#Data Diversity

[segmed]

Bias, Equity & Data Diversity: Why Real-World Imaging Data is Essential for Ethical AI in Healthcare

Discover how ethical AI, driven by real-world imaging data, is shaping the future of healthcare. This blog explores the importance of transparency, fairness, and diverse datasets in building responsible AI models that enhance clinical decision-making, improve outcomes, and support patient trust.

[theconcinnitycompany]

Spotlight on Rare Diseases: How Data Diversity Drives Innovation in Rare Diseases Trials

Explore how data diversity is revolutionizing rare disease clinical trials by enhancing innovation, patient representation, and therapeutic outcomes. Learn why inclusive real-world data is essential for accelerating research, supporting equitable healthcare, and driving meaningful breakthroughs.

[thefantastickatinator]

Dropout should hire more trans women.

That said, a couple things about the data set floating around showing disproportionality in casting:

1. 7 of the top 9 (those cast members who appear in over 100 episodes, everyone else has under 70 appearances) are members of the core dimension 20 cast, aka “the intrepid heroes”. This cast has been in 7 of the 22 seasons, with those seasons usually being 20-ish episodes long (the other seasons are between 4-10 episodes long typically). That’s approximately 140 episodes for each of the main intrepid heroes cast members just for these seasons (not including bonus content like live shows). Brian Murphy has appeared 154 times, which means almost all of his appearances were on D20 intrepid heroes campaigns.

2. The other 2 in the top 9 are Sam Reich and Mike Trapp, who are both hosts of long running shows (Game Changer and Um, Actually)

3. 198 of the 317 episodes that noncis “TME” people have appeared in can be attributed to ally Beardsley alone (there is some crossover where for example alex and ally have both appeared in the same episodes). Erika ishii has been in 67 of the 317 noncis “TME” episode appearances i don’t know how much crossover there is between them but i don’t think they’ve been on d20 together so i doubt it’s more than 20. It could be as many as 250 of the 317 episodes that have either erica or ally. Both Erika and ally are majorly skewing the results for the data

4. Over 3/4 of people have no listed gender identity in the spreadsheet - most of them have 1-2 appearances, but a few have 3-4 appearances. I’m pretty sure these people aren’t included in the data at all (some of them i’m p sure are not cis like jiavani and bob the drag queen)

5. The data collector has assigned “tme” and “tma” to various cast members.

TME: transmisogyny exempt

TMA: transmisogyny affected

Now, tranmisogyny can affect trans women, trans femmes, and nonbinary people, and occasionally masculine appearing cis women.

I personally do not believe that an outside person can assign you a label deciding whether or not you experience certain types of oppression- and yet that is what the data collector has done.

I think a more accurate label would be amab/afab, or more honestly- “people i think are amab or have said they are amab and then everyone else”

6. The data does not include many of their newer shows such as Very Important People, Gastronauts, Play it By Ear, and Monet’s Slumber Party, all of which feature trans people (MSP, Gastronauts, and VIP are all hosted by noncis people)

What I think the data more accurately shows:

- Dimension 20 has a “main cast” who have appeared in the majority of episodes

- Dropout has some “regulars” who appear on the majority of their content/shows (sam has referenced multiple times that brennan is one of the first people he calls whenever someone can’t show up for something since he’s nearly always down for anything) - none of these people are trans women

Final thoughts:

I think eliminating “hosts” and the “intrepid heroes” from THIS TYPE of data set would be more appropriate because they massively skew the data when crunching the numbers for dropout shows. Especially since I can tell from the excel sheet that there are shows missing. Examining d20 sidequests and the guests on the other shows will give a more accurate representation of casting. Hosts should be analyzed separately as that’s a different casting process.

Also imagine if we referred to men and women as “misogyny exempt” and “misogyny affected” when doing demographics. Or if someone did a data collection of the number of POC appearances in dropout episodes and sorted it by “racism affected” and “racism exempt” - so weiiiiird

TLDR: the data set has massive issues with its methodology and that should be considered. That doesn’t make what trans women are saying less valid.

