This Media Literacy Week, I’m highlighting three research-backed habits that help us stay grounded and think clearly online:
🧠 Critical ignoring
💡 Actively open-minded thinking
🔍 Lateral reading
matthewfacciani.substack.com/p/three-medi...
While there’s a lot of focus on young people and screen time, a new British study found that adults over 65 spend more than three hours a day on smartphones, computers, and tablets. When TV is included, older adults actually log *more daily screen time* than young adults.
Is misinformation a virus or a weapon?
Analogies have galvanized important conversations, but what new avenues emerge when we integrate these views into a multi-level complexity informed system?
Read our paper in npj Complexity
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Thanks for the shoutout!
In an attempt to work more effectively, we’ve accidentally deployed an inhumane way to collaborate.
How did 3M’s “forever chemicals” end up in all of us? The inside story of the corporate scientists who discovered—then helped to conceal—the dangers of its chemicals.
Our new piece in Nature Machine Intelligence: LLMs are replacing human participants, but can they simulate diverse respondents? Surveys use representative sampling for a reason, and our work shows how LLM training prevents accurate simulation of different human identities.
This excellent interactive tutorial on misleading data visualizations explores the idea of a "counter chart" — the graph you draw in response to refute a misleading claims
flowingdata.com/projects/dis...
I watched this video this morning and it really has been instructive for understanding, well, a lot of behavior.
youtu.be/bNOol5OTasw
Arguably *the* central story of American life in the 21st century.
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/b...
WSJ sub: “Indian Partition went smoothly enough, right? Will try to remember to check this before publishing.”
I found this to be an informative and provocative read - what happened to cognitive science? Authors argue, based on bibliometric and scientometric analysis, that cognitive science as a discipline is basically dead. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Tests are useful for humans because we think slowly and have to massively compress everything due to shitty hardware. Those aren't true for ai. Now, I'm an AI believer, but these recent incredible o3 results don't mean you'll be replaced
Using this popular "draw a scientist" method, my friend has an intervention study and classroom materials that measurably improve how all children including boys (not just girls!) imagine scientists, and their curricula was deleted from federal websites
Well said, @carlbergstrom.com.
I also feel the dismantling of our scientific institutions & funding agencies for basic science is an attack on all scientists, wherever they might be (government or corporate lab, academic institution, ...).
Our collective identities are about advancing knowledge.
logging on
{tinyplot} 0.3.0 is out! 🚨
It's a lightweight #Rstats 📦 to draw beautiful and complex plots, using an ultra-simple and concise syntax.
This is a massive release! @gmcd.bsky.social @zeileis.org and I worked hard to add tons of new themes and plot types.
Check it out!
grantmcdermott.com/tinyplot/
I went through my RL bookmarks, because it seems like finally the rest of the world has caught up to my world, I rediscovered this gem 💎 mpatacchiola.github.io/blog/2016/12... although I suspect nobody wants to learn RL this way now 😜
I've built a machine that can be Confidently Wrong. It can also make pictures that all look a bit the same, as well as make a video of you kissing any celebrity or person you know. In payment, I'd like to boil the world's oceans dry, & steal all literature. For some reason, my head is not on a spike
Garlic in my cooking and vanilla extract in my baking share one guiding principle: I add them with wild abandon, defying the recipe with a mix of audacity and playful disdain.
I don’t have an opinion on TikTok because I’m on Bluesky and that means I’m over 30 years old and most of my opinions are about Tylenol and what’s on Hulu
The monochrome cover image of Nature Astronomy's December issue shows dendritic streamlines depicting galaxies being drawn towards 'basins of attraction', as defined within the Valade et al. paper within the issue.
The December issue, and the final issue of volume 8 of Nature Astronomy, is now available to read: nature.com/natastron/vo...
The wonderful cover image shows the movement of galaxies towards basins of attraction, and is linked to the Valade et al. paper in the issue.
“hole in the ozone layer” levels of erasure. my mom was a project manager who busted her ass for years to make sure IBM was ready for Y2K and completely succeeded, only for it to get turned into a late night joke. funny how the stories of mass collective action to avoid disaster rarely get told
A journalist retraces humanity’s journey out of Africa—on foot
"In 2013 paul salopek, an American journalist, began a trek around the planet. His aim was to follow Homo sapiens’ first migration, out of Africa... He guessed it would take seven years. Eleven years later, he is still walking..."
My milk frother also heats as it froths, and I've discovered that if I add in powdered chocolate, I can make a delightfully frothed hot chocolate in under a minute. This is dangerous knowledge for a man of my considerable appetites and wild, hedonistic disposition
you know who should be inducted into the rock and roll hall of fame? Sisyphus
Cover of a book. A Chinese painting is divided into 29 squares separated by white margins. The text reads: "Twenty-nine goodbyes. An introduction to Chinese poetry. Timothy Billings."
This gem arrived in my mailbox a couple of days ago. Analysis of 29 translations of a single poem by Li Bai. I suspect this wonderful little volume might end up becoming necessary reading for anyone interested in understanding the kinds of choices made when translating poetry.
Column by Michelle Singletary: Shame is common among financial fraud victims, making it all the more important not to inject blame into the mix.
