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Why slow running could be even more beneficial than running fast

New Scientist Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 10:00am
The slow-running movement, in which people meet for unhurried jogs, is booming – but don't be fooled into thinking that if there's no pain, there's no gain
Categories: Science

Could smart guide RNAs usher in an era of personalized medicine?

Computers and Math from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 9:35am
Scientists utilize logic gate-based decision-making to construct circuits that control genes.
Categories: Science

Mass layoffs and data breaches could be connected

Computers and Math from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 9:35am
A research team has been exploring how mass layoffs and data breaches could be connected. Their theory: since layoffs create conditions where disgruntled employees face added stress or job insecurity, they are more likely to engage in risky behaviors that heighten the company's vulnerability to data breaches.
Categories: Science

New video test for Parkinson's uses AI to track how the disease is progressing

Computers and Math from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 9:35am
An automated assessment technique that uses artificial intelligence could revolutionize the management of Parkinson's disease.
Categories: Science

Researchers develop more environmentally friendly and cost-effective method for soil remediation

Matter and energy from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 9:35am
Chemists have developed a rapid electrothermal mineralization (REM) process, which in seconds can remediate the accumulation of synthetic chemicals that can contaminate soil and the environment.
Categories: Science

Nanoscopic imaging aids in understanding protein, tissue preservation in ancient bones

Matter and energy from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 9:35am
A pilot study shows that nanoscopic 3-D imaging of ancient bone not only provides further insight into the changes soft tissues undergo during fossilization, it also has potential as a fast, practical way to determine which specimens are likely candidates for ancient DNA and protein sequence preservation.
Categories: Science

3D-printed microstructure forest facilitates solar steam generator desalination

Matter and energy from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 9:35am
Faced with the world's impending freshwater scarcity, researchers turned to solar steam generators, which are emerging as a promising device for seawater desalination. The team sought design inspiration from trees and harnessed the potential of 3D printing. They present technology for producing efficient SSGs for desalination and introduces a novel method for printing functional nanocomposites for multi-jet fusion. Their SSGs were inspired by plant transpiration and are composed of miniature tree-shaped microstructures, forming an efficient, heat-distributing forest.
Categories: Science

Wearable sensors help athletes achieve greater performance

Matter and energy from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 9:35am
Researchers have developed a low-cost, flexible, and customizable sensor for badminton players that overcomes current monitoring constraints. The team used triboelectric sensors to construct their intelligent monitoring system because they are easy to adapt for flexible, wearable devices and to minimize interference during bending and twisting, they built a 3D-printed flexible arch-shaped sensor encased in a thermoplastic elastomer. This design is comfortable during use and can be easily customized to individual athletes.
Categories: Science

Electric scooter and bike accidents are soaring across the United States

Matter and energy from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 9:35am
In the crowded urban landscape, where small electric vehicles -- primarily scooters and bicycles -- have transformed short distance travel, researchers are reporting a major national surge in accidents tied to 'micromobility.'
Categories: Science

New research identifies less invasive method for examining brain activity following traumatic brain injury

Computers and Math from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 9:34am
Researchers have published new research that reports on a potential alternative and less-invasive approach to measure intracranial pressure (ICP) in patients.
Categories: Science

Pioneering the cellular frontier

Matter and energy from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 9:33am
Scientists use a multimodal approach that combines hard X-ray computed tomography and X-ray fluorescence imaging to see the structure and chemical processes inside of a single cell.
Categories: Science

Strategic emission caps key to ammonia industry decarbonization, researchers find

Matter and energy from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 9:33am
New research has revealed critical insights into how strategic emission cap choices can lead to cost-effective, near-100% ammonia industry decarbonization while avoiding issues such as land use constraints and grid congestion.
Categories: Science

Risks and benefits of integrating AI into medical decision-making

Computers and Math from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 9:33am
Researchers found that an artificial intelligence (AI) model solved medical quiz questions -- designed to test health professionals' ability to diagnose patients based on clinical images and a brief text summary -- with high accuracy. However, physician-graders found the AI model made mistakes when describing images and explaining how its decision-making led to the correct answer.
Categories: Science

Expiring medications could pose challenge on long space missions

Space and time from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 9:33am
A new study shows that over half of the medicines stocked in space -- staples such as pain relievers, antibiotics, allergy medicines, and sleep aids -- would expire before astronauts could return to Earth.
Categories: Science

A promising new method uses light to clean up forever chemicals

Matter and energy from Science Daily Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 9:33am
A room-temperature method to decompose perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) using visible LED light offers a promising solution for sustainable fluorine recycling and PFAS treatment.
Categories: Science

University of Chicago grad students file suit against their union, alleging that it makes them engage in compelled speech

Why Evolution is True Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 9:30am

After several years of effort, graduate students getting paid for research or teaching at the University of Chicago joined a labor union.  Because they couldn’t form a union de novo but had to join an existing one, they became dues-paying members of the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America, Local 11o3.  This enables graduate students who get paid as research assistants or for teaching to engage in collective bargaining and to strike against the University if the bargaining reaches an impasse. The University of Chicago opposed the students’ efforts to join a union, but the University can’t prevent it.

