The Kostoff knowledge: Elsevier fakes peer review of COVID click-bait
The Kostoff knowledge v.14
Updates: Elsevier retraction (5/9), concern (12/17). EIC Tsatsakis removed. (~3/25).
Analyses by Schneider (10/6) & Morris (10/14). Kostoff’s article is top 1% by Altmetric.
K. publishes 3× more extreme version (10/13). Tox.Rep’s CiteScore grows 5% in Oct.
15 of Kostoff’s last 18 papers written w. Tsatsakis, the other 3 in Tsatsakis journals.
Earlier this month, Elsevier‘s Toxicology Reports (CiteScore 6.4, top quintile) published a special issue on the COVID-19 pandemic. Its includes a remarkable article by Kostoff, et al., claiming that getting a COVID-19 vaccine is, “extremely conservatively“, 5x as likely to kill people over 65 as it is to save them, and even more harmful to younger people. (Kostoff, et al., Tox. Rep. (2020), 7, 1448-1458)
This echoes the fraudulent claims of German homeopath Harald Walach, who briefly published a similar article in MDPI Vaccines in June, before it was promptly retracted. A few of the most outrageous claims are listed below. None of this is subtle – unbelievable assertions start in the second paragraph of the abstract; the lead author has no past experience in the field; and the article puts “pandemic” and “vaccine” in scare quotes, and makes regular use of bold italics to emphasize points that are exaggerated.
This is why we have peer review, and editors, to distinguish research from polemic. Access to a reliable + competent body of reviewers is, in theory, a primary service that giant publishers like Elsevier offer to editors. Another is their name: being an Elsevier journal means you will be taken seriously out of the gate, and added to the major indices.
We should all be concerned that our publishing model allowed such a deceptive essay to be given the veneer of legitimacy – for weeks now, without correction. And we must hold both journals and publishers accountable for fraud that they support or legitimize – through deceptive practice, lack of claimed review, or inaction.
I want to come back to this, and discuss ways to remedy this, and some current steps in the right direction. But first let’s look at this instance in detail – as the errors were the most obvious that I’ve seen, related papers have been retracted in recent months, and it is impossible to imagine even casual peer review missing them. And because, as we will see, this particular Elsevier journal has been gaming the system for some time.
Article-level fraud (by the authors)
1. Extensive misuse of VAERS data: VAERS is an open public registry of unvetted self-reports of health events occurring after vaccination. Most events are not caused by vaccines, but this is a starting point for further analysis. Doctors are supposed to report any deaths or hospitalizations occurring within a week of vaccination, regardless of potential causal link.
The very openness of this data has led to it being widely cited in anti-vax propaganda, misinterpreting VAERS as a catalog of known harms and side-effects. (“Don’t Fall for VAERS scares“)
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FSF splits up, dithering til only a Stallman corps remains
The FSF, bastion of advocacy for free & open software and the need for copyleft in general, split up last week – dividing its community in a lasting way.
At the end of the 2021 LibrePlanet conference, surprising staff and speakers and attendees, RMS announced he was returning to the Board.
In the immediate aftermath, all of the external conference keynotes, some former FSF trustees, and a number of other free software community leaders, published an open letter calling on the entire FSF Board to resign.
Since then:
* A number of large organizations withdrew their support for the FSF, including Mozilla, RedHat, EFF, and Creative Commons
* A number of GNU and other free software projects have signed the letter, including GCC, GNU Radio, GNU Mailman, X.org, and Tor
* A number of FSF staff gave notice, including the ED, Deputy ED, CTO, and President.
* Their most meticulous board member resigned.
* A member of the FSF staff was appointed to the Board.
Some 3000 people signed the open letter; another 4500 6000 signed a letter in support of Stallman. That split is likely to last, and to define the Foundation as it hires new leadership and looks for new Trustees.
