The epidemic started with a few cases during the winter holidays, increased exponentially afterwards including significant more cases by beer festivals and another significant excess of cases following the election that occurred in Bavaria only. Compared to other German countries, Bavaria reached the highest prevalence which could not be reversed by even the most restrictive containment measurements. To be effective, NPIs need to applied early, if possible even before the beginning of the exponential phase.
When you look back, what was the most momentous mistake in the pandemic response?
Farrar: The biggest mistake was that we didn’t take it seriously enough in the first six weeks of 2020. It was the time when a pandemic could still have been prevented. From the beginning of January, it was clear what was happening in Wuhan. By the end of January, it was clear how dangerous the situation was. And even though this information was available, the rest of the world didn’t act until March – two critical months passed in which the virus was spreading. Instead, we had a U.S. President Donald Trump, who dismissed what was happening as “kung flu,” and in Europe, at least in the UK, there was a sense that this was all happening in faraway China, and northern Italy was also somehow different – it won’t be so bad here. It was a kind of complacency, the arrogance of exceptionalism.
It has some unexpected turns while at the end basically everybody seems to be happy — although we neither know the buyer, the price and the courtage. And just 9 months display at Prado is a bit disapppointing, isn’t it?
Doubts remain also about the authorship as the work is not signed by Caravaggio as nearly all of his paintings. There was a large number of “follower” as many artists were influenced by Caravaggio’s style and techniques. And well, there is an exceptional high value included where all people involved have a significant financial incentive: seller, auction house, trader, experts, museums …
Most of the scholars who have examined the painting date its execution between 1606 and 1607, either during the artist’s last months in Rome or after his escape to Naples after impaling the local gang boss Ranuccio Tommasoni with his rapier during a game of tennis.
So did Caravaggio leave an unfinished painting? Did another painter complete it?
Camillo Manzitti, writing in Finestre sull’Arte (May 2024), contends that after restoration, the painting reveals a moderate chiaroscuro and lack of the dramatic tension characteristic of Caravaggio. He specifically highlights weakened emotional expression. Pilate appears only vaguely sad, not deeply troubled, and the young man behind Christ lacks the hallucinatory horror typical of Caravaggio’s depictions. The poor anatomical modeling, which he argues is incompatible with Caravaggio’s known skill. Christ’s face is asymmetrically deformed, with misaligned eyes and an ear inserted at an unnatural angle. Pilate’s face also shows modeling weaknesses. Kolja Thurner, an art historian based in Berlin, voiced his doubts via X as “a good painting by a talented Caravaggio follower, stylistically imitating the master to a high degree.”
It is a troubling sign of the times, and the crisis that many fear higher education is in, that several of our analyses this week relate to the theme of university collapse.
An essay on the massification of UK higher education argues that “the current state of UK universities seems like a very bad deal for those involved, bad for society and ultimately unsustainable”, with high participation rates and declining income levels creating a system that author Lincoln Allison compares to that of the Soviet Union.
“The reasons to fear the collapse of the system, however, are not that it’s bad or unfair but that it’s unfundable,” writes the emeritus reader in politics at the University of Warwick.
“The university sector has been bloated to an unsustainable level and is now bound to decline; the questions are by how much and how will it happen.”
Ich habe den Plot hier schon 2020 gebracht, wie im Osten Deutschlands die Inzidenz vor allem von Landkreisen mit primär AfD, FDP und CDU Wählern nach oben getrieben wurde.
Protestbewegungen gegen Maßnahmen zur Eindämmung der COVID-19-Pandemie, wie beispielsweise die deutsche Bewegung Querdenken, verfolgen das Ziel, ihre Positionen auf die politische Agenda zu setzen. Während die rechtsgerichtete Partei Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) im Deutschen Bundestag als parlamentarischer Arm von Querdenken agierte, bleibt die Rolle anderer Parteien bislang unzureichend erforscht. … Grundlage [der Studie] bilden n = 934.432 Telegram-Nachrichten von Querdenken sowie n = 445.690 Tweets der sechs im Bundestag vertretenen Parteien in den Jahren 2020–2021. Methodisch kamen eine Kombination aus Sentence-Transformer-Modellen, Zeitreihenanalysen sowie einer ergänzenden manuellen Bewertung zum Einsatz. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass sich nach Herbst/Winter 2020 sämtliche untersuchten Parteien – wenn auch aus unterschiedlichen Gründen – semantisch zunehmend an die Diskurse von Querdenken angenähert haben. Während die Kommunikationsmuster der AfD die größte inhaltliche Nähe aufweisen, lassen sich auch bei Teilen der Freien Demokratischen Partei (FDP) sowie der Christlich Demokratischen Union/Christlich-Sozialen Union (CDU/CSU) Übereinstimmungen feststellen, etwa hinsichtlich der Abwertung linker und grüner Politik sowie der Ablehnung pandemiebedingter Eindämmungsmaßnahmen….
