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Updated: 1 hour 12 min ago

The Most Likely To Confront Racism Are White People

Feb 13 2024 - 10:02
White people are more likely to confront those who post racist content on social media.

On surveys, at least, but on surveys very few people say they are anti-science, or even anti-vaccine. Not from 1998 to 2021, when coastal cities dominated vaccine exemptions, and not from 2021 on when middle states do. In both cases the argument is they support science but products need more testing, and they are anti-corporate.

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New York City Is Not The Future - Metro Areas With Multiple Hubs Is

Feb 12 2024 - 13:02
New York City makes no sense on paper. It is expensive to get into, expensive to live in, yet crowded and dirty. The heat is overwhelming in the summer while in the winter the wind effect among all those buildings cut can through your parka.

There is no way to undo its monocentric development now, like California, New York is suffering a wealth and marriage diaspora for better tax and family environments, and “polycentric” spatial patterns may solve both those problems.

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Older Transgender People Use The Emergency Room For Psychological Issues More, Concern About Timely Care

Feb 12 2024 - 12:02
Transgender and gender-diverse Medicare beneficiaries use significantly more emergency department services than cisgender people, particularly for psychological care, and these visits were more likely to be followed by an admission.

It brings up an obvious question; with outsized use of emergency services, why are there delays in seeking timely health care that result in visits to the ER?

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On Overfitting In Statistics And In Machine Learning

Feb 11 2024 - 09:02
I recently held an accelerated course in "Statistical data analysis for fundamental science" for the Instats site. Within only 15 hours of online lectures (albeit these are full 1-hour blocks, unlike the leaky academic-style hours that last 75% of that) I had to cover not just parameter estimation, hypothesis testing, modeling, and goodness of fit, plus several ancillary concepts of high relevance such as ancillarity (yep), conditioning, the likelihood principle, coverage, and frequentist versus bayesian inference, but an introduction to machine learning! How did I do?

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It's About Calories, So Kimchi Is Not A Weight Loss Superfood - But You May Eat Less

Feb 08 2024 - 11:02

Fermented foods have become popular in recent years, partly due to their perceived health benefits.

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Electric Car Mandates Have Caused Auto Insurance Costs To Rise 26%

Feb 07 2024 - 16:02
'In a high tide, all boats rise' is a government platitude about why they continue to increase taxes and regulatory costs while creating higher inflation, but markets are not a level playing field. If you do more work and I do less and we are forced into the same result, you do less because there is no point. Half of boats sink.

Only a Keynesian economist or someone else lacking basic literacy of the human condition thinks otherwise. 

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Barely Half Of The Public Now Trusts Science - What To Do

Feb 02 2024 - 09:02
When I was young, conservatives and liberals had equally high levels of trust in science. And it was high. Only progressives thought science was not a force for public good.

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Report: COVID-19 Shutdowns Mean Michigan Students Have Lost A Comprehension Grade Level

Feb 01 2024 - 18:02
In 2019, government union employees insisted they were so vital that private sector alternatives like charter schools should be denied any funding. In 2020, government union employees said they were so interchangeable anyone on a Zoom call could educate children just as well as humans in a classroom.

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An Idea For Future Calorimetry

Feb 01 2024 - 10:02
A calorimeter in physics is something that measures heat. However, there are mainly two categories of such objects: ones that measure macroscopic amounts of heat, and ones that measure the heat released by subatomic particles when they smash against matter. I am sure you guess which is the class of instruments I am going to discuss in this article.
A further distinction among calorimeters for particle physics is the one concerning the kind of particles these devices aim to measure. Electromagnetic calorimeters target electrons and photons, and hadronic calorimeters target particles made of quarks and gluons. Here I will discuss only the latter, which are arguably more complex to design.

Smashing protons

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$50 Million, 10 Months, And The Messenger Closes Its Doors

Jan 31 2024 - 22:01
Is there room for centrist journalism in 2024? The Wall Street Journal exists, so yes, but that doesn't mean there is room for two.

Yet Jimmy Finkelstein, who owned he Hill when it was centrist, thought he could do it again, and had enough connections he could raise $50 million. Yet instead of spending that The Messenger money wisely, he threw big salaries at journalists who are economically conservative about their own funding even if the majority espouse the benefits of socialism - and weren't going to join any start-up unless the money was big. As in ProPublica money.

Ten months later the worst kept secret in media is officially out - $50 million gone. 

