SCROLL NEWS / DISCOVERY
Search headlines
Find the stories shaping the conversation.
Results for " poor " 551 found 🔀 AI-powered Shuffle
The Pulse: Women's Health is Having a Reckoning - The Longevity Gap is Where it Starts
Welcome to our new series The Pulse, covering everything you need to know about the age of intelligent health.From ovarian aging and maternal health to cardiovascular and dementia risk, HLTH USA 2026 is programming the women’s health conversations medicine has been too slow to have.While women live longer than men, they spend 25% longer in poor health. The healthspan gap, between how long women live and how long they live in good health, is the defining focus of the next frontier in women’s health. “Diminished healthspan ...
This one question may reveal whether your body is getting the rest it needs, study finds
Research finds that feeling older than your actual age may be linked to poor sleep quality, insomnia symptoms, irregular patterns and daytime fatigue.
More than 70 medics infected with Ebola as DRC outbreak spreads ‘fast’
Aid cuts and poor sanitation are deepening fears that Ebola is spreading through displacement camps.
Can Better Sleep Lower Dementia Risk? What the Science Says
Poor sleep may raise your Alzheimer's risk by as much as 44%. Here's what researchers know about sleep, brain health, and what you can do tonight.
How Politicized is Public Healthcare in Orange County?
There are growing questions over what politicians should be involved in healthcare for the county’s poorest residents through CalOptima.
‘It’s a vulnerability’: Vance makes a political gamble with public-facing Iran role
Some of Vance’s outside allies describe the role he is taking with the peace agreement as the best among poor options for the vice president.
How Healthcare Policy Shifts Are Reshaping Care for Vulnerable Patients
The Bronx is the poorest congressional district in America and the sickest county in the state of New York. Montefiore Einstein, the academic medical center in the Bronx, serves a population that is 85% dependent on Medicaid and Medicare. As federal Medicaid rules tighten and funding shrinks, more ...
Monitoring water sources to protect herd health
K-State Beef Cattle Institute experts discuss neurological issues in cattle which may occur from lack of water or poor water quality.
Could OC Supervisors Lose Control of County’s Health Plan for the Poor?
Assemblyman Avelino Valencia’s state bill is looking to strip supervisors off the CalOptima board after years of concerns that they politicized healthcare.
Soccer is a ‘poorly designed experiment.’ And that makes it great.
Look no further than Cape Verde tying Spain in the World Cup and embrace the unpredictability.
Limited Health Literacy Common in Middle-Aged Primary Care Patients
Limited health literacy is common among middle-aged primary care patients and is associated with poorer health self-management skills.
The Hidden Health Toll of Loneliness in Aging
Loneliness in older adults is more than a social concern — it is linked to higher mortality, poorer mental health, frailty, and faster cognitive decline.
Turner on Addressing Poor Mental Health Outcomes of Black and Latino Boys
Assistant professor of social welfare David C. Turner III argues that still more needs to be done to address the structural issues impacting the mental health outcomes of Black and Latino boys
Poll: Democrats maintain an edge in the fight for Congress as Trump gets poor marks
Democrats have a 5-point advantage in a new NBC News poll as Trump’s approval rating sinks to a second-term low among registered voters.
Opinion: The politics of learned helplessness in New Mexico
Duke Rodriguez argues NM isn't a poor state — it's a poorly run one. The real obstacle? Believing things can never improve.
Club Science: Pride
School may be out for summer, but the Science Museum of Minnesota in Saint Paul is keeping the curiosity alive with something exciting for grown-ups. Caillean Kapoor, visitor experience manager at the Science Museum, joined Minnesota Live to share details about Club Science: Pride, a vibrant 21-plus night happening Saturday, June 13 starting at 5:30 p.m. Tickets are still available and include museum admission, an Omnitheater show and a drink ticket.
The number of uninsured Californians could nearly double by 2030, says new report
Historic cuts to Medicaid and low-cost California health insurance could leave 4.6 million residents with no coverage. A new report from the UC Berkeley Labor Center says the working poor, older workers and undocumented workers could bear the brunt.
AI token leaderboards are 'dystopian': Replit AI chief
As Amazon and others rethink AI-use rankings, Replit's AI head said it was a poor measure of employee performance.
