About a year after India died, my husband, Mark, visited the lab. At the time we were deep in grief and had decided to stay with a close friend. We couldn’t be in our own house. Whenever I walked through the door I was assaulted by images from the past— India trying to catch her breath as she had a seizure on the sofa; paramedics carrying India down the steep staircase on a stretcher; the empty space in India’s bedroom, by the window, where her hospital bed once stood.

After Mark returned from the lab, we sat on our friend’s porch to talk. He looked tired and sad so I was careful not to press him. All that remained of our only child were the cells my husband had viewed through a microscope. Finally, Mark lit a cigarette and said, “It was like looking at a city from space.”

I thought about that conversation on the porch, four years later as I was flying into Vancouver airport at night. From above, the flickering yellow lights of the city made me think of a video I’d seen of a nerve cell firing: the crowded centre was the nucleus; the suburbs branching from it, the dendrites; and the stretch of highway heading into the city was the slender nerve fibre known as the axon. For those who have not lost a child this might seem strange, but when my plane arrived in Vancouver I was hoping to catch a glimpse of her, if only in the shape of a metaphor.

Dr. Steffany Bennett, who runs the Neural Regeneration Laboratory where India’s cells are housed, told Mark she thought our daughter’s cells were beautiful. He thought so too, but he didn’t know if all cells were beautiful in the same way. India would have enjoyed their attentions. Like most teenage girls, she never tired of being admired.

To me, India’s cells are like starlight —a hint of the brightness that was my child. To say she was unique is an understatement. India died of Spinal Muscular Atrophy with Progressive Myoclonic Epilepsy (SMA-PME), a disease that Dr. David Dyment—a clinical geneticist and Dr. Bennett’s collaborator—described as “ultra-rare.” While there are no formal numbers, the condition is seen in significantly fewer than one child in a million.

India’s symptoms began when she was 10 years old, with petit mal seizures that we were told she’d probably grow out of. By the time she was 15, she’d suffered grand mal seizures so ferocious that a veteran pediatric nurse who witnessed one told me later it was the worst day of her career. In the last two years of India’s life, her muscles became so weak that she developed a tremor in her voice and lost the ability to walk or use her arms. The talented teenager who’d once amused herself by drawing detailed manga characters while singing her favourite songs from Rent and Wicked could no longer hold a pencil or a tune.

Photo by Hilary Gauld Commercial.

When Nobel Laureate Tim Hunt said, at a science conference in 2015, that the trouble with women in labs is they cry and fall in love, the scientific community reacted with a barrage of vituperations from both sides. For doctoral candidate Eden Hennessey, one hashtag became a call to action.

Under the banner #DistractinglySexy, female scientists took to Twitter to clarify what it’s really like for them in the lab or field. “Here I am shoulder-deep in cow rectum,” one woman tweeted. “So seductive!” Hennessey, a social psychology PhD candidate and manager at the Centre for Women in Science at Waterloo’s Wilfrid Laurier University, responded with another, more on-the-nose hashtag: #DistractinglySexist. The hashtag mobilized women across science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields to present their true stories of confronting sexism.

As part of her dissertation, #DistractinglySexist became Hennessey’s first photo-research exhibition, drawing attention to sexism in Canada’s “Silicon Valley”—Ontario’s Waterloo, Kitchener, and Cambridge areas. The project integrated art and social psychology research methods to assess whether women fighting sexism in STEM fields face greater social costs than other women, and if so, how can those costs be buffered.

The #distractinglysexy trend is phenomenal. Here I am shoulder-deep in cow rectum, so seductive! pic.twitter.com/fz0v5fygTK

— justmeness (@VanessaAdams6) June 11, 2015

If you look at a high school math or science class, you’ll notice more than half of the students are girls. In university, the number of women in STEM drops to about 39 percent. By the time they get into the workforce, women hold 22 percent of jobs in STEM fields—up just two percent from 1987.

