#Data validation methods

[marketxcel]

5 Methods of Data Collection for Quantitative Research

Discover five powerful techniques for gathering quantitative data in research, essential for uncovering trends, patterns, and correlations. Explore proven methodologies that empower researchers to collect and analyze data effectively.

[justkillingthyme]

Sometime in probably the next week I’m going to send out a Google form here (and probably reblog it like. Every day) because I need stats for a psych project I’m doing on teen social psychology. It would be helpful if yall would take a second to fill it out cause it’ll be like. 5 questions max probably. You won’t have to fill out a name or give an email or anything so it’ll be totally anonymous. I just need good data

[random2908]

We're going through the absolute dumbest drama at work lately with a funding agency. It was looking like it was all going to turn out in our favor (through, like, the stupidest means possible). But today they just threw a curveball at us that is so insane. So insane for a funding agency to meddle in that. That even though we're probably going to win in the end, they might drag our reputation through the mud in the middle.

So. Ok. This guy pretty high up in the DoD got Congress to put a pretty big earmark for our tech in the 2024 budget. (And by big, I mean, if we asked an investor for help they'd laugh and give us twice as much just for us, rather than having to split this government money between us and our competitors; maybe they'd introduce us to their investor friends and it would be 10 times as much. But we're an employee-owned company, and most of us employees are afraid of investors, so that's not happening.)

The catch ended up being that a specific agency within the DoD got the rights to distribute most of it. And that agency decided to make a rule that they were mainly going to consider small-business/giant-corporation partnerships. Well. That's not great for us, a small business who was hoping to just, like, get some of this money. But luckily we already had existing partnerships with two giant corps. The agency split the money into three pots, and two of them were for projects we thought we could do. So we told our favorite company we'd apply for the easy one with them, and our not-favorite company we'd apply for the hard one with them. (Not-favorite because we think they're semi-secretly trying to steal our IP and then use their fleet of literally thousands of engineers, compared to our 35 total employees, to run us out of business.) Favorite company said, great, let's do it. Most-detested company said, wait, we could do both these projects, shouldn't we apply for both? We (and by we I mean my bosses) told company-we-don't-like that we'd apply for one section with them but we didn't think it was a good idea to apply for both because we might look greedy; but they could do whatever the hell they wanted with the other section, if they didn't mind looking greedy.

Both our applications got rejected three months ago. For the harder project, we suspect it went to a completely different technological approach, so, ok I guess. For the easier project, though.... Evil-corp's application won... in which they said they'd hire us to do it under their supervision.

Which means they'd have all the IP. But also, stupid stupid them, they'd have none of the physicists, just the engineers. What the fuck do they expect to be able to do, hiring physicists as simple artisans rather than collaborating with us as thinking physicists, and having no physicists of their own who understand how the tech actually works.

And, here's their hubris, here's the first step from over a year ago when we realized they were trying to steal our own project out from under us: even in the existing partnership, they originally purchased a quantum device and a control box from us. And then collaborated with us on a new device design, but said they'd make their own control boxes from here on out. But they seem not to understand what's actually in the control box, and how tailored it is to the quantum device.

So, ok, we thought: they'd hire us to make the quantum device that they design (oh, cue tangent about how the current iteration--from our existing partnership--that they've designed with their fleet of engineers is unmachineable, i.e. we can't get a vendor who is willing to make the chassis for us; their design skills are hopeless). We'd do our level best to build it very well for them. I'd use one of my spare control boxes (I build/supervise the control boxes) and test it out for them (I'm one of the two testers), and do whatever I needed to to get it working. We'd send them those results, and the device. Then they'd hook it up to the legacy control box they bought from us last year (that doesn't have my newest upgrades), and one of their untrained just-out-of-college techs would try it out, and wouldn't get anything out of it. But we'd have proof that it's just user error, and so they'd lose (can't finish the project) and we'd win (reputation intact, plus the bit of money they'd give us for building it--not much, but something anyway).

This is the scenario that my coworker (the other tester, and supervisor for building the devices) and I have daydreamed about to each other frequently over the past month, to console ourselves about having lost the contest to actually get the grant money.

