WAIT WHAT?!

'Come to Jesus': Biden frustration grows with Israel PM

Agence France-Presse
March 9, 2024 

President Joe Biden knows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from back when he was vice president under president Barack Obama (AFP)

With Gaza's humanitarian crisis growing more dire and his left flank in uproar, President Joe Biden is increasingly showing impatience with Israel's leader and making clear the United States will act on its own -- but few expect a dramatic break.

In his State of the Union address Thursday, Biden announced that the United States would build a temporary pier to bring aid into Gaza, days after the US military started airdropping food and top US officials received a key rival to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden's frustration with Netanyahu was laid bare after the speech when he was overheard speaking to a senator.

As he was warned that his microphone remained on, Biden said, using Netanyahu's nickname, "I told him, 'Bibi,' -- and don't repeat this -- 'but you and I are going to have a Come to Jesus meeting.'"

The American expression -- perhaps jarring when speaking of a Jewish leader in the land where Jesus lived -- refers to a dramatic realization that one must correct course.

But the administration has given short shrift to activist calls to use one of the most significant forms of US leverage -- cutting military aid -- and the 81-year-old president told Congress that he remained a "lifelong supporter of Israel" second to none.

Biden nonetheless directly addressed the Israeli leadership in his speech, warning not to use aid as a "bargaining chip" in Gaza, where the vast majority of the two million people have been displaced and the United Nations has warned of famine risks.

Biden repeated Friday that Netanyahu must do more to bring relief into the Hamas-led territory, which has been pounded by Israel since militants on October 7 infiltrated Israel and killed 1,160 people, mostly civilians, in the country's deadliest ever attack, according to Israeli figures.

Vowing to eradicate Hamas, Israel launched an offensive that has killed more than 30,000 people, also mostly civilians, according to Gaza's health ministry.

Pressure

The United States has coordinated with Israel on the aid deliveries, including by ensuring the temporary port is supplied from Cyprus and not an Arab country.

But such aid delivery is more commonly associated with remote or hostile territories, not an area under control of a US partner and a top recipient of aid.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators near the US Capitol block a street ahead of President Joe Biden's State of the Union address 

© PEDRO UGARTE / AFP

Anti-war protesters lined the streets of Washington for Biden's speech and critics of Israel, including Arab-Americans, have threatened to shun Biden in the November election in Michigan, crucial for his chances to beat Donald Trump.

In a letter this week, 37 Democratic lawmakers led by Representative Joaquin Castro urged the administration to use "every tool at your disposal" to ensure US weapons are not used in a potential Israeli ground invasion of Rafah, the southern city where some 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge.

Merissa Khurma, director of the Middle East program at the Wilson Center, called the US military's relief efforts "last-resort attempts" to help Palestinians.

"For anyone who has been watching photos and coverage of the harrowing situation on the ground, I think this was, again, an indication that the United States will have to step in if the Israelis are not listening," said Khurma, a former Jordanian official.
'Lose-lose' politics

Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken earlier in the week met Benny Gantz, a centrist who has joined Netanyahu's war cabinet but has risen to the top of some polls on choice of prime minister.

US officials insist they were not courting Gantz but acknowledge privately that the former military chief was seeking to look like a future prime minister.

Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, and Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, hold signs reading "Stop Sending Bombs" and "Lasting Ceasfire Now" as President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address 

© ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP

Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Biden had miscalculated with his early unstinting support for Israel.

Biden underestimated how Israel would "frame the conflict in terms of an existential struggle, which means he has actually limited influence over them," Cook said.

Cook said that while Biden has come under fire from the left, he is beginning to face criticism from Israel supporters who believe he is tilting too far to the Palestinians.

"It's really a lose-lose situation for the president. It'll have to be entirely up to him and his political people to decide which constituency he wants to upset more," he said.

© 2024 AFP

Hispanic health disparities in the U.S. trace back to the Spanish Inquisition

The Conversation
March 6, 2024

Class, gender and religion influenced health care in early modern Spain and Latin America. 

Diego Velázquez/The National Gallery, CC BY-NC

Many of the significant health disparities and inequities Hispanic communities in the United States face are tied to a long history of health injustice in the Hispanic world.

The health landscape of early modern Hispanic societies, particularly from the late 15th to 18th centuries, was a complex interplay between professional and nonprofessional providers shaping health care. The convergence of Indigenous, African and European practices, both in Spain and the Americas, affected how clinicians treated their patients.

This all played out against the backdrop of the Inquisition and colonization, when the Catholic Church prosecuted heresy. Consolidating religious norms promoted health care through charitable activity, such as the creation of hospitals, but also created challenges between the authority of the Catholic Church and competing health care initiatives.
My research focuses on how health and medical practices in early modern Latin America and Spain are represented through cultural artifacts, including literature, recipe books, the Inquisition and convent records. In our book, my colleague Sarah Owens and I explore how gender norms affected medicine and health care. We also consider how popular representations of health and medicine in culture inform widely held beliefs and biases about these experiences.

