Lavin-മുടിയൻ ആയ ലവിൻ

ഞാൻ ഇവിടെ ജോലി അന്വേഷിച്ചു വന്നത് ഒന്നുമല്ലേ ബയോ ഒക്കെ വെയ്ക്കാൻ... എന്നിക്ക് നിങ്ങടെ ജോലി വേണ്ട താനും... ഒരു കുഞ്ഞി എൻജിനിയർ ആണ്... പക്ഷെ #WaanabeFarmer

[Narayani Basu @narayani_basu]

If the state moved this fast to work for actual important basics like functional infrastructure, welfare & fundamental rights, we'd be a real super power.

Instead, it goes on war footing against rightfully furious citizens. Travesty of a democracy, this.

[Sabeer Bhatia @sabeer]

Popcorn? Ready. 🍿 Drink? Ready. 🥤 I’m settling in to watch this film. Why don’t you grab your popcorn and join me? Let’s watch it together!

[Ashwin Mahesh @ashwinmahesh]

How can governments have tens of thousands of crores for large projects and not pay their municipal workers, bus drivers and conductors, etc. on time? How can we not be able to expand and improve the public schools and health facilities but still have plenty of money to go on jaunts at taxpayer expense and spend endlessly on advertising their announcements? Is even half of the public spending reaching its intended beneficiary?

[jack @jack]

government of India officially removes bitchat from the App Store

[Siddharth Patil @siddharthpatil]

While the relative impact of the various impediments on roads and footpaths differs on each road, the fact remains that there's no monitoring (leave alone "Continuous Monitoring") going on that leads to any action in ground! No accountability towards complaints registered through #Sahaaya20.

[Anil H Wagde @awagde]

If govt doesn’t want you to read “Annihilation of Caste”, don’t worry. That’s why we host all of Dr Ambedkar’s writings on https://t.co/Y0nH2E8cog where you can read, listen, bookmark, reference links and everything is free. Thanks to AIC and BAWS. @ambedkar_center @baws_bot

[Caleb @caleb_friesen]

Indian snacks in Canada are... different.

In a good way.

Canada is enforcing a new policy where packaged foods high in saturated fats, sugars, and sodium need unavoidable front-of-package labels disclosing their composition.

Similar to cigarettes.

When I returned to India I couldn't help but miss these labels. During my month in Canada, these labels were the difference between me impulsively picking an unhealthy snack up off the shelf and leaving it there. The label is essentially the government saying, "This food is bad for you. It is linked to chronic diseases. Eat it at your own risk." Given the abundance of healthier options that didn't have these labels (because they weren't high in sat fat, sugars, or sodium), I'd often take a step or two down the aisle and purchase a similar but healthier product in the same category. Easy.

I wish FSSAI would implement something similar in India, so that Indian consumers can make healthier and more informed decisions without having to parse complex back-of-package nutrition labels.

[jeremy scahill @jeremyscahill]

For more than two months, I have been working on a truly horrific story about one of the gravest war crimes committed by the United States since Vietnam: The bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab, Iran. It was one of the first targets struck in the opening hours of the war on February 28, 2026.

At least 156 people were killed in the U.S. cruise missile strikes—120 of them were children and 26 were teachers. We spoke to survivors, first responders, parents, doctors, teachers, psychologists, and other witnesses. Some of them had never before shared their experiences of that day.

It would be impossible to do justice to what happened in Minab that day with words alone. In more than 25 years in journalism and reporting on war, I do not believe I have reported on a more heinous single crime.

Massacre at Minab: The School That Became a Grave

https://t.co/6zcGDYIzCC

Please share this story with as many people as you can.

[TheLiverDoc™ @theliverdoc]

PLEASE READ. THIS IS IMPORTANT. SEE HOW YOUR TAX MONEY IS WASTED ON FRAUD PSEUDOSCIENCE STUDIES BY THE BJP GOVERNMENT.

The study did not demonstrate added benefit, and its claim of prolonged safety is a lie.

