Shan Kothari
@shankothari.bsky.social
Assistant professor at University of Alberta. Forest ecology + tree physiology. he/il
🌳 Do you want to contribute to research on how humans perceive forests? Take this quick, anonymous 10-min survey 🌲 👉 www.biodiful.org#/forest This will help us explore how people experience forest biodiversity! Please share on 🦋 & tag @biodiful.bsky.social to reach more participants 🙏💚 🌐🌍🦤🦑🪴🍁🧪
This is one of the most core war crimes available.
#Diversity affects #microclimate #temperature and humidity: an overview of the evidence and major unanswered questions #TansleyInsight by Alexandra J. Wright, J. English, and C. Guimaraes-Steinicke 📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Good news everyone! You can now analyze your own posts for semantic novelty from the famous Sichu post, ‘analyze the semantic novelty’ mino.mobi/novelty The consequences of my most offbrand post wondering how to relate to people are left to the reader for evaluation
Sichu Lu@sichulu.bsky.social · 5mo ago
Americans: we live in a fallen state—embroiled by sin, cheating, lying, and evil. You cannot trust anyone, not even those who claim to know you best Canadians: I love my neighbors and my friends!
The FCC just opened public comments on SpaceX's plan to launch a million satellites to do AI compute in space. Under the current proposal, an environmental review won't be required. Please consider submitting a public comment to oppose this damaging plan. darksky.org/news/two-sat...
Satellite proposals threaten the night sky
In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency responsible for authorizing satellite launches and operations…
darksky.org
Show me the coolest thing you own. Whether it’s art or a leaf that you found neat, I want to see it!
The phrase “preemptive strike” is as insulting as when we were sold “humanitarian pauses” in the middle of a live-streamed genocide. The powerful looking you straight in the face and telling you your common sense simply doesn’t matter.
what a crazy night for sam altman to be like "yeah we got that dept of war deal, and there's no moral concerns here"
They were going to pass rules to phase out gas stoves, until they received 20,000 public comments against the regulations. Except, oops, it turns out the comments were generated by AI.
Southern California air board rejected pollution rules after AI-generated flood of comments
The opposition appeared overwhelming: Tens of thousands of emails poured into Southern California's top air pollution authority as its board weighed a June proposal to phase out gas-powered appliances...
phys.org
Was on this one but it is my favorite as I learned a ton, got to think about Silverswords and traits as well as had a chance to collaborate with Baldwin and Robichaux besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Variation and macroevolution in leaf functional traits in the Hawaiian silversword alliance (Asteraceae)
The Hawaiian silversword alliance includes 33 species in three endemic genera (Argyroxiphium, Dubautia, and Wilkesia) that occupy almost all major habitats of the Hawaiian archipelago (top row). We s...
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
ecology and evolution folks! what are your favorite recent-ish, accessible papers on trait evolution?
AI makes continuous reproducibility and robustness testing trivial. What happens to science under new levels of scrutiny and stress-testing by default? Some thoughts on how this could play out, informed by watching open science play out over the last decade.
Living the metascience dream (or nightmare) with AI for science
What happens when we go from replication crisis to robustness extremes?
open.substack.com
LLMs make statistical metascience easier. LLMs don't increase the validity of statistical metascience. www.argmin.net/p/devezers-urn
Devezer's Urn
LLMs make metascience easier, but that doesn't increase metascientific validity.
argmin.net
NEW POST: Danielle Smith is no separatist; she's much, much worse emmettmacfarlane.substack.com/p/danielle-s...
Danielle Smith is no separatist; she's much, much worse
In a televised address last night Danielle Smith launched a xenophobic assault on immigration and proposed a set of referendum questions for next Fall advocating a constitutional agenda that would red...
emmettmacfarlane.substack.com
None of Smith's referendum questions are likely to result in actual policy change. Because they require constitutional amendments (federal veto) or are plainly unconstitutional. Assuming "yes" votes carry, what then? Kenney's equalization referendum didn't soothe separatists. It emboldened them.
Smith kicked off the sovereignty referendum campaign tonight. The fight for the future of Alberta starts now.
A lot of AI rollouts assume that humans or other AIs won't interact adversarially with the product, when "any system deployed in the real world with real stakes will eventually get attacked" is one of the few real constants in life
Faine Greenwood@faineg.bsky.social · 6mo agoit is stunningly easy to manipulate LLM chatbots into saying whatever you want - i noticed this the other day when LLMs I was experimenting with pretty instantly started regurgitating my own Bluesky post, almost as soon as I'd made it, identifying the sourcing of an image.
More from the University of Alberta today. Faculty & students are fighting back against repeated capitulations of senior administrators to blackmail and threats from the UCP government. Read this powerful statement from the Indigenous Graduate Students Association. www.facebook.com/share/p/1EPk...
Let me explain why I think these are interesting to look at. There are two dominant perspectives on LLMs: Boosters and Haters. They are both wrong. Boosterism says this kind of thing is of the past and simply doesn’t happen if you’re using the latest SOTA model on super smart mode. That’s wrong.
Meta's plan for launching glasses that people can use to secretly identify strangers on the street is to do it "during a dynamic political environment" when people who care about why that's bad are "focused on other concerns." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...
Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition Technology to Its Smart Glasses
nytimes.com
"... the trees are innumerable / Marumbi, taraṭī, and hivara / hiṅgaṇa, pācunda, and bābara / ṭākaḷī, and vehaṅkaḷī are abundant... Such is this thorny forest / it is highly frightening / this forest is empty / peacocks scream here" besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Utilizing traditional literature to triangulate the ecological history of a tropical savanna
Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
obviously I would prefer that my employer not be defunded, but reading someone say "show some courage, would you please?" to Bill Flanagan is cathartic
Amir Attaran@amirattaran.bsky.social · 6mo agoI've been saddened today to learn that the University of Alberta is going down MAGA road and wants to abolish Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. So I've written to University President Bill Flanagan, warning him of the legal risks. Because the University may need suing.
Not long before seeing this tweet, I asked Gemini 3 (thinking) whether Hausfather & Peters (2020)'s argument was widely accepted or contested. It said the former, citing (among other sources) the American Enterprise Institute. This sort of thing is imo much more of a danger than "hallucination"
Madison Condon@madisoncondon.bsky.social · 6mo agoincredibly frustrating how RCP 8.5 is controversial has been burned into the brains of everyone including climate reporters
FYI Americans: if you had Canadian grandparents/parents: you may be Canadian
LAPD kills man allegedly holding gun near California Science Center, officials say
LAPD kills man allegedly holding gun near California Science Center, officials say
Los Angeles police shot a man after receiving reports of someone with a firearm in the parking lot of the California Science Center in Exposition Park on Thursday morning. Fire officials said the man was pronounced dead at the scene.
latimes.com
