Arindam Basu

Urgent mediation to save the Indus Waters Treaty could be a route to de-escalation between India and Pakistan Tensions over water have contributed to the outbreak of hostilities, but potential mediation by the World Bank could provide an important chance for engagement.

The Indus Waters Treaty was considered an exemplar of resource diplomacy. Its suspension can only fuel tensions between India and Pakistan.

in case you're wondering how things are going with the India-Pakistan negotiation they are currently calling narender modi "surrender modi" in India

Unpardonable!

India has reportedly the world’s highest road fatality rate. This is an example of a sidewalk encroached by shops and see the state of junction between sidewalk and street. People are forced to walk on the road.

Why India's roads are among the world's deadliest India's roads claimed over 172,000 lives in 2023 - averaging 474 deaths daily, or one every three minutes.

www.bbc.com/news/article...
The figures are underreported. Pedestrians are forced to walk on the roads because the footpaths/sidewalks are so badly designed and uneven that you cannot walk on them or are narrow or encroached by shops. It’s not that people do not care.

Comparable to what happened in Kolkata (Calcutta). An incompetent administration destroyed a vibrant, safe, economic, zero-polluting electric tram network in the city. There was even a collaboration with Melbourne on sustaining trams which, I believe, is now dead.

Apple Wallet as seen in the wild in India

Wow!!

Be warned.

A hybrid model combining environmental analysis and machine learning for predicting AI education quality This section of the article proposes strategies to address the challenges about applications of AI in universities, attempting to tackle them from two different perspectives. Initially, by employing a macro-environment segmentation method, corrective actions and their impacts on the management...

A hybrid model combining environmental analysis and machine learning for predicting AI education quality
->Nature | #Environment #AI #MachineLearning | More info from EcoSearch

This paper argues that we are not just social epistemic creatures because we operate in social contexts. We are social epistemic creatures because of the nature of our epistemic cognitive capacities. In The Enigma of Reason, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber develop and defend the view that reasoning is a social competence that yields epistemic benefits for individuals through social interaction with others. I argue an epistemological consequence of their position is that, when beliefs are formed and sustained by dialogical deliberation, the relevant justification-conferring process doesn’t occur solely within the cognition of the subject whose belief is under evaluation. Rather, it extends to include her interactive engagement with other deliberative participants. I argue this demonstrates that not all justification-conferring is evidential. As such, the analysis not only supports reconceiving the process reliabilist’s notion of justification-conferring processes; it also serves as an argument against evidentialism. A goal of this paper is to demonstrate that social epistemology isn’t merely a siloed offshoot of traditional epistemology. Even when approaching social epistemology using a conservative methodology, our investigation has serious implications for fundamental questions concerning epistemic normativity.

O’Rourke-Friel (2025). Social epistemology for individuals like us. Episteme.

Open Access: doi.org/10.1017/epi....

Europe wants to ready its citizens for war. Will they listen? | CNN Survival guides, stockpiling and mass evacuation drills. Europe is scrambling to prepare its citizens for the growing threat of conflict arriving on its doorstep.

Several European nations have been offering sobering guidance in recent months – envisioning garages and subway stations transformed into bunkers and promoting psychological resilience

Oh dear!

This would be so for all of us New Zealanders even if there was no tariff for many items and whenever possible or practical. Shopping local, in-season helps everyone

Two for the price of one there.

Off to The Hague.

This is a Trump/Thiel/Musk ally.

This is bad.
Be clear-eyed, scientists. We can fight and win but we have to be clear-eyed about the actual threats.

Guys, you got to read this.
#medsky

People who need to read this article are not on bsky …

The essay is TLDR; stuff but does address the issues around correlation is not causation. Causality is a lot more complex issue.

Words to the wise.

#NZpol Just a reminder that submissions for the second phase of the COVID-19 Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19 Lessons Learned are due in a month, April 27th.

haveyoursay.covid19lessons.royalcommission.nz

How a Cup of Tea Laid the Foundations for Modern Statistical Analysis Scientific experiments run today are based on research practices that evolved out of a British tea-tasting experiment in the 1920s.

🧪 Modern statistical analysis for science started from a debate over British tea, and the order of adding milk: milk before tea, or milk after tea. ☕️

Think about it!

There you go!

Iconic cartoon with people looking at a long list of public benefits connected with climate action, asking “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”

15+ years old, but still VERY relevent — and if we had acted 15 years ago, the “better world” we’d be creating would be a LOT better & easier to reach. There are real consequences we’re just starting to see to not heeding this cartoon a lot sooner. Even worse if we don’t heed it now. #ClimateCrisis

“A constant theme across historic pandemics and epidemics is inequity … heaviest burden … falls on populations with … least resources ... Future pandemic plans must minimize limiting assumptions about the nature of potential pandemic threats, … addressing structural inequities ..”
#medsky

They still hold elections in places like Russia and Turkey. In fact, Erdogan just threw his main opponent in jail this week. We’ll get to vote. But it’ll be for guys like Chuck Schumer who pose no threat to Trump when things get dicey.

Today I lost an NIH grant training clinicians to do research about intimate partner violence with perinatal women.

More women are murdered in the perinatal period than die of obstetric complications.

I didn't just lose a grant. We lost an entire cohort of people building careers to prevent that.