Guardians 2024 Conference Program

The BHAVI 2024 October Symposium with title Guardians 2024 Conference will be held on Wednesday October 9 as a virtual meeting 09:00 - 17:00 PDT (California time). Guardians 2024 will be held as an online event, open to the public, in our series of annual Guardians of Truth and Integrity Conferences. There will be no registration fees charged for attendance at this symposium held via GoToMeeting videoconference at meet.goto.com/965055533. Guardians 2024 Call for Papers with information and instructions for authors who wish to contribute available at Guardians.BHAVI.us.

2024 Guardian

At Guardians 2024, we honor Peter Ash as our 2024 Guardian of Truth and Integrity.

• 2024 Guardian: Peter Ash
• 2023 Guardian: Anthony Fauci
• 2022 Guardian: Peter Wilmshurst

Invited Speakers

• Natalie Burke, Common Health Action, Washington DC
• Philip Koch, Colorado School of Mines, Golden CO
• Maggie Mulqueen, Brookline MA
• Joshua Rubin, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI
• Olivia Sagan, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh UK

Conference Program

The annual October 9 workshops ask the question Who are the Guardians of Truth and Integrity? and discuss the use of mis-information, dis-information, anti-information, caco-information, and mal-information in science, engineering, and medicine. People talking to people with civility, courtesy, tolerance, and respect is the focus theme for invited speakers at Guardians 2024. The general theme for technical report submissions by authors who wish to contribute to our annual Guardians conferences series remains reproducibility, validity, and integrity when conducting and communicating research while avoiding common fallacies and pitfalls in the relevant research field. All times listed below in this program schedule are PDT (California time).

Guardians 2024 Opening Session

• 09:00 Julie Neidich, Honoring our BHAVI 2024 Guardian
• 09:15 Peter Ash, Under the Same Sun: Changing Hearts and Minds about Albinism

Invited Talks

• 10:00 Maggie Mulqueen, What Does Care Look Like in 2024? Caring for Others in Times of Dissent and Distress

  Human connection is foundational to good mental and physical well-being, so when we take care of others we are effectively also taking care of ourselves. The most valuable skill in caring for another person is the capacity to listen so that person experiences feeling heard. Enhancing our listening skills is critical to staying connected to one another despite the cacophony of disinformation and vitriol infecting our lives.

• 11:00 Philip Koch, Holding Their Feet to Our Fires: Rural Emergency Services and the Struggle to Serve in the Face of Ignorance and Corruption

  In the rural US, and much of suburbia as well, emergency services other than law enforcement (fire, rescue, and medicine) are provided by publicly-funded entities, oftentimes a ‘fire’ department, which typically is heavily staffed by volunteers. Usually, fire departments are overseen by external bodies working on the public’s behalf. In the case of rural Fire Protection Districts (FPDs) in Colorado, we utilize elected Boards of Directors (BoDs) to provide this oversight. While public safety should not be a political matter, because elections are involved, all of the ugliness of contemporary US politics has crept into BoD elections. This presentation will examine these dynamics for a representative FPD near Denver, the apparent motives behind these dynamics, and how a group of concerned citizens (many of us volunteers in this FPD) have attempted to inject fact, change the crazed narratives, and wrest control back from those who do not seem motivated by the common good of the community they were elected to serve.

• 12:00 Natalie Burke, The Journey Towards Health Equity: Taking Uncomfortable Steps to Change Hearts and Minds

  While the practice of medicine is rooted in science, it is also deeply rooted in human bias, racism, and power dynamics that create conditions in which too many patients cannot experience equitable health care or health outcomes. Not only are patients adversely affected; nurses, physicians, and other healthcare workers are struggling with moral distress and moral injury perpetuated by identity-based inequities they witness and experience within and outside the four walls of their workplace. Providers, healthcare leaders, and their institutions are at a critical juncture that requires them to identify bias, racism, and racist ideas as threats to quality, safety, and health equity. That journey starts with knowing and accepting the history that shapes and frames the culture of healthcare and medicine; recognizing the harm done to patients and practitioners; learning new language to have difficult discussions in which facts take precedence over feelings; and embracing the belief that change is not only required, but it is also possible. Those changes are personal and professional — taking place first in hearts and minds.

• 13:00 Joshua Rubin, Musical Chairs for Darvomanics: How Anti-Learning Systems Enable Systemic Abuses of Power in Academia and What We Can Do Together to Help Them Learn

  Academic healthcare systems ostensibly aspire to become learning health systems that improve outcomes as a byproduct of experience. Yet, major systemic problems in academic medicine, academia, and elsewhere persist because structures and incentives that engender anti-learning systems are interwoven into the cultural fabric of these organizations. Divergent issues including sexual predation, racism, antisemitism, plagiarism, quashing free speech, trampling on the rights of patients, and more proliferate at universities in spite of well-funded efforts aimed at addressing such challenges. They do so because they are all fruits of the same poisonous tree, and all represent the same monster wearing different masks. Indeed, when the people occupying seats of power change over time but the problems persist, we bear witness to a game of musical chairs for darvomanics who cause harmful consequences. Fortunately, one promising solution emerges from harnessing the transformative magnetism of moral courage.

• 14:00 Olivia Sagan, Loneliness, Social Cohesion and the Role of Art Making

  Interest in rising rates of loneliness runs parallel to increased concern about weakening social cohesion. Both phenomena are described as complexly entwined with trust and agency and related to wellbeing at both individual and societal level. Opinions are divided on how to alleviate loneliness and build social cohesion, but there is some coalescence around claims of the contribution of art making to both warding off loneliness and building social cohesion. This paper draws on contemporary readings of Hannah Arendt’s theory of loneliness to suggest how art making can be efficacious and why it should play a central role in community building. Drawing on data from two studies into community art making, the talk explores how the inter- and intra-personal processes of being seen and showing can alleviate loneliness, help restore agency and build social cohesion.

Technical Talks

• 15:00 Micha Burkhardt, UOL Germany, Quantifying Similarities between fMRI Processing Pipelines for Efficient Multiverse Analysis
• 15:20 Pan-Jun Kim, HKBU Hong Kong, Long-Term Innovative Potential of Genetic Research and its Suppression
• 15:40 Adam Craig, BHAVI USA, From Open Review to Reproducible Review: FAIR Metrics Analysis of Peer Reviews for Brain Informatics Literature

Guardians 2024 Closing Session

• 16:00 Carl Taswell, BHAVI USA,

Background References

• A. Craig et al 2019, DREAM Principles and FAIR Metrics from the PORTAL-DOORS Project for the Semantic Web, DOI 10.1109/ECAI46879.2019.9042003
• S. K. Taswell et al 2020, The Hitchhiker's Guide to Scholarly Research Integrity, DOI 10.1002/pra2.223
• A. Athreya et al 2020, The Essential Enquiry 'Equal or Equivalent Entities?' About Two Things as Same, Similar, Related, or Different, DOI 10.48085/PEDADC885
• S. K. Taswell et al 2021, Truth in Science, DOI 10.48085/M85EC99EE
• A. Craig et al 2022, Motivating and Maintaining Ethics, Equity, Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Expertise in Peer Review, DOI 10.48085/I5B147D9D

Important Dates

• Tue Jan 9: report website opens for submissions
• Mon Sep 9 Mon Sep 16: report website closes for submissions
• Thu Sep 12 Tue Sep 17: report website opens for review discussions
• Mon Sep 30: authors notified of review decisions
• Fri Oct 4: report website closes for presentation versions
• Wed Oct 9: author presentations online at Guardians 2024