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AI And The End Of Human Exceptionalism

Jan 31 2024 - 13:01

Over the last two years, generative AI has smashed our ideas of what intelligence means, what AI can and cannot do, and of our place in the cosmos. A two-thousand year old journey from Aristotle to today, has culminated in a moment where human exceptionalism has finally been challenged.

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Peer Review Is A Business, And That's Why Journals Often Ignore Concerns About Papers

Jan 31 2024 - 10:01
With some journals publishing 100,000 articles per year, you have to be truly naïve to believe they are all peer-reviewed in the sense that the public thinks peer review works. Journals don't pay for peer review, but they sure get paid, often even to publish articles.

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Minorities Don't Buy Populist Rhetoric Of Either US Party As Much As Whites Do

Jan 31 2024 - 00:01
America is one of the most religiously, racially and ethnically diverse countries in the world, but that doesn't mean Latinos, Asians or Blacks believe that Democrats and Republicans want them as anything more than reliable voting blocs.

A new analysis finds that though Asians were up 35 percent between 2010 and 2020, Latinos increased 23 percent and the Black population increased by 6 percent even as Whites decreased 2 percent, minorities didn't vote in numbers similar to their eligible voter population.

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Estradiol Hormone Used During Menopause Linked To Cocaine Addiction

Jan 29 2024 - 22:01
Estradiol is an estrogen hormone used medically during menopause and after hysterectomies to help reduce symptoms such as hot flashes and to prevent osteoporosis (bone loss) in women, but a new paper says it is linked to cocaine addiction.

Women are more likely than men to develop an addiction, try cocaine at a younger age, use larger amounts of the drug, and suffer from overdose. A psychologist says estradiol may be why.

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CDC Regulations Stopped Everything Except The COVID-19 Pandemic

Jan 29 2024 - 19:01
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, government health officials went to Congress to ask for more funding to help with Ebola. Prior to that they asked for more funding to help stop Teen Vaping. Prior to that they asked for more funding to stop the Prediabetes Epidemic.

After the pandemic they created regulations to keep landlords from evicting deadbeat tenants. They created regulations to force COVID-19 vaccines on everyone...except fellow government union employees. 

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Deep Sea Vision Thinks They Found Amelia Earhart's Plane

Jan 29 2024 - 13:01
In July of 1937, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan never arrived at Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean, on their trip around the world.

In September, the Deep Sea Vision team, funded privately by Tony Romeo, began scanning 5,200 square miles in search of Earhart and Noonan's Lockheed 10-E Electra aircraft - and they think they have location it.

Their proof are sonar images of a plane-shaped object 16,000 feet down, under miles from Howland Island, where Earhart and Noonan were supposed to refuel.


Image: Deep Sea Vision

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Science Denial: Alternatives To Medicine Like Acupuncture And Naturopathy Increased A Lot In 20 Years

Jan 27 2024 - 11:01
Republicans joined the anti-vaccine movement in 2021 but you might not know it xisted prior to that. Academics and allied journalists would roll out surveys showing that the anti-vaccine movement was similar on both sides to rationalize the behavior of their tribe - while ignoring actual data.

Data like that that coast of California had more vaccine exemptions for school kids than the rest of the US combined. Some coastal schools had vaccine rates of just 26%. Fortunately, we had physicians like Dr. Richard Pan on our side, willing to defy his political party to save kids. We pressured the Governor to sign a law banning arbitrary exemptions and now California is nearly as high as Mississippi and Alabama in vaccine uptake.

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COVID-19: Healthcare Workers Exited At Dramatically Higher Rates

Jan 26 2024 - 17:01
Like some soldiers become conscientious objectors if they end up in an actual military situation, or when over 300 armed government union employees suddenly forgot they had guns while kids were being murdered in Uvalde, healthcare workers, 18.8 million strong just in the US, were more likely to exit the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unlike the first two, healthcare workers were right to be afraid. 

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The Worst Disaster In The History Of British Polar Exploration Now Yields Archeological Treasure

Jan 25 2024 - 14:01
In 1845, two ships under the command Captain John Franklin, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, left England on a voyage to chart the top of North America and a Northwest Passage that would connect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. 

Like the interior of Africa and finding the source of the Nile, Great Britain was using some its imperial wealth to explore the unknown and a veteran skipper like Franklin wanted to be first to make the breakthrough across the north pole.

Their ships were state-of-the-art; interior heating and storage enough preserved food to last the 100-plus men for months at a time plus chicken, pigs, and even for the early parts.

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