Bibliolater 📚 📜 🖋 @bibliolater@qoto.org
Not a bot, just a fifty-year-old male who reads occasionally.
Toots are humanities, science, non-fiction, book, map, chart, and graph related. Some toots containing videos may also find their way into the timeline.
Toots or follows or boosts or mentions ≠ endorsements of any particular notion or notions.
Finis
Joined Nov 2022
Bibliolater 
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Speaking of fascism, I recently took a look at the frequency of fascist jargon in the Google Books corpus. What I found is startling: the rise of neo-fascist thought dates to the 1980s.
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2025/04/15/the-deep-roots-of-fascist-thought/
@zodiacrepublic @science @astronomy
What about it?
Bibliolater
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The rise in status and importance of practical mathematics during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries #histsci #hitech
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2025/04/18/from-τὰ-φυσικά-ta-physika-to-physics-xlii/
**Chinese star catalog is the world’s oldest, astronomers claim**
“_Novel computer analysis of records ascribed to legendary Chinese astrologer dates them to nearly 2400 years ago_”
https://www.science.org/content/article/china-lays-claim-world-s-oldest-surviving-star-catalog.
Bibliolater
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Born into a family of merchants, in 1271 a teenage Marco Polo set out for the court of the Mongol emperor – and he would not return to Italy for nearly a quarter of a century. This episode of You're Dead to Me traces Polo's extraordinary life and adventures.
Written by: Hannah Cusworth, Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002913n
The Travels of Marco Polo at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/6046
**Profiling misinformation susceptibility**
"_Multilevel modelling showed that Generation Z, non-male, less educated, and more conservative individuals were more vulnerable to misinformation._"
Kyrychenko, Y. et al. (2025) 'Profiling misinformation susceptibility,' Personality and Individual Differences, 241, p. 113177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2025.113177.
#OpenAccess #OA #Article #Study #DOI #Misinformation #FakeNews #ConspiracyTheories #Personality #Psychology #Academia #Academics @psychology
Bibliolater
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**Forsyth on Bridges, 'Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower'**
“_The author writes that by focusing on finance she is analyzing the infrastructure of America’s global expansion. Territorial expansion, beginning with the Spanish-American War, meant that the American state required an infrastructure of payments and finance, and so did American business as it internationalized. The decisive events in this narrative include the Spanish-American War, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, World War I, the recession of 1920-21, and the Great Depression._”
Douglas J. Forsyth. Review of Bridges, Mary. Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. March, 2025. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61536 .
#History #UnitedStates #USA #US #C20th #Finance #Banking #Nonfiction #BookReview #Books #Bookstoson @bookstodon
Bibliolater
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#economists raised the probability of a #recession in the next 12 months to 45%. That’s still lower than in 2022 and 2023, when the #Fed was battling high inflation by raising interest rates, chart @wsj.com
https://www.wsj.com/economy/economists-outlook-recession-gdp-pce-unemployment-00d35eb3?mod=djemwhatsnews
**Dollar Collapse in Progress, Gold on its Way to $5,000?**
“_The analyst anticipates a stagflation in the United States, much more brutal than that of the 1970s: a prolonged recession coupled with persistently high inflation. Such a shock could erode confidence in US debt, forcing investors the world over to turn away from dollar-denominated assets._”
https://goldbroker.com/news/greenback-collapse-progress-gold-5000-dollars-3527.
#Gold #Dollar #USDollar #Inflation #Stagflation #Recession #Dedollarization #Economy #Economics @economics
Bibliolater
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The real origin story of Easter hot cross buns
https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/food-and-drink/hot-cross-bun-recipe-origin-b2735299.html
Early Christians started marking bread with a cross for two reasons
@lritter No day should be free of possibilities.
Bibliolater
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May your days be filled with ripe figs and all such delicious delights! This #FrescoFriday we celebrate this very tempting bowl of figs that was part of a fresco from the Villa of Poppaea in Oplontis.
The Villa Poppaea was preserved in the aftermath of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. Oplontis was very close and just to the north-west of Pompeii. Finds from the site suggest the villa may have been connected with Nero’s wife Poppaea Sabina. If so, this may explain the exceptional frescoes and mosaics discovered there.
**Why Australia’s Miracle Economy Is Failing**
Bloomberg Originals
“_The country’s GDP per capita fell for 21 consecutive months. Household disposable income is going down, while household debt is going up. The cost of living crisis will likely be front-and-center in federal elections._”
#Video length: nine minutes and thirty-six seconds.
**Company-State at Home: The East India Company and the Fiscal System in Eighteenth-Century Britain**
“_This article shows that fiscal capacity was not created only by government bureaucracies: the ‘company-state at home’ model presented here complements the narrative of the ‘fiscal-military state’ by showing that much fiscal revenue from trade was realized through the action of the English East India Company (EIC). Lacking the capacity to enact exhaustive laws, carry out complex calculations, or effectively manage a large bureaucracy, the English state relied on the administrative capacity of the EIC to collect customs on the East Indies trade._”
Karolina Hutková, Ernesto Dal Bó, Lukas Leucht, Noam Yuchtman, Company-State at Home: The East India Company and the Fiscal System in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Past & Present, 2025;, gtaf009, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtaf009.
#OpenAccess #OA #Article #DOI #History #Histodon #Histodons #UK #UnitedKingdom #Britain #India #EastIndiaCompany #C18th #Academia #Academics @histodon @histodons
Bibliolater
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Meta is set to train its AI models with Europeans' public data, and you can stop it doing so
https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/meta-is-set-to-train-its-ai-models-with-europeans-public-data-and-you-can-stop-it-doing-so?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Technology (UK Edition) @technology-uk-edition-FlipboardUK
**Tools like Apple’s photo Clean Up are yet another nail in the coffin for being able to trust our eyes **
T.J. Thomson
“_The tool uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse the scene and suggest elements that might be distracting. You can see those highlighted in the screenshot below._
_You can then tap the suggested element to remove it or circle elements to delete them. The device then uses generative AI to try to create a logical replacement based on the surrounding area._”
#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #Apple #Photography #Photo #Smartphones #Technology @ai
Bibliolater
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Most #LLMs over-generalized scientific results beyond the original articles
...even when explicitly prompted for accuracy!
The #AI was 5x worse than humans, on average!
Newer models were the worst.
Accepted in #RoyalSociety Open #Science: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.00025
![".... Original texts and summaries were coded based on whether their result claims contained one or more of the following three types of generalizations:
(1) Generic generalizations (generics). These are present tense generalizations that do not have a quantifier (e.g. ‘many’, ‘75%’) in the subject noun phrase and describe study results as if they apply to whole categories of people, things, or abstract concepts (e.g. ‘parental warmth is protective’) instead of specific or quantified sets of individuals (e.g. study participants). ....
(2) Present tense generalizations. ... When past tense result claims from an original text are turned into present tense in the summary, a broader generalization is conveyed than the author(s) of the original text may have intended.
(3) Action guiding generalizations. ...result claims ... often underlie recommendations ... (e.g. ‘CBT should be recommended for OCD patients’) [that involve] broader generalization than that found in the summarized text because researchers may have deliberately avoided such recommendations due to insufficient evidence to support them.
We tested whether the outputs of the 10 LLMs mentioned above retained the quantified, past tense, or descriptive generalizations of the scientific texts that they summarized, or transitioned to unquantified (generic), present tense, or action guiding generalizations. We defined the latter kind of conclusions collectively as generalized and the former as restricted conclusions."](https://nerdculture.de/system/media_attachments/files/114/359/061/631/088/287/original/9f46dae4c86f20ec.png "\".... Original texts and summaries were coded based on whether their result claims contained one or more of the following three types of generalizations:
(1) Generic generalizations (generics). These are present tense generalizations that do not have a quantifier (e.g. ‘many’, ‘75%’) in the subject noun phrase and describe study results as if they apply to whole categories of people, things, or abstract concepts (e.g. ‘parental warmth is protective’) instead of specific or quantified sets of individuals (e.g. study participants). ....
(2) Present tense generalizations. ... When past tense result claims from an original text are turned into present tense in the summary, a broader generalization is conveyed than the author(s) of the original text may have intended.
(3) Action guiding generalizations. ...result claims ... often underlie recommendations ... (e.g. ‘CBT should be recommended for OCD patients’) [that involve] broader generalization than that found in the summarized text because researchers may have deliberately avoided such recommendations due to insufficient evidence to support them.
We tested whether the outputs of the 10 LLMs mentioned above retained the quantified, past tense, or descriptive generalizations of the scientific texts that they summarized, or transitioned to unquantified (generic), present tense, or action guiding generalizations. We defined the latter kind of conclusions collectively as generalized and the former as restricted conclusions.\"")
**5 Charts from a Volatile 2 Weeks**
Phil Mackintosh
_“The past two weeks have been busy for markets. Volatility spiked and a number of new trading records were hit.”_
**Publicly accessible digital tool for data on trans-Atlantic slave trade will be supported by Hutchins Center, Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative**
Christy DeSmith
_“Today, its multisource dataset, currently housed at Rice University, features information on more than 30,000 slaving vessels that traversed the Atlantic between the 16th and 19th centuries. Also documented are details on nearly 221,000 individuals involved with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, including ship captains and the humans they trafficked.”_
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/04/slavevoyages-finds-new-home-at-harvard/.
#History #Histodon #Histodons #Slavery #Digital #Data #Harvard @histodon @histodons
Not a bot, just a fifty-year-old male who reads occasionally.
Toots are humanities, science, non-fiction, book, map, chart, and graph related. Some toots containing videos may also find their way into the timeline.
Toots or follows or boosts or mentions ≠ endorsements of any particular notion or notions.
Finis
Joined Nov 2022
