Tootfinder

@xankarn
Approximately 18% of SNAP recipients are over 60.
That’s over 7 million people.
A lot of those people have few options to generate more income.
Graphic from the USDA web page:
Also featuring a flagrant Hatch Act violation
http://www.ers.usda.gov/d…

Economic Bidding Strategy of Electric Vehicles in Real-Time Electricity Markets based on Marginal Opportunity Value
Zhen Zhu, Hongcai Zhang, Yonghua Song
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00744

Economic Bidding Strategy of Electric Vehicles in Real-Time Electricity Markets based on Marginal Opportunity Value
The participation of electric vehicle (EV) aggregators in real-time electricity markets offers promising revenue opportunities through price-responsive energy arbitrage. A central challenge in economic bidding lies in quantifying the marginal opportunity value of EVs' charging and discharging decisions. This value is implicitly defined and dynamically shaped by uncertainties in electricity prices and availability of EV resources. In this paper, we propose an efficient bidding strategy that enab…

Top researchers consider leaving U.S. amid funding cuts: ‘The science world is ending’ | PBS News https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/top-researchers-consider-leaving-u-s-amid-funding-cuts-the-science-world-is-ending &qu…

Top researchers consider leaving U.S. amid funding cuts: ‘The science world is ending’
A poll from the journal Nature found that 75% of researchers in the U.S. are considering leaving the country. That includes a man who’s been dubbed the "Mozart of Math." Stephanie Sy examines what’s behind a potential scientific brain drain.

🤦🏽‍♀️ Overconfidence persists even where regular feedback should discourage it, chess study finds
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-overconfidence-persists-regular-feedback-discourage.html

Overconfidence persists even where regular feedback should discourage it, chess study finds
The late psychologist Daniel Kahneman once said if he could wave a magic wand and get rid of any bias, he would choose overconfidence. However, overconfidence is here to stay. In a recent study in Psychological Science, researchers examined this bias among tournament chess players, to investigate if overconfidence is prevalent in an environment that should discourage it.

Reference-free automatic speech severity evaluation using acoustic unit language modelling
Bence Mark Halpern, Tomoki Toda
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00639 https://

Reference-free automatic speech severity evaluation using acoustic unit language modelling
Speech severity evaluation is becoming increasingly important as the economic burden of speech disorders grows. Current speech severity models often struggle with generalization, learning dataset-specific acoustic cues rather than meaningful correlates of speech severity. Furthermore, many models require reference speech or a transcript, limiting their applicability in ecologically valid scenarios, such as spontaneous speech evaluation. Previous research indicated that automatic speech naturaln…

🐟 Research helps untangle the complexity of small-scale fisheries
#fish

Research helps untangle the complexity of small-scale fisheries
By classifying small-scale fisheries into five broad types, a Stanford-led study helps clarify a diverse sector essential to global nutrition and local economies.

So in another dream I just woke up from, I was talking to someone about "the idea problem" (that it's becoming harder to monitize ideas, from a vox article written by an AI cooked reporter).
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/executive-disorder-white-house-weekly-46-313675864/
Basically, I was arguing that the majority of inventions target men because patriarchy puts economic control in men's hands. As men have started to help more with childcare, there have been more inventions related to childcare. (I don't have any idea if this is true. Seems legit, but I'm just relating my dream. I think I was also oversimplifying a bit to "men" and "women" because of my audience, but anyway it was a dream.) There's actually more low-hanging fruit, I pointed out, related to making care work easier.
So I argued that the real problem was a failure to invest in research into solving that problem. Today there are all these boondoggles built around killing people. What if, instead of all this government research into killing people, we dumped a ton of money into making it easier to support a household? That would be great for the economy. (Being asleep, I seem to have forgotten that working people need money.)
In the blur of being just awake I started thinking about how you could kickstart the US economy by taking the money from the AI boondoggle and other autonomous murder bots and create something like a program to build robots for housekeepers. You'd still be funding tech with government money, so the same horrible people get paid, but you're now actually solving real problems. It wouldn't even matter if it was a boondoggle, honestly. Just dumping money into something other than murdering people is good enough.
I imagined first if there was a program to fund a robot housecleaner, like robot dog with AI some laundry pickup, that would be provided, free of charge, to help people with children. It would work the same as the military boondoggle where a private company makes the government buy a piece of hardware from them and then also pay them to service it for some number of years. But instead of that hardware sitting around waiting to kill someone, it would be getting brought to people's houses to help them.
Then I thought, hey, you could even boost the economy more if you just had government funding for doulas and housecleaners and paid them a living wage. Hey, you could really kickstart the economy by nationalizing healthcare and including doula support as part of all births. Oh, and you could also just include the optional household help for families with children until the kids turn 18.
None of this is perfect (I don't actually think most of this is possible from any state), but the point is that it's actually wildly easy to figure out all kinds of ways to invest in the economy and monitize ideas as long as you aren't entirely focused on the same old "make money from spying on people and killing them." Funny that. Like they said in the podcast, maybe "finding ideas" isn't the problem.
Hope you enjoyed the weird semi-awake brain dump/rant.

New UN report outlines economic pathways for tackling planetary crisis #environment

New UN report outlines economic pathways for tackling planetary crisis
A new global assessment of the planet's environmental health was unveiled this week at the seventh UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-7), with University of Portsmouth researchers playing a central role in shaping its economic blueprint for a sustainable future.

Uruguay used to rely heavily on oil & gas-based power.
But as the economy grew and electricity demand threatened to overtake supply from the early 2010s,
it needed to add additional generating capacity, and fast.
New hydro wasn’t an option as it had already made the most of that resource.
To chart the way forward, the president appointed Ramón Méndez Galain,
a particle physicist from the private sector,
as the country’s director of energy
— a pos…

'Energy independent' Uruguay runs on 100% renewables for 10 straight months
Uruguay achieves energy independence by running on 100% renewable energy for 10 consecutive months, setting a global sustainability example.

⏰ Examining why some species developed consciousness while others remained non-conscious
#animals

Examining why some species developed consciousness while others remained non-conscious
What is the evolutionary advantage of our consciousness? And what can we learn about this from observing birds? Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum published two articles on this topic.