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Companies charge money to change your Wikipedia page
This article, from Pirate Wires, shows something that many of us already knew: there’s a thriving industry out there to either create or buff up your Wikipedia page, despite it being against the rules. (I note immediately that I neither created nor had anyone buff up my page.)
There are two types of editing: “white hat editing” in which paid interests are disclosed and direct edits aren’t made, and which may be okay (I don’t agree), and “black hat editing,” in which edits are made without conflicts of interest being disclosed, which is definitely against Wikipedia’s rules. New article are even created to boost businesses or organizations. Both of the latter two are against Wikipedia’s rules, but are hard to police.
I’ll give just a few examples to show you what kind of stuff is subject to paid editing:
. . . . . Today, Wikipedia’s list of black-hat editors includes over 200 companies, many of which operate dozens of front companies and subsidiary brands. One of the biggest and highest-profile is Abtach, a Pakistani firm founded in 2015 linked to an IT company called Intermarket Group. On Wikipedia, Abtach has been tied to at least 130 different Wikipedia editing front companies that operate under domains like Wikicreatorsinc.com, Wikicreation.services, Wikipedia Pro, Wikipedia Legends, and USAwikispecialists.com. Alongside its Wikipedia activities, Abtach’s owners run a parallel business selling low-cost trademark applications under names like Trademark Terminal, Trademark Eminent, Trademark Excel and more than a dozen others. In 2022, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) found that firms tied to Abtach had defrauded customers, in some cases by billing them for multiple filings when only one single-class trademark was filed. USPTO invalidated 5,500 trademarks as a result of the investigation and Google banned the companies from advertising. The previous year, the Federal Investigation Agency, Pakistan’s equivalent to the FBI, investigated the company for criminal fraud.
While Abtach may have pushed the boundaries farther than most, there are hundreds of Abtach-like companies out there — many based in Pakistan, India and Ukraine, but some of the longest standing and most impactful in the UK, Switzerland, France, Spain and the US — each with a profusion of front sites and domains ready to slurp up overflowing demand. Most of what these black hat firms offer is a kind of blunt-force approach to reputation management. For $1,200 to $1,500, they promise to create a Wikipedia article about you or your company. The process will take around a week (or so you’ll be told) with half the payment made up front and the other half upon completion. Payments are usually made in the form of bank wires, which are much more difficult to reverse than credit card charges. Frequently, the newly created article will be taken down by Wikipedia community editors patrolling for articles that don’t meet the site’s notability threshold. In some of these cases, black-hat companies will demand further payment to get the article back up, forcing clients to double the $1,500 investment, then triple it, etc.
And oy, the NYT does it!
While the mainstream media has covered the issue of Wikipedia editing, they have not been immune to its temptations. In 2020, during the lead-up to A.G. Sulzberger — the scion to the Sulzberger dynasty that controls the New York Times — assuming the chairman position at the newspaper, the Times hired one of the first and most highly regarded white-hat Wikipedia firms, Beutler Ink. Readying A.G. for the new post at the height of the #MeToo movement, the firm requested community editors beef up of the section on the incoming chairman’s journalistic experience, including a heroic account of Sulzberger’s time as an intern at the Providence Journal, where he “revealed” a local country club was not open to women. A range of other similar additions were requested — and made — including Sulzberger’s stint at The Oregonian newspaper, “writing more than 300 pieces about local government and public life, including a series of investigative exposés on misconduct by Multnomah County Sheriff Bernie Giusto” — language provided almost verbatim by Beutler Ink.
This seems unethical for a newspaper, and especially unethical for what is supposed to be a leading and reputable newspaper. A few more clients, which will surprise you.
The list of Beutler Ink’s clients alone reveals the staggering scale of this activity. A small sample includes media executive and Democratic mega donor Jeffrey Katzenberg, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, Simon and Schuster CEO Jonathan Karl and Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. Corporate clients include Reddit, MetLife, Accenture, Intel, IBM, Hubspot, Hilton, Vox Media, Dick’s Sporting Goods, United Airlines, Amdocs, Gallup, Allergan, Breyers, Vimeo and Waymo.
The PR tactics and marketing KPIs involved are just as diverse. While the New York Times turned to Wikipedia to burnish its brand, NBC News hired a white-hat firm to do damage control during a period of major upheaval. The scandal began when Today show host and media super-star Matt Lauer was abruptly fired in 2017 following serious allegations of sexual misconduct. In October 2019, an excerpt from a book by Ronan Farrow reported shocking details on the allegations, and claims top NBC executives, including NBC News chairman Andrew Lack and president Noah Oppenheim, quashed Farrow’s reporting on the scandal when he was at the network.
The revelations sent NBC into a tailspin. . .
Does this mean you can’t trust Wikipedia? No, though Greg Mayer has been promising me a post on “What’s the matter with Wikipedia?” for about a decade now. But surely nobody is going to pay to have articles about specific species of animals, chemical compounds, some biographies altered. But as for politics, history, or currently controversial subjects (including people), caveat emptor!
