Matt Graham

Keep posting what you read, always looking for new papers to help understand + teach DD

Donor List Suggests Scale of Trump’s Pay-for-Access Operation

The most corrupt White House in history. Here is an account of what people are paying, directly to a PAC called MAGA Inc, in order to meet the president, get pardons, change policy

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/u...

@crampell.bsky.social’s post got me to thinking and…yes…Trump has apparently canceled the research grant of Judea Pearl, who is one of the world’s leading scholars, is Jewish, Israeli-American, & is vocally opposed to antisemitism, & is the father of Daniel Pearl.
www.science.org/content/arti...

“The president cut your health care so he could build himself a golden ballroom” is a pretty easy message to sell

How quickly we normalize corruption

Twitter is now 75% bot activity. The dead internet theory aint a theory anymore.

98%

That's the decrease in the annual number of single-use plastic bags in the UK since a 5p charge started 10 years ago (it's now 10p)

Not all environmental problems are that easy to tackle, but change is possible

Resharing the Mail's 2015 splash, which has aged well

www.gov.uk/government/p...

Human exposure to PM10 microplastics in indoor air The ubiquitous presence of airborne microplastics (MPs) in different indoor environments prompts serious concerns about the degree to which we inhale these particles and their potential impact on huma...

"The microplastic (MP) 1–10 μm exposure estimates are 100-fold higher than previous estimates that were extrapolated from larger MP sizes, and suggest that the health impacts of MP inhalation may be more substantial than we realize."
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Today is a good day — any day is a good day — to read and share this February resignation letter from SDNY prosecutor Hagan Scotten to Emil Bove.

It’s the type of thing you show your kids as an example of how to be.

Guess we should start putting our name on all our advisees' work

Brb deleting my Substack account

Religion aside: Cooper is also a member of the Presbyterian Church (USA), a tradition that openly ordains LGBTQ folks.

Also among their number is Rep. Sarah McBride who, in addition to being the first openly trans person elected to Congress, is an ordained PC(USA) elder.

“Staggering” Water Loss Driven by Groundwater Mining Poses Global Threat A new study finds that freshwater resources are rapidly disappearing, creating arid “mega” regions and causing sea levels to rise.

“farther south — where most people live — it is largely the race to suck groundwater from aquifers that is removing the water from the continents.

So much groundwater is now being pumped that it’s filling the oceans as it drains off land, becoming one of the largest drivers of global sea level rise

Haha, so chatgpt's new agent feature has a warning that if you send the agent to do stuff, it may give bad people access to your data. Necessary, I guess, but if this is true it'd make it fairly useless, no?

I mean to me the main use case would be giving it access to sites requiring login.

Like selective restoration of illegally canceled federal funding, selective relief from immigration enforcement is authoritarianism 101

Trump’s Caddie magically drops a ball for him not in the deep stuff ⛳️

What Will It Cost to Renovate the ‘Free’ Air Force One? Don’t Ask.

What Will It Cost to Renovate the ‘Free’ Air Force One? Don’t Ask.
To hide the cost of renovating the plane Qatar donated to President Trump, the Air Force appears to have tucked it inside an over-budget, behind-schedule nuclear modernization program.
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/u...

Most of the internet used to be like this. This is actually the default, it took companies enclosing the internet and adding weird, soul-killing incentives to make people behave the way they do now. In a way, there is truly nothing special about Wikipedia except that it survived longer.

South Park's Matt Stone and Trey Parker are storytelling geniuses! I highlight their remarkably simple but effective "but/therefore rule" in every science communication lecture I give.

FEMA has money for detention centers, but not *checks notes* emergency management.

abcnews.go.com/Politics/fem...

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Completely disagree, valuable to know if things work as intended

Does your smartwatch say you’re stressed? It may often be wrong Consumer grade smartwatches may not be as accurate as promised when measuring tiredness or stress. That conclusion is drawn by researchers Björn Siepe and Eiko Fried based on a comparison between smar...

1/2
Press release @unileiden.bsky.social about our upcoming JoPACS paper led by @bsiepe.bsky.social, showing that the overlap of similar constructs assessed via wearable vs EMA data is surprisingly low (n~850, 3 months).

www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2025...

Coffee recalled nationwide for potential ink contamination The FDA issued a recall for coffee pods sold nationwide due to an issue that could potentially contaminate the product with ink.

One more reason not to drink coffee brewed out of a little plastic piece of trash

Could always try the ole "thank you oh genius reviewer for helping us see that the MS should have explained why we didn't examine this related but irrelevant outcome"

DOJ slides into DMs of convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell They're gonna make her an offer she can't refuse.

"In 2020, the government pointed to Maxwell’s 'willingness to brazenly lie under oath about her conduct' as a reason to deny her bail. Now, with her entire life in the government’s control, it turns to her as a source of truth. Or, if not truth, a story that can help the president out of this jam."

Effect size isn't all that determines the p-value

Effect size isn't all that determines the p-value