In other words: spiders brennan is an outlier and should not have been counted

[barksbog]

Salamandra s. salamandra - Dunkelsteinerwald NÖ Austria

we saw three!! different fire salamanders on our morning walk

[jcmarchi]

MIT scientists pin down the origins of a fast radio burst

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/mit-scientists-pin-down-the-origins-of-a-fast-radio-burst/

MIT scientists pin down the origins of a fast radio burst

Fast radio bursts are brief and brilliant explosions of radio waves emitted by extremely compact objects such as neutron stars and possibly black holes. These fleeting fireworks last for just a thousandth of a second and can carry an enormous amount of energy — enough to briefly outshine entire galaxies.

Since the first fast radio burst (FRB) was discovered in 2007, astronomers have detected thousands of FRBs, whose locations range from within our own galaxy to as far as 8 billion light-years away. Exactly how these cosmic radio flares are launched is a highly contested unknown.

Now, astronomers at MIT have pinned down the origins of at least one fast radio burst using a novel technique that could do the same for other FRBs. In their new study, appearing today in the journal Nature, the team focused on FRB 20221022A — a previously discovered fast radio burst that was detected from a galaxy about 200 million light-years away.

The team zeroed in further to determine the precise location of the radio signal by analyzing its “scintillation,” similar to how stars twinkle in the night sky. The scientists studied changes in the FRB’s brightness and determined that the burst must have originated from the immediate vicinity of its source, rather than much further out, as some models have predicted.

The team estimates that FRB 20221022A exploded from a region that is extremely close to a rotating neutron star, 10,000 kilometers away at most. That’s less than the distance between New York and Singapore. At such close range, the burst likely emerged from the neutron star’s magnetosphere — a highly magnetic region immediately surrounding the ultracompact star.

The team’s findings provide the first conclusive evidence that a fast radio burst can originate from the magnetosphere, the highly magnetic environment immediately surrounding an extremely compact object.

“In these environments of neutron stars, the magnetic fields are really at the limits of what the universe can produce,” says lead author Kenzie Nimmo, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “There’s been a lot of debate about whether this bright radio emission could even escape from that extreme plasma.”

“Around these highly magnetic neutron stars, also known as magnetars, atoms can’t exist — they would just get torn apart by the magnetic fields,” says Kiyoshi Masui, associate professor of physics at MIT. “The exciting thing here is, we find that the energy stored in those magnetic fields, close to the source, is twisting and reconfiguring such that it can be released as radio waves that we can see halfway across the universe.”

The study’s MIT co-authors include Adam Lanman, Shion Andrew, Daniele Michilli, and Kaitlyn Shin, along with collaborators from multiple institutions.

Burst size

Detections of fast radio bursts have ramped up in recent years, due to the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). The radio telescope array comprises four large, stationary receivers, each shaped like a half-pipe, that are tuned to detect radio emissions within a range that is highly sensitive to fast radio bursts.

Since 2020, CHIME has detected thousands of FRBs from all over the universe. While scientists generally agree that the bursts arise from extremely compact objects, the exact physics driving the FRBs is unclear. Some models predict that fast radio bursts should come from the turbulent magnetosphere immediately surrounding a compact object, while others predict that the bursts should originate much further out, as part of a shockwave that propagates away from the central object.

To distinguish between the two scenarios, and determine where fast radio bursts arise, the team considered scintillation — the effect that occurs when light from a small bright source such as a star, filters through some medium, such as a galaxy’s gas. As the starlight filters through the gas, it bends in ways that make it appear, to a distant observer, as if the star is twinkling. The smaller or the farther away an object is, the more it twinkles. The light from larger or closer objects, such as planets in our own solar system, experience less bending, and therefore do not appear to twinkle.

The team reasoned that if they could estimate the degree to which an FRB scintillates, they might determine the relative size of the region from where the FRB originated. The smaller the region, the closer in the burst would be to its source, and the more likely it is to have come from a magnetically turbulent environment. The larger the region, the farther the burst would be, giving support to the idea that FRBs stem from far-out shockwaves.

Twinkle pattern

To test their idea, the researchers looked to FRB 20221022A, a fast radio burst that was detected by CHIME in 2022. The signal lasts about two milliseconds, and is a relatively run-of-the-mill FRB, in terms of its brightness. However, the team’s collaborators at McGill University found that FRB 20221022A exhibited one standout property: The light from the burst was highly polarized, with the angle of polarization tracing a smooth S-shaped curve.  This pattern is interpreted as evidence that the FRB emission site is rotating — a characteristic previously observed in pulsars, which are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars.

