Julia M. Wright

Jules Verne suggested using an enormous gun to send a capsule to the moon, and IIRC has some interesting calculations on the force required and its impact on the ground. Buddy might wanna give that a read. It's usually translated as "From the Earth to the Moon."

Short thread on our new paper. We use face mask efficacy research as a “stress test” for systematic review methods. We analysed 66 systematic reviews of face mask efficacy; they reached widely different conclusions (~half said they work, half said that evidence of efficacy was lacking). 1/

Photo of four athletes seated at a press conference table, all wearing face masks, with microphones in front of them. A blue backdrop behind them shows sponsor logos (including P&G, Samsung, TCL, Visa, Salomon) and Olympic branding. WHN branding “whn.global” appears at the top left. Large yellow text over the lower half reads: “Olympians are still masking in 2026” Smaller white text below reads: “At the Winter Olympics in Italy, some athletes are still masking and isolating, aware that COVID and other respiratory illnesses are not over.” Footer text: “The World Health Network is a network devoted to global compassion—working together to inspire collective action through science for a safer, healthier world.”

At parts of the Winter Olympics in Italy, COVID precautions remain, grounded in the reality that respiratory illness is still circulating. When your lungs are your livelihood, prevention is part of performance.

#COVID #COVID19 #PublicHealth #InfectionPrevention #Olympics #LongCOVID #MaskUp #N95

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Our new paper: toxic experts

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

i hold no love for Mark Carney but even I've gotta have sympathy for the dude when I imagine his aide being like "sir, the president thinks you own the whole bridge and you're being mean about it" and him having to put down his copy of The Economist to make the dumbest phone call of all time

Bloomington police announce arrests in sex trafficking bust: "Rashad Johnson out of Maple Grove. This is the most disturbing arrest that we've had here. He is a backgrounder for ICE, Homeland Security, and federal agencies."

Our new paper:

Synthesis challenges in complex evidence: A critical analysis of systematic reviews of face mask efficacy

#episky #healthpolicy #medsky

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Poster for the event with the information in the post plus an image of the provincial flag and the notice “hosted by the Coalition for Collegial Governance” and the URL cocogov.org/blog/townhall

Townhall at the Halifax Central Library, 23 February (Monday), starting at 6:30 pm: “Protecting Post-Secondary Education in Nova Scotia.” #nspse #nspoli #cdnpse

There are US states where professors could be fired for walking their students thru a critical analysis of the Bad Bunny halftime show.

Ugh, yeah, problems with names in my work too, including variant spellings--it will autocorrect Whytt to White and Owenson to Swenson, e.g. (just like Bluesky!). It will also autocorrect specialized terms, though thankfully the MLA Bibliography seems to recognize most literary terms. Most...

Today in enshittification news: the @modernlanguage.bsky.social Bibliography will autocorrect "Tintern" to "intern"; if you ask it to search for "landscape," it will list items with "nature"; similarly, a search for "medicine" will yield items with "pharmaceutical" as well. So much for precision.🙄

New evidence suggests last man executed in Halifax was wrongfully convicted: lawyer A discussion at the Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law in Halifax Thursday night focused on the last man executed in the city.

www.ctvnews.ca/atlantic/nov...

McGill Spent Over $1 Million Fighting Unionization – The Rover Union organizers at the university say this is part of a broader trend towards corporatization of the public institution.

This speaks to the imperative to hold univ administrations accountable for their non-academic spending--on travel, on consultants, on lawyers, on PR, etc. Student tuition dollars and public funding should go to academic activities, not making some administrator's day a little easier. #cdnpse #nspse

Masking at a meeting

Tom Radcliffe‬ ‪@tjradcliffe.bsky.social‬ · 9m The future is becoming more evenly distributed. ‪William Gibson‬ ‪@greatdismal.bsky.social‬ · 12h Masking at a meeting

Arin Arcady‬ ‪@rnrkd.bsky.social‬ · 1h I'm sorry the guy changing the rules on the fly is named what ‪Governor Wes Moore‬ ‪@govwesmoore.bsky.social‬ · 23h I stand with County Executive Calvin Ball as he signs emergency legislation today prohibiting privately owned buildings from being used as ICE detention centers.

Ok so I was going to announce that @tjradcliffe.bsky.social had just won the Internet for today but then I saw @rnrkd.bsky.social's post and now I am thinking maybe it's a tie.

What a time to be alive!

They seem to have no sense of public purpose and responsibility. You can’t run a government like a widget maker: sure, numbers matter, but they’re only the means to an end. Health funding, incl for research and education, is a more direct means to that end.

