Tootfinder

Confidence Regions for Multiple Outcomes, Effect Modifiers, and Other Multiple Comparisons
Paul N Zivich, Stephen R Cole, Noah Greifer, Lina M Montoya, Michael R Kosorok, Jessie K Edwards
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07076

Confidence Regions for Multiple Outcomes, Effect Modifiers, and Other Multiple Comparisons
In epidemiology, some have argued that multiple comparison corrections are not necessary as there is rarely interest in the universal null hypothesis. From a parameter estimation perspective, epidemiologists may still be interested in multiple parameters. In this context, standard confidence intervals are not guaranteed to provide simultaneous coverage of more than one parameter. In other words, use of confidence intervals in these cases will understate the uncertainty due to random error. To a…

Artificial vibrotactile feedback elicits neural correlates of sense of agency https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12984-025-01850-2

Artificial vibrotactile feedback elicits neural correlates of sense of agency - Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation
The Sense of Agency (SoA) refers to the subjective experience of having control over our own actions and their outcomes. SoA is experienced when there is a

Strategic Experimentation with Private Payoffs
J\'er\^ome Renault, Eilon Solan, Nicolas Vieille
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06180 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.06180 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.06180
arXiv:2512.06180v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study a strategic experimentation game with exponential bandits, in which experiment outcomes are private. The equilibrium amount of experimentation is always higher than in the benchmark case where experiment outcomes are publicly observed. In addition, for pure equilibria, the equilibrium amount of experimentation is at least socially optimal, and possibly higher. We provide a tight bound on the degree of over-experimentation. The analysis rests on a new form of encouragement effect, according to which a player may hide the absence of a success to encourage future experimentation by the other player, which incentivizes current experimentation.
toXiv_bot_toot

EDUMATH: Generating Standards-aligned Educational Math Word Problems
Bryan R. Christ, Penelope Molitz, Jonathan Kropko, Thomas Hartvigsen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06965 https:…

EDUMATH: Generating Standards-aligned Educational Math Word Problems
Math word problems (MWPs) are critical K-12 educational tools, and customizing them to students' interests and ability levels can increase learning outcomes. However, teachers struggle to find time to customize MWPs for each student given large class sizes and increasing burnout. We propose that LLMs can support math education by generating MWPs customized to student interests and math education standards. To this end, we use a joint human expert-LLM judge approach to evaluate over 11,000 MWPs …

Lung Infection Severity Prediction Using Transformers with Conditional TransMix Augmentation and Cross-Attention
Bouthaina Slika, Fadi Dornaika, Fares Bougourzi, Karim Hammoudi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06887

Lung Infection Severity Prediction Using Transformers with Conditional TransMix Augmentation and Cross-Attention
Lung infections, particularly pneumonia, pose serious health risks that can escalate rapidly, especially during pandemics. Accurate AI-based severity prediction from medical imaging is essential to support timely clinical decisions and optimize patient outcomes. In this work, we present a novel method applicable to both CT scans and chest X-rays for assessing lung infection severity. Our contributions are twofold: (i) QCross-Att-PVT, a Transformer-based architecture that integrates parallel enc…

Arthur Blank addresses regime change, aims for 'leadership' that gets Falcons to 'next level' https://www.nfl.com/news/arthur-blank-addresses-regime-change-aims-for-leadership-that-gets-falcons-to-next-level

chess: Kaggle chess players (2010)
A network among chess players (nodes) giving the chess match outcomes (edges), for game-by-game results among the world’s top chess players. The direction of edge (i,j) denotes white player (i) and black player (j). Each edge is timestamped (approximate). Edge sign is 1 for a win by white, 0 for draw, and -1 for a win by black.
This network has 7301 nodes and 65053 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Signed, Timestamps

TGPR: Tree-Guided Policy Refinement for Robust Self-Debugging of LLMs
Daria Ozerova, Ekaterina Trofimova
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06878 https://arxiv.org…

TGPR: Tree-Guided Policy Refinement for Robust Self-Debugging of LLMs
Iterative refinement has been a promising paradigm to enable large language models (LLMs) to resolve difficult reasoning and problem-solving tasks. One of the key challenges, however, is how to effectively search through the enormous search space of possible refinements. Existing methods typically fall back on predefined heuristics, which are troubled by the exploration-exploitation dilemma and cannot adapt based on past refinement outcomes. We introduce Tree-Guided Policy Refinement (TGPR), a …

Last season’s updated vaccine provides significant protection against covid-19,
particularly against severe illness and death.
The results reaffirm the benefit of staying current with covid vaccination.

Researchers analyzed data from approximately 1.8 million Americans between August 2024 and April 2025,
of whom only about 13 percent received the 2024–2025 coronavirus shot.
They evaluated three clinical outcomes related to the disease: infections, emergency departm…

How long does covid booster protection last? A new study offers answers.
More evidence highlighting the benefit, and limitations, of covid-19 vaccines

"COP30: Key outcomes for food, forests, land and nature at the UN climate talks in Belém"
#UN #UnitedNations #Climate

COP30: Key outcomes for food, forests, land and nature at the UN climate talks in Belém - Carbon Brief
Carbon Brief breaks down the main COP30 outcomes on food, forests, land and nature.

🎲 TextBandit: Evaluating Probabilistic Reasoning in LLMs Through Language-Only Decision Tasks
#llm

TextBandit: Evaluating Probabilistic Reasoning in LLMs Through Language-Only Decision Tasks
Large language models (LLMs) have shown to be increasingly capable of performing reasoning tasks, but their ability to make sequential decisions under uncertainty only using natural language remains underexplored. We introduce a novel benchmark in which LLMs interact with multi-armed bandit environments using purely textual feedback, "you earned a token", without access to numerical cues or explicit probabilities, resulting in the model to infer latent reward structures purely off linguistic cu…

Data as Commodity: a Game-Theoretic Principle for Information Pricing
Pasquale Casaburi, Giovanni Piccioli, Pierpaolo Vivo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07101 https://

Data as Commodity: a Game-Theoretic Principle for Information Pricing
Data is the central commodity of the digital economy. Unlike physical goods, it is non-rival, replicable at near-zero cost, and traded under heterogeneous licensing rules. These properties defy standard supply--demand theory and call for new pricing principles. We propose a game-theoretic approach in which the value of a data string emerges from strategic competition among N players betting on an underlying stochastic process, each holding partial information about past outcomes. A better-infor…

Revised January 8, 2026: Simulation of prosthetic vision with the PRIMA system and enhancement of face representation https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11677 retinal implant

Simulation of prosthetic vision with PRIMA system and enhancement of face representation
Objective. Patients implanted with the PRIMA photovoltaic subretinal prosthesis in geographic atrophy report form vision with the average acuity matching the 100um pixel size. Although this remarkable outcome enables them to read and write, they report difficulty with perceiving faces. Despite the pixelated stimulation, patients see smooth patterns rather than dots. We present a novel, non-pixelated algorithm for simulating prosthetic vision, compare its predictions to clinical outcomes, and de…

Analysis of managerial behaviors in business management
Ernest G\'orka, Dariusz Baran, Micha{\l} \'Cwi\k{a}ka{\l}a, Gabriela Wojak, Robert Marszczuk, Katarzyna Olszy\'nska, Piotr Mrzyg{\l}\'od, Maciej Frasunkiewicz, Piotr R\k{e}czajski, Kamil Sa{\l}uga, Maciej \'Slusarczyk, Jan Piwnik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07047

Analysis of managerial behaviors in business management
This study explores how different managerial behaviors influence team effectiveness and organizational outcomes, using Kenneth Blanchard's situational leadership model as a diagnostic tool. Conducted across ten companies, the research evaluates leadership adaptability through a scenario-based questionnaire identifying instructional, teaching, supportive, and delegating styles. Results show that the supportive (affiliative) style is dominant, present in 60 percent of surveyed companies, with del…

Smart Contract Adoption in Derivative Markets under Bounded Risk: An Optimization Approach
Jinho Cha, Long Pham, Thi Le Hoa Vo, Jaeyoung Cho, Jaejin Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07006

Smart Contract Adoption in Derivative Markets under Bounded Risk: An Optimization Approach
This study develops and analyzes an optimization model of smart contract adoption under bounded risk, linking structural theory with simulation and real-world validation. We examine how adoption intensity alpha is structurally pinned at a boundary solution, invariant to variance and heterogeneity, while profitability and service outcomes are variance-fragile, eroding under volatility and heavy-tailed demand. A sharp threshold in the fixed cost parameter A3 triggers discontinuous adoption collap…

"SNAP benefits reduced the depth and severity of poverty experienced by recipient households, especially among children, who experience higher poverty rates than the population at large."
But the gop would rather have kids in poverty.
https://www.

Video Call Glitches Evoke Uncanniness, Damage Consequential Life Outcomes - Slashdot
https://slashdot.org/story/25/12/27/0142219/video-call-glitches-evoke-uncanniness-damage-consequential-life-outcomes

At what point do business executives become liable for gross negligence? The near absolute protection of executives from liability for the actions their comapnies take is leading to very bad outcomes.
A Calif. teen trusted ChatGPT's drug advice. He died from an overdose.
https://www.

At what point do business executives become liable for gross negligence? The near absolute protection of executives from liability for the actions their comapnies take is leading to very bad outcomes.
A Calif. teen trusted ChatGPT's drug advice. He died from an overdose.
https://www.

Influencing Outcomes
The podcast that gets real about what drives success in influencer marketing...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/influencing-outcomes/

Learning Paths to Multi-Sector Equilibrium: Belief Dynamics Under Uncertain Returns to Scale
Stefano Nasini, Rabia Nessah, Bertrand Wigniolle
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07013 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07013 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.07013
arXiv:2512.07013v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This paper explores the dynamics of learning in a multi-sector general equilibrium model where firms operate under incomplete information about their production returns to scale. Firms iteratively update their beliefs using maximum a-posteriori estimation, derived from observed production outcomes, to refine their knowledge of their returns to scale. The implications of these learning dynamics for market equilibrium and the conditions under which firms can effectively learn their true returns to scale are the key objects of this study. Our results shed light on how idiosyncratic shocks influence the learning process and demonstrate that input decisions encode all pertinent information for belief updates. Additionally, we show that a long-memory (path-dependent) learning which keeps track of all past estimations ends up having a worse performance than a short-memory (path-independent) approach.
toXiv_bot_toot

Outcomes-over-outputs is one thing — but even outcomes aren't always impactful.
Investing in any outcome carries opportunity cost. Any effort you expend means not spending that effort elsewhere.
And when there's a bottleneck in the system, effort upstream of the bottleneck has diminishing returns. Typically, that bottleneck is your process.
Since the process is made up of people, technical solutions won't help.

All your problems are people problems (Don't Just Do Things, Part 2)
If you want to do strategy, you must be willing to do process transformation first.

Mike Tomlin leaving Steelers? All the possible 2026 outcomes for Pittsburgh and its embattled coach

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/mike-tomlin-leaving-steelers-2026-pittsburgh…

When Machines Meet Each Other: Network Effects and the Strategic Role of History in Multi-Agent AI
Yu Liu, Wenwen Li, Yifan Dou, Guangnan Ye
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06903 htt…

When Machines Meet Each Other: Network Effects and the Strategic Role of History in Multi-Agent AI
As artificial intelligence (AI) enters the agentic era, large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that interact with one another rather than operate in isolation. This shift raises a fundamental question: how do machine agents behave in interdependent environments where outcomes depend not only on their own choices but also on the coordinated expectations of peers? To address this question, we study LLM agents in a canonical network-effect game, where economic …

The TikTok deal is the worst of all possible outcomes, shifting ownership of TikTok to Trump's allies, while maintaining the supposed problematic links to China (Karl Bode/Techdirt)
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/12/19/tiktok

TikTok Deal Done And It’s Somehow The Shittiest Possible Outcome, Making Everything Worse
There were rumblings about this for a while, but it looks like the Trump TikTok deal is done, and it’s somehow the worst of all possible outcomes, amazingly making all of the biggest criticis…

"COP30: Key outcomes agreed at the UN climate talks in Belém"
#COP30 #Climate #ClimateSummit

COP30: Key outcomes agreed at the UN climate talks in Belém - Carbon Brief
A voluntary plan to curb fossil fuels, a goal to triple adaptation finance and new...

Bears vs. Packers and five more Week 14 games that have biggest impact on playoff races https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6855590/2025/12/04/nfl-week-14-playoffs-races-bears-packers-cowboys-lions/

Invariant Price of Anarchy: a Metric for Welfarist Traffic Control
Ilia Shilov, Mingjia He, Heinrich H. Nax, Emilio Frazzoli, Gioele Zardini, Saverio Bolognani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05843 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05843 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.05843
arXiv:2512.05843v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The Price of Anarchy (PoA) is a standard metric for quantifying inefficiency in socio-technical systems, widely used to guide policies like traffic tolling. Conventional PoA analysis relies on exact numerical costs. However, in many settings, costs represent agents' preferences and may be defined only up to possibly arbitrary scaling and shifting, representing informational and modeling ambiguities. We observe that while such transformations preserve equilibrium and optimal outcomes, they change the PoA value. To resolve this issue, we rely on results from Social Choice Theory and define the Invariant PoA. By connecting admissible transformations to degrees of comparability of agents' costs, we derive the specific social welfare functions which ensure that efficiency evaluations do not depend on arbitrary rescalings or translations of individual costs. Case studies on a toy example and the Zurich network demonstrate that identical tolling strategies can lead to substantially different efficiency estimates depending on the assumed comparability. Our framework thus demonstrates that explicit axiomatic foundations are necessary in order to define efficiency metrics and to appropriately guide policy in large-scale infrastructure design robustly and effectively.
toXiv_bot_toot

chess: Kaggle chess players (2010)
A network among chess players (nodes) giving the chess match outcomes (edges), for game-by-game results among the world’s top chess players. The direction of edge (i,j) denotes white player (i) and black player (j). Each edge is timestamped (approximate). Edge sign is 1 for a win by white, 0 for draw, and -1 for a win by black.
This network has 7301 nodes and 65053 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Signed, Timestamps

Ventura County Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster ( #VCVOAD )
is a collaborative of nearly 50 local non-profit agencies,
faith-based organizations,
volunteer groups,
public institutions,
and private entities
dedicated to improving outcomes for people affected by disasters.
VC-VOAD helps communities respond to and recover from major disasters guided by our f…

About | Ventura County VOAD

At what point do business executives become liable for gross negligence? The near absolute protection of executives from liability for the actions their comapnies take is leading to very bad outcomes.
A Calif. teen trusted ChatGPT's drug advice. He died from an overdose.
https://www.

The TikTok deal is the worst of all possible outcomes, shifting ownership of TikTok to Trump's allies, while maintaining the supposed problematic links to China (Karl Bode/Techdirt)
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/12/19/tiktok

TikTok Deal Done And It’s Somehow The Shittiest Possible Outcome, Making Everything Worse
There were rumblings about this for a while, but it looks like the Trump TikTok deal is done, and it’s somehow the worst of all possible outcomes, amazingly making all of the biggest criticis…

It's utterly brainwormed the way people have projected political identities onto software projects. The level of ideological capture that politics exerts on the average person is wildly out of proportion with their ability to influence it, and has led to terrible outcomes for society in general.
Anyway, on a more serious note, I'm concerned that my 13mm box end wrench has become fash. Looking for a good option for a woke wrench. Recommendations welcome.

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Global average farm size may triple by 2100 amid rural population decline
#farming …

Global average farm size may triple by 2100 amid rural population decline
Farm size plays a crucial role in shaping food production systems and environmental outcomes. However, its long-term global trends have remained poorly understood.

Ecological myopia: The blind spot holding back climate action #climate

Ecological myopia: The blind spot holding back climate action
Global debate about how to navigate the climate crisis often centers on high-level pledges and whether national targets are being met. Yet focusing on these technical outcomes obscures a deeper problem that keeps climate action falling short.

Identifying treatment effects on categorical outcomes in IV models
Onil Boussim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10946 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.10946

Identifying treatment effects on categorical outcomes in IV models
This paper provides a nonparametric framework for causal inference with categorical outcomes under binary treatment and binary instrument settings. We decompose the observed joint probability of outcomes and treatment into marginal probabilities of potential outcomes and treatment, and association parameters that capture selection bias due to unobserved heterogeneity. Under a novel identifying assumption, association similarity, which requires the dependence between unobserved factors and poten…

This is a subtweet...
People who are not anti-capitalist sometimes wonder: "Why is there a monopoly on X life-critical thing?" (E.g., epipens, insulin, web search).
This one is really simple actually: because monopolies are more profitable than competition, and the foundation of capitalism is that capital = power.
Various societies have recognized the necropolitical outcomes of monopolies and have tried to erect barriers to monopoly; we all know that monopolies are bad, death-and-suffering-causing things. But since these societies mostly remain capitalist, they allow these barriers to be eroded by the power of capital (to do otherwise would be to repudiate capitalism because it puts a limit on the power of money). The barriers are ineffective, and the capital = power equation holds, and monopolies result and get to do their killing & maiming thing (remember: even things like social media monopolies that you wouldn't expect to pay for political assassinations like a mining company still profit from inciting genocides). *Sometimes* there are oligopolies instead of monopolies, but instances of really competitive markets are pretty rare for things that are widely sought-after.
The "government will manage the markets to prevent bad outcomes like monopolies" strategy has failed repeatedly, spectacularly, and almost universally. To actually prevent monopolies you need a population that no longer believes that money should equal power, it's that simple. Sadly, it's actually not that simple, since all of the alternatives which equate something else to power, like "the king" or "party loyalty as judged by the supreme leader" have the same problems or worse. The attitude you need to cultivate is "nobody should have power," which is hard because *all* of the power-systems we have constantly propagandize against this attitude in myriad ways. Still, in the future once we've broken free of this age where hierarchy is accepted, people will look back and wonder whether the historical records are even credible given how much needless death and suffering were endured with little resistance.
#anarchy #capitalism

Kathi asks ChatGPT "how to test a graph algo".
Repeats the query 6 months later…now it mentions PBT.
Huh! We ask it why it mentioned PBT. It cites back…
Our own papers and blog, and specifically mentions our own education research work on why graph algos are a great eg.
Moving the needle!

Is it talent?
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQM0-w2jEOd/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

Duaa Izzidien - Visual Storyteller & Artist on Instagram: "I had far too much fun creating this reel and couldn’t bring myself to delete any of it to make it shorter and more algorithm friendly 🙈 If you watched it all the way to the end - well done! You’ve just demonstrated the very thing the reel is about - showing up is the only talent that matters. My arrows don’t always hit the target. My paintings don’t always turn out how I planned. And honestly? Life rarely goes the way I intend. But really that isn’t what matters. In Islam we say that actions are by intentions and that sometimes means letting go of controlling our outcomes. We can control our intentions, our effort, showing up - but we have to remember that the result doesn’t actually come from those actions. Sometimes the arrow misses because there’s a better lesson waiting or perhaps it’s to remind you to stay humble and remember that ‘you’ are not the architect of your success. Sometimes the painting goes “wrong” because it’s becoming something more beautiful than you imagined. Sometimes life doesn’t work out the way you planned because there’s something different, better, round the corner for you. A huge thank you to @thabitoon_archers and @mamluk.academy for teaching me. You’ve taught me far more than just archery - you’ve taught me a rich history and life lessons that bring peace. (any mistakes in my form are entirely mine!). Want to learn how to use art as a tool for trusting and letting go of control? DM me ‘CREATE’ and I’ll show you these techniques. #showingisenough #trusttheprocess #archery #archerygirl #traditionalarchery #archerylife #overwhelm #personalgrowth #innerstrength #growthmindset #breakthrough #findingmyself #resilience #transformation #letgoofcontrol"
24K likes, 763 comments - duaaizzidien on October 24, 2025: "I had far too much fun creating this reel and couldn’t bring myself to delete any of it to make it shorter and more algorithm friendly 🙈 If you watched it all the way to the end - well done! You’ve just demonstrated the very thing the reel is about - showing up is the only talent that matters. My arrows don’t always hit the target. My paintings don’t always turn out how I planned. And honestly? Life rarely goes the way I …

"The study’s authors emphasized that, as an observational study, the findings do not prove that covid-19 causes the conditions diagnosed in children, but rather signal an association between maternal infection and these outcomes. "
Covid in pregnancy tied to autism, developmental issues, study says - The Washington Post
https://archive.ph/eSFKO

Bears vs. Packers and five more Week 14 games that have biggest impact on playoff races https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6855590/2025/12/04/nfl-week-14-playoffs-races-bears-packers-cowboys-lions/

Oh goody, a LinkedIn connection request with a message!
Let’s break this down:
> …vc backed…
Focused on quarterly profits / RoI instead of outcomes.
> …invite-only…
NDAs and other gag agreements.
> …openAI browser…
Chromium that begs authors for ARIA to parse content.
> …seeing promising results…
Which aren’t genuine results.
> …goal is 100% WCAG testing…
Ah, snake oil.
> …with high capture rates.
Sales…

A comparison of approaches to incorporate patient-selected and patient-ranked outcomes in clinical trials
David S. Robertson, Thomas Jaki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11578 https:…

A comparison of approaches to incorporate patient-selected and patient-ranked outcomes in clinical trials
A key aspect of patient-focused drug development is identifying and measuring outcomes that are important to patients in clinical trials. Many medical conditions affect multiple symptom domains, and a consensus approach to determine the relative importance of the associated multiple outcomes ignores the heterogeneity in individual patient preferences. Patient-selected outcomes offer one way to incorporate individual patient preferences, as proposed in recent regulatory guidance for the treatmen…

The Unsuccessful Stories
Where people share the real story behind the success story...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/influencing-outcomes/

Meta cuts roles in its Risk unit citing a shift from manual reviews to a "consistent and automated process" that is delivering "reliable compliance outcomes" (Jyoti Mann/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-job-cut…

Meta told some employees their jobs are being replaced by tech
An internal memo explaining the cuts said "many routine decisions can now be handled efficiently by technology."

"We are hurtling toward climate chaos. The planet's vital signs are flashing red. The consequences of human-driven alterations of the climate are no longer future threats but are here now. This unfolding emergency stems from failed foresight, political inaction, unsustainable economic systems, and misinformation. Almost every corner of the biosphere is reeling from intensifying heat, storms, floods, droughts, or fires. The window to prevent the worst outcomes is rapidly closing.&quo…

"What was achieved for Indigenous peoples at COP30?"
#COP30 #Climate #ClimateSummit

What was achieved for Indigenous peoples at COP30?
After two weeks of negotiations in Belém, Brazil, the COP30 U.N. climate summit delivered mixed outcomes, Indigenous delegates say. The event saw the largest Indigenous participation in COP history and landmark pledges made, but also heated protests and last-minute disappointments. “The summit was historic for Indigenous peoples, and this is the result of the Indigenous […]

chess: Kaggle chess players (2010)
A network among chess players (nodes) giving the chess match outcomes (edges), for game-by-game results among the world’s top chess players. The direction of edge (i,j) denotes white player (i) and black player (j). Each edge is timestamped (approximate). Edge sign is 1 for a win by white, 0 for draw, and -1 for a win by black.
This network has 7301 nodes and 65053 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Signed, Timestamps

Guardian: Face transplants promised hope. Patients were put through the unthinkable https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/nov/27/face-transplant-patients-results-outcomes "negative data is often buried, driven by funding battles and inst…

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Can’t say I know enough to have a real opinion beyond the fact that sending a child into harder subject matter when they haven’t mastered their current level seems like a recipe for disaster. As such, this seems to make sense. #oklahoma #oked

'This is the dark side and true meaning of "business optimization." The optimal business pays its suppliers and workers nothing, and charges its customers everything it can. Obviously, businesses need to settle for suboptimal outcomes, because workers won't show up if they don't get paid, and customers won't buy things that cost everything they have⹋.
⹋ Unless, of course, you are an academic publisher, in which case this is just how you do business.'
…

A novel imaging solution, called
"prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) positron emission tomography (PET) scanning",
can more effectively detect the recurrence of prostate cancer
compared to standard imaging methods,
and is associated with improved survival outcomes.

New imaging technique boosts survival in prostate cancer patients
A multicenter study led by London Health Sciences Centre Research Institute (LHSCRI), Lawson Research Institute of St. Joseph's Health Care London (Lawson), and University Health Network (UHN) has found a novel imaging solution, called prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, can more effectively detect the recurrence of prostate cancer compared to standard imaging methods, and is associated with improved survival outcomes.

Interpretable Machine Learning for Predicting Startup Funding, Patenting, and Exits
Saeid Mashhadi, Amirhossein Saghezchi, Vesal Ghassemzadeh Kashani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09465

Interpretable Machine Learning for Predicting Startup Funding, Patenting, and Exits
This study develops an interpretable machine learning framework to forecast startup outcomes, including funding, patenting, and exit. A firm-quarter panel for 2010-2023 is constructed from Crunchbase and matched to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) data. Three horizons are evaluated: next funding within 12 months, patent-stock growth within 24 months, and exit through an initial public offering (IPO) or acquisition within 36 months. Preprocessing is fit on a development window (2010-2019…

chess: Kaggle chess players (2010)
A network among chess players (nodes) giving the chess match outcomes (edges), for game-by-game results among the world’s top chess players. The direction of edge (i,j) denotes white player (i) and black player (j). Each edge is timestamped (approximate). Edge sign is 1 for a win by white, 0 for draw, and -1 for a win by black.
This network has 7301 nodes and 65053 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Signed, Timestamps

Scattering in Time-Varying Drude-Lorentz Models
Bryce Dixon, Calvin M. Hooper, Ian R. Hooper, Simon A. R. Horsley
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19322 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.19322 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.19322
arXiv:2511.19322v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Motivated by recent experiments, the theoretical study of wave propagation in time varying materials is of current interest. Although significant in nearly all such experiments, material dispersion is commonly neglected in theoretical studies. Yet, as we show here, understanding the precise microscopic model for the material dispersion is crucial for predicting experimental outcomes. Here we study the temporal scattering coefficients of four different time-varying Drude-Lorentz models, exploring how an incident continuous wave splits into forward and backward waves due to an abrupt change in plasma frequency. The differences in the predicted scattering are unique to time-varying media, and arise from the exact way in which the time variation appears in the various model parameters. We verify our results using a custom finite difference time domain algorithm, concluding with a discussion of the limitations that arise from using these models with an abrupt change in plasma frequency.
toXiv_bot_toot

Compositional difference-in-differences for categorical outcomes
Onil Boussim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11659 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.11659

Compositional difference-in-differences for categorical outcomes
In difference-in-differences (DiD) settings with categorical outcomes, treatment effects often operate on both total quantities (e.g., voter turnout) and category shares (e.g., vote distribution across parties). In this context, linear DiD models can be problematic: they suffer from scale dependence, may produce negative counterfactual quantities, and are inconsistent with discrete choice theory. We propose compositional DiD (CoDiD), a new method that identifies counterfactual categorical quant…

Cowboys Week 17 Rooting Guide: 4 teams can help Dallas' draft slot https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/12/27/cowboys-week-17-rooting-guide-draft-pick-slots/87926684007/

A distressing story less told about drug overdoses- and I can't help but wonder if wider adoption of the Zurich "Four Pillars" approach might help prevent these outcomes.
It's pretty clear that current policies related to #drugs and #addiction are not doing such a great job.
…

Persuasion with Verifiable Information
Maria Titova, Kun Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08251 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.08251

Persuasion with Verifiable Information
This paper studies a game in which an informed sender with state-independent preferences uses verifiable messages to convince a receiver to choose an action from a finite set. We characterize the equilibrium outcomes of the game and compare them with commitment outcomes in information design. We provide conditions under which a commitment outcome is an equilibrium outcome and identify environments in which the sender does not benefit from commitment power. Our findings offer insights into the i…

Estimands and doubly robust estimation for cluster-randomized trials with survival outcomes
Xi Fang, Bingkai Wang, Liangyuan Hu, Fan Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08438 https://…

Estimands and doubly robust estimation for cluster-randomized trials with survival outcomes
Cluster-randomized trials (CRTs) are experimental designs where groups or clusters of participants, rather than the individual participants themselves, are randomized to intervention groups. Analyzing CRT requires distinguishing between treatment effects at the cluster level and the individual level, which requires a clear definition of the estimands under the potential outcomes framework. For analyzing survival outcomes, it is common to assess the treatment effect by comparing survival functio…

Evaluating and Learning Optimal Dynamic Treatment Regimes under Truncation by Death
Sihyung Park (North Carolina State University), Wenbin Lu (North Carolina State University), Shu Yang (North Carolina State University)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07501

Evaluating and Learning Optimal Dynamic Treatment Regimes under Truncation by Death
Truncation by death, a prevalent challenge in critical care, renders traditional dynamic treatment regime (DTR) evaluation inapplicable due to ill-defined potential outcomes. We introduce a principal stratification-based method, focusing on the always-survivor value function. We derive a semiparametrically efficient, multiply robust estimator for multi-stage DTRs, demonstrating its robustness and efficiency. Empirical validation and an application to electronic health records showcase its utili…

It’s Do Or Die: 3 Reasons The Raiders Need To Win In Week 6 https://raiderramble.com/2025/10/11/its-do-or-die-3-reasons-the-raiders-need-to-win-in-week-6/

Injecting Hallucinations in Autonomous Vehicles: A Component-Agnostic Safety Evaluation Framework
Alexandre Moreira Nascimento, Gabriel Kenji Godoy Shimanuki, L\'ucio Flavio Vismari, Jo\~ao Batista Camargo Jr, Jorge Rady de Almeida Jr, Paulo Sergio Cugnasca, Anna Carolina Muller Queiroz, Jeremy Noah Bailenson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510…

Injecting Hallucinations in Autonomous Vehicles: A Component-Agnostic Safety Evaluation Framework
Perception failures in autonomous vehicles (AV) remain a major safety concern because they are the basis for many accidents. To study how these failures affect safety, researchers typically inject artificial faults into hardware or software components and observe the outcomes. However, existing fault injection studies often target a single sensor or machine perception (MP) module, resulting in siloed frameworks that are difficult to generalize or integrate into unified simulation environments. …

MOUFLON: Multi-group Modularity-based Fairness-aware Community Detection
Georgios Panayiotou, Anand Mathew Muthukulam Simon, Matteo Magnani, Ece Calikus
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12348

MOUFLON: Multi-group Modularity-based Fairness-aware Community Detection
In this paper, we propose MOUFLON, a fairness-aware, modularity-based community detection method that allows adjusting the importance of partition quality over fairness outcomes. MOUFLON uses a novel proportional balance fairness metric, providing consistent and comparable fairness scores across multi-group and imbalanced network settings. We evaluate our method under both synthetic and real network datasets, focusing on performance and the trade-off between modularity and fairness in the resul…

TOI-3288 b and TOI-4666 b: two gas giants transiting low-mass stars characterised by NIRPS
Yolanda G. C. Frensch, Fran\c{c}ois Bouchy, Gaspare Lo Curto, Alexandrine L'Heureux, Roseane de Lima Gomes, Jo\~ao Faria, Xavier Dumusque, Lison Malo, Marion Cointepas, Avidaan Srivastava, Xavier Bonfils, Elisa Delgado-Mena, Nicola Nari, Khaled Al Moulla, Romain Allart, Jose M. Almenara, \'Etienne Artigau, Khalid Barkaoui, Fr\'ed\'erique Baron, Susana C. C. Barros, Bj\"orn Be…

TOI-3288 b and TOI-4666 b: two gas giants transiting low-mass stars characterised by NIRPS
Gas giant planets orbiting low-mass stars are uncommon outcomes of planet formation. Increasing the sample of well-characterised giants around early M dwarfs will enable population-level studies of their properties, offering valuable insights into their formation and evolutionary histories. We aim to characterise giant exoplanets transiting M dwarfs identified by TESS. High-resolution spectroscopic data are obtained in the optical and nIR, combining HARPS and NIRPS. We derive RVs via the cross-…

Coinbase plans to move its incorporation from Delaware to Texas, saying Delaware "once provided companies with consistency" but now has "unpredictable outcomes" (Ari Levy/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/12/coinbase-m

Coinbase moves incorporation to Texas from Delaware, following Musk's lead
Coinbase's legal chief wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the crypto platform is moving its state of incorporation to Texas.

chess: Kaggle chess players (2010)
A network among chess players (nodes) giving the chess match outcomes (edges), for game-by-game results among the world’s top chess players. The direction of edge (i,j) denotes white player (i) and black player (j). Each edge is timestamped (approximate). Edge sign is 1 for a win by white, 0 for draw, and -1 for a win by black.
This network has 7301 nodes and 65053 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Signed, Timestamps

Trends and Performance Visualization of Clutch Time in Japan's Professional B.League
Shota Shiiku, Jun Ichikawa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08597 https://

Trends and Performance Visualization of Clutch Time in Japan's Professional B.League
Reflecting the recent rise in Japanese basketball's competitiveness and pivotal outcomes in international tournaments, clutch-time performance has become increasingly critical. We examine clutch-time performance in Japan's B.League using play-by-play and box-score data from the 2023-24 season. Defining clutch time as the final five minutes with a score margin within five points, we compare efficiency and shot selection between clutch and non-clutch windows. We focus on effective field-goal perc…

A distressing story less told about drug overdoses- and I can't help but wonder if wider adoption of the Zurich "Four Pillars" approach might help prevent these outcomes.
It's pretty clear that current policies related to #drugs and #addiction are not doing such a great job.
…

AI Agents as Universal Task Solvers
Alessandro Achille, Stefano Soatto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12066 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.12066

AI Agents as Universal Task Solvers
AI reasoning agents are already able to solve a variety of tasks by deploying tools, simulating outcomes of multiple hypotheses and reflecting on them. In doing so, they perform computation, although not in the classical sense -- there is no program being executed. Still, if they perform computation, can AI agents be universal? Can chain-of-thought reasoning solve any computable task? How does an AI Agent learn to reason? Is it a matter of model size? Or training dataset size? In this work, w…

Optimizing BCI Rehabilitation Protocols for Stroke: Exploring Task Design and Training Duration
Aniana Cruz, Marko Kuzmanoski, Gabriel Pires
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08082 htt…

Optimizing BCI Rehabilitation Protocols for Stroke: Exploring Task Design and Training Duration
Stroke is a leading cause of long-term disability and the second most common cause of death worldwide. Although acute treatments have advanced, recovery remains challenging and limited. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have emerged as a promising tool for post-stroke rehabilitation by promoting neuroplasticity. However, clinical outcomes remain variable, and optimal protocols have yet to be established. This study explores strategies to optimize BCI-based rehabilitation by comparing motor image…

Beyond Test Scores: How Academic Rank Shapes Long-Term Outcomes
Emilia Del Bono, Angus Holford, Tommaso Sartori
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11973 https://ar…

Beyond Test Scores: How Academic Rank Shapes Long-Term Outcomes
We study the effects of academic rank using data on the entire population of children enrolled in primary schools in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1962. Exploiting quasi-random variation in peer group composition, we estimate the causal impact of rank on academic performance, noncognitive development, parental investment, and long-term outcomes. Higher rank improves achievement on the high-stakes eleven-plus examination and strengthens internalizing skills (traits related to self-concept and confidenc…

Day 26: Emily Short
If you know who Short is, you know exactly why she's on this list. If you don't, you're probably in the majority. She's an absolutely legendary author within the interactive fiction (IF) community, which gets somewhat pigeonholed by stuff like Zork when there's actually a huge range of stuff in the medium some of which isn't even puzzle-focused, and Short has been writing & coding on the bleeding edge of things for decades.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Short's work in graduate school, where we played "Galatea" as part of an interactive fiction class. Short uses a lot of clever parser tricks to make your conversation with a statue feel very fluid and conversational, giving to contemporary audiences a great example of how vibrant interaction with a well-designed agent can be in contrast to an LLM, if you're willing to put in some work on bespoke parsing & responses (although the user does need to know basic IF conventions). While I didn't explore the full range of Galatea's many possible outcomes, it left a strong impression on me as a vision for what IF could be besides dorky puzzles, and I think that "visionary" is a great term to describe Short.
If you'd like you get a feel for her (very early) work, you can play Galatea here: #30AuthorsNoMen

A national cohort study in France shows no association between mRNA COVID-19 vaccine received in the first trimester & congenital defects in babies.
This adds to previous national studies that reported similar outcomes.
Kennedy is wrong, as usual.
🧪 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/ja…

Doubly Robust Estimation with Stabilized Weights for Binary Proximal Outcomes in Micro-Randomized Trials
Jinho Cha, Eunchan Cha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08359 https://

Doubly Robust Estimation with Stabilized Weights for Binary Proximal Outcomes in Micro-Randomized Trials
Micro-randomized trials (MRTs) are increasingly used to evaluate mobile health interventions with binary proximal outcomes. Standard inverse probability weighting (IPW) estimators are unbiased but unstable in small samples or under extreme randomization. Estimated mean excursion effect (EMEE) improves efficiency but lacks double robustness. We propose a doubly robust EMEE (DR-EMEE) with stabilized and truncated weights, combining per-decision IPW and outcome regression. We prove double robustne…

Counterfactual Identifiability via Dynamic Optimal Transport
Fabio De Sousa Ribeiro, Ainkaran Santhirasekaram, Ben Glocker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08294 https://

Counterfactual Identifiability via Dynamic Optimal Transport
We address the open question of counterfactual identification for high-dimensional multivariate outcomes from observational data. Pearl (2000) argues that counterfactuals must be identifiable (i.e., recoverable from the observed data distribution) to justify causal claims. A recent line of work on counterfactual inference shows promising results but lacks identification, undermining the causal validity of its estimates. To address this, we establish a foundation for multivariate counterfactual …

chess: Kaggle chess players (2010)
A network among chess players (nodes) giving the chess match outcomes (edges), for game-by-game results among the world’s top chess players. The direction of edge (i,j) denotes white player (i) and black player (j). Each edge is timestamped (approximate). Edge sign is 1 for a win by white, 0 for draw, and -1 for a win by black.
This network has 7301 nodes and 65053 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Signed, Timestamps

AI-Driven Radiology Report Generation for Traumatic Brain Injuries
Riadh Bouslimi, Houda Trabelsi, Wahiba Ben Abdssalem Karaa, Hana Hedhli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08498 https…

AI-Driven Radiology Report Generation for Traumatic Brain Injuries
Traumatic brain injuries present significant diagnostic challenges in emergency medicine, where the timely interpretation of medical images is crucial for patient outcomes. In this paper, we propose a novel AI-based approach for automatic radiology report generation tailored to cranial trauma cases. Our model integrates an AC-BiFPN with a Transformer architecture to capture and process complex medical imaging data such as CT and MRI scans. The AC-BiFPN extracts multi-scale features, enabling th…

chess: Kaggle chess players (2010)
A network among chess players (nodes) giving the chess match outcomes (edges), for game-by-game results among the world’s top chess players. The direction of edge (i,j) denotes white player (i) and black player (j). Each edge is timestamped (approximate). Edge sign is 1 for a win by white, 0 for draw, and -1 for a win by black.
This network has 7301 nodes and 65053 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Signed, Timestamps

Indirect CW for teen pregnancy, rape, death.
Just finished "Girls Like Us" by Randi Pink. Pink has a knack for telling stories that capture the grim but also vibrant nuances of African-American history. I previously read "Under the Heron's Light" which has more elements of magical realism and connects more directly to the history of enslavement; "Girls Like Us" is more historical fiction, with a bridge at the end to contemporary times (circa 2019, when the book was published). It tells the story of a disparate group of mostly-Black teens who are pregnant in 1972, and shows a range of different outcomes as varied as the backstories of the different girls. Rather than just separate vignettes, the girls' stories are women together into a single plot, and Pink is a expert at pulling us in to deeply contemplate all the complexities of these girls' lives, showing rather than telling us truths about the politics of teen pregnancy and abortion, and how even though the choices involved don't have simple answers, taking those choices out of the hands of the people they most intimately affect is cruel and deadly.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

Evaluating and Mitigating LLM-as-a-judge Bias in Communication Systems
Jiaxin Gao, Chen Chen, Yanwen Jia, Xueluan Gong, Kwok-Yan Lam, Qian Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12462 …

Evaluating and Mitigating LLM-as-a-judge Bias in Communication Systems
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to autonomously evaluate the quality of content in communication systems, e.g., to assess responses in telecom customer support chatbots. However, the impartiality of these AI "judges" is not guaranteed, and any biases in their evaluation criteria could skew outcomes and undermine user trust. In this paper, we systematically investigate judgment biases in two LLM-as-a-judge models (i.e., GPT-Judge and JudgeLM) under the point-wise scoring…

😁 Disrupting bacterial 'chatter' could tip the balance for better oral health
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-11-disrupting-bacterial-chatter-oral-health.html

Disrupting bacterial 'chatter' could tip the balance for better oral health
Like all living things, bacteria adapt to survive. Over time, bacteria have been developing resistance to common antibiotics and disinfectants, which poses a growing problem for health care and sanitation. However, many species of bacteria are beneficial and even essential for human health. What if there was a way to change the behavior of bacteria in the body to prevent illness and poor health outcomes?

Beyond Revenue and Welfare: Counterfactual Analysis of Spectrum Auctions with Application to Canada's 3800MHz Allocation
Sara Jalili Shani, Kris Joseph, Michael B. McNally, James R. Wright
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08106 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.08106 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.08106
arXiv:2512.08106v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Spectrum auctions are the primary mechanism through which governments allocate scarce radio frequencies, with outcomes that shape competition, coverage, and innovation in telecommunications markets. While traditional models of spectrum auctions often rely on strong equilibrium assumptions, we take a more parsimonious approach by modeling bidders as myopic and straightforward: in each round, firms simply demand the bundle that maximizes their utility given current prices. Despite its simplicity, this model proves effective in predicting the outcomes of Canada's 2023 auction of 3800 MHz spectrum licenses. Using detailed round-by-round bidding data, we estimate bidders' valuations through a linear programming framework and validate that our model reproduces key features of the observed allocation and price evolution. We then use these estimated valuations to simulate a counterfactual auction under an alternative mechanism that incentivizes deployment in rural and remote regions, aligning with one of the key objectives set out in the Canadian Telecommunications Act. The results show that the proposed mechanism substantially improves population coverage in underserved areas. These findings demonstrate that a behavioral model with minimal assumptions is sufficient to generate reliable counterfactual predictions, making it a practical tool for policymakers to evaluate how alternative auction designs may influence future outcomes. In particular, our study demonstrates a method for counterfactual mechanism design, providing a framework to evaluate how alternative auction rules could advance policy goals such as equitable deployment across Canada.
toXiv_bot_toot

chess: Kaggle chess players (2010)
A network among chess players (nodes) giving the chess match outcomes (edges), for game-by-game results among the world’s top chess players. The direction of edge (i,j) denotes white player (i) and black player (j). Each edge is timestamped (approximate). Edge sign is 1 for a win by white, 0 for draw, and -1 for a win by black.
This network has 7301 nodes and 65053 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Signed, Timestamps

Distribution-Free Prediction Sets for Regression under Target Shift
Menghan Yi, Yanlin Tang, Huixia Judy Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10985 https://arxi…

Distribution-Free Prediction Sets for Regression under Target Shift
In real-world applications, the limited availability of labeled outcomes presents significant challenges for statistical inference due to high collection costs, technical barriers, and other constraints. In this work, we propose a method to construct efficient conformal prediction sets for new target outcomes by leveraging a source distribution that is distinct from the target but related through a distributional shift assumption and provides abundant labeled data. When the target data are full…

Just finished "I'm Awful, Thanks" by Lara Pickle. A good story that serves as a guide to managing emotions, although it's actually a cute story too, not just framing for the mental health discussion.
That said, I feel like it doesn't get far enough into the details of accepting self-control as our only form of real control vs. understanding that some events outside our control aren't fair or are others' attacks, and trying to manage our own emotions as our only response is a disservice to ourselves and others. Even further, I suspect that the HR resolution depicted here, while not impossible, is less frequent than much worse outcomes, which is part of a larger pattern of systemic assaults on our mental health that aren't totally solvable with individual emotional regulation.
Sure, leveling up one's control of ones own emotions and learning to accept and manage a range of emotions is super useful and it's a good thing overall, but the systemic problems of late stage capitalism are real, and making it seem like everyone is responsible for managing their own mental health in the face of these problems helps avoid confronting them.
Still, it's a good book overall, with vibrant art and a well-structured plot.
#AmReading #ReadingNow

When Can Communication Lead to Efficiency?
Itai Arieli, Yakov Babichenko, Atulya Jain, Rann Smorodinsky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12508 https://arxiv.org/…

When Can Communication Lead to Efficiency?
We study games with incomplete information and characterize when a feasible outcome is Pareto efficient. We show that any outcome with excessive randomization over actions is inefficient. Generically, efficiency requires that the total number of actions taken across states be strictly less than the sum of the number of players and states. We then examine the efficiency of equilibrium outcomes in communication models. Generically, a cheap talk outcome is efficient only if it is pure. When the se…

AutoQual: An LLM Agent for Automated Discovery of Interpretable Features for Review Quality Assessment
Xiaochong Lan, Jie Feng, Yinxing Liu, Xinlei Shi, Yong Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08081

AutoQual: An LLM Agent for Automated Discovery of Interpretable Features for Review Quality Assessment
Ranking online reviews by their intrinsic quality is a critical task for e-commerce platforms and information services, impacting user experience and business outcomes. However, quality is a domain-dependent and dynamic concept, making its assessment a formidable challenge. Traditional methods relying on hand-crafted features are unscalable across domains and fail to adapt to evolving content patterns, while modern deep learning approaches often produce black-box models that lack interpretabili…

Macroeconomic Forecasting and Machine Learning
Ta-Chung Chi (Kevin), Ting-Han Fan (Kevin), Raffaele M. Ghigliazza (Kevin), Domenico Giannone (Kevin), Zixuan (Kevin), Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11008

Macroeconomic Forecasting and Machine Learning
We forecast the full conditional distribution of macroeconomic outcomes by systematically integrating three key principles: using high-dimensional data with appropriate regularization, adopting rigorous out-of-sample validation procedures, and incorporating nonlinearities. By exploiting the rich information embedded in a large set of macroeconomic and financial predictors, we produce accurate predictions of the entire profile of macroeconomic risk in real time. Our findings show that regulariza…

Assessing the Influence of Locational Suitability on the Spatial Distribution of Household Wealth in Bernalillo County, NM
Onyedikachi J. Okeke, Uloma E. Nelson, Chukwudi Nwaogu, Olumide O. Oladoyin, Emmanuel Kubuafor, Dennis Baidoo, Titilope Akinyemi, Adedoyin S. Ajeyomi, Rekiya A. Idris, Isaac A. Fabunmi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11048

Assessing the Influence of Locational Suitability on the Spatial Distribution of Household Wealth in Bernalillo County, NM
This study applies Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) to examine the spatial determinants of household wealth in Bernalillo County, New Mexico. The model incorporates sociodemographic, environmental, and proximity-based variables to evaluate how locational suitability influences economic outcomes. Key factors considered include income, home value, elevation, PM2.5 concentration, and distances to essential services such as schools, markets, and hospitals. The MGWR model demonst…

ReInAgent: A Context-Aware GUI Agent Enabling Human-in-the-Loop Mobile Task Navigation
Haitao Jia, Ming He, Zimo Yin, Likang Wu, Jianping Fan, Jitao Sang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07988

ReInAgent: A Context-Aware GUI Agent Enabling Human-in-the-Loop Mobile Task Navigation
Mobile GUI agents exhibit substantial potential to facilitate and automate the execution of user tasks on mobile phones. However, exist mobile GUI agents predominantly privilege autonomous operation and neglect the necessity of active user engagement during task execution. This omission undermines their adaptability to information dilemmas including ambiguous, dynamically evolving, and conflicting task scenarios, leading to execution outcomes that deviate from genuine user requirements and pref…

Ranking Policies Under Loss Aversion and Inequality Aversion
Martyna Kobus, Rados{\l}aw Kurek, Thomas Parker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09590 https://arxiv…

Ranking Policies Under Loss Aversion and Inequality Aversion
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more heavily than gains. The electorate's loss aversion, in turn, influences politicians' choices. We propose a new framework for welfare analysis of policy outcomes that, in addition to the traditional focus on post-policy incomes, also accounts for individuals' …

Denoised IPW-Lasso for Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation in Randomized Experiments
Mingqian Guan, Komei Fujita, Naoya Sueishi, Shota Yasui
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10527

Denoised IPW-Lasso for Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation in Randomized Experiments
This paper proposes a new method for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATE) in randomized experiments. We adopt inverse probability weighting (IPW) for identification; however, IPW-transformed outcomes are known to be noisy, even when true propensity scores are used. To address this issue, we introduce a noise reduction procedure and estimate a linear CATE model using Lasso, achieving both accuracy and interpretability. We theoretically show that denoising reduces the predictio…

Bayesian Multivariable Bidirectional Mendelian Randomization
Bitan Sarkar, Yuchao Jiang, Yang Ni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09991 https://arxiv.org/pdf/251…

Bayesian Multivariable Bidirectional Mendelian Randomization
Mendelian randomization (MR) is a pivotal tool in genetic epidemiology, leveraging genetic variants as instrumental variables to infer causal relationships between modifiable exposures and health outcomes. Traditional MR methods, while powerful, often rest on stringent assumptions such as the absence of feedback loops, which are frequently violated in complex biological systems. In addition, many popular MR approaches focus on only two variables (i.e., one exposure and one outcome) whereas our …

Who gets hit first and who recovers last? Evidence from Indian Coastal Flood Shock
Jheelum Sarkar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08856 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

Who gets hit first and who recovers last? Evidence from Indian Coastal Flood Shock
Catastrophic floods directly risk 1.8 billion lives worldwide, most of whom are from East and South Asia. How do extreme floods reshape paid labor outcomes? To answer this, I focus on a 1-in-100 year flood event in India. I first combine Sentinel-1 SAR with JRC Global Surface Water dataset to generate flood map. Using information from this map in various rounds of periodic labor force surveys, I estimate gender-specific dynamic effects of the flood shock. Key results show that men experienced s…

Zero-Inflated Bayesian Multi-Study Infinite Non-Negative Matrix Factorization
Blake Hansen, Dafne Zorzetto, Valeria Edefonti, Roberta De Vito
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07518 ht…

Zero-Inflated Bayesian Multi-Study Infinite Non-Negative Matrix Factorization
Understanding the association between dietary patterns and health outcomes, such as the cancer risk, is crucial to inform public health guidelines and shaping future dietary interventions. However, dietary intake data present several statistical challenges: they are high-dimensional, often sparse with excess zeros, and exhibit heterogeneity driven by individual-level covariates. Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), commonly used to estimate patterns in high-dimensional count data, typically…

Women's inheritance rights reforms and impact on women's empowerment: evidence from India
Minali Grover, Ajay Sharma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10437 https://

Women's inheritance rights reforms and impact on women's empowerment: evidence from India
This paper explores the influence of inheritance rights on women' empowerment in India. We employ the quasi-natural experiment framework wherein; five states amended the Hindu Succession Act (HSA) from 1976 to 1994 before it was federally amended in 2005. Further, we apply difference-in-difference (DID) strategy and consider triangulation approach to identify women empowerment indicators namely: access to resources, agency, and outcomes to measure varying dimensions of empowerment. Using the In…

Bayesian Profile Regression with Linear Mixed Models (Profile-LMM) applied to Longitudinal Exposome Data
Matteo Amestoy, Mark van de Wiel, Jeroen Lakerveld, Wessel van Wieringen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08304

Bayesian Profile Regression with Linear Mixed Models (Profile-LMM) applied to Longitudinal Exposome Data
Exposure to diverse non-genetic factors, known as the exposome, is a critical determinant of health outcomes. However, analyzing the exposome presents significant methodological challenges, including: high collinearity among exposures, the longitudinal nature of repeated measurements, and potential complex interactions with individual characteristics. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a novel statistical framework that extends Bayesian profile regression. Our method integr…