Meanwhile, our CEO went to talk to the government agency like, we're the leaders in this field, why did you reject all our applications?? And he was like, we didn't reject all of them! We accepted the one with dumbass-corporate-thieves! Our CEO was like, that wasn't our application, we're just a subcontractor on it, it wouldn't involve any of our IP or physics knowledge. And the government official was like... Oh fuck. But I hate Nice-company, you know that right? You know I couldn't let that application through because I hate them? Why did you even write an application with them? (If you knew the name of nice-company, you'd immediately be like, "oh that makes sense." Even though the department collaborating with us on quantum devices has nothing to do with the department making, oh, let's say, airplane doors.) So the government official was like, well, the contract with the smug-idiots isn't finalized yet, I can try to steer it so that you're less subcontractors and more partners in this. And of course, our CEO couldn't say, well, we don't want to be partners with them, because they're thieves and also stupid and mean. But he also knew they wouldn't agree to it in any real way and it was moot. So he just said ok. It's at least comforting to know... I guess... that the government did intend to fund us, in particular, they just didn't read the applications very carefully.

Ok, so that's the first fork, that's been playing out over the last couple months since the applications were due.

But meanwhile, in addition to our partnerships with those two large corps, we also had project funding from a certain branch of the military, and from an unnamed government agency (even I'm not supposed to know who it is, I think). The latter project is sunsetting--it's six years old, a full year past the end of the contract. But the director of that project told us, we should go quietly asking around in Washington DC to see who's disgruntled that the one agency got to distribute all these funds, and see if anyone wants to compete with them by directly sponsoring us (without asshole-corp tagging along). The other project, the military-branch project, is right in the middle right now: we're approximately half done and have about a year left to finish. And it transpired that right after this agency, the one with all the money, announced who the money was going to at the end of September, they then announced who their liaisons would be in each military branch. And they picked some random dude that they're personally friends with in this particular branch, rather than anyone out of the relevant department for this type of tech. So now, the actual department is like "we can't trust whatever end product comes out of this other agency's project." So suddenly, someone who is already funding us--already feels personally invested in our success--has become exactly who the secret-person told us to look for: someone in the government who resents the contest judges and wants to hold a separate competition against them. So, two months ago, they were like "next year we'll end your project, because the future of the technology is this big grant from this other agency." And now suddenly they're looking for more money to throw at us, longer term and in larger amounts. (Not as much as if we'd won the grant competition, but still. Like I always say, we're academia-adjacent; even a million dollars is a lot to us.)

And the third fork: nice-corp is pissed that there's so much prejudice against them for the doors thing, so they want to renew their partnership with us, just to show up that government agency that held the contest.

So we lost the contest, but we might be getting two new projects out of it.

And then today's wrench, back to the first fork. The government agency just told the idiot-assholes that they were going to require the quantum tech be made of a different quantum material than originally planned. (I suspect because it's the material that JPL/NASA really likes.) There is absolutely no reason for this requirement, no reason for them micromanage something like material choice. What's really, deeply hilarious about this weird bit of meddling is that for us physicists, this barely matters; you can make some arguments one way or the other in terms of how well it works for the tech, but we can work with either material. My whole previous job was with the material we're currently using--between that job and this job, I've been using it for 8 years. But my whole PhD and postdoc was with the material that the government agency wants dumb-corp to switch over to. I know both these materials equally well, and so do all the other physicists here. Mainly the difference this makes is... You need to change all the components in the control box to match the material it's controlling! The one part of the project that now-seriously-screwed-corp contractually doesn't want our input on! And changing that many components all at once is never a risk-free undertaking, from a simple engineering perspective; except that we suspect they don't even know how to build a control box in the first place, so "risk" doesn't even cover it.

When my boss broke the news to me this afternoon, I was like, wait, are you telling me I have to build a control box just to test this thing, for free because me building a control box is outside the scope of the project? My boss was like, no. They'll build a control box and send it to us, so we can test the quantum device that we're going to build for them, out of the new material, based on their designs that we have very little input on, even though we're the physicists and they're not.

I was like ...but their control box isn't going to work. My boss was like, nope! I was like, so then the project isn't going to work. My boss, no :) it isn't :). I was like, ok, I know this won't be for another two years, but... how hard should I try to make it work? Because I can try really hard and probably do something. My boss was like no, don't do that. Absolutely do not try to fix their box. If it doesn't work, just tell them it doesn't work. Tell them what doesn't work about it, but not why, don't give them hints. Maybe you won't even know why! You don't know what they're putting in the box, how can you diagnose it for them!