Understanding the historical roots of health disparities in Hispanic communities can help address them both locally and globally today.

Interplay of medical practices

Latin America and Spain in the late 15th to 18th centuries were home to a number of medical practices, including traditional medical knowledge and remedies and the professionalization of medicine through new universities and licensing systems.

Early modern medical humanists, or Renaissance clinicians, took up medical treatises by the ancient Greek and Roman physicians, including those of Galen and Hippocrates, and revived them in the context of “learned” medical instruction through European universities. The study of Paracelsianism, or the theories of Swiss physician Paracelsus, though more contested among practitioners because of its connections to the supernatural and occult, also affected a variety of health practices across early modern Spain and colonial Latin America. With the publication of anatomical treatises at the start of the 16th century, including the work of Renaissance physician Andreas Vesalius, the study of anatomy slowly and dramatically changed medical practice.


An 18th century engraving depicts a woman soothing a wound on Don Quixote’s back. William Hogarth/Wellcome Collection

Traditional healing practices varied significantly but often provided accessible and culturally compatible care, including reduced language barriers. Many people in Hispanic communities still rely on these practices today. Discussions about the legitimacy and health effects of folk remedies in Latin America, such as varieties of herbal and holistic medicine and other animal-based remedies, are ongoing.

Gender and medicine

As health care became more professionalized during the early modern period, some women found ways to practice medicine in more formalized contexts, while others continued to work as healers or herbalists. These practices alternated between success and suspicion during the Spanish Inquisition. Accusations of sorcery and witchcraft along with sexualities outside heterosexual norms often collided with practices of health and medicine.

But just as pregnancy and child–rearing are not the only medical events that shaped early modern women’s lives, women medical providers weren’t only witches. Nuns in Arequipa prepared treatments in convents, and mothers and daughters made medicine within households in Madrid.

From Fernando de Rojas’ 1499 tragicomedy “La Celestina,” about the go-between who crafts love potions and repairs hymens, to the 2019 Colombian TV series “Siempre Bruja,” about a 17th century Afro-Colombian witch who finds herself in present-day Cartagena, the cultural legacy of witchy women healers in the Hispanic world continues to be deeply felt.

Class, race, geography and language

The transfer of plants, animals and diseases across the Atlantic also profoundly affected health outcomes.

European diseases such as smallpox devastated Indigenous populations. Meanwhile, plants from the Americas offered novel treatments for a number of illnesses globally. Peruvian cinchona bark is a natural source of quinine that proved effective against malaria, a disease prevalent in both Europe and the Americas. Other plants such as cacao seeds found various medicinal and ritual uses, including relieving exhaustion or anxiety or improving weight gain.

The Columbian Exchange was not mutually beneficial.

But access to this range of treatment methods was unequal, especially across social class and geography. Wealthier nobility in urban centers often had much greater access to scarce resources across the Iberian empire.

Health outcomes were also often linked to racial and ethnic hierarchies. Patients were classified as Spanish, mestizo – mixed European and Indigenous – or African slaves in treatment records. These documents show evidence of uneven access to care, while there is also evidence that some exchanges in care practices across these hierarchies were possible.


‘Grammar of the Castilian Language’ codified Spanish. 

Antonio De Nebrija/World Digital Library via Library of Congress

Forced displacement as well as language discrimination also affected health access and outcomes. Spanish wasn’t standardized as a language until the publication of Antonio de Nebrija’s “Grammar of the Castilian Language” in 1492, inscribed to Queen Isabel with the reminder that “language has always been the companion to empire.”

For example, while Arabic and Hebrew were widely spoken throughout the Iberian Peninsula before the forced expulsions of the Inquisition, politics around language resulted in centuries of stereotypes and discrimination against Muslim and Jewish medical providers, who had to navigate alternative licensing methods to practice medicine in Spain and its colonial territories.

Understanding the story of medicine

More than 400 years later, inequities in and commodification of Hispanic health and wellness continue.

Luxury travelers are sold wellness via Mayan purification rituals, among other assorted local remedies and practices that can be purchased, marketed and monetized. Wood from the Palo Santo tree, which healers have used for centuries for spiritual cleanings and pain relief, continues to be grown all over the Americas, including Mexico, Peru and Ecuador, and is now bought and sold globally to bring “good vibes.”

Considering these early modern health practices and inequities allows for deeper engagement with health care systems today. Informed critical thinking about medicine and health care across disciplines is a powerful way to consider how these histories continue to shape current values and practices, including ongoing disparities in health care.

