Rob Davies

Keynes talked of the ‘advanced guard’ - the fact that there will be people in the economy who demonstrate a way forward out of current traps, and the fact is they exist now - from alternative corporate forms to innovative local authorities to SME catalysts. Be interested in what’s outside!

Survey administration schedule across the 12-week study period. Participants completed biweekly surveys (orange) every two weeks, with US participants additionally completing daily surveys (blue) for the first 30 days. Cognitive tests (green) were administered during biweekly surveys at weeks 1, 5, and 9. Gray circles indicate days with no scheduled surveys. Retention percentages show the proportion of baseline participants (N=1978) who were still active at each measurement week (defined as having completed either a daily or biweekly survey at any time after that week)

Diurnal play across Xbox, Nintendo, Steam.

Sample of daily gaming patterns and mental wellbeing for three representative participants. Stacked bars represent total daily playtime across platforms. Orange line shows biweekly mental wellbeing scores (short WEMWBS) measured at six study waves. Participants were selected from those closest to the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of total playtime, prioritizing those with the most varied multi-platform gaming behavior. Participant IDs: p9009984081 (25th percentile), p8809196928 (50th percentile), p7162729307 (75th percentile)

We released a pretty cool dataset/preprint today looking at video game play, cognition, time-use and a ton of self-reported psych measures at osf.io/preprints/ps... with @nballou.bsky.social @matti.vuorre.com @thomashakman.bsky.social @rpsychologist.com and @shuhbillskee.bsky.social RRs coming soon

Ate at a Thai/Jewish fusion food truck named L'Thaim and it was fantastic. Curry latkes.

This is an Eastern Cape giant cycad. This specimen at Kew Gardens is the world's oldest potted plant* & it is older than the United States.
I found this oddly comforting? Certain systems seem deeply entrenched & unchangeable but in reality there are houseplants that have been around longer.🧪🌿

a very grumpy little brussels griffon with black and tan fur and big ears is laying in a fluffy dog bed and absolutely scowling at you. his mouth is a downturned arch that would be classified as a rainbow shape in any more positive context, and he’s squinting directly at you, challenging this unnecessary disruption. the green dog bed he’s laying on looks (probably coincidentally?) exactly like the fur of oscar the grouch.

This is Carl. He was just woken up from a nap. Hopes for your sake the house is on fire. 12/10 (IG: grumpus.steve.carl)

Women at NASA, starting with one of my favorite #WomenInSTEM photos
🧵

Behavioral data can be very detailed but are usually aggregated and normalized in ways that smother the dynamics. Ben wrote a continuous-time Markov model to improve on this, and also wrote simulations for exploring and validating pipelines. All the code is here: github.com/BenKawam/ASN...

Can someone please turn this into a series of novels set in the Song dynasty which then becomes a longrunning television series starring eg Benedict Wong?

I can help with the format proposal but could only be co-writer at best, because it needs someone with much more China expertise than me.

wow

Text Shot: The last hominins to use Oldowan tools looked very different, and probably lived and behaved very differently, from the first; over this huge span of time, the stone tool technology itself changed less than the beings using it.

🧪 For hundreds of thousand of years over the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary, through climate change and hominid evolution itself, a technology/method for making stone tools remained the same.

A level of technological stability almost too alien for us to understand.

arstechnica.com/science/2025/1…

Was thinking about a problem and a how to guide that @andrew.heiss.phd wrote (comparing populations and samples). Instead of doing a clever search through his bsky posts, just scrolled through his feed and rediscovered a bunch of other cool stuff. I appreciate them, thanks @andrew.heiss.phd!