Stool test could provide a simpler way to diagnose endometriosis
France slashed bird flu outbreaks by vaccinating ducks
The NSF goes full DEI
Well, I guess I was premature in announcing the death of DEI in academia. Although some DEI programs are being dismantled or reduced in universities, the ideology they espouse is just now filtering into federal science-granting agencies. The report below from the Free Press shows that the National Science Foundation (NSF) is using a lot of taxpayers’ money funding DEI-related projects infused not only with ideology, but with postmodernism and verbal contortion. They don’t seem to be projects designed to find out something about the real world, but to impose progressive ideology on the real world.
Click below to see the article, or find it archived here:
Some excerpts from the article, though a description of funded grants (also given) tells the tale:
If you thought the august National Science Foundation focused only on string theory or the origins of life, you haven’t spent much time in a university lab lately. Thanks to a major shift endorsed by the Biden administration, recent grants have gone to researchers seeking to identify “hegemonic narratives” and their effect on “non-normative forms of gender and sexuality,” plus “systematic racism” in the education of math teachers and “sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.”
A new report from Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation made available to The Free Press says that DEI considerations now profoundly shape NSF grant decisions.
. . . The report, titled “DEI: Division. Extremism. Ideology,” analyzed all National Science Foundation grants from 2021 through April 2024. More than 10 percent of those grants, totaling over $2 billion, prioritized attributes of the grant proposals other than their scientific quality, according to the report.
What’s more, that’s a feature—not a bug—of the new grant-making process. Biden’s 2021 Scientific Integrity Task Force released a report in January 2022, stating that “activities counter to [DEIA] values are disruptive to the conduct of science.”
“DEIA” expands the concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion to include “accessibility.”
Yes, it’s Republicans, but you’re not going to find “progressive” Democrats combing through the list of NSF awards to find “studies” proposals. (The search was done using “terms associated with social justice, gender, race, and individuals belonging to underrepresented groups”.) And yes, the report has a political agenda, but have a look at the grants that were funded as well as the amount of money devoted to that funding. These things can be checked.
So, here are some projects funded by American taxpayers to the tune of $2 billion. The report also notes that while these Social Justice grants constituted less than 1% of NSF grants in 2021, ballooned to constitute 27% of all grants between January and April of this year. The first grant is for more than a million bucks!
- Shirin Vossoughi, an associate professor of learning sciences at Northwestern University, is co-principal investigator for a $1,034,751 2023 NSF grant for a project entitled “Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM.” The project’s abstract says that current teaching practices reproduce “inequitable” structures in the teaching of STEM subjects and “perpetuate racial inequalities” within STEM contexts. Her public writing, such as in a co-authored 2020 op-ed, argues that all American institutions, including STEM education, are “permeated” by the “ideology of white supremacy.” Vossoughi could not immediately be reached for comment.
- A 2023 NSF grant for $323,684 to Stephen Secules, assistant professor in the College of Education & Computing at Florida International University, intends to “transform engineering classrooms towards racial equity.” Secules has also been critical of the fact that “engineering professors are not engaging as active change agents for racial equity.” Secules could not be reached for comment.
- The NSF provided a total of $569,851 split among Florida International University, Colorado State University, and University of Minnesota for a project to examine “sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.”
- And the University of Georgia received $644,642 to “identify systemic racism in mathematics teacher education.”
Asked for comment, the NSF said this:
An NSF spokesperson did not specifically address the committee’s report when I reached out. But they said the “NSF’s merit review process has two criteria—intellectual merit and broader impacts—and is the global gold standard for evaluating scientific proposals.” Their statement continued, “NSF will continue to emphasize the importance of the broader impacts criterion in the merit review process.”
And indeed, those “broader impacts,” which used to explain how one’s project would improve public understanding of science, have now been broadened to include “diversity” and “STEM engagement.” What has happened in all four grants above is that these two “broader impacts” have merged to become the main subject of the grant. What we have above is sociology mixed with ideology to advance (not simply to “investigate”) Social Justice. For example, the last project, apparently aimed at identifying “systemic racism in mathematics teacher education” will no doubt SNIFF OUT that systemic racism. It just wouldn’t do it, as is likely, if the results (and the PI’s report) said “we looked for systemic racism in this area and didn’t find much.”
Clearly, the NSF has expanded its mission from fostering public understanding and adoption of science to fostering Social Justice.
Let us remember that the Dispenser of Grants is called the National Science Foundation. What we have above could be construed as science education, but it’s education of a peculiar sort: designed to ensure that science education is forced into the Procrustean Be of “progressive” ideology. And that, I suspect, is two billion dollars that could have been used to do real science, or even to improve science education in a non-ideological way. But instead the money seems to have gone into the dumpster. Is it any surprise that three of the five awardees, when contacted by the Free Press, “could not be reached for comment”?
Expelled! The True Story Behind Ben Stein’s Anti-Evolution/Pro-Intelligent Design Film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
The 2008 documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was released to widespread media coverage and hype. Starring Ben Stein—a conservative commentator, actor, and former speechwriter for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—the film argued there was a conspiracy within academia to censor Intelligent Design (ID) and to cover up evidence that belief in evolutionary theory led to everything from atheism to the Nazi Holocaust. Expelled opened in over 1,300 theaters and earned nearly $8 million. In addition to ID theorists, the film included interviews with noted proponents of evolutionary theory such as Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Shermer.