One such discipline is narrative medicine. Using the tools of the humanities, physicians can broaden their view of their patients from simple metrics to human beings with stories to tell. This process involves perceiving and incorporating patients’ personal experiences, valuing narration of the past and recognizing the significance of the encounter between doctor and patient. While much of this research focuses on English-language narratives, cross-cultural and bilingual research in Spanish is expanding the field.

It is estimated that by 2060 there will be more than 111 million Latinos in the United States. Understanding the historical legacies that have shaped wellness and care practices, including the factors that determine care quality and access, can promote more equitable and culturally nuanced health outcomes.

Margaret Boyle, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Director of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies Program, Bowdoin College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ICYMI

NOAA warns world's coral on verge of 'worst bleaching event in history of the planet'

Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams

March 5, 2024 

Coral reefs, dubbed the "rainforests of the oceans" for their rich biodiversity, are under threat everywhere as rising sea temperatures and acidification cause catastrophic "bleaching" events Khaled DESOUKI AFP

Driven by sustained climate-fueled oceanic heating, the planet is on the brink of another mass coral bleaching event that marine biologists warn could kill large swaths of tropical reefs including significant areas of Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

Scientists are sounding the alarm following months of record ocean temperatures exacerbated by the planetary emergency and the El Niño climate pattern in the Pacific Ocean.

"It's looking like the entirety of the Southern Hemisphere is probably going to bleach this year," Derek Manzello of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Coral Reef Watch toldReuters. "We are literally sitting on the cusp of the worst bleaching event in the history of the planet."

As NOAA explains:
When water is too warm, corals will expel the algae (zooxanthellae) living in their tissues causing the coral to turn completely white. This is called coral bleaching. When a coral bleaches, it is not dead. Corals can survive a bleaching event, but they are under more stress and are subject to mortality.

In 2005, the U.S. lost half of its coral reefs in the Caribbean in one year due to a massive bleaching event. The warm waters centered around the northern Antilles near the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico expanded southward. Comparison of satellite data from the previous 20 years confirmed that thermal stress from the 2005 event was greater than the previous 20 years combined.

Following the planet's hottest summer on record last year, the Caribbean suffered its worst recorded bleaching event. The last worldwide bleaching occurred in 2014-17, when scientists say approximately 15% of all reefs experienced major coral deaths. Nearly a third of the Great Barrier Reef's coral perished during the bleaching.

In the Southern Hemisphere, where summer is ending and ocean temperatures are at or near their annual peaks, there is "basically bleaching all over the place," according to Manzello.

Matthew England, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia who studies ocean currents, recently toldTheNew York Times that "the sea ice around the Antarctic is just not growing" and "the temperature's just going off the charts."

"It's like an omen of the future," he added.

It's a similar story in the North Atlantic, which "has been record-breakingly warm for almost a year now," University of Miami hurricane expert Brian McNoldy told the Times. "It's just astonishing. Like, it doesn't seem real."

A 2018 report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global heating of 1.5°C is likely to result in the loss of 70-90% the planet's coral reefs over the coming decades.

Current emissions-based forecasts have Earth on track for at least 1.5°C of warming, which researchers say is likely to trigger five climate tipping points: melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, mass die-off of warm-water coral reefs, thawing of Arctic permafrost, and collapse of the North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre circulation.

The European Environment Agency's long-term forecasts for 2071-2100 predict worldwide oceanic heating of 0.5°C-3.8°C, depending on future greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

Scientists say the best way to avert worst-case outcomes for both coral reefs and the climate is to swiftly transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Reducing land-based pollution and overfishing are also critical to reef preservation.

Scientists develop mathematical model to optimise elite athletes' performance

WHY IS 'DOPING' STILL ILLEGAL 

Agence France-Presse
March 5, 2024 

Femke Bol of the Netherlands shattered her own world record to win world indoor 400m gold in Glasgow 

(DENIS CHARLET/AFP)

Scientists have developed a mathematical model that promises to optimise training for competitors in 400-meter and 1,500-meter athletics events, according to a study published Tuesday

The model is based on performance data gathered from elite athletes including Olympic 1,500 meters champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen of Norway, Dutch world indoor 400m world record holder Femke Bol and Britain's Matthew Hudson-Smith at the 2022 European Championships in Munich.

"We wanted to understand what was happening at the physiological level in a 400 meters, which is a sprint, and a 1,500 meters, which is the first endurance race," Amandine Aftalion, co-author of the study published in the journal Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, told AFP.

Thanks to new technology of GPS sensors placed under athletes' jerseys, researchers were able to trace with precision the speeds of each athlete, with their position indicated ten times per second.

They integrated equations calculating physiological variables -- energy expenditure during exercise, maximum oxygen consumption (VO2), running economy and motor control -- in other words the role of the brain in the process of movement such as motivation, which has a role in the delay in action.

The data was later examined by scientists from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) who observed how they influenced the speed of the champions.

"Thanks to the quantification of costs and benefits, the model provides instant access to the best strategy so that the runner 'performs' in an optimized manner," the CNRS said in a statement.

The study shows the importance of a rapid start in the first 50 metres, for reasons linked to the speed of oxygen consumption, or that of less deceleration at the end of a 400 meters.

The simulations notably explained the performance of middle distance runner Ingebrigtsen by his ability to quickly reach his maximum oxygen consumption (VO2), and to maintain it throughout the race.

A particularity which allows the Olympic champion "to run at a greater pace than his competitors throughout the race, even though we see him start less strongly," explained Aftalion.

The model could lead to performance support software so that coaches can "refine the racing strategy in relation to the physiological profile of the runner", the researcher concluded.

The ghosts of the past: Pop music is haunted by our anxieties about the future

The Conversation
March 5, 2024 

The Beatles (UPI:AFP:File )

In 2011, pop music scholar Simon Reynolds was already observing pop culture’s fascination with its own past, noting that “we live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration.”

For Reynolds, this obsession with the past has the potential to bring about the end of pop music culture: “Could it be,” he asks, “that the greatest danger to the future of our music culture is … its past?”

The situation has not improved in the years since Reynolds voiced his concerns. Our fixation on the popular music of previous decades threatens our future by stifling originality.

Thanks to recording technology, and now to more recent developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, we find ourselves more and more in a spectral present, thoroughly haunted by the ghosts of pop music’s past.

Ghostly presence

This type of hauntedness can provoke anxiety. Hauntology, a theoretical concept originating in the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, was later applied to musicology by critic Mark Fisher. Hauntology is concerned with memory, nostalgia and the nature of being. The present is never simply “present,” and the remnants of our cultural past always linger or return.

A ghost, in literature, folklore and popular culture, is a presence from the past of something or someone that no longer remains. Is a ghost, then, from the past or of the present? As hauntology would insist, a ghost is paradoxically both at the same time.

In November 2023, pop phenomenon the Beatles released a “new” song titled “Now and Then.” It received a rapturous reception from fans and critics alike, and was soon topping the charts in the United States and the United Kingdom, becoming the fastest-selling single of 2023.

The Beatles’ 2023 track “Now and Then.”

The song features a lead vocal track by the late John Lennon, salvaged from a demo recording he made at home in the late 1970s, just a few years before his murder in 1980. It also includes archival guitar tracks from the late George Harrison.

The two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, contributed new bass, drum, vocal and guitar parts (McCartney even played a slide guitar solo mimicking Harrison’s sound and style), and producer Giles Martin (son of legendary Beatles’ producer George Martin) provided a string arrangement and a tapestry of background vocals lifted from other iconic Beatles songs.


“Now and Then” was also celebrated for the technological sophistication of its production, and specifically for its use of artificial intelligence. Using software that could tell the difference between a human voice and other sounds on a recording, Lennon’s voice was isolated and reanimated, allowing McCartney and Starr to perform alongside their long-deceased bandmate.

Final masterpiece

“Now and Then,” in addition to being a “new” Beatles tune, is likely also the group’s last: there are no more old recordings to resurrect, and McCartney and Starr are both octogenarians.

Indeed, according to music critics like The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis, “Now and Then” is an emotionally satisfying “act of closure.” It stands on its own as a genuine addition to the Beatles’ catalogue, wrapping up the band’s career and “never stoops to deploying obviously Beatles-y signifiers.”

Music journalist Jem Aswad, writing in Variety, characterizes “Now and Then” as a “bittersweet finale.” While Aswad is mildly critical of the song as an “incomplete sketch,” he insists at the same time that any further criticism is just unwarranted sour grapes, concluding that it is “an unexpected pleasure that marks the completion of the group’s last bit of unfinished business.”

Haunted, ghostly

Some critics, however, echoing Reynolds’s concerns, found “Now and Then” decidedly less praiseworthy. Josiah Gogarty’s brutal review, published in UnHerd, argues that the song serves as “a sign of our cultural doom loop,” and likened it to a “séance, calling forth the warbling and the jangling of the dead.”

The recording includes McCartney’s count-in at the beginning and some studio chatter from Starr at the end, as if to reassure listeners that the song is a product of living musicians.

At the same time, the song is eerily placeless or ahistorical, caught somewhere between past and present: a haunted, ghostly thing, evidence of a pop culture that has long ceased to evolve.

Limiting the future

The problem is the way songs like “Now and Then” are imbued with nostalgia: they threaten the future and limit the possibility of the emergence of new ideas.