So, yeah, this project isn't going to work, and we're going to look bad for it. But hopefully we'll be getting two additional projects out of it, thanks to spite! And if two of our three projects work then who cares, I guess.

[5realtor]

Unveiling the Power of Market Research Analytics: A Strategic Imperative for Business Success

Introduction -

In today's fast-paced and hyper-competitive business landscape, gaining a competitive edge requires more than just intuition and guesswork. Enter market research analytics – an essential approach that empowers businesses to make informed decisions, uncover hidden insights, and navigate the complex maze of consumer preferences and market trends. In this blog, we take a deep dive into the world of market research analytics, exploring its significance, methodologies, and the transformative impact it can have on your business.

The Significance of Market Research Analytics -

Market research analytics is the art and science of extracting actionable insights from raw data to drive strategic decision-making. It provides a structured approach to understanding consumer behavior, market dynamics, and industry trends. By leveraging data-driven insights, businesses can:

Enhance Customer Understanding: By analyzing consumer preferences, buying patterns, and sentiment, businesses can tailor their products and services to meet customer needs more effectively.

Competitor Analysis: Market research analytics enables companies to assess competitor strengths and weaknesses, identify gaps in the market, and formulate strategies to gain a competitive advantage.

Optimize Marketing Efforts: Precise data analysis allows businesses to target their marketing campaigns with laser-like precision, reducing costs and increasing conversion rates.

Product Innovation: Uncovers latent customer needs and pain points through data analysis, fuels the creation of innovative products that resonate with the target audience.

Methodologies in Market Research Analytics –

In the domain of Market Research Analytics, diverse methodologies play a pivotal role in facilitating informed and sound decision-making. These methodologies empower businesses with the tools to untangle complex market dynamics, cultivate a deeper understanding of consumer preferences and enable the formulation of impactful strategies.

Quantitative Analysis: This approach involves the use of numerical data to measure, quantify, and analyze various aspects of the market. Surveys, polls, and structured questionnaires are common tools used to gather data for quantitative analysis.

Qualitative Analysis: Qualitative research delves into the subjective aspects of consumer behavior, focusing on insights that are not easily quantifiable. Techniques such as focus groups, in-depth interviews, and content analysis provide valuable context and depth to numerical data.

Predictive Analytics: Using historical data and statistical algorithms, predictive analytics helps forecast future trends, customer behavior, and market shifts. This enables businesses to proactively adapt and strategize.

Text and Sentiment Analysis: With the proliferation of online reviews, social media, and user-generated content, extracting insights from text data has become crucial. Text and sentiment analysis tools decipher consumer sentiment, helping businesses gauge public opinion and adjust strategies accordingly.

Transformative Impact on Business-

Market research analytics has different impacts which transforms business into more successful entity. Brands can improve their bottom line and build stronger relationships with their customers by providing high quality products/services. Embracing market research analytics can usher in a myriad of benefits for businesses:

Informed Decision-Making: Accurate data-driven insights provide a solid foundation, reducing the element of risk and uncertainty in strategic decision-making.  

Cost Efficiency: By focusing resources on targeted strategies and campaigns, businesses can optimize their marketing budgets and operational expenditures.

Agility and Adaptability: Real-time data analysis equips businesses to swiftly respond to changing market conditions, ensuring they remain relevant and adaptable.

Customer-Centric Approach: By understanding consumer preferences and pain points, businesses can align their offerings with customer needs, thereby fostering brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.

Innovation Catalyst: Market research analytics can uncover untapped opportunities, enabling businesses to innovate and stay ahead of the curve.

Conclusion -

In a business landscape driven by data and insights, market research analytics emerges as a strategic imperative for sustainable success. By deciphering the intricate web of consumer behavior, market trends, and competition dynamics, businesses can chart a course towards informed decision-making, innovation, and customer-centricity. Embracing market research analytics isn't just an option; it's a powerful tool that can unlock the doors to unparalleled growth and prosperity in today's dynamic marketplace.

[5ummit]

AO3 Ship Stats: Year In Bad Data

You may have seen this AO3 Year In Review.

