It's an unfortunate reality that we're going to exceed +1.5C, and we need to begin preparing for the consequences now. "Solving" climate change requires humanity to both prevent further warming AND take care of the people impacted by it. 10% of us could be forced to flee our homes by 2050...
In 2019 I founded Distribute Aid to develop community supply-chains that can support displaced people at scale. Since then, we've delivered $25M of aid between 100+ communities in 16+ countries. Given the size of the problem, and the need for rapid growth of successful solutions, we're taking a distributed approach that prioritizes local aid groups who are supporting displaced people. Everything is open-source of course!
If anyone wants to learn more / support us, please leave a comment or email me at taylor /at/ distributeaid.org. :)
I'm building supply chain & logistics tech at Distribute Aid. We help grassroots aid groups meet more needs, more consistently, and work together to gain efficiency at scale.
We deliver $100 worth of aid for every $1 we spend on operations. Literally a 100x return for humanity.
The need is there. The scale is there. But it'll never get VC funding for obvious reasons.
We leverage partnerships with in-kind donors and shipping companies to get a lot of stuff for free. And of course there are tons of community groups gathering second-hand donations which we can send for free as well.
For example, there's a charitable factory making soap in Scotland. They give us a few hundred thousand bars of soap every 6 months or so, and we ship em out to 15+ refugee camps in Greece to ensure the hygiene of 100,000 people are met.
Did you read the article? Sounds like she didn't do anything wrong, but was sent falsified data by a more senior scientist that she trusted. After discovering that, she took steps to correct the record, alert other scientists that they need to double check their papers, and build automated tools to catch similar issues going forward. That sounds appropriate, and high in integrity, why should she be punished for doing the right thing?
That sounds reasonable as far as it goes, but if you were the person next in line for that UC Davis position and your research wasn't based on falsified data, I think you'd be feeling pretty unhappy about this.
(I hope that in reality there's a lot more to the author's research than the retracted papers, but of course in such a competitive job market, every bit helps.)
Look at it another way: the author sure was lucky they found out about the problem after they were securely in their tenure-track position, and not just before.
> Look at it another way: the author sure was lucky they found out about the problem after they were securely in their tenure-track position, and not just before.
Look at it another way: The author was sure unlucky to have based their research on shoddy data from a trusted colleague. And it took guts and integrity to react in the way they did.
They have proven their integrity. That seems worth a bit more than being right on these spiders‘ specific kinks.
Not because I don’t care about spiders, but because the first is entirely within their control, while some hypothesis finding the data to support it comes down to luck far too often to use a single case a meaningful measure of an individual.
> That sounds reasonable as far as it goes, but if you were the person next in line for that UC Davis position and your research wasn't based on falsified data, I think you'd be feeling pretty unhappy about this.
Her technique was presumably (not my field) otherwise quite good and she didn't know at the time the source data were bad. Apart from her willingness to follow up to the query on an old paper, her approach to followup was excellent. And she seems to have learnt from the experience.
All in all this sounds like what you want from a good scientist. After all once you have tenure, you can just ignore all that "old stuff" if you are so inclined.
As far as not getting the position: there are more people than tenure track positions these days so "luck of the draw" is also pretty significant.
Don't make "did you read the article" style comments. It's rude and against the HN guidelines. Even if you think someone has such a bad take on an article that it stretches your credulity to believe that they actually read the article, there is probably something more productive you can say instead.
But still, there is no fucking way that you get three papers into your research and then figure this out. Having done an MS, PHD, and postdoc in evolutionary biology, including sociality in insects, I can attest that one scrutinizes every (insignificant) data point.
And fuck off Did I read the article.
If you see fraud and don't say fraud, you are a fraud.
~Taleb (I think)
Agreed, this reads like a pretty serious indictment of Pruitt. It sounds like he had no spine when they went back with questions about the data he provided. There didn't seem to be pushback from him about why his data was correct, simply "it's good that you're retracting". Reading between the lines it seems like the author didn't get this answer easily.
Also curious, how did no one question the data earlier when some guy, albeit respected, sends you a data file and you write several papers on the matter? No one knew what sheet #2 was and we're writing scientific papers based on this excel file? I think we need to revisit correct data hygiene and reasonable suspicion.
They are big in the grassroots aid movement running important projects in multiple countries, but they aren't the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders big.
Hoping to get this resolved before they have to try and publicly call out Facebook, but you're right- that seems to be the only way to get tech orgs to take a minute to care about situations like these.
Have to agree. been really enjoying Elixir / Ecto / Phoenix.
I find Ecto lets me be as expressive as I need to with Queries, and handles the mapping into models very well for the 90% of easy cases that I need it to.
I have a "summer of code" project. I'm a founder of Distribute Aid [1], a Swedish ngo that builds tech tools for refugee aid groups. We're an open source project [2] and are looking for people who can contribute.
There are opportunities to join us on the ground in Europe, or to volunteer remotely. We try to take a people-first approach and will match volunteers up with tasks / projects that they are most interested in. It's a great fit for students looking to build their resume while making substantial contributions to an important project.
If anyone is interested in learning more, shoot me an email at taylor /at/ distributeaid.org
Don't have links on hand, but it changes from country to country. We started ours in Sweden, where my cofounder is from. It was pretty easy compared to the 503(C) process in the US: create a governing document, put together a board, hold your first meeting, apply for organization status, apply for charity status.
Happy to talk more if you want- my email is in my profile.
Can you link a news article or study about the similarities between programmers at the end of the day and adults with ADHD? Just curious... for a friend... ;)
In 2019 I founded Distribute Aid to develop community supply-chains that can support displaced people at scale. Since then, we've delivered $25M of aid between 100+ communities in 16+ countries. Given the size of the problem, and the need for rapid growth of successful solutions, we're taking a distributed approach that prioritizes local aid groups who are supporting displaced people. Everything is open-source of course!
If anyone wants to learn more / support us, please leave a comment or email me at taylor /at/ distributeaid.org. :)