Alistair Munro

A (Green) Switch in Time Saves Nine: Assessing the Environmental Damage of the European Truck Cartel - Environmental and Resource Economics This study examines how the cartel of European truck manufacturers coordinated the timing of compliance with emission standards, generating additional air pollution without violating environmental…

In March's Environmental and Resource Economics:
Ilona Dielen, Patrice Bougette & Christophe Charlier calculate that delays in introducing emissions regulation created by a European a lorry cartel increased average infant hospital admissions by 12–18 cases per 1000 births.

buff.ly/EeOe293

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A hugely important message from the UK PM.

It is vital everyone listens to it in full to understand the situation in the Middle East tonight.

As things escalate, there are 200,000 British citizens in the region who are at risk.

www.instagram.com/reel/DVW0LmL...

Cultural tightness reduces a person’s ability to be funny A new cross-cultural study reveals that people living in societies with strict social norms are less skilled at creating humor. This suggests that comedic ability is heavily shaped by our cultural environment and tolerance for rule-breaking.

Cultural tightness reduces a person’s ability to be funny

The image is a thermal rendering of industrial piping, displaying various colors indicating temperature variations. Text on the left reads, "Unlocking thermal energy. Capture, storage and re-use of industrial waste heat. Read the report online." The Royal Society logo is at the bottom left.

Our recent report on unlocking thermal energy looks at how capturing, storing and re-using waste heat from industrial processes could be a huge opportunity for the UK to make progress towards #NetZero: https://royalsociety.org/news/2026/01/thermal-efficiency-in-industry/

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Allister Heath

The Nazis stopped Jewish doctors from practising, so thousands of them left the country (my great grandfather was one of them). So many left that this was a good natural experiment for estimating the causal effect of losing doctors on infant mortality (& thousands died)

How a Close Associate of Epstein’s Found Career Redemption in Japan

After a disgraced exit from the top ranks of American tech and media circles, Joichi Ito, an entrepreneur who had deep ties to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein secured a 2nd act in Japan with the help of powerful allies in the Japanese government
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/b...

stirring-fox-7e1fab.netlify.app

If you're arguing for public ownership (as in Scotland), then I'm not against that, but my distaste is for xenophobic attitudes to foreign ownership.

This recent RCT of an "AI stethoscope" claims the technology "shows promise" for diagnosing cardiovascular conditions.

It does not.

It is a textbook example of the risks of conducting unprincipled 'per protocol analyses'. Once again, peer review at a major medical journal has failed.

🧵 1/

Great film, great scene, but surely his breakthrough role was The Long Good Friday (1980) ?

It was already foreign owned. For 15 years. And while we’re at it, UK owned water companies have been just as shitty as their foreign counterparts.

OpenSAFELY news: you can apply to do non-COVID research, from today! | Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science We are delighted to announce that - from today - you can submit applications to the OpenSAFELY service for non-COVID-19 studies.

OpenSAFELY is open from today! Huge thanks to all who supported this vast collaboration: whole population GP data; in a productive platform; innovative privacy protections; unprecedented support from professions, privacy campaigners; &c

Now it's over to users!

www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/blog/2026/02...

if you rent a swan boat in bright weather and paddle around the lake in Shakujikoen, you will find love for Nerima.

I believe they used to be in Ninomiya but that’s before my time. Now they are less than 5 mins away by car or bike from Human Arts maps.app.goo.gl/2WSKY9pYCF43...

Convenience Store Woman is a book I love, so it's shame I can't be there, but may I recommend a nearby favourite, Heartland restaurant (B set) for anyone looking for lunch options? Just book first.

Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review The process of peer review is vital to contemporary science, but is also under enormous strain. This study uses mathematical models to dissect the threats to the long-term viability of peer review, su...

1. Kevin Gross and I have a new paper out today PLOS Biology.

We used economic models based around screening games and the market for unpaid labor to highlight a meltdown cycle threatening peer review.

"Lincolnshire’s countryside is under threat. Vast swathes of productive farmland—over 30,000 acres—are being lost to industrial-scale solar developments clustering around our villages and communities." www.andrea4mayor.co.uk/lincoln-marc...

Yeh, but fracking's fracking fine.

Jean de Florette,
Whistle Down the Wind,
Far From the Madding Crowd,
Babe,
Naked Jungle
Naked Island

A burger shop in Yamaguchi prefecture

Yeh, but can I get a Kirin beer to go with that,’?

Regular expressions were easily the most obscure thing I learned in college — and I'm an economist. Glad that LLMs take that away from us.

Former CalMac boss signed gagging order as part of exit package

Robbie Drummond also received almost ten times the amount of legal fees typically allowed, with his replacement warning of the risk of public litigation

Because she is actually a French data scientist she replies, Salut, et encore merci pour le poisson

Academia.edu - Find Research Papers, Topics, Researchers Academia.edu is the platform to share, find, and explore 50 Million research papers. Join us to accelerate your research needs & academic interests.

FYI, Academia.edu has changed its terms of service to give an irrevocable worldwide license for anything uploaded to its site to be used for generative AI. I do not consent to this and have pulled all my papers.

You can in an open economy. Let's imagine country A, call it the UK, has (comparative) advantage in creative services, insurance, finance etc. Billionaires in country B, let's call it USA control key technologies that eliminate the advantage and can supply AI replacements for workers remotely.

Classic school field-trip destination.

You mean like いわはし げんき元キング アンド プリンス?

When you eat renkon, it probably comes from a giant Ibaraki swamp. Just saying.

Reliability of LLMs as medical assistants for the general public: a randomized preregistered study - Nature Medicine In a randomized controlled study involving 1,298 participants from a general sample, performance of humans when assisted by a large language model (LLM) was sensibly inferior to that of the LLM alone ...

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...