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🔖 Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security

Bookmarked Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences )

The narrowing of diversity in crop species contributing to the world’s food supplies has been considered a potential threat to food security. However, changes in this diversity have not been quantified globally. We assess trends over the past 50 y in the richness, abundance, and composition of crop species in national food supplies worldwide. Over this period, national per capita food supplies expanded in total quantities of food calories, protein, fat, and weight, with increased proportions of those quantities sourcing from energy-dense foods. At the same time the number of measured crop commodities contributing to national food supplies increased, the relative contribution of these commodities within these supplies became more even, and the dominance of the most significant commodities decreased. As a consequence, national food supplies worldwide became more similar in composition, correlated particularly with an increased supply of a number of globally important cereal and oil crops, and a decline of other cereal, oil, and starchy root species. The increase in homogeneity worldwide portends the establishment of a global standard food supply, which is relatively species-rich in regard to measured crops at the national level, but species-poor globally. These changes in food supplies heighten interdependence among countries in regard to availability and access to these food sources and the genetic resources supporting their production, and give further urgency to nutrition development priorities aimed at bolstering food security.

h/t Eat This Podcast

@GMJuditPolgar, I’m doing some research for a book on note taking traditions, commonplace books, and zettelkasten/card indexes. In watching an interview of you with Christiane Amanpour from 2020 I noticed a photo of you next to a card index while playing chess. Do you have 15-20 minute for a short interview to talk about it and how you compiled and used it?

👓 How Barr and Trump Use a Russian Disinformation Tactic | New York Times

Read Opinion | How Barr and Trump Use a Russian Disinformation Tactic (New York Times)

They were able to define “collusion” to benefit themselves. Don’t let them twist meanings again with their “spying” investigation.

🔖 Special Issue : Information Dynamics in Brain and Physiological Networks | Entropy

Bookmarked Special Issue "Information Dynamics in Brain and Physiological Networks" (mdpi.com)

A special issue of Entropy (ISSN 1099-4300). This special issue belongs to the section "Information Theory".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 December 2018

It is, nowadays, widely acknowledged that the brain and several other organ systems, including the cardiovascular, respiratory, and muscular systems, among others, exhibit complex dynamic behaviors that result from the combined effects of multiple regulatory mechanisms, coupling effects and feedback interactions, acting in both space and time.

The field of information theory is becoming more and more relevant for the theoretical description and quantitative assessment of the dynamics of the brain and physiological networks, defining concepts, such as those of information generation, storage, transfer, and modification. These concepts are quantified by several information measures (e.g., approximate entropy, conditional entropy, multiscale entropy, transfer entropy, redundancy and synergy, and many others), which are being increasingly used to investigate how physiological dynamics arise from the activity and connectivity of different structural units, and evolve across a variety of physiological states and pathological conditions.

This Special Issue focuses on blending theoretical developments in the new emerging field of information dynamics with innovative applications targeted to the analysis of complex brain and physiological networks in health and disease. To favor this multidisciplinary view, contributions are welcome from different fields, ranging from mathematics and physics to biomedical engineering, neuroscience, and physiology.
Prof. Dr. Luca Faes
Prof. Dr. Alberto Porta
Prof. Dr. Sebastiano Stramaglia
Guest Editors

🔖 Computational Social Scientist Beware: Simpson’s Paradox in Behavioral Data by Kristina Lerman

Bookmarked Computational Social Scientist Beware: Simpson's Paradox in Behavioral Data by Kristina Lerman (arxiv.org)

Observational data about human behavior is often heterogeneous, i.e., generated by subgroups within the population under study that vary in size and behavior. Heterogeneity predisposes analysis to Simpson's paradox, whereby the trends observed in data that has been aggregated over the entire population may be substantially different from those of the underlying subgroups. I illustrate Simpson's paradox with several examples coming from studies of online behavior and show that aggregate response leads to wrong conclusions about the underlying individual behavior. I then present a simple method to test whether Simpson's paradox is affecting results of analysis. The presence of Simpson's paradox in social data suggests that important behavioral differences exist within the population, and failure to take these differences into account can distort the studies' findings.

📑 Maria Ressa, Zeynep Tufekci, and others on the growing disinformation war | Columbia Journalism Review

Annotated Maria Ressa, Zeynep Tufekci, and others on the growing disinformation war (Columbia Journalism Review)

Tufekci argued that, in the 21st century, a surfeit of information, rather than its absence, poses the biggest problem. “When I was growing up in Turkey, the way censorship occurred was there was one TV channel and they wouldn’t show you stuff. That was it,” she said. “Currently, in my conceptualization, the way censorship occurs is by information glut. It’s not that the relevant information isn’t out there. But it is buried in so much information of suspect credibility that it doesn’t mean anything.” ❧

Featured image “Vintage Television” by Sven Scheuermeier via CC on Unsplash

Checked into Jefferson Elementary

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🎧 ‘The Daily’: Rod Rosenstein’s Impossible Choice | New York Times

Listened to ‘The Daily’: Rod Rosenstein’s Impossible Choice by Michael Barbaro from nytimes.com

President Trump has asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether the F.B.I. infiltrated his campaign in 2016 for political purposes. In response, the department granted the president’s team access to highly classified information from the special counsel’s Russia investigation. What’s behind this decision?

On today’s episode:

• Julie Hirschfeld Davis, who covers the White House for The New York Times.

Background reading:

• In a series of tweets on Sunday, President Trump demanded an investigation into whether an F.B.I. informant “infiltrated or surveilled” his campaign. The deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to accommodate the president’s wishes by expanding an existing inquiry.

• The president’s tweets referred to a Times report about Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, examining whether countries other than Russia, including Saudi Arabia, had offered assistance to the Trump campaign.

• After a White House meeting on Monday, intelligence and law enforcement officials agreed to disclose some sensitive documents from the Russia investigation to Republican congressional leaders.

Where to begin?