Fatal car wrecks are correlated with stock-market fluctuations

Writing in The Journal of Health Economics, three economists claim (Sci Hub mirror) that “a one standard deviation reduction in daily stock market returns is associated with a 0.6% increase in fatal car accidents that happen after the stock market opening” and that this is robust across “a battery of falsification tests.”
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The 1970s called and they want their proto-McMansions back!

The latest installment of the always-delightful McMansion Hell (previously) departs from the usual format of mercilessly skewering the tasteless custom homes of the contemporary super-rich and instead delves into their historic precedent, the 1970s-vintage “proto-McMansion,” AKA the “Styled Ranch.”
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You will be helped! Research using real-world situations fails to replicate the “bystander effect”

For decades, the “bystander effect” (previously) has been a bedrock of received psychological wisdom: “individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present; the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that one of them will help.”
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For the first time, you can search the database of money that publicly funded researchers in Illinois received from pharma companies

Researchers in Illinois who receive federal funding are required to file paperwork disclosing potential conflicts of interest, but these handwritten forms just moulder in the NIH’s filing cabinets…until now.
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More than 800 Russian academic articles retracted after “bombshell” report reveals plagiarism and other misconduct

After Antiplagiat, a private plagiarism detection company, accused Russia’s scientific and scholarly journals of being rife with plagiarism, self-plagiarism, duplication and other misconduct, the Russian Academy of Sciences chartered a committee to investigate the problem: their report confirmed the accusations, finding more instances of plagiarism/self-plagiarism, as well as instances in which the same paper was published in different journals under different authors’ names.
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Machine learning is innately conservative and wants you to either act like everyone else, or never change

Next month, I’m giving a keynote talk at The Future of the Future: The Ethics and Implications of AI, an event at UC Irvine that features Bruce Sterling, Rose Eveleth, David Kaye, and many others!
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Doctors who take pharma industry freebies prescribe more of their benefactors’ drugs

Doctors who accept pharma industry gifts (which can range from free coffees to lavish dinners to six-figure speaking fees) claim that they’re not influenced by these bribes/gifts, which is possibly why doctors are taking more pharma bribes than ever.
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Bernie Sanders got the GAO to study the life chances of millennials, and the report concludes that debt is “crushing their dreams”

Bernie Sanders commissioned the Government Accountability Office to study the consequences of the high degree of indebtedness borne by Millennials; the GAO’s report concludes that Millennials dreams are being “crushed” by debts — primarily student loans — which have limited their abilities to seek good employment, good housing, and to save for retirement.
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Facebook promised to provide academics data to study disinformation, but their foot-dragging has endangered the whole project

Social Science One is an academic consortium that was created to conduct “independent scientific research into potentially consequential phenomena such as online disinformation, polarization, and echo chambers” after the Big Tech platforms made changes to their policies that made this kind of research effectively impossible without cooperation from the platforms themselves.
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