As the film’s co-writer, I was part of the crew that came to the Skeptic magazine office to interview Michael Shermer. Here is how he described his experience with us:
Ben Stein came to my office to interview me about what I was told was a film about “the intersection of science and religion” called Crossroads (yet another deception). I knew something was afoot when his first question to me was on whether or not I think someone should be fired for expressing dissenting views. I pressed Stein for specifics: Who is being fired for what, when, and where? In my experience, people are usually fired for reasons having to do with budgetary constraints, incompetence, or not fulfilling the terms of a contract. Stein finally asked my opinion on people being fired for endorsing Intelligent Design. I replied that I know of no instance where such a firing has happened.
This seemingly innocent observation was turned into a filmic confession of ignorance when my on-camera interview abruptly ends there, because when I saw Expelled at a preview screening at the National Religious Broadcasters’ convention (tellingly, the film is being targeted primarily to religious and conservative groups), I discovered that the central thesis of the film is a conspiracy theory about the systematic attempt to keep Intelligent Design creationism out of American classrooms and culture.
Although I was in agreement with the film’s agenda at the beginning, throughout the long production process, my feelings about the project and the ID movement underwent a significant shift. But I stayed on board in the hope of providing a counterbalance to the producers’ desire to create what amounted to a piece of pro-ID propaganda. I eventually realized, however, that whoever controls the money controls the point of view, so there was only so much that I could do as a fledgling screenwriter.
In the years since Expelled came out, the transformation of my views has continued apace, so I wrote to Shermer to apologize for the damage the film did and the duplicitous circumstances under which some of our interviews were obtained. In response, he invited me to write an article describing my experience on Expelled as well as my subsequent reflections on the ID movement and the larger issue of the relation between science and religion.
• • • • • •
During the two and a half years I spent working on Expelled, one of the key dynamics I observed was how bitterly divided people were over the notion of ID as a concept, and even more so as a movement. After reading countless books and articles on the subject and participating in interviews with people on all sides, I realized that no matter which way one approached the topic of Darwinian evolution versus intelligent design—and by extension, science and religion—the individuals on the frontlines were virtually all highly intelligent people of goodwill. Unfortunately, some of the leading voices were also exceedingly argumentative by nature. Thus, rather than engage in dialogue that sought to establish common ground and then work together to build bridges toward truth, interactions between the ID movement and its critics often amounted to one side lobbing a verbal grenade at the other and then hunkering down in the trenches as it exploded, all the while chuckling about how foolish the folks on the other side were. Rather than emulate that spirit, I decided I would try to engage my critics in constructive conversation. I wanted to see if it was possible to cross no man’s land and find some sort of common bond with the “enemy.”
Over the several weeks leading up to the film’s release, I did exactly that, spending hours each day engaged with people on my personal blog and other online forums. Despite my legitimate desire to conduct a meaningful dialogue with my opponents, my efforts were often met with an unrelenting wall of bitterness and sarcasm. Perhaps not surprisingly (considering the relentless barrage of abuse) and despite my good intentions, I occasionally succumbed to a similar rhetorical approach, adding a heavy dose of sarcasm to my own barbed responses. Even so, I was truly seeking to abide by motivational speaker Steven Covey’s “highly effective” habit number five: seek first to understand, then to be understood.
I hoped the film could do away with the need to “win” the debate over ID. One way or the other and instead unite these contending minds around their mutual desire to move science forward.
Over time, I recognized a pattern across the various responses that I received, one that matched a famous quote by Richard Dawkins: “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” On the surface, this sounds like an incredibly arrogant thing to say, relegating one’s opponents to varying levels of intellectual inferiority, insanity, or iniquity. But as I thought about it, I realized that’s how many of us treat those who don’t share our beliefs. When we encounter someone who disagrees with us, at first we assume they simply don’t know what we know, so we attempt to educate them. If that fails, we may briefly entertain the idea that the person is incapable of understanding what we recognize as truth. But if they display a reasonable level of intelligence, we seem to be left with only two options: either they know what we know to be true, and they’re purposely suppressing or obscuring that information (which puts them in the wicked category), or they’re so out of touch with reality that they’re a lost cause.
This was exactly the continuum I found myself traveling along with my neo-Darwinian debating partners. While, in their minds, I made a brief stop at “ignorant,” once I demonstrated that I was reasonably well informed on the relevant issues, they quickly shuffled me into the “wicked” category, with brief stopovers at “stupid” and “insane.” Their favorite name for me was “liar,” which I found frustrating because, despite how one might interpret the rhetorical position of Expelled, a film in which I had authorial influence but no editorial control, I wasn’t trying to be deceptive at all. I was sincerely seeking the truth, not claiming to have it.
In retrospect, though, I empathize with my opponents’ frustration. My stubborn refusal to concede my views probably led them to believe their efforts to correct my faulty thinking were in vain. As it turned out, it was the opposite. Even though I was championing a documentary that many regarded as contrary to science and truth in general, cracks had begun to form in my own beliefs about the ID movement and the branch of evangelical Christianity to which I had converted as a child.
