imdef @imdef@qoto.org

The basic story has been told before. In journals...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ina.13070

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2021.0017

...and in popular form:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/

Lidia Morawska and 31 coauthors in a new article on the struggle to recognize #aerosol or #airborne transmission of #SarsCoV2. Maybe a scientific research journal is not the best place for this message but the topic is important.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciad068/7034152

https://www.titan.uio.no/energi-og-miljo/2023/strommarkedet-hva-skjer-hvis-vi-kobler-nord--og-s.html

All #bibliographic tools I know (#Zotero, Papers, #CiteULike, etc.) do a terrible job with accents/umlauts and need to be hand corrected and I suspect this one is no different. However, it usually takes a few clicks on a journal webpage to get a #BibTeX entry. This program is at least as convenient and lends itself to automation.

This Python program for looking up a DOI and printing a #BibTeX entry looks useful:

https://scipython.com/blog/doi-to-bibtex/

Found an interview with the lead author of the #Cochrane review. He is a good example of someone engaging in default thinking:

"[...] it's a complete subversion of the ‘precautionary principle’ which states that you should do nothing unless you have reasonable evidence that benefits outweigh the harms."

https://maryannedemasi.substack.com/p/exclusive-lead-author-of-new-cochrane?utm_campaign=post

In the summer 2021, I collected a lot of literature on this and wrote up some thoughts. Much of it applies to the reception of the latest #Cochrane's summary too.
https://intemittdefault.wordpress.com/2021/07/10/evidence-decisions-and-default-reasoning/

(3/n, n=3)

Based on what I have seen during the pandemic, many people poorly equipped to interpret this sort of selective summary because they rely on a type of default thinking:

Pick a hypothesis that wins by default (e.g. a specific physical intervention is harmful/non-beneficial). Then once new studies become available, check if they give a strong and rigorous enough reason to reject the default; if not, keep the default. (Similar to how, in a court of law, the accused is by default innocent until proven beyond reasonable doubt to be guilty.)

This can be contrasted with a more Bayesian way of thinking:

No hypothesis wins by default. Decide on some initial degree of belief in a hypothesis and its negation. Carefully weigh new evidence for an against and incrementally update the degrees of belief. (2/n)

A new #Cochrane Review on physical interventions against respiratory viruses is making the rounds. The review focuses exclusively on #RCTs and finds that in the entire scientific literature, there are 78 studies with a bearing on the various questions asked. (1/n)
https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6

Every physicist has a copy of Goldstein's book on Analytical mechanics in his/her bookshelf. I don't share the conviction but have to love his cockiness about Bohmian mechanics around the 12 minute mark here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pslh_P24If4

From a workshop on Shape dynamics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU0sDEeWsfE

A written tutorial:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0105

Idag snögubbe med yngsta barnet.

Stillsam skogstur i söndags. Bra tillfälle att fundera över harmoniska oscillatorer.

LaTeX formatting often becomes unreadable on #qoto. Often a single character is resized to enormous size compared to the rectangular box a typical toot fits into, and this hides a lot of the containing toot. This happens frequently with posts from mathstodon.xyz. @freemo, if others have this problem too, would it be possible to turn off LaTeX formatting until it's fixed? Seeing the raw, unformatted LaTeX code would be an improvement.

Årets #julklapp: träningscykel med generator