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Shan Kothari

@shankothari.bsky.social
1.3K followers 1.8K following 210 posts

Assistant professor at University of Alberta. Forest ecology + tree physiology. he/il

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Reposted by Shan Kothari
Charlotte Grossiord @charlottegrossiord.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
🌳We are hiring a PhD student in Forest Ecophysiology and Remote Sensing at EPFL and WSL in Lausanne! @vallicrosah.bsky.social @wslresearch.bsky.social Start: April-May 27 Applications: Open until filled careers.epfl.ch/job/Lausanne...
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Forward Canada @forwardcanada.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
In this week’s opinion column, Senator Paula Simons writes about anti-separation Albertans who genuinely believe the best form of protest is to boycott the referendum. While she understands their motives, she warns that staying home will backfire. #ableg #canpoli forwardweekly.ca/simons-cant-...
forwardweekly.ca
We Can’t Boycott Our Way Out of a Meaningless Referendum | By Paula Simons | Forward Weekly
Forward Weekly feature for September 20, 2026.
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Senator Paula Simons 🇨🇦 @senatorpaulasimons.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I keep meeting smart informed Albertans who tell me they do not intend to vote, because they don’t want to legitimize the process, or because they know the premier is not bound by the results. But what if making us give up on voting is the whole point? My argument to vote - no matter the absurdity.
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Andy Grabia @agrabia.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
The current state of Convocation Hall at the University of Alberta. On Alumni Weekend. Behind it sits a Memorial Organ honoring the lives of 238 dead Canadian soldiers. Soon it will be dismantled and placed in crates, its future unknown. How soon we forget.
The entrance to Convocation Hall at the University of Alberta. Behind the hoarding and inside the hall is the Memorial Organ.
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Nicolas Mouquet @nmouquet.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
‪ 🌳 Do you want to contribute to research on how humans perceive forests? Take this quick, anonymous 10-min survey 🌲 👉 www.biodiful.org#/forest This will help us explore how people experience forest biodiversity! Please share on 🦋 & tag @biodiful.bsky.social to reach more participants 🙏💚 🌐🌍🦤🦑🪴🍁🧪
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Mikhail Gorbaechev @mikhailgorbaechev.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
This is one of the most core war crimes available.
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New Phytologist @newphyt.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
#Diversity affects #microclimate #temperature and humidity: an overview of the evidence and major unanswered questions #TansleyInsight by Alexandra J. Wright, J. English, and C. Guimaraes-Steinicke 📖 nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Relationship between herbaceous species richness and relative humidity at hourly intervals across a 24 hour period. We measured relative humidity every 5 min during the growing season in the Biodiversity, CO2, and Nitrogen (BioCON) experiment in central Minnesota in 2012 (Reich et al., 2001, Wright et al., 2015).
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Minor Mobius @minormobius.bsky.social · 04/03/2026
Good news everyone! You can now analyze your own posts for semantic novelty from the famous Sichu post, ‘analyze the semantic novelty’ mino.mobi/novelty The consequences of my most offbrand post wondering how to relate to people are left to the reader for evaluation
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Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 @josephpolitano.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
Americans: we live in a fallen state—embroiled by sin, cheating, lying, and evil. You cannot trust anyone, not even those who claim to know you best Canadians: I love my neighbors and my friends!
A picture of PEW poll on global attitude survey, saying the % who rate the morality and ethics of people in their country as good vs bad, where the US has the worst rankings and Canada the best
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Alex Turnbull @alejandroturnbull.space · 22/02/2026
The FCC just opened public comments on SpaceX's plan to launch a million satellites to do AI compute in space. Under the current proposal, an environmental review won't be required. Please consider submitting a public comment to oppose this damaging plan. darksky.org/news/two-sat...
darksky.org
Satellite proposals threaten the night sky
In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the agency responsible for authorizing satellite launches and operations…
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Florence Ashley @floralashes.bsky.social · 02/03/2026
Show me the coolest thing you own. Whether it’s art or a leaf that you found neat, I want to see it!
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Prem Thakker ツ @premthakker.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
The phrase “preemptive strike” is as insulting as when we were sold “humanitarian pauses” in the middle of a live-streamed genocide. The powerful looking you straight in the face and telling you your common sense simply doesn’t matter.
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sarah jeong @sarahjeong.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
what a crazy night for sam altman to be like "yeah we got that dept of war deal, and there's no moral concerns here"
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 27/02/2026
They were going to pass rules to phase out gas stoves, until they received 20,000 public comments against the regulations. Except, oops, it turns out the comments were generated by AI.
phys.org
Southern California air board rejected pollution rules after AI-generated flood of comments
The opposition appeared overwhelming: Tens of thousands of emails poured into Southern California's top air pollution authority as its board weighed a June proposal to phase out gas-powered appliances...
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Brian J. Enquist @bjenquist.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
Was on this one but it is my favorite as I learned a ton, got to think about Silverswords and traits as well as had a chance to collaborate with Baldwin and Robichaux besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Variation and macroevolution in leaf functional traits in the Hawaiian silversword alliance (Asteraceae)