“For women in STEM,” says Hennessey, “it’s not just the lack of women, it’s the resistant and slow rate of change.”

The sluggish improvements are both a cause and symptom of the old boys’ club culture that continues to disadvantage female scientists. While there’s myriad data describing the gender gap in STEM, Hennessey was compelled to communicate the problem in a different way.

“We all have a right to be presented facts in a way that’s easily understood,” she says during our interview, before she makes her way to a protest march in downtown Waterloo to fight for her rights in STEM labs. “I wanted to de-silo knowledge from the ivory tower and present it such that it can get us the funding we need and effect change for STEM women.” Indeed, her work is part of a small but growing movement toward academic activism. The idea is that by taking hard data and converting it into creative expression, research becomes more inclusive and creates a wider, more powerful impact.

On the heels of #DistractinglySexist, which attracted international praise, Hennessey recently launched #DistractinglyHonest. This second exhibit features female-led research that unpacks whether honesty is the best policy for women facing sexism in STEM fields.

In the series, Imogen Coe, Dean of Sciences at Ryerson University, is photographed looking over rose-hued glasses with the message: “We cannot change what we will not see.” Coe’s piece highlights that male-authored studies are deemed more scientifically valuable than female-authored ones, even when those studies are identical. “There was something intensely personal about Eden’s photo-essay,” Coe says. “She focussed on individual women and their authentic self. We’re supposed to be scientists—hence, unemotional—but the photography aspect of her exhibit made us value ourselves more. It’s about engaging men and not about fixing women.”

The stats suggest girls grow up with just as much interest in science, math, and technology as boys. The shift away from STEM, then, is linked to cultural messaging that says women and girls don’t belong.

“There are systemic barriers every step of the way for women,” says Hennessey, noting that this is particularly apparent for women who want to have children in graduate school. “For them, financial support is minimal. It’s a cultural issue and a big deterrent for women.”

Of the 14 portraits featured in #DistractinglyHonest, perhaps the most poignant is of 10-year-old Alyssa Armstrong. She’s wearing headphones inside a bubble, shielded from negative gender biases. “I want to go to Mars when I grow up,” she says.

When that time comes, Hennessy is hopeful projects like hers won’t have to exist—that Alyssa and other young women can pursue their ambitions, undeterred by flawed cultural mores. “Changes to such systemic pressures need to happen in the next decade,” Hennessey adds, “or we’ll lose another cohort of scientists.”

Now but a meme, this was originally seen as fact

So long ago it was proven that women are evil because, duh, uteruses have horns.

This week, I am reading An Introduction to Women’s Studies Gender In A Transnational World by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan for Dr. Kristine Klement’s Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies class at York University. We are focusing on how science may just be as culturally affected as the rest of us, especially when it comes to gender: “Many people think that biology answers [what counts as difference] once and for all,” reads the first essay, “Social and Historical Constructions of Gender.” “But science (including biology) has a history.”

These influences affect different aspects of gender and sexuality. As Dr. Klement points out, “Binary thinking affects science.” Because we are so dead set on sticking with this male/female gender dichotomy we are able to use science to justify prejudice against trans* people, or decide what gender role a child will be expected to live up to—something many people and organizations, including the Intersex Society of North America would like to see stop. “Intersexuality is primarily a problem of stigma and trauma, not gender,” reads the society’s website, for example. “Parents’ distress must not be treated by surgery on the child.”

I’m not saying all science is terrible—it’s a pretty broad profession and, of course, used toward wonderful advancements. But scientists are still people coming from an oppressive culture, with their own ideas and—even though some may be subconscious—their own prejudices. And there’s quite the history of how it has been used to justify the dehumanization of women, especially working class women. Take, for instance, the  early 1900s case of Margaret Sanger.

