Notices by Michael Szell (mszll@datasci.social)

As many people here I'm looking to switch from Gmail, github, etc to more reliable non-US tech/services. I like https://european-alternatives.eu/, but EU countries/companies are not necessarily stable either. So, is there a list that ranks services by *resilience*, like to: govt change, billionaire capture, ddos attacks, new laws, bankruptcy,..? Thx!

Every country has its problems. Here in Denmark, we have too many cyclists causing congestion. Tackling this issue, we published in Interface our study on cohesive urban bicycle infrastructure design through optimal transport routing: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2024.0532

Concerning our stance on threads.net, we had a "wait and see" approach until now at datasci.social: https://community.datasci.social/blog/2023-12-17/our-stance-on-threads/

However, their moderation policies have become clearly inadequate and incompatible: https://www.wired.com/story/meta-immigration-gender-policies-change/

Therefore, we plan to suspend threads.net from Jan 20th. #serverinfo #mastoadmin #meta

PS this article gives some context: https://slate.com/technology/2022/05/elon-musk-wikipedia-page.html
Billionaires don't like #wikipedia because they can't control it.

According to certain billionaires, you should not donate to #wikipedia, which you could do here: https://donate.wikimedia.org/
Merry 🎄!

📢 New preprint: #network analysis of the #danish #Bicycle infrastructure 🚲🕸️ -Yes, a *whole country's* bike network analyzed, led by @ane. See the 37-page paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06083

Main results: Good bikeability in cities, some regional connectivity, but high stress in most rural areas #dktrp

Our mastodon server https://datasci.social is 2 years old! 🎂🥳

We are one of the most reliable servers with >99.99% uptime in 2024. Sign-ups are open - for everybody working or interested in #datascience.

Full news: https://community.datasci.social/blog/2024-11-15/two-years-old/

Nice, our #Geospatial Data Science 🌐 course materials reached 500 stars on Github! ⭐🤩
https://github.com/mszell/geospatialdatascience
We aim to update it yearly with new developments.

📢 New preprint: Urban highways are barriers to social ties: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11596

We overlay the highway network with a massive, geolocated online social network (Twitter 2012), and measure how social ties are impacted by highway segments. We find a strong barrier effect in all 50 considered US cities. See below - the red squares show that this effect is stronger for short distances.

@TheWarOnCars #geospatial #urbanism #segregation #datascience

I just created this plot, inspired by the great new paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692324000267
cc @TheWarOnCars #JustStreets

How Much of the World Is It Possible to Model? (by Dan Rockmore)
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/how-much-of-the-world-is-it-possible-to-model

After 1+ year of being #mastoAdmin, the one thing that would boost onboarding/retention of new members the most is an automated welcome message to every account right after sign-up, containing a short "get started" list like this: https://fedi.tips/
If this was a feature, it should actually be turned on by default on new servers - that would help so much.

Given it is not (yet?) a feature of mastodon, has anybody tried to implement a bot for this? Or has tips for how one could build one?

@alex Also curious about the history. In any case, this is an interesting "infographic" that I show my students to make them aware of different concepts of "nothing" and "something"

To whom it may concern: Our stance on Threads: https://community.datasci.social/blog/2023-12-17/our-stance-on-threads/ #MastoAdmin
(thx to @tchambers for making this simpler)

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And now that this is out of the way, back to posting awesome research! 🧑🔬

Tough read on AI, war, and "collateral damage" (in the context of Gaza): https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/

@MastodonEngineering The perfect tongue twister (try to say it really fast)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/21/anger-is-most-powerful-emotion-by-far-for-spurring-climate-action-study-finds

Interesting points: “Rather than climate anxiety, we should be calling it politician anxiety or people anxiety, because it’s the people in power who are failing to do the right thing whilst lying to us, or doing the opposite”

“same as the narratives around child abuse. The very people who are supposed to protect you are the people who are hurting you. And not only are they hurting you, they’re telling you that they love you and they’re doing it for your own good.”

@rikefranke paging @TerribleMaps

🥳 We just published "BikeDNA: A tool for bicycle infrastructure data and network assessment" in EPB, introducing our new tool BikeDNA 🚲 🧬

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23998083231184471

BikeDNA is a :jupyter: :python: Python-based tool for assessing the quality of #OpenStreetMap and other bike infrastructure data sets in a reproducible way. It provides planners, researchers, data maintainers, cycling advocates, a detailed, informed overview of data quality in a given area.
https://github.com/anerv/BikeDNA

Spatially-optimized urban greening for reduction of population exposure to land surface temperature extremes

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38596-1.epdf?sharing_token=yxHupBGxVhtuER_RNxBs59RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0O1pGmA2LzoIMu6bBKTcd6cHVkaWZup4Y5ApWTYgJd3EHP68G-7l22TG4RQck1D5hnMk41o8GqHiueQ7G_adf0qXNNxAINW70-wf7EHkjycl6-p_kCiitpPfXajER-ejPc%3D