To see a similar polarization in fast radio bursts was a first, suggesting that the signal may have arisen from the close-in vicinity of a neutron star. The McGill team’s results are reported in a companion paper today in Nature.

The MIT team realized that if FRB 20221022A originated from close to a neutron star, they should be able to prove this, using scintillation.

In their new study, Nimmo and her colleagues analyzed data from CHIME and observed steep variations in brightness that signaled scintillation — in other words, the FRB was twinkling. They confirmed that there is gas somewhere between the telescope and FRB that is bending and filtering the radio waves. The team then determined where this gas could be located, confirming that gas within the FRB’s host galaxy was responsible for some of the scintillation observed. This gas acted as a natural lens, allowing the researchers to zoom in on the FRB site and determine that the burst originated from an extremely small region, estimated to be about 10,000 kilometers wide.

“This means that the FRB is probably within hundreds of thousands of kilometers from the source,” Nimmo says. “That’s very close. For comparison, we would expect the signal would be more than tens of millions of kilometers away if it originated from a shockwave, and we would see no scintillation at all.”

“Zooming in to a 10,000-kilometer region, from a distance of 200 million light years, is like being able to measure the width of a DNA helix, which is about 2 nanometers wide, on the surface of the moon,” Masui says. “There’s an amazing range of scales involved.”

The team’s results, combined with the findings from the McGill team, rule out the possibility that FRB 20221022A emerged from the outskirts of a compact object. Instead, the studies prove for the first time that fast radio bursts can originate from very close to a neutron star, in highly chaotic magnetic environments.

“These bursts are always happening, and CHIME detects several a day,” Masui says. “There may be a lot of diversity in how and where they occur, and this scintillation technique will be really useful in helping to disentangle the various physics that drive these bursts.”

This research was supported by various institutions including the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Trottier Space Institute at McGill University, and the University of British Columbia.

[misiahasahardname]

noone asked for epileptic ramírez family art but you‘re getting it anyways

(more details on my headcanon below)

so the basis of this headcanon is that epilepsy runs in the ramírez side of the family, most likely starting with bisabuela pati (despite not being blood related to her cousin bud also has epilepsy, a pretty insane coincidence if you think about it). this seems to have hit the primos’ generation the most, with only gordita, lucita and baby bud having not been hit with it yet

i wrote about each character (besides the three i mentioned previously) in more detail in one of my notebooks but that shit did NOT make sense so i’m going to summarise.

tater -

went through the first half of her life perfectly fine until her fifth birthday where she watched a rather overstimulating movie which triggered her first seizure (she’s photosensitive). she had a few more that year but she got everything under control relatively quickly, meaning she’s unmedicated, she just has to be careful when choosing things to watch.

nellie -

was barely a week old when she had her first seizure. as a baby she was constantly in and out of the hospital — the family epilepsy curse hit her HARD. for the first years of her life nellie was under CONSTANT supervision (when she moved in to tater’s bedroom keeping track of her at night got harder so they installed a seizure sensor thing under her bunk (i have one too!)), and she got excused from a lot of chores and physical activities just to be safe (this enabled her to become her lazy self).

lita -

lita’s epilepsy wasn’t ever really serious — when she was little her parents noticed she was pretty spacey, and even as she aged and got more energetic, she would still wear out pretty quickly. she’d stare blankly for a couple seconds, her eyelids would flutter as she looked around, looking mildly confused, then she’d shrug it off and get back to what she was doing. these turned out to be absences. she would have these pretty regularly but she grew out of them pretty quickly.

scooter -

he went a long time without suffering from anything his family did — had the occasional spasm here and there but nothing too severe — until one day his brain decided to turn against him, and now all of a sudden he’s having seizures left and right. his anxiety is a pretty big trigger for his seizures. he tends to get auras/„warning seizures” in stressful situations which only add even more stress.

tabi -

had her first (tonic-clonic) seizure at a sleepover when she was around… ten-elevenish? she had stayed up WAY longer than she ever had before and apparently her body couldn’t handle that. tabi’s a lot better at handling staying up longer than usual now, though her body does sometimes throw an absence at her if she’s overstepping it.

tere -

tere was already a lot to deal with as a little kid — her family epilepsy kicking in did NOT make things any easier to deal with. getting too overwhelmed/excited/emotional could send her straight into a fit. thankfully, this is no longer a problem she has to deal with. she has a lot of myoclonics but those are really easily dealt with.

toñita -

like nellie, she’s been having seizures since she was a baby, though hers were bad length-wise rather than quantity-wise. she’s had practically every kind of seizure under the sun, though nowadays she usually only has to deal with myoclonics and a nasty tic she developed (the doctors still aren’t sure if it’s caused by the epilepsy itself or a side effect of her meds). she’s a bit self conscious about her tic (she has tried everything to hide it), but besides that, she doesn’t mind her epilepsy too much. it’s a pain in the ass, but at least she gets extra attention when it starts playing up!

lotlot -

she’s been dealing with her epilepsy her whole life but it’s never been all that bad. she’s had a few tonic-clonics over the years, though her seizures usually tended to be atonic or tonic. she doesn’t mind them at all — collapsing on the cold, hard floor at random intervals has helped her build a resistance to feeling pain when falling over, meaning pretending to drop dead is a lot easier. (that’s one way to cope, i guess….)

chacha -

though it was extremely unpredictable at first, chacha’s epilepsy is probably the least prevalent and best controlled of all the seizure-having primos. good for her!

cousin bud -

his diagnosis was definitely the biggest shocker, mostly because of what an insane coincidence it is, lol. he’s been dealing with epilepsy since he was around eight, though he still hasn’t gotten around to getting it fully under control. he’s doing a lot better than he used to, but tonic-clonics (and the occasional complex partial) are still regular occurrences in his life.

big nacho -

he’s gotten past the worst of his epilepsy — in the first grade he would always have seizures in the most inconvenient times and places leading to various unfortunate injuries, but he hasn’t had a tonic-clonic or any other more serious seizure in a long time. his biggest epilepsy related problem he deals with currently is self consciousness. he’s afraid that his medical history is going to stop him from acheiving some of his dreams (or having children)

nachito -

his epilepsy isn’t unpredictable per se, it’s just that nachito doesn’t know how to tell when he’s about to have a seizure, which can cause some unfortunate situations. lucky for him, his epilepsy is on the weaker side, so he tends not to deal with anything worse than a partial. slightly less lucky for him, his epilepsy has impaired his memory a bit

aaand that about covers everything! i’ve also got some teirlists i made in school for other miscellaneous details (ignore how i spelled absence, i suck at typing)

[more-flotsam-and-jetsam]

Responses to poll by the Pew Research Center, June 2024

[delicatelysublimeforester]

Don’t Let the City Nature Challenge End Without You: Get Out, Observe, and Have Fun!

[captaingimpy]

Exploring the Human Condition Through the Lens of The Orville

The Orville, much like its spiritual predecessor Star Trek, is more than just a science fiction show; it is a thoughtful exploration of humanity, morality, and the value of diversity. While The Orville often pays homage to Star Trek, it carves its own path, embracing a worldview that challenges some of the foundational aspects of traditional philosophy, particularly Platonic ideals. At the heart…

[knxfesck]

Tbh I think florida deserves more credit imagine having only the most insufferable cubans imported to your shores. Do you know how hard it is to recover from having an insufferable latino population? Look at what people are saying about south texas

[bahadurislam011444]

Unveiling the Best SEO Worker in Bangladesh: Driving Digital Success

[eclecticsophism]

a studyblr/gradblr offering -- a section of my Zettelkasten for my MA thesis?

[delicatelysublimeforester]

Saskatoon’s City Nature Challenge 2025: A Celebration of Nature, Community, and Curiosity

[mxs-space]

Nothing is as cool and funny as sharing religious stuffs with peers

Muslims? Gives you the most detailed explanation about their rituals and why it’s important. (Are more than happy to share because so many people don’t know how it works and just bad mouth it)

Hindus? Have the most batshit insane stories. (We don’t even know it’s batshit insane until someone says “He did WHAT TO HIS WIFE’SON???” or “you guys SUMMON YOUR ANCESTORS???”)

Christians? Actually have no idea about what is going on. There’s no redemption, everything is sin and fish are not animals. (And you’re just like… what?)