Fascinating paper. Even as LLMs get better and better at choosing what to do in different medical scenarios, when used by members of the public the performance is no better than in a control group. So either we need better humans, or we need to think about deployment! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Glad to see a piece that is less panicked about projected population decline www.ft.com/content/0ae2...

Tests found barium, which can cause heart and blood pressure problems, at 3x the EPA’s limit in the Boarmans’ drinking water. But the state did not inform the family of the results for over a month — until @readfrontier.bsky.social and ProPublica requested them.

Survey researchers: I'll discuss LLM "synthetic respondents" in a free webinar this week. ➡️ Synthetic Survey Data? It's Not Data Thursday Feb 19, 12pm Eastern, hosted by Sawtooth Free registration: sawtoothsoftware.com/resources/ev... (P.S., I give no quarter on this topic 😆)

A very helpful assistant. I tried it on a few of my rejections and it picked up weak points and offered some good suggestions. What was notably missing compared, to a more typical review from a human, were those slightly irrelevant citation suggestions that point to the referee's identity.

English-language guides to hiking Japan’s many mountains can be scarce, but one Filipina resident has taken it upon herself to map out the country’s many trails.

The Kanagawa police department plans to cancel about 2,700 traffic violations that are believed to have been falsified by some officers.

Mainichi has a translation of last month's piece on convenience store training of foreign staff. While the Japanese original is behind a paywall, the English version is free to read. mainichi.jp/english/arti...

Now this is a movie plot!!! Someone understands grad school.

The moment I knew: as soon we parted I realised Hitomi was the one. I waited years to see her again

In February's Environmental and Resource Economics: Sampriti Sarkar and Frank Lupi use a choice experiment to investigate how caring for others affects the willingness to deal with aging water and sewage infrastructure problems in the US. #EAERE #Econsky

Coverage of the EPA rollback of the endangerment finding from @alexwitze.bsky.social.

Scrap the triple lock and give the money to graduates drowning in debt

Final EIA-860 is out, and 2025 really did it: 54 GW of new U.S. electric capacity, 96% clean. Solar again carries the offense, and we built more storage in 2025 than the cumulative total through 2023. More and more and more additions... but also record low retirements.

In February's Environmental and Resource Economics: sovereign debt risk poses challenges and sets constraints even for high income countries. Caterina Seghini examines how climate change complicates the picture. #Econsky #EAERE

Always learn some thing new from this blog. Expanding Japanese language-learning opportunities really seems like a no-brainer for a government that seeks better integration.

I have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.

Kosode (proto-kimono) with Overturned Flask Design, Mid to late 17th century, Japan. Kanoko shibori tie-dyeing and ink on white figured satin. The design features a large, overturned sake flask at the top, from which a vast stream of liquid flows diagonally across the white figured-satin ground.

Under new government guidelines, when foreign residents move into public housing, local authorities must confirm their nationality. Any emergency contact must be someone capable of communicating in Japanese. news.web.nhk/newsweb/na/n...

In February's Environmental and Resource Economics: when it comes to supporting nature, should governments pay by results (risky, hard to evaluate) or for actions (observable, but not the real goal)? The two approaches go head-to-head in Martin Drechsler's paper. #EAERE #Econsky

Good for Ireland but the “cost benefit analysis (CBA)” involves some money pump magical thinking. A transfer of money nets out in CBA. Here it doesn’t.

Today we’re launching Open Climate Risk, a fully open option for U.S. building-level climate risk data. It’s unique because it allows you to see not only risk scores, starting with wildfire, but also the complete underlying dataset, methods, and codebase. carbonplan.org/research/cli...

Unlike her immediate predecessors, Prime Minister #Takaichi's headline manifesto had no mention of #climatechange and #NetZero. Still, buried in the details of the pdf version is a renewed commitment to a 2050 goal, and a vow to get #Japan's #carbon trading up and running in FY2026. #排出量取引制度

/6 And of course, gym shoes are commonly known as 'plimsolls' due to the similarity between the Plimsoll line on a ship's hull, and the line of the rubber soul on the shoe.

Another three UK universities decline new Elsevier deal buff.ly/x1YZwEp

Tomorrow we welcome @lucasmolleman.bsky.social as our latest CeDEx seminar speaker. The talk will take place in @uoneconomics.bsky.social Sir Clive Granger Building, room A40, 1-2pm. More about Lucas: www.uva.nl/en/profile/m... More about our seminars: www.nottingham.ac.uk/cedex/semina...

In February's Environmental and Resource Economics: temporary sinks for carbon put off permanent removal but buy precious time for developing better solutions. Max Franks, Friedemann Gruner, Matthias Kalkuhl, Kai Lessmann & Ottmar Edenhofer examine the economics. #EAERE #Econsky

📣 @i4replication.bsky.social and CERDI are organizing a Replication Game on May 29, 2026 in #ClermontFerrand. 🧠💡 Teams of researchers, PhD, and master's students will reproduce the results of an academic article. Register now: www.surveymonkey.ca/r/F6XWX9F

In February's Environmental and Resource Economics: does proximity to a local air quality monitoring station matter for regulartory strictness, pollution and production? Xi Liu & Yinhe Liang show that it does for firms in China. #EAERE #Econsky

I made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail

In February's Environmental and Resource Economics: both adaptation and mitigation are important part of global responses to climate change. Michèle Breton & Lucia Sbragia explore how the Paris agreement alters the strategic incentives for countries. #EAERE #Econsky

183 died, most of them forced labourers from Korea. But you have to question whether it is worth further deaths in order to recover the bodies.

Snow brings out some unusual creatures in Ibaraki

In February's Environmental and Resource Economics: Claire Doll examines how tree-planting preferences in Western Australia depend on information provision. #EAERE #Econsky

Not only that, but denialist-bench-weakness=> including Canadian economist with experience of *falsification* & being brought to US to impede science-based climate policy, via CEI+George Marshall Institute=> Jim Inhofe, Joe Barton=>Wegman Report , all in early 2000s.

In February's Environmental and Resource Economics: how should CBA be done for pilot projects that generate spillovers? With the French glassware industry as a case study, Maryam Sadighi Jean-Pierre Ponssard, Maria Eugenia Sanin, Murès Zarea & Elodie Le Cadre Loret provide answers.

1. Noam Chomsky's response to the first tranche of Epstein docs - arrogant, high-handed, obfuscatory and, we now know, dishonest - reminded me of something: his response to my questions about genocide denial, 15 years ago. 🧵 www.monbiot.com/2012/05/21/2...

In February's Environmental and Resource Economics: Bui Bich Xuan, Quach Thi Khanh Ngoc, Claire W. Armstrong, Godwin K. Vondolia & Pham Khanh Nam investigate the roles of social norms in sustaining illegal fishing activities in Vietnam. #Econsky #EAERE buff.ly/ggXsW32

(1/7) Keisuke Kinoshita’s 1957 film 𝘛𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘑𝘰𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘚𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘸 (喜びも悲しみも幾歳月), also known as 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦, was shot at ten lighthouses across Japan. Kannonzaki Lighthouse, Kanagawa below on right, and more screenshots from the film in thread…

The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions! This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...

Only 10 cases of Guinea worm disease were recorded *globally* last year. It may become the second human disease we eradicate, after smallpox.

Are you a #Stata user? Maybe you work with one? Have you ever found yourself copy-pasting from the results window? It's annoying as hell! And terrible practice. So I wrote a blog post on using #rstats to extract results from Stata log files benharrap.com/post/2026-02...

Japan’s exports to Russia of agricultural products & seafood jumped 439% in 2025. The total value of these exports was $246m.

Honda remains popular in Russia despite the firm no longer having official representation there. Registration of new Hondas was up 18% in 2025. Imports of used Hondas were up 12%.

The entrumpification of Japanese politics has arrived

Lead (Pb) in archived hair in Salt Lake City. "Lead (Pb) in archived hair documents a decline in lead exposure to humans since the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency " www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

"Undermining Academic Freedom and Environmental Research in the US: How European Institutions and Researchers can Fill the Gap" - a publication by Linda Nøstbakken (@nhhecon.bsky.social & @nhhnor.bsky.social), Simone Borghesi and Phoebe Koundouri: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Water is a vital economic resource. How do we account for it? Join our ESCoE webinar on compiling UK freshwater accounts using the UN SEEA-EA standard: tinyurl.com/yc8ffxmy @uniofeastanglia.bsky.social @ucl.ac.uk

Put a third way, growing corn for ethanol to move combustion vehicles around uses ~100 times more land than making solar electricity to move electric vehicles around.

Rental guarantor companies move to the front lines in the battle between landlords and tenants, taking casualties in the process. bit.ly/4t73jr7 #家賃保証会社