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Madalsa

@madalsa.org
313 followers 636 following 324 posts

Assistant Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology. I study and teach carbon-constrained energy systems. via Stanford, IIT Bombay. Views mine, many interests. long-arc.org madalsa.org

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Jessica Green @greenprofgreen.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Big ups to @katearonoff.bsky.social for covering this seemingly boring but actually really important story about the GHG Protocol. Standards are technical & opaque AND they’re where the politics happen. This is a classic case of “managing tons.” 🧵
newrepublic.com
Did the Forestry Industry Just Get to Write Its Own Emissions Rules?
Accusations of industry capture, allegedly secret working groups, and the resignations of two researchers—a scandal is rocking the world of carbon emissions accounting.
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UCLA Emmett Institute @uclalawemmett.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The U.S. Department of Transportation just issued new fuel economy standards. When first proposed, our resident fuel economy expert Ann Carlson described the standards as ‘audaciously, aggressively awful.” The final standards are too, she explains. A thread ⬇️
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Simon Evans @drsimevans.carbonbrief.org · 28/09/2026
EVs are now up to 9x cheaper to drive than diesels in UK www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-evs...
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Madalsa @madalsa.org · 28/09/2026
Awesome chart. 1) didn’t know how much money musicians made through CDs until streaming; 2) how little they make through streaming; 3) why concert prices are so high; 4) why musicians need to put up ”heroic” entertainment (Anne Carson’s words) during concerts now. It all really needs to be worth it.
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Madalsa @madalsa.org · 27/09/2026
I understand IVs but I don’t *really* understand IVs.
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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
It's a system set up to funnel young women into enemy territory, where this stuff happens over and over.
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Madalsa @madalsa.org · 25/09/2026
Please read Jane Doe's lawsuit against Cornell + Chi Phi frat + Moonies bar. The details of this incident are horrific. Also, this courageous Cornell Sun editorial. www.cornellsun.com/article/2026...
cornellsun.com
EDITORIAL | Cornell Won’t, We Will
The Editorial Board demands that Cornell stops protecting the alleged Chi Phi rapists through the University's opaque sexual assault policies.
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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
So much of schools "responding to rape" is preventing the legal system from doing so. This is a report on seven adults who committed serious felonies for which there is a legal system to remind them and their pals that they are felonies.
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Jessie🌈 @atropius.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I caught the cutest thing ever on the Katmai bear cams
A photo of a large brown bear, taken from behind, laying on the ground with her back legs splayed out. Her two cubs are laying against her right side, both using her butt as a pillow. They're laying next to a river
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Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
WSJ: The AI build-out is on track to become the biggest economic bet in US history, dwarfing the investments made to fund other huge US infrastructure projects — such as the railroads, the highway system and the plumbing for the internet.” (via Jefferies)
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Jan Rosenow @janrosenow.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Gasoline prices in the US are soaring. EV sales should be booming. They're not. Policy rollbacks have left the US trailing China and Europe just when drivers need an alternative most.
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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Wtaf is this question my university just asked me about my project?
Does the project involve any work that could be interpreted as promoting DEIA, climate change research, or non-compliant to any Presidential Executive Orders?
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United Farm Workers @ufw.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Farm workers in Western NY are harvesting apples in rainy & slippery conditions. The silver strips on the ground are runners used for reflecting sun to the apples. But on rainy days, workers have to be careful as the ladders they climb are known to slip on the surface. #WeFeedYou
In New York apple orchard on a rainy day
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James Temple @jtemple.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
<Shrug emoji>
bloomberg.com
Climate Startup Shifts Focus From Carbon Removal to Oil Recovery
Direct air capture startup Spiritus was founded to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and bury it underground. Now, it’s pivoting to selling that CO2 to help extract oil, as the clean-tech indu...
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Madalsa @madalsa.org · 22/09/2026
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4... Absolutely fantastic piece situating U.K energy crises.
lrb.co.uk
Arthur Downing · Asset Sweating: Britain’s Energy Crisis
Britain has private ownership while making the state responsible for planning via subsidies. The result is a zombie...
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Transactions on Machine Learning Research @tmlrorg.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Spoilers: all 10 ended up being desk rejected. - 1 paper withdrawn - 1 author was too busy for a call - 1 author no-showed - Authors of 3 papers couldn't answer basic qs - Authors of 3 papers could, but not technical qs - 1 author answered all qs, but paper had a major flaw
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Madalsa @madalsa.org · 21/09/2026
Depressing
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Anirvan Chatterjee @chatterjee.net · 21/09/2026
Hello Bay Area! Come join me next Sunday, September 27 for the Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour We’ll be sharing stories of immigrant freedom fighters, Desi feminists, and more—a totally different take on Bay Area history  Details and registration at www.berkeleysouthasian.org
berkeleysouthasian.org
Berkeley South Asian Radical History Walking Tour
Discover the secret histories of South Asian Americans in Berkeley and San Francisco, California. As seen in National Geographic and NPR.
