As vaccination numbers grow, it is increasingly likely that at least some places are going to ask for proof of covid-19 vaccination to enter their spaces and that some businesses may require their employees to be vaccinated if they are to return to offices. Given how some people became absolutely freaked out by the minimal requirement to weak masks, losing their minds to the extent of comparing it to Jews being forced by to wear the Star of David during the period of the Holocaust, one can only imagine how apoplectic they are going to get over this issue.

The most likely place where this requirement will begin to be imposed is in international travel, where the idea of people having digital vaccination certificates is gaining ground.
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Anti-vaccine myths keep growing

We are reaching the stage in the US where people who have been vaccinated are being told that they pose little or no risk to themselves or others and can thus go about their daily activities without wearing masks. But it appears that the anti-vaxxers have also upped their game. Not being content with posing a health risk to others, they are now claiming that vaccinated people are a danger to them.

As reported by NBC News, the owner of a butcher shop in Ontario, Canada, banned all people who were vaccinated from COVID-19 to protect unvaccinated female customers.

“We have decided that since the majority of our customers are women and since women are most at risk for these side effects, we ask that if you’ve been vaccinated to please order for curbside pickup or delivery for 28 days after being vaccinated,” the post read on Instagram.

A separate store in Canada banned vaccinated customers for a fear of vaccinated people “shedding” the coronavirus to its unvaccinated customers. In the U.S., a private school in Miami barred vaccinated teachers from coming into contact with students. The same school threatened the employment of its vaccinated teachers.

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Selling snake oil as news

I long ago stopped watching TV news and talk shows, either on local stations or on the national networks. They never said anything that I did not hear about elsewhere and instead spent a lot of time on mindless blather that was truly irritating. And of course there were the numerous commercial breaks.

But sometimes you cannot avoid them, such as when the TV is on in a doctor’s waiting room or in the boarding areas for flights and then you would often see segments where the host would interview people who were talking about some new product that supposedly has beneficial effects on health.

On his show Last Week Tonight on Sunday, John Oliver dissected such segments, showing how often they were what are called ‘sponsored content’, i.e. essentially advertisements paid for by the manufacturer of the product that the ‘news’ shows presented without clearly disclosing this key fact.

Towards the end of the segment, Oliver’s team pulls off one of the pranks they are famous for and that is worth watching. They clearly plan these shows well in advance of airing.

Great review of my book!

Karim Bschir, a philosopher of science at the University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland, has published a very detailed review of my book The Great Paradox of Science in the April 29, 2021 issue of the journal Metascience (This is a Springer journal and is thus behind a paywall. You can read it in full if you have the institutional access that universities often provide.) It is always gratifying for an author to have their book assigned to a reviewer who not only has a deep knowledge of the subject matter, but has clearly also read the text very carefully and summarized its content accurately and succinctly.

Since the review is behind a paywall, I will just provide the conclusions at the end where he looks at how I try to resolve the paradox that is central to the book, of why scientific theories work so well even though we have no reason to think that they represent the truth about the world or even that they are approaching the truth. (That is what the ‘anti-realist’ position referred to in the review means to philosophers of science. It does not mean that I live in some imaginary world!) Bschir’s summarizes my argument even better than I could and I hope it encourage readers of the review (and this blog!) to obtain and read my book.
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Why it is getting harder to prove that you are human

We are all familiar with the little test called a ‘captcha’ (an acronym that stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) that we sometimes have to pass in order to access some website. You may have noticed that these tests are getting harder, in that we often fail once or twice before passing.

The video below explains why this is happening and it is not because we are becoming less human. It says that there is a race between these tests and computers, that as computers get better at doing them, the tests have to raise the level of difficulty. It also says that there is something else that is going on in the background, and that is that our responses are used to create databases that enable computers to become better at character and image recognition. For example, many of the captchas are to identify things that we see while driving, such traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, fire hydrants, and the like. The responses are used to program self-driving cars to better identify those things.

We may arrive at a point where this system runs out steam because we are not able to design simple tests that only humans can pass.