Sanger, is considered the mother of the birth control movement. Earlier this summer, The Washington Times published an article about Sanger’s pushing of the eugenics movement. Sanger wanted birth control to be used for “respectable” married women, not working class women—despite her own working class background. “Her views and those of her peers in the movement contributed to compulsory sterilization laws in 30 U.S. states,” writes Arina Grossu in The Washington Times. “That resulted in more than 60,000 sterilizations of vulnerable people, including people she considered ‘feeble-minded,’ ‘idiots’ and ‘morons.’”

Almost a hundred years before Sanger was Paul Broca, known for measuring skulls, or, crainometry. Broca also thought we were a bunch of idiots, and wanted science to  prove this. He determined women’s heads were smaller than men’s, and thus women were more stupid. Stephen Law writes about it in “Women’s Brains,” quoting who he referred to as “a black sheep in Broca’s fold,” L. Manouvrier: “Women displayed their talents and their diplomas. The also invoked philosophical authorities. But they were opposed by numbers … The theologians had asked if women had a soul. Several centuries later, some scientists were ready to refuse them a human intelligence.”

Also, on the list of “bad” things women’s bodies do: shedding unnecessary garbage during menstruation while men are being awesome producing all sorts of sperm (“The Egg and the Sperm” by Emily Martin.) “In analyzing male/female differences these scientists peer through the prism of everyday culture, using the colours so separated to highlight their questions, design their experiments, and interpret their results,” writes Anne Fausto-Sterling in ‘The Biological Connect.’ “More often than not their hidden agendas, non-conscious and thus unarticulated, bear strong resemblances to broader social agendas.”

Interestingly enough, at my last science lab, part of my assignment was to help a fictional lady, Jezebel (named after the Bible’s bad girl), figure out the father of her baby.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her first year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

Illustration by Matt Daley

Why the Canadian government needs to hit refresh on its digital strategies

When former Public Safety Minister Vic Toews stood in the House of Commons and proclaimed that anyone who didn’t support the government’s new Lawful Access legislation was standing with the child pornographers, the Internet collectively decided he was being ridiculous. When MP Dean Del Mastro compared ripping a CD to buying socks and then stealing shoes (because, you know, feet), the Internet collectively decided he was being profoundly stupid.

The Internet wasn’t wrong.

And it’s not that Toews is a ridiculous guy or that Del Mastro is actually stupid, but there’s a disconnect between the digital policies they’re advocating and the way people actually use digital technology. Wanting privacy doesn’t mean you support molesting children and converting your music collection doesn’t make you a thief. Obviously.

This isn’t strictly an attack on the current Conservative government. Previous governments didn’t really have to deal with these issues. Consider how far we’ve come since Stephen Harper first came to power in 2006, before the iPhone was a thing or the words “big” and “data” had collided in a sentence. But newness doesn’t excuse the tenuous grasp elected officials like Toews and Del Mastro have on both the technical and cultural aspects of modern technology. Either they aren’t the right people to be working on these policies or, more frightening, it’s a problem that permeates the entire House of Commons—a group whose average age is 53, with only a handful of millennials (the only generation with the opportunity to have internalized so many digital issues) who all belong to the minority opposition.

Whether it’s age or politics, the sitting government has already repeatedly whiffed on digital policy. Most disappointing was when Industry Minister James Moore introduced Digital Canada 150 in April, a strategy document designed to put digital priorities front and centre, but was  panned for lacking any sort of real vision or concrete plans (Michael Geist called it a strategy document lacking much in way of actual strategy). It was a document that took a staggering four years to produce, which means much of the data used pre-dates the iPad and Netflix streaming and a lot of other things we take for granted today.

The shortcomings of Digital Canada 150 became apparent with subsequent legislation. Bill C-13, officially the Protecting Canadians from Online Crime Act, was supposed to be a huge step toward combatting cyberbullying. Unfortunately, it also includes a pile of provisions that have nothing to do with cyberbullying, and has been strongly criticized for allowing investigative overreach without judicial oversight, while stripping away the privacy protections many Canadians assume they have. It’s a wide-reaching bill that was heavily scrutinized by a small group of people who enjoy heavily scrutinizing these things, but was largely sold to the general public as something that would save our kids from the scourge of bullies on the Internet. In short, C-13 has never received the public discussion it deserves and, while not straight out of 1984, does have an Orwellian feel to it.