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Teaching a poodle to make certain requests of his human partner
The following is a lovely essay by John Lubbock on learning to communicate better with dogs by teaching them language to express concepts. It was first published in Nature in 1885 and included in his delightful On the Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Animals (1888)
That the dog is a loyal, true, and affectionate friend must be gratefully admitted, but when we come to consider the psychical nature of the animal, the limits of our knowledge are almost immediately reached. I have elsewhere suggested that this arises from the fact that we have tried to teach animals, rather than to learn from them—to convey our ideas to them, rather than to devise any language or code of signals by means of which they might communicate theirs to us. The former may be more important from a utilitarian point of view, though even this is questionable, but psychologically it is far less interesting.
Under these circumstances it occurred to me whether some such system as that followed with deaf mutes, and especially by Dr. Howe with Laura Bridgman, might not prove very instructive if adapted to the case of dogs. I have tried this in a small way with a black poodle named Van.
I took two pieces of cardboard about 10 inches by 3, and on one of them printed in large letters the word [ F O O D ], leaving the other blank. I then placed two cards over two saucers, and in the one under the “food” card put a little bread and milk, which Van, after having his attention called to the card, was allowed to eat.
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Forging Social Proof: the Networked Turing Test Rules the First AI War
A few years ago I wrote about how our civilization was forfeiting the zeroth AI war — allowing individual attention hacks, deployed at scale, to diminish and replace our natural innovation and productivity in every society. We gained efficiency in every area of life, and then let our new wealth and spare time get absorbed by newly-efficient addictive spirals.
Exploit culture
This war for attention affects what sort of society we can hope to live in. Channeling so much wealth to attention-hackers, and the networks of crude AI tools and gambling analogs that support them, has strengthened an entire industry of exploiters, allowing a subculture of engineers and dealmakers to flourish. That industry touches on fraud, propaganda, manipulation of elections and regulation, and more, all of which influence what social equilibria are stable.
The first real AI war
Now we are facing the first real artificial-intelligence war — dominated by entities that appear as avatars of independent, intelligent people, but are artificial, scripted, automated.
What is new in this? Earlier low-tech versions of this required no machine learning or programming: they used the veil of pseudonymity to fake authorship, votes, and small-scale consensus. In response, we developed layers of law and regulation around earlier attacks — fraud, impersonation, and scams are illegal. AI can smoothly scale this to millions of comments on public bills, and to forging microtargeted social proof in millions of smaller group interactions online. And these scaled attacks are often still legal, or lightly penalized and enforced.
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Raw Ought: Norms as Frames for Life and Thought
…and Models of Enrageousness.
Fjordic Norway is a mix of lush beauty, arable land, and impassable terrain — rivers, lakes, and steep mountainsides, interlaced like the fingers and planes of so many hands intertwined in four dimensions.
Today that part of the country is striped with tunnels through the mountains, over 1000 in all, some over 20km long. Tunnel-construction is a norm there, permeating many aspects of life. Driving for a few hours outside of Bergen, I passed two being constructed from scratch; and at a few points had to follow a lead car through five that were under construction and so were staggering traffic to work on them.
The overall understanding of road usage and travel was different. And national commitments to construction were made decades at a time. Different approaches to innovation have led to quite divergent models of practice.
Perec’s Valène’s dreams : Life: A User’s Manual’s story concept hoard
And a second catalog of tales, with fewer interconnections : Valène’s incomplete catalog of 179 stories from the Fifty-First chapter of Life, A User’s Manual, a life-work of Perec, poetic puzzlemaker and one of the great writers of the 20th century, lovingly translated into English by the meticulous David Bellos :
1 The Coronation at Covadonga of Alkhamah's victor, Don Pelage
2 The Russian singer and Schönberg living in Holland as exiles
3 The deaf cat on the top floor with one blue & one yellow eye
4 Barrels of sand being filled by order of the fumbling cretin
5 The miserly old woman marking all her expenses in a notebook
6 The puzzlemaker's backgammon game giving him his bad tempers
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Journey to the West : Wu Cheng-en’s Magnum Opus, from the Ming era
In the spirit of winter cataloguing: Journey to the West, an ancient novel by Wu Cheng-en, has some spectacular chapter titles, which give the sense of the work without spoiling its story. If you have read the work they remind you of it, but if you have not it is hard to know what to make of the couplets.
