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james stevenson

@jsstevenson.bsky.social
595 followers 903 following 595 posts

Bioinformatics and municipal politics. Radicalized by parenthood in Columbus, Ohio. Views ==(=) my own. jsstevenson.github.io

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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
Is a surge in tattoo removal shops a recession indicator?
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Nick @nicksattele.bsky.social · 05/04/2026
Still surprising to me that there’s no conversation happening right now about additional libraries at minimum in the SLU/Belltown/LQA area. The densest part of the city not in the walkshed of any library!
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Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
this is HILARIOUS therepublicjournal.com/essays/ai-an...
Ontology, a term popularized by Palantir, originally comes from philosophy: it is the traditional name for the branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature of being, existence, and reality. To define an ontology of something is to assert its fundamental structure.
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Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
Guest editors of special journal issues have been abusing their powers by publishing an excessive number of their own papers, according to a new study. This is "a blatant case of scientific misconduct" www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
Some guest editors pack special issues with their own articles
Thousands have penned more than one-third of a journal issue, raising conflict-of-interest concerns
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Ryan @r-aherin.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
Just a reminder that Esri proudly touts that they work with DHS, whose agents are currently doing door to door Nazi-style raids in Minnesota. Probably using ther software to support these operations www.esri.com/en-us/indust... #gischat
esri.com
GIS for Homeland Security | Geospatial Intelligence Informs Operations
ArcGIS software for homeland security is a complete mapping & analytics system. Improve national security with actionable, data-driven geospatial intelligence.
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Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 19/12/2025
I think this post nails the actual problem, for researchers at least—AI hallucinations would simply not be a problem in academic work if we’d not normalized citation-as-signaling rather than actual engagement—you can only cite a fake paper if you’re not in the habit of reading the papers you cite
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Waldo Jaquith @waldo.net · 08/12/2025
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.
nature.com
The relative contribution of close-proximity contacts, shared classroom exposure and indoor air quality to respiratory virus transmission in schools - Nature Communications
The relative importance of close-proximity interactions, shared space and air quality to the transmission of respiratory viruses is not well understood. Here, the authors investigate this question by ...
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Paul F. Tompkins @pftompkins.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
It is fun to go to the movies
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Kelsey Atherton @atherton.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
Every legal story now is either Ancient Circuit Judge Delivers Crystal Clear 100 Page Rebuke To Trumpist Overreach or In Unsigned Shadow Docket Decision, 6-3 Majority Declares Trump Can Hunt People For Sport
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
www.statnews.com/2025/12/05/r...
statnews.com
His lab was humming with discovery. After one year under Trump, it’s almost silent
John Quackenbush built a lab that is at the forefront of human genetics research and bioinformatics. Trump administration cuts have put it in danger of collapse.
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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
a civilized society cannot just let a platform like xshitter exist without heavy social sanctions
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
Sighing wearily as I install the Chik Fil A app on my phone
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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 30/11/2025
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
When are they gonna let John Wilson do a Criterion Closet episode?
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
First returns in Columbus, OH! - Contested city council race is going to be a nailbiter - Tax levies out to a comfortable lead - Southwestern BoE incumbents all behind - Things not looking great for Columbus BoE outsider candidate Mounir Lynch
Tiara Ross 52%
Jesse Vogel 48%Peterson, Alkire, Dillon 22% apiece
Boso, Feucht, Gocha 10-13%Miranda, Katzenmeyer, Kennedy 22-25%
Mounir Lynch 8%Issue 1 for 67-33
Issue 2 for 61-39
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Senator Meow @senatormeow.bsky.social · 07/10/2025
Hello, Meowlets! Early Voting for the 2025 General Election starts today. I'll be at 1700 Morse Rd to cast my Meowlot soon, and the BoE will be waiting for you 8am-5pm weekdays, with more details on their website. More details in the newsletter. See you there!
Senator Meow's Sample Meowlot - Columbus City Council: Jesse Vogel; Columbus City School Board: Antoinette Miranda, Mounir Lynch, Janeece Keyes; Upper Arlington City Council: Laura Oldham; Canal Winchester City Council: Hanna Detwiler; Grove City City Council: Joel Newby; South-Western City Schools Board: Camille Peterson, Chelsea Alkire, Kelly Dillon; visit senatormeow.substack.com for any missing races and explanations!Senator Meow's Sample Meowlot - Issue 1 (ADAMH Levy): Yes; Issue 2 (Zoo Levy): Yes; Issues 5-9 (Bond Issues): Yes; Issues 25-28 (Fairway Cliffs): No; yes to school bonds, Sunday sales, library levies, funding social services. Visit senatormeow.substack.com to read more about the issues.
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
the Green New Deal was pretty clearly doing “abundance”
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 07/08/2025
This is an astounding piece of work — the authors employ metadata signatures to suss out entire academic publishing fraud networks. A small subset of PLOS One editors, representing 1.3% of articles accepted for publication, accounted for 30.2% of retracted articles www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
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girl fieri @laureneahmed.bsky.social · 07/08/2025
“Folks say “I don’t like kids,” as casually as they’d say they prefer Pepsi to Coke. When people say things like “kids are okay, but I just don’t want them around me,” we don’t generally question that. I think we should.”
open.substack.com
Children's Spaces With No Children
Have we lost our very minds?
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 04/08/2025
Today I learned that “Frontiers of Computer Science” and “Frontiers in Computer Science” are two different journals, but maybe they’re actually kinda the same
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Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 19/07/2025
A classic in the genre (link to details www.peri.umass.edu/publication/...)
“In a paper, ‘Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,’ Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst criticise a 2010 paper by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, ‘Growth in a Time of Debt.’ They find three main issues: First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth. Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries. Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries. All three bias in favor of their result, and without them you don’t get their controversial result.”

