Sol Yates

Paris said au revoir to cars. Air pollution maps reveal a dramatic change. Air pollution fell substantially as the city restricted car traffic and made way for parks and bike lanes.

“Air pollution fell substantially as Paris restricted car traffic and made way for parks, people-streets and bike-lanes.”

Better for the climate, better for health, better for livability & quality of life.

Common sense.

Such a no-brainer, it’s remarkable that more cities HAVEN’T done the same.

McSweeney is exercised by the fact that the civil service has 7,000 communications officers, 4,500 of whom work for arm's-length bodies and quangos and frequently attack what the government is trying to do. Like Dominic Cummings, he is enthused by the possibilities of technology to speed change, such as AI in the NHS or gamers being hired by the Ministry of Defence to fly drones. He is now experimenting with 'synthetic voters' – essentially fake focus groups of AI voters who can tell ministers more quickly and cheaply what the public thinks of policies. In the last week he has been reading The Technological Republic by Alexander Karp, co-founder of the tech firm Palantir, which argues that the West’s technical dominance over the past century has been down to collaboration between governments and tech firms.

Morgan McSweeney (UK Labour's Dominic Cummings knock-off) is reportedly experimenting with 'synthetic voters' – "essentially fake focus groups of AI voters who can tell ministers more quickly and cheaply what the public thinks of policies" www.spectator.co.uk/article/can-...

#govtech #govcomms

Streeting sets out digital overhaul of NHS centred on ‘doctor in your pocket’ app Health secretary banks on resulting efficiencies to reduce number of frontline workers in 10-year health plan

Someone needs to tell these guys about supply-induced demand. #healthpolicy

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Screenshot from Positron showing code that connects to a database, and then highlights the connection in a Connections Pane and shows the data in a Data Explorer tab Here's the code: library(dplyr) # Connect with {connections}, which automatically adds this to the panel con <- connections::connection_open(duckdb::duckdb(), ":memory:") # Or do it manually with {DBI} # con <- DBI::dbConnect(duckdb::duckdb(), ":memory:") # connections::connection_view(con) # Add some stuff to the database copy_to(con, penguins, name = "penguins", overwrite = TRUE) copy_to(con, gapminder::gapminder, name = "gapminder", overwrite = TRUE) # Get stuff out of the database adelie_query <- tbl(con, I("penguins")) |> filter(species == "Adelie") # Check it out! It's SQL! show_query(adelie_query) # Actually run the query penguins_from_db <- adelie_query |> collect() penguins_from_db connections::connection_close(con) # Or this: # DBI::dbDisconnect(con)

Ooh, @posit.co's Positron is no longer in beta as of this week(!), and it recently added support for DuckDB databases in the Connections Pane positron.posit.co/connections-... - any db connection you add with {connections} shows up there—this is magical! #rstats

If anyone needs more empirical evidence that climate change is driving the uptick in extreme wildfire activity across western NAmerica, this is a good illustration.

Proactive case-finding and risk-stratification in people at risk of chronic liver disease in Greater Manchester: a cost-effectiveness analysis Background: We urgently need innovative strategies to combat a growing epidemic of chronic liver disease (CLD). ID-LIVER was a collaborative project aiming to improve detection of reversible-stage CLD...

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

A long long time ago, in a far away galaxy... the US used to tax the rich

A alpha version of an R package to estimate differences-in-differences with a continuous treatment is now available from the authors
bcallaway11.github.io/contdid/inde...

Net migration has halved, meaning the government didn't need to axe the social care route, or double the time for settlement, or create a funding crisis among universities.

Hundreds of thousands of lives impacted because of the politics.

YouTube video by Adam Ragusea Is ALL cooking "ultra-processed" food?

youtu.be/OhA3T60PtSM?...

Research Associate in Health Economics:Oxford Road

The Manchester Centre for Health Economics has three new Research Associate positions in Health Economics (£37,174 - £41,671 p/a). These are 24-month fixed-term contracts from July 2025 to June 2027.

For full details and to apply, visit
www.jobs.manchester.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

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Why So Many MAGA Men Look Like Joe Rogan The slim-fit uniform of grindset entrepreneurs and right wing podcasters can be traced back decades.

I want to give credit to my editors, who asked me to write 2,000 words on why Andrew Tate wears such tight pants. I submitted 3,700. They asked if I really needed to start with a story about the industrial revolution and I said "yes, absolutely don't cut."

www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

What is Git and how to use it? In this lesson, we learn the basics of using Git.

Here's the link. www.code-like-a-journalist.com/en/git-and-g...

The UK car industry contributes £22bn to the economy and employs c 35k people.

Universities contribute £265bn and employ nearly 400k, over 10x as much.

Yet he seems ok to let that sector implode.

I’m happy to share our new working paper, "Are Female-Dominated Cancers Underfunded?", co-authored with my incredible doctoral advisors, @juditvall.bsky.social and @lidiafarre.bsky.social . This paper has evoked a range of emotions, but we hope it sheds light on an important topic.

Health Equity North directors respond to Spring Statement - Health Equity North Following the announcement of today’s (March 26, 2025) Spring Statement by Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves MP, Health Equity North’s four Academic Co-Directors have issued a joint statement ...

Following the announcement of the #SpringStatement by Chancellor of the Exchequer, our Academic Co-Directors @profkepickett.bsky.social @profbambra.bsky.social @lukemunford.bsky.social & Prof David Taylor-Robinson have issued a joint statement in response www.healthequitynorth.co.uk/health-equit...

Congestion Pricing is a Policy Miracle Which is exactly why Trump wants to get rid of it

bettercities.substack.com/p/congestion...

Congestion Pricing

Traffic down
Pollution down
Public transport up
Business impact positive
Safety improved

The Reshaping Of NHS National Bodies Has Only Just Started. How Will It Finish? | The King's Fund Following the announcement that NHS England is to be abolished, Siva Anandaciva considers the implications and why at the moment there are more questions than answers.

Brilliant piece by Siva Anandaciva from the Kings Fund on the implications of abolishing NHS England.

www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-...

zuck wearing a shirt that says "aut zuck aut nihil"

jay graber, bluesky ceo, wearing a shirt that says "mundus sine caesaribus"

Written for Scotland, applies globally.

Trump To New York: Drop Dead Why he wants to kill a hugely successful policy

As expected paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-to-n...

“As in Ricardo’s time, the impact of automation on workers today is more complex than an automatic linkage from higher productivity to better wages”

economics.mit.edu/sites/defaul...

The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s power grab: a coup veiled by chaos | Editorial Editorial: The US president is testing the limits of executive authority, sidelining Congress and enriching allies while destabilising the global economy

.@theguardian.com to the rescue of journalism, calling TrumpMusk's ongoing totalitarian insurrection what it is: a #COUP.
Do read. From the Guardian, it's always a gift link:
The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s power grab: a coup veiled by chaos
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

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TIL Abraham Wald, who famously worked on selection bias in assessing aircraft damage, died in a plane crash :(

Reminder for a new year and a new platform: parquet is a really efficient way of storing big tabular datasets. These two files are identical, written from the same R data frame - the parquet one is >10x smaller than the csv

Departing the New York Times I left to stay true to my byline

I wrote for The Contrarian about my decision to leave the New York Times contrarian.substack.com/p/departing-...