Fisher feared the effect of this sort of nostalgia giving rise to “a cancelled future.” We can readily imagine such a future, because we already inhabit it: a future of never-ending tours by impossibly decrepit rock bands, countless re-boots of old movies and television shows, the fetishization of all that is vintage.

Even the most stunningly progressive technological developments — such as the AI that made “Now and Then” possible — turns out to serve a regressive purpose, namely to resurrect the Beatles.

A generous take on “Now and Then” would be to view its arrangement and production as capturing and amplifying the meaning of the song lyrics: “Now and then I miss you … I want you to return to me.” These lyrics suggest the presence and absence theorized by hauntology, which is cleverly reflected in the song’s haunted soundscape.

Less generously, “Now and Then,” rather than an act of closure, simply continues an ongoing trend of looking backwards in pop music. It indicates that our insecurities about our future ensure we will remain forever entangled with its ghosts.

Alexander Carpenter, Professor, Musicology, University of Alberta

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

World's first airport snackbot now driving itself around in Munich

2024/03/05

An autonomous snackbot is now rolling around Munich Airport offering weary travellers sustenance. L. Sammetinger/Munich Airport/dpa

Travellers flying through Munich are now set to meet a new robot wandering the halls of the airport and offering drinks and snacks.

The self-driving snackbot Jeeves was developed for use in hotels and health care facilities, but now, for the first time in the world, is being used at an airport, officials at Munich Airport have announced.

The robot is relatively low for a vending machine, about a metre in height, allowing passengers to stop and look down at its large screen to browse and cashlessly purchase soft drinks and snacks.

Once you approach it, the robot stops. Jeeves can be found rolling around the gate area of levels 4 and 5 in Terminal 2 at Munich Airport. Built by a Munich start-up, it is now set to do its rounds at the airport for a year.

'Terrifying': New AI appears to know when humans are testing it

2024/03/05

"Interesting behavior": Developers of a new rival to ChatGPT say their AI appears to be aware of when they're testing how smart it is, a skill apparently not yet seen in this kind of software. 

Sebastian Gollnow/dpa

The latest rival to ChatGPT claims the ability to recognize when people are testing it, according to developers at Anthropic, touting what appears to be a new level of awareness for an AI-powered chatbot.

To assess the capabilities of such chatbots, developers typically run a so-called "needle-in-a-haystack" evaluation, which involves asking the software about a longer text into which an unrelated sentence has been artificially inserted.

The aim is to find out how well the software can identify the relevance of information in its context.

"When we ran this test [...], we noticed some interesting behaviour - it seemed to suspect that we were running an eval[uation] on it," Anthropic engineer Alex Albert wrote on social media platform X.

In the test, the new Claude 3 Opus AI model scanned a collection of technical texts and picked up on an incoherent sentence about an international pizza association identifying figs, prosciutto ham and goat's cheese as the best toppings.

But the software did not only point out that the sentence did not fit with the rest of the text, which was mainly about programming languages and start-ups, the company says. It appeared to also know it was being tested.

"I suspect this pizza topping 'fact' may have been inserted as a joke or to test if I was paying attention," the AI was quoted as saying.

AI researcher Margaret Mitchell suggested the development could be "fairly terrifying."

"The ability to determine whether a human is manipulating it to do something foreseeably can lead to making decisions to obey or not," Mitchell said on X.

Given the increasing sophistication of the AI, the needle-in-a-haystack approach of testing the software with artificial, constructed tasks could ultimately not be a reliable means of assessing its true capability, the company said.

No problems had been identified during the usual tests to determine whether the programme could be misused to develop bioweapons and software for cyberattacks - or whether it would continue to develop itself. Collaborating with Google and Amazon, Anthropic is a competitor of the ChatGPT developer OpenAI.

Pope Gregory XIII gave us the leap year – but his legacy goes so much further

The Conversation
March 4, 2024 

An oil portrait of Pope Gregory XIII painted by Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614). Wikimedia

On this day, February 29, conversations the world over may conjure the name of Pope Gregory XIII – widely known for his reform of the calendar that bears his name.

The need for calendar reform was driven by the inaccuracy of the Julian calendar. Introduced in 46 BC, the Julian calendar fell short of the solar year – the time it takes Earth to orbit the Sun – by about 12 minutes each year.

To correct this, Gregory convened a commission of experts who fine-tuned the leap-year system, giving us the one we have today

But the Gregorian calendar isn’t the only legacy Pope Gregory left. His papacy encompassed a broad spectrum of achievements that have left a lasting mark on the world.

Rise to papacy

Born in 1502 as Ugo Boncompagni, Gregory made many contributions to the life of the Catholic Church, the city of Rome, education, arts and diplomacy.