It hasn’t crossed my tumblr dash but it sure is circulating on twitter with 3.5M views, 10K likes, 17K retweets and counting. Normally this would be great! I love data and charts and comparisons!

Except this data is GARBAGE and belongs in the TRASH.

I first noticed something fishy when I realized that Steve/Bucky – the 5th largest ship on AO3 by total fic count – wasn’t on this Top 100 list anywhere. I know Marvel’s popularity has fallen in recent years, but not that much. Especially considering some of the other ships that made it on the list. You mean to tell me a femslash HP ship (Mary MacDonald/Lily Potter) in which one half of the pairing was so minor I had to look up her name because she was only mentioned once in a single flashback scene beat fandom juggernaut Stucky? I call bullshit.

Now obviously jumping to conclusions based on gut instinct alone is horrible practice... but it is a good place to start. So let’s look at the actual numbers and discover why this entire dataset sits on a throne of lies.

Here are the results of filtering the Steve/Bucky tag for all works created between Jan 1, 2023 and Dec 31, 2023:

Not only would that place Steve/Bucky at #23 on this list, if the other counts are correct (hint: they're not), it’s also well above the 1520-new-work cutoff of the #100 spot. So how the fuck is it not on the list? Let’s check out the author’s FAQ to see if there’s some important factor we’re missing.

The first thing you’ll probably notice in the FAQ is that the data is being scraped from publicly available works. That means anything privated and only accessible to logged-in users isn’t counted. This is Sin #1. Already the data is inaccurate because we’re not actually counting all of the published fics, but the bots needed to do data collection on this scale can't easily scrape privated fics so I kinda get it. We’ll roll with this for now and see if it at least makes the numbers make more sense:

Nope. Logging out only reduced the total by a couple hundred. Even if one were to choose the most restrictive possible definition of "new works" and filter out all crossovers and incomplete fics, Steve/Bucky would still have a yearly total of 2,305. Yet the list claims their total is somewhere below 1,500? What the fuck is going on here?

Let’s look at another ship for comparison. This time one that’s very recent and popular enough to make it on the list so we have an actual reference value for comparison: Nick/Charlie (Heartstopper). According to the list, this ship sits at #34 this year with a total of 2630 new works. But what’s AO3 say?

Off by a hundred or so but the values are much closer at least!

If we dig further into the FAQ though we discover Sin #2 (and the most egregious): the counting method. The yearly fic counts are NOT determined by filtering for a certain time period, they’re determined by simply taking a snapshot of the total number of fics in a ship tag at the end of the year and subtracting the previous end-of-year total. For example, if you check a ship tag on Jan 1, 2023 and it has 10,000 fics and check it again on Jan 1, 2024 and it now has 12,000 fics, the difference (2,000) would be the number of "new works" on this chart.

At first glance this subtraction method might seem like a perfectly valid way to count fics, and it’s certainly the easiest way, but it can and did have major consequences to the point of making the entire dataset functionally meaningless. Why? If any older works are deleted or privated, every single one of those will be subtracted from the current year fic count. And to make the problem even worse, beginning at the end of last year there was a big scare about AI scraping fics from AO3, which caused hundreds, if not thousands, of users to lock down their fics or delete them.

The magnitude of this fuck up may not be immediately obvious so let’s look at an example to see how this works in practice.

Say we have two ships. Ship A is more than a decade old with a large fanbase. Ship B is only a couple years old but gaining traction. On Jan 1, 2023, Ship A had a catalog of 50,000 fics and ship B had 5,000. Both ships have 3,000 new works published in 2023. However, 4% of the older works in each fandom were either privated or deleted during that same time (this percentage is was just chosen to make the math easy but it’s close to reality).

Ship A: 50,000 x 4% = 2,000 removed works Ship B: 5,000 x 4% = 200 removed works

Ship A: 3,000 - 2,000 = 1,000 "new" works Ship B: 3,000 - 200 = 2,800 "new" works

This gives Ship A a net gain of 1,000 and Ship B a net gain of 2,800 despite both fandoms producing the exact same number of new works that year. And neither one of these reported counts are the actual new works count (3,000). THIS explains the drastic difference in ranking between a ship like Steve/Bucky and Nick/Charlie.

How is this a useful measure of anything? You can't draw any conclusions about the current size and popularity of a fandom based on this data.