More curious than sinister was Bill C-23, the much discussed Fair Elections Act. In a world where we can pay bills, buy groceries, and file taxes online, C-23 offers substantial electoral reform without ever broaching the subject of online voting. In fact, the infrastructure needed to make online voting a reality isn’t really on anyone’s roadmap, which is crazy if you really think about it. (This isn’t just a Canadian problem and, oddly, it’s Estonia that leads the way with a comprehensive digital identification program that’s required at every level of government.)

Technology touches everything—justice, privacy, resources, copyright, access to information, entertainment, democracy itself—so robust and complex digital policies are necessary. It’s not just enough that our politicians understand this stuff, which they mostly don’t (if you don’t believe me, you haven’t listened to an MP try to clearly and accurately define “metadata” or “net neutrality”), they need to ensure we understand it, too. Balance on these issues is important: balance between companies and consumers, law enforcement and citizens, government and taxpayers. But keep in mind that half of all of those equations is people—we are the consumers and citizens and taxpayers. And, generally speaking, when an issue isn’t being widely discussed and properly understood, it’s the people that are getting screwed.

When the mammoth pharmaceutical company Bayer announced in 2009 that it would be making NorLevo, a morning-after pill, available over the counter to women in Toronto, it failed to mention one small detail: it doesn’t work for every woman.

The drug, which is identical to Plan B One-step, (the more popular emergency contraception pill), may not be effective for women who weigh over 176lbs, according to HRA Pharma, the French manufacturer of NorLevo. The decision to investigate the pill’s efficacy was made on the heels of research done in 2011 by Anna Glasier, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research showed that levonorgestrel, the progestogen used in most emergency contraceptives, including Plan B and NorLevo, was ineffective for women with higher body mass index

One might infer that, with such strong evidence, health advisors here in Canada would be hastening to revise the packaging, in the interest of not misleading certain women. Especially when the particular drug has such momentous implications on a woman’s life. But it’s been all crickets and tumbleweeds at Health Canada, who hasn’t yet attempted to update its literature on the drug.

Scarier still is to think that, had HRA Pharma not released the information in Europe, Glasier’s research could have gone blissfully ignored altogether. Women deserve better transparency than this—when it comes to their bodies, when it comes to the choices they make. Information is power, and in this case, it’s sad to say, power has been eschewed for profits. We can only speculate how many women, over 176lbs, took the pill misguidedly and wondered why it didn’t work.

The story, over the past few days, has been swimming around other sites and blogs. If you know anyone whom this might affect, don’t wait for the big pharmaceutical companies to break the news—share the info. With a matter this consequential, it’s best to be as informed as possible.

I eat meat. I like the taste of it, and each day I witness my belly’s lust for the stuff dupe my mind into concordance. It’s simple. I look at a cluster of cooked chicken strands in a shawarma sandwich and it has none of the paradigmatic signs of life or pain or loss that might normally trigger my empathy; it’s as if you had asked me to empathize with the pita bread surrounding it, inanimate and functional.

I have, however, recently become something of an armchair vegetarian. When I give my brain a platform to think on the subject, it can’t come up with any sturdy justification for meat eating. And that’s not for lack of trying. As I see it, in order to get to the meat of the issue (pardon me) we need to dust off our old-timey weigh scale and consider the relative values of the following: On one side, the wellbeing and life-continuation of a sentient animal; on the other side, the enjoyment and easy nutrition of a supremely intelligent animal (so intelligent, in fact, that this animal can actually choose how it gets its calories and nutrients).

Interactive time. I’ll set a line below and you place your finger on the spot that best represents your enjoyment of meat (-5 being you hate it; 0 being take-it-or-leave-it; and 5 being it’s the high point in your earthly existence). Yes, you can use decimals.