At one point R&R set cell L51 equal to AVERAGE(L30:L44) when the correct procedure was AVERAGE(L30:L49). They left Denmark, Canada, Belgium, Austria, and Australia out of the average. When you fix the Excel error, a -0.1 percent growth rate turns into 0.2 percent growth. See the article for a picture of the error.
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Will Bunch @willbunch.bsky.social · 17/07/2025
Free the Spokane 9 Largely ignored in a small market, this week's federal indictment of 9 anti-ICE protesters in Washington state, including a former council president, shows how far the Trump regime will go to crush dissent This was always the plan. My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/ice-...
inquirer.com
The Trump regime is arresting protesters now. This was the plan all along | Will Bunch
Federal felony charges against nine ICE protesters in Spokane reveal how Trump's secret police are expanding their web.
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Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · 04/07/2025
America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home. Happy Independence Day. No Kings in America.
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
dudes rock www.axios.com/2025/06/14/f...
axios.com
Exclusive: More fathers are taking paid parental leave, new study finds
Dads and moms are coming close to parity in states with paid leave policies.
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Michael "Fallen Coffee Pot of Shadows" Senters the Sigillite:ABD @mikesenters.bsky.social · 22/06/2025
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Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 15/06/2025
Springer-Nature launched a series of "Discover" journals that closely mimic MDPI titles -- sharing *identical* journal names, and likely similar business model. What is going on, and why researcher will - as always - fall for it? A 🧵 the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io/website/post...
the-strain-on-scientific-publishing.github.io
Springer Nature Discovers MDPI – The Strain on Scientific Publishing
Home page for the paper ‘The Strain on Scientific Publishing’ by Mark A Hanson, Dan Brockington, Paolo Crosetto and Pablo Gomez Barreiro
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
Highlights of 1-star French letterboxd reviews of RESURRECTION (2025): "Je ne suis pas venue au festival de Cannes pour souffrir." ("I didn't come to the Cannes Film Festival to suffer." "Ohlala j’ai dormi" ("Oh la la I slept") "non"
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
Last night my wife Vibe Cooked (prepared a recipe provided by ChatGPT)
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Kelsey Atherton @atherton.bsky.social · 28/05/2025
This study on automated traffic enforcement is now 15 years, pretty modestly framed. Automated enforcement changes behavior over time but notably (in this study of red light cameras) it meant fewer accidents with injuries and more rear-end collisions. Intuitive! isr.unm.edu/reports/2010...
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 28/05/2025
Realization: the cost of a hospital stay isn’t *that* much more than daycare
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 27/05/2025
And Vim-inspired key bindings!
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 26/05/2025
Somewhat delayed mail day. The Bunuel box set is marvelous. Also a… unique entry from my in laws: some very early footage of my wife as a child, including her birth. So, uh, now that’s on the shelf too.
Films received: Lady from Shanghai, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Missing., The Passenger, and Blue Collar from Indicator; Being John Malkovich from Arrow UK; Kaili Blues from Grasshopper, River of Grass, Bunuel box set, and Je T'aime, Je T'aime from Radiance UK. Also home movies of my wife from my in-laws.
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 21/05/2025
So excited to cry at this movie
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
Just learned that former roommate @eclectichutch.bsky.social is at Cannes and I’m reeling
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NE Ohio Regional Sewer District @neorsd.org · 18/05/2025
kids literally wanted to grow up and be public servants because of Richard Scarry.
Richard Scarry illustration of a city scene with animals working various jobs. Text reads:

Some workers work indoors and some work outdoors. Some work up in the sky and some work underground.