No demonstrated benefit
Ashwagandha did not produce a statistically convincing improvement in antibody responses, COVID-19 prevention or quality of life. There were 27 infections among 598 Ashwagandha recipients and 20 among 602 placebo recipients. This does not demonstrate protection.

Some numbers are mathematically impossible
The same supplement reports a spread (standard deviation) of 13.8 for a questionnaire score that mathematically cannot have a spread larger than about 10.8–12 — like reporting that everyone in a room is between 5 and 6 feet tall, with an average variation of 2 feet. Elsewhere, the placebo group’s heights supposedly vary by 17–22 cm while every other group varies by 9–10 cm; the odds of that happening in a real randomized trial are about one in a trillion trillion trillion.

The one “positive” result is an illusion created by math
The abstract says the Ashwagandha group showed “persistently higher” antibody levels in one subgroup. The paper’s own Table 2 shows the opposite: that group’s actual antibody levels were lower at every single time point. The “20–40% higher” claim comes from measuring change from each group’s starting point — and the Ashwagandha group happened to start 25–34% lower, so its catch-up looks bigger as a percentage. It is like two runners: one starts 10 metres behind and both finish together; you then praise the trailing runner for “gaining more metres.” That is not a drug effect; it is an accounting artifact. The paper never tells readers this.

The safety story is a lie and the bad bits were left out
“Safe” in this paper means “no statistically proven difference in harms” - but the trial was not designed to detect rare or moderate harms, and every actual number tilts against the herb: more adverse events (337 vs 309), more serious adverse events (6 vs 2), more probably drug-related events (7 vs 2), and more dropouts (92 vs 76) in the Ashwagandha arm. Some numbers were simply misreported: serious reactions are listed as “0.08%” when the real figure is 0.67% - ten times higher. Significant differences in blood tests (including D-dimer, a clotting marker that matters after an adenovirus-based vaccine like Covishield) appear in the tables but are never mentioned in the text, which instead says all lab results stayed normal. And 168 people (14%) left the trial for “various reasons” that are never itemized, so the claim that “no one quit because of side effects” cannot be checked.

Basic numbers and statistical tests do not agree.
Nobody can say how many people were actually in the trial. The text reports 11 symptomatic COVID-19 infections, while the adverse-event table reports 22. Depending on which table you read, the same 1,200 participants split into subgroups four different, mutually contradictory ways (the totals come out as 1,200, 1,194, 1,019-labelled-as-919, and 1,025). One trial cannot have four different headcounts. Dropout rates also varied bizarrely between recruitment waves - 23.7% in one group versus 5.4% in another, with no explanation. Some statistical test results cannot be reproduced from the printed counts.

Some laboratory data require urgent verification. Some of the data were literally copied and pasted.
In the paper’s quality-of-life supplement, one column of numbers (baseline results for the Ashwagandha group) reappears — digit for digit, all eight values — as a completely different column (week-28 results for the placebo group). Two different groups of people, measured six months apart, do not produce identical results down to the second decimal place. This is a copy-paste job, and it means at least one of those columns is not real data. One table reports a very large difference in blood urea between groups, with small variation within each group, yet gives a statistical result suggesting little difference. The corresponding urea-nitrogen value also does not fit. In the quality-of-life supplement, four pairs of averages and measures of variation are repeated exactly across different groups and visits.

Ashwagandha's quality documents do not consistently support their own claims.
A raw-root test reports 0.048% total alkaloids against its stated minimum of 0.3%, while declaring compliance. Those statements cannot all be correct. The extract and finished-tablet measurements also do not reconcile on the obvious calculation. Chromatograms dated 2019 are supplied for a trial that began enrolling in late 2021, without showing their connection to the actual trial batches. This means the documentation is insufficient to verify what participants received.

The goalposts were moved after the results came in
When the trial was registered in 2021, its main question was whether Ashwagandha improves the immune response to the vaccine. The answer came back: no measurable effect. So the published paper re-centred itself on a secondary question — safety — and put “safe” in the title, while demoting the original main question to “exploratory.” That is called outcome switching, and trial registration exists precisely to prevent it. Along the way, the eligible age range quietly changed three times across documents (18–45, then 18–65, then 18–70), a planned interim analysis vanished, and the timeline described in the paper contradicts the registry.

