Luis M. Rocha @lmrocha@qoto.org

Interesting piece on NY Times about a supposed “wood wide web” — an underground fungal network that allows trees to cooperate by sharing nutrients and “communicating”. The widely believed theory is falling apart under scrutiny, and it's becoming clear it should not have been widely accepted in the first place.

One particular item that I found interesting is how the criticisms of the hypothesis were presented very early, but since the original publications were done in a fancy journal (Nature), the debunked claim flourished nevertheless, while the criticisms were forgotten.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/07/science/trees-fungi-talking.html

This also reminds me of a modern problem with science communication. We're often asked to accept two things simultaneously:

1. Science is a human endeavor, and hence is subject to ideological and cultural biases, societal pressures, consensus dynamics, etc.

2. We need to trust The Science™, and accept the opinion of experts, without second-guessing them.

Obviously we can't have both. This cognitive dissonance is obvious to anyone, and causes distrust in the general population.

It should be clear to any scientist that point 1 is largely true — although not to the same extent across all fields, and certainly not to the absurd levels claimed by some (e.g. that mathematics is inherently white supremacist and needs to be “decolonized”).

Any scientist exerts skepticism in their own field, and there is no reason not to do so for other fields, and not allow the general population to do the same.

I take vaccines and I'm worried about climate change not simply because scientists (even a majority of them) have said so, but because of the evidence and logic presented, which affects my trust on the scientists. I do not trust other fields of science based on the same criteria, despite not having the credentials or detailed expertise — although, of course, one needs to exercise careful humility in these cases.

It's rare to see science communication that embodies skepticism in a healthy way.

#science #sciencecomm #fungus
@complexsystems @networkscience

"Without modern mechanised transportation and confronted by enormous distances and varying weather by season, the ancient perception of distance had to have differed from our own. A long-distance journey in the Roman Empire, it has been posited, was anywhere beyond five days’ reach: quite the departure from our current ideal of anywhere not accessible within a few hours by car, plane or train."

https://aeon.co/essays/the-roman-empire-was-a-cosmopolitan-network-of-adventurers

NIH has established a self reporting COVID + test site

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-establishes-website-self-reporting-covid-19-test-results

After hearing some feedback,a nd wanting to be fair in my representation, I have change the title of the article. It is now:

# Eugen Rochko, CEO of Mastodon, Caves to Nazi's Agenda

I think we can all agree thats a more faithful title.

https://jeffreyfreeman.me/eugen-rochko-ceo-of-mastodon-found-to-support-nazis-agenda/

"A storm of these proportions should demand not only crisis clinical measures, but also community prevention efforts. Yet instead of deploying public health strategies to weather the storm, the U.S. is abandoning them."

#Flu #RSV #Covid #publichealth

https://www.statnews.com/2022/11/22/tripledemic-hurricane-include-community-prevention-efforts/

If anyone fancies watching a beautiful 6 minute scientific video about #SARSCoV2 life cycle, this is really quite absorbing... #COVID19 #IDMastodon #virology
https://youtu.be/k2GlafQ9YhY

Sharing this Time Series Analysis Handbook put together by our first batch of PhD in Data Science students. The handbook extensively covers time series analysis and forecasting, delving from the most fundamental methods to the state-of-the-art.

https://phdinds-aim.github.io/time_series_handbook/Preface/Preface.html

"The aim of this handbook is to serve as a practitioner’s guide to forecasting, enabling them to better understand relationships in signals."

Using the data from @beatty opencheck project, I have represented the ORCID (left, ~1900 users) and the TWITTER/MASTODON (right, 2250 users) networks.

Color encodes communities, size the # of connections.

In the right-hand one, the bottom-right (green) group consists of many complexity scientists!

#TwitterMigration #TwitterExodus #SocialNetworkAnalysis #ComputationalSocialScience #ScienceMastodon #ScienceTwitter

First message in a bottle:
Estimating the impact of COVID-19 vaccine allocation inequities: a modeling study
- counterfactual scenarios assuming for lower and middle income countries the same per capita daily vaccination rate reported in selected high income countries
- more than 50% of deaths that occurred in the analyzed countries could have been averted
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.18.22282514v1

If you're looking for some quality science writing, my friend Olivia Judson has a new piece over at Aeon (no paywall).

"Darwin, of course, is famous for his work on evolution. His book On the Origin of Species (1859) laid out a wealth of evidence that evolution occurs, and proposed a mechanism – natural selection – for how it does so. Although much has been learned since, and many of his ideas have been extended, corrected or refined, the Origin remains the founding text of modern biology, and is the pinnacle of Darwin’s work. But Darwin’s first scientific monograph and his last – the two bookends of his thoughts, so to speak – were both about how animals have, over vast spans of time, transformed the landscape."

#Evolution #EvolutionaryBiology #Geology #Aeon #AeonMagazine #Darwin

https://aeon.co/essays/the-insight-of-darwins-work-on-corals-worms-and-co-evolution

I started collecting #mastoadmin resources some time ago: https://github.com/mszell/mastodaminresources
Hope it can be useful (also for non-admins). Please help adding to it! 🐘 🤍

The issue #2 of #ComplexityThoughts is out!

#ComplexSystems #ClimateChange #HumanBehavior #Neuroscience