Bake Off sparks backlash as charity demands apology after 'harmful message' on show causes 'deep concern' for Channel 4 viewers - "charity Coeliac UK has since demanded an 'apology' from the show after the celebrities 'undermined the seriousness' of the disease."
???
YOU SAID IT: NDP politically irrelevant - "The once-proud NDP — which would never compromise on its ideology that formerly stood proudly for medicare, workers’ rights and ordinary Canadians — is now only about being Trudeau’s “yes man” until Singh’s federal pension tenure is realized. Singh announced nationally that the NDP would no longer support the awful Trudeau Liberal government and then, in the very next non-confidence vote, supported Trudeau like an obedient robot. Forget about NDP principles or a commitment he just made to all Canadians; Singh buckled like a tower of cheap champagne glasses to protect his own pension."
‘Not a bad thing’: Chinese students gave tours of National University of Singapore for cash | South China Morning Post - "Chinese postgraduate students were selling tours of the National University of Singapore (NUS) to tourists, amid unhappiness from local students over an influx of mainland visitors. A listing of the two-hour tour, which has since been removed, was found on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu for 273 yuan (US$38). Thirty-one people had purchased the tour, which covered the Central Library, University Town and the NUS Museum, and left mostly positive reviews on Xiaohongshu."
'He ordered 30 plates of chicken rice': NUS students bemoan tourist crowds on campus - "What happens when a diner in front of you orders 30 plates of chicken rice? Well, one National University of Singapore (NUS) student who found herself in this situation had to give up on her order, she said in response to a vox pop question posed by HeyKaki on the problems brought about by the influx of tourists, one which has disrupted life on the campus... When asked how they deal with issues, two of the students said they will leave for school 30 minutes earlier than usual. A student added that she will eat lunch at about 2pm, after the peak period."
NTU, NUS students renting out hostel rooms illegally, some at almost double what uni charges - "Former NUS students who stayed in halls between 2017 and 2023 told ST that the phenomenon was common and one may find "three subletters per block". A former head of a block at NUS' Eusoff Hall said some sublet their rooms because they want to participate in hall sports but do not want to pay for a room to do so. He added that those who rent from students might want to live on campus but do not want to participate in hall activities, usually a requirement to qualify for a room."
Actual Fact Bot: Revived | Facebook - "When Robin Williams appeared on ‘Inside the Actors Studio’ in 2001, an audience member developed a hernia from laughing too hard and had to be taken away in an ambulance."
One Ladybug's Surprise Appearance During A 59-Year-Old Man's Colonoscopy - "As it turns out, ladybugs aren’t the only beetle capable of surviving (in the intact corpse sense) a trip down colon lane. In a series of tweets, gastrointestinal specialist Dr Keith Siau shared several case studies where cockroaches had also been discovered during colonoscopies, proving that even with our advanced science and medicine we remain – sometimes, quite literally – at one with nature."
Meme - @meintobluberilhu: "I sent him like 104 reels while he's asleep rn
HE REPLIED TO ALL 104 REELS INDIVIDUALLY STOP"
Has @SeaweeedBrain_: "love hits crazy when you're both unemployed"
To Avoid Killing Their Pollinators, Venus Fly Traps Put Their Flowers Far Away - "Hank Green recently shared this cool factoid on Twitter: “Venus fly traps have to put their flowers really far away from their traps so they don’t accidentally kill their pollinators and I love it so much.”"
Meme - "You see a puddle I see a cool location *girl having photo taken while on road in puddle*"
"I see a ring worm infection"
kelly kapowski on X - "In 8th grade we had to turn in a weekly journal and the day after I turned in one about the kid I had a crush on in class my teacher redid the seating chart and put us next to each other real wing woman work"
Meme - *Europe*
"red countries. Road distances are shown from furthest to nearest city
blue countries. Road distances are shown from nearest to furthest city"
Harris on X - "Rather than buying that Starbucks for the person behind you, call a local school and pay down a child’s overdue lunch account. The person behind you can afford their own coffee."
Manager Proves HR System Is Auto-Rejecting Candidates Using His Own Resume - "The ATS, or applicant tracking system, has become the bane of every job seeker's existence, basically making submitting a job app the digital equivalent of balling up your resume and hurling it into the ocean like Gob Bluth in "Arrested Development."... The manager posted their story in a comment on a separate Reddit post in which a job seeker from another company lamented a "world record rejection" after applying for a job. Both emails — one containing the confirmation receipt of their application and the other their rejection from the job — arrived at 10:56 a.m. Obviously, there is no possible way that their application was actually reviewed by anything besides a software product with requirements that are entirely too stringent and inscrutable, which is absolutely infuriating on its face. But it may well be that the ATS in question was simply making a deeply stupid error... When the manager brought the issue to upper management, "they fired half of the HR department in the following weeks." It turned out the entire problem resulted from a typographical error with enormous consequences. The manager works in the tech space and was trying to hire developers. But HR had set up the system to look for developers with expertise in not only the wrong development software but a development software THAT DOESN'T EVEN EXIST ANYMORE. "They were looking for an AngularJS developer," he wrote, "while we were looking for an Angular one (different frameworks, similar names)." AngularJS was discontinued in 2010. In 2010! "Since the [ATS] was auto-rejecting profiles without AngularJS in it we literally lost all possible candidates," they explained. "The truly infuriating part was that I consistently talked to them asking for progress and they always told me that they had some candidates that didn't pass the first screening processes (which was false).""
Meme - Woman: "I'VE NEVER BEEN OUT WITH A WHISTLE BEFORE. I'M HAVING SUCH A GREAT TIME!"
Whistle: "ME TOO!"
Woman: "THAT'S ODD, THIS TASTES FUNNY.. SO WHAT KIND OF WHISTLE ARE YOU, AGAIN?"
Whistle: "FINISH YOUR DRINK."
Labour's tax raid on private school fees is in CHAOS - "Labour's tax raid on private tuition fees is in disarray as school heads have been unable to register for VAT on the official UK tax website. Schools logging on have been told they must have a ‘company number’ to register, but because they are charities they do not have one. It left schools spending hours trying to navigate the system via HMRC’s live webchat, with one adviser even admitting: ‘we don’t seem to have the systems in place’... Labour says the controversial tax will pay for 6,500 extra teachers for the state sector. It says private schools should absorb some or all of the cost so that it is not passed on to parents via fee rises. However, many schools have already said they will have to raise fees, and many families will not be able to afford it. Tens of thousands of pupils are expected to be forced from their schools to find places in the state sector, creating added cost for the taxpayer."
Coddled affluent professional on X - "Defective rich kids shouldn’t have fake careers, try to be Good People, or otherwise put on a show of bourgeois respectability. They should have coke habits, dress up like Nazis for Halloween like Prince Harry, and, when they turn 30, lose money with a poorly run vanity business like a bar or art gallery. They should be banned from journalism, NGOs, activism, and other performative, fake work."
Meme - NPC: "Who radicalized you?"
Normal person: "No one. You're so far left that you've been brainwashed to think I'm radical."
Americans Grow Increasingly Dependent on Government Payments - "An old saying has it that he who takes the king's coin becomes the king's man. The idea is that rulers expect obedience in return for money disbursed. That has important implications in a country founded on the ideal of independence from intrusive government but whose citizens are increasingly dependent on the public teat. With taxes collected from some repurposed as transfer payments to other members of the public, a growing share of Americans are becoming the king's men. "Income from government transfers is the fastest-growing major component of Americans' personal income," according to a September report from the bipartisan Economic Innovation Group (EIG). "Nationally, Americans received $3.8 trillion in government transfers in 2022, accounting for 18 percent of all personal income in the United States. That share has more than doubled since 1970." As of 1970, the report's authors found, people in less than 1 percent of counties in the United States received a quarter or more of personal incomes from transfers... The significant rise in the share of personal income represented by government payments occurred because they are no longer targeted at just the "most economically distressed." The biggest growth in transfer payments comes in the form of entitlement programs linked to old age and retirement... The EIG authors worry that growing reliance on transfer payments creates pressure for higher taxes that "could choke off the very economic activity that finances transfers." They're concerned the situation promotes stagnation as people come to value the security of regular checks over taking risks and building businesses that will create future prosperity. At least as worrisome is that the cash flows create a client–patron relationship between Americans who receive government payments and the politicians who create and administer such programs. It's a relationship that empowers the political class by eroding the economic independence of the people over whom they wield authority. It's difficult to say "no" to those on whom you depend for handouts, and it's not obvious that many office-seekers, or voters, want to alter that dynamic."
If the face fits: predicting future promotions from police cadets’ facial traits - "Facial traits are the primary driver of subject perceptions of leadership ability, and those perceptions successfully predict promotional success later in the cadets’ careers. When selecting for leadership potential based on police cadet photographs, respondents predict correct promotional choices at levels well above chance as measured by an AUC score of .70. Further, respondents’ evaluations successfully discriminate both between no promotion and lieutenant promotion, and sergeant versus lieutenant promotions.
Promoting the most capable police officers is a critical feature of public service. Our findings cast a degree of doubt on the purportedly meritocratic foundations of police promotion and selection. Extra-legal information, such as facial features, predicts later promotional success."
Of course, it couldn't possibly be that certain facial features are correlated with other traits that get people promoted, like job performance, because we all know that phrenology is pseudoscience
Meme - Delusional Takes @DelusionPosting: "This is in response to someone's brother committing suicide by the way. 194,000 likes..."
p. @silverwayss: "It really be like this"
"Men without women: *despair*
Women without men: *happy*"
"Bad" Billy Pratt @ @KILLT...: "The reality of being an incel"
We're still told that misandry is a myth
Far-left ‘Mother Jones’ editor accuses airline of ‘Christian nationalism’ after flight attendant wishes passengers a ‘blessed’ night - "The editor-in-chief of the far-left "Mother Jones" publication declared on Friday that it was an example of "creeping Christian nationalism" when a flight attendant on an airline wished her and others to have a "blessed" evening. Clara Jeffery, the EIC of the left-wing outlet, wrote about her apparent experience in a post: "Creeping Christian nationalism alert: Alaska Airlines flight attendant just wished us a 'blessed' night as we landed in SFO (!) to groans. Other adjectives that would have sufficed: great, awesome, fabulous, amazing, fantastic." As of Saturday morning, the post had over 2 million views on X, with many, even those on the left, roundly criticizing the editor's remark about her apparent experience with the flight attendant. In the replies, YIMBYs for Harris cofounder Armand Domalewski wrote "Respectfully, I’m a pretty left leaning guy and I wish folks a blessed day fairly often. It’s just a nice thing to say."... User Peter Henlein wrote, "What do you say to a person when they sneeze around you?" to poke fun at was widely seen as an overreaction."
This is why we can't have nice things
Clearly, the War on Christmas is a right wing conspiracy theory
These are the same people who say things like "The Holy month of Ramadan"
Coddled affluent professional on X - "It’s really been a lost decade, culturally and intellectually. We put the midwits, the censors, and the mentally ill in charge and everything ground to a halt. There’s been some technical progress but only in fields too complex for the iconoclast midwits to properly vandalize."
Thread by @Paracelsus1092 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Any discussion of Mesoamerican archaeology has to be mindful that this one guy - Brigído Lara - managed to forge around 40,000 ceramic objects, manufactured so perfectly they fooled museum curators and researchers for decades. He may be responsible for forging virtually all the Totonac pottery on record, opening up not just the possibility that some artwork might be fake, but that everything ever written about this culture is nonsense. To make matters worse, no one knows whether Lara is lying about the objects he claims. This piece for example, depicting Ehecatl, the Mesoamerican wind god, is supposed to be one of his. But it is so perfect that curators think he's faking that this is a fake. The piece is old enough that Lara would have been a child when he made it, at the earliest, but he knows so much about how it was made that some have suspected he was trained in the art of ceramic forgery - he might be the apprentice to an older master forger. In 1910, Leopoldo Batres published Antiquedades Mejicanas Falsificadas: Falsificacion y Falsificadores, the first book-length study of forgery in Mexican antiques, "It offers an eyewitness account of a work-shop of forgers located near the pyramids of Teotihuacan" Faking archaeological artefacts occurred on a near industrial scale in pre 1910 Mexico. The book has many pictures of forger's workshops and vendors plying their wares. One academic response to Lara's massive output of forged pottery has been to consider them 'original interpretations', and try to find some value in them as pieces of art. Lara is not alone though, although he seems particularly gifted. Entire museum collections, such as the Jubaozhai Museum in Hebei, have been suspected of being fakes. Producing these objects may employ around 250,000 people in China alone."
Emil O W Kirkegaard on X - "Interestingly, there are 3 races/subspecies of Bonobo chimpanzees. Their genetic distances are actually comparable to human populations despite all of them inhabiting a relatively small part of Africa. They even seem to have split about 150kya."
Deep genetic substructure within bonobos
Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - ""SAT scores just reflect zip codes" is probably dead. A new study used a sample of 760,000 military children whose families were randomly assigned to different counties/zips and found living in a +1 SD county or zip code for twenty years upped scores by just 0.05 or 0.19 d:
That 1 SD gap between Blacks and Whites? It's not explained by Blacks living in about 0.6 SD worse neighborhoods. Maybe about 10% is. That's probably to much though, because the instrumental variable analysis suggested the sign of the effect on SAT scores was negative!
The authors had this to say on the negative estimated effect on SAT totals: Looking closely, all of the causal estimates of place effects on SAT scores were at best marginally significant, unlike the effects on attained income, college attendance, and earnings.
The paper is worth a read. It is much less reassuring about impacts on SAT scores than it is about impacts on other aspects of SES. Those effects are small but meaningful, and thankfully not too heterogeneous by group, but that is realistic!"
Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Achievement gaps do not simply reflect geographic sorting. This fact has been known for more than a century now, but some people still don't get it. Short🧵
First: achievement gaps exist within the same schools. This is not just true for race, it is also true for class. When it comes to district-level family incomes by group, we see that intercepts differ. In other words, even when lower-performing groups are wealthier, they tend to do worse than higher-performing groups. If you're reading this, you probably know that this replicates the results for rearing household income. Parental education. And attained education
Consider Reardon, Kalogrides & Shores (2019). They found that even in districts where lower-performing groups had higher SES than Whites, they still tended to perform worse. In this picture, 79% of the mean Black-White gap is independent of SES. At the metro level, 62% was.
It is a pernicious myth that test scores and achievement gaps are mere reflections of geography and that geography plays a major causal role in test scores. The truth is that their association primarily reflects selection."
Crémieux on X - "Some people mistakenly believe tests just reflect your zip code. Differences in student achievement between classrooms are larger than the differences between schools, states, or school districts."
Breaking the Curve: Promises and Pitfalls of Using NAEP Data to Assess the State Role in Student Achievement
Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "There are people who desperately want this to be untrue🧵 One example of this came up earlier this year, when a "Professor of Public Policy and Governance" accused other people of being ignorant about SAT scores because, he alleged, high schools predicted college grades better. The thread in question was, ironically, full of irrelevant points that seemed intended to mislead, accompanied by very obvious statistical errors. For example, one post in it received a Community Note for conditioning on a collider.
But let's ignore the obvious things. I want to focus on this one: the idea that high schools explain more of student achievement than SATs The evidence for this? The increase in R^2 going from a model without to a model with high school fixed effects This interpretation is bad. The R^2 of the overall model did not increase because high schools are more important determinants of student achievement. This result cannot be interpreted to mean that your zip code is more important than your gumption and effort in school. If we open the report, we see this:
Students from elite high schools and from disadvantaged ones receive similar results when it comes to SATs predicting achievement. If high schools really explained a lot, this wouldn't be the case. What we're seeing is a case where R^2 was misinterpreted.
The reason the model R^2 blew up was because there's a fixed effect for every high school mentioned in this national-level dataset That means that all the little differences between high schools are controlled—a lot of variation!—so the model is overfit, explaining the high R^2 This professor should've known better for many reasons. For example, we know there's more variation between classrooms than between school districts when it comes to student achievement. As another example, we know that achievement gaps exist along the whole continuum of school and district quality. If the issue was really zip codes, high schools, and so on, this shouldn't be the case. The other thing this professor should've known is that high school is biased! GPAs are biased too! The bias in GPAs has actually been exploited: elite high schools inflate grades and don't report class ranks, so students appear better than they are. But you know what isn't a biased tool for admissions? Just one thing: test scores."
i/o on X - "73% of Boomer males: "No matter what psychological challenges I face, I will not let them define me."
72% of Gen Z females: "Mental illness is an important part of my identity.""
Phil on X - "Stoicism has been replaced with victimhood."
Colin Wright on X - "This hyperfixation on "identity" really defines our time. The first time I knew something odd was afoot was around 2010 when my (then) girlfriend was upset about something Richard Dawkins said, causing her to claim that she no longer "identified" as an atheist. "What, so you now believe in God?" I asked. "No, I still don't believe in God, I just don't identify as an atheist," she responded. This was utterly baffling to me, as I never viewed atheism as an identity, but rather a label that simply described my lack of belief in God/gods. I still don't understand it. But this highlighted for me the odd and now common phenomenon of the split many people now assert between what they are and how they identify."
Left wing ideology leads to mental illness, and it glorifies it too
Meme - the Rich @Duderichy: "there’s a pervasive idea that when a man gets rich he’s likely to leave his wife for a younger woman but the higher a man’s income the lower the chance of divorce"
Companies are firing Gen Z workers soon after hiring them. What’s behind their job market struggles? - "one in six employers were reluctant to hire Gen Z workers mainly due to their reputation for being entitled and easily offended. Moreover, more than half said that this generation, which refers to people born between 1997 and the early 2010s, lacks a strong work ethic, struggles with communication, doesn't handle feedback well, and is generally unprepared for the demands of the workforce. Holly Schroth, senior lecturer at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, explained that Gen Z's focus on extracurricular activities to boost their college competitiveness rather than gaining job experience has led to “unrealistic expectations” about the workplace and how to deal with their bosses. “They [Gen Z] don't know basic skills for social interaction with customers, clients, and co-workers, nor workplace etiquette”... Around six in ten companies included in the survey reported firing a recent university graduate they hired this year... some of their Gen Z workers struggled to manage their workload, were frequently late, and did not dress or speak appropriately. A separate report from April found that Generation Z workers were overly reliant on parental support during their job search. According to the survey that was conducted by ResumeTemplates and which included responses from nearly 1,500 young job seekers, 70 per cent admitted to asking their parents for help in the job search process. Another 25 per cent even brought their parents to interviews, while many others had their parents submit job applications and write resumes for them."
Meditation can be harmful – and can even make mental health problems worse - "A 2022 study, using a sample of 953 people in the US who meditated regularly, showed that over 10% of participants experienced adverse effects which had a significant negative impact on their everyday life and lasted for at least one month. According to a review of over 40 years of research that was published in 2020, the most common adverse effects are anxiety and depression. These are followed by psychotic or delusional symptoms, dissociation or depersonalisation, and fear or terror. Research also found that adverse effects can happen to people without previous mental health problems, to those who have only had a moderate exposure to meditation and they can lead to long-lasting symptoms."
Number of pubs may reach ‘critically low’ levels with less than 1,000 set to stay - "Britain may have less than 1,000 pubs by 2074. The number of pubs in the country has fallen significantly in the last decade – from 41,015 operating in 2013 to the 38,175 with their doors open in 2023."