The Hawaiian silversword alliance includes 33 species in three endemic genera (Argyroxiphium, Dubautia, and Wilkesia) that occupy almost all major habitats of the Hawaiian archipelago (top row). We s...
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Shan Kothari @shankothari.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
ecology and evolution folks! what are your favorite recent-ish, accessible papers on trait evolution?
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Jessica Hullman @jessicahullman.bsky.social · 23/02/2026
AI makes continuous reproducibility and robustness testing trivial. What happens to science under new levels of scrutiny and stress-testing by default? Some thoughts on how this could play out, informed by watching open science play out over the last decade.
open.substack.com
Living the metascience dream (or nightmare) with AI for science
What happens when we go from replication crisis to robustness extremes?
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Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
LLMs make statistical metascience easier. LLMs don't increase the validity of statistical metascience. www.argmin.net/p/devezers-urn
argmin.net
Devezer's Urn
LLMs make metascience easier, but that doesn't increase metascientific validity.
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Emmett Macfarlane 🇨🇦 @emmettmacfarlane.com · 20/02/2026
NEW POST: Danielle Smith is no separatist; she's much, much worse emmettmacfarlane.substack.com/p/danielle-s...
emmettmacfarlane.substack.com
Danielle Smith is no separatist; she's much, much worse
In a televised address last night Danielle Smith launched a xenophobic assault on immigration and proposed a set of referendum questions for next Fall advocating a constitutional agenda that would red...
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Jared Wesley @jaredwesley.ca · 20/02/2026
None of Smith's referendum questions are likely to result in actual policy change. Because they require constitutional amendments (federal veto) or are plainly unconstitutional. Assuming "yes" votes carry, what then? Kenney's equalization referendum didn't soothe separatists. It emboldened them.
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Andrew Leach @aleach.ca · 20/02/2026
Smith kicked off the sovereignty referendum campaign tonight. The fight for the future of Alberta starts now.
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Shan Kothari @shankothari.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
friends don't let friends use X
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Shan Kothari @shankothari.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
A lot of AI rollouts assume that humans or other AIs won't interact adversarially with the product, when "any system deployed in the real world with real stakes will eventually get attacked" is one of the few real constants in life
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Laurie Adkin, Ph.D. @laurieadkin.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
More from the University of Alberta today. Faculty & students are fighting back against repeated capitulations of senior administrators to blackmail and threats from the UCP government. Read this powerful statement from the Indigenous Graduate Students Association. www.facebook.com/share/p/1EPk...
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 17/02/2026
Let me explain why I think these are interesting to look at. There are two dominant perspectives on LLMs: Boosters and Haters. They are both wrong. Boosterism says this kind of thing is of the past and simply doesn’t happen if you’re using the latest SOTA model on super smart mode. That’s wrong.
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Shan Kothari @shankothari.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
and people say Alberta has no culture!
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Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · 13/02/2026
Meta's plan for launching glasses that people can use to secretly identify strangers on the street is to do it "during a dynamic political environment" when people who care about why that's bad are "focused on other concerns." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/t...
nytimes.com
Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition Technology to Its Smart Glasses
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Andrew Hipp @andrewlhipp.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
"... the trees are innumerable / Marumbi, taraṭī, and hivara / hiṅgaṇa, pācunda, and bābara / ṭākaḷī, and vehaṅkaḷī are abundant... Such is this thorny forest / it is highly frightening / this forest is empty / peacocks scream here" besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Utilizing traditional literature to triangulate the ecological history of a tropical savanna
Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
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Shan Kothari @shankothari.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
obviously I would prefer that my employer not be defunded, but reading someone say "show some courage, would you please?" to Bill Flanagan is cathartic
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Shan Kothari @shankothari.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
Not long before seeing this tweet, I asked Gemini 3 (thinking) whether Hausfather & Peters (2020)'s argument was widely accepted or contested. It said the former, citing (among other sources) the American Enterprise Institute. This sort of thing is imo much more of a danger than "hallucination"
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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
FYI Americans: if you had Canadian grandparents/parents: you may be Canadian
What does the new law say?
Bill C-3, which came into force on December 15, 2025, reinstates citizenship by descent beyond the first generation. In 2009, the Conservative government had restricted access to citizenship. Canadians born abroad could therefore only pass on their Canadian citizenship if their child was born in Canada. The law was ruled unconstitutional by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

Now, to be eligible for Canadian citizenship by descent, a person born abroad before the coming into force of Bill C-3 must have an ancestor who became a Canadian citizen on or after January 1, 1947  (the date the status of Canadian citizenship was created).