The process began about six years before I signed on to Expelled when I took a class on Science and Christianity at Regent College (a seminary in Vancouver, BC) co-led by historians Mark Noll and David N. Livingstone, author of Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders. That class served as a rebuttal to the commonly held belief that evolution and Christianity must be inherently at odds. As Livingstone outlines in his book, the initial Christian response to Darwin’s theory was characterized by accommodation rather than confrontation. Rather than refute Darwin’s theory, many theologians focused on harmonizing evolution with the notion of divine design instead. It wasn’t until the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the early 20th century—which lumped evolutionary theory together with higher criticism and other attacks on a literal approach to the Bible—that a split between evolutionary science and some branches of Christianity developed.
Noll and Livingstone’s class triggered a desire to go deeper into the subject, leading me to focus on epistemology in general and the philosophy of science in particular. I was fascinated by the concept of warranted belief and the reliability of belief-producing processes. Are humans capable of discerning truth? If so, how? Does objective truth even exist? If so, is it possible to know it?
While my belief in God was still relatively intact at that point, by the time we started development on Expelled in late 2005, the epistemological ground beneath me had shifted. I don’t recall when it was exactly, but sometime over the next six months, I was in a coffee shop doing research for the film when I ran into my pastor and confessed that I no longer believed in Satan, angels, or demons. I can still clearly recall the look of deep disappointment on his face.
My confession was as much a revelation to me as it was to him. I can’t point to any one thing that led to that conclusion, but by then I had steeped myself in the writings of those at the forefront of the fight against ID, including Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, Kenneth Miller, Michael Ruse, Eugenie Scott, and Sam Harris. I had also read and interacted with several leading proponents of the ID movement, including Stephen Meyer, David Berlinski, William Dembski, Philip E. Johnson, and Michael Behe. Altogether, the more my understanding of the relevant science grew, the less work there seemed to be required of God to create the universe. No matter to which gap in our knowledge one could point, claiming God’s handiwork could always be found there, even if the history of science appeared to be one long, inexorable march toward shining a light into those very gaps, revealing not God but the same natural processes that we observe today, removing the need to resort to any sort of divine intervention as a cause.
To my way of thinking, that didn’t necessarily negate the concept of God or some sort of guiding intelligence in the universe. However, even if such a being existed, it seemed the most one could say was that “life, the universe, and everything” were the product of secondary rather than primary causes. God may have created the scale by which all things are measured, but apart from a few moments where a nudge in the right direction was required, his finger was never on it.
This put me in an ideal frame of mind to accept the primary claims of the ID movement. Many proponents of ID accept most aspects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, agreeing that the majority of what we observe in the universe is the product of secondary causes. However, while ID proponents agree that natural selection can account for relatively minor changes within species, they argue that it is wholly inadequate when it comes to explaining the origin of new species or of life itself, not to mention the origin of the universe. Not only do ID proponents believe life is too complex to be attributed to “blind” natural causes, they also argue that it is “irreducibly complex,” as Michael Behe puts it, wherein “a single system which is composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning” could not possibly be the product of a gradual process because the system’s function couldn’t be produced by selection until all the pieces were in place.
Furthermore, ID proponents such as William Dembski and Stephen Meyer argue for something called “specified complexity,” whereby if something exhibits both complexity and specificity (i.e., information), one must infer that it is the product of intelligence, given that intelligence is the only source of information in the universe of which we are aware. Hence, even if blind, natural processes could account for how that information is edited (something else that ID proponents dispute), such causes could not explain how that information arose in the first place, much less how the universe in which that information is processed came into being.
Richard Dawkins being interviewed by Ben Stein for Expelled, at the Natural History Museum in London
Of course, opponents of ID have rebuttals to each of these arguments. Primarily, as Richard Dawkins argued in The God Delusion, rather than end the argument regarding origins, proposing an intelligent designer to account for irreducible or specified complexity merely punts the ball down the field because such a designer would have to be the product of the same processes as the phenomenon the designer is invoked to explain. So, as Shermer articulates in Why Darwin Matters, if complexity necessitates an intelligent designer, then there must be a super-intelligent designer, which itself necessitates a super-duper- intelligent designer, and so on in an infinite regress.
Despite such objections to ID, I realized both sides of the debate faced the same sort of infinite regression when it came to explaining origins. Just as positing a designer merely postpones the problem, so does a purely materialistic point of view, with natural selection seemingly incapable of providing an account for how it came to be without invoking itself. The same goes for the seemingly immutable laws of nature within which natural selection operates. We have all sorts of theories for how these forces might have come into being and what holds them constant, but as for an ultimate explanation for the origin of the laws of nature, no one knows for sure. Accordingly, it appeared to me that on a philosophical level at least, ID’s proponents and its materialist critics were on equal footing. Each side was proceeding from a set of philosophical presuppositions about how the world came into being that cannot be proven, and each was at the same time equally certain that the other side’s philosophical presuppositions were wrong.
To add another level of similarity, many individuals on each side claimed that their presuppositions were a scientific inference rather than a philosophical preference. That is, they insisted their axiomatic beliefs were a product of their scientific observations rather than something they brought to the table with them beforehand, only to have those beliefs consciously or affect their scientific observations. Those observations were then predisposed to conform to what they already believed.
If we continue to expel, cancel, and block each other over our differences of opinion rather than dialogue and partner together to share our unique perspectives, there really is no hope for science, freedom, or truth.
When it came to Expelled, it was this interplay between philosophical presuppositions and the day-to-day practice of science that interested me most. After all, any honest observer has to admit that philosophical presuppositions affect how we approach science, for example by determining what is and is not accepted as evidence. At the same time, a truly scientific person must always be willing to revise their presuppositions in light of new evidence and/or arguments. My highest hope for the film was that it could explore this reciprocal relationship between science and philosophy, leading to the very common ground that I had sought to establish with my online debating partners. Perhaps operating from a place of naïve optimism, I hoped the film could do away with the need to “win” the debate over ID one way or the other and instead unite these contending minds around their mutual desire to move science forward.
Alas, that was not to be. For one thing, early in the process of making Expelled, I realized that the film’s producers weren’t interested in open-minded inquiry. They had an axe to grind against what they saw as an oppressive scientific establishment that was unwilling to “allow one divine foot in the door” (as geneticist Richard Lewontin put it), and they were determined to change that. Initially, I bought into this agenda as well, feeling like we were on the right side of history because we were fighting for free and open inquiry, not just on behalf of ID, but also on behalf of science itself. Why shouldn’t scientists be able to follow the evidence wherever it leads? And why shouldn’t intelligence be considered as a potential explanation for particular phenomena until proven otherwise? Hadn’t a presumption of theism, or at least deism, guided most of the early scientists, leading to all sorts of fruitful inquiry? If so, why couldn’t that continue?
My interactions with some of the leading lights of ID also had a chilling effect on my belief that we were on the right side of the debate. For example, when Ben Stein asked Michael Behe how biology would be different if it had ID theory as its foundation, Behe was left groping for an answer. Then when Stein was interviewing David Berlinski outside the Berlin Wall, trying to coax him into saying that an unnecessary ideological wall had been erected to keep any notion of God out of science—just as the Berlin Wall had been erected to keep “dangerous” ideas out of the Soviet bloc—Berlinski refused to acquiesce. Instead, he insisted that we need boundaries in science to help define the field. For example, we don’t accept astrology as part of science, nor should we. Walls aren’t bad in and of themselves, Berlinski argued; it’s more a matter of where we build them and why.
Of course, how we make such a determination is a product of our philosophical presuppositions, which are becoming increasingly impossible to agree on as we all break away from traditional meta-narratives and drift off into our own private definitions of reality. But even if we don’t agree with some or all of a field’s presuppositions, if we presume competence and goodwill amongst scientists, it’s only logical to assume that these boundaries exist not to limit the production of good science but to facilitate it. Otherwise, we find ourselves in the absurd position of arguing that scientists are working against their own self-interest.
Michael Shermer with the film’s press kit
I realize that a presumption of competence and goodwill is increasingly difficult to maintain these days as our confidence in the integrity of various institutions wanes. The problem is, considering the increasing complexity of the modern world, we are facing what energy theorist Vaclav Smil describes as a growing “comprehension deficit,” which makes our need to rely on experts greater than ever. This being the case, how can we determine when a dissident group, such as the ID movement, which is challenging the majority opinion in a field, is correct or whether they are a destructive force that really should be “expelled” out into the cold?
I continue to believe that a presumption of competence and goodwill amongst experts is the most fruitful and cognitively healthy way to proceed. I’m willing to go with the majority view in any given field until given good reason to think otherwise. But I have to admit I’m far more skeptical than I used to be. And who doesn’t love the idea of a plucky group of rebels who risk everything to stand up to oppressive, corrupt authorities, and by opposing them restore freedom, truth, and justice? Everyone from political leaders such as Lenin and Hitler, to storytellers like George Lucas, have exploited this universal narrative, which is becoming increasingly attractive as we all sense a growing lack of control over our circumstances due to the increasing pace and complexity of change, technological and otherwise.
This was exactly the narrative that we sought to tap into when making Expelled, knowing it would resonate with viewers on an emotional level. The question is, were we right when it came to the ID movement? Were they really courageous dissidents standing up against the evil Darwinian empire? I certainly believed it at the time, but I no longer think so now.
Despite the radical change in my views, fifteen years after Expelled I can’t say I regret being involved with the film. It provided me with a blank check to indulge my passion for research, to travel the world, to meet some of the brightest minds in science, to work with people who eventually became some of my closest friends, and to establish myself in the film industry. More importantly, over the long term, it completely transformed my view of life and culture, bringing me much closer to those whom I used to regard as standing on the opposite side of the aisle. But I do have significant regrets about how the film itself turned out, the distrust it sowed amongst viewers regarding the scientific establishment, and the deceptive practices we engaged in to make the film happen.
One example of those deceptive practices was hiring hundreds of extras to serve as Ben Stein’s “audience” during the speech he gives that bookends the film, making it seem as if he’s leading a groundswell of young people who are looking to overthrow the tyrannical Darwinian academy. This was filmed at Pepperdine University, Shermer’s alma mater, so he wrote them to ask how this happened:
The biology professors at Pepperdine assure me that their mostly Christian students fully accept the theory of evolution. So who were these people embracing Stein’s screed against science? Extras. According to Lee Kats, Associate Provost for Research and Chair of Natural Science at Pepperdine, “the production company paid for the use of the facility just as all other companies do that film on our campus” but that “the company was nervous that they would not have enough people in the audience so they brought in extras. Members of the audience had to sign in and the staff member reports that no more than two to three Pepperdine students were in attendance. Mr. Stein’s lecture on that topic was not an event sponsored by the university.” And this is one of the least dishonest parts of the film.
