Stephen Hill

Can New Zealand's economy recover if house prices don't? New Zealand's economy is expected to continue to slowly recover this year.

As a) an economist and b) someone who did a whole ass PhD on this very topic, the macro evidence is that house prices are at best concurrent with economic growth and at worst lag it. House prices don't drive the economy.

Can NZ's economy recover if house prices don't? www.rnz.co.nz/news/busines...

A grey hoodie with text which reads: “Buy a man eat fish, He day, teach fish man To a lifetime.”

Wise words

Government’s new science institute to lose 6% of staff less than a year after forming The Bioeconomy Science Institute is shedding 6% of its staff.

And people wonder why NZ’s R&D spend is way lower than the rest of the OECD & our productivity is in the toilet. www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360...

That's not what the article says at all.

Social media bans for teens lack evidence - Nature Health Online harms are an urgent societal challenge, but governments should prepare teenagers to responsibly use digital technology.

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Something without lyrics so I don’t fill my phonological loop with the wrong stuff.

"Evolutionary psychologists had developed a robust science around what people *say* they would do or *say* they would be attracted to. But natural selection does not act on what people say they would do in a hypothetical scenario." 🔥🔥🔥

Sovereign Citizens - Police Manual chapter This chapter provides guidance on how to handle interactions with individuals who identify as sovereign citizens.

Police chapter released - link to download ⬇️

www.police.govt.nz/about-us/pub...

Anger over plans to abolish New Zealand’s dedicated environment ministry
Critics say proposal to fold department into a new ‘mega ministry’ will dilute accountability and put nature protections at risk
#nzpol

(CNN) - Facing a crowd of journalists, inventor Thomas Midgley Jr. poured a lead additive over his hands and then proceeded to inhale its fumes for about a minute. Unfazed, he said, "I could do this every day without getting any health problems whatsoever." Soon afterward, Midgley needed medical treatment. But the act would have dire consequences beyond his own well-being.

A latter day Thomas Midgley Jr

Signs of psychosis seen in Australian users’ interactions with AI chatbots, expert warns Toby Walsh says he despairs at Australian government’s lack of regulation of artificial intelligence * Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates * Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast A leading AI expert has warned some Australians are showing signs of psychosis or mania in their interactions with chatbots, arguing Silicon Valley is being “careless” with the technology amid a pursuit of profit. During an address at the National Press Club on Wednesday, Toby Walsh, scientia professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, said he believed the AI race will be both “boom and doom”, with some benefits. Continue reading...

Signs of psychosis seen in Australian users’ interactions with AI chatbots, expert warns

Designing observational studies for safer inferences: Harrison Hansford How can we better design observational studies to make the inferences we seek?

events.humanitix.com/metascience-...

Join us for our first metascience seminar of the year, featuring Harrison Hansford and a discussion about the inferences we can safely draw from observational studies.

Puberty blockers ban anxiety grinds on as ‘very, very worried’ children and families look for support 'Ultimately, there's a very real chance that it's going to cost people's lives.'

There’s not much I can add to this piece this morning other than to ask you to read it, because it contains the words of those actually affected by this ban - the people whose voices have been missing the entire time. Heartbreaking. While the ban has been paused, our communities are still suffering.

New police powers to ‘move on’ rough sleepers only mask NZ’s deeper homelessness problem Women make up half of the people experiencing homelessness in New Zealand. A study shows access to permanent housing improves their health and lifts their income.

NZ is an international outlier in that more than half of those experiencing homelessness are women, often with dependent children. A "housing first" approach makes a huge difference to their lives (and men's), writes @universityofotago.bsky.social's Brodie Fraser theconversation.com/new-police-p...

Cycling is ten times more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities Active travel can help tackle the climate crisis earlier than electric vehicles – even if you swap the car for a bike for just one trip a day.

Cycling is 10 times more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities and 100 times more fun.

HOT FUZZ scene. Pegg as a cop talking to some underage kids in a pub When’s your birthday? 22nd of February. What year? Every year.

Happy birthday to this young man, and really to us all

Please don't feed your children to the AI beast

Comment from Victoria University: Our children deserve places to grow up that offer them privacy, not having their personal information served up to AI for potentially nefarious uses.

#rstats

The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics will be running a special issue commemorating the 25th anniversary of the official release of R. (The Univ. of Auckland was the birthplace of R.) They invited various people to contribute articles, including me. 🧵 1/

Graph of CO2 concentrations for the past 800,000 years from the Antarctic ice cores, showing current CO2 levels of 430 ppm are far, far higher than any level over this period, which never exceeded 300 ppm. Also shown is the emergence of Homo sapiens around 200,000 years ago -- so CO2 levels are higher than we've ever experienced.

You are here.
We've breached 430 ppm CO2.
#climatechange

The greatest risk of AI in higher education isn’t cheating – it’s the erosion of learning itself Automating knowledge production and teaching weakens the ecosystem of students and scholars that sustains universities, raising existential questions about their mission.

"Cognitive psychology has shown that students grow intellectually through doing the work of drafting, revising, failing, trying again, grappling with confusion and revising weak arguments. This is the work of learning how to learn."

More women are professors, but gender gaps continue to plague NZ universities New Zealand universities are slowly closing the pay gap, but men are still more likely to fill senior leadership roles in the highest pay brackets.

More women are professors, but gender gaps continue to plague NZ universities
theconversation.com/more-women-a...

Good news coming out of the NZ parliament, finally leaving X.

Parliament ditches X, formerly Twitter, over deepfakes Free Speech Union writes to the Speaker as Clerk of House says he doesn’t want his organisation associated with controversial platform.

Clerk of the House David Wilson tells me it was him who decided to stop Parliament posting on Twitter.

He says Grok's abuse imagery and the lack of a serious response from the platform were the reason.

www.thepost.co.nz/politics/360...

A thread for the 15-year anniversary of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. I won’t have a chance to post it on the day, so I’m doing it a couple days early. Note that the work I’m posting was carried out by many brilliant people. 1/

‘Mind-blowing’ baby chick study challenges a theory of how humans evolved language Newborn chicks connect sounds with shapes just like humans, suggesting deep evolutionary roots of the “bouba-kiki” effect

Newborn chicks connect sounds with shapes just like humans, suggesting deep evolutionary roots of the “bouba-kiki” effect

The ones on Kapiti are easy to find (at least in my experience) - they hang around where the boats moor. I hope you get a chance to photograph a few more!

Producing more while understanding less with large language models Many scientists are enthusiastic about the potentials of 'Artificial Intelligence' (AI) for research. We recently examined the vision of ‘AI Surrogates’ [1]: computer models [including but not limited to large language models (LLMs)] designed to simulate human participants for the purpose of generating knowledge about human cognition and behavior. Some scientists believe that AI Surrogates can improve the generalizability of cognitive science: first, by simulating diverse populations that are not readily accessible, overcoming the field’s overreliance on Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) samples; and second, by enabling researchers to quickly and cheaply explore vast experimental design spaces, expanding the diversity of situations that can be probed experimentally.

Online Now: Producing more while understanding less with large language models

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of t...

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