@oliverlamford
A co-ordinator for Nature by the Taff, a nature group building local appetites for change and ecological living in South Wales. Studying MSc Sustainability and Ecology at the Centre for Alternative Technology, Machynlleth.
- Cancers
- unexplained scarring on the lungs
- impaired fetal growth
- premature birth
- heart disease
Canadian doctors warn of alarming health trends near fracking sites:
share.google/Y3bkaYqgOUfb...
Looking down over around six four-petalled pinky/purple flowers, with others about to open.
Cuckoo cuckoo! Cuckooflower is out.
aka Milkmaids
aka Lady's Smock
aka Pink Folly
aka Meadowcress
@sussexwildlife.bsky.social
@bsbibotany.bsky.social
#WildflowerHour
#UKwildlife
Florida Has Deemed All Existing Intro to Sociology Textbooks Illegal and Produced Its Own
European pre-industrial agriculture was actually good for plant diversity. This according to a study that showed diversity slumped with the Black Death as human population crashed and land was abandoned and rewilded itself.
theconversation.com/the-black-de...
#biodiversity #agriculture #rewilding
Caitlin KALINOWSKI over X I resigned from OpenAl. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn't an easy call. Al has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I'm proud of what we built together.
OpenAI head of robotics just resigned over company deal with the Pentagon saying…
“Surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got”
IMO we should not be letting the US use the UK bases at all. If that is too hard to do - politically or practically - then we should close the bases, because otherwise it is just servitude.
The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.
Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.
This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.
💥 Professor Vernon Bogdanor writes for @financialtimes.com:
"An electoral system should do two things: ensure that the majority rules and that significant minorities are adequately represented.
First Past the Post achieves neither."
The words of a real leader. A leader of courage and conviction. A leader who puts peace before craven compliance and subjugation of his nation to an illegal war and an autocratic warmongering US President.
Well done Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez!
Black Death Research Reveals People & Nature Thrive Together 🌍
theconversation.com/the-black-de...
paper > doi.org/10.1111/ele....
The good kind of infighting. Creasy explaining very clearly why the policy sucks. More power to the backbenchers
The Metropolitan Police has raided the Westminster Quaker Meeting house – again, this time targeting Take Back Power's direct action training. There were 15 arrests
"I am getting to the point where I refuse to spend more of my time making the case. It just makes you think they don't actually want growth everywhere. They just want to hold on to things down here. We need Whitehall reform but we also need Westminster reform.”
The UK is almost three decades into a mass devolution of powers (if not resources to a similar extent).
The centre still acts like a nineteenth century colonial administration.
Staggering what it tries to manage- and fails to.
Burnham is right here.
New Welsh Government legislation has officially recognised the Eurasian beaver as a native species and granted it protected status
Just sayin.
It shows a total contempt for free speech and democracy when political parties restrict journalists they fear will challenge them.
If they are willing to do this when they are in opposition, imagine what they will be like if they have all the levers of the state behind them.
3/3
Reform are denying me access to the Welsh manifesto launch...
Remember a few weeks ago when Reform UK threatened to defund Bangor University in the name of "free speech"?
Well despite repeated requests, Reform are not allowing me to attend their manifesto launch.
1/3
Relatedly: over half of all the freight moved on Indian Railways is coal. Ditching coal power would release huge amounts of rail network capacity to take lorries off roads in India
I actually don't have words as to how angry I am.
Wonder what happened in these countries that people on student visas in the UK found themselves needing to apply for asylum instead of going home post 2021.
UK Labour are heartless bastards & apparently have bo idea whats happening in the world.
Tell me the truth...I'm ready.
New IPBES report finds that $220 billion were directed to conservation & restoration of biodiversity in 2023...
yet $7.3 trillion flowed toward subsidies that directly harm nature.
IPBES Business & Biodiversity Assessment www.ipbes.net/business-imp...
@ipbes.net
Landscape ecological restoration. It can be done but we need to get a move on. This is Carrifran where the sheep were removed to allow this native woodland to take over.
When we talk about Baby Boomers not getting off the stage: In 1997, the US president was born in 1946.
In 2007, the US president was born in 1946.
In 2017, the US president was born in 1946.
And next year in 2027? The US president will have been born in 1946.
we appear to have four competing fascist movements jockeying for control: blood & soil nazism under miller and hegseth, darwinian ecofascism from rfk, technofascism under vance and musk, and one Big Wet Hitler who understands the true animating core of the american volk is a deep love for shopping
Musk, worth $829 billion, owns X.
Bezos, worth $234 billion, owns The Washington Post & Twitch.
Zuckerberg, worth $231 billion, owns Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp.
And now Larry Ellison, worth $202 billion, is about to control CNN, CBS, TikTok & HBO.
Yes, this is oligarchy.
NYT’s reporting on the DOD-Anthropic dispute sheds more light on how the Pentagon planned to use Claude for mass surveillance of Americans: by collecting and analyzing commercial bulk data.
So what is this commercial data? And how might Claude be used to collect and analyze it? 🧵 1/
#CopernicusAtmosphere dust aerosol optical depth forecast shows a massive #SaharanDust plume crossing NW Africa, W Mediterranean + parts of Europe through the first week of March.
Read the article ⬇️
A shameful, heartbreaking betrayal of our duties as a country that is lucky enough to be on the right side of history and on the lucky side of political geography.
How can the politicians who betray our moral duties look themselves in the eye in the mirror I will never know.
Bloody ‘sectarian‘ <checks notes> British public
Don't want giant mirrors in the sky to reflect sunlight onto the earth, lighting it all up at night? Don't want a million more low-orbit starlink satellites in space? There's still time to stop these proposals now at FCC. See instructions for commenting from DarkSky International
#astro 🌿🌎