New OMB rule could break science in the United States
The drug that saved your mother. The treatment your doctor recommended. The clinical trial that bought someone you love more time. None of it was inevitable. It required a system built to operate outside politics and sustained over decades, because science doesn’t operate on the timeline of a politician. That system is now under direct threat. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has proposed a new rule to regulate all federal grants, not just science, but housing, education, defense, NASA and everything in between, that would fundamentally change how research is conducted in the United States. There have been a lot of fires in the past 16 months, and if everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. But this is a very big deal. These rules would strip away the independence that has kept science from becoming a political tool. The good news is there’s still something we can all do. How the grant system was designed to work When I was a new faculty member, I was full of millions of ideas, so I sat down and wrote an NIH proposal. I worked on it for months and thought it was so good. Then I sent it to my mentor. It came back covered in comments. Places where my reasoning wasn’t as airtight as I’d thought, methods that could be stronger, gaps in my thinking that I had been too close to the work to see. It stung, as honest feedback always does, but peer review almost always makes the work better. In fact, it’s the backbone of how American science has functioned for generations. At NIH, submitted proposals go to a panel of scientists who have experience in the field. These are the people who can read research methods and spot their weaknesses, who understand when an experiment is designed well and when it isn’t. Applications are scored rigorously, and often only the top 3-20% of proposals receive funding. The people making funding decisions are required to justify them based on these reviews. To be clear: this is not a perfect system, and good science still goes unfunded more often than any of us would like due to limited resources. There is also criticism that peer review may undervalue bold ideas that are risky but could have high payoffs. But the peer review system is nonetheless a meaningful part of the grant selection process. While thoughtful and careful changes could improve the system, the changes being proposed by OMB will not make things better. The rule that could change everything Through this OMB proposal, the system that helps decide what gets funded is being dismantled. There are many troubling elements buried in this proposal, but three provisions stand out in particular. Each would be damaging alone. Together, they would change what kind of science gets done in America, and who it serves. 1. Political appointees would decide which science gets funded, and peer review would be explicitly sidelined or ignored. The guidelines your doctor follows, the standards that determine what’s in your air and water, the drugs that get approved for your family: all of it starts with a funding decision. Right now, that decision is made by scientists who can evaluate whether the work is actually sound and whether it could move the needle forward. Under this proposal, funding decisions could be made by political appointees. The careful, expertise-driven review process that shapes grant funding would be effectively sidelined. That means that a poorly designed study could get funded simply because someone in a political office liked the sound of it, while rigorous, important work doesn’t get funded because it no longer aligns with the administration’s priorities. In other words, critical work that benefits all of us could now be missed just because it has become politically inconvenient. 2. Grants could be canceled at any point, without warning, in the middle of ongoing work. Say your tax dollars have been paying for a cancer study for two years. The grant was awarded for five years, so the team is mid-experiment. There are three additional years’ worth of answers that could change how the disease is treated for hundreds of thousands of people. With this new rule, the federal government could cancel the remaining funding tomorrow, walk away from the commitment it made with your money, and have no legal obligation to finish what it started. This is a huge waste of money. There are rarely other sources of funding for this work, which means the team, the graduate students, postdocs, and research staff who have dedicated years of their careers to this project could lose their jobs. Patients who have contributed their time to studies may not see it turn into useful learnings for others. Every hour of work already completed could result in nothing useful. Science can take decades to get to tangible outcomes. It needs a stable funding system to flourish. 3. Researchers would have a harder time communicating their findings without pre-approval from the federal government. There is a saying from Sir Mark Walport: “Science isn’t finished until it’s communicated.” Science is no use to anyone if it is kept locked away in the labs that produced the data. The proposed rule could make communicating research findings harder in a number of ways: Make it harder for scientists to widely share their findings in scientific journals. Publication costs, including journal fees that allow for broad public access, could not be paid for by federal funds which is often how scientists pay these costs. Restrict researchers from engaging publicly about how their findings should inform policy or public health guidelines. This would restrict scientists from doing the work that transforms years of lab work into decisions that actually affect people’s lives. Make it harder for scientists to attend conferences. Conferences would now need to be approved by the federal agency at the time of grant award. This disadvantages conferences or publications that are not politically aligned. Conferences are a key way in which scientists learn about work happening in their field so they can collaborate and build on each other’s findings. What good is science with a muzzle? The long-term impact These changes could (and hopefully would) be reversed under the next administration. But by then, damage has been done. Once projects are halted or denied funding by political appointees, people leave their science careers for other paths or even leave the country to do their amazing science elsewhere. You cannot pause a scientific study the way you pause a subscription you decided isn’t useful anymore. You cannot freeze a research team that depends on salaries to feed their families, causing a scramble for replacement funding that, in most cases, simply does not exist. When the money stops, everything stops, and all the work in progress and its potential are lost. Despite all of the language about reducing waste, fraud, and abuse, this new proposed rule increases the administrative burden tremendously. Every researcher watching this unfold will make a rational decision: don’t start anything that will take a decade to finish. This includes not building a team around funding that could vanish, or asking the big questions that need patience and stability to answer. The most consequential science, the kind that produces the treatments and the breakthroughs that reach your doctor’s office twenty years from now, is exactly the science that would be abandoned first. This is still a proposal, so we can all do something Some worry this rule is already a done deal. But by law, OMB is required to open a public comment period. Those comments matter because they inform members of Congress, they can be used in litigation, and they create a public record. So here’s