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Ada Palmer @adapalmer.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
The world’s largest battery-electric aircraft flew for the first time on the 12th of August, a 27-minute test flight over upstate New York that cost about five dollars in electricity. Heart Aerospace’s 30-seat prototype is a big step toward a commercial version. buff.ly/i3f0PhR #ShareGoodNewsToo
techspot.com
The largest all-electric plane ever flew for 27 minutes, on $5 of electricity
Heart's X1 demonstrator flew for 27 minutes from a regional airport in upstate New York, running on battery power the entire time. The aircraft reached 1,100 feet...
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Kate Marvel @drkatemarvel.bsky.social · 28/09/2025
my takeaway from climate week nyc is that "climate storytelling" is a little too much "we must reimagine our deepest souls in relationship to mother nature and the moral abyss of the polycrisis into which we must now stare" and not enough "ok but get a heat pump"
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Madalsa @madalsa.org · 18/09/2026
India reached its record highest polio cases in 1992. During the 1990s, 60% of all polio deaths were occurring in India. The universal pulse polio vaccine drive was initiated in 1995 with 75 million children were vaccinated in two months. I was one of them. In 2014, India was declared polio free
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Madalsa @madalsa.org · 15/09/2026
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Karthik Sankaran @rajakorman.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
One big difference from the last time is that it’s the machines that are threatening to form a non-aligned movement.
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Adam Przeworski @adamprz.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
A summary of what I understand and do not understand about the way democracy works: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7269378
papers.ssrn.com
<p>Swan Song: My Understanding of Democracy</p>
I summarize my understanding of democracy: the theory which predicts when elections peacefully manage conflicts and the empirical evidence regarding the co
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Terence Tao @teorth.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...
mathandai.org
Declaration — Math and AI
Read the declaration and add your name.
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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
🧵CO₂ removal (CDR) is back in the news, but just because the UNEP report says we need CDR, it doesn't mean we'll have CDR. Many challenges will take decades of research and negotiation to solve. Here are some examples: Technological: We currently don't have any durable CDR method that scales.
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
at this point: carbon removal is, at best, essentially a research project. renewable expansion is a policy project
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
if it took you 5 seconds of contemplation to think of an alternative you should take at least another 5-10 to at least consider the possibility that it at least crossed the minds of 1 or 2 of the people who dedicate their lives and research careers to dealing with the problems we post about on here
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Cannot believe there’s a tremendous mathematical result and instead of being exciting it’s annoying
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Madalsa @madalsa.org · 09/09/2026
Open AI is updating their references real time on the navier stokes paper — now 22, started with 16. Great scientific practice.
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John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch.ft.com · 08/09/2026
Two extraordinary charts from today’s PISA test results: 1) School test scores continue to collapse internationally, underscoring how this is no longer a Covid effect but sustained decline. Those falls in reading and maths are equivalent to about two years of lost schooling.
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Madalsa @madalsa.org · 03/09/2026
Huzzah!
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Leon Simons @leonsimons.com · 02/09/2026
RIP 1.5
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Will Davies @will-davies.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Out next Spring with @princetonupress.bsky.social !
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Count Binface @countbinface.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Can't get a moment's peace on this bloody planet.
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John Hanger @jrfhanger.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Good morning with good news: US battery storage set a quarterly deployment record at 20.2 GWh in Q2 2026. 44% was paired with solar & 56% was standalone storage. Arizona added 6.2 GWh, strongest quarter ever by a state. US 2026 total rises ~20% to ~71 GWh! electrek.co/2026/08/31/t... #energysky
electrek.co
The US added a record 20.2 GWh of battery storage in just 3 months
US battery storage set a quarterly record in Q2 2026, adding 20.2 GWh as utility-scale projects surged in Arizona, Texas, and California.
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Madalsa @madalsa.org · 31/08/2026
"Water is ice at 0°C and liquid at 1°C. Small changes in temperature can produce profound physical changes in a frozen landscape. We do not need uncertainty reduced to zero before acting." nepalitimes.com/certainty-on...
nepalitimes.com
Certainty on a Himalayan scale
Doubt about an individual disaster need not be reduced to zero before we act on climate breakdown
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Floodlight @floodlightnews.org · 27/08/2026
NEW: Thermal drone footage shows the Microsoft-backed DataOne AI data center in Vineland, NJ is running dozens of gas generators. None of them have permits. A Floodlight visual investigation with @us.theguardian.com:
floodlightnews.org
One of East Coast’s largest data centers accused of ‘violating federal law’
Thermal drone footage shows DataOne — the Microsoft-backed AI data center in Vineland — is powering its operations with dozens of unpermitted generators
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Year Progress Bot @yearprogress.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░ 66.10%
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Clark Gray @clarklgray.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Nice story by Inside Climate News on our PNAS paper from last week:
insideclimatenews.org
As Oceans Warm, Children Face Growing Malnutrition Risk - Inside Climate News
In low- and middle-income countries, marine heat waves threaten children’s growth rates and lives, new research shows.
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Madalsa @madalsa.org · 27/08/2026
Not much to say except : Highly recommend visiting Seneca-Iroquois National Museum, an incredible museum detailing the history of the native peoples that have inhabited these glacial lands for many, many years. Ontario (most likely) has origins in ironquois languages.
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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
to paraphrase DeGaulle, india is a big country inhabited by many indians
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Madalsa @madalsa.org · 26/08/2026
Teaching Rittel and Webber's "Wicked Problems" (1973) tomorrow. Always a pleasure to read!
We have come to think about the planning task in very different ways in recent
years. We have been learning to ask whether what we are doing is the right thing to do.
That is to say, we have been learning to ask questions about the outputs of actions
and to pose problem statements in valuative frameworks. We have been learning to
see social processes as the links tying open systems into large and interconnected
networks of systems, such that outputs from one become inputs to others. In that
structural framework it has become less apparent where problem centers lie, and
less apparent where and how we should intervene even if we do happen to know what
aims we seek. We are now sensitized to the waves of repercussions generated by a
problem-solving action directed to anyone node in the network, and we are no longer
surprised to find it inducing problems of greater severity at some other node. And
so we have been forced to expand the boundaries of the systems we deal with, trying
to internalize those externalities.
This was the professional style of the systems analysts, who were commonly seen
as forebearers of the universal problem-solvers. With arrogant confidence, the early
systems analysts pronounced themselves ready to take on anyone's perceived problem,
diagnostically to discover its hidden character, and then, having exposed its true
nature, skillfully to excise its root causes. Two decades of experience have worn the
self-assurances thin. These analysts are coming to realize how valid their model really
is, for they themselves have been caught by the very same diagnostic difficulties that
troubled their clients.
By now we are all beginning to realize that one of the most intractable problems
is that of defining problems (of knowing what distinguishes an observed condition
from a desired condition) and of locating problems (finding where in the complex
causal networks the trouble really lies). In turn, and equally intractable, is the problem
of identifying the act…
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Dolly Parton’s husband being just some guy rocks. Guy owned a Nashville driveway paving business and just did his own thing, never sought celebrity at all.
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Dan Larremore @danlarremore.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
🎉 New paper (and data) on editorial & peer review at Science and Science Advances, two elite general science journals. With a wonderful team! @samzhang.bsky.social, @nicklaberge.bsky.social, Quinten and @aaronclauset.bsky.social. 1/ www.science.org/doi/full/10....
Screenshot of the title page: 

Elite general science journals shape scientific discourse, public policy, and scientific careers. However, expectations of confidentiality in most editorial proceedings has limited efforts to understand and improve the review process. Here, we describe and release deidentified data on 110,303 manuscript submissions over 5 years at Science and Science Advances, two elite general science journals. Analyzing evaluation dynamics across the initial editorial review and subsequent peer review stages, we find strong selective effects associated with higher institutional prestige, larger team size, and certain topics and countries. Corresponding authors who are men exhibit a small but significant advantage at Science, while authors based in China have a significant disadvantage. These associations are generally stronger in editorial review than in peer review, even as final editorial decisions correlate strongly with reviewer advice. These patterns highlight the complexity of multistage evaluations at elite journals and the importance of open data to better understand them.
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Arvind Ravikumar @arvindpawan1.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
A geologist and a systems engineer walk in to a bar... ...and start arguing about whether we can actually pump enough CO2 underground to hit net zero. That's more or less how this paper got started with @hdaigle.bsky.social. Read on to find more: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
iopscience.iop.org
Can we sequester carbon fast enough? growing disconnect between models and reality
Can we sequester carbon fast enough? growing disconnect between models and reality, Daigle, Hugh, Ravikumar, Arvind P
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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
refuting every claim anybody makes is not in fact how science, or any discipline, works discarding approaches that have proven fruitless or wrongheaded, not stopping to re-litigate them every time someone digs up a junk data set or a retracted article they wish were true, is how disciplines move
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John Bistline @bistline.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Tradeoffs everywhere: “Policies that favored photovoltaic expansion led to reductions in bird diversity, disproportionately affecting wealthier and nondesert regions, as well as widespread species.” 2,344 counties, 10 years of data.
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Christina Toms @christinatoms.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
California: worth it
orange CA poppies against a turquoise sea
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London Review of Books @lrb.co.uk · 23/08/2026
‘The suggestion that people from ethnic minority backgrounds are regularly promoted beyond their qualifications or are being given some form of advantage is contradicted by the evidence.’ Colin Douglas on attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, from the blog. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/au...
lrb.co.uk
Colin Douglas | Not Fair Enough
The suggestion that people from ethnic minority backgrounds are regularly promoted beyond their qualifications or are...
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