Good. Remember your number. This next part takes some empathizing, so close your door and concentrate. Imagine, as best you can, that you’re a pig. You have a pig brain and you like apples and you get along well with your sty-mates and can even distinguish between them and enjoy their company. Place your finger (now a trotter, I suppose) on the point that best represents your feelings about your own slaughter (again, -5 being you hate it; 0 being take-it-or-leave-it; and 5 being it’s the high point in your earthly existence).

Is your first number lower than your (inverse) second number? If yes, you might be ethically opposed to eating meat. If not, you might not be giving the pig enough credit.

This is what’s kept me awake some nights, counting sheep on their way to the slaughterhouse—that there’s a clear disconnect between what I believe and what I do. I’m not comfortable with that. So how does this refer to the title then: FTW? Well, after all this mulling over the issue—chewing the cud, as it were—I revisited a news story that had piqued my interest a month ago. It’s a story that, whenever I stare down the barrel of a Polish takeout bag, my mind keeps returning to.

About a month ago, a team of Dutch scientists successfully created the first “in vitro” hamburger, that is, hamburger meat created from stem-cells that has its hands clean of suffering. When I heard the news I was struck. You could almost visualize the two opposing poles inside of me—the ethical animal and the carnal animal—perking their ears up in unison. Could I someday tuck into an aged steak, with its unctuousness and umami, knowing that the only thing that suffered was a lab-assistant who sprained his ankle tripping over a wayward protein strand? Could I own a potbelly pig pet and not have to sue for forgiveness each time I catch one of his glassy, full eyes watching me eat a strip of bacon? Might I be able to eat meat while sitting in my armchair?

Curious to get a vegetarian’s take on the breakthrough, I spoke with David Alexander, the executive director for the Toronto Vegetarian Association. “My personal response is that I think it’s an encouraging step,” says Alexander.  “I think that if we can move towards a food system that relies more on in vitro meat and less on meat from factory farms, that would be a big win”. But while he recognizes it as a positive step for meat-eaters to take, he has his reservations: “We still have to wait and see whether this is a scalable product, whether it can, as the scientists are hoping, be done in a way that’s better for the environment.”

Then, there’s the issue of the price tag. In 2008, if you had a million dollars you could get just over a half pound of the stuff. Optimistic projections put the future production price at $2.35/lb., compared to the current production price of beef, which is about $1.85/lb. In a time when Wal-Mart can blow like a tornado through small-town businesses, simply undercutting by a few cents, one wonders what hope in vitro meat has on a larger societal level.

Plus, adds Alexander: “As for the general public, there’s a gross-out factor that’s going to have to be overcome.” He’s probably right. With GMOs occupying a place in the shared psyche once held by Frankenstein’s monster, are people really going to be lining up to buy a petri dish’s worth of ground meat? Those in the natural farming movement would probably balk at the idea of in vitro meat too, perhaps rightfully so. Gastronomes may not forego a creamy foie gras for a heaping helping of red tissues. I also don’t expect support from countries where meat eating and butchery are so normalized that most don’t even see it as a moral issue.

The many caveats aside, whatever your view on the matter—whether you’re a hog-a-day kind of carnivore, or a strict vegan—we can agree that it’s bad to cause suffering. To kill is bad too. To mitigate suffering, to stifle deaths, is therefore a win, and what it’s done, at the very least, is helped raise a dialogue surrounding something many of us—certainly me—often take for granted.

Image via pixdesk.ca

The image of Stephen Harper “muzzling” anybody frightens me. Hair slightly un-coifed, half a glass of Chablis to the wind, his dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged has been tucked away on the dresser where his tighty-whiteys are neatly folded in the drawers below. It’s Friday night god dammit and Stephen’s here to party. The safe word is: prorogation.

My musings on our Prime Minister’s psychosexual tendencies aside, as most of us have heard, the real muzzling is going on in the research lab not the bedroom.