Student research award scrapped due to province's focus on economic outcomes | CBC News The Scotia Scholars Award supported health-related research at Nova Scotia post-secondary institutions and was administered by Research Nova Scotia.

What if… we are not here to serve the economy, but the economy matters because it serves us?

A healthy economy helps keep us healthy: supporting healthcare and other services, reducing food insecurity and inequity, etc.

Everyone’s wellbeing is the goal—isn’t it?

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

I cannot sufficiently underline how despicable it is that the IOC has required Haitian Olympic athletes to remove an image representing the leader of the Haitian Revolution (against SLAVERY) from their uniforms.

Important paper. Schools are high-risk environments for respiratory disease transmission MAINLY because classrooms are underventilated. This problem has a workable solution - it just needs political will. Air quality is as important as water quality for public health. MT @martinmckee.bsky.social

Perhaps, but this isn’t entirely about student experience. Accreditation requirements in some programs could be at risk, and univ reputation could—should—crash. There are structural norms that ensure a credential means something somewhere else, and this puts a number of those at risk.

Further to this point about “softening”: “meta-analyses that combined studies of different designs or included studies at critical risk of bias—served to obscure important aspects of heterogeneity, resulting in bland and unhelpful summary statements” (www.cambridge.org/core/journal...).

Tenure supports long-term planning, incl curricular reform and research projects (which draw funding). It’s bad enough that so many precarious colleagues are in this situation. Entire universities? Why would students go to a university like that? So how would that affect outcome metrics?

The NB government is setting standards others should follow, including requiring ASHRAE 241 for new public buildings.

This is what being responsible looks like. Refreshing, eh?

I am just going to paste here what Bill Bahnfleth wrote on a LinkedIn post today about this awesome development by @govnb.bsky.social, @susanholtnb.bsky.social 💕 Bahnfleth is the chair of ASHRAE’s Epidemic Task Force. He lead development of ASHRAE 241. Read on: /1

Universities are not government departments. Recent governments in Nova Scotia seem to have forgotten that, first with Bill 100, which became the Universities Accountability and Sustainability Act in 2015, and now with proposed amendments to it. The Act was shocking enough in its overreach that the Canadian Association of University Teachers passed a rare motion in 2015 to begin a censure process against any university that invoked the Act. Unlike departments in the provincial government, universities are not fully funded by the province—far from it. Transfer payments from the federal government funneled through the provinces are significant parts of #cdnpse operating budgets, true. But as significant (and increasingly so) are revenues from other sources, especially tuition fees and non-provincial research grants and contracts. The principle of “the one who pays the piper calls the tune,” then, does not easily apply to univs. Federal research grants are decided by competitive, academic processes; students support programs with their course choices. But neither calls the tune—provincial governments aren’t supposed to either. Typically, under universities’ founding legislation, responsibility for academic matters falls to univ senates. University senates have the authority and the mandate, and the subject-matter expertise, to regularly assess whether educational programs are of sufficiently high quality to continue. National and international accreditors, for some programs, also play a significant role. No non-academic party—in this case, the government of the day—would have the information and highly specialized expertise to assess these programs. A minister’s team might have the time, given all of their other responsibilities, to look at program names and descriptions, but that would be like threading a needle with a pickaxe. Universities have professional programs that are geared around the job market and particular professions, so ma…

With all of the Bill 12, Schedule H, etc. gibberish and now a university offering to run some government work, it bears repeating: "Universities Are Not Government Departments" (my op-ed in the Cape Breton Post a year ago).

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

I love this!!! ground.news/article/mozi...

This “softening” has been around for a long time, and not just from governments.

The infographic form, bullet points, and sub-sub-headings are all devices for fragmenting information and diluting it so it all seems clear, easy and factual. It takes a paragraph to lay out divergences and debates.

An Illusion of Consensus: What the Government Isn’t Saying About the Results of its AI Consultation - Michael Geist The government quietly released a “what we heard” report this week discussing the response to its 30-day sprint AI consultation from last October. Described as the “largest public consultation in the ...

Government used AI to summarize expert reports from its AI consult. I did the same by uploading them to Chat GPT/Perplexity AI to generate new summaries. I found the government consistently softened advice creating an illusion of consensus that isn’t really there.
www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/02/aico...

one of my strongest beliefs is that we're in our situation right now bc some of the most prominent talking heads (e.g. joe rogan, andrew schulz) are learning about politics in their 40s and 50s, instead of their teens and early 20s, and we have to go along for the ride as they learn basic things

France’s Foreign Ministry owns Elon Musk in this response: