This from Data Colada, about detecting U-shapes with quadratic regression, is extremely good. (Happens to be about AI, but that's not important to anything argued). Nice intuitive explanations of why quadratic regression may not be doing quite what you think it's doing. datacolada.org/131 1/2

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

Peeps, I'll be on CBC radio's "All In A Day" tonight at 5:pm to talk about the current flu season.

"which, according to the notice, could add an extra hurdle for travelers." 'Could' COULD???

By focussing on charismatic large fauna rather than restoring ecosystem functions, there is the danger that some rewilding projects are less about radical processed-based conservation and instead are a reinvention of species-centric approaches www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Diderma sp slime mold. Northwest Territories, Canada. #slime #myxo #fungifriends while #hiking

Deere sales are down as the farmers feel the pain of Trump's tariffs and stop buying new machines. This kind of pattern of the big companies seeing sales drop in agricultural bust times is longstanding and often leads to pressures from shareholders for consolidation. www.ft.com/content/523a...

Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.

"America has blown 80 years of accumulated goodwill and trust among its allies, our American moderator was told."

I wish @tomlevenson.bsky.social was wrong. He's not.

Love it. Can be paired with other odd words, e.g. I need an exipotic to rid myself of this turducken of evil

I suspected this and here is the evidence

Holy CRAP. Retired engineer takes random pics of *kids*, without consent or attribution, bins them into “autistic” or “not autistic”, and uploads that “data” for free on Kaggle. Well over a HUNDRED papers are published, 38 in Springer Nature, 25 in IEEE, using it. And no reviewers objected? WTF.🧪

Really happy to share that the Second Edition of our book, "Spatial Ecology and Conservation Modeling", is now out and available online! We provide a foundation for applied spatial ecology with a focus on learning-by-doing. @camzoology.bsky.social @conservation.cam.ac.uk

It appears that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has, within the past week, scrubbed a large amount of climate change content from its official website, as well as *removed human-caused warming* from the discussion on its "causes of climate change" page.

What are the perils vs possibilities in working with business & finance to achieve nature recovery? Come to our workshop next week (Tuesday, 13:15) at #BES2025 to explore these issues & share your thoughts @britishecologicalsociety.org @bes-cascade.bsky.social

Why the “immunity debt” narrative ultimately collapsed: Over the past few months, the conversation has moved toward the conclusion the evidence has been pointing to for years. Since 2022, immunity debt offered an easy explanation for the unusual patterns of illness we kept seeing. 1/7

I wish a notice like this wasn't necessary. www.icrc.org/en/article/i...

From one of the many excellent epigrams cited by @dougaldlamont.bsky.social below: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

We're half a decade into studies finding that improving airflow in classrooms will reduce disease transmission enormously, and that bleaching surfaces etc. does very little. And yet nothing changes. Waves of flu and colds wash over schools, and the schools pretend it's an act of God.

Green Catbirds are members of the bowerbird clade. They were going off on call and response this morning in Royal National Park. #birds #birding #nature #naturelovers

What Doesn't Kill You Mutates And Tries Again. #COVIDisNotOver #COVIDisAirborne #CleanAir #MaskUp😷

A study on 1.7 million people in Hong Kong shows superior hybrid immunity to Covid in people who got vaccinated before infection vs. people who got infected first. "Our findings are a direct rebuttal to arguments for natural immunity," the authors write. doi.org/10.1016/j.va...

Energy as technology vs. Energy as a commodity This. Right here. Where Alberta gets it completely wrong. Wind/solar/batteries (tech) are FUNDAMENTALLY different than oil/gas (commodities). This video explains why and why it matters. #abpoli #cdnpoli youtu.be/OATk15pvd7Y

We went down to the San Clemente pier a few days ago to collect mussels & barnacles for experiments. Because virtually all natural hard substrate in Orange County is protected, when possible, we get critters from “built” habitats. I noticed a couple of cool things there. (1/x) #MarineLife 🌊🦑

Don always gets it. One assumes that the public has no idea what happens to, well, everything with a partisan used-to-be-professional government workforce. The strategy works: a few people here and there are harmed or die from it but not enough in a population near 400 million for people to notice

"...the department head for medicine was shaking his head in disbelief at having to state the obvious: “Why is it that every year, just like snow in winter, we know flu is coming, and yet every year flu catches us by surprise?” The room fell silent."