Kevin Miller holding our Big Foot fake-tracks shoe for cryptozoology tomfoolery at the former Skeptic Magazine headquarters in Altadena, CA, where segments of Expelled were filmed
Another was creating a fake production company, complete with a website listing several dummy film projects. We used this website to mislead potential interviewees into believing we were taking an objective approach to the subject matter, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. I’ve been involved in several controversial documentaries since Expelled, and landing interviews with potentially hostile subjects is always a challenge. In such circumstances, I admit to being less than forthcoming about my point of view at times because I’d rather get a “clean read” than a confrontational exchange, a relaxed conversation where the subject expresses their views similar to how they might talk to a friend, but not since Expelled have I taken things to such an extreme.
Like anyone who believes they have the truth (or possibly even God) on their side, while making Expelled we felt the ends justified the means. As history shows time and time again, though, just when we think we’re most virtuous, we’re also at our most dangerous. When facing off against what we regard as a great evil, belief in our own righteousness can blind us to the very evils we ourselves are committing in response.
If Expelled had been made today, it probably would have been called Canceled or Blocked instead because too often when we encounter ideas that offend our philosophical presuppositions, our emotional sensibilities, or our fragile sense of identity, that’s exactly what we do. And unlike the way the scientific establishment is portrayed in Expelled, it’s not just those in authority who do this. More often than not, mobs of regular people are leading the charge. Driven by a sense of self-righteousness and/or a weaponized form of compassion, they summarily destroy people’s lives, due process be damned.
This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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Lack of common ground, a shared version of reality in which to engage, remains a problem. And with traditional means (such as religion) of establishing this common ground rapidly fading away, it seems like an impossible goal to achieve. If we continue to expel, cancel, and block each other over our differences of opinion rather than dialogue and partner together to share our unique perspectives, there really is no hope for science, freedom, or truth.
We may never be able to achieve unanimity of belief, but if we can at least aspire toward unity of purpose and intent, agreeing to operate from a position of goodwill, charity, and curiosity rather than selfish gain or the need to bolster our identity by scapegoating others, maybe we can find a way to work together despite our differences.
Despite this discouraging state of affairs, I still believe in the power of conversation and debate as perhaps the only way forward. It worked to change my mind (eventually), so why couldn’t it work for others?
About the AuthorKevin Miller is an award-winning author and filmmaker. He has written, directed, and produced several documentary films, including Hellbound? and J.E.S.U.S.A. He is also the author of the best-selling Milligan Creek Series for middle-grade readers as well as numerous other books for children and adults, both fiction and non-fiction.
Auroras, Yes!! Comet, No.
I hope many of you saw auroras (northern lights) last night! I briefly saw the strongest steady red glow I myself have ever observed, visible even amid street lights and my neighbors’ house lights.
The skies, shown only slightly brighter than to the naked eye, as seen at 8pm Boston time. Credit: Matt Strassler
Then, after a break as some clouds rolled in, we were graced with a few hours of mostly diffuse green glow with patches of dim but distinct red that would come and go. All these colors were visible with the naked eye, albeit much less bright than shown in photos. It was quite a storm, not as violently active as the one earlier this year, but very persistent.
The storm lasted all night, though the auroras varied greatly in brightness. Data from https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
I also tried to find Comet A3 just after sunset, but failed, even with the help of binoculars. Apparently the brief spike in its brightness, due to “forward scattering” as it passed between us and the Sun, may have died off too quickly, leaving it impossible to see in early twilight. It will become dimmer day by day, but it will also be visible later each evening, and at some point should become easy to see in dark skies. Let me know when you first observe it!
Nobel Prizes awarded for Peace and Literature
This year I didn’t have a contest to name the winners of the two prizes above, for nobody ever wins. And, indeed, I’m not sure if these awards were all that predictable, though Literature Laureate Han Kang did win a Booker Prize for international fiction. So, here we go:
The Peace Prize was awarded this morning to an organization: the Japanese group Nihon Hidankyo. short for Nihon gensuibaku higaisha dantai kyōgi-kai (日本原水爆被害者団体協議会), or The Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations, started in 1956. The press release says this:
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 to the Japanese organisation Nihon Hidankyo. This grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as Hibakusha, is receiving the Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.
In response to the atomic bomb attacks of August 1945, a global movement arose whose members have worked tirelessly to raise awareness about the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of using nuclear weapons. Gradually, a powerful international norm developed, stigmatising the use of nuclear weapons as morally unacceptable. This norm has become known as “the nuclear taboo”.
The testimony of the Hibakusha – the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – is unique in this larger context.
These historical witnesses have helped to generate and consolidate widespread opposition to nuclear weapons around the world by drawing on personal stories, creating educational campaigns based on their own experience, and issuing urgent warnings against the spread and use of nuclear weapons. The Hibakusha help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons.