The work has been translated and interpreted constantly over the past 4 centuries; most recently in a series of films; but the texture of the original and its chapter structure is my clearest memory of it. The poetry of the original has been hard to capture in translation; seen too in the title translations. This version is from Yu’s 2012 revised edition.
Journey to the West
Volume 1
1 The divine root conceives, its source revealed;
Mind and nature nurtured, the Great Dao is born.
2 Fully awoke to Bodhi’s wondrous truths,
He cuts off Māra, returns to the root, and joins Primal Spirit.
3 Four Seas and a Thousand Mountains all bow to submit;
From Ninefold Darkness ten species’ names are removed.
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Designing life for episodic tyranny | 2: Social networks
For background, see also Part 1: Secure toolchains
Motivation
Imagine a Stasinario: while in a Tier 3 environment, you expect your social networks to be subverted, with people pressured to report on one another, and casual gatherings discouraged or explicitly outlawed. Your contact with local colleagues and neighbors is always tinged with the certainty that eventually, one of them will report on the others, if only to stay out of trouble themselves.
Assume that a few community members will be willing informants, and that everyone else would rather not inform, but will periodically be questioned by an adversary trying to prevent organizing or information-passing of any kind. When questioned, you will be punished for sharing any information that can be shown to be false. What sorts of preparation can you make in advance, for both offline and online gatherings? [Input needed from people facing this in closed systems, and in heavily-monitored activist movements.]
Social design options
1. Make gathering information more expensive. Add plausible noise to the system; report frequently rather than rarely?
2. Human ddos/noise: instead of LOIC [Anons], have collective noise generation pointed at some unethical public db or data-collection. 1) setting your devices to signal to such networks; 2) sending your info / generating random info to send there;
2a. For human / minority-tracking databases: blacklists, registering refugees, or migrants from specific regions/religions. Consider self-registration, auto-registration of valid-looking but random identities.
2b. Try SETI@Home style noise, where a large number of devices compute/produce small amounts of signal sent out along a given channel
3. Social steganography? Embed real discussions among a few friends with lots of chatbots? so it’s hard to know which comments are real to find participants to trace or lean on. [Or even change which apparent participant in a channel is the real person communicating, over time]. Possibly not helpful if subversion happens at the human level using the tapped-in comms device.
4. Find ways to confound tracking and data-tracing.
4a. Make mixing (or air-gap) services widely / anonymously available
4b. Fake geo-tag generation. Fake GPS data from a group of users’ phones so it can’t be seen that they are all gathering together. Emit randomized (but logical) GPS coordinates when requested if turned on. ++
5. Randomized salting of communication, to provide plausible deniability for those who pass on wrong information, and to spot-check members of a group for currently being a leak.
Ex: Encrypted group chat has pairwise encryption now. No guarantee you get the same message as someone else in the group? You could implement round-robin disinformation where one member of a group chat gets different info than the rest [and you could randomly select who gets bad info to see if outsiders sweep in / show up at the wrong place]
6. Signalling: Be open about some of the above preparation, so that all parties know there are less certain returns on relying on such information. Share how to build a system like this [specifics?] that anyone can adopt unilaterally without active coordination.
7. Open books: imagine ways to share access to your toolchain to friends, self-surveillance to let everyone observe there is no or limited collaboration with dangerous parties.
8. Collective multi-national insurance? to offset risks of a bubble of tyranny in one place: a pool that will help you relocate, find jobs/home in another jurisdiction… Similarly: flesh out details of potential future costs, currently handled by the public, that might become individual costs under f – in case you have to start paying for them yourself.
8a. Related: collective libersurance: investing in a libertarian solution, that stops relying on government to provide those shared services (EPA protection, health insurance, &c) : leaving less on the table for a governmental shift to distort.
8b. Counterpoint: you might be prevented from doing this? if the government is explicitly propping up one industry (coal) over another. Gov occupies a bunch of fields that individuals can’t use.
9. Reduce reliance on your region’s infrastructure. Practice living through blackouts, emphasize taking your gadgets off-grid on a regular basis, ensuring they still work. Ditto for plumbing.
10. Preserve mulinational free-trade zones, black markets, networks outside of national jurisdictions, not as terribly large or strong, but with reasonable burst capacity and robust to crushing. So that there is always a functioning side channel. [Ex: ?? falls in Lat Am, Kowloon City]
Related ideas
1. Fix security holes in current distributed communication.
1a. Metadata about who’s using what network and when is still sharable; WeChat is not very secure – even being in a channel can make you guilty and rounded up. IPFS is great as far as it goes, but their routing mechanism still shows the node-interconnection-graph, which as with bittorrent can show who seeds/shares/acts as a hub.
1b. Iterated/ decentralization? needed. A mostly-decentral system with central elements can be more vulnerable than a robustly-central system that acknowledges this as a weakness and prepares for it.
2. Consider multinational/extranational decision-making and stakeholding, so no core stakeholder group can be entirely dominated by a central national actor
3. Keep doing this work transparently and publicly. Increase security for discussing & updating & suggesting new ideas.
Cop dines with homeless mother of four, gets kudos. Her plight is ignored.
Recent news blurbs across our fair state, applaud a state trooper for “sharing lunch with a homeless mother of four“. (Headline language).
This was noticed and photographed by a passerby; the trooper then identified by the state police and posted to their online webpage praising him for his good deed; a CBS affiliate spent hours tracking down both the photographer and the woman for a video interview. They got quotes from her about: being a ‘homeless panhandler’, his common decency, and her surprise. She was described by her motherhood, her panhandling, and being down on her luck.
And that’s it! Nothing thoughtful about why this young mother is homeless in Fall River, or what will become of her family. No opportunities to reach out and fix a tragedy. She clearly needs more than one good meal and healthcare, but the outpouring of interest in the viral photo is entirely directed towards how and whether to applaud the police officer [who, quite decently, refused to be interviewed], how this reflects on police officers everywhere, how this perhaps restores faith in humanity.
(Update: It seems the trooper and one local news affiliate did find a way to help her temporarily with material support, a bit after that event. And a few cases like this that have famously included a crowdfunding campaign. But the most newsworthy issue is: how does this happen in our society, what can we do to fix that, and what permanent fixes could work for the family in the spotlight.)
The Underlay — Brazing public knowledge graphs for the public good
Lately I have been dreaming of knowledge graphs, iteratively refined and detailed, that allow us to pore over what we know and enhance our knowledge. A framework and language for amplifying, amending, annotating, qualifying, contextualizing, decomposing, reconstituting, synthesizing and comparing specific and uniquely-named elements of trains of logic, thought, computation, interpolation, and other inference.
One shared element that I keep coming back to is an underlayer of data, assertions, and reported knowledge, designed to support many different mesh sizes (for the conceptual mesh used to describe an observation), to let you expand observations into increasingly granular bits, and to add context and background, tracing them back to their original observation. To make use of it efficient, it would also support clusterings (for the equivalence class of names that, in the current context, resolve to the same thing), and filters (for deciding what data to include or exclude in a given view).
For all of this, I propose a collective project to which we can all contribute: an Underlay, comprised of networks of interlinked, structured data. Each point versioned, meshed, linked to its sources, and linking likewise to the composites and analyses that have relied on it. Each underlay a composite of many different layers, each with its own canonical mesh-grain; and the global Underlay project a constellation of the individual underlays, providing a way to name and disambiguate an idea or claim or discussion.
Righteousness and peace, and recovering at last what we threw away
Dinesen‘s short story Babette’s Feast includes a lovely riff on Psalm 85. This is quoted in full towards the end, and refined in the film. In one of those revealing errors highlighting the fragility of citation, there is a canonical English misquote online, repeated in a thousand places, but the correct quote did not exist.
I leave the quote here in honor of the season. And I wish you, dear reader, a confident and grateful year, full of potential and choiceness.
Mercy and truth are met together.
