murphyslab
Joined 9 years ago
Joined 9 years ago
So, yes, the poem does extend to all subcultures because it reaches out to include every voice of opposition to totalitarianism, until no one is left but the speaker.
It's also meant to be understood in the first four lines: The people mentioned — communists, trade unionists, social democrats, and Jews — were meant to be emblematic of people who are seen as enemies or outsiders to the author's cause. These are people whose values are seen to be radically different than our own.
Remember the context: the author of the speech, which was re-rendered as a poem, was a real person, Martin Niemöller, who was a pastor in the Confessing Church, which was an underground church movement organized in resistance to the Nazis.
However his speech, given in January of 1946, was an indictment of the Confessing Church. The movement was initially organized primarily as a form of resistance to governmental interference in religion, rather than to speak out for all people. Niemöller was, in fact, explicit that this was about people who were his "opponents" and his "enemies":
> "... The people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?"
Instead, Niemöller points out, in a theologically poignant allusion to the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, that we have a responsibility to our fellow humans to look out for their wellbeing and their interests as our own.
So yes, that poem calls for you to look out for the wellbeing and interests — including freedom from oppression and censorship — for those folks who you might now perceive to be your enemies.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
It should be noted that Niemöller was not the only one to draw on this story as an indictment of the church's inaction. Margarete “Marga” Meusel, a contemporary and correspondent of Niemöller wrote this in 1935 which was antecedent in the body of thought informing the 1946 speech:
> Why does the church do nothing? Why does it allow unspeakable injustice to occur? ... What shall we one day answer to the question, where is thy brother Abel? The only answer that will be left to us, as well as to the Confessing Church, is the answer of Cain. ("Am I my brother's keeper?" Genesis 4:9)
Moreover, I cannot edit my previous comment.
What I was getting at with the issue of credibility is that I (or most others) would have time determining if a particular scholarly author in pharma is a good person to listen to on the subject. But having evidence that Derek Lowe is an honest broker of information in that domain, given his long history of commentary as well as other chemists I know who eagerly read his commentary, I'm willing to defer to his assessment.
It's difficult to calibrate statements made by other scientists unless you're well embedded within a field: Is this someone whose opinions matter? Are they the subject matter expert they make themselves out to be? Is this research itself truly impactful? Is it really 5 years until it will be realized outside of academic labs? Etc...
It's difficult to decipher questions around credibility because they rely on real-world interactions and associations that extend beyond the physical tokens of paper counts, publication venues, citations, and author lists that typically lag behind the front of human knowledge which is generated from real-world interactions. It can be simple things, like the insightful question a grad student, with minimal publication history, asks in a seminar.
Of course, the paywall is also unhelpful too, but a good, brief commentary by an appropriate commentator is a better link for 99% of prospective readers compared to most "peer reviewed" (scare quotes because that's a real question nowadays) articles.
Naruto: https://floor796.com/#t2l4,684,675
The author continues adding and refining the project, so if it isn't in there yet, perhaps in the future.
Was it because you were male or because you were studying math? Many schools struggle to find good math teachers; it's one of the qualifications in perpetual shortage.
The author has never worked in chemistry. They are absolutely ubiquitous in scholarly journals for chemistry and I'd say that most people trained in chemistry often only read the graphical abstract when initially deciding whether the paper is worth a deeper read. Perhaps chemistry is a naturally visual field, given that we rely on visualizations of reactions and mechanisms from the very start of our university education.
The table of contents (TOC) graphic usually shows a key chemical structure (thus bonding connectivity, angles, elements, and electronic configurations), reaction mechanisms or conditions, models, or even core results as graphs. Now I do not claim to understand what is implied in every TOC graphic, however I can immediately see which branches of chemistry the article relates to faster than I can process the title, especially in a multidisciplinary chemistry journal.
That ability to categorize to identify relevance is a bigger issue in reading a multidisciplinary chemistry journal like the Journal of the American Chemical Society:
https://pubs.acs.org/toc/jacsat/current
But graphical abstracts are still immensely useful within a subdiscipline such as organic chemistry, which I suspect were the early adopters of TOC graphics:
https://pubs.acs.org/toc/joceah/current
The better graphical abstracts tend towards simplicity, but it's a challenging task to distill a year or more of research into a single picture. And, unfortunately, graphic design is not a subject for which scientists generally receive additional training, despite it being a core element of digital communication.
> One of the simplest approaches to correct for multiple testing is the Bonferroni correction. The Bonferroni correction adjusts the alpha value from α = 0.05 to α = (0.05/k) where k is the number of statistical tests conducted. For a typical GWAS using 500,000 SNPs, statistical significance of a SNP association would be set at 1e-7. This correction is the most conservative, as it assumes that each association test of the 500,000 is independent of all other tests – an assumption that is generally untrue due to linkage disequilibrium among GWAS markers.
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...