henry copeland @hc

Creating https://t.co/yaIkIOcF20, an online toolkit the average person can use for personal (n-of-1) experiments. Way back when: Y84, bond trader, journalist.

Recent quotes:

Do smartphones and social media really harm teens’ mental health?

To try and make sense of the conflicting literature, researchers have done dozens of reviews analysing many studies together, again with varying results. Many have found relatively weak associations and small effects of these technologies on mental health. One 2020 analysis3 of more than 80 reviews concluded that there was, on average, a “negative but very small” association between adolescents’ use of digital technology, and social media in particular, and psychological well-being. A 2024 literature review4 by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine “did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level”. It’s also unclear in some studies, say Odgers and some other researchers, which comes first: whether social media causes depression, for instance, or whether young people who are depressed are more likely to spend time on social media. “We might have the arrow pointing in the wrong direction,” Odgers says.
#depression #social-media #causality - nature.com

Transcript: What Does Trump See in Putin? - Fiona Hill – The Singju Post

There was all kinds of menace in what Putin had said. He chooses words very carefully. Many times when Putin and Trump are interacting, Putin’s actually making fun of him. It’s just completely lost in the translation. I can give lots of episodes of this or he’s goading him and urging him onto something because he’s trying to kind of see how he will react. And the translation, you know, smooths over all of that. That context is obviously missing and he doesn’t do a readout afterwards. And, you know, we heard, for example, that Witkow spent several hours one on one with Putin.
#trump #Russia #putin #translation - singjupost.com

Is the international monetary system “unfair”? | Banque de France

Over the longer term, the geopolitical and climate uncertainty could push Europe to finance a growing portion of its public investment jointly, by increasing the European budget and issuing common European debt. The sovereign debt of large euro area countries will also continue to provide a close substitute for a genuine European debt instrument, provided these economies comply with European fiscal rules.
#debt #mar-a-lago-accord #dollar - banque-france.fr

What Is the Average HRV? Check This Heart Rate Variability Chart

Heart rate variability (HRV) measures the variation in milliseconds (ms) between your heartbeats. HRV is linked to your autonomic nervous system (ANS) and the balance between the parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) and sympathetic (fight-or-flight) branches. “What we measure at Oura is largely parasympathetic activity, due to how the parasympathetic system impacts heart rate beat-by-beat,” explains Altini.
#health #hrv - ouraring.com

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies – Henry Farrell

Yet they will also have wider and more profound cultural consequences. We don’t yet know if these consequences will be as great as those of earlier technologies like print, markets, or bureaucracies, but thinking of them as cultural technologies increases rather than decreases their potential impact. These earlier technologies were central to the extensive social transformations of the 18th and 19th centuries, both as causes and effects.
#LLM #McLuhan - henryfarrell.net

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies – Henry Farrell

But these systems do not merely summarize this information, like library catalogs, Internet search, and Wikipedia. They also can reorganize and reconstruct representations or “simulations” (1) of this information at scale and in novel ways, like markets, states and bureaucracies. Just as market prices are lossy representations of the underlying allocations and uses of resources, and government statistics and bureaucratic categories imperfectly represent the characteristics of underlying populations, so too Large Models are ‘lossy JPEGs’ (6) of the data corpora on which they have been trained.
#LLM #McLuhan #simulation - henryfarrell.net

Large AI models are cultural and social technologies – Henry Farrell

Adopting Herbert Simon’s terminology (1), large models are a new variant of the “artificial systems of human society” that process information to enable large-scale coordination. Our central point here is not just that these technological innovations, like all other innovations, will have cultural and social consequences. Rather we argue that Large Models are themselves best understood as a particular type of cultural and social technology. They are analogous to such past technologies as writing, print, markets, bureaucracies, and representative democracies. Then we can ask the separate question about what the effects of these systems will be. New technologies that aren’t themselves cultural or social, such as steam and electricity, can have cultural effects. Genuinely new cultural technologies, Wikipedia for example, may have limited effects. However, many past cultural and social technologies also had profound, transformative effects on societies, for good and ill, and this is likely to be true for Large Models.
#social-media #LLM - henryfarrell.net

NY ‘Times’ Crossword Editor Will Shortz Is Back in the Game

The decades-stale fill of the pre-Shortz crosswords, when any reference less than 25 years old was deemed suspect, has been replaced by BABYSHARK. Female constructors and constructors of color have ticked up but still fall far short of parity. (The Times runs an annual Diverse Crossword Constructor Fellowship to try to address this.) When Shortz started out, he was the Times’ sole full-time puzzle employee; now, there are roughly 100. The main crossword has been joined by the Mini and new games like Wordle and Connections with more likely to come. The “Games” department is a major moneymaker and subscription driver to an increasingly polyvalent company. The paper is cagey about specific numbers, but more than 11 billion of its puzzles were solved last year. More than 150 crossword submissions come in every week, of which 10 to 15 percent make it to the weekly Thursday “maybe” meeting. Shortz has the final say.
#quizlab - vulture.com

Do You Have Restless Legs Syndrome (RLS)? Treatment Advice Has Changed > News > Yale Medicine

Specifically, the academy changed its previous strong recommendation for the use of dopamine agonists to a conditional recommendation against them in response to clinical trials, longitudinal studies, and the experience of doctors in the field showing the drugs cause augmentation. This affects medications including the drugs pramipexole (Mirapex®) and ropinirole (Requip®) among others. “What really moved the needle on these drugs is an increase in the number of people who take them and develop augmentation,” Dr. Koo says. “It takes years to develop augmentation, but many of the patients who were started on these medicines in the early 2000s, when they were considered breakthrough medications for RLS, have been on them now for 20-plus years.”
#dopamine #augmentation - yalemedicine.org

The Echoes of Hitler

“If Tom can be master, what is to prevent Dick and Harry from having their turn too?” Hitler asks, with the implication that Dick and Harry are imbeciles. “We cannot be too sharp in condemning the absurd notion that geniuses can be born from general elections,” he says, because the majority “is not only a representative of stupidity, but of cowardice as well,” and thus democracy means “placing the ultimate decision in a matter in the hands of men totally lacking in every prerequisite to the task,” so that “the decision is always made by a majority of ignoramuses and incompetents.” It is “the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy.” It is the good of the nation rather than equal participation that should matter: “The law of democracy seems holier to such a principle-monger than the welfare of a nation.”
#USAUSA #democracy #MAGA #fascism #hitler - currentaffairs.org

The Echoes of Hitler

“The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture…”
#racism #GOP #MAGA #hitler - currentaffairs.org

The Horrifying Fascist Manifesto Endorsed By J.D. Vance

Notably, Posobiec and Lisec do not seem to care at all about civil liberties. They say that they “believe in beauty, truth, law, and order.” Tolerance and freedom of expression are absent from that list. They are very explicit in saying that democracy is not a priority, admiringly quoting Franco saying “we do not believe in government through the voting booth.” They comment that “Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.” The “great American counterrevolution to depose the Cultural Marxists” must be conducted “with the resolve of Franco and the thoroughness of McCarthy.” Beyond Franco, McCarthy, and Pinochet, their models include “Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Pyotr Wrangel, [and] Chiang Kai-shek.” These men were not squeamish about using violence, or terribly concerned with popular legitimacy.
#USAUSA #trump #democracy #MAGA - currentaffairs.org

‘Time for It to Die’: The Chaotic Killing Off of the Government

Let’s start with the weather. The Verge reports that the Trump administration is canceling leases for facilities crucial to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s many missions, and plans to lay off half of its employees. One cancellation on the list is the National Weather Service’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction in College Park, Maryland. There are nine centers specializing in hurricanes, storm predictions, flight safety, weather forecasts, and other essential information (and I hope those nine links are still active by the time you read this). One of them, the Environmental Modeling Center, is the data nerve center that produces daily forecasts for meteorologists and consumers. I’d like to keep those, thank you very much.
#DOGE - thebulwark.com

He Gave a Name to What Many Christians Feel - The New York Times

On the Christian right, then, a thesis is emerging: If conservative Christians are no longer a “moral majority” but a moral minority, they must shift tactics. They ought to be less concerned with persuading the rest of the country they are relevant and can fit perfectly well in secular spaces. They don’t. Instead, they must consider abandoning mainstream institutions like public schools and build their own alternatives. They must pursue ownership of businesses and real estate. And they must stop triangulating away from difficult teachings on matters like sexuality and gender differences. Resilience over relevance. “Like the Hebrews crossing the Jordan after 40 years in the desert, evangelicals have entered unfamiliar territory,” Mr. Renn writes in his book, issued by a major evangelical publisher in 2024. “Finding a path in this fundamentally unknown world will require a different approach from the strategies of the past.”
#hoosiers #christian - nytimes.com

German

Zumutung (exorbitantly unreasonable demand).
#vocab - mail.google.com

Proposed Cuts to SSI Would Hurt Disabled Children and Their Families | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

SSI provides monthly benefits to low-income seniors and disabled people, including children; it is the only federal income support targeted to families caring for children with disabilities and reaches only the lowest-income and most severely impaired children, who tend to need the most significant support. These children have conditions such as Down syndrome, cerebral palsy, autism, intellectual disability, and blindness. About 1 million households with disabled children receive SSI benefits averaging about $800 a month.
#trump #medicaid #ssi - cbpp.org

Terminating pandemics with smartwatches | PNAS Nexus | Oxford Academic

Smartwatches can detect physiological factors that may be associated with infection such as changes in heart rate and heart rate variability, sleep patterns, activity levels, and skin temperature (11, 12). When integrated with machine learning models, these digital biomarkers of infection have been shown to be useful in detecting infections before symptom onset (11, 13).
#prediction #coronavirus #hrv #resting-heart-rate #influenza - academic.oup.com

Terminating pandemics with smartwatches | PNAS Nexus | Oxford Academic

The smartwatch's day of disease detection and accuracy vary between pathogens and were informed using data from randomized clinical trials (11, 13, 17). We estimated that smartwatches would have 88% sensitivity in detecting COVID-19 variants (13), 90% sensitivity in detecting pandemic influenza (11), and 94% sensitivity in detecting seasonal influenza (17) and that smartwatches could detect COVID-19 infection 3 days before symptom onset (13), pandemic influenza 36 h before symptom onset (11), and seasonal influenza 23 h before symptom onset (17).
#prediction #coronavirus #mobile #resting-heart-rate #influenza - academic.oup.com

The Carter Reader | Carter Brooks | Substack

I’ve found cultivating this quality of being ok being overwhelmed is mostly about reframing things. For example, reframing the purpose of meditation from an effort to calm the world down, to instead cultivating enough experience of stillness to be able to stay centered in the chaotic moments. One can also put oneself into more chaotic situations intentionally, to build capacity to endure them, which is why going to Burning Man is not just hedonistic fucking off, but can also be an important collective muscle building for the anticipated future unfolding. For Trump’s reelection the challenge is to stay focused and manage the consequences without getting thrown off by the cruel intent and the flaunting of asshole politics.
#meditation #burningman #absurdity - carterbrooks.substack.com

The exercise type that will help you beat insomnia

Using this, detailed analysis showed that strength/resistance exercise improved the PSQI by 5.75 points. Aerobic exercise improved the PQSI by 3.76 while combination exercise improved it by 2.54. The researchers concluded: “Exercise that strengthens muscles, rather than aerobic or combination exercises, is the most effective way to enhance sleep quality.”
#exercise #sleep - telegraph.co.uk

Does Anyone Really Know You? | The New Yorker

The philosopher Stanley Cavell describes it beautifully in an essay about Frank Capra’s movie “It Happened One Night.” In the movie, an heiress named Ellie has fallen in love with Peter, a reporter, but hasn’t told him yet; she asks him if he’s ever fallen in love. (“Haven’t you ever thought about it at all? Seems to me you could make some girl wonderfully happy.”) He’s dreamed about meeting the right kind of girl, he says, and imagined taking her away to a beautiful tropical island, but “where you gonna find her? Somebody that’s real. Somebody that’s alive.” She’s right there in front of him, of course. “Why can he not allow the woman of his dreams to enter his dream?” Cavell asks. The answer, he thinks, is that “to walk in the direction of one’s dream is necessarily to risk the dream.” If Peter and Ellie are to really know one another, they have to merge dreams and reality. This is like “putting together night and day.” It’s scary.
#love #hendrix - newyorker.com

Parkinson's Disease Risk Tied to Sleep Apnea | MedPage Today

Of veterans with sleep apnea, 9.9% had documented use of a CPAP machine. Those who started CPAP early -- within 2 years of OSA onset -- had 2.3 fewer cases of Parkinson's per 1,000 (P<0.001) compared with those who did not use CPAP, the researchers reported in an abstract released ahead of the American Academy of Neurology opens in a new tab or window annual meeting. Those who started CPAP later than 2 years after OSA onset had a similar risk of Parkinson's disease as those who did not use CPAP at all.
#parkinsons #apnea - medpagetoday.com

Bessent Says Housing Will ‘Unfreeze’ in Weeks, Sees 2% Inflation - Bloomberg

“The housing market is stuck now, but I would expect that the housing market, sometime in the next few weeks, is going to unfreeze,” Bessent said.
#prediction #trump #housing - bloomberg.com

Levi & Korsinsky Notifies Shareholders of The Trade Desk, Inc. (TTD) of a Class Action Lawsuit and an Upcoming Deadline

(1) Trade Desk was experiencing significant, ongoing, self-inflicted execution challenges rolling out the Company's AI forecasting tool, Kokai, including transitioning clients to Kokai from the Company's older platform Solimar; (2) such execution challenges meaningfully delayed the Kokai Rollout; (3) Trade Desk's inability to effectively execute the Kokai Rollout negatively impacted the Company's business and operations, particularly revenue growth; and (4) as a result of the above, Defendants' positive statements about the Company's business, operations, and prospects were materially false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis at all relevant times.
#advertising #ttd - wspa.com

Trump Blasts USA as 'Bloated and Fat and Disgusting'

“This country has gotten bloated, fat, disgusting, and incompetently run,” Trump added, before insulting Biden. “I think we had the worst president in the history of our country. He just left office. I think he’s a disgrace what he’s done to our country by allowing millions of people to come into our country like that and all of the other things he inflation, which he caused because of energy and stupid spending to spend hundreds of millions, trillions and trillions of dollars on the green new scam, a total scam.”
#USAUSA #trump - mediaite.com

The Hidden History of Trump’s First Trip to Moscow - POLITICO Magazine

According to The Art of the Deal, Trump toured “a half dozen potential sites for a hotel, including several near Red Square.” “I was impressed with the ambition of Soviet officials to make a deal,” he writes. He also visited Leningrad, later St. Petersburg. A photo shows Donald and Ivana standing in Palace Square—he in a suit, she in a red polka dot blouse with a string of pearls. Behind them are the Winter Palace and the state Hermitage museum.
#trump #KGB #leningrad #casino - politico.com