Für mich ist die unverfälschte jüdische Religion wie alle anderen Religionen eine Incarnation des primitiven Aberglaubens. Und das jüdische Volk, zu dem ich gerne gehöre und mit dessen Mentalität ich tief verwachsen bin, hat für mich doch keine andersartige Dignität als alle anderen Völker. Soweit meine Erfahrung reicht ist es auch um nichts besser als andere menschliche Gruppen wenn es auch durch Mangel an Macht gegen die schlimmsten Auswüchse gesichert ist. Sonst kann ich nichts „Auserwähltes“ an ihm wahrnehmen.
Wir verstehen uns als liberale, progressive, weltoffene, linke und feministische Stimmen, die für Pluralität und Toleranz einstehen. Alle Menschen müssen leben dürfen “nach dem Gesetz, nach dem sie angetreten”. Gerade deswegen aber sehen wir mit Sorge, wie fatal die Debatte um Sex und Gender derzeit läuft. Bestürzt müssen wir zur Kenntnis nehmen, dass falsche und zum Teil regelrecht aberwitzige Verdrehungen (“weiblicher Penis”, “die Biologie ist längst weiter”, “es gibt mehr als zwei Geschlechter”) gerade denen in die Hände spielen, die unsere demokratische Vielfalt mit dumpfen Parolen bedrohen…
Der funktionale Begriff “Geschlecht” ist in der naturwissenschaftlichen Community unstrittig: Biologisch gibt es bei allen Arten, die sich über das Verschmelzen ungleich großer Keimzellen vermehren (Anisogamie), nur zwei Arten von Keimzellen – und daraus abgeleitet zwei Geschlechter, die als männlich und weiblich bezeichnet werden…
Auf dieser biologischen Grundlage der Zweigeschlechtlichkeit gibt es kulturelle und soziale Erwartungen und Geschlechterrollen. Es ist ein Kennzeichen liberaler Gesellschaften und eine große Errungenschaft der Emanzipationsbewegung des neunzehnten und zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, dass Geschlechterrollen keinen zwingenden Charakter mehr haben und dem Individuum alle gesellschaftlichen Rollen unabhängig vom Geschlecht offen stehen.
Every tax dollar the Government spends should improve American lives or advance American interests. This often does not happen. Federal grants have funded drag shows in Ecuador, trained doctoral candidates in critical race theory, and developed transgender-sexual-education programs. In 2024, one study claimed that more than one-quarter of new National Science Foundation (NSF) grants went to diversity, equity, and inclusion and other far-left initiatives. These NSF grants included those to educators that promoted Marxism, class warfare propaganda, and other anti-American ideologies in the classroom, masked as rigorous and thoughtful investigation.
While I once believed that funding should primarily support the advancement of core scientific methods and studies rather than numerous DEI initiatives, this view is a grotesque distortion of reality, especially when we consider the so-called “study” the White House is citing. Many DEI projects are, in fact, valuable educational efforts or have an environmental focus, often addressing critical research needs that receive little to no funding from other sources.
Here is a brief overview how these numbers were produced, and key problems that I have with the methods. The statement comes from the October 9, 2024 Senate Republican staff report Division. Extremism. Ideology: How the Biden-Harris NSF Politicized Science from the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, then led by Sen. Ted Cruz (PDF, the original is no more available on Aug 12, 2025). The underlying dataset was released on February 11, 2025 (press release and database).
Staff analyzed 32,198 NSF prime awards with start dates between January 2021 and April 4, 2024. Using a keyword-based tagging process, they identified 3,483 awards they labeled as “DEI/neo-Marxist,” totaling more than $2.05 billion. The report says that for 2024 (measured only up to April 4), 27% of new grants fell into this category. Appendix A of the report explains the method. Staff pulled all NSF awards from USAspending.gov with start dates in the 2021–2024 window. They ran an n-gram/keyword search using glossaries from sources like NACo and the University of Washington, expanding the list to more than 800,000 variants. Awards with zero or only one keyword match were removed, and additional filtering plus manual checks produced the final set of 3,483. Grants were grouped into five thematic categories (Status, Social Justice, Gender, Race, Environment). The “27% in 2024” figure came from the share of awards in that subset with start dates in the first quarter of 2024.