On September 22, the New York Times Editorial Board wrote a piece criticizing our government’s policy of obstruction between scientists and the media. The board notes, “There was trouble of this kind here [America] in the George W. Bush years, when scientists were asked to toe the party line on climate policy and endangered species. But nothing came close to what is being done in Canada.”

Let’s just all live with that quote for a few minutes.

I’m not sure what to be more embarrassed about: that the newspaper of record (in a country where 57 percent of the people believe that the devil is an actual real thing) has felt compelled to completely justifiably trash our government and characterize the issue as “an attempt to guarantee public ignorance.”

OR

That the shit-tonne of great Canadian reporting on this subject has gone largely un-read.

What I do know is that this government’s policy of stifling communication, particularly on the topic of scientific research, is indicative of controlling a message that is so at odds with what I identify as Canadian that it sickens me to think about it. Isn’t this consolidation of power precisely what a multi-party, bicameral legislature is designed to safeguard against?

So how does the Prime Minister, who has adorably said (with a straight face) that he “believes in small government” and “doesn’t believe in imposing his values on people” justify his government’s actions? He doesn’t of course. He does what researchers are being instructed to do: evade and avoid.

But wait, the Information Commissioner (a largely toothless position) Suzanne Legault (appointed by Harper) is investigating a complaint brought against the government that states their policy is illegal under the Access to Information Act. So Canadians have that going for them…

Until then, Canadian scientists will continue to stand in solidarity with their government-owned brethren, fighting for transparency in what is supposed to be an apolitical field. Also, organizations like Evidence for Democracy,  the Canadian Science Writers’ Association and Democracy Watch are committed to being vocal about the issue and keeping it in the public consciousness.

University of Ottawa biologist, Jeremy Kerr, summed it up well at a rally against muzzling when he said: “The facts do not change just because the Harper government has chosen ignorance over evidence and ideology over honesty.”

The facts don’t seem to be much of an issue for the majority of Canadians, fearlessly led by the Harper government. However, anyone who believes that restricting Canada’s access to unfiltered scientific research is wrong will continue to get screwed. What was that safe word again?

The case centred on controversial Myriad Genetics, the (now former) patent-holder of the gene mutation responsible for hereditary breast cancer. Perhaps, like many others, you first heard about the gene mutation after Angelina Jolie spoke openly about her preventative double mastectomy last month—launching the subject into hot topic territory. Jolie had the surgery after tests revealed she carried the gene mutation which gave her an 87 percent chance of developing breast cancer.

In that New York Times op-ed, Jolie encouraged other women to be tested for the gene. However, the property rights to the patented gene mutation push the cost of the test over $3,000—even for those likely to test positive, such as women with mothers and grandmothers who’ve had breast cancer. Jolie’s double mastectomy, though seemingly extreme, was a preventative cancer treatment. But with the cost of the test so high, even the option to consider this preventative care was available only to those with the money to spare.

The case was, of course, more complicated than the coverage of celebrity health, though Jolie did bring hereditary breast cancer and this particular gene mutation into the limelight. The biotech industry is up in arms about the Supreme Court’s ruling, afraid the decision will reduce funding for research—gene patents lead to bigger payoffs when treatments hit the market, an attractive prospect for investors.

But many, including civil rights activists, say it’s a win, as the decision opens the field to independent research and study, particularly at universities.

The judges voted unanimously on the issue, and reportedly in line with President Obama’s opinions on the topic. But the decision did not outlaw synthetic gene patenting; companies are still allowed to patent cDNA, the synthetic DNA produced by cloning.

So, here’s hoping healthcare becomes more affordable in the U.S., preventative cancer treatments become more accessible, and clones don’t take over the world.

In the wake of the discovery, Japan, South Korea, and much of Europe—all major buyers of the American export—have ceased import and distribution pending testing. Much of Europe is strictly GMO-free, and over 60 countries require foods with GM ingredients to be labeled.