Before ascending to the papacy, Boncompagni had a distinguished career in law in Bologna where he received his doctorate in both civil and canon law. He also taught jurisprudence, which is the theory and philosophy of law.

His intellectual influence positioned him as a trusted figure in legal and diplomatic circles even before his election as pope in the 1572 conclave. Upon being elected he adopted the name Gregory, in honour of Pope Gregory the Great who lived in the sixth century.
Movement in the Church

One of Gregory’s major undertakings was reforming the Catholic Church in response to the Reformation, a movement which established a distinct new branch of Christianity, Protestantism, separated from the Catholic Church.

Gregory aimed to implement the decisions of the Council of Trent, which met between 1545 and 1563, and defined key Christian doctrines and practices, including scripture, original sin, justification, the sacraments and saint veneration. Its outcomes directed the church’s future for centuries.

Gregory’s administrative reforms were aimed at centralising church governance and its operations. As pope, he relished the practice of law, personally engaging in judicial deliberations and surprising his contemporaries with his legal acumen.

His papacy also marked a revision of Gratian’s Decretals, a collection of 12th-century church laws that served as a textbook for lawyers. Gregory aimed to correct numerous errors and unify the various versions of this foundational text of canon law. This culminated in the publication of an amended edition in 1582.

Gregory’s dragon

Pope Gregory lived at a time when emblematic and symbolic interpretations were central to the political and cultural discourse. In particular, monsters were interpreted as omens or divine signs and played a significant role in religious and political debate.

Gregory’s coat of arms, the heraldic emblem of the Boncompagni family, featured a dragon. As such, it drew criticism from Protestant propaganda.


The coat of arms of Pope Gregory XIII has a dragon. Wikimedia

Anti-Catholic publications featured the Boncompagni dragon as an emblem of the Antichrist, drawing on the seven-headed monster in the Book of Revelation.

Rooted in biblical and mythological references, the negative imagery of Gregory’s dragon became a focal point for debates over the nature of papal authority, the legitimacy of Protestant criticisms, and the broader struggle to define truth and meaning in a rapidly changing world.

A legacy enshrined in art

Gregory’s legal legacy is celebrated in art, particularly in the Sala Bologna of the Vatican Palace, which commemorates his and other popes’ contributions to the study and codification of law.

Gregory XIII’s pontificate (term of office) was marked by a comprehensive effort to renew and beautify Rome, improving both the city’s functionality and aesthetics. He had a particular focus on the Capitoline Hill, the political and religious heart of Rome since the Antiquity.

Gregory’s initiatives – which included restoring essential infrastructure such as gates, bridges and fountains – were part of a broader vision to emphasize the centrality of law in Rome’s history and culture.

This is demonstrated by him being honored by a statue in the Aula Consiliare of the Senator’s Palace. This hall was designed to showcase the importance of judicial proceedings.

Alongside his urban planning initiatives, Gregory’s commissioning of artworks and architectural projects showcased his commitment to fostering a city that was not only the spiritual centre of Catholicism, but also a beacon of Renaissance culture.

In the Sala Regia hall in Vatican City, he commissioned a series of mural frescoes showcasing the triumph of Christianity over its enemies. He also commissioned an entire map gallery for the Apostolic Palace, to demonstrate the extent of Christianity’s spread over the world.

Reforming the calendar

Because the Julian calendar fell short by about 12 minutes each year, it was increasingly out-of-sync with the solar year. By the time Gregory’s reign began, this discrepancy had accumulated to more than 10 days.

To correct this, Gregory convened a commission of experts. Their work led to the publication of a formal papal decree in the form of the bull Inter Gravissimas on February 24 1582.


This decree not only fine-tuned the leap-year system, but also mandated the elimination of ten days to realign the calendar with the solar year.



The first page of the bull Inter Gravissimas. Wikimeia

The Gregorian calendar reform signified a monumental shift in timekeeping. In 1582, October 4 was followed directly by October 15, correcting the calendar’s alignment with astronomical reality.

This adjustment, slowly adopted by Protestant nations, has had a lasting impact on how the world measures time.
Faith, intellect and reform

In St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, you will find a remarkable funerary monument to Pope Gregory XIII. Completed in 1723 by Milanese sculptor Camillo Rusconi, it incorporates representations of both Religion and Wisdom, personified by two statues flanking the pope.

Wisdom is shown drawing attention to a relief beneath the enthroned pope which illustrates the promulgation of the new calendar – the pope’s most significant achievement. At the base of the monument, a dragon crouches unapologetically.

It’s a fitting tribute to a pope whose tenure was characterised by the interaction of faith, intellect and reform – and which can now be marked as a cornerstone in European history.



A dragon, the heraldic emblem of the Boncompagni family, is carved into the base of the monument.Shutterstock/The Conversation

Darius von Guttner Sporzynski, Historian, Australian Catholic University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

EMOTIONAL PLAGUE

US conspiracy theorists monetize 'Disease X' misinformation

2024/03/03
Fast-spreading 'Disease X' conspiracy theories pose a threat to public health, researchers say

Washington (AFP) - Coined by the World Health Organization to denote a hypothetical future pandemic, "Disease X" is at the center of a blizzard of misinformation that American conspiracy theorists are amplifying -- and profiting from.

The falsehoods, including that the unknown pathogen indicates an elitist plot to depopulate the earth, appeared to originate in the United States but spilled to Asia in multiple regional languages, AFP fact-checkers found.

The fast-spreading misinformation, which experts say illustrates the perils of reduced content moderation on social media sites, threatens to fuel vaccine hesitancy and jeopardize preparation for public health emergencies four years after the outbreak of Covid-19.

Stoking fears about Disease X, right-wing influencers in the United States are also cashing in on the falsehoods by hawking medical kits which contain what health experts call an unproven Covid-19 treatment.

"Misinformation mongers are trying to exploit this conspiracy theory to sell products," Timothy Caulfield, from the University of Alberta in Canada, told AFP.

"This is often their primary mode of income. The conflict is profound. Without the evidence-free fearmongering about vaccines and government conspiracies, they'd have little or no income."

The conspiracy theories particularly took off after the World Economic Forum -- a magnet for misinformation -- convened a "Preparing for Disease X" panel in January focused on a possible future pandemic.
Selling products

Alex Jones, the founder of the website InfoWars who has made millions spreading conspiracy theories about mass shootings and Covid-19, falsely claimed on social media that there was a globalist plan to deploy Disease X as a "genocidal kill weapon."

As the conspiracy spread to China, posts shared on TikTok and X (formerly Twitter) claimed the Chinese government was rolling out mobile cremation ovens to cope with "mass deaths."

But using reverse image searches, AFP fact-checkers found the videos in the posts actually showed pet cremation services.

Last October, AFP fact-checkers debunked online posts in Malaysia that claimed nurses were being forced to take a nonexistent vaccine for Disease X.

US cardiologist Peter McCullough, known for spreading Covid-19 misinformation, claimed without evidence that Disease X was "expected to be engineered in a biolab."

He made the claim on the website of The Wellness Company, a US-based supplements supplier where he serves as the chief scientific officer.

Urging people to "be ready" for Disease X, the website offers a "medical emergency kit" for around $300, which contains drugs including ivermectin, an unproven Covid-19 treatment.

The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing website notorious for conspiracy theories, also promoted the kits in a sponsored message titled "'DISEASE X' -- Are The Globalists Planning Another Pandemic?"

"Don't be caught unprepared," the message said, leading readers to a link to order the kits.
Misinformation goes unchallenged

"Spreading conspiracy theories in order to make money is a grift long established on the right," Julie Millican, vice president of the left-leaning watchdog Media Matters, told AFP.

"The ones most likely to be spreading conspiracy theories" about topics such as Disease X, she added, "are also looking for a way to take advantage of their audience to profit from it."

The Wellness Company and Gateway Pundit did not respond to AFP requests for comment.

Much of the misinformation appears to go unchallenged as platforms such as X scale back content moderation in a climate of cost-cutting that has gutted trust and safety teams.

The conspiracy theories build on growing vaccine hesitancy since Covid-19, which is likely to have "far-reaching" public health effects, said Jennifer Reich, a sociologist at the University of Colorado Denver.

"Since Covid, we have seen declining support for childhood vaccines and more support on surveys for parents' rights to reject vaccines for their children," Reich told AFP.

Some believers of Disease X conspiracies vowed to reject future vaccines, according to social media posts tracked by AFP, a stance that could limit the response to real health emergencies.

"Disinformation can also lead to some segments of the population taking up either ineffective or even harmful measures during an epidemic," Chunhuei Chi, a professor of global health at Oregon State University, told AFP.

"It can become a major barrier for a society to be proactive in preparing and preventing an emerging contagious disease."

burs-ac/nro

© Agence France-Presse

RADICAL ENGINEERING
The ‘average’ revolutionized scientific research, overreliance on it led to discrimination

The Conversation
March 11, 2024 

The average can tell you a lot about a dataset, but not everything. 

marekuliasz/iStock via Getty Images Plus

When analyzing a set of data, one of the first steps many people take is to compute an average. You might compare your height against the average height of people where you live, or brag about your favorite baseball player’s batting average. But while the average can help you study a dataset, it has important limitations.

Uses of the average that ignore these limitations have led to serious issues, such as discrimination, injury and even life-threatening accidents.

For example, the U.S. Air Force used to design its planes for “the average man,” but abandoned the practice when pilots couldn’t control their aircraft. The average has many uses, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the variability in a dataset.

