Gaythia Weis @Gaythia@qoto.org

In June (2022) my team published research introducing a dataset of 100s of false, misleading, & unsubstantiated claims that sowed doubt in election 2020, and identified the most influential accounts in the spread of those claims. Folks on the right have called this a "watchlist" & blended it into some conspiracy theory about a "censorship cartel'. Nope. Just an analysis initiated by PhD students, using their freedom of speech to call out the lies that led to January 6: https://journalqd.org/article/view/3137

Fun fact: Ryan Mac, the NYT tech reporter who Elon suspended tonight is also the reporter who broke the news that Peter Thiel was secretly financing lawsuits (including Hulk Hogan's sex tape lawsuit) in order to destroy Gawker.

Why buy any digital NFT nonsense when you can actually see me live and on stage in London, from Jan-Apr next year?
For tickets: https://Allegiancemusical.com

Elon Musk's banning of journalists again shows that we need to update our understanding of his playbook. He's waging a form of right wing information warfare. The display of domination over journalistic enemies is the key thing here.

Free article on this idea for those without subscriptions:
https://wapo.st/3HBT74u

After sufficient lurking, here is my #introduction

I’m a #computational #cognitive #neuroscientist and asst. prof. at JHU Cog Sci studying social vision. Our lab uses a combination of human behavior, neuroimaging and computational modeling to understanding how humans can so effortlessly extract rich social information from the visual world around them.

Our recent work relies heavily on naturalistic neuroimaging and state of the art modeling (such as graph neural networks and disentangled representation learning). You can learn more/find papers on our website: isiklab.org

Aw yeah, you know what time it is, baby! Another #BlackFriday full of #BlackJoy all over #blackmastodon ! As always, shout outs to @BigAngBlack, @BlackAzizAnansi and them for getting me into this.

Humans can be fallible, violence prone, dangerous to themselves, other species and the world, true.
But humans can also cooperate, achieve amazing feats, and even save the planet from devastation.
I considered this when I heard that 70 years after the first use of atomic fusion, humans have achieved *ignition* at the Lawrence Livermore Lab. That means more energy was produced from a fusion reaction than was used to power it. We have a long way to go, but this is a huge milestone! #Hope #Fusion

Nearly all the progress the U.S. has made in treating #HepC in prisons has come because incarcerated people filed lawsuits against their jailers. When Phil Turney took on the Idaho Department of Corrections, he didn’t even have a computer. Watch: https://www.statnews.com/2022/12/15/typewriter-in-prison-overturns-idaho-hepatitis-c-policy

Just before the invasion, #Ukraine made a deal with #Amazon #AWS to create a data warehouse for its government information and infrastructure: tax and property records, bank statements, and the like. Things that an invaded and occupied Ukraine might lose if Russia got their hands on the only copies.

They literally snuck Pelican crates full of SSDs into the country and spirited them back offshore after backing up 10 petabytes of important historic and legal records.

This paragraph, second from the end, really put a fine point on why Amazon did this: They were not beholden to, nor being held hostage by, any Russian operations...because they never had any:

Amazon didn’t have to worry about its relationship with Russia on the Snowball project. It doesn’t have one. “We didn’t have anything to turn off there,” Maxwell said. “We had never invested there. It’s a point of principle.”

Truly an amazing story from the #LATimes.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-15/amazon-ukraine-war-cloud-data

Corporate profits only accounted for roughly 11% of price growth from 1979 to 2019.

Today, record corporate profits account for 53.9% of price increases.

Folks, corporate greed is driving inflation, not workers asking for better wages.

In 1941, Nazis asked the city of Amsterdam to make this map of Jews in the city. Each dot equalled 10 Jews.

In 2022, TX AG @KenPaxtonTX sought data from driver's licenses on #transgender Texans.

But don't worry. History never repeats itself. #LGBTQ+
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/12/14/texas-transgender-data-paxton/

Democrats have until Jan 3 to pass DACA protections. After that, MAGA GOP takes over and we know they'll do everything to make DACA lives miserable.

I need y’all to raise your voice. Sign the petition & demand Dems act: https://bit.ly/3YaaZt7

This petition is from United We Dream, an extremely reputable immigrant rights org that does the hard work on the ground.

I'd be deeply grateful if you signed at the above link & shared this post to get maximum participation. Thank you. Much love.

#NASA new #SWOT #satellite will study #climatechange and its ability to look in detail at surface #water on #Earth is already getting excitement from scientists.

https://www.space.com/nasa-swot-satellite-earth-water-science

## Few bullets about myself.

* At work my current focus area is software systems for industrial process automation.

* I have interests in wide variety of topics as mentioned in my profile https://qoto.org/@srijit or https://mas.to/@srijit.

* My preferred languages are English, Bengali, Kannada and Hindi.

* I favour free and open source application software.

* I expect Mastodon fediverse to be the digital town square which rewards moderate and rational talk that promotes consensus.

#Introduction #MastIndia #Bengaluru

New UC Berkeley report funded by Tusk Philanthropies concludes internet voting is not ready for prime time. Pleased to have been part of the group developing this piece. https://gspp.berkeley.edu/faculty-and-impact/news/recent-news/csp-working-group-findings-on-mobile-voting