Luis M. Rocha @lmrocha@social.cleverlibre.org

PhD Students from any field --- are you interested in understanding the nature of intelligence across disciplines?

Apply to join us this summer in Cambridge UK for the SFI's two-week international summer school on *Intelligence & Representation*.

https://santafe.edu/engage/learn/programs/complexity-gains-international-summer-school

My newest column for @QuantaMagazine:

What Does It Mean to Align AI With Human Values?

https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-does-it-mean-to-align-ai-with-human-values-20221213?swcfpc=1

Paper on excess mortality associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. “We estimate 14.83 million excess deaths globally, 2.74 times more deaths than the 5.42 million reported as due to COVID-19 for the period” 2020-2021

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05522-2
https://github.com/dkobak/excess-mortality

This is a tremendous piece of work by Nick Florko at #StatNews. Thousands of people are dying every year from #HCV--a curable viral illness--in American #prisons.

#publichealth
https://www.statnews.com/2022/12/15/hundreds-incarcerated-people-dying-hepatitis-c-despite-simple-cure/

For reasons I can't fathom, Internet Archive Scholar got attention today, a mass of it, painting it as a "new" service. Actually, it has been out there for about a year. BUT....

If beautifully structured access to academic citations by the millions is your bag or desperately needed tool, especially ones that are ONLY left in the Wayback Machine, you are in LUCK. And this will be your favorite day. Try it.

https://scholar.archive.org/

The leader of the Republican Party and the owner of Twitter have both spent the past week or so nodding to, winking at, or outright promoting QAnon and Pizzagate.

It's hard for me to describe to you how dangerous, how crazy, how unprecedented, this all is.

America, 2022.

Big day for vaccines? HUGE day for vaccines. https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/moderna-merck-vaccine-combo-cut-melanoma-recurrence-by-44-study-2022-12-13/

New paper out:
A two-phase model of collective memory decay with a dynamical switching point
(with @ZeroSano)
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-25840-9

Excellent visualization. This is a comparison of the speeds of rotation of the planets of the solar system and their axes of rotation in real time!

New preprint! More central nodes in online social media detect early contagious outbreaks offline. We use the "friendship paradox" online to identify people who talk earlier about flu symptoms and build early warnings of ILI outbreaks.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.15.22282355v2

@yisraeldov @freemo @louis Rather than being premature optimization, this is late in coming. You might not be aware of this, but in the absence of a central authority, self-moderating instances have joined together to build domain blocklists that are shared widely and based on nothing more than the say-so of one or two people.

While mastodon does have plenty of tools we can use to block content that we don't want to see, many instance admins choose to really aggressively block entire instances without any due process or evidence or opportunity for counter-evidence. I've seen QOTO described as having "no moderation at all," something I know to be factually false. I've seen entire instances blocked because of the actions of one non-admin user, which is the right of any server admin, but doesn't bode well for federation. I've seen entire instances blocked *not* because of something anyone said or did, but because the instances were insufficiently aggressive in promising to seek out and block other bad instances. It's mind-boggling, and scary for anyone thinking about running an instance of their own.

Primarily at this point, the UFoI is about a guarantee of due process, which is currently lacking in the fediverse. It might not cause the super-aggressive blockers to change their approach, but it will at least guarantee that smaller instances won't be completely isolated from everyone on the whim of someone at a big server having a grumpy day.

If mastodon were as safe and friendly as you say it is, the UFoI wouldn't exist, and the hashtag for BlackMastodon wouldn't be filled with people saying that they're seeing worse treatment on Mastodon than the bird site. I'm glad your personal experience has been positive, but that is not the case for everyone.