They are of course on a mission from Ceiling Cat, and I wish we’d just have worldwide disarmament. With a bunch of rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea getting the bomb, it’s only a matter of time before some demented leader decides to use it. But I am grateful that a worthy organization got it; I was a bit afraid because I heard that UNRWA was nominated. (Remember that Henry Kissinger shared that prize a while back.)
Here’s the announcement (the awardees are told in advance, but cannot share the news until the announcement).
*******************
And. . . . the literature prize, which this year went to Korean writer Han Kang, who’s only 53.
The press release is very short, just says this:
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 is awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang,
“for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”.
I had never heard of her, but Wikipedia fills out her literary biography:
She is best known for the novel The Vegetarian, which traces a woman’s mental illness and neglect from her family. In 2016, in its English translation, it was the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize for fiction. In 2024, Han became the first Korean writer and the first Asian woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
. . . . .The Vegetarian was Han’s first novel translated into English, although she had already attracted worldwide attention by the time Deborah Smith translated it. There has been some controversy over the translation, as scholars have detected mistakes in it; among other things, there is concern that Smith attributed some of the dialogue to the wrong characters. The translated work won the International Booker Prize 2016 for both Han and Smith. Han was the first Korean to be nominated for the award, and, in its English translation, it was the first Korean language novel to win the International Booker Prize for fiction. The Vegetarian was also chosen as one of “The 10 Best Books of 2016” by The New York Times Book Review.
. . .The Vegetarian made it to place 49th in The New York Times‘s “100 Best Books of the 21st century” in July 2024.
If you want that NYT “21st century” list to find reading material, the archived link is here. I have read seven of the top ten books, but not #1 (My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante). More from the entry:
Han’s third novel, The White Book, was shortlisted for the 2018 International Booker Prize.
Han’s novel Human Acts was released in January 2016 by Portobello Books. Han received the Premio Malaparte for the Italian translation of Human Acts, Atti Umani, by Adelphi Edizioni, in Italy on 1 October 2017. Her 2017 autobiographical novel The White Book centers on the loss of her older sister, a baby who died two hours after her birth.[18]
Han’s novel We Do Not Part was published in 2021. It tells the story of a writer researching the 1948–49 Jeju uprising and its impact on her friend’s family. The French translation of the novel won the Prix Médicis Étranger in 2023.
In 2023, Han’s fourth full-length novel, Greek Lessons, was translated into English. The Atlantic called it a book in which “words are both insufficient and too powerful to tame”
You can order the book from Amazon by clicking on the cover below (I’ve already requested it via interlibrary loan, as I have no more room for books):
And the announcement, which gives a bit more about the reasons she won the prize:
Here’s an interview with the new Laureate:
A Black Hole has Destroyed a Star, and Used the Wreckage to Pummel Another Star
When a supermassive black hole consumes a star, it doesn’t just swallow it whole. It shreds the star, ripping it apart bit by bit before consuming the remains. It’s a messy process known as a tidal disruption event (TDE). Astronomers occasionally catch a glimpse of TDEs, and one recent one has helped solve a mystery about a type of transient X-ray source.
Known as quasi-periodic eruptions (QPEs), they are soft X-rays that emanate from the centers of galaxies every few hours or a few weeks. QPEs are rare, so they are difficult to study, and we aren’t sure what causes them. One idea is that they are caused by a large star or stellar black hole orbiting the supermassive black hole in such a way that its orbit intersects with the accretion disk of the supermassive black hole. Each time the smaller object passes through the disk, it triggers superheated plasma to release X-rays. We’ve seen a similar effect with blazars, for example.
Given the short periodicity of QPEs the companion object would need to orbit the black hole very closely, just on the edge of a stable orbit distance. And when it starts intersecting with accretion disk material, its orbit will decay on a short cosmic timescale. This would explain why QPEs are so rare. But to prove this model, astronomers would need to observe this happening in real time, which is what a team of astronomers has recently done. The results will be published in Nature later this month.
AT2019qiz seen in X-ray and optical light. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Queen’s Univ. Belfast/M. Nicholl et al.; Optical/IR: PanSTARRS, NSF/Legacy Survey/SDSSThe story begins with an observation by the Zwicky Transient Facility back in 2019. The ZTF captured an optical flare that had all the markings of a tidal disruption event. It came to be known as TDE AT2019qiz. According to black hole models, when a star is ripped apart, much of the material forms an accretion disk around the black hole within a few years. This would make for perfect QPE conditions if there was a close companion object. So the team aimed the Chandra X-ray Observatory at AT2019qiz occasionally, hoping to capture a quasi-periodic eruption. Sure enough, in 2023, the team started to observe X-ray flashes erupting about every 48 hours. Observations from the Swift and AstroSAT telescopes further confirmed the result.
It isn’t known whether the companion is a star or small black hole, and the team would like to capture more QPEs occurring after known tidal disruption events, but this initial result is pretty clear.
Reference: Nicholl, M., et al. “Quasi-periodic X-ray eruptions years after a nearby tidal disruption event.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.02181 (2024).
The post A Black Hole has Destroyed a Star, and Used the Wreckage to Pummel Another Star appeared first on Universe Today.