what you can do: Submit a public comment. The public comment period on this proposed change is open until July 13. Anyone can submit a comment, and OMB is required to respond to substantial ones. Each comment must be different to count as distinct; identical comments will be counted only once. Comment as an individual, not on behalf of your organization. Here’s a full resource to help you, with useful examples, but in general: Share a story about how science or federal funding has benefitted you or is involved in your work. Are you or someone you loved a cancer survivor? Do you know someone with Alzheimer’s? Have you received NIH/NSF or other federal funding? All of these can be stories you use to highlight why you care. Explain why you’re worried about these proposed changes. You can use the wording found here or in other resources to help you. Ask them to withdraw this proposed rule. Contact your elected representatives. Congress allocates money to federal agencies to spend, and it has oversight of how that process works. You can let your representatives know this proposed change concerns you and ask them to intervene. There are levers they can push that can help at this moment. Let others know why federal funding matters. This isn’t just about science, but ALL federal grants, including for education systems, defense projects, and more. The process, including the importance of federal funding, is invisible to many. We can all make it more visible by sharing how science benefits us and why we value it. You can also share this article, or any of the resources linked here, to help spread awareness! Bottom line We are quickly losing ground in scientific research in the U.S. More changes, like the proposed rule by OMB, would decimate our ability to conduct research here, leaving us all worse off: fewer treatments for pancreatic cancer, less research on pollution impacts, fewer answers for patients with rare disease, and more unaddressed health needs. The impact will be very real for all of us, regardless of where we stand politically. Using our voices for science is more important than ever. Love, LM Big thanks to Dr. Megan Ranney for reading this over and providing brilliant insights, as always. Dr. Liz Marnik, PhD, is Executive Director of The Evidence Collective at YLE and a science communicator and immunologist working at the intersection of public trust, science, and public health. You can find her on Substack, LinkedIn, Instagram and Threads. Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) comprises a team of experts, ranging from physicians to immunologists to epidemiologists to nutritionists, working together with one goal: to “Translate” ever-evolving public health science so that people are well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions. The YLE suite of newsletters reaches over 475,000 people across more than 132 countries. This newsletter is free to everyone, thanks to the generous support of fellow YLE community members. To support the effort, subscribe or upgrade below: Subscribe
Pate lauds new Iowa law targeting fake business filings
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate says a new state law is a good first step to address scammers using an actual Iowa address when filling out online forms to register the name of a fake business. “What they’re doing to these poor homeowners is now setting them up for concern about what liabilities they […]
Snyder's Soapbox: You don't want a salary cap, you just want to be a billionaire
The only thing a salary cap will do is keep player salaries down and save the poor owners some money
Breckenridge businesses are hanging tough after poor ski season tourism
Kyle Schwarber Quietly Says What All Phillies Fans Are Thinking
At the beginning of the season, there was a strong argument to be made that not only were the Philadelphia Phillies one of the worst teams in Major League Baseball, but that there was going to be a major problem for this organization in the long term because of how poorly they were playing on both sides of the ball.
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.
Europe pours money into ocean research as Trump guts science funding
US withdrawal means Europe is a lifeline for ocean research, although a poorer one.
Poor sleep threatens health, society and the economy
An increasing number of people are suffering from sleep deprivation, difficulty falling asleep, or interrupted sleep—with consequences for health, society, and the economy. An international research team ...
Spencer Pratt's Race for Mayor Shows How Climate Disasters Can Fuel Anti-Establishment Politics
Research has long shown that poorly managed disasters foment distrust in institutions.
Number of students failing UC Berkeley computer science, engineering classes ‘soars’
UC Berkeley professors report a significant increase in student failures in computer science classes, attributing it to cheating, poor math skills, and over-reliance on AI. In spring, 35%
Japan change World Cup training sites in Mexico over conditions
Japan's World Cup squad had to twice change their training pitches in Mexico because of the poor condition of the fields, Japanese media said, in a turbulent start to preparations."We came to this conclusion (to change practice venues) because we searched for a better environment," he said, according to Japanese media.
So You Majored in Computer Science . . .
Suddenly, headlines about unemployed computer science majors are everywhere. Poor kids. Especially because—so it appears—many computer science majors did not choose the subject
James Beard-nominated chef leaves Seattle for Bainbridge Island, citing poor business environment
A James Beard-award-nominated chef, Brendan McGill, has closed his final two Seattle restaurants and is leaving the city over a poor business environment.
People with disabilities often experience poorer oral health—training could drive improved care
People with disabilities continue to face major barriers when seeking oral health care, according to new research that explores the perspectives of patients, caregivers and health care professionals in ...
The “Deli Boys” cast strike a pose — and get seriously funny about season 2
Asif Ali, Saagar Shaikh, Poorna Jagannathan, Fred Armisen, executive producer Jenni Konner, and EP and showrunner Michelle Nader sat for a conversation with EW.
Tech-favored candidates fell short on California's primary night
Tuesday's primary night was a poor showing for California's tech billionaires and founders who viewed statewide politics as the next frontier for their ambitions
Democrats use profanity to go viral. It won't persuade voters.
The rise of profanity in politics is both a symptom of declining civic culture and a poor political strategy.
5 Vikings Theories That Aged Poorly as of Late
Heading into every offseason, Minnesota Vikings fans and various media members manufacture some theories that come true — and some […]
'Astonishing': James Webb telescope spots the most chemically primitive galaxy in the ancient universe
The James Webb telescope peered into an ancient spot of light, and found it to be the most metal-poor galaxy in the early universe.
Sad Saturday: Rays 3 Angels 14
Drew Rasmussen put in one of his worst performances of the year, getting through just four innings while giving up five runs. Four of those runs came in the first, an uncharacteristically poor inning from the Rays righty. He gave up a single and then two walks — this is a guy who had, before […]
'Top class' Liverpool star contacted by Euro giants
Liverpool's squad is going to undergo another revamp this summer. hardly any of their transfers have worked out.Granted, a lot of their poor performances are due to the number of injuries that they've...
How Right-Wing Politics Make You Physically Ill
How Right-Wing Politics Make You Physically Ill: Over the past two decades, right-wing ideology has become associated with less trust in medicine—and poorer health
Rare Pigmentation In A Deep-Sea Shark Could Change How Scientists Think About Camouflage
A rare deep-sea sevengill shark with unusual patchy coloration was found to be in poor energetic condition, suggesting that even subtle disruptions to camouflage in the deep ocean may carry real survival costs.
Former CA lieutenant governor on Gavin Newsom: ‘The poor guy wants to be president so bad’
Heart-healthy lipid profile benefits brain health in adolescents, study finds
A new Finnish study shows that blood markers of dysfunctional lipid metabolism are associated with poorer cognitive function in 15–17-year-olds. The findings are significant because brain development ...
'Poor' health of Biscayne Bay threatens Miami 'economic powerhouse'
Miami's Biscayne Bay remains “vulnerable and under stress due to continuous pollution” threatening tourism, entertainment, boating and real estate.
Medical spa owned by US senator hit with multiple lawsuits over poor mammography quality
Plaintiff attorneys have filed at least three proposed class-action lawsuits against the Greenbrier Clinic in Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.
Scientists are raising new questions about vitamin B12 and cancer
Vitamin B12 has long been seen as a health hero, helping the body make red blood cells, repair DNA, and keep nerves functioning properly. But scientists are discovering that the story may be more complicated than simply “more is better.” While too little B12 can damage DNA and raise cancer risk, some studies suggest that extremely high levels — especially from long-term high-dose supplements — may also be linked to certain cancers or poorer outcomes in cancer patients.
Bolivia Unrest Threatens Return of Chaos, Sinks Sovereign Bonds
Bolivian sovereign bonds are in free-fall, dropping for a 10th day on Tuesday as protests and road blockades choke off essential supplies to La Paz and lead to violent clashes, threatening to push South America’s poorest country back into political and economic chaos.
'A very underwhelming campaign'
Now the curtain has come down on the 2025-26 Premier League campaign, here is my end-of-season review - with a look back to what I predicted in August. Chelsea's poor season contained one final insult when they were beaten at Sunderland on the final day, meaning they have no European football under new manager Xabi Alonso next season. Liam Rosenior lasted only three months amid acrimony - a head coach out of his depth - before Calum McFarlane stepped in to take Chelsea to the FA Cup final, which they lost to Manchester City.
India’s Scorching Nights Strain Power Grid and Threaten Health
India’s dangerously torrid summer days have long been a climate warning. Now the country is increasingly dealing with sweltering nights too, as global warming and poor urban planning put millions at risk.
Blood pressure swings over 24 hours tied to poorer brain health
Frequent changes in blood pressure could affect cognitive health and contribute to brain changes associated with dementia risk, according to new research from Monash University.
Why Trump’s possible Iran deal may be almost as divisive as his decision to wage war
The best hope for ending a poorly planned war started with scant consultation with Congress or the American people may be an unsatisfactory peace that leaves critical issues to be resolved later and deepens Washington strife.
Dietitian who never skips breakfast shares 3 high-fiber favorites
Skipping breakfast is linked to health problems including obesity, poor gut health, anxiety, and depression.
Buying your way to better health comes at the expense of others
Private health insurance contributes to poorer health among people with the lowest levels of education.
Bubsy 4D Review - Bobcat Banality
If Bubsy 4D is an attempt to bring new players to this 33-year-old franchise, its poor level design, characterization, and platforming will ensure it won't.
Screen time limits can protect children’s health, U.S. surgeon general advisory says
The Trump administration warned that too much screen time for children is linked to poor sleep, bad behavior and less physical and social activity
Poor air quality could aggravate health issues for vulnerable Long Island residents
The Air Quality Index, which measures the level of five pollutants, hit 105 in the metro area, including Nassau and Suffolk counties.
Texas's On-Again, Off-Again Hemp Product Ban Causes Confusion For Businesses And Consumers
“This is what we call the ‘Texas whiplash.’ These poor guys don’t know what is going to happen one day to the next. All they want is certainty and to sell their products.” By Paul Cobler, The Texas Tribune Hemp flower buds and rolled joints were piled into boxes and tucked out of public view […]
AI models were told to run profitable media businesses and did poorly
Andon Labs told Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to run profitable, 24/7 radio stations. Grok did poorly and Claude tried to quit, the startup said.
Hantavirus Is Scary. Your Daily Habits Are More Dangerous.
Why rare diseases like hantavirus generate fear while heart disease, loneliness, obesity, and poor sleep quietly cause far greater harm.
How Trump’s Science Cuts Threaten National Security
How Trump’s Science Cuts Threaten National Security: Weak science leads to bad forecasting and poor decision making
Scientists stunned: students discover the purest star born right after the Big Bang - Futura-Sciences
The Search for the Universe’s Oldest Star SDSSJ0715-7334 is a star so strikingly poor in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, it could only have been born at the dawn of the chemical evolution of galaxies, not long after the Big Bang itself. Currently, astronomers believe it is the oldest...
‘The mouth is a gateway into your body’: the fascinating, frightening links between our gums and our health
Scientists are discovering more and more associations between poor oral health and everything from heart disease to dementia. But can flossing and brushing properly guarantee a longer life?
Why Are Life Science Companies So Poorly Prepared For RIM's Future?
Most organizations have modernized their global regulatory information management (RIM) systems and improved data quality. Yet modernization and readiness are not the same thing.
Why Are Life Science Companies So Poorly Prepared For RIM's Future?
Most organizations have modernized their global regulatory information management (RIM) systems and improved data quality. Yet modernization and readiness are not the same thing.
Syria sees first government reshuffle since al-Assad’s ouster: State media
Interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa's reshuffle comes amid protests over poor government performance.
Poor sleep can cause or worsen mental illness. Which treatments work and what's just hype?
Sleep disorders can cause serious physical and mental health problems. Treatments are aplenty, from gummies, lotions and meditation to apps, sounds, C-PAPs and medications. There are so many medical, over the counter, and influencer-peddled ways to treat sleep problems. What’s hype? What works? And what’s it like when it seems all the remedies are failing?
German Business Leader Criticizes Merz for Poor Reform Record
The head of Germany’s Chambers of Commerce and Industry sharply criticized Chancellor Friedrich Merz for his poor reform record, calling the conservative leader’s ruling coalition dysfunctional and unreliable.
What 3 Ex-OpenAI execs testified about Sam Altman's management style
From complaints of "chaos" to poor communication, see what 3 witnesses said about Sam Altman's management style at the Musk v. Altman trial.
Oregon has the worst racial health disparities in the West
American Indian and Alaska Native communities face the poorest health outcomes in the state.
India’s iPhone Hub Stunned by Movie Star Vijay’s Political Rise
In most of his films, Tamil superstar C. Joseph Vijay has saved the nation and its poor from powerful forces. He used that same script in politics this week to emerge as the unlikely winner in elections in one of India’s most economically important states.
Roku and TCL accused of 'bricking' TVs with poor software updates in new class action lawsuit
Degraded experiences caused problems
'The Bean' Sculptor Kapoor Blasts America's 'Politics Of Hate' And 'Warmongering'
Kapoor last year threatened to sue the Trump administration after a group of border patrol agents posed for a photo in front of his Chicago sculpture.
Magic fire Jamahl Mosley after another first-round playoff loss
Orlando allowed Toronto to score 31 unanswered points in a 52-point loss earlier in the season that spelled poorly for Mosley's future with the team.
Anish Kapoor says US’s ‘politics of hate’ should exclude it from Venice Biennale
Artist commends jury for resigning over inclusion of Russia and Israel but says reasoning should also have included US
Bournemouth 3-0 Crystal Palace
Simon: Andoni Iraola orchestrated another masterpiece and the players delivered. Alex Scott and Alex Jimenez were the standouts. Paul: Crystal Palace were only poor because Bournemouth never allowed them to be involved.
Flaws in Kenya’s AI-driven health reforms driving up costs for the poorest
Exclusive: amid unrest, President William Ruto promised to give all Kenyans access to healthcare. But the algorithm favours the rich, an investigation has found
Analysis: De Zerbi channels positive performance
Roberto De Zerbi had demanded all negative thoughts be dismissed as he attempted to salvage safety in this wretched, turbulent season for Spurs. The response on the pitch was also outstanding as they tore into Villa from the first whistle, pressing high to force goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez and his defenders into poor clearances and uncertainty. Spurs suddenly looked like a team bursting with self-belief and confidence as the hosts, closing in on a place in next season's Champions League, were run ragged.
F1 Miami Grand Prix 2026: Kimi Antonelli, Max Verstappen recover from poor starts as anticipated rain does not fall
Formula 1 returns to the track after a five-week hiatus with its first of three trips to the United States this weekend for the Miami Grand Prix. The race, now in its fifth year, takes place on a temporary circuit that envelopes the Miami Dolphins' Hard Rock Stadium.
TST Best Bets: May 3, 2026
After the Philadelphia 76ers became the 14th team to ever come back from a 3-1 lead to win the series, the Detroit Pistons enter Sunday on the brink of history themselves. Detroit looked to be in dire straits against the Orlando Magic, as their physical defense made for a very poor matchup with the Pistons’ lack of secondary offensive creators behind Cade Cunningham. However, aided by an untimely injury to Franz Wagner for the Magic, the Pistons have started to look like the 60-win team they wer
60 years building Black political power: He sees a wipeout coming
It was a trajectory the son of a poor sharecropper in the Jim Crow South never envisioned was possible.
Which questions do peatland scientists want to answer most?
Peatlands are poorly understood worldwide, but have important implications for the climate. Nevada scientists compiled the 50 most urgent questions about them.
Report: Oklahoma health system performs poorly across all racial, ethnic groups
Health research and policy nonprofit the Commonwealth Fund warns that federal cuts and restrictions to Medicaid and the ACA Marketplace could worsen outcomes.
Microsoft's Internal Initiative to Fix Windows 11: Don't Rush Features Out the Door
Unless you've been living under a rock, you've seen the numerous issues Windows users have faced, from poor performance to experience-breaking bugs and updates, and AI oversaturation in the OS. While Microsoft has previously announced that it intends to address many of these complaints levelled by W...
Making AI chatbots more friendly leads to mistakes and support of conspiracy theories, study finds
Chatbots trained to respond warmly give poorer answers and worse health advice, researchers say
Informal educators get a powerful new way to speak their mind and boost their skills
Few elements of our culture are as firmly established in the 21st century western zeitgeist as the fact that teachers are underappreciated and poorly paid. That goes double for informal educators — those who work outside the confines of diploma or degree-granting institutions. In the realm of scienc
Data-Driven Research is Helping Health Policy
Dr. William Schpero has seen firsthand how public policy drives patient outcomes at the population level, cementing a core idea that continues to guide his work as a health economist: that policy can be a powerful force for improving health equity — or, if poorly designed, a barrier to it.
LeBron James takes blame for turnovers, poor performance in Game 4 loss to Rockets: 'It started with me'
Political appointments surging, career SES workforce shrinking under Trump 2.0
The federal government has reached its highest level of political appointments in decades, while also undergoing a significant loss of career senior leadership — a combination that one organization warns will lead to poor outcomes across agencies.
Healthy life expectancy gap between rich and poor has widened
Poor housing, obesity and the effects of deprivation have been suggested as underlying causes of the fall.
Patients taking weight-loss drugs often make 5 critical mistakes, doctor warns
Experts say GLP-1 drugs offer benefits beyond weight loss, but common mistakes like skipped labs and poor nutrition can undermine results or cause harm.
Windows Update gets new controls to reduce forced restarts
Microsoft is rolling out Windows Update improvements that give users more control over how updates are installed while reducing disruption from frequent or poorly timed restarts.
Sputtering Red Sox Offense Reaches New Low Vs. Yankees
Boston's slumping lineup hit rock bottom on Tuesday with its latest poor performance.
Shaky political science: using "simulated" elections over real-world elections
[Dear DSOS readers – this article is the latest in our “Shaky Political Science” series. In our 38 page report, “Shaky political ‘science’ misses mark on ranked choice voting,” released in early December, we examined over 40 studies focused on ranked choice voting. We found that many of these studies suffered from puzzling research methodologies, poorly constructed surveys, unrealistic simulated elections, cherry picked data, and faulty analyses that often were contradicted by results from real-world elections (a link to our full paper is here). Here are links to the first three articles in our series: the first one summarizing the overall results of our report, the second one analyzing a study co-authored by University of Minnesota academic Larry Jacobs, which was one of the most error-prone of all the research we reviewed in our report, and a third article showing an admirable example of two political scientists holding two other political scientists accountable for their flawed, sloppy research]. In this fourth article in our “Shaky Political Science” series, we shine a spotlight on seven studies that were web-hosted and funded by New America’s Political Reform Program and its Electoral Reform Research Group (the ERRG is an ad hoc committee headed by New America’s Political Reform Program and joined by the American Enterprise Institute, the Unite America Institute and Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law). This research consortium has been led by Lee Drutman, senior fellow with New America’s Political Reform Program. These seven studies are simply not credible from any objective standard about how political “science” is supposed to illuminate our understanding of either ranked choice voting or politics in general. The feature that six of these seven studies have in common is that they all used surveys – artificial, simulated elections -- to attempt to say something cogent or interesting about ranked choice voting (RCV) elections. None of them used real world data from actual RCV elections – either the 1000+ elections in the US or the many thousands of elections from places like Australia, Ireland and elsewhere where RCV has been used for 100 years. While a few of these studies conclude with some mixed positives about RCV, our analysis here is content neutral. The idea that, with a political reform like RCV, you can ask respondents in a mock, artificial election to vote with that method, with only the barest of explanation about how RCV works or its likely impacts (i.e. no spoiler candidates, majority winners, voters liberated to pick their favorite candidates, coalition-building), and then ask them their thoughts/reactions about voting in that system, with fake candidates and no real campaigning, no real exposure to an actual election or actual candidates, rests on some very puzzling assumptions. The findings of these seven studies actually are contradicted by the findings from many other studies based on real-world RCV elections. These New America studies also failed to list the real-world RCV studies in their own citations, instead including those studies that reinforced their conclusions. The seven studies featured in this article were chosen because they form a cohesive cohort which precisely illustrates one of the main points of our research paper, namely that using surveys, i.e. artificial elections, or mathematical/theoretical models, instead of real-world data, is in fact “shaky political science.” Below are summaries of our analysis of five of the seven New America studies. You can read our complete analysis of all seven studies at our paper, “Shaky political ‘science’ misses mark on ranked choice voting.” Choosing to “Vote As Usual” by Andre Blais, Carolina Plescia, and Semra Sevi. New America. (Blais et al., 2021). This study, web-hosted and funded by New America’s Political Reform Program and its Electoral Reform Research Group, used two surveys in which respondents completed ballots for simulated elections using plurality, approval, RCV and point (Score) voting. In both cases the authors provided the respondents with only minimal explanation of each method. For example, the entire explanation for RCV was “For this vote, rank the candidates from your first to your last choice (you do not need to rank them all). This is called the ranked vote.” That’s it. The study did not provide any context or explanation to survey respondents about why she/he might want to rank multiple candidates. Participants were not even told that ballots would be tabulated using an “instant” runoff, not to mention any description of RCVs ability to eliminate the spoiler effect or liberate voters to rank their favorite candidates without fear of helping the “greater evil” candidate to win. That’s like taking an iPhone back in time to 1970 and asking someone if they like it better than their rotary phone without explaining how it works. Their first survey targeted states that held 2020 Super Tuesday Democratic primaries and used the real candidates’ names in the survey; the second survey used fictitious candidates. In other words, they surveyed respondents who had only ever participated in plurality elections, had no history or background with using RCV or any of the other methods, had no clue about its likely impacts, and did not communicate how the alternative methods would be counted, and then asked them: “How satisfied are you with using each system?” Predictably, the winner was plurality elections, the system used for president, Congress, gubernatorial and state legislative elections – in other words, the method they have been using, year after year, all their voting lives. With so little explanation of RCV and its impacts, this study is simply not credible in discovering anything useful about real-world RCV elections. It merely shows that a basic voter education campaign is needed when adopting a new election system. Additionally, the result contradicts many other post-election surveys following real RCV elections, asking opinions from voters who had just participated in a RCV election, that showed a great deal of satisfaction with RCV (see details on that in Studies 22-25 in our paper, as well as the four studies cited in the review for Study 28). Share Other studies on “satisfaction” and “understanding” make similar mistakes, in terms of basing their surveys on inadequate explanation to respondents and lack of education about context. How could any survey ever hope to measure accurately, in essence simulate a real-world election, without actual campaigning candidates, the media writing about those candidates, organizations endorsing candidates and voters being inundated with crucial information? More than anything, what these “studies” based on surveys show is that if you ask voters about something they don’t know very much about, and fail to adequately educate them, their responses will unsurprisingly reflect their confusion. Equally puzzling is that New America’s Electoral Reform Research Group, headed by political scientist Lee Drutman, found this to be a credible enough study that they not only published it but highlighted it in Drutman’s own discussion of research related to ranked choice voting. This pattern was repeated in study after study featured by New America’s Electoral Reform Research Group. For example in Ranked-Choice Voting and Political Expression: Voter Guides Narrow the Gap between Informed and Uninformed Citizens by Cheryl Boudreau, Jonathan Colner, and Scott MacKenzie, the researchers based their analysis on a survey which found that respondents who were asked to vote in a simulated RCV election, with minimal explanation of RCV or how it works, displayed less evidence of being informed about how to use RCV effectively, with the least informed voters ranking fewer candidates. As pointed out under the study above, in a real election voters are informed by a wide variety of methods, including public education by the election administration, by interested political groups, the media, and the candidates themselves who benefit from voters being aware of how to vote in the new system. In Support for Ranked-Choice Voting across Race and Partisanship by Joseph Anthony, David C. Kimball, Jack Santucci and Jamil Scott, the researchers used respondents from different parties and races voting in simulated plurality and RCV elections, who indicated their satisfaction with each voting method. Instead of using real world election results, the authors fell back on the easy, armchair and less reliable academic research methodology of making up mock elections. As with the other studies, little explanation was given of how RCV works or what its implications might be (electing majority winners or eliminating spoilers, for example). Unsurprisingly, this study found that respondents were not very satisfied with RCV. However, when the authors added an explanation that RCV has a tendency to elect more women and people of color, they found that this greater explanation increased the preference for RCV. The more voters were familiar with it, and the more they understood potential positive impacts – surprise! -- the more they were open to switching away from the status quo. Of note, the results from this study are thoroughly contradicted by a number of other studies whose data was obtained from real RCV elections with real voters. Those studies show a great deal of satisfaction with RCV. More “fake election” research An interesting wrinkle on this “research by fake elections” approach, which only served to illustrate how unreliable such “research” can become, was taken in Ranked-Choice Voting, Runoff, and Democracy: Insights from Maine and Other U.S. States by Joseph Cerrone and Cynthia McClintock_,_ also web-hosted and funded by New America’s ERRG. It gets high marks for creativity, but an eye-roll for thinking this could possibly add anything meaningful to our understanding of real world RCV elections. This study tried to determine whether RCV, plurality or two-round runoff elections provided greater voter satisfaction and acceptance of election results. To determine that, the authors conducted a survey asking if voters were satisfied with a fictional newspaper report of an election, with three different versions given to respondents – plurality, runoff and RCV, with variations of Republican/Democrat winners and variations of “come-from-behind” winners,” i.e. candidates not initially in first place but who win the “runoff.” Again, a minimal explanation of RCV or how it works was given, and the survey showed that respondents had the greatest unfamiliarity with RCV than the other methods. The unsurprising