🇫🇷 💶 **Debt of the general government according to the Maastricht definition - first quarter 2025**
"_At the end of the first quarter 2025, the Maastricht debt accounted for €3,345.4 billion ; it increased by €40.2 billion, after +€3.8 billion in the previous quarter. Expressed as percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it stood at 113.9 %, after 113.2 % in Q4 2024._"
🔗 https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/8599494.
#Data #DataViz #Statistics #Debt #France #GDP #Economy #Economics @economics
🇬🇧 🇪🇸 🇵🇹 📖 **No Country for Travellers British visitors to Spain and Portugal, 1760–1820**
"_The travellers’ memoirs reflect changing perceptions of Spain and Portugal as modernisation raised new hopes that vied with pessimism and ancient prejudice, and also the persistence of cultural stereotypes, while the counterintuitive relationship between civilian travel and armed conflict emerges through a case study of the Peninsular War._"
🔗 https://uclpress.co.uk/book/no-country-for-travellers/.
#OpenAccess #OA #History #Histodons #Travel #UK #UnitedKingdom #Spain #Portugal #Ebooks #Books #Bookstodon @histodons @bookstodons
📖 **A Short History of Stupidity by Stuart Jeffries review – comfortably dumb?**
"_It’s not all straight philosophy. Jeffries gives us affectionate readings of Don Quixote and Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, dips into Shakespeare’s fools and the rich menu of stupidities available in King Lear, as well as making the odd excursus into cognitive science._"
#Philosophy #History #Stupidity #Review #BookReview #Books #Bookstodon @philosophy @bookstodon
**‘Keseph’: The Use of Silver Money in the Southern Levant from the Middle Bronze Age to the End of the Iron Age (~ 2000–600 BC)**
"_The Southern Levant saw significant use of silver during the final stages of the Middle Bronze Age, with the first silver-currency hoards appearing at Shiloh and Gezer (~ 1650/1600–1600/1550 BC), predating other regions. Although silver was temporarily replaced by gold in the Late Bronze Age, it re-emerged as the dominant form of money by the Late Bronze Age IIB, ~ 1300 BC, a status it retained until the end of the Iron Age (~ 600 BC), despite occasional shortages._"
Eshel, T. ‘Keseph’: The Use of Silver Money in the Southern Levant from the Middle Bronze Age to the End of the Iron Age (~ 2000–600 BC). J World Prehist 38, 5 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10963-025-09191-7.
#OpenAccess #OA #Article #Archaeology #Archaeodons #History #BronzeAge #IronAge #Sliver #Money #Levant #NearEast #Academia @archaeodons
**Morphodynamic Foundations of Sumer**
"_We propose that tidal irrigation offers a plausible jumpstarting mechanism for high-yield, diversified agriculture providing an impetus for urbanization. As access to sea was restricted by delta build-up and tides shifted with the advancing deltaic coast, intensified reliance on mercurial river regimes eventually led to the expansive fluvial irrigation network of Early Dynastic city-states._"
Giosan L, Goodman R (2025) Morphodynamic Foundations of Sumer. PLOS ONE 20(8): e0329084. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0329084.
#OpenAccess #OA #Research #Article #Sumer #Morphodynamic #Rivers #Irrigation #Paleooceanography #Agriculture #Academia
From Duke University Press:
New Book: Living On After Failure
Save 30% with coupon code SAVE30
More info: https://t.e2ma.net/message/d52wmo/5e9dtoac
@rebeccasenese Completely agree!
**The Politics of Small Business Owners**
"_...we find consistent evidence that small business owners are more likely to identify with and vote for right-wing parties. We find that this tendency cannot be fully explained by factors that cause people to select into being small business owners. Rather, we identify a key operational channel: the experience of being a small business owner leads people to adopt conservative views on government regulation._"
Malhotra, N., Margalit, Y. and Shi, S. (2025) ‘The Politics of Small Business Owners’, British Journal of Political Science, 55, p. e94. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123425000274.
#OpenAccess #OA #Article #RightWing #Conservative #Politics #PoliticalScience #Business #Economics #Sociology #Academia @politicalscience
**Gold prices hit all-time high on rising uncertainty, while U.S. stock futures little changed**
"_Continuous gold futures GC00 +0.99% on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose about 1% to a high of $3,552.40 an ounce on Monday. Gold was most recently trading around $3,551. The precious metal has seen its price soar about 34% year to date._"
🌍 🛢️ **Ranked: The World’s Top 25 Countries by Oil Consumption**
🔗 https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-worlds-top-25-countries-by-oil-consumption/.
You are welcome.
📰 **You are what you read: Antagonistic narcissism predicts increased preference for antisocial and reduced preference for prosocial information**
"_In two studies, we investigated how antagonistic narcissism affects one’s choice of news headlines. We also examined narcissists’ social motives, (affective) empathy, and sensation seeking as potential underlying mechanisms (S2)._"
Chen, J. et al. (2025) 'You are what you read: Antagonistic narcissism predicts increased preference for antisocial and reduced preference for prosocial information,' Journal of Research in Personality, p. 104653. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2025.104653.
#OpenAccess #OA #Article #Psychology #Personality #Narcissism #Empathy #News #Headlines #Academia @psychology
"Japan suffers through its hottest summer on record"; "June to August was 2.36 degrees hotter than average", "the third straight record for summer heat".
The Japan Meteorological Agency "also indicated that the rise in temperatures could be speeding up."
"Rates were at 1% for a full year! That had simply never occurred before in history. If you look at the late 1950s and early 1960s, rates would dip below 2%, but only for weeks at a time."
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/barry-ritholtz-causes-financial-crisis/
📚 **find a book you actually like in under 3 minutes**
#Video length: two minutes and forty-nine seconds.
🖥️ **ChatGPT only talks in clichés – here’s why that’s a threat to human creativity**
"_In short, ChatGPT statistically flattened human dialogues in the context of our enquiry, replacing them with a polished, plausible but ultimately rather dry template._"
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology #Tech #ChatGPT #Language
#ThrowBackPaper How Alternative for Germany made radical right-wing populism almost normal in 🇩🇪 (free preprint)
https://www.kai-arzheimer.com/right-wing-populism-germany-normalisation/
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