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Reposted by Sean Prall

Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 2d

If one man marries two women, another man must go unmarried, right? No. Demography matters. If sex ratios are skewed towards women, then polygyny can exist alongside universal marriage for men (who want to marry women). If only more people understood demography 😊

Hampton Gaddy @hggaddy.bsky.social · 3d

🚨 The Economist has been telling you for years that polygamy causes civil war by locking men out of marriage. A new article with @rebeccasear.bsky.social and @anthrolog.bsky.social explains that the demography of marriage markets doesn't actually work that way. 🧵

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

High rates of polygyny do not lock large proportions of men out of the marriage market | PNAS

There is a widespread belief, in both the scholarly literature and the popular press, that polygyny prevents large numbers of men from marrying by ...

www.pnas.org

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Prof Gavin Yamey @gavinyamey.bsky.social · 29d

"Public health is under siege in our country. This time it is not from fringe communities scattered across the nation but from our appointed leaders, who were nominated by our president and confirmed by our elected officials in the Senate."

A must-read anonymous piece

www.bmj.com/content/390/...

Struggling on in the US federal research system

In February The BMJ allowed me, a US federal researcher, to publish anonymously two accounts of the anger, despair, harm, and chaos we are experiencing in our work.12 They had to be anonymous, as is t...

www.bmj.com

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Dr. David Miller 🏳️‍🌈 @davidimiller.bsky.social · Aug 19

From a colleague:

NSF proposal received FOUR "excellent" ratings (the highest possible...that almost never happens).

Rated "highly competitive" in panel summary.

👎 ...but still rejected.

Likely reason: It studied a topic disfavored by this admin.

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Miriam Posner @miriamposner.com · Aug 9

Fun fact: even as UCLA is being extorted for $1B by a fascist government, its administration is requiring all faculty to install a “security” program that surveils everything we do and shares that information with the federal government.

Summary of our concerns

1. Implementation Timeline We have learned that the UC system has suffered numerous and increasingly frequent cyber attacks and security breaches. For years, the administration has done little to stud...

sites.google.com

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Sean Prall @sprall.bsky.social · Aug 9

I’m frustrated to lose our grant & field season, but more concerned about the state of science in the US and the longterm ramifications of this obscene attack on higher ed. I hope that UCLA and other universities actually stand up and fight back, instead of give in to ridiculous demands.

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Sean Prall @sprall.bsky.social · Aug 9

Very disappointed that we were forced to cancel our field season and return early, following the suspension of our NSF grant as part of Trump’s attacks on UCLA. Particularly sad for our students, who spent significant time and effort to join us this year.

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Jessica Leight @leightjessica.bsky.social · Aug 8

Still a projection, but a devastating projection: 30-40% drop in international students at U.S. universities this fall
www.nafsa.org/about/about-...
Hard to wrap your head around the full implications of this for universities

U.S. Economy Could Suffer a $7 Billion Loss from Precipitous Drop in International Students

NAFSA: Association of International Educators is the world's largest nonprofit association dedicated to international education and exchange.

www.nafsa.org

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Taylor van Doren, PhD @taylorvandoren.bsky.social · Aug 2

My new paper "Post-pandemic inequalities: Evolutionary anthropological frameworks for long-term impacts of the 1918 influenza pandemic" is now published in Evolutionary Anthropology!

Please check it out at the link below!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Vivek V. Venkataraman @vivek123.bsky.social · Jul 31

Pleased to present our new preprint on sleep and circadian rhythms among the Orang Asli of Peninsular Malaysia.

This is a fascinating system for exploring sleep biology. Lots of variation in light exposure, housing type, and subsistence.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧵 below.

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ProPublica @propublica.org · Jul 9

Federal kindergarten vaccination data shows national rates for four major vaccines, which had held steady before the COVID-19 pandemic, have fallen significantly since.

In fact, measles vaccination rates were below herd immunity in most states in 2023.

➡️ Read more: propub.li/40KnM8n

A U.S. tile map that depicts the measles vaccination rate for kindergarteners (according to CDC data) in each state from 2013 to 2023. A key explains that for each state, a gray dotted line represents the benchmark for herd immunity: a 95% vaccination rate. Vaccination rates above 95% are shown in blue, while vaccination rates below 95% are shown in orange. Looking at the full map, the trend lines lean much more orange than blue. Measles vaccination rates in most states were below herd immunity in school year 2023-2024.

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Graham Coop @gcbias.bsky.social · Jun 7

The university of California is a powerhouse of innovation, healthcare, and social mobility for California and the US.

Federal investment in UC research Federal funds are the university’s single most important source of support for research, accounting for more than half of UC’s total research awards.

Many of California’s leading industries grew from UC research, including biotechnology, computing, semiconductors, telecommunications and
agriculture.

Providing health care at UC University of California Health (UC Health) is one of the nation’s largest public academic health systems, serving
as a critical part of the California safety net.

UC trains approximately 36% of the medical residents in California

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Dr. David Miller 🏳️‍🌈 @davidimiller.bsky.social · May 30

🚨🚨 Friday night news drop from National Science Foundation!! 🧪

NSF just released its detailed budget request for next year: nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/00-NSF...

We knew it was going to be bad...and it lives up. Guts direct NSF support for a **quarter million people**

🧵 on some highlights...

Senior Researchers 60,400 --> 16,900
Other Professionals 14,400 --> 4,100
Postdoctoral Associates 5,500 --> 1,000
Graduate Students 41,500 --> 12,400
Undergraduate Students 37,300 --> 8,000
PreK-12 Teachers 42,900 --> 8,200
PreK-12 Students 128,100 --> 39,400
Total Number of People 330,100 --> 90,000

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Voilà: Francis Gagnon @chezvoila.com · May 19

Happy to see an update to this classic from the Wall Street Journal (Tynan DeBold, Dov Friedman), this time by @scientificdiscovery.dev and @spoonerf.bsky.social at @ourworldindata.org. 📊

New: a log chart, new colours and three relevant annotations.

