Gaythia Weis @Gaythia@social.cleverlibre.org

I was reading interviews of Katalin Karikó, who made key discoveries that led to the development of lifesaving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Her dedication in the midst of adversity struck me.

-She pushed on despite not having job security, NIH R01 research funding, or recognition.
-A chance stop in Mainz led to her joining BioNTech.
-And her daughter is a two-time Olympic gold medalist!

More talk of dedicated scientists, less talk of narcissistic businessmen please.

(interviews in PNAS and JCI)

*Sheepish request* I'm new to Mastodon, but a lot of my former Twitter followers don't know I'm here yet. Someone suggested I could simply ask you fine people to boost me. Would you be so kind? (I promise to post a photo of my dog to say thanks). #WelcomeToMastodon

New and established users alike:

Alt text on images is important for accessibility as we have lots of blind and partially sighted users here. Please consider adding it to your images, or asking for help from other people to write descriptions:

https://mastodon.art/@Curator/109279035107793247

A lot of the fediverse won't boost posts without image descriptions, including me.

Just a friendly reminder!

#TwitterMigration #TwitterExodus #fediverse #FediTips

My mastadon link at my pinned tweet on Twitter is now warning anyone who clicks on it that the sight may be “unsafe.”
You know what actually feels unsafe right now? Musk on Twitter.

Rosalind Franklin’s research was crucial to discovering DNA’s double helix structure 🧬 but it was James Watson & Francis Crick who received the credit & Nobel Prize.

Unknown to Franklin, the pair saw her unpublished data & X-ray diffraction images, inspiring their famous model. They never acknowledged her contribution until after her death.

How many discoveries & innovations of #women do we attribute to the men who took credit for their ideas?

https://theconversation.com/sexism-pushed-rosalind-franklin-toward-the-scientific-sidelines-during-her-short-life-but-her-work-still-shines-on-her-100th-birthday-139249 #history #science

@tony
The whole point was for an autocratic oligarch to demonstrate control over journalists at big orgs, so they — and their execs — will think twice about criticizing Musk in future.
And it seems to be working.

Ich habe allein seit gestern über 1000 Follower:innen auf #Mastodon dazugewonnen, auf #Twitter gut 200 verloren. Viele Menschen stimmen jetzt offenbar mit den Füßen oder besser per Mausklick über die Eskapaden von #Elonmusk ab.

I was thinking last night as a new wave of #TwitterRefugees came washing over the #fediverse about the many #climate and #political #refugees doing the same irl right now.
Will you take a moment with me today to think beyond computer screens, phone apps, etc to consider those who are actually undergoing #migration - fleeing unsafe conditions, giving up their homes and cultures in hopes of safety and a life worth living? #TwitterMigration is trending rn but human migrants need support too. 🙏 🤎

In June (2022) my team published research introducing a dataset of 100s of false, misleading, & unsubstantiated claims that sowed doubt in election 2020, and identified the most influential accounts in the spread of those claims. Folks on the right have called this a "watchlist" & blended it into some conspiracy theory about a "censorship cartel'. Nope. Just an analysis initiated by PhD students, using their freedom of speech to call out the lies that led to January 6: https://journalqd.org/article/view/3137

Fun fact: Ryan Mac, the NYT tech reporter who Elon suspended tonight is also the reporter who broke the news that Peter Thiel was secretly financing lawsuits (including Hulk Hogan's sex tape lawsuit) in order to destroy Gawker.

Why buy any digital NFT nonsense when you can actually see me live and on stage in London, from Jan-Apr next year?
For tickets: https://Allegiancemusical.com

Elon Musk's banning of journalists again shows that we need to update our understanding of his playbook. He's waging a form of right wing information warfare. The display of domination over journalistic enemies is the key thing here.

Free article on this idea for those without subscriptions:
https://wapo.st/3HBT74u

After sufficient lurking, here is my #introduction

I’m a #computational #cognitive #neuroscientist and asst. prof. at JHU Cog Sci studying social vision. Our lab uses a combination of human behavior, neuroimaging and computational modeling to understanding how humans can so effortlessly extract rich social information from the visual world around them.

Our recent work relies heavily on naturalistic neuroimaging and state of the art modeling (such as graph neural networks and disentangled representation learning). You can learn more/find papers on our website: isiklab.org

Aw yeah, you know what time it is, baby! Another #BlackFriday full of #BlackJoy all over #blackmastodon ! As always, shout outs to @BigAngBlack, @BlackAzizAnansi and them for getting me into this.

Humans can be fallible, violence prone, dangerous to themselves, other species and the world, true.
But humans can also cooperate, achieve amazing feats, and even save the planet from devastation.
I considered this when I heard that 70 years after the first use of atomic fusion, humans have achieved *ignition* at the Lawrence Livermore Lab. That means more energy was produced from a fusion reaction than was used to power it. We have a long way to go, but this is a huge milestone! #Hope #Fusion

Nearly all the progress the U.S. has made in treating #HepC in prisons has come because incarcerated people filed lawsuits against their jailers. When Phil Turney took on the Idaho Department of Corrections, he didn’t even have a computer. Watch: https://www.statnews.com/2022/12/15/typewriter-in-prison-overturns-idaho-hepatitis-c-policy

Just before the invasion, #Ukraine made a deal with #Amazon #AWS to create a data warehouse for its government information and infrastructure: tax and property records, bank statements, and the like. Things that an invaded and occupied Ukraine might lose if Russia got their hands on the only copies.

They literally snuck Pelican crates full of SSDs into the country and spirited them back offshore after backing up 10 petabytes of important historic and legal records.

This paragraph, second from the end, really put a fine point on why Amazon did this: They were not beholden to, nor being held hostage by, any Russian operations...because they never had any:

Amazon didn’t have to worry about its relationship with Russia on the Snowball project. It doesn’t have one. “We didn’t have anything to turn off there,” Maxwell said. “We had never invested there. It’s a point of principle.”

Truly an amazing story from the #LATimes.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-15/amazon-ukraine-war-cloud-data

Corporate profits only accounted for roughly 11% of price growth from 1979 to 2019.

Today, record corporate profits account for 53.9% of price increases.

Folks, corporate greed is driving inflation, not workers asking for better wages.