The Internet Protection Agency, Content Moderation Division

By: | January 24, 2019

A Facebook content moderator is suing the social network for psychological trauma after watching thousands of hours of toxic and disturbing content. “There is no long-term support plan when these content moderators leave. They are just expected to melt back into the fabric of society.” – “An online decency moderator’s advice: Blur your eyes“, Jane Wakefield, BBC News, 14 Oct 2018


Consider the plight of the content moderators

A spill had been reported at the border. Granger swiped at the incoming job notification to accept and shut off the ping, and hoofed it to the stack. This one came with serious hazard pay.

The front of the building looked very different from the back. The front was all Maryland Government Agency – leafy ornamental trees, spacious drive, big shiny laser-cut marble letters configured into a sculpture that spelled “Internet Protection Agency”. In the back, near a sprawling construction site, the newly transferred Content Moderation Division squatted inside its temporary housing – an intimidating stack of cargo containers piled as high as it was deep. Inside, these were much fancier than their outsides let on: the IPA had been spun out of a joint project of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Security Agency.

Freya was already at her station. She had even managed to clip her toxicity monitor to her visor. Granger, irritated, wondered how she had gotten here so fast.

“Hey,” said Freya, sounding just as unimpressed to see Granger. Behind her a woman with a face no one would ever remember (definitely OT) stood in a bland suit with her hand held out impatiently holding Granger’s monitor. Her fingers were twitching. Granger palmed it and slipped it into its clip. “Don’t burn it out this time,” the OT warned.

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Canada Goose, American Dream

By: | January 23, 2019

In the fall of 1969, somewhere in Ohio, scientists put a numbered plastic tag around the leg of a one year-old, female Canada goose, and released it into the wild. When it was eventually shot down in Ontario, in 2001, it was 33 years old — the oldest Canada goose to be recorded in the United States Geological Survey’s archive of bird longevity. 

I have to admit, when I first learned that Canada geese can live to be more than 30 years old, I thought: that is a very long time to be a goose.  

Where I live in Northern California, many Canada geese don’t migrate. Instead, like all the other locals — lots of seasonal boaters, pot farmers and telecommuters —  they just hang out on the river, being what the Fish & Wildlife Service now considers “nuisance animals.” They fly upriver, then they fly downriver. They land on one person’s lawn, then on other person’s lawn. Mostly they rip up bermuda grass, honk, poop and hiss.  

I thought Canada geese were kind of boring. But that all changed when I called a mustachioed scientist named Paul Curtis, who runs the Wildlife Damage Management Program at Cornell. Canada geese are not boring — they are winning, I learned. Once driven close to extinction, today Canada geese are living the American dream.

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Redux: The Wonderful World of Oz…and Science

By: | January 22, 2019

I was just sick for two weeks with some dumb respiratory virus, and writing a new post was low on my list of priorities. So please enjoy this old one, which originally ran December 3, 2013.

Lately I’ve been reading my way through the series of Oz books. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is only the first in a series of 14 books, and it’s not remotely the best.

It’s fascinating to reread books I loved as a child. Some are still great. Others have inexplicably morphed into poorly-written, preachy duds. Fortunately, the Oz books are the former type. They were published between 1900 to 1920 and vary in quality, but the made-up world is fun and Baum’s sense of humor holds up well.

In The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the seventh book in the series, I was surprised—and pleased—to encounter a bit of science. Even better, it’s totally outdated science.

In the book, Dorothy and her companions go on a quest to revive some people who have been turned to marble. One of the ingredients they need is water from a dark well, which they seek inside a mountain where two tribes live in a vast cave.

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Orchid Care for the Uncertain

By: | January 21, 2019

I wake up this morning on the prickly side—or at least, I’m prickly once I look at my phone. There are a series of misunderstood texts, frail disjointed things that have good intentions but poor phrasing, or lack the perfect emoji.

My phone is sitting right next to an orchid. It’s a new type of orchid for me—a miltonia, with narrow leaves that point upward and a sweet, pansy-like flower. But now the orchid’s flowers have withered and some of its leaves are yellowing. It may be getting too much light. It may be getting too much water, or not enough.

I thought I was doing so well with my orchids. We had received several plants as gifts; a few months ago, I decided I needed to start taking better care of the plants if I ever wanted them to flower again. I bought pots with holes to let their roots breathe. I researched the right potting mix, I unwound roots that had grown soggy. There is now a special spray bottle that I take around the house to give them a tropical misting.

The ones I’ve re-potted have been growing new leaves. But this morning, the straw-colored tips of the miltonia leaves reminded me that I must keep taking care of things, keep learning how to take care in new ways.

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Impossible Feats of Strength and Endurance

By: | January 18, 2019
This is me. I am ripped.

