tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

At ~06:30 UTC today a very close conjunction at 608 km between two non-maneuverable spacecraft took place, a derelict Russian satellite and the operational NASA satellite TIMED: https://twitter.com/LeoLabs_Space/status/1762851748702511418 (long and important thread ... sorry, non-X-ers) - the miss distance was 20 meters or less, the probability of collision 3 to 8% at TCA. Nothing happened, fortunately: https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2024/02/28/nasas-timed-spacecraft-passes-safely-by-satellite/

En två meter hög snöhög fanns plötsligt där IF Metalls strejkvakter brukar stå utanför Tesla i Umeå. ”Det är med stor sannolikhet Tesla som ligger bakom det här.”
Nu har strejkvakterna gjort högen till sin.
https://da.se/2024/02/herren-pa-tappan-utanfor-teslas-verkstad/
#tesla #ifmetall #umeå

…they found that applicants were self-selecting out because of their own bad test scores / test phobia / struggles with the test. Going test-optional wasn’t to improve the •selection• process; it was to widen the pool of •applicants•. And yes, it did just that when we want test-optional — in ways that produced more equitable outcomes.

4/

There is some debate at my lab on if we should reorganize our scientific teams, so I did what anyone would do:
- Wrote a python script scraping all the recent publication history of every scientist at my lab from the lab's website
- Mapped their publications relationships as a weighted social graph
- Applied the Louvain clustering algorithm from python's sknetwork library to get new team suggestions
- Hid the results forever so that I don't look like a weird nerd
#python #datascience

“Even now, we estimate that at least 90% of Gaza’s children under the age of five are affected by one or more infectious diseases, and that 70% have had diarrhea in the past two weeks — a 23-fold increase compared with the 2022 baseline.” https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/26/opinions/israel-gaza-rafah-children-aid-unicef-russell

NEW: Tumblr and Wordpress are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to internal documentation we've reviewed

https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-data-to-train-ai-tools/

@w7voa It sounds like Wapo is trying to make sense of an act of conscientious objection and probing for reasons it might be considered explainable by reasons not related to the simple fact of deeply felt personal revulsion over the situation in Gaza - and coming up empty. A lot of us live with the cognitive dissonance of living in a deeply unjust world while being personally content day to day; but we should not pat ourselves on the back for making that adjustment.

This is why I thin that, in general, silent power is the scariest kind. Power that doesn't try to justify itself, or engage you in rational argument. It's just going to roll over you, because you're not considered a full person.

Newly leaked documents from the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin reveal in detail how the Kremlin is working to ensure Putin’s election victory, building a pan-Russian propaganda network and internet censorship machinery for the purposes of information warfare, and integrating the occupied territories in Ukraine.

https://vsquare.org/kremlin-leaks-putin-elections-russia-propaganda-ukraine/

#russia #putin #ukraine

A talk at the "Space Development and Utilization Subcommittee" meeting reported a little news on the SLIM rovers, LEV-1 & LEV-2.

LEV-1 (bigger, ☂️-shaped 🤖 that can talk to Earth) sent radiowaves home for 107 mins, including transmitting data from LEV-2 (SORA-Q: ball transformer that needs LEV-1 to phone home).

This was the world's 1st lunar robot-to-robot communication, 1st direct communication from something so teeny tiny, and 1st amateur ratio station on the Moon (UHF transmitted 📻 ).

Is there a law that describes how the rapid growth in renewable energy is outpaced by the growth in the dumb ways we think of to use that energy?

Fascinating first person account by a psychologist who faked data

The scientist: Diederik Stapel. A Dutch social psychologist. He wrote a book explaining the context and how one thing led to another until he was caught. Nick Brown translated it into English. Freely available here:

http://nick.brown.free.fr/stapel

Page 101:

I also became increasingly skilled in the use of techniques that could put a healthy-
looking shine on otherwise mediocre results. If I didn’t get the effect I wanted across all the
different measures I’d used or the questions I’d asked, I would use the ones that did show
that effect. If an effect was present in an experiment, but not strongly enough to be tapped
by all of the types of measurements I’d used, I would make it stronger by combining the measures where the effect seemed to be only partly working. ...

Page 102:

After years of balancing on the outer limits, the gray became darker and darker until
it was black, and I fell off the edge into the abyss. I’d been having trouble with my
experiments for some time. Even with my various “gray” methods for “improving” the data,
I wasn’t able to get the results the way I wanted them. I couldn’t resist the temptation to go wanted it so badly. I wanted to belong, to be part of the action, to score. I really, really wanted to be really, really good. I wanted to be published in the best journals
and speak in the largest room at conferences. I wanted people to hang on my every word
as I headed for coffee or lunch after delivering a lecture. I felt very alone.

p103

I was alone in my tastefully furnished office at the University of Groningen. I’d taken
extra care when closing the door, and made my desk extra tidy. Everything had to be neat
and orderly. No mess. I opened the computer file with the data that I had entered and
changed an unexpected 2 into a 4; then, a little further along, I changed a 3 into a 5. It
didn’t feel right. I looked around me, nervously. The data danced in front of my eyes.
When the results are just not quite what you’d so badly hoped for; when you know that that
hope is based on a thorough analysis of the literature; when this is your third experiment
on this topic and the first two worked great; when you know that there are other people
doing similar research elsewhere who are getting good results; then, surely, you’re entitled
to adjust the results just a little?

⚡️ Russian officials release Alexey Navalny’s body to his mother after days of trying to pressure her into a secret burial. Questions about a public funeral at home in Moscow remain. Russia’s next presidential election begins in just 20 days. https://meduza.io/en/news/2024/02/24/russian-officials-release-alexey-navalny-s-body-to-his-mother

Aleksej Navalnyj dödades eftersom han vägrade att hålla tyst. Han fortsatte att kommunicera med omvärlden även från fängelset. Hans straffades med odrägliga förhållanden och nästan konstant isolering i straffcell. Nu leker de ryska myndigheterna kurragömma med hans kropp för att undanhålla sanningen om hur han dog.

Det här skrev jag förra året.
https://www.glasnost.se/2023/navalnyjs-narmaste-medarbetare-de-mordar-honom-langsamt/

#navalnyj

Alexey Navalny’s family and associates have so far been unable to find the politician’s body, and the authorities have been tight-lipped about the circumstances surrounding his death. Here’s what’s actually supposed to happen when a Russia prisoner dies:
https://t.co/vBc3N63S2t

Biden indicates that the “devastating consequences” he threatened three years ago in the event of Navalny’s death in prison are already in motion in Ukraine. In other words, don’t expect anything new now. https://www.youtube.com/live/cvqMXRooFCo?si=ga-desMpaxEaaIoQ

(Generally, if your major demographic trend shows a 700% increase in 10 years, double-check the data.) #demography

Another interesting element is the news media showing up on Mastodon.

I have a Google alert set up for my name, in case I’ve written anything stupid online - it went quiet for months, but nowadays it’s constantly triggering, and mostly foreign language articles due to European journalists branching out.

Decades before today’s migrants boarded small boats to Europe to ‘take their jobs’, European fishing ships were trawling West African waters, taking food and jobs from the locals. And they still are. https://bit.ly/3HXfeBu