Really helpful: how to do something like this came up in a seminar this week and I remembered this guide and will share it, thanks for taking the time to write and share

Plot showing the percent decrease in the number of polling places in a handful of US states after the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder SCOTUS ruling, with Arizona seeing a 22% decrease in voting locations. The title and subtitle use nicer typography and have keywords colored in reddish pink to match the plot

Trying out the {marquee} #rstats package for markdown-based formatting of ggplot elements and it's super neat marquee.r-lib.org

(code for plot here github.com/andrewheiss/...)

so I can explain this: it's not generative AI: it's usually deep learning models trained on meteorology tasks and it can be quite effective

Wrote up a little intervention post/explanation for my class about why using LLMs for trying to learn programming (as first time learners!) is bad and detrimental datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-11...

Blue and red stripes showing temperature anomalies since 1850

Have you ever wanted to make your own climate warming stripes plot? It's super easy with #rstats! (code here gist.github.com/andrewheiss/... )

BBC really burying the lede there

I have my students co-develop class policies, and they pretty much unanimously chose to ban AI in the class. There were a few questions about using Grammarly, but those were the only real exceptions any students expressed (and even then, we talked about alternatives to that and they were open to it)

I'm one of the four fired employees. I was a writer & producer at Bon Appétit for nearly five years, during which I helped organize our union and sat on our bargaining committee.

I am, to my knowledge, the only trans woman in our union and the only trans woman on editorial who doesn't work at Them

Introducing our new, more powerful search Finding what you’re looking for, or discovering something new, has never been easier.

Over the last months, we’ve entirely rebuilt search on Our World in Data — we just launched it:
ourworldindata.org/introducing-...

Let me know what you think. Does it work for you?

I did not coin it tho! nyslibrary.libguides.com/c.php?g=1357...

Accountability sinks

aworkinglibrary.com/writing/acco...

The health inequalities agenda is "tired and risks having run out of road" - not my words, the words of a senior health policymaker in the Scottish Government. But other SG policymakers told me health inequalities were a "huge priority" - so what's going on? A thread... 1/

Position statement on artificial intelligence (AI) use in evidence synthesis across Cochrane, the Campbell Collaboration, JBI and the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence 2025 - Environmental Evid... 1. Evidence synthesists are ultimately responsible for their evidence synthesis, including the decision to use artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, and to ensure adherence to legal and ethical...

Position statement on artificial intelligence (#AI) use in evidence synthesis across Cochrane, the Campbell Collaboration, JBI and the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence 2025 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Jumping on the Wifi long enough to past a quick #bird pic from this morning, Golden-hooded Tanager, #RanchoNaturalist, Cartago, Costa Riica #birding

The full interior of the great barn at Coxwell in Oxfordshire showing the steep roof dominating the image with the arcade timbers rising from old stones. Has a Scandinavian feel. The light is contrasty but warm - it pricks out the openings at the gable which is in the distance.

Great Coxwell barn in Oxfordshire was built in 1292. Dendrochronology has shown that some of its timbers were felled in 1256, whilst the majority were felled in the winter of 1291. It was part of a Cistercian abbey founded by King John.

Every Tree Can Be a Buddha I began at the end. The Chōishi-michi pilgrimage route is an amazing 12-mile trail that winds its way up through the forest from the Jison-in temple in the town of Kudoyama in the valley to the Danjo Garan temple in th

I wrote about my time in the holy Japanese town of Kōyasan: Every Tree Can Be a Buddha. “You don’t want your pilgrims getting lost — how are you going to find eternal salvation if you can’t even make it to the temple?” [kottke.org]

1/3 Reddit’s popularity has exploded in recent years.

Daily users have approximately doubled since the summer of 2023. It’s become one of the top sources cited by AI chatbots. And organic search to the platform has skyrocketed (you may have noticed more Reddit results when you Google these days).

I've been getting back into the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series after many years, and the most relatable part is how everyday objects like doors and elevators have been imbued with artificial intelligence and it just makes them obnoxious and frustrating to use and everyone hates it.

The men who raised the flags Nigel Farage says this summer’s movement was led by ‘ordinary people’ expressing their patriotism. That’s not what we found

Well, there are some interesting details in this…