Faults and shortcomings in the method
The keyword approach equates the presence of certain words with being a DEI-focused grant, and the keyword list is very broad (including terms like “equity,” “privilege,” “climate change,” “systemic,” “historic*,” and “intersectional”), which can capture unrelated research.
The 27% figure comes from only part of the year (January–April 2024), not a full year.
There is ambiguity between counts and dollar amounts; the 27% refers to counts, not necessarily to total funding share.
Removing all single-keyword matches and applying manual pruning introduces subjectivity and potential bias.
Categories like “Social Justice” or “Race” are based purely on word presence, not actual research aims, conflating standard NSF education/broader impacts work with political advocacy.
Reliance on abstracts and spending descriptions means the screen often catches standard boilerplate language that NSF requires by law.
A House Science Committee Democratic staff review in April 2025 found numerous false positives in the Cruz dataset, such as biodiversity studies flagged for the word “diversity” or wildlife grants flagged for the word “female.” That review also notes that NSF is required by statute to consider “broader impacts” in all awards.
The Senate report is a partisan staff product, not peer-reviewed, and uses normative framing (“neo-Marxist,” “extremist”) rather than neutral description.
Restoring „gold standard“ of science by non-scientists?
An US health secretary who wants to retract an Annals paper for personal opinion?
Es ist ja nicht so, daß sich die Diakonie – der soziale Dienst der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland EKD – umgehend nach dem Hamas Überfall im Oktober 2023 mit Spendenaufrufen gemeldet hätte (ohne selbst vor Ort aktiv gewesen zu sein).
Oder daß die EKD nicht zu Gebeten für den Frieden aufgerufen hätte. Aber hat sie die Bundesregierung jemals für die Waffenlieferungen in dieKriegsregion kritisiert?
I have summarized the history of Post Publication Peer Review starting with Pubmed Commons to the leading website PubPeer. But most recently there are at least three new kids on the block: Peer Community In, Paperstars and alphaXiv.
What is the difference?
Peer Community In was founded in 2017 by Denis Bourguet and colleagues, targeting researchers across disciplines with a focus on peer-reviewing and recommending preprints as an alternative to traditional journals.
Paperstars, launched in 2023 by currently undisclosed founders, is aimed at both the general public and researchers, focusing on making scientific papers more accessible through AI-generated summaries and visuals.
alphaXiv was created in 2024 by the Allen Institute for AI to serve researchers and academics by enhancing preprint discoverability through AI-powered search and summarization tools.
BTW Science Guardians is a scammer website.
This is not about the extraordinary cyclist Peter Sagan but about the astronomer Carl Sagan who postulated in his 1979 book “Broca’s brain” that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”
A major part of the book is devoted to debunking “paradoxers” who either live at the edge of science or are outright charlatans.
Or the authorship discussion around the “Napalm Girl” Phan Thị Kim Phúc.
A third photograph – a snapshot from a London house two decades ago – has a similar price tag attached like Le Violon d’Ingres.
My most recent paper at https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.1223 examines this infamous photograph using the latest image analysis techniques.
This study offers a forensic assessment of a widely circulated photograph featuring Prince Andrew, Virginia Giuffre, and Ghislaine Maxwell – an image that has played a pivotal role in public discourse and legal narratives. Through analysis of multiple published versions, several inconsistencies are identified, including irregularities in lighting, posture, and physical interaction, which are more consistent with digital compositing than with an unaltered snapshot. While the absence of the original negative and a verifiable audit trail precludes definitive conclusions, the technical and contextual anomalies suggest that the image may have been deliberately constructed. Nevertheless, without additional evidence, the photograph remains an unresolved but symbolically charged fragment within a complex story of abuse, memory, and contested truth.
Even if there are now reasonable doubts on the image, the whole event may have happened — an horrible crime including many young women.
Maybe an artist is painting a scene from memory, this photograph could be showing a real scene although not in a physical sense.
An Pamela-Meyer-type analysis of the video above at least did not show that Virginia Giuffre is lying – her body language is more consistent with the reporting of a trauma survivor. So this
photograph remains an unresolved but symbolically charged fragment within a complex story of abuse, memory, and contested truth.