Source: ourworldindata.org/measles-vacc...

Measles
Heatmap of the number of cases of measles from the 1920s to the 2010s in the United States, shown by stage. Blue is low, red is high. The chart is annotated with a black line that shows the date of the introduction of the vaccine (approx 1963) and the number of cases drops dramatically right after.

Heatmap of vaccines reduced measles cases across US states
From 1929 to 2022
There are lots of cases before 193, then it drops and almost disappears completely in the 1990s.

1963: The first measles vaccine is developed by John Enders
1971: The measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine is developed by Maurice Hilleman
1980: It becomes mandatory for children entering kindergarten to be vaccinated against measles

Data source: Project Tycho (2018); Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (1959-2022)
OurWorldinData.org - Research and data to make progress against the world's largest problems.
Licensed under CC-BY by the author Fiona Spooner

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Sean Prall @sprall.bsky.social · May 19

In other news, my engineer father has published a book! Looks like a spicy read!
link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

CMOS Plasma and Process Damage

This book provides an up-to-date, single-source reference on CMOS plasma and process damage, for engineers from all disciplines.

link.springer.com

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Paul Smaldino @psmaldino.bsky.social · May 9

As grant money starts drying up, it's more important than ever not to waste it on paying publishers' open access "article processing fees" when we can host PDFs for free. Tom Morgan and I wrote a paper on this, forthcoming at Science and Public Policy. Accepted draft here: osf.io/preprints/os...

Author-Paid PublicationFees Corrupt Science and Should Be Abandoned
Thomas J. H Morgan & Paul E. Smaldino

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Sean Prall @sprall.bsky.social · May 7

New paper on malaria in NW Namibia, highlighting significant differences between cultural models and biomedical ones that could be detrimental to malaria eradication efforts.

malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Erema po otjindjumba? Highlighting cultural models and knowledge gaps of malaria in rural Namibian pastoralists - Malaria Journal

Background As Namibia attempts to eradicate locally transmitted cases of malaria, epidemiological strategies, interventions, and outreach require a sound understanding of indigenous knowledge and prac...

malariajournal.biomedcentral.com

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · Apr 28

New at Can We Still Govern: An anonymous NIH employee maps out the GOP budget gameplan to permanently gut our most important science agency.
Impoundment, delay and red tape will create artificial "savings" that become the new benchmark for NIH budgets.
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nih-bu...

The NIH budget is on a fast track to disaster

An NIH insider explains what Republicans are likely to do next, and what we can do

donmoynihan.substack.com

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WIRED @wired.com · Apr 24

A new study forecasts more than 850,000 measles cases over the next 25 years if US vaccination rates stay the same. Millions of infections are possible if rates drop. www.wired.com/story/scient...

Scientists Find Measles Likely To Become Endemic in the US Over Next 20 Years

A new study forecasts more than 850,000 measles cases over the next 25 years if US vaccination rates stay the same. Millions of infections are possible if rates drop.

www.wired.com

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Sean Prall @sprall.bsky.social · Apr 22

share link:

rdcu.be/eiEGs

The Role of Medical Mistrust in Vaccination Decisions in Rural, Indigenous Namibian Communities

rdcu.be

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Sean Prall @sprall.bsky.social · Apr 22

New paper out exploring the relationship between medical mistrust and vaccination beliefs and decisions in Namibian pastoralists, with some COVID stuff thrown in for good measure

doi.org/10.1007/s406...

The Role of Medical Mistrust in Vaccination Decisions in Rural, Indigenous Namibian Communities - Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities

Objectives Substantial inequalities in access to healthcare are common in rural and marginalized populations in the Global South, and these inequalities can drive health disparities. Historical mistru...

doi.org

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Michael Bang Petersen @m-b-petersen.bsky.social · Apr 18

This statement from the NSF is insane.

Science is, in essence, designed to separate the true from the false.

Understanding how falsehoods spread is key to the scientific endeavor. It is not a violation of free speech to be proven wrong.

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Eric McDaniel @ericm.cd · Apr 17

I look at close to 100 stories a week and even more outside of work. I’ve done this ten years.

This is among the most horrific things I’ve ever read — testimony from dying children whose access to medicine has been cut off by the Trump administration.

www.npr.org/sections/goa...

Haunted by hopelessness: 12 Zambians share their stories as HIV drugs run out

Mothers and children, husbands and wives, doctors, truck drivers and religious leaders are all grappling with the fallout from the sudden U.S. cuts in aid.

www.npr.org

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Jesse D. Jenkins @jessedjenkins.com · Apr 15

Now there's a memorable stat!

"Colleges and universities are among America’s most competitive international exporters. In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined."

wapo.st/3EvzMCI

Opinion | Trump is killing one of our strongest exports

The president wants to balance U.S. trade deficits? He can’t do it without this industry he hates.

wapo.st

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Sean Prall @sprall.bsky.social · Apr 12

oh hell yes

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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · Apr 11

The NYT has profiled Rufo repeatedly but never come close to asking the vital questions that Larry lays out so well here:

Larry Glickman @larryglickman.bsky.social · Apr 11

Rufo would "like to see that prototype [what's happened at Columbia and elsewhere] industrialized and applied to all of the universities as a sector" and that he would like "to reduce the size of the [higher education] sector itself."
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/p...

The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges

Christopher Rufo has helped inspire Republican messaging and bills on hot-button issues.

www.nytimes.com

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