Still very much a beta, but I made an #rstats package to help faculty and others more easily get data to engage in discussions on closing departments, etc. It's at bomeara.github.io/sharedgovern... Issues, pull requests, etc. gladly accepted. Uses IPEDS and college scorecard data.

HEY! YOU! ggdibbler 0.6.1 is finally up on CRAN! harriet-mason.github.io/ggdibbler/in... You can now pass random variables to any aesthetic in any ggplot geom/stat. If you can express it as a distribution, ggdibbler can plot it. It also works with ggplot extensions, like gganimate. #rstats

This is immoral. "3-year-old child forced to serve as her own attorney in Tucson immigration court. More than a dozen undocumented minors were forced to serve as their own attorneys in front of an immigration judge as the Trump admin. ramps up removal proceedings." coppercourier.com/2025/12/05/c...

Solar panel areas can be designed to be better for bird diversity than cropland: Ecovoltaic solar energy development can promote grassland bird communities besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... #solarpanels #birds #energy #greenenergy #jernmarker

Geneviève Bergeron, 21 Hélène Colgan, 23 Nathalie Croteau, 23 Barbara Daigneault, 22 Anne-Marie Edward, 21 Maud Haviernick, 29 Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz, 31 Maryse Laganière, 25 Maryse Leclair, 23 Anne-Marie Lemay, 22 Sonia Pelletier, 28 Michèle Richard, 21 Annie St-Arneault, 23 Annie Turcotte, 20

“School officials have created a Microsoft Copilot prompt to review course descriptions with an eye toward avoiding ‘advocacy-oriented or prescriptive terms.’” Terms: “dismantling, decolonizing, interrogating, challenging, centering, combating, liberation, resistance, activism, justice oriented”

Inject this quote from @hypervisible.blacksky.app straight into my veins (it references the bullshit Texas university use of copilot to hunt for offensive words like 'justice')

Also: "It’s classic neoliberal jiu-jitsu: reframe the erosion of institutional norms as a character-building opportunity. Yeah, like a drug dealer lecturing about personal responsibility while handing out free samples."

1/ "Welcome to the brave new world of parasocial machine bonding—sponsored by the campus center for teaching excellence. The moment was absurd but revealing; the university wasn’t resisting bullshit education, it was onboarding it."

I finally got around to reading this. You should read it too. "We are exporting the very labor of teaching and learning—the slow work of wrestling with ideas, the enduring of discomfort, doubt and confusion, the struggle of finding one’s own voice." www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

As always, great, clear, evidence-filled discussions of vaccine science and policy from @pauloffit.bsky.social here. (And now I know why the producers chatted with me about this and then ghosted me — the right choice by a mile!) www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uUR...

I’m recruiting a PhD and MSC student for fall 2026 working on the movement ecology and conservation of Mexican spotted owls in SW forests and rocky canyonlands. Exciting partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory. Great vibrant lab group, high impact research! 🦉 gavinmjones.com/opportunities/

…and to rehabilitate Russia. I put together this free piece--and the points are striking. This part of the long con is over. Here are the main US positions.

If you want to help, you can share our story, check out our work at viralemergence.org, and - if you're the one in a million person who can save our project - reach out. (At this point, my job is to fundraise for the amazing scientists I work with, so they can focus on doing some actual science! 🦠)

Death by starvation is turning out to be at least as bad as death by firing squad. Because we have no termination notice, everyone is struggling to apply for bridge funding, and no one is stepping in to save our work, because our project "still exists" even as our labs' bank accounts hit zero. /5

If anyone cares at all, EV battery recycling is now hitting 99% recovery for important metals Please remind me again what the recycle rate for fossil fuels is interestingengineering.com/energy/recyc...

How can we monitor biodiversity on a budget? In this article, Moore et al discuss optimizing camera trap selection in a biodiversity hotspot.🌿 Find their #openaccess article at doi.org/10.1111/csp2... #conservation #biodiversity #science

How social–ecological #networks can improve our understanding and management of #biologicalinvasions – new paper by Fiona Rickowski et al. now published in #BioScience doi.org/10.1093/bios... #InvasiveSpecies #nonnative #pests #conservation #alienspecies

We had a wonderful evening yesterday hosting our annual Schneider Award celebration with this year's winner, @globalecoguy.bsky.social Missed it? The episode drops next week! Make sure you never miss a Climate One event by signing up for our newsletter: www.climateone.org/listen-watch...