result? Respondents were much more satisfied with “come-from-behind” victories in a traditional two-round runoff election than in RCV, even though RCV is also a runoff system but with a single round of counting. Interestingly, the dissatisfaction with RCV disappeared for those who were more familiar with RCV. In fact, among those respondents who were “very familiar” with RCV, they were equally satisfied with RCV, runoff and plurality. Surprise, surprise. Again, what this study revealed, more than anything, is not only the inadequacy of the explanation for RCV given by the authors of this study, but the failure of the research format itself, thinking that such an artificial mock election could somehow simulate what actually happens in the real world in a real RCV election. Those four studies reviewed above are fitting examples of inadequate and shaky political “science.” Other studies reviewed in our paper from the New America/Electoral Reform Research Group cohort which also used mock elections included: Ranked-Choice Voting is an Acquired Taste by Joseph Anthony and David C. Kimball. New America. (Anthony et al., 2021). Ranked-Choice Voting is No Refuge for Extreme Candidates by Melissa Baker. New America. (Baker, 2021). Also included in this New America cohort is Does Ranked-Choice Voting Reduce Racial Polarization? by Yuki Atsusaka and Theodore Landsman, which actually did use real-world election results data but applied an odd and unconventional methodology to the data which relied on shaky assumptions and non-real-world scenarios that were too divorced from reality. To determine levels of “racially polarized voting,” the researchers imagined “ethnic parties,” by which they mean political parties for each ethnic group, which was especially odd since the election data they were using came from nonpartisan RCV races. But then they made an even odder assumption, namely that since race and ethnic characteristics of studied voters were not available, the authors tried to infer that information based on who voters selected and the racial make-up of voters in each district. This amounted to little more than vague and ambiguous guesswork dressed up with a bunch of mathematical equations used to give it a veneer of scientific appearance. Indeed, it seemed to assume racial polarization in order to prove racial polarization. Based on this questionable methodology, the authors concluded that RCV doesn’t reduce racial polarization. But the premise of this study missed an obvious reality: since RCV incentivizes more candidates to run and can result in more diverse fields of candidates, one would expect more racially-polarized voting in voters’ top rankings, not less, because more voters would have someone on that ballot who represents their racial or ethnic identity and more freedom to vote for their real first choice. By encouraging more diverse candidates and eliminating the spoiler effect, RCV facilitates voting for a favorite candidate of your own race and then selecting a second choice with the best likelihood of winning. The real measure is what voters do with their additional rankings – do they consider other candidates and vote “for the best of the rest”? This study didn’t tell us anything useful about that. But readily available data shows this is common in real RCV elections, and candidates act on this knowledge by engaging with voters outside their racial group. So the authors of this study failed to consider or account for what actually happens in real-world elections, and their conclusions are tainted by this failure. New America has contributed a great deal over the past 2.5 decades to our understanding of many policy areas, including politics and political reform (full disclosure: Steven Hill, one of the authors of this article and of the “Shaky Political Science” research paper and series, is a former senior fellow and former director of New America’s political reform program, 2005-2010). So it was especially disappointing that New America funded and published such a large batch of dubious studies about ranked choice voting. The stated praiseworthy goal of its Electoral Reform Research Group was to inspire new academic research about ranked choice voting that would shed light and help the public better understand the impacts of RCV. Instead, the ERRG research did just the opposite. It produced dubious research that created more confusion and misinformation. In so doing, New America’s political reform program contributed to “shaky political science.” Steven Hill and Paul Haughey Share Upgrade to $5 subscription Thanks for reading DemocracySOS, a reader-supported digital portal for the pro-democracy movement. Subscribe for only $5 per month to receive full benefits and to support our work. Subscribe
Madonna pleads for 'safe return' of vintage outfits she wore with Sabrina Carpenter at Coachella
Madonna has called for the 'safe return' of her material, girl. The superstar said vintage clothes she wore on stage with Sabrina Carpenter at Coachella 'went missing' after the performance.
Local Politics: City Council votes today on plans to turn McCoy Park into an NWSL training facility
After spending years working with neighbors and promising improvements to benefit disabled residents, elected officials are prepared to give away a 28-acre park in the poorest corner of the city for the use of billionaire investors.
What went wrong for Penguins in poor Game 1 showing vs. Flyers
The Penguins were supposed to be the team ready for playoff hockey. Sidney Crosby has almost as much playoff experience as the Flyers’ entire postseason...
'Really poor in terms of chances created'
Stoke boss Mark Robins says they gave away two bad goals and did not create enough opportunities going forwards following their defeat by Wrexham.
Scientists discover hidden ocean methane source that could worsen global warming
Scientists have discovered that methane in the open ocean is produced by microbes under nutrient-poor conditions, solving a long-standing mystery. As warming oceans reduce nutrient mixing, these methane-producing microbes may thrive. This could lead to increased methane emissions from the sea. The result is a potential feedback loop that could intensify climate change.
Arsenal 0 Sporting 0: Arteta’s men do enough to set up Atletico Madrid semi-final
After a recent run of poor results, Arsenal hold firm to progress to the Champions League semi-finals
HEALTH Yeah! Episode 29: When Kids Don’t Sleep: What Parents Should Know
In this podcast episode, you'll learn about sleep studies, treatment options and how poor sleep can affect behavior, weight and more.