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Landlord-tenant spat at center of Highland Park's retail losses
Uncharacteristic store closures in popular Highland Park linked to landlord-tenant dispute that's headed to court.
Wauwatosa business calls for lawmakers to save hemp
In November, most hemp in Wisconsin will be illegal. Wisconsin's estimated $700 million-dollar industry will shut down.
Predicting winners for NFL's remaining QB competitions: Who wins starting gigs?
Five NFL teams are set to enter training camp with quarterback competitions lingering. Who will emerge as QB1 in each battle?
LincolnFest was staged for the first time 45 years ago. A look back in photos
Featuring national music acts, unique contests and copious amounts of beer, LincolnFest packed a punch during its run from 1981 to 1993.
Ravens’ young core is already showing signs of growth
The Ravens have a new head coach, new coordinators, and a new direction, but much of what has made the franchise successful remains firmly in place.
Fish oil supplements no match for Alzheimer's risk, new study finds
A new study from the Keck School of Medicine at USC found a revelation regarding fish oil supplements. Here's the researchers' findings.
The Supreme Court handed Trump an election case defeat. Is a bigger win for him coming?
The Supreme Court’s ruling letting more than a dozen states keep their post-election grace periods for mail ballots is a defeat for President Donald Trump and Republicans ahead of the midterms, but the GOP can still capture significant victories in major election-related cases coming farther down the pipeline.
Monroe County Health Department reports multiple cases of parasite-caused intestinal illness
Multiple cases of cyclosporiasis, a diarrheal illness caused by an infection from a parasite, have been reported in Monroe County, according to the county health department.
Why ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ Just Hit Its Highest Playercount In 2.5 Years
Cyberpunk 2077 is climbing the Steam charts 5.5 years after its release, and it's a great time to pick it up if you haven't.
Second 2026 Connecticut measles case reported
Connecticut’s second measles case of 2026 in Connecticut was confirmed by state health officials in Monday.
Key Shohei Ohtani, LeBron James rookie cards sell for more than $2.5 million each
The cards of two of those best modern cards in their respective sports.
Framingham Baking Co. workers 'couldn't let it go.' What they did next
Two former Framingham Baking Company kitchen workers have started their own baking business.
The strangest transfer story of 2026 starts with a loophole
By entering the portal as a track athlete, he unlocked a path most football players never consider.
Pensacola Black-owned business show off goods during Black Business Expo
Check out the goods and services black-owned business had to offer during the Black Business Expo at Pensacola's DeVillier's Square Sunday.
Photos from start of Sunday's final Memorial Health Championship round
The final round of the Korn Ferry Tour's Memorial Health Championship was played on Sunday at Panther Creek. See the best images from the day.
Steelers Insider Reveals Drew Allar's Likely Role In Rookie Season
Pittsburgh selected Allar in the third round.
Here are June business openings, closings and what's coming to Abilene
Abilene saw business changes in June. See the month's new openings, re-openings, and grand restaurant transformations.
Report: Rockets have been linked to Lakers' Marcus Smart
The Rockets reportedly have interest in signing Marcus Smart away from the Lakers if he declines his player option for next season.
Tony Brown, trailblazing journalist, TV talk show, dies at 93
"Tony Brown’s Journal," which ran on PBS for nearly four decades, provided a national platform for frank discussions on race, politics, and culture.
MS Comic Con 2026: cosplayers, celebrities and fans unite to celebrate beloved characters
Attendees decked out in costumes and homemade props from their favorite TV shows and movies gathered at the Mississippi Trade Mart for Comic Con 2026
Photo gallery | Day 3 of Memorial Health Championship at Panther Creek
See some of the most interesting images from the third round of the Korn Ferry Tour's Memorial Health Championship at Panther Creek from Saturday.
See the fun at the 2026 Boone County Fair
See Kentucky residents embrace the rainy weather at the 2026 Boone County Fair. The fair also included a monster truck show.
Oklahoma City business taking donations to help Venezuela following multiple earthquakes
Venezuelan restaurant VeneBurgers is organizing donations to provide Venezuelans with necessary items.
Rangers Go for Series Win on Saturday Against Blue Jays
The Texas Rangers will go for a series win against the Toronto Blue Jays at Rogers Centre with Cal Quantrill taking the mound.
Illinois 250: What we’ve invented, innovated, created and manufactured
Illinois builds things. We invent and innovate, too — everything from the Pullman car to plastic party cups.
Ducks move into first round, select skill in Klepov, Nordmark
Anaheim jumped back into the first-round with two picks acquired in the Mason McTavish deal, and the Ducks went for scoring punch in Nikita Klepov and Marcus Nordmark.
Exit statement from midfielder baffles Real Madrid fans
Real Madrid confirmed what had been an open secret on Friday, that Dani Ceballos would be leaving. The 29-year-old has been a bit-part player for some time, but continued reports about his exit seemed...
Baylor teen health clinics provide free medical care, mental health services
According to the latest U.S. Census data, Texas leads the nation in the number of uninsured residents.
Tired of long waits? Mochi Health offers virtual care starting at $39
Mochi Health now offers full-service virtual care with unlimited visits, flexible pharmacy options and plans starting as low as $39.
Three Chicago Bears make CBS Sports’ Top 100 NFL Players of 2026 List
With the NFL on a break, get ready for list season, and CBS Sports just dropped their Top 100 Players, and three Chicago Bears made the cut.
Caitlin Clark made the WNBA bigger. It’s still playing small
The league’s paltry one-game suspension of Alyssa Thomas after her fist to Caitlin Clark's throat barely begins to address the problem.
Usha Vance mocks NYT article over 'political significance' of pregnancy outfits
Second lady Usha Vance mocks a New York Times article scrutinizing the 'political significance' of her maternity outfits.
The history behind the Marcus Alert System
Marcus-David Peters was a 24-year-old high school biology teacher at Essex High School when he died.
Fort Lauderdale hopes "Uptown Urban Village" could bring extra business to the area
Alex Rodriguez on how to build a business empire and what an MLB strike would mean to baseball
Baseball star Alex Rodriguez started building his business with a single $250,000 investment in 1995.
WATCH: Trump says nuclear inspectors will be able to enter Iran at 'appropriate time'
President Donald Trump insisted Tuesday that Iran agreed to United Nations watchdog inspections of its nuclear sites, but said there is "no rush."
Prime Day deals are officially live: Shop the best tech sales from Apple, Sony, Bose, Anker and others for up to 54% off right now
Prime Day deals have discounted a bunch of our favorite tech from headphones to TVs to iPhone accessories and more.
Work Visa Issues Leave Door County Businesses Short Staffed for Summer
Decline in international summer workers under Trump administration taking a toll.
Work visa issues leave Door County businesses short staffed for summer season
Businesses say they are facing staffing challenges because many of the foreign workers they rely on through the summer tourism season haven’t arrived.
CIBC US Faces of Impact Chicago Affordable Housing
Since 2014, CIBC has been financing affordable housing initiatives in Chicago to strengthen neighborhoods and make a difference in communities that need it the most. As of publication, more than 50 structures have been completed from West Ridge to Calumet Heights, each with a unique story. Faces of Impact highlights three of those stories, and the people behind them driving safe and accessible housing.
Nonprofit behind new Fairview behavioral health center reworks proposal after neighborhood pushback
The Anchorage Assembly will consider updated grant contract on July 7.
Lives are being ruined by undiagnosed hypermobility and lack of treatment
Letters: Ignorance around hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is a public health catastrophe, say readers in response to an article on how sufferers have to wait 21 years for a diagnosis
Miami-Dade Commission finally approves mental health facility over two decades after it was promised
More than two decades after voters were promised a new facility to treat people with mental illnesses, rather than warehousing them in the county jail, the Miami-Dade County Commission gave final approval on Tuesday to open the Miami Center for Mental Health and Recovery.
Raising the minimum wage has been a big political winner. Now it's running into resistance
Raising the minimum wage has been a progressive policy winner at the ballot box, but recent losses suggest an economic mood slowing its political momentum.
Rock star pauses mid-concert to ask crowd for World Cup game score
"You can think of tonight as a gathering to celebrate the World Cup, with some music interspersed.”
Should everyone be on GLP-1s? What science actually tells us (and doesn't) about the broader health benefits
The laundry list of possible health benefits from GLP-1 drugs seems to get longer by the day, from cancer prevention to combating addiction. But while there’s no question these medications show immense promise beyond their use for diabetes and weight loss, science is still catching up.
Apple Explains Why watchOS 27 Drops Support for So Many Models
Apple today detailed why five Apple Watch models will miss out on watchOS 27 and the new Siri AI features that come with it. The Apple Watch Series 6, 7, 8, SE 2, and the original Apple Watch Ultra will not receive watchOS 27, and will only get basic security updates going forward. With the update, Apple is effectively dropping three years' worth of device support in a single software update, which is unprecedented for the product line.
Comedian Carlos Mencia faces 12 felony charges
LA County District Attorney Nathan Hochman announced the charges at a news conference
2027 NFL Draft Summer Scouting Report: Cole Sullivan, LB, OU
More scouting reports on the way, this time on Oklahoma's Cole Sullivan.
Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-orders begin June 25th, cover art revealed
Wallpapers are now available at up to 5K resolution.
Indonesia’s MD Entertainment Bets on IP and Microdramas for Global Push
As Indonesia’s entertainment industry gains greater international visibility, MD Entertainment, one of the country’s top studios, is increasingly looking beyond local success and toward global partner...
Ohtani battles, Freeman powers Dodgers to sweep of Rays
LOS ANGELES — The margin for error was razor-thin all week, and on Wednesday afternoon at Uniqlo Field at Dodger Stadium, the Dodgers once again found a way to come out on top.
City lawyer rebuffs parking meter owner’s warnings as fight spills into view
Newly obtained documents reveal a growing legal and political battle over Stonepeak's bid to acquire Chicago's parking meter concession and City Council's role in approving the deal.
Scottish Premiership fixture release - all you need to know
The fixtures for the 2026-27 Scottish Premiership season are released on Thursday at 12:00 BST - and you can see them on the BBC Sport website and app as soon as they are announced.
Small Business Owners Face Confusion Over Signage
A new law permitting some use of sandwich boards may help businesses — but other signage complexities remain
Woman says she ‘didn’t understand mental health’ before daughter in acute psychosis killed another child
Girl told mother she thought about killing people ‘all the time’, inquest into Biddy Porter’s death hears
Goats can find food by following a human voice, study finds
Experiments show 29 animals moved towards a treat-filled bucket 60% of the time when guided by a researcher
Inspired Entertainment (INSE) Uses Paddy Power Renewal to Reinforce Its Retail Betting Base
Inspired Entertainment, Inc. (NASDAQ:INSE) is one of the best e-gaming and sports betting stocks to buy now. The company strengthened its betting-shop exposure on May 6, when it extended its long-term agreement with Paddy Power to remain the exclusive provider of gaming terminals and content across Paddy Power’s UK retail estate. The agreement matters because […]
Samsung S95H OLED Review: Not Quite the 'Ultra' Frame TV We Wanted
The Samsung S95H OLED TV is great for gaming, while its color performance could have been better.
Panthers part ways with TE on Monday
The Panthers waived a TE on Monday.
Doctor on how social media can affect children's health, development
Dr. Scott Hadland, the Chief of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Mass General for Children, said research shows real risks that social media can affect young people's sleep as well as their attention and focus in school.
Cone Health Plans Hospital in Forsyth County
The health system is applying for 56 acute care beds allocated to Forsyth County.
Eagles’ all-time winning percentage shows long franchise climb
The Eagles rank No. 18 among all NFL teams in all-time winning percentage, sitting just above .500 in franchise history
All Whites' Stamenic aims to do late father proud
Swansea City's Marko Stamenic will be thinking of his inspirational dad as New Zealand begin their World Cup campaign.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating a fatal excavator bucket incident
A 64-year-old Sun Valley man was struck and crushed by an excavator bucket, according to the Storey County Sheriff's Office.
Teladoc Health (TDOC) Stock Valuation As Analyst Sentiment Improves Despite Expected Earnings Decline
Analyst sentiment shift and near term expectations Teladoc Health (TDOC) is back on investors’ radar after analysts turned more positive in their earnings estimates, even as they still expect a 26.32% year over year decline in the upcoming report. This change in sentiment, paired with a recent 1.44% gain that outperformed key indices, has focused attention on how the company’s virtual care and mental health businesses might shape near term performance. See our latest analysis for Teladoc...
Business People: Belinda Jensen to be brand ambassador for Kowalski’s
RETAIL Kowalski’s, a Shoreview-based metrowide grocery store chain, announced Belinda Jensen as brand ambassador. Jensen retired this year as chief meteorologist for Twin Cities NBC affiliate KARE 11-TV. EDUCATION The…
25 best whodunit movies in movie history, according to fans
Stacker compiled data on the top whodunit movies and ranked them by IMDb user ratings, with any ties being broken by votes. To qualify, the plot of the film had
Department of Veterans Affairs stops LGBTQ+ veteran support
Internal VA guidance obtained by The Advocate raises questions about the future of specialized assistance for those who served.
It’s not Ebola you need to be worried about with the World Cup. These are the real health risks.
That dip sitting out for hours in the heat poses a bigger health risk than Ebola, according to physicians preparing for the World Cup in New Jersey.
Women's flag football will be a college varsity sport in Maine for the first time
The first NCAA championship season for Women's Flag Football is in 2028, and at least one college in Maine plans to field a team that season.
Elden Ring Director Insists FromSoftware Is Free to Make the Games It Wants To, Teases 'Unannounced Titles'
Dark Souls and Elden Ring creator Hidetaka Miyazaki recently commented on the shareholder pressure that is putting FromSoftware parent company Kadokawa in the news lately. Reassuring fans, he insisted that Fromsoftware can still “freely make the kind of games we want to make without excessive interference."
Brendan Sorsby isn’t a victim. He’s the latest face of America’s public health crisis
Texas Tech QB's injunction may allow him to play, but the problem remains: Online betting and a growing gambling addiction among young men.
907 Sports: Recapping a wild weekend that capped off the spring sports season
In this edition of 907 Sports, the team breaks down the Division I and Division II baseball state championships, both of which brought an unpredictable ending. Then, we head up to Fairbanks for the State Softball Tournaments where Chugiak reclaims the DI title and Palmer rattled off four victories in one day to become the Division II champs.
Eaton moves one step closer to becoming a cleaner bet on the AI boom
Auto parts manufacturer Dana has agreed to combine with Eaton's Mobility business in a deal that values the unit at $5.1 billion.
Xbox Boss Asha Sharma Asked Her Chief Strategy Officer if The Brand Was 'Fixable'
Xbox's new chief strategy officer Matthew Ball says he was asked a direct question about the brand's future by recently-installed CEO Asha Sharma: "Is it fixable?"
College Enrollment Trends: Certificates and Health Majors See Big Surge
Undergraduate enrollment in health fields jumped between 6.0% and 7.1% this spring, with more than 1 million students in those majors at four-year schools, according to National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s Final Spring Enrollment Trends 2026 report. Short-term undergraduate certificate ...
Political reviews are causing a huge grant backlog at the National Park Service
Hundreds of millions of dollars in National Park Service funding is sitting in limbo at the Department of Interior, awaiting a political review that longtime agency staff say has put a stranglehold on the agency’s work.
Commissioner Young joined Virtua Health for beam signing celebration at Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital
On Tuesday, Commissioner Jonathan Young joined local leaders and healthcare professionals for a beam signing celebration at Samson Pavilion, the new six-story tower at Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital ... More
160,000 people drop Pennie health plans following price hikes
A critical federal incentive program ended in January, raising costs for many.
Three golfers named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in Sports list
On Tuesday, Rory McIlroy, Nelly Korda, and Jeeno Thitikul were named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in Sports list for 2026.
Steelers Accused of Not Taking QB Situation Seriously
Despite Aaron Rodgers’ return, critics blast the Pittsburgh Steelers front office for failing to secure a high-upside future and settling for a veteran past his elite prime.
Paramount Searches For Business-Side Partner For Bari Weiss: Axios
This comes as CBS News has been under intense scrutiny following a wave of firings at "60 Minutes."
Northampton entertainer raises curtain on affordable shows for marginalized communities
Matt Dibrindisi will unveil his company's summer and fall entertainment lineup at the Northampton Center for the Arts on June 10.
Fontainebleau Las Vegas adds new sports artifacts to its Hall of Excellence exhibits
Fontainebleau Las Vegas’ Hall of Excellence added new sports artifacts, including a Jack Eichel game-worn jersey, Golden Knights championship items, Aces rings, Rafael Nadal gear and more.
Oil rises slightly as investors await clarity after Iran-Israel halt attacks
Oil prices inched up in early trade on Tuesday after Iran and Israel left the door open to a possible resumption of attacks on each other, though they had called a halt to hostilities following an appeal from U.S. President Donald Trump.
We can create the future of science right now
Paul Litvak is the founder and Executive Director of the Robyn Dawes Institute and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. He has a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon where he studied emotions and the sunk cost bias. Over 15 years in industry, he solved a wide range of challenging technical problems. At Meta he created models optimizing the ad review process. At Google he ran experiments to measure social influence. At Airbnb, he was a product manager leading machine learning teams optimizing search ranking and price suggestions. He also co-founded and led product at Rhythmic Health, a venture-backed biosensing startup, creating an accurate low cost system using a color changing strip and a smart phone to measure salivary lactate. The bottleneck At this point, it is uncontroversial to say that science needs to stop using the PDF article as the unit of knowledge and currency. The unbearable slowness of scientific publishing, the profit motive and margins: I’m not saying anything new. The PDF also sucks because it’s hard to extract structured information, which makes it hard to do evidence synthesis. As a result, we do much less evidence synthesis than is needed. And evidence synthesis ultimately undergirds most policy and medical decision-making. I can see second-by-second real-time odds for any sporting or newsworthy event, but a school board can’t see the best evidence on whether their 8th graders should be taught algebra. As a society, we don’t treat this as an important problem. Again, not controversial. Not only is the problem well understood, but the solution has already been laid out. What we need is AI-assisted living evidence synthesis - (1) an open knowledge graph of atomic claims, (2) claims linked to evidence, (3) assessment and synthesis of each piece of evidence, and (4) continuous updating with new data. What few realize (yet) is that the technical capacity to build this vision for a significant portion of science already exists. Not only that, scientists and startup teams are already building many of these components. I know this because I’ve been surveying the space and talking to many of the builders. There are some missing pieces: for example, evaluations of how well some of the components work. But at this point, most of what’s missing is a fully end-to-end working integration of all of these parts. In the rest of this essay, I’m going to lay out all the parts of a working living evidence layer for science and who is working on them, and propose concrete next steps for building this system. What’s now possible The diagram above outlines the components of a living evidence synthesis platform, including some of the teams working on each component1. Scientific PDFs are processed into claims with associated evidence. The evidence is subjected to a forensic audit, methodological evaluation and robustness and reproducibility checks. Finally it’s given a weight in a continuously updating synthesis. What follows is a description and status of each component and a few of the teams working on them. Document understanding The first thing you need to be able to do is turn an article into structured data. Mostly that means parsing PDFs. There are often multicolumn layouts that confuse non-specialized PDF to text processing libraries. For scientific papers, there is the added complexity of parsing formulas and tables and figures. This is a really hot area - there are startups offering APIs, and it seems like a new open source package gets posted to Github every few weeks. What follows isn’t exhaustive. A package called GROBID was the state of the art for a while, they didn’t update their package for nearly two years until very recently. In the meantime reducto.ai released an AI powered PDF extraction API, PaddleOCR became popular, IBM released a model called Docling, and both Mistral and Gemini created models and libraries. I also know of at least one other well-funded psychology research group working on a paper parser. By contrast, there are few open evals in this space, with no extensive evals for complex table comprehension in particular. Nonetheless, I’m confident this will be a solved problem soon, given the combination of LLM advances and developer interest. Hypothesis level extraction There has been increasing interest in comprehending the extracted text of papers and linking information to evidence for each hypothesis. A lot of work has already been done. Trialstreamer (Marshall et al. 2020) and RobotReviewer LIVE (Marshall et al. 2023) demonstrated automated extraction of trial population, intervention, and outcome at scale on clinical RCTs. PaperQA2 (Skarlinski et al. 2024) and Ai2 ScholarQA (2024) extended this to retrieval-augmented question answering with citation grounding. Elicit, Consensus, and SciSpace operationalized claim-level extraction for end users. OpenEval (Booeshaghi et al. 2026) is the most recent and most ambitious: 1.96 million atomic claims extracted from 16,087 eLife manuscripts using Claude Sonnet 4.5, grouped into ~299,000 results, with LLM evaluations showing 81% agreement with human peer review on a 2,487-paper subset. None of these solutions link claims to test-statistics, as you would need to evaluate randomized controlled trials. This is why I built the evidence.guide API - to extract hypotheses and associated test statistics from behavioral science papers. The best public eval of this kind of extraction I’m aware of comes from the recent SCORE project - they had humans code thousands of psychology papers to extract their claims by hand. It would be extremely helpful to the world if all scientific PDFs were available as structured open data. I’ve been working to make this happen, both directly at Berkeley and through coordination with large entities I can’t yet speak of; as hard as it is to do, I think it’s possible2. Forensic audit A lot of work has been done on forensic audit, but some gaps remain. Of course, for biology papers that rely on images for evidence, there are a variety of tools (notably Proofig and ImageTwin) to spot anomalies. These are still well short of what sleuths like Elizabeth Bik can do on her own, but these tools are constant companions among fraud analysts. There’s someone working on auditing Excel files for anomalies, and a number of teams are automating numerical checks like GRIM and SPRITE, including Scrutiny project, the INSPECT-SR team as well as statcheck. The regcheck team is building a way to use AI to compare preregistrations to analyses in papers, to ensure there aren’t significant deviations. Nonetheless, there are many other kinds of anomalies to screen for, both public and less publicly known. And there are no formal evals for anomaly detection that I’m aware of. Still, there’s a lot to draw from in this space and I’m pretty certain we will be able to scan papers for most kinds of obvious anomalies in the near future. Methodological review This area has been white hot, though I fear for many of the startups in this space, because this capability may become commoditized. There are at least six different AI peer review companies, including Refine.ink, Reviewer3, ReviewerZero.ai, Q.E.D. Science, Paper Wizard, and Isitcredible. Coarse (a pun on refine) was also recently created as an open source alternative. These systems provide qualitative feedback on the content of papers, spotting methodological weaknesses and mathematical errors. They seem to work pretty well, and many academics report bitterly that they exceed the average quality of typical peer reviewers. But there are few evals here either. What evals exist so far involve using LLM-as-judge (circularity problems abound) or comparing against human reviews of questionable quality. What you’d ideally want is an eval that measures capturing known errors in papers3. Reproducibility and robustness Another active area has been using AI agents to automate computational reproducibility4 and robustness5 checks in papers that report numerical results. For more recent papers where data and code are available, AI agents can see whether they can re-run the analyses and produce the numbers reported in the published paper. In addition to a handful of individual academics who have been experimenting using Claude Code for this, the Institute for Replication is a leading group working on building an end to end system. The evals related to this problem are the most mature, with CORE-Bench (Siegel, Kapoor, Narayanan 2024) and PaperBench (OpenAI 2025) available to benchmark agents on this task. There is also work on getting AI agents to test alternative ways of analyzing the data to ensure the results are robust to small analytic design choices. Synthesis This is the most underdeveloped area where significant investment is required. Although some automated evidence synthesis systems exist — for example, otto-sr is building an AI agent to write systematic reviews — none of these incorporate the full range of paper level signals to weight evidence appropriately. Nor is there anything like an eval or a gold standard for a good systematic review. Arguably Cochrane reviews are the closest we have to gold standard human systematic reviews, though I’ve heard academics in the know complain about their uneven quality. A key question for a synthesis platform is how to weight anomalies and methodological issues in assessing the quality of a piece of evidence. This is an unsolved problem and one I’m very keen to work on. Continuous updating There are many pieces of basic infrastructure available for monitoring for new research and initiating updates. OpenAlex is the current open citation graph. Retraction Watch integrated into Crossref in October 2023. Scite tracks how citations support, contrast, or mention prior claims. The Living Evidence Network demonstrated continuous-update workflows in clinical guidelines. Engineering this is a relatively straightforward task. When you look over this technical architecture and all the progress being made, it’s hard not to be optimistic that a living guide to scientific evidence will be built. The stakeholders are ready The social infrastructure for this is starting to coalesce — it’s not just a pie in the sky academic exercise to imagine this coming into existence. Institutions like the Center for Open Science, the Institute for Replication, the INSPECT-SR, the Living Evidence Network and more are all working on scaling work to improve research quality. Funders are also aligned. The Sloan Foundation has funded living evidence work through COS. Coefficient Giving supports the Institute for Replication and COS. The Astera Institute and the Institute for Progress have shown interest in this space. NIH has established an Office for Replication and Reproducibility. Although there are (very unfortunately) serious headwinds in science funding generally, there is an active group of funders interested in metascience. A brief word about what I’ve been doing at RDI. First, as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley I’ve been actively figuring out how a non-profit and a public university can conduct and make public the results of large-scale academic article data mining. With some of the money I raised from donors, I commissioned a legal analysis of recent case law and publisher text data mining (TDM) agreements in order to understand whether a massive open data mining of academic articles is possible (with caveats, it is). I’ve also been working to bring together stakeholders in this space, and identify gaps. I’ve also been doing some software development in this space, with more to come. A pilot proposal The assumption undergirding all of this is that an AI, given all this information, would make the right judgment about a scientific claim with lots of conflicting evidence, weighing all the factors appropriately. That’s the hypothesis we need to test. Randomized control trial research is the best place to focus on first. RCTs are used to make many of the important decisions in society - from medical trials to public policy changes. And they use a relatively uniform set of inferential statistics with lots of known and available diagnostics. Behavioral science experiments, within the broader realm of RCTs, should be first used as a testbed whose results can be generalized. Because behavioral science is at the vanguard of open science practices, replications abound (there are thousands of them) to serve as ground truth training data. Key Hypothesis Therefore the pilot would test, in behavioral RCTs that have been replicated, whether the quality of evidence for a claim can be used to accurately predict whether that claim will replicate. Secondary Hypotheses Compared to claims that replicated, non-replicated claims demonstrate a greater share of forensic anomalies in their source literatures. Hypothesis level claim and statistic extraction is accurate enough to scale living evidence without onerous human review costs. Replication prediction is more accurate than prediction markets6 or journal prestige. If all the different quality signals we gather do accurately predict which studies will replicate, then we can use that model to score evidence to power the living evidence layer. Why this is informative regardless of outcome If the pilot succeeds, the architecture extends to medical RCTs (where Living Evidence already operates and integration is mostly about claim representation), then to slices of basic biology with stable replication structure. If it fails, the field learns which quality signals are load-bearing and which ones metascience has oversold. Either result is a contribution to knowing what the literature supports. Implications for funders Because this burgeoning ecosystem of builders already exists, a well-informed philanthropic or government funder could play a crucial catalyzing role in bringing this future about. They could play at least three roles: creating open structured datasets, publishing open benchmarks and incentivizing the solving of key technical challenges. First, open archives of papers that the government maintains, like PubMed, could be turned into structured data amenable to large scale metascience and claim aggregation. I know the US government already has an interest in doing this, though some key open questions remain unanswered. How do you determine the best models and systems for accurately extracting information from papers? How can you establish a robust way to allow researchers to flag errors and correct them? And finally, how do you create a legal regime in working with publishers to maximize the scope of available papers? For the latter, a university or a private philanthropy may be better positioned to make structured data publicly available under journal subscription terms or fair use. Philanthropists or government funders could also coordinate to create or commission benchmarks that evaluate whether important problems have been solved. For example, an open benchmark for claim extraction from a range of different scientific article types would be extremely helpful. Ensuring the underlying data are accurate is vital for creating these evaluations. I’ve discussed opportunistically using various human-created datasets for this purpose, but a consistent problem is that errors in human data make it difficult for them to serve as a gold standard. Finally, with structured data and benchmarks available, the government or private philanthropy could use them to incentivize groups to develop machine learning systems that meet these benchmarks. Prizes are one potentially valuable tool for this. For example, you could establish a prize for a system that accurately updates a living meta-analysis for a small set of claims. Prizes are particularly useful as signals of problem importance, and can help create vibrant ecosystems of public and private research—see, for example the role the government played in kickstarting the current work on nuclear fusion. Conclusion The drawbacks of the current scientific publishing system are known. Scientists agree, metascientists agree, philanthropists agree: the published PDF plus citation graph isn’t the right substrate for maintaining a representation of the evidence base in science. The pieces needed to build the alternative either already exist or are rapidly taking shape. The community is forming around exactly this problem, with concrete partnerships and shared infrastructure. A pilot should start on behavioral science RCTs because that’s the slice of empirical science most amenable to legibility, where replication ground truth is richest, and where the failure modes are best documented. What’s been missing is the galvanizing mission to assemble these pieces into something that works. That’s what I’m proposing to build. *** 1 I have a broader field map that I’ll release publicly soon. This is me, building in public! 2 If this is something that you are excited about, please reach out and talk to me. 3 More on this very soon too! 4 This tests whether, given the code and the data, you can get the same statistics as reported in the published paper. 5 This tests whether the results are the same as a paper’s given alternative analytical decisions in conducting the analysis (like outlier omission). Closely related is the idea of a “multiverse” where you come up with many different ways of answering the same underlying research question with the same data, and test whether the results hold in all those alternative methods. There’s been work on the latter as well. 6 Some of the replications, e.g. those from the SCORE project, had paired the experiments with forecasts from prediction markets. So we get to look at this for free.
The “Romy and Michele” sequel is finally happening
After years of talk, the long-awaited follow-up to the 1997 cult classic has begun filming.
Rob Sand picks western Iowa county supervisor as running mate
Rob Sand's pick for lieutenant governor is Crawford County Supervisor Dave Muhlbauer, a native Iowan and fifth-generation family farmer.
Woman charged with DWI after crashing into Rocky Mount business
Rocky Mount police say 34-year-old Keyaira Brock crashed into Red Light Auto Sale, located at 923 W. Raleigh Boulevard, around 7 p.m. on Saturday.
Genes vs. environment: What really determines your health?
A family history of heart disease, diabetes or high cholesterol can feel like a warning about what’s ahead, but genes are only part of the story.
Genes vs. environment: What really determines your health?
A family history of heart disease, diabetes or high cholesterol can feel like a warning about what’s ahead, but genes are only part of the story.
World Cup Streams Land in Airports Through Fox, ReachTV Deal
As airports around the United States prepare to host World Cup tourists, ReachTV recently struck a deal with Fox Sports to put all 104 tournament matches on TVs for travelers nationwide. ReachTV programs screens at gates and other common areas across more than 80 airports, mixing original programming and licensed content. Fox pregame shows and …