With this system, not only is the reported "new works" count incorrect, the older, larger fandom will always be punished and it’s count disproportionately reduced simply for the sin of being an older, larger fandom. This example doesn’t even take into account that people are going to be way more likely to delete an old fic they're no longer proud of in a fandom they no longer care about than a fic that was just written, so the deletion percentage for the older fandom should theoretically be even larger in comparison.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the author of this "study" KNEW the data was tainted and chose to present it as meaningful anyway. You will only find this if you click through to the FAQ and read about the author’s methodology, something 99.99% of people will NOT do (and even those who do may not understand the true significance of this problem):

The author may try to argue their post states that the tags "which had the greatest gain in total public fanworks” are shown on the chart, which makes it not a lie, but a error on the viewer’s part in not interpreting their data correctly. This is bullshit. Their chart CLEARLY titles the fic count column “New Works” which it explicitly is NOT, by their own admission! It should be titled “Net Gain in Works” or something similar.

Even if it were correctly titled though, the general public would not understand the difference, would interpret the numbers as new works anyway (because net gain is functionally meaningless as we've just discovered), and would base conclusions on their incorrect assumptions. There’s no getting around that… other than doing the counts correctly in the first place. This would be a much larger task but I strongly believe you shouldn’t take on a project like this if you can’t do it right.

To sum up, just because someone put a lot of work into gathering data and making a nice color-coded chart, doesn’t mean the data is GOOD or VALUABLE.

[unsolicited-opinions]

3/26/25

Haviv Rettig Gur on deaths in Gaza:

The full list of Gazans killed in the war has been released in Gaza. Possibly. At the very least, as Israeli analysts are now finding, there aren't duplicate ID numbers or other tells one finds in obviously manipulated data sets. But here's another reason to trust the data: It shows just how much Israel's warfighting tried to separate combatant from civilian. It seems unlikely that a faked Gazan data set would show such a result. The graph in the first tweet of this thread shows male to female deaths. If female deaths are assumed to be a civilian baseline (the age distribution is roughly the general Gazan population's age distribution), then the enormous spike of the blue line, right in the area of the graph that represents fighting-age men, is the best likely measure of combatant deaths. According to this analyst, the gap comes to over 16,000 dead, or almost exactly a third of total deaths. That's a Gazan data set, not an Israeli one. And it's the most complete one so far, the only one that claims to give all the names of all the dead, the one most likely to be an honest recording of the actual dead. And according to this data set, the death toll in Gaza is two civilians to each combatant, well in line with the highest standards of modern democratic armies. To be clear - this caveat is obvious, but it's important enough to say it explicitly nonetheless - the debate isn't over whether children died in Gaza or crimes were committed. The answer to both is yes. There were definitely and unquestionably war crimes committed in Gaza, air strikes that should not have been carried out. And there are thousands of dead children in this data set. The debate is over the extent, whether these are at a level consistent with the inevitable costs of even the most legitimate kind of war, which will always be horrible, or whether the best data we have shows wanton Israeli killing and disregard for moral rules and international laws. Israel's haters will tweet pictures of dead children in response. If they did that for every war, I'd take them seriously and sympathetically. But the vast majority of them don't. They don't care about dead children, only about destroying Israel. And so they can't actually tell us anything about whether our army, broadly speaking, has fought morally. But this data set can. All war is evil, all war is hell, all war is a kind of civilizational failure. But war is sometimes nevertheless legitimate and inevitable. International humanitarian law came about not to end war, because ending war is impossible, but to mitigate its evils. If this data set is correct - again, a data set released from Gaza and not at all intended to validate any Israeli argument about its battlefield standards - then the costs imposed on Gaza by Israeli warfighting methods are consistent with what is generally considered in the West to be moral and legitimate. It is a comparable ratio to the 2016 Battle of Mosul in which Iraq, the Kurds and America drove ISIS out of the city. War is bad. I respect people who vehemently oppose this one, who question the Israeli political leadership's decisions, who use the war to debate the larger question of Palestinian independence and statehood. These are all legitimate responses to the suffering of Gazans. As is the argument I personally agree with that this war was the only path available to us to rid ourselves and Gaza of the neverending and endlessly destructive scourge of Hamas. But it nevertheless matters - indeed, it may be the most important thing over the long term - that this war's civilