Tootfinder

"If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands!"
* tumbleweed
"Librarians in UK increasingly asked to remove books, as influence of US pressure groups spreads
Anecdotal evidence suggests a rise in requests to take books off shelves, particularly LGBTQ titles"

To the genocide-loving German from mastodon.social who reported @… for being antisemitic:
Fuck you, you genocide-loving piece of shit, opposing genocide isn’t antisemitism. What you’re doing – conflating being anti-genocide with being antisemitic – is the greatest antisemitism as you’re de facto stating that all Jews are pro-genocide.

@… @… Evidence strongly implies that quotas work. If you set a minimum diversity quota, on any given axis, it doesn’t just improve your quality (because e.g. women who stay in male-dominated industries tend to be way better than their male cou…

(Bicycle) Speed and safety
For years I've heard people talking about how motor-assisted bicycles "are safer" because they can "match traffic speed", but I think this is mistaken.  Here's three reasons why. For me the most compelling reason comes from a 2007 paper by Laurie F. Beck, Ann M. Dellinger, and Mary E. O’Neil in the American Journal of Epidemiology, "Motor Vehicle Crash Injury Rates by Mode of Travel, United States: Using Exposure-Based Methods…

(Bicycle) Speed and safety
For years I’ve heard people talking about how motor-assisted bicycles “are safer” because they can “match traffic speed”, but I think this is mistaken.  Here’s t…

Assessing a Safety Case: Bottom-up Guidance for Claims and Evidence Evaluation
Scott Schnelle, Francesca Favaro, Laura Fraade-Blanar, David Wichner, Holland Broce, Justin Miranda
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09929

Assessing a Safety Case: Bottom-up Guidance for Claims and Evidence Evaluation
As Automated Driving Systems (ADS) technology advances, ensuring safety and public trust requires robust assurance frameworks, with safety cases emerging as a critical tool toward such a goal. This paper explores an approach to assess how a safety case is supported by its claims and evidence, toward establishing credibility for the overall case. Starting from a description of the building blocks of a safety case (claims, evidence, and optional format-dependent entries), this paper delves into t…

The vast majority of the plastic flotsam and jetsam in the North Pacific subtropical gyre (the North Pacific Garbage Patch) consists of discarded fishing gear.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-16529-0

Industrialised fishing nations largely contribute to floating plastic pollution in the North Pacific subtropical gyre - Scientific Reports
The subtropical oceanic gyre in the North Pacific Ocean is currently covered with tens of thousands of tonnes of floating plastic debris, dispersed over millions of square kilometres. A large fraction is composed of fishing nets and ropes while the rest is mostly composed of hard plastic objects and fragments, sometimes carrying evidence on their origin. In 2019, an oceanographic mission conducted in the area, retrieved over 6000 hard plastic debris items > 5 cm. The debris was later sorte…

AI Tutors vs. Tenacious Myths: Evidence from Personalised Dialogue Interventions in Education
Brooklyn J. Corbett, Jason M. Tangen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09292

AI Tutors vs. Tenacious Myths: Evidence from Personalised Dialogue Interventions in Education
Misconceptions in psychology and education persist despite clear contradictory evidence, resisting traditional correction methods. This study investigated whether personalised AI dialogue could effectively correct these stubborn beliefs. In a preregistered experiment (N = 375), participants holding strong psychology misconceptions engaged in one of three interventions: (1) personalised AI dialogue targeting their specific misconception, (2) generic textbook-style refutation, or (3) neutral AI d…

«As a result, there’s been some speculation that the [Waymo] cars were burned to destroy evidence. There’s likely more to it than that—and that the cars weren’t torched to destroy evidence as much to punish collaborators.»
Speaking of the Zeitgeist about working with big tech. 😁
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-weaponization-of-waymo

"The hacking mystery roiling the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing government is deepening after researchers said they had found new evidence that two more journalists were targeted using the same military-grade spyware that Italy has admitted to using against activists."
#Spyware @…

Evading Dark Matter Bounds through NLSP-Assisted Freeze-Out with Long-Lived Signatures
Sarif Khan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10618 https://

Evading Dark Matter Bounds through NLSP-Assisted Freeze-Out with Long-Lived Signatures
In this work, we explore a conversion-driven freeze-out scenario, where the next-to-lightest stable particle (NLSP) sets the dark matter (DM) abundance through the process ``NLSP SM $\leftrightarrow$ DM SM". Although DM is produced via a freeze-out mechanism, its interaction strength with the visible sector can range from weak to feeble couplings. This results in a vast, largely unexplored parameter space that evades current direct, indirect, and collider bounds, while remaining testable in the…