I am a discipline-specific education researcher, meaning I study how people learn, with a focus on engineering. My research includes study of how engineers use averages in their work.

Using the average to summarize data

The average has been around for a long time, with its use documented as early as the ninth or eighth century BCE. In an early instance, the Greek poet Homer estimated the number of soldiers on ships by taking an average.

Early astronomers wanted to predict future locations of stars. But to make these predictions, they first needed accurate measurements of the stars’ current positions. Multiple astronomers would take position measurements independently, but they often arrived at different values. Since a star has just one true position, these discrepancies were a problem.

Galileo in 1632 was the first to push for a systematic approach to address these measurement differences. His analysis was the beginning of error theory. Error theory helps scientists reduce uncertainty in their measurements.

Error theory and the average

Under error theory, researchers interpret a set of measurements as falling around a true value that is corrupted by error. In astronomy, a star has a true location, but early astronomers may have had unsteady hands, blurry telescope images and bad weather – all sources of error.

To deal with error, researchers often assume that measurements are unbiased. In statistics, this means they evenly distribute around a central value. Unbiased measurements still have error, but they can be combined to better estimate the true value.

Say three scientists have each taken three measurements. Viewed separately, their measurements may seem random, but when unbiased measurements are put together, they evenly distribute around a middle value: the average.

When measurements are unbiased, the average will tend to sit in the middle of all measurements. In fact, we can show mathematically that the average is closest to all possible measurements. For this reason, the average is an excellent tool for dealing with measurement errors.

Statistical thinking

Error theory was, in its time, considered revolutionary. Other scientists admired the precision of astronomy and sought to bring the same approach to their disciplines. The 19th century scientist Adolphe Quetelet applied ideas from error theory to study humans and introduced the idea of taking averages of human heights and weights.

The average helps make comparisons across groups. For instance, taking averages from a dataset of male and female heights can show that the males in the dataset are taller – on average – than the females. However, the average does not tell us everything. In the same dataset, we could likely find individual females who are taller than individual males.

So, you can’t consider only the average. You should also consider the spread of values by thinking statistically. Statistical thinking is defined as thinking carefully about variation – or the tendency of measured values to be different.

For example, different astronomers taking measurements of the same star and recording different positions is one example of variation. The astronomers had to think carefully about where their variation came from. Since a star has one true position, they could safely assume their variation was due to error.

Taking the average of measurements makes sense when variation comes from sources of error. But researchers have to be careful when interpreting the average when there is real variation. For instance, in the height example, individual females can be taller than individual males, even if men are taller on average. Focusing on the average alone neglects variation, which has caused serious issues.

Quetelet did not just take the practice of computing averages from error theory. He also took the assumption of a single true value. He elevated an ideal of “the average man” and suggested that human variability was fundamentally error – that is, not ideal. To Quetelet, there’s something wrong with you if you’re not exactly average height.

Researchers who study social norms note that Quetelet’s ideas about “the average man” contributed the modern meaning of the word “normal” – normal height, as well as normal behavior.

These ideas have been used by some, such as early statisticians, to divide populations in two: people who are in some way superior and those who are inferior.

For instance, the eugenics movement – a despicable effort to prevent “inferior” people from having children – traces its thinking to these ideas about “normal” people.

While Quetelet’s idea of variation as error supports practices of discrimination, Quetelet-like uses of the average also have direct connections to modern engineering failures.

Failures of the average

In the 1950s, the U.S. Air Force designed its aircraft for “the average man.” It assumed that a plane designed for an average height, average arm length and the average along several other key dimensions would work for most pilots.

This decision contributed to as many as 17 pilots crashing in a single day. While “the average man” could operate the aircraft perfectly, real variation got in the way. A shorter pilot would have trouble seeing, while a pilot with longer arms and legs would have to squish themselves to fit.

While the Air Force assumed most of its pilots would be close to average along all key dimensions, it found that out of 4,063 pilots, zero were average.

The Air Force solved the problem by designing for variation – it designed adjustable seats to account for the real variation among pilots.

While adjustable seats might seem obvious now, this “average man” thinking still causes problems today. In the U.S., women experience about 50% higher odds of severe injury in automobile accidents.

The Government Accountability Office blames this disparity on crash-test practices, where female passengers are crudely represented using a scaled version of a male dummy, much like the Air Force’s “average man.” The first female crash-test dummy was introduced in 2022 and has yet to be adopted in the U.S.

The average is useful, but it has limitations. For estimating true values or making comparisons across groups, the average is powerful. However, for individuals who exhibit real variability, the average simply doesn’t mean that much.

Zachary del Rosario, Assistant Professor of Engineering, Olin College of Engineering

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.