A Kansan wheat farmer from Morton County, Ernest Barnes, filed a lawsuit June 3 accusing Monsanto of “gross negligence,” and other American farmers have joined him.

Monsanto has provided tests to the EU, Japan, and South Korea to determine if the American wheat they have is genetically modified. So far, all the tests have been negative, but American farmers have already lost money.

This is not the first time rogue GMOs have caused a ruckus. In 2006 genetically modified rice entered the American rice crop with dire economic consequences: nearly $1.29 billion (USD) in lost exports. Eleven thousand farmers sued Bayer, the company responsible for the development of the genetically modified rice grain, and received a settlement of $750 million.

Sounding more like a WTF than a FTW? Wheat is a much larger U.S. export than rice. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan all import huge quantities of white wheat, used to make noodles. Even this potentially brief halt in trade could have dire consequences for the wheat industry in the U.S., an even more significant loss of revenue and dire consequences for Monsanto’s corporate image.

The company recently gave up on a campaign lobbying the EU’s GM-free zones to change their laws banning modified crops, saying in a statement that Monsanto respects a region’s right to remain GMO-free. This gross negligence charge emphasizes just how little respect Monsanto has for both farmers and agriculture, and how little control they have over their seeds.

This time, though, there may be real consequences for Monsanto.

“We show that easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes, can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.”

Here are some of the findings: If you like “Being Conservative” and “The Bible,” you are “Satisfied with life”; if you like “Gorillaz” and “Science” you are “Unsatisfied with life”; and liking “Not Being Pregnant” and  “The L Word” means you are “A homosexual woman.”

As always, there was a furor over what looks like another Facebook privacy violation. Chain messages warning friends to tighten up their privacy settings yet again circulated the web.

Others embraced the study with a fun, interactive app—The One Click Personality Test. “It looks at the things you Like on Facebook, and then tells you who you are. Because you are what you like.”

But what do the results really mean? Basically, marketers now have another resource for targeting consumers, and anyone who wants to can use the results to make inferences about your personal life (as if they weren’t doing that already).

Most of these results are pretty obvious anyway. For example, if you ‘Like’ Jesus Christ that means you’re a Christian; if you ‘Like’ Belvedere Vodka that means you drink alcohol. Other results are plain weird, like if you ‘Like’ Curly Fries you likely have a high IQ.

My concern isn’t that this tool will be used to profile or “out” people. What gets me is that the study was done in the first place. This is a scientific study conducted by Cambridge University. Is this really what science (at least the stuff we’re exposed to) is reduced to? A marketing tool? Meanwhile in Canada, researchers battle to get funding for real science only to be muzzled when their results don’t jibe with the federal government’s agenda.

As of February 1 this year, Harper tightened up the privacy settings on science research. Now, any research associated with the DFO (Department of Fisheries and Oceans) is vetted by the government before it’s submitted to a scientific journal. The government also controls who scientists give interviews to and what kind of questions they can answer.

When journalist, Michael Harris, called bull-shit on Harper, the government simply lied about what’s been going on. The DFO posted on its website, “The iPolitics story by Michael Harris published on February 7th, 2013 is untrue. There have been no changes to the Department’s publication policy.”

An unnamed DFO scientist responded by posting an e-mail from Michelle Wheatley, the Central and Arctic science director, which outlined changes to the publication policy. The scientist ended the post, “You decide who’s being untruthful.”

It’s embarrassing, really. Scientists from the United States say they won’t work with the DFO because they refuse to be muzzled. And in the Canadian arctic we’re neglecting the world’s prime location for studying climate change, leaving scientists in Sweden and Germany – confused and annoyed –to pick up our slack.

So great, we know what our ‘Likes’ tell us about our behaviours, but what do our behaviours tell us about climate change in the arctic, or the state of salmon aquaculture operations. Maybe it’s not a lack of privacy that’s the problem, but too much of it.