You can see why the University would oppose unionization, for often research assistantships and teaching are regarded by universities as training rather than jobs; and if there were a strike, it would cripple research at the school as well teaching itself, for in some courses graduate teaching assistants do much of the work. But the students prevailed.  I didn’t have much of a dog in this fight, except that I thought the possibility of strikes was a dangerous byproduct of unionizing.

But joining the union came with an unexpected downside: unions can take political and ideological positions, and as a member of one (qualified students are required to join and pay union dues), you implicitly sign on to those positions.  And you may not want to do that.  In the case at hand, the Union has taken pro-Palestinian positions, and some students, especially Jewish ones, don’t want to sign on to these positions. So a group called “Graduate Students for Academic Freedom” has sued the union, alleging that the union makes them engage in implicit endorsement of the union’s positions. That, they claim, is Constitutionally prohibited “compelled speech.” You may have already guessed that this involves the war in Gaza.

Click the screenshot to read. I’ve put an excerpt below

An excerpt by Baude (there’s more at the site):

A few years ago, the graduate students at the University of Chicago, where I teach, formed a legally recognized labor union. Last year, that union expanded to include the law school, at least to the extent that law students engage in paid work such as providing research assistance. Law students who want to work as research assistants must either join the union and pay dues, or else pay agency fees to the union even if they do not join. Either way, giving money to the union is a legally required condition of working as a research assistant.

Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago, the union, engages in political speech that some law students find quite objectionable. The union is part of the United Electrical, Radio and Mine Workers of America, which also engages in political speech. For some law students, having to give money to these causes is an unacceptable condition of employment.

Yesterday, a group of those students, Graduate Students for Academic Freedom, filed a federal lawsuit against the union arguing that the arrangement violates their First Amendment rights under cases like Janus v. AFSCME, which holds that compelled agency fees “violate[] the free speech rights of nonmembers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.”

You can read the complaint here, and the motion for a preliminary injunction here.

This is from the complaint, so you can see what the students are objecting to. Bolding is mine:

INTRODUCTION

1.  Graduate students at the University of Chicago have been put to the choice of halting their academic pursuits, or funding antisemitism. That is unlawful.

2.  In the Winter of 2023, graduate students at Chicago voted to unionize, and are now exclusively represented by GSU-UE—a local of United Electrical (UE).

3.  That is a real problem. Among much else, UE has a long history of antisemitism. It is an outspoken proponent of the movement to “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” Israel (BDS)—something so clearly antisemitic that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have condemned it as such. Indeed, for years, the union has had a consuming fixation with the world’s only Jewish state—a fixation peppered with all-too-common rhetoric. UE has charged Israel with “occupying” Palestine; has branded Israel an “apartheid regime”; and has accused Israel of committing “ethnic cleansing.”

4.  GSU-UE is cut from the same cloth. On campus, it has not only echoed its parent union’s rhetoric, but has added to it. It took pains to publicly “reaffirm” its commitment to BDS just one week after the October 7 terrorist attacks. And it has joined the “UChicago United for Palestine Coalition,” which gained notoriety for its protest encampment and hostile takeover of the Institute of Politics. Through it, GSU-UE has joined calls to “honor the martyrs”; fight against campus “Zionists”; resist “pigs” (i.e., police); “liberate” Palestine from the “River to the Sea,” and by “any means necessary”; and “bring the intifada home.” Jimmy Hoffa’s union this is not.

5.  Nonetheless, under a recent collective bargaining agreement extracted by the GSU-UE, graduate students at the University must now either become dues-paying members of the union, or pay it an equivalent “agency fee,” as a condition of continuing their work as teaching assistants, research assistants, or similar positions.

6.  Constitutionally speaking, that is not kosher. The union’s ability to obtain agency fees from nonconsenting students is the direct product of federal law—i.e., it involves governmental action, subject to the First Amendment. But if GSU-UE wishes to wield such federally backed power, it must accept the responsibility that comes with it; it cannot use a government-backed cudgel, outside constitutional constraint. And if the First Amendment means anything, it means students cannot be compelled to fund a group they find abhorrent as the price of continuing their work.

7.  The stories of Plaintiff’s members lay bare the stakes that are at issue here. One member is an Israeli; another a proud Jew with family fighting in Israel; and some are graduate students simply horrified by the union’s antisemitism—as well as its other (to put it mildly) controversial political positions, which reach well beyond collective bargaining to virtually every hot-button subject (e.g., abortion, affirmative action, policing, gender ideology, even the judiciary). Although members come from different backgrounds, none can stomach sending a penny to this union.

Now I’m no lawyer (I only play one on television), but it seems that this is indeed compelled speech: Jewish students are being forced to endorse policies that can be regarded as anti-Israel and likely as antisemitic. Nor do I know the solution, unless it’s to ditch the agreement that qualified students should have to join the union.  It seems to me, in my ignorance, that unions, like universities, should be “institutionally neutral”: they should not take political or ideological positions that have nothing to do with the working of the union itself.

The First Amendment itself prohibits compelled speech. As a free-speech site says,

The compelled speech doctrine sets out the principle that the government cannot force an individual or group to support certain expression. Thus, the First Amendment not only limits the government from punishing a person for his speech, it also prevents the government from punishing a person for refusing to articulate, advocate, or adhere to the government’s approved messages.

The Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) is the classic example of the compelled speech doctrine at work.

In this case, the Court ruled that a state cannot force children to stand, salute the flag, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The justices held that school children who are Jehovah’s Witnesses, for religious reasons, had a First Amendment right not to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or salute the U.S. flag.

In oft-cited language, Justice Robert H. Jackson asserted, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

The problem, of course, is that this doctrine applies only to the government punishing people for their speech or for refusing to adhere to approved governmental speech. Since schools are arms of the government, they can’t be forced, as noted above, to salute the flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance.  But the plaintiffs argue that the power of unions ultimately derives from the government—from legislative acts. From the complaint:

80. Step one asks: “Whether the claimed constitutional deprivation resulted from the exercise of a right or privilege having its source in state authority.” Edmonson v. Leesville Concrete Co., 500 U.S. 614, 620 (1991). And the answer here is yes: GSU-UE’s extraction of fees is the product of its legal power to bind all workers to a single collective bargaining agreement, as their sole and exclusive representative.

81. The Supreme Court has said as much: The “collection of fees from nonmembers is authorized by an act of legislative grace—one that we have termed ‘unusual’ and ‘extraordinary.’” Knox v. SEIU, Local 1000, 567 U.S. 298, 313-14 (2012).

This case, then, would seem to be an important one, for it could decide whether unions in general can indeed take political positions that are seen as implicitly endorsed by their members.  And, of course, unions regularly endorse political candidates.

The fate of this case thus depends on whether the compelled speech involved in being a union member is construed as being connected with government. As I said, I think unions, representing a broad spectrum of views among their members, should be politically neutral even if there’s no governmental connection. Compelled speech is chilled speech and inhibits free speech; this is why our university has its institutional neutrality embodied in the Kalven report.

But if the court does find that union activities occur under the aegis of government, then it’s game over: the plaintiffs win. We shall see.

Categories: Science

If your gym instructor is an iPad, what is lost – and gained?

New Scientist Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 8:30am
When your gym class is online at home, you don't necessarily need to miss out on the benefits that come from exercising in-person with others
Categories: Science

Robot dog can stifle weeds by blasting them with a blowtorch

New Scientist Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 8:00am
A Spot robot equipped with a blowtorch can locate weeds on farms and precisely heat them up to stop them growing, offering a possible alternative to herbicides
Categories: Science

What is the optimal amount of exercise and how much is too much?

New Scientist Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 7:35am
When it comes to exercise, more isn't necessarily better – and we're now discovering the ideal dose for better health
Categories: Science

Have an AI chat with famous figures of the past

Why Evolution is True Feed - Tue, 07/23/2024 - 7:30am

Reader Su called my attention to the AI website below, which you can join simply by giving your email and a password. And, of course, I couldn’t resist. Click on the link I just gave you, or on the screenshot below.  The figures you can talk to (ask them anything!) include Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Genghis Khan, Socrates, Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Galileo, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Catherine the Great, Alexander the Great, Alan Turing, Sigmund Freud, and Leonardo da Vinci. Clearly there are hours of fun to be had, and much time to be wasted. I asked a few of them questions, with the answers reproduced below. You’ll have to click on the conversations to enlarge them.

I started with Darwin, of course, and asked him about speciation. He clearly knew much more about species and speciation than he discussed in The Origin. His definition of species at the bottom is spot on. Click to enlarge:

I asked Freud if he was a fraud, and of course he was evasive:

Genghis Khan denied being a mass murderer:

I asked Socrates the Euthphro question, and he gave a very good answer!:

I asked Marie Curie how she felt about her work contributing to the atomic bomb.  She gave a boilerplate answer, but it shows she (or AI) would make a good politician:

Asked about whether Gandhi was mistaken in insisting that India remain a country of simple farming and crafts, and not embrace modern technology, he equivocated.

This gives uis a chance to revise history: to find out what can be, unburdened by what has been.  Perhaps those of you of a philosophy bent would like to interact with philosophers of the past.  In the meantime, I better leave this site alone.

Categories: Science

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