Righteousness and peace have kissed one another.
Man, in his weakness and short-sightedness,
believes he must make choices in this life.
He trembles at the risks he must take.
We know that fear.
But, no - our choice is of no importance.
There comes a time when our eyes are opened.
And we come to realize at last that mercy is infinite.
We need only await it with confidence,
and receive it with gratitude.
Mercy imposes no conditions.
And, see: Everything we have chosen has been granted to us.
And everything we renounced — has also been granted.
Yes, we even get back what we threw away.
For mercy and truth are met together.
And righteousness and peace have kissed one another.
I don’t like theory of language, but this piece on Big Data is great
On the development of language around ‘Big Data’:
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4869/3750#p3
Ravalomanana v. Rajaonarimampianina
Madagascar’s presidential election, after 4 years of being couped up, heats up in neck-and-neck runoff with apparent vote-rigging and complaints about fraud on both sides.
It is a beautiful island of 22 million people; also a microcosm of regional political hijinks.
Colin Thompson’s art and Gelaskin printing make sweet laptop covers
When I travel with my laptop, kids of all ages want to play with my cover. It’s full of books with wonderfully bad title-puns. Here’s a quick how-to for making your own form-fitting skins, for $20.
Start with your favorite high-resolution art from Colin Thompson — beautifully hued, full of word and visual tricks.
Pipe it through Gelaskins with your favorite laptop or phone model. End up with a thin, removable full-body sticker that will give you countless moments of joy. (I’ve tried covers for both top and bottom to fit my laptop; this was the best of the 3 skin-printing services I tried. The bottom skin survived being removed after 3 months when the laptop was sent in for repair, and reattached a week later, with no distortion.)
A ditty for Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane
Adapted from Bunsen,
via Pipeline’s Things I Wont Work With:
Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzita-ane
Even though the synthesis
is something quite insa-ane
If you cough too close to it
You’ll lose a window pa-ane
Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzita-ane!
A New ‘Pedia: planning for the future of Wikipedia
Wikipedia has gotten more elaborate and complex to use. Adding a reference, marking something for review, uploading a file or creating a new article now take many steps — and failing to follow them can lead to starting all over. The curators of the core projects are concerned with uniformly high quality, and impatient with contributors who don’t have the expertise and wiki-experience to create something according to policy. Good stubs or photos are deleted for failing to comply with one of a dozen policies, or for inadequate cites or license templates; even when they are in fact derived from reliable sources and freely licensed.
The Article Creation Wizard has a five-step process for drafting an article, after which it is submitted for review by a team of experienced editors, and finally moved to the article namespace. 7 steps for approval is too much overhead for many. And the current notability guidelines on big Wikipedias excludes most local and specialist knowledge.
We need a simpler scratch-space to develop new material:
- A place not designed to be high quality, where everything can be in flux, possibly wrong, in need of clarification and polishing and correction.
- A place that can be used to build draft articles, images, and other media before posting them to Wikipedia
- A place where everyone is welcome to start a new topic, and share what they know: relying on verifiability over time (but not requiring it immediately), and without any further standard for notability
- A place with no requirements to edit: possibly style guidelines to aspire to, but where newbies who don’t know how the tools or system works are welcomed and encouraged to contribute more, and not chastised for getting things wrong.
Since this will be a new sort of compendium or comprehensive cyclopedia, covering all topics, it should have a new name. Something simple, say Newpedia. Scripts can be written to help editors work through the most polished Newpedia items and push them to Wikipedia and Wikisource and Commons. We could invite editors to start doing their rough work on Newpedia, to avoid the conflict and fast reversion on the larger wiki references that make it hard to use for quick new work.
Update: Mako discussed Newpedia (or double-plus-newpedia) in his panel about “Wikipedia in 2022“, and Erik Moeller talked about how the current focus on notability is keeping all of our projects from growing, in his “Ghosts of Wikipedia Future“. I look forward to the video and transcripts.
What do you think? I started a mailing list for people who are interested in developing such a knowledge-project. I look forward to your thoughts, both serious and otherwise 😉