On January 9, I went to the gym and did a chin up. Here’s what should have happened next: The clouds should have parted to allow a single beam of light to cast its golden glow on my body. Winged trumpeters should have surrounded me. Confetti should have rained from the sky. A flash mob should have appeared and performed a choreographed dance to Eye of the Tiger.

Instead I turned to the guy doing bridge pose on the floor nearby and said, “I just did a chin up.” He smiled and said, “That’s great.”

There’s nothing special about doing a chin up. Many people can do them. Many people can do many of them. But to me, the act felt momentous. I had never done one before. I’ve long subscribed to the theory that my muscles simply weren’t strong enough. But lately another possibility occurred to me: What if I couldn’t do a chin up because I didn’t think I was strong enough to do a chin up? What if my problem was mental rather than physical?

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The Journal of a Middle-Aged, Middle-Management, Sub-Atomic Particle

By: | January 17, 2019

It’s been a rough couple billion years. I don’t know why, I just haven’t been feeling the same way as I did in the billions of years after the Big Bang. Back then, being a quark meant something – it had weight you know? Muons and leptons took you seriously, electrons wanted to get together with you and build a little chemistry.

I just … popped after the Big Bang. I had charge.

But the last couple billion years, I don’t know, I’ve just felt a little down. I feel jumbled, disordered. Maybe it’s entropy, maybe I just need a hobby.

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So I split up with my nucleus. Being part of a proton as kid was exciting, we were colliding with everything in our path and ready to take on the galaxy. But the galaxy is mostly empty space and, when you get right down to it, so is the atom. Lately it’s been like, what’s the point? It was amicable. We said we’d keep in touch – we won’t – joint custody of the ions – I’ll be lucky to get weekends. I was sad to see the fourth valence electron go, she was a mercurial as hell but a good listener. Ah well. Onward.

——————————————————————————————————————

Life has become a slog. I guess I’ll never be one of those top quarks you see in the magazines. I’m doing some part time work in a tomography lab but I just don’t get much from weak interactions. Everything around me these days just feels like decay. I’m guess I’m just having trouble feeling positive.

——————————————————————————————————————

Things have gotten worse. I can’t tell anymore if I’m spinning or everyone else is. I’m pretty down.

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Redux: Old Bone Song

By: | January 16, 2019
An elk skull nestled in dewy grass

I am turning 40 on the day I am supposed to write this, so instead, I am re-running my favorite LWON essay–one suited to summiting the peak of midlife and looking out towards the horizon of death (ideally still just at the limit of one’s vision). Enjoy!

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We Need More Than A Tweet

By: | January 15, 2019
A local network. Image by See-ming Lee via Wikimedia Commons.

It just happened again. My Twitter mentions blew up, because someone posted a tweet soliciting names of favorite female science writers after most of the students in a science communication class couldn’t come up with a single one. I have no doubt that the tweet was well-intentioned, but all I could think is, oh no, here we go again…

Of course I was flattered and happy to be mentioned in the tweets and responses, and I’d be overjoyed to see more attention paid to the many, many talented and accomplished writers who aren’t cis men. 

The problem is that these twitter threads don’t really accomplish that, and I’ve started to wonder if they might even be counter productive if they make people feel like they’ve accomplished more than they really have.

It’s easy to see the appeal though. It feels good to do something. Science writing is a field filled with women, and yet the counts and statistics show that the awards and recognition and plum assignments go disproportionately to men. And the problems driving this are “so systemic, so insidious, so much a part of our culture and so much bigger than one single person that it feels hopeless,” as Bethany Brookshire said in a chat among some of my journalist friends. A discussion in which we collectively wrung our hands and did a lot of sighing. 

“How can you nudge the finger of every person who automatically RTs the same men, crowing their brilliance, while scrolling past the few women in their feed?” Brookshire asked. “How can you possibly shift the gaze of a male science writer, looking for articles to read and promote, who tracks toward the bylines of the people he’s already friends with, giving them priority over the people of whom he’s never heard?” There aren’t many easy answers, she said. “But you can tweet. That takes only a second. It gives a small sweet feeling of triumph. You DID something.”

What does this accomplish? It can make you feel good for a minute. “If you’re a man, you get ‘fresh-baked ally cookies’ and if you’re a woman, you get the cred of looking like crusaders,” Brookshire said.

But then you’re back to square one. “This is not an effective means of signal boosting—I think I got one new follower,” Shannon Palus said in our informal discussion. “Increasing diversity meaningfully requires people with power, money and/or clout spending time and resources on sharing that power, money, and/or clout.”

Yes, it truly does feel uplifting to be praised in these Twitter threads, but it doesn’t help us solve the invisible women problem when these outbursts of love are mostly among ourselves. We need people to buy our books, invite us to speak at events. Give us a seat at the table.

Maryn McKenna may have said it best with this tweet, “I am thrilled to see so many women science writers listed. I’m simultaneously discouraged that we keep having to make these lists, again and again.”