included in the image is a fox in a hard hat working underground surrounded by cables and pipes and sewers.
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Cargo Occultist @whisk.bsky.social · 17/05/2025
there should be a summer camp for adults where you can simply embed with a given civil infrastructure discipline and watch
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Emily Badger @emmbadger.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
Policy changes often take years to show results. And then there is congestion pricing in New York. Here are all of the ways we could find it having an immediate effect: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
nytimes.com
Just About Everything That’s Changed Since Congestion Pricing Took Effect (Gift Article)
Fewer cars. Faster travel. Less honking. And some questions we still can’t answer.
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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 11/05/2025
Sorry to hear of the passing of Joseph Nye, originator of the concept of soft power which itself passed a little over 100 days earlier. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_...
en.wikipedia.org
Joseph Nye - Wikipedia
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Arne Elofsson @handle.invalid · 05/05/2025
In this evaluation of AlphaFold3 (and other methods), we show that (i) accurate predictions are limited to RNA structures/complexes with structural similarity to PDB and (ii) that current methods are bad at estimating the accuracy of the predictions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
Limits of deep-learning-based RNA prediction methods
Motivation: In recent years, tremendous advances have been made in predicting protein structures and protein-protein interactions. However, progress in predicting the structure of RNA, either alone or...
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post malone ergo propter malone @proptermalone.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
the greatest trick crypto ever pulled was convincing the world AI was the environmental danger
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Ben Keith @benlk.com · 02/05/2025
Columbus, Ohio's NWS office in Wilmington is missing key personnel, according to this report.
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 30/04/2025
Americans really do grossly underestimate what a difference “walking everywhere” makes when they travel like yeah the walking is the reason you lost weight while eating bread in Italy, it’s not because Italian bread is imbued with magical nonna sprinkles that give it fewer calories
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 16/04/2025
been thinking about trying something like “documentation-driven development”. Write docs for the ideal software you want to have, then fill in the code that fulfills it.
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lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 15/04/2025
there's so many layers of fraud and abuse in this story that "someone might have been trying to log into the NLRB's systems with a valid Doge username and password from russia" doesn't even make it into the first 5,000 words
Within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in, according to Berulis' disclosure. The attempts were "near real-time," according to the disclosure. Those attempts were blocked, but they were especially alarming. Whoever was attempting to log in was using one of the newly created DOGE accounts — and the person had the correct username and password, according to Berulis. While it's possible the user was disguising their location, it's highly unlikely they'd appear to be coming from Russia if they wanted to avoid suspicion, cybersecurity experts interviewed by NPR explained.
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james stevenson @jsstevenson.bsky.social · 15/04/2025
Included here is a quick discussion about the citeability (and lack thereof) of research software. Also notes a kind of paradox, that while we might cite individual programs, we ~never cite languages or runtimes supporting them.
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Scotty Cameron @cdnecon.ca · 15/04/2025
If even a fraction of this is true, hoo boy. www.npr.org/2025/04/15/n...
npr.org
A whistleblower's disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data
A whistleblower tells Congress and NPR that DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data and hid its tracks. "None of that ... information should ever leave the agency," said a former NLRB official.
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Yonah Freemark @yonahfreemark.com · 10/04/2025
Transportation costs are a huge problem! Housing costs in regions like New York City are, definitely, very high. But transportation costs are much lower! That's what makes it possible for NYC region to have lower overall housing + transportation costs than the Dallas region. htaindex.cnt.org/map/
In the Dallas metropolitan area, housing + transportation costs account for 45% of income, of which 27% is spent on housing and 18% on transportation.In the New York metropolitan area, housing + transportation costs account for 43% of income, of which 30% is spent on housing and 13% on transportation.
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NE Ohio Regional Sewer District @neorsd.org · 09/04/2025
you don’t have to rain 3s to know how to control runoff. rain gardens can be attractive and functional ways to reduce flooding, keep extra flow out of local sewers, and bring some new life to your property. also go Cavs.
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Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
Georgetown scholar Dr. Khan Suri, who was abducted by ICE, was refused food/water to break Ramadan fast, housed in a room without a bed, and issued *used* underwear. His child cried for days after he was taken and has since stopped speaking. ccrjustice.org/home/press-c...
In just four days, Dr. Khan Suri was transferred among five different ICE facilities across three states, despite the fact that ICE records indicate there were beds in Virginia facilities. Dr. Khan Suri was fasting in religious observance of Ramadan, but multiple ICE facilities refused him food or water to break his fast.

For almost two weeks, he was housed in a room without a bed and with a television blaring 21 hours a day. Dr. Khan Suri was issued used underwear, and a bright red uniform that is usually reserved for detained individuals who have been classified as ‘high security’ based on their criminal history or alleged affiliation with criminal organizations. He is not permitted to work or spend more than two hours per week outside of his dorm.
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