Dr Keith Walker @SteelFolk@qoto.org

1. We, Ukrainians, want to live.
2. We want to live in our sovereign independent state. Not russia.
3. We want to have our cultural identity and language. Not russian.
4. We want to decide our own future.

And russia has no legal or moral right to deny us any of this.

#UkrainianView

Last year, I walked 26 miles in a day to raise money for Alzheimer's Research, in memory of my mother Joy Cooke, who died of dementia in 2017.

On 1st June this year, I'm doing it again. This time, I will be accompanied by my daughter Nadz.
.
I raised over £2,000 last year. Let's see if we can do even better this year! Here's our Just Giving page. Please give generously!

https://www.justgiving.com/team/FrancesandNadz

Also! If you've never heard of #PFAS / "forever chemicals" before and want to learn more, I recently revamped the PFAS FAQs on my website

(because I kept getting the same questions over and over!)

There's stuff there for both the public & for academics

https://brittanytrang.com/pfas/

Are there any #scientists studying #extremophiles here avaliable for some short talk?

Here's my piece at The Mint magazine on instability economics. Most Western economists think the natural state of an economy is stability. though shocks can temporarily force it out of its normal stable orbit and it evolves over time. But I argue that when you take into account the storms constantly experienced by developing countries, economic history shows the natural state of the global economy is instability, not stability.
https://www.themintmagazine.com/the-illusion-of-stability/

In an important development, civil servants of conscience in Germany have finally joined their peers in other countries and published an open letter calling on their government to stop exporting weapons to Israel.

This should terrify the genocide enablers in the German government, because it means there is a pool of whistleblowers available to shred their excuses to bits and confirm that domestic laws and reports of Israeli war crimes were consciously ignored, greatly increasing their individual legal exposure at The Hague.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/7/german-civil-servants-demand-immediate-end-to-israeli-arms-supplies?traffic_source=rss

I somehow seem to have pulled together a 14-track album during the last few months and as it's #BandCampFriday if you buy it today, I'll get 100% of the dosh. The album's an eclectic mix of tunes, under the title "Genre Fluid"

https://davebradley.bandcamp.com/album/genre-fluid

Does international law really exist?

When it is asserted that Israel and Russia are in breach of international law, it means—or should mean—something

By me, at @prospect_uk

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/65614/does-international-law-exist-david-allen-green-israel-russia

The narrative around Universal Basic Income often gets twisted into a saga of laziness. But here's food for thought: UBI will be the most significant productivity booster we've yet to embrace. Freed from survival stress, innovation and creativity will flourish like never before.

Our Wikipedia page is at risk of being deleted because it may not meet notability guidelines.

Can we get some help?

We're not that familiar with Wikipedia or its processes, but we think our project is notable enough for inclusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixelfed

#pixelfed #wikipedia

Lots of the proposals for fixing #healthcare #cybersecurity focus on equipping #hospitals (or penalizing them for attacks).

But as the #Change outage shows, third-party vendors pose a huge risk.

“Even if we spent every dollar of our budgets on cybersecurity, that still does not eliminate the majority of cyber risk that comes to us from third parties.”

@STAT's Mohana Ravindranath on what's next:
https://www.statnews.com/2024/03/29/change-healthcare-attack-proposed-cybersecurity-regulations/

#health #medicine #MedMastodon #healthpolicy #unitedhealth

Shell abandons 2035 emissions target and weakens 2030 goal.

Cynical victim blaming from a major fossil fuel polluter:
“if society is not net-zero in 2050… there would be significant risk that Shell may not meet this target”. This is familiar language from the oil major, which frequently explains that it is consumers, not Shell itself, that influence fossil-fuel use. —Carbon Brief

https://www.carbonbrief.org/shell-abandons-2035-emissions-target-and-weakens-2030-goal/

Does this happen to you?

I was advised to never ever use childcare responsibilities as a justification for unavailability, e.g. when rejecting meetings at late hours. Well, because, someone could think that I am not serious about science or that my kids are more important to me than my science, or something like this 🙄

But when a male colleague tells about skipping a meeting because his child is sick, everyone goes like "ah, he is such a good father!" (and a good scientist of course, anyway)

These are leaf sheep (Costasiella kuroshimae). They live in the sea, grazing on algae.

Are you based in the UK and interested in #teaching #statistics (in the #lifesciences but even outside!)? Would you like to discuss #challenges and #strategies with other people from different disciplines?

Then we invite you to a #workshop based upon a cross-UK survey of undergraduate teaching in study design and data analysis for #Biology, #Biomedical Science, #Medicine and #Psychology. The workshop aims to critically examine teaching practice with an eye on improving research reproducibility as a part of science reform.

What can you gain from the workshop?

- Cross-disciplinary perspective on the challenges faced and approaches to overcome them, and solidarity that comes from openly discussing challenges;

- Resources for teaching/to influence teaching of stats in an attendees’ own institution;

- Opportunity to benchmark your teaching programs versus those nationwide;

- Opportunity to gain “outside the box” (cross-discipline) perspective on why and how to teach study design and analysis;

- Knowledge of approaches and software people are using across UK to do/teach data analysis.

The workshop will occur *12 June*, 2024, at the University of Manchester. We anticipate the fee will be less than £20 (and will most likely be free)

Below, we provide links to (1) view the workshop's itinerary and (2) to sign up to indicate your general interest (we are gauging interest at the moment for organisational purposes; registration will follow).

Link for itinerary:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fj_VN3_bJ9H1kXpXqFjVqPR6Kbg5ErVFq7iKldlltu0/edit?usp=sharing

Link to indicate interest:
https://forms.office.com/e/yfTsyPe49e

============================

Organising committee:

- Crispin Jordan (University of Edinburgh)
- Nicola Romanò (University of Edinburgh)
- Kasia Banas (University of Edinburgh)
- Vanessa Armstrong (Newcastle University)
- William Kay (Cardiff University)

"Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”

and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay."

-a 15yo autistic girl experiencing ABA therapy

WTF is going on with UK Labour and UK politics in general?

Brexit has shifted the Overton window so far to the right that Labour are now Thatcherites, and the Tories are full blown fascists.

https://www.politico.eu/article/margaret-thatcher-david-lammy-visionary-labour-united-kingdom/

Fenland Sunset