The paper hid the fact that the two groups were not comparable
A fair trial needs the treated group and the placebo group to start out the same. At the start of this trial, 77.6% of the placebo group had signs of a past COVID infection, versus 70.9% of the Ashwagandha group — a real, statistically significant difference (the correct p-value is about 0.01). The paper’s own Table 1 says so. But the text of the paper claims the groups were “comparable” and quotes a p-value of 0.50 - wrong by a factor of fifty, and wrong in the direction that hides the problem. Why it matters: the group with fewer past infections (Ashwagandha) would be expected to look different on later antibody tests anyway, which muddies every comparison the paper makes about immunity and breakthrough infections.

The published paper contains fabricated-looking data blocks, impossible statistics, a fifty-fold misreported p-value that hides an unfair comparison, a main result replaced by a secondary one after the fact, and a headline “benefit” that its own tables disprove.
https://t.co/jXY9Q75PMM

A letter to the journal's Science Integrity Department WILL BE MAILED TODAY with the following concerns about this paper @FrontiersIn

[Rishita @rishitaakhanna]

SIR: Bulk Form-7 applications seeking deletion of names, largely against Muslim voters, were filed across at least four Assembly constituencies in Karnataka. In some cases, the targeted voters’ details were already printed on the forms, with only the objectors’ details handwritten

Read here: https://t.co/QOb614upYi

[MANJUL @MANJULtoons]

Instagram has restricted this cartoon in India.

I am posting the cartoon again, along with the notice I received from Instagram.

According to the notice, access has been restricted in India “pursuant to a notice from the Government of India / Law Enforcement” and based on local laws.

The cartoon is still visible outside India.

A cartoon about the Election Commission has been stopped from being seen by Indians. When satire gets censored, perhaps the cartoon has made its point. 🇮🇳

#Censorship #FreeSpeech #Satire #PoliticalCartoon #FreedomOfExpression #ElectionCommission #MANJULtoons

[hrex @alchitdada]

SANJAY VERMA

[Nikhil Dey @nikhilmkss]

When the @ECISVEEP refuses to follow its own duties, & the Supreme Court supports their arbitrary exclusions - citizens must step in .

A Jan Sunwai In Delhi Shows the Way: Only Public Audits Can 'Purify' SIR Electoral Rolls. - The Wire https://t.co/pvNqfG7RLf

[Lavin-മുടിയൻ ആയ ലവിൻ @LavinSamuel]

@BMTC_BENGALURU @byrathi_suresh @ChristinMP_ Tagging you for visibility. :)

[Lavin-മുടിയൻ ആയ ലവിൻ @LavinSamuel]

Have to give credit where it's due though. Thank you @BMTC_BENGALURU @byra

[Lavin-മുടിയൻ ആയ ലവിൻ @LavinSamuel]

Have to give credit where it's due though. Best work done by @BMTC_BENGALURU @byrathi_suresh for the well made nammabmtc 2.0 app. The new ui/ux is absolutely way better and didn't face any glitches at all.

[Bitkit @bitkitwallet]

Somebody paid 80 cents to write eight words into the Bitcoin blockchain:

"we are whitehats. contact us on chain."

Four hours earlier they had walked out of Liquid with 3,998 BTC. $320 million. 95% of everything in the vault.

They didn't steal a key. They didn't break the 11-of-15 federation. What happened next has no precedent.

We made a 6-minute film about it. 📺

[Veena Dubal @veenadubal]

This is how you do it!

[Lavin-മുടിയൻ ആയ ലവിൻ @LavinSamuel]

INDIAN CITIES MEASURE TRAFFIC. WHAT IF WE MEASURED MOBILITY? – Indian cities have long tracked how fast traffic moves. Pawan Mulukutla argues, drawing on the new Transport Analytics Hub, that the more useful question is whether people can… https://t.co/USl8eQt2Sn