The leader of the Republican Party and the owner of Twitter have both spent the past week or so nodding to, winking at, or outright promoting QAnon and Pizzagate.

It's hard for me to describe to you how dangerous, how crazy, how unprecedented, this all is.

America, 2022.

Big day for vaccines? HUGE day for vaccines. https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/moderna-merck-vaccine-combo-cut-melanoma-recurrence-by-44-study-2022-12-13/

New paper out:
A two-phase model of collective memory decay with a dynamical switching point
(with @ZeroSano)
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-25840-9

Excellent visualization. This is a comparison of the speeds of rotation of the planets of the solar system and their axes of rotation in real time!

New preprint! More central nodes in online social media detect early contagious outbreaks offline. We use the "friendship paradox" online to identify people who talk earlier about flu symptoms and build early warnings of ILI outbreaks.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.15.22282355v2

@yisraeldov @freemo @louis@emacs.ch Rather than being premature optimization, this is late in coming. You might not be aware of this, but in the absence of a central authority, self-moderating instances have joined together to build domain blocklists that are shared widely and based on nothing more than the say-so of one or two people.

While mastodon does have plenty of tools we can use to block content that we don’t want to see, many instance admins choose to really aggressively block entire instances without any due process or evidence or opportunity for counter-evidence. I’ve seen QOTO described as having “no moderation at all,” something I know to be factually false. I’ve seen entire instances blocked because of the actions of one non-admin user, which is the right of any server admin, but doesn’t bode well for federation. I’ve seen entire instances blocked not because of something anyone said or did, but because the instances were insufficiently aggressive in promising to seek out and block other bad instances. It’s mind-boggling, and scary for anyone thinking about running an instance of their own.

Primarily at this point, the UFoI is about a guarantee of due process, which is currently lacking in the fediverse. It might not cause the super-aggressive blockers to change their approach, but it will at least guarantee that smaller instances won’t be completely isolated from everyone on the whim of someone at a big server having a grumpy day.

If mastodon were as safe and friendly as you say it is, the UFoI wouldn’t exist, and the hashtag for BlackMastodon wouldn’t be filled with people saying that they’re seeing worse treatment on Mastodon than the bird site. I’m glad your personal experience has been positive, but that is not the case for everyone.

Interesting conference on #networks #digitalhumanities #archaeology and #Temporality

@digitalhumanities @archaeodons @networkscience

https://historicalnetworkresearch.org/cfp-graphnr-2023-joint-conference-of-the-hnr-community-and-graphs-networks-in-the-humanities-18-21-07-2023-mainz/

'It’s this kind of libertarianism—the you-do-you ethos of American culture that sees the “public” in public health as anathema, clinging to a medical model of private risk and private cures—that dropped us down to the 40s in global life expectancy rankings before the pandemic, and will land us below the 60s by 2040. “Give me liberty and give me death” is the reigning mantra of America today.'
@gregggonsalves

#PublicHealth

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/public-health-covid-pandemic/

There are 2 ways to sign up to the United Federation of Instances, for those wondering.

We have over 200,000 members but looking for more before launch.

One, and the most important, is as an instance admin bringing your instance onto the UFoI. For this you dont need to do anything other than ensure you follow our basic code of conduct. See the proposal/by laws for that:

https://ufoi.gitlab.io/constitution/united_federation_of_instances_proposal.pdf

https://ufoi.gitlab.io/constitution/united_federation_of_instances_bylaws.pdf

Other than that you dont have to do anything to be a member, and you can be a one person instance or a large instance. You do need to promise to federate with other instances in the UFoI. Also you can leave at any time, no questions asked, so not much obligation.

The other is as an individual.. for that just let me know and ill give you access to everything and add you to the list of contributors. In this case you arent under any obligation either, you can join in on conversationsn, suggest edits, or just lurk. Up to you. Message me if you want to be a contributor and ill add you and check out the repo here:

https://gitlab.com/ufoi/constitution

Any questions first feel free to ask me.

For more information on ways to connect see this post:

https://qoto.org/@freemo/109433298021890915

#UFoI #UFI @ufoi #mastoadmin

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/