The new law also specifies that a person can become a citizen if one of their deceased parents or grandparents had obtained citizenship status upon the law's entry into force.
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Los Angeles Times @latimes.com · 06/02/2026
LAPD kills man allegedly holding gun near California Science Center, officials say
latimes.com
LAPD kills man allegedly holding gun near California Science Center, officials say
Los Angeles police shot a man after receiving reports of someone with a firearm in the parking lot of the California Science Center in Exposition Park on Thursday morning. Fire officials said the man was pronounced dead at the scene.
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Vox @vox.com · 04/02/2026
Apartments are safer and more affordable than single-family homes. Why do we treat them like a hazard? www.vox.com/future-perfe...
vox.com
The hidden double standards driving our housing crisis
Apartments are safer and more affordable than single-family homes. Why do we treat them like a hazard?
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terra firma, terra eterna 🚱🌉 @kavi.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
It's genuinely crazy the degree to which scientific racism is way more popular among liberal elites than normie liberals, despite it not being supported by relevant science
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Andy Grabia @agrabia.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
As an Albertan, I reject the premise that there are legitimate complaints that have led to this. The right has spent the past ten years manufacturing grievances against Ottawa and Canada. From Trudeau to pipelines to equalization to vaccines, it’s all been torqued and twisted and manipulated.
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Shan Kothari @shankothari.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
now they always say congragulations 🎵
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Shan Kothari @shankothari.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
recognizing a lot of names from the Epstein Files as someone who used to casually browse edge dot org circa 2012
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David Brauer @dbrauer.net · 26/01/2026
The Atlantic Magazine just dropped a tremendous story on the Minnesota Resistance. The author is a war correspondent & sees the echoes of leaderless community empowerment around the globe: www.theatlantic.com/politics/202... (supposed to be a gift link, might not work, it’s in Apple News, too.)
theatlantic.com
Welcome to the American Winter
In the frozen streets of Minneapolis, something profound is happening.
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Chris Elmendorf @cselmendorf.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
Read @mbolotnikova.bsky.social excellent new story on housing aesthetics and housing politics, covering my work w/ @dbroockman.bsky.social & @jkalla.bsky.social, the advocacy of @urbancourtyard.bsky.social, and more! Gift link: www.vox.com/future-perfe...
vox.com
Can America build beautiful places again?
Ugliness has more to do with the housing crisis than you think.
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The Narwhal @thenarwhal.ca · 28/01/2026
A new report says Alberta has lost its status as a leader in attracting renewable energy investment — and provincial policies are to blame. thenarwhal.ca/alberta-rene...
thenarwhal.ca
Alberta, once a hotspot for renewable energy projects, sees investment 'plummet’ | The Narwhal
Corporate investment fell 99% after Alberta’s pause on new renewable energy development, as the industry faces ongoing policy uncertainty
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Jay Kirell @jasonkirell.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
Two women trained as first responders were abducted by three ICE agents. One of the agents starts seizing. The other two don’t know what to do. The women jump into action and save the agent’s life, only to be re-handcuffed and processed. www.startribune.com/detained-by-...
startribune.com
Detained by ICE, two women became first responders during agent’s seizure
The women say they guided agents through the emergency, later raising concerns about medical protocols, weapons safety and accountability.
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ghost malone ergo propter bones @proptermalone.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
don't really want to argue about the ethics of genAI overall right at the moment but if you're giving OpenAI in particular your money please consider literally any other option
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
You have to read this. Firsthand affidavit from one of the women who was there and recording the video. She talks about how Alex Pretti was directing traffic when she arrived. She watched him be killed in front of her. She's afraid to go home, worried she'll be arrested.
1. I am a resident of the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am over 18 years of age. I am a children's entertainer who specializes in face painting.
2. On Saturday, January 24, 2026, at about 8:50 am, I was getting ready to go to work when I heard whistles outside. I knew the whistles meant that ICE agents were in the area, so I decided to check it out on my way to work. I've been involved in observing in my community because it is so important to document what ICE is doing to my neighbors. Connecting to your local community and knowing who your neighbors are is something I profoundly value.
3. I drove to Nicollet Ave. and 26th where I could hear the whistles coming from. I turned south onto Nicollet. There were already several ICE agents there and they'd set up a sort of vehicle convoy on Nicollet and 28th. There were also about 15 observers there, recording and observing ICE.
4. I saw ICE agents surrounding cars and punching car windows. I also saw them stopping vehicles further down Nicollet, so I backed up because I didn't feel safe continuing on.
5. I noticed a man sort of acting to help traffic move more smoothly. He helped me find a place to park. I got out with my whistle and my camera. I went over to him and said something like, "I'm going to film and use my whistle."
6. It seemed like most ICE activity was happening a little farther down the street from us, near 27th. Someone was being thrown to the ground.7. I started recording. There was an agent by a car across the street. Two observers were a few feet away from the agent, blowing their whistles. One was wearing a backpack.
8. I and the man who was observing and helping direct traffic were standing in the street. There was a phone in the man's hand recording a video.
9. An agent approached and asked us to back up, so I moved slowly back onto the sidewalk.
10. The man stayed in the street, filming as the other observers I mentioned earlier were being forced backward by another ICE agent threatening them with pepper spray. The man went closer to support them as they got threatened, just with his camera out. I didn't see him reach for or hold a gun.
11. Then the ICE agent shoved one of the other observers to the ground. Then he started pepper spraying all three of them directly in the face and all over. The man with the phone put his hands above his head and the agent sprayed him again and pushed him.
12. Then the man tried to help up the woman the ICE agent had shoved to the ground. The ICE agents just kept spraying. More agents came over and grabbed the man who was still trying to help the woman get up. All three of the observers looked to have been badly affected by the pepper spray. I could feel the pepper spray in my eyes.13. The agents pulled the man on the ground. I didn't see him touch any of them-he wasn't even turned toward them. It didn't look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help the woman up. I didn't see him with a gun. They threw him to the ground. Four or five agents had him on the ground and they just started shooting him. They shot him so many times.
14.1 don't know why they shot him. He was only helping. I was five feet from him and they just shot him.
15. The video I recorded of what happened accurately depicts the events leading up to the agents shooting him and several minutes afterwards. The video is attached as Exhibit 1.
16. I have read the statement from DHS about what happened and it is wrong. The man did not approach the agents with a gun. He approached them with a camera. He was just trying to help a woman get up and they took him to the ground.
17. I feel afraid. Only hours have passed since they shot a man right in front me and I don't feel like I can go home because I heard agents were looking for me. I don't know what the agents will do when they find me. I do know that they're not telling the truth about what happened. I've heard that other witnesses might have been arrested and taken to the Whipple Building.
18. I am disgusted and gutted at how they are treating my neighbors and my state. I keep alternating between crying and feeling determined it is important to remember the value of documenting injustice. We show up for the people who need us to bearwitness, because it can't just be one group of people bearing the brunt of their tyranny. This is a struggle to protect our freedom and democracy, those things are on the line. He lost his life for those values.
I declare under penalty of perjury that everything I have stated in this document is true and correct.