Starship: When will SpaceX's next 'chopstick' test flight go ahead?
Spider-Man’s Web Shooter
I have to admit that my favorite superhero as a kid, and still today, is Spider-Man (and yes, that’s the correct spelling). There are a number of narrative reasons for this that I grew to appreciate more as I aged. First, Spider-Man is in the sweet spot of super abilities – he is strong, fast, agile, and has “spidey senses”. But he is not boringly invulnerable like Superman. He doesn’t brute force his way to solving situations. You don’t have to retcon questions like – if Ironman has the technology to produce immense energy, why doesn’t he just make it available to the world? He would save more lives that way.
But of course the coolest aspect of Spider-Man is his webslinging. This allows him to fly through the city, and to tie-up villains for the police to collect. This is also one aspect of the Spider-Man story that I thought was a bit contrived (even for the superhero genre where being bitten by a radioactive spider gives you super powers). In science fiction you generally get one gimmie – the author is allowed to make up just one fantastical fact to use as a cornerstone of their story. But they should not introduce multiple such gimmies. It breaks the unwritten contract between author and reader.
With Spider-Man, the one gimmie is the whole radioactive spider thing. That’s the one thing we are being asked to just accept and not question. I do like how more modern versions of the story changed that to genetic engineering – still fantastical, but way more plausible than radioactivity. I also liked that in the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man his webbing was part of the genetic engineering, and he produced the spider silk himself and extruded it from spinners in his wrists. For other versions we are asked to accept a double-gimmie – first, the whole spider thing, and second that Peter Parker also happens to be such a genius that he invented practically overnight something that scientists have been unable to do in decades, mimic the spider silk-spinning of spiders. Spider-Man was created in 1962, and here we are more than 60 years later and this remains an intractable problem of material science.
Or is it?
OK, we are not there quite yet, but scientists have made a significant advance in artificially creating strands of silk. The problem has always been spinning the silk into threads. We can genetically engineer animals to produce spider silk, but it comes out as a glob. Spiders, however, are able to keep their silk a liquid, and then extrude it from their spinnerets as threads with variable properties, such as stickiness. We really want to be able to do this artificially and at scale because spider silk is really strong – depending on what type of strength you are talking about, spider silk can be as strong or stronger than steel. When you hear this statistic, however, that often is referring to specific strength, because spider silk is much lighter than steel, it is stronger per unit weight than steel. In any case – it’s strong.
Perhaps a better comparison is Kevlar. Spider silk has several advantages over this modern material – it is more resilient, flexible, and in some cases tougher. But we are still not close to spinning spider-silk bullet-proof vests.
The current study has a title that does not betray its possible significance – Dynamic Adhesive Fibers for Remote Capturing of Objects. That’s a technical way of saying – you can shoot freaking spider webs. What the researchers found is that if you take a liquid silk from B. mori, which is a domestic silk moth, and combine it with a solvent like alcohol or (as in this case) acetone, it will become a semi-solid hydrogel. But the process takes hours. You can’t have your villain waiting around for hours for the webbing to solidify. But, if you also add dopamine to the mix, the dopamine helps draw water away from the silk quickly, and the solidification process becomes almost instant. Shoot this combination as a stream and the acetone evaporates in the air while the dopamine draws away the water and you have -an instant sticky string of silk. You can literally shoot this at a object at range and then pick it up. The silk will stick to the object.
This is a massive advance, figuring out a key component to the process. Spiders and silk-producing insects also use dopamine in the process. Spiders generally don’t shoot their webs. They adhere it to an anchor and then draw it out. So in a way they have done spiders one better. But the real goal is making artificial silk that can then be made into fibers that can then be made into stuff.
Now, the main limiting factor here – spider silk is still about 1000 times stronger than the resulting silk in this study. It’s strong and sticky enough to pick up small objects, but it’s not going to replace Kevlar. But the authors point out – the properties of this silk are “tunable”. They write:
“Furthermore, the possibility of tuning these properties is demonstrated by adding chitosan (Ch) and borate ions (BB), leading to remarkable mechanical and adhesive performances up to 107 MPa and 280 kPa, respectively, which allows the retrieval of objects from the ejected structure. This process can be finely tuned to achieve a controlled fabrication of instantaneously formed adhesive hydrogel fibers for manifold applications, mimicking living organisms’ ability to eject tunable adhesive functional threads.”
Spider silk has a tensile strength of about 1 GPa, so that is still 100 times this silk. Of course, they are just getting started. The hope is that further research will reveal formulas for tuning the properties of this silk to make it super strong, or have whatever other properties we need. I don’t want to trivialize this. As I have frequently pointed out – when scientists say “all we have to do is” they really mean “there is a huge problem we cannot currently fix, and may never be able to fix.”
It’s possible this method of spinning silk fibers may end up being little more than a laboratory curiosity, or may have a few niche applications at best. It is also possible this is the beginning of the next plastic or carbon fibers. Probably we will end up somewhere in between. But I am hopeful. There is a reason material scientists have been trying to crack the spider silk puzzle for decades – because the potential is huge. This really is an amazing material with incredible potential.
The post Spider-Man’s Web Shooter first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.
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