Varroa Mites: No-Treatment is the Best Treatment

...) to target varroa. It’s easy to see why Hayes would be interested in RNAi technology. It has the potential to knock out varroa mite without the many problems of current miticides. Critics of RNAi, however, bring up the issue of risk management: the unintended consequences of using a novel technology such as RNAi. If something did go wrong it could go very wrong, what some scientists refer to as an “oops” moment. The ideas in the article, like muc...

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Inside the Internet Archive: A Meat World Tour

...r of the books they currently lend online. Concurrently, a group of record labels have sued to stop the Internet Archive’s efforts to digitize and make available recordings on 78rpm records. Parsing the dialectical relationship between the value of public domain material and the rights of creators and publishers is beyond my pay grade. Let’s just say it’s complicated and made more so by technology and the huge data models gestating in the, perhaps...

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Book Review: The Machine Stops by E.M. Forester

...is that he did this toe dipping in 1909. In 1909, the telephone was a new technology, and radio in its infancy. That he should be able to extrapolate this strangely accurate dystopia at that time points not only to his powers of observation and imagination, but also, perhaps, to the discomfort I suspect many people were experiencing at that time, as the world rushed into modernity. We don’t hear much about that discomfort, because Progress is our...

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I Deleted my Facebook Account

...n-target information. Facebook knows that I’m an epee fencer who practices urban homesteading, reads Rowan Williams and goes to Nick Cave concerts (damn, that’s all pretentious!). But it also seems to think that I’m an African-American who grows with hydroponics, rocks out to the Queens of the Stone Age and loves Honey Baked Ham. I suspect much of the data Cambridge Analytica gathered was, similarly, off-target and useless. How to #DeleteFacebook...

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