"In the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, Azerbaijan used drones — purchased cheaply and easily from Turkey and Israel — to crush the vaunted Armenian army in a short space of time. Armenian troops were renowned as masters of infantry warfare and heavy weaponry, but their tanks, missile launchers, artillery, and transport vehicles were sitting ducks for their foes’ cheap disposable drones." There are things you know that are coming - even previews of the future as you can see above. Still I expect there'll be a lot of surprise when this happens in a more-broadly-focused context.
"The aftermath of a pandemic that systematically killed the overweight seems a particularly bad time to make the argument that the relationship between weight and health is "a myth.""
"The first hypothesis is that the popular uprisings in these countries represented a social response to rising income inequality. This view was particularly popular among a social media contingent who seem to believe, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that inequality is always rising everywhere. The trouble with this hypothesis is that income inequality, as captured by household surveys, has actually been declining in Latin America for the last twenty years. ... In countries that did experience mass protests (Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia) on the other hand, inequality was either constant or continued to decline in the last few years for which data is available."
Reminds me a bit of the case of Phuc Bui, albeit in this latter case the professor seems to have acted somewhat inappropriately as they themselves seem to have acknowledged.
"Contrary to expert predictions and a large body of sleep research, increased nighttime sleep had no detectable effects on cognition, productivity, decision-making, or well-being, and led to small decreases in labor supply. In contrast, short afternoon naps at the workplace improved an overall index of outcomes by 0.12 standard deviations"
"Women and girls can produce up to twice as many antibodies after receiving flu shots and vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella (M.M.R.) and hepatitis A and B, probably because of a mix of factors, including reproductive hormones and genetic differences. A study found that over nearly three decades, women accounted for 80 percent of all adult allergic reactions to vaccines. Similarly, the C.D.C. reported that most of the anaphylactic reactions to Covid-19 vaccines, while rare, have occurred among women."
"A solution to marketplace information asymmetries is to have trading partners publicly rate each other post-transaction. Many have shown that these ratings are effective; we show that their effectiveness deteriorates over time. The problem is that ratings are prone to inflation, with raters feeling pressure to leave “above average” ratings, which in turn pushes the average higher. This pressure stems from raters’ desire to not harm the rated seller. As the potential to harm is what makes ratings effective, reputation systems, as currently designed, sow the seeds of their own irrelevance."
What fraction of sources would you expect to mention both of these sorts of studies?
A study by University of CA finds teachers are harsher in grading black student’s writing than they are on IDENTICAL writing from a white student. White female teachers are most likely to show racial bias and black boys are most often the targets. https://t.co/Yvir6fgJS2
Boys Lag Behind: A comparison of gender-blind vs. non-blind test scores reveals a teacher marking bias in favor of girls. This appears to be part of the reason that boys fall behind girls at school. https://t.co/CQFFflJVGipic.twitter.com/fxgArNEOMj
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) April 8, 2021