Dated and signed on Jan 24, 2026 in Hennepin County, State of Minnesota.
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Jeff Rueter @jeffrueter.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
Kare 11 local news just read, in full, this statement from Michael and Susan Pretti, the parents of Alex Pretti. "Please get the truth out about our son."
Statement from Michael and Susan Pretti
Parents of Alex Jeffrey Pretti

“We are heartbroken but also very angry.

Alex was a kindhearted soul who cared deeply for his family and friends and also the American veterans whom he cared for as an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital. Alex wanted to make a difference in this world. Unfortunately, he will not be with us to see his impact.

I do not throw around the ‘hero’ term lightly. However, his last thought and act was to protect a woman. The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting. Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE thugs. He had his phone in his right hand and his empty left hand is raised above his head while trying to protect the woman ICE just pushed down, all while being pepper sprayed. 

Please get the truth out about our son. He was a good man. Thank you.
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Dan Froomkin/Press Watch/Heads Up News @froomkin.bsky.social · 25/01/2026
This piece by M. Gessen should have been co-signed by the entire NYT editorial board. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | State Terror Has Arrived
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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 24/01/2026
DOJ lies. DHS lies. ICE lies. That has been established. Do not repeat their claims as fact. Their claims are arguments or, often, misleading propaganda — when not outright lies. They are seeking to make a case for their lawlessness (and to please Trump), not seeking to inform.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 22/01/2026
remarkable how much contempt this white house has for the nation’s historical and artistic treasures
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