Show newer

Global population growth peaked six decades ago

"The growth rate peaked in 1963 at over 2% per year, and since then, it has more than halved, falling to less than 1% by 2020."

ourworldindata.org/data-insigh

@data

How do we use the Earth’s land?

"There are a few pretty big takeaways here. For one, the fact that agriculture takes up almost half of habitable land. Humankind has, over the past 1000 years, turned 120,000 square kilometers of wild habitat into farmland — an area equal to the USA 13 times over.

That, of course, makes agriculture the absolute number one cause of deforestation and our planet’s diminishing biodiversity."

blog.datawrapper.de/land-use-a

@data

attribution: mxwegeleSasin Tipchai, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

John Milton’s notes discovered

"John Milton’s handwritten annotations have been identified in a copy of Holinshed's Chronicles, a vital source of inspiration for the Paradise Lost poet."

cam.ac.uk/stories/john-miltons

@poetry @literature

attribution: William Faithorne, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

Episode 294 - The Rise and Fall of Epirus

"Theodoros Doukas the leader of the Roman state of Epirus leads his people to ever greater heights in the 1220s. He captures Thessalonica and drives towards Constantinople itself. Doukas declares himself Emperor but does he have the resources necessary to reach the Hagia Sophia?"

shows.acast.com/b53d3462-8bc8-

@histodon @histodons

attribution: Orion 8, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

Backstabbing, bluffing and playing dead: has AI learned to deceive? – podcast

"Dr Peter Park, an AI existential safety researcher at MIT and author of the research, tells Ian Sample about the different examples of deception he uncovered, and why they will be so difficult to tackle as long as AI remains a black box."

theguardian.com/science/audio/

@science

attribution: Orion 8, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

2023 was the northern hemisphere’s hottest summer in 2,000 years

"Looking back at the past 2,000 years, the team searched for the warmest summers on record to see how they compared to 2023. They found that the hottest June to August in the pre-industrial era was in 246 CE when temperatures were around 0.88⁰C above average.

This record stood for over 1,000 years, before being broken repeatedly since the late 1990s."

nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2024/m

@climatechange @geography

attribution: Geralt, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

Thomas Willis (1621-1675) : Neurologist, Chemist, Physician

"Willis is not only credited to be the founder of neurology, but he is also seen as the father of comparative neuroanatomy, as his work, in particular Cerebri anatome and De anima brutorum, compare the human brain with that of other species in ‘search for specific human abilities in cognitive functions’ (Molnár, p. 334)."

stjohnscollegelibraryoxford.or

@science @earlymodern @histodon @histodons

attribution: Rijksmuseum, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

"A Bayesian analysis showed that participants had high expectations and performed descriptively better irrespective of the AI description when a sham-AI was present. Using cognitive modeling, we could trace this advantage back to participants gathering more information."

Agnes Mercedes Kloft, Robin Welsch, Thomas Kosch, and Steeven Villa. 2024. "AI enhances our performance, I have no doubt this one will do the same": The Placebo effect is robust to negative descriptions of AI. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 299, 1–24. doi.org/10.1145/3613904.364263

@science @technology

attribution: Madhav-Malhotra-003, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

Band of Brothers: the Jesuits

"Ignatius of Loyola’s movement begins modestly, but winds up having a global impact on education and philosophy."

@earlymodern @philosophy

attribution: Orion 8, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

🇺🇸 How Christianity’s Decline Impacts White Christians’ Emotional and Attitudinal Response

"Racial resentment predicts Christian nationalism, Christian persecution beliefs, and White persecution beliefs. In other words, negative stereotypes about Black Americans are related to Christian nationalism and persecution beliefs. But while Whiteness and Christianity are undeniably intertwined among Whites, our experiment provides evidence that they cannot be conflated."

religioninpublic.blog/2024/05/

@politicalscience

Image : IonlyPlayz, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

The History of Ions: Unveiling the Electric Charge

"Around 1830, Faraday posited the existence of charged particles within molecules that migrate between electrodes during electrolysis—an idea ahead of its time."

historyofsciences.blogspot.com

@science

attribution: Science History Institute, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

"I analyze Machiavelli's frequent references to hope throughout his corpus to offer an explanation of what he means by ‘hope,” examine the relation between hope and fear, and identify the benefits, dangers, and limits of these two foundational and complementary passions."

Mitchell, C.E. (2024) ‘Beyond the Politics of Fear: Machiavelli on Hope’, The Review of Politics, pp. 1–23. doi: doi.org/10.1017/S0034670524000.

@politicalscience

attribution: Peace Palace Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

Episode 176: All the World’s a Playhouse

"In this episode, we look at how distant cultures were contributing to the growth of English and how Shakespeare’s acting company built a world-famous theater in the late 1500s."

@earlymodern

attribution: Orion 8, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

"The ultimate goal, I suggest, was a translatio imperii; the establishment of an imperial monarchy in the west that could rival the Habsburg empire, and which in time, perhaps, might even come to imitate the universal glory of the Roman imperium. Not the American Atlantic seaboard, but rather the continent of Europe, with its arms, its learning, and its treasure, was the goal of Bacon’s early imperial vision."

Serjeantson, R. (2024) ‘Francis Bacon, colonisation, and the limits of Atlanticism’, History of European Ideas, pp. 1–14. doi: doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2024..

@histodon @histodons @earlymodern

attribution: Yale Center for British Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

"...our data suggested that the Japanese population could be best modeled by admixtures of three ancestral components (hereafter K1 to K3). K1 to K3 were the highest in Okinawa, Northeast, and West, respectively (Fig. 1D and table S4). K1 (Okinawa) component maintains a relatively stable fraction of around 12% in Hondo subgroups, except for South (which is a region adjacent to Okinawa), with a higher proportion of 22%. K2 (Northeast) and K3 (West) components showed a cline from West to East."

Xiaoxi Liu et al., Decoding triancestral origins, archaic introgression, and natural selection in the Japanese population by whole-genome sequencing. Sci. Adv. 10, eadi8419 (2024). DOI: doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adi8419

@science

The age structure of populations varies widely across countries

"Over the last 70 years, birth rates have declined in most countries, and life expectancy has increased, leading to aging populations worldwide."

ourworldindata.org/data-insigh

"Banana republics are Central American and Caribbean nations exploited by multinational businesses and imperialist governments."

Stoyack, Aaron. "What Is a Banana Republic?" TheCollector.com, thecollector.com/what-is-a-ban (accessed May 4, 2024).

@histodon @histodons

attribution: Rosendahl, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

🇬🇧 🇪🇺 "Our results show that individuals who lacked wealth are less likely to support leaving the EU, explaining why so many Brexit voters were wealthy, in terms of their property wealth."

Green, J. and Pahontu, R.L. (2024) ‘Mind the Gap: Why Wealthy Voters Support Brexit’, British Journal of Political Science, pp. 1–21. doi: doi.org/10.1017/S0007123423000.

@politicalscience

attribution: TeroVesalainen, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

"Even though it was hoped that machines might overcome human bias, this assumption often fails due to a problematic or theoretically implausible selection of variables that are fed into the model and because of small size, low representativeness, and presence of bias in the training data [5.]."

Suchotzki, K. and Gamer, M. (2024) 'Detecting deception with artificial intelligence: promises and perils,' Trends in Cognitive Sciences [Preprint]. doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.04.

@science @psychology

attribution: Madhav-Malhotra-003, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil

Show older
Qoto Mastodon

QOTO: Question Others to Teach Ourselves
An inclusive, Academic Freedom, instance
All cultures welcome.
Hate speech and harassment strictly forbidden.