Matt Berkley

I just voted against proscribing Palestine Action, a civil disobedience group, as a terrorist organisation. But I'm furious that in doing so, the government forced me and others to vote against proscribing two other clearly terrorist groups. Cynical and dangerous from govt.

Rant alert. Mega rant alert. How about our leaders stop wringing hands, issuing feeble denunciations, and actually DO something? Stop the moral equivalency. Stop pretending we’re helpless. There’s plenty we could do if genuinely committed. Here’s some suggestions for starters. 🧵

X post by Amy Nixon (@texasrunnerDFW ), featuring a verification badge. The post reads, "The USA is weird now. If you're a person under 30, you probably think it's normal but that's because you don't know. Trust me. It's weird."

America hasn’t felt this upside down since I was a child in an internment camp.

Precise or definite-sounding climate predictions intended to alert people, obscuring the uncertainty, may paradoxically reassure people into doing less because they do not understand the real inadequacy of science to predict complex systems.

As with climate disturbance, uncertainty provides a good argument to take more action, not less.

Let's take a little time to consider what Trump and his allies may be doing behind the scenes, in the form for instance of instructions to agencies on surveillance.

Some ideas for people to consider:

Be like water.

Treat those who were conned, or who it seems may have been conned, with respect.

Don't get negative, get curious.

Avoid insults.

Bookkeepers of catastrophes: The overlooked role of reinsurers in climate change debates Global warming had long been discussed as an abstract matter of physics and chemistry. Only in the 1990s did the more tangible costs caused by natural…

"In part due to this statistics-driven view, reinsurers asserted that evermore frequent and damaging natural catastrophes are likely a consequence of man-made #climate change at an earlier stage than, for example, the IPCC, making them important translators of climate change knowledge"

The publisher Nature has promoted an article which recommends the unthinking use of AI to write peer reviews.

Is that a symptom of a lax attitude by too many publishers and/or reviewers towards peer review more widely?

If so, what can be done to improve the situation?

There may be new ways to communicate various disruptions that

a) changing temperatures

and

b) changing temperature differences between places

can cause for

i) atmosphere/weather

ii) aquatic environments

iii) underground environments

iv) natural processes eg migration, food chains.

Perhaps there are concepts which can usefully replace the idea of "climate" anyway, for some purposes.

To a large extent people are concerned about more-chaotic weather.

People may see the word "weather" and think of the situation and risks as less stable and predictable than "climate".

Let's talk of change to climates, plural.

It's more accurate. The Earth has many climates.

It may help people understand that the processes are complex, varied, and hard to understand or predict.

How long would your commute take in 1680? Mine would be about a day and a half.

@camunicampop.bsky.social has a brilliant tool for calculating travel times in Roman, 1680, 1830, 1911 and 2024. 🗃️
www.travelintimes.org/journey/52.2...

Important to note in all this is that a yuge factor is Zelenskyy’s refusal to be coerced by Trump to smear Biden in 2019 (& thus interfere in US pol & election).👇
There was an impeachment enquiry!

This is a classic Trump narcissistic-injury obsession…
…and we’re burning the world order bc of it.

The publisher Nature has promoted an article which recommends the unthinking use of AI to write peer reviews.

Is that a symptom of a lax attitude by too many publishers and/or reviewers towards peer review more widely?

If so, what can be done to improve the situation?

AP finds that a Pentagon-funded study on extremism in the military relied on old data Early this year, Pete Hegseth told a Fox News audience a new, Pentagon-funded study proved that the number of military service members and veterans involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection did not indicate...

AP has done some really good reporting on the issue of extremism in the military. The extent of extremism in the military is likely very low, but an unwillingness to examine the extent of the problem is troubling.

apnews.com/article/pent...

Filosoferen met Trump

Global biodiversity loss from outsourced deforestation - Nature An analysis of global deforestation linked to consumption of products in the supply chains of large economies finds greater losses for vertebrate species’ ranges outside these countries than in them.

Long overdue analysis to show how global supply chains stretch around the world to have a major impact on biodiversity in distant countries - those outsourcing resource needs are responsible for much greater cumulative range loss to species outside their own borders than within

A pretty useful recent summary of how little we know about the world's groundwater, how much we overuse it, and why we should really be paying attention.

Hey man sorry to hear about all your political turmoil. Would it help if I scrolled around on the computer all day and drove myself insane?

Elon Musk-Inspired U.S. Constitution 2025 | Shared Grok Conversation Please write a US Constitution based on the output from Elon Musk on social media, and another US Co

Six US constitutions produced by Grok on 25 February 2025 from prompts about Elon Musk and Donald Trump

grok.com/share/bGVnYW...

Another thing that people could be better informed on is why a specific part of the law/constitution/tradition being violated is dangerous for the readers/audence/others, including in the longer term.

I meant that it may be far better to report using such terms as "purportedly fired" than just "fired" - not that it's better to do that than to make the statement about illegality. "Real-time" reporting will continue even if we prefer more considered approaches.

I think we're both going in the same direction.

I agree in general, and news organisations should be getting input from lawyers to help journalists and editors.

Where there are breaking stories, it may I think be appropriate to say the writer isn't yet clear on legality.

Given that some illegal acts can be overturned in the courts, it may be far better for journalists and others to report that Trump/Musk/allies have "attempted" to do something or "purportedly" fired people, or use related language.

If you don't know whether something may be illegal, say that.

Another thing that people could be better informed on is why a specific part of the law/constitution/tradition being violated is dangerous for the readers/audence/others, including in the longer term.

Exclusive: These universities have the most retracted scientific articles A first-of-its-kind analysis by Nature reveals which institutions are retraction hotspots.

The moment that we operationalise "ratio of retracted papers" into a metric of suspicion - even if only informally, we put Goodhart's Law in reverse: We'd be disincentivising institutions to cast a serious gaze inward and we'd be casting entire nations and their scientists into risk categories

Agreed. Incentivising the wrong behaviour is already a risk if people look at, for example, Retraction Watch without also looking at other sources for possible problems in unretracted work (eg PubPeer) or seeing retractions in a proper context of what's known about common research defects.

Common statistical errors in systematic reviews: A tutorial The aim of this article is to present the most common statistical errors in meta-analyses included in systematic reviews; these are confusing standard deviation and standard error, using heterogeneit....

Statistical errors in meta-analyses can impact the reliability of systematic reviews. This new article highlights the most frequent mistakes and how to avoid them.

#SystematicReviews #MetaAnalysis #ResearchMethods #Statistics

Check this out from Cochrane: