Mastodawn

If you drive in #France and suddenly see something milky on the roads, it's not a new farmers' protest. It's called "lait de chaux".
This #whitewash consisting of lime and water is a try to protect the bitumen in the roads from melting due to more and more heatwaves: https://www.franceinfo.fr/environnement/evenements-meteorologiques-extremes/vagues-de-chaleur-canicules/canicule-du-lait-de-chaux-repandu-sur-les-routes-pour-eviter-la-chaleur-du-bitume_7326369.html The streets are about 10 degrees cooler due to the white colour.
This week-end, we will have up to 37°C.

#climateDiary #ClimateAdaption #ClimateCrisis #white #colours #heatwave #road #roadSafety

Canicule : du lait de chaux répandu sur les routes pour éviter la chaleur du bitume

Dans l'Allier, un mélange d'eau et de chaux est répandu sur les routes pour faire baisser la température du bitume. Les opérations ont commencé avant la vague de chaleur du vendredi 20 juin.

Franceinfo

Moritz Negwer 2h ago

Cian O’Donnell 3h ago

"The writing is getting better. The ideas are getting worse."

Great post on the impact of GenAI on students' ability to learn how to write and therefore how to think

https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-death-of-the-student-essayand

The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition

One professor's reflections on the end of an era, as AI tools such as ChatGPT have murdered the student essay (RIP). Here's why that threatens the future of human cognition—and how to save ourselves.

The Garden of Forking Paths

Moritz Negwer 8h ago

Cormacs Coast 8h ago

A beautiful pair of Solitary Rugose Coral fossils.
Eroded into perfect cross-sections, you can see their internal structures.
County Donegal, Ireland.

Cormacscoast.com walking tours

#wildatlanticway #walkingtours #discoverireland #keepdiscovering #fossil #irishfossils #coral #rugosecoral #Ireland

Moritz Negwer 10h ago

Ulrike Hahn 1d ago

It’s live: The Anti-Autocracy Handbook- The Scholars’ Guide to Navigating Democratic Backsliding. The need for this is self-evident given current events around the world and in particular in the U.S. The team of authors includes experts from relevant fields and several authors with first-hand experience of living under autocracy.

a pdf of the handbook is freely available for download at the short link https://sks.to/autocracy and there is an associated Wiki that will continue to be expanded and updated.

Please share!

The Anti-Autocracy Handbook: A Scholars' Guide to Navigating Democratic Backsliding

The Anti-Autocracy Handbook is a call to action, resilience, and collective defence of democracy, truth, and academic freedom in the face of mounting authoritarianism. It tries to provide guidance to scholars navigating the growing global trend of democratic backsliding and autocratization, in particular in the U.S. To this end, it sets out how autocracies often follow a common playbook, built around the “3 Ps”: populism, polarization, and post-truth. Leaders present themselves as voices of “the people” against “corrupt elites”, inflame societal divisions, and undermine facts to avoid accountability. This leads to a cascade of dangers for scholarship, including censorship, restrictions on funding and research collaboration, and even violence. The Trump administration serves as a contemporary example, with policies that curtail international scientific cooperation, revoke research grants, and suppress studies related to public health, climate change and minority issues. Because open inquiry and dissent are central to science and academia—qualities antithetical to authoritarian control—academia is often among the first targets of autocrats. To help scholars resist authoritarian developments, the handbook highlights both historic and contemporary measures aimed at attacking scholars, their institutional environments, and their scholarship. The handbook also sets out a framework for action based on personal risk level—low, medium, high, or extreme. This is designed to help scholars think about their own risk and purposefully choose actions in line with it. The handbook considers tools for enhancing digital safety and highlights the importance of ongoing documentation, preserving imperilled data, and creating distributed archives as a defence against erasure. It also calls on scholars to tell their stories—publicly or anonymously—to inspire others, maintain accountability and preserve a historical record. Accompanying the handbook is a living wiki that will continue to incorporate new developments and provide updates on global efforts by scholars to push back against authoritarianism and safeguard the democratic foundations that enable free inquiry.

Zenodo

Moritz Negwer 11h ago

Caspar C. Mierau 22h ago

Heute war ein Schulfest. Da gab es einen Quizstand. Eins underer Kinder (9) wollte schummeln, kam zu mir und bat, ob ich "schnell bei ChatGPT" nachfragen könne nach der Frage, ob die Legislative in den USA im Weißen Haus oder im Capitol sitze. Danach folgten weitere solcher Fragen. (Edit: Das Quiz warn nicht für 9jährige, sondern einfach ein Stand auf dem Hof, wo vor allem größere Kinder waren, aber kleinere Kinder turnten da rum und wollten auch mitmachen).

Wir haben später nochmal über diese Situation gesprochen. Ich habe gefragt, warum es nach ChatGPT gefragt hat. Die Erklärung war, dass der Lehrer bei einer Frage vorher mit den Kindern die Lösung mit Google und ChatGPT "gesucht" habe und nur ChatGPT hat sie richtig gewusst.

Kleine Anekdote, aber da steckt viel drin. Ich habe nochmal erklärt, was eine Suche mit Google eigentlich ist und das Google keine Antworten liefert bzw. eigentlich liefern sollte und dass sie eventuell ein Versuch einer KI gesehen haben, die dafür bekannt ist, besonders schlecht zu sein. Aber auch, dass ChatGPT gar keine Wissensdatenbank ist und halluzinieren kann. Das Kind war stark irritiert davon, weil im Sprachalltag von Kinder, Schule, Medien ChatGPT quasi als Superpower imaginiert wird und überhaupt nicht klar ist, dass ChatGPT nicht dafür da ist, um Wissensfragen zu beantworten.

Wir konnten das jetzt klären, aber sonst wird das wohl nicht geklärt. Das macht mich nicht besonders glücklich. Ich habe in den letzten Jahren nun schon mehrfach kurze Medienunterrichtseinheiten an den Schulen der Kinder zu Computer-nahen Themen gemacht. Aber das ist eben nur ein Tropfen auf den heißen Stein. Das läuft wirklich extrem schief gerade. Und hier ist auch nochmal eine Alterslinie erkennbar: Je jünger die Kinder, desto selbstverständlicher sind für sie LLMs in der Lebensumgebung, während die älteren Kinder sie als "neu" auch eher skeptisch betrachten.

Moritz Negwer 18h ago

𝚃𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚜 𝙶𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚎 🚇1d ago

"A cyclist can go 3 or 4 times faster than a pedestrian, but uses 5 times less energy. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match metabolic energy to impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips efficiency of not only all machines, but all other animals as well."
—Ivan Illich, 1974.

Moritz Negwer 20h ago

Datagraver.com 21h ago

Grafieken over verkoop en gebruik antibiotica in veesector NL in case toegevoegd aan site.
https://datagraver.com/antibiotica-voor-veesector/

Antibiotica voor veesector

Jaarlijks rapporteert de Autoriteit Diergeneesmiddelen over de verkoop en het gebruik vn antibiotica voor de veesector. In 2009 heeft de Tweede Kamer, na jarenlange stijging van gebruik, bepaald dat voor 2015 een significante verlaging noodzakelijk was. Dat doel is in dat jaar net gehaald. Hier de ontwikkeling eerst in verkochte hoeveelheid en daarna in gebruik...

Datagraver

Moritz Negwer 22h ago

Show thread

Melissa Santos 1d ago

reminder that I have 20+ years of data experience and I'm looking for some kind of Data Scientist/Analyst/Analytics Engineering gig, remote in the US (I'm in Portland, OR)

I would like to be doing something that makes the world a bit better, and every one has data, so it seems like that should be possible.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/amsantos/

Reboosts and links to job posts are most welcome!

#GetFediHired

Moritz Negwer 22h ago

Jalal Khawaldeh 22h ago

fMRI unifies categorical/dimensional visual cortex views. Face/body/scene areas encode multi-dimensions, tuning to sub/cross-category features, with local clusters & sparse distribution, suggesting multidimensional tuning key. #Neuroscience www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org/content/10.110...

Moritz Negwer 23h ago

The Carpentries 1d ago

ICYMI: In September 2024, The Carpentries submitted a proposal for 1.5 million USD to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) Program, and were extremely pleased to learn that the proposal was recommended for funding.

However, we have had to rescind our proposal because it was flagged for DEI content, namely, for “the retention of underrepresented students, which has a limitation or preference in outreach, recruitment, participation that is not aligned to NSF priorities.”

Since we are no longer in the running for this funding, we are actively seeking donors and a cohort of funders who align with our mission and core values and want to support our work.

Find out in this blog post announcement how you can help us by making a recurring donation, or reaching out to potential donors on our behalf, or connecting us with potential donors and program officers, or collaborating with us to apply for grants, and many other ways you can support our mission: https://carpentries.org/blog/2025/06/announcing-withdrawal-of-nsf-pose-proposal/

Announcing Withdrawal of NSF Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems Proposal

In September 2024, The Carpentries submitted a proposal to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) Program. This project would position The Carpentries as a leading open source ecosystem and further solidify our independence as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation. Developing a proposal of this magnitude (1.5 million USD) involved a significant amount of preparation, from conceptualisation of the idea to navigating the complex submission process. It was the first time The Carpentries did it on our own, with our Associate Director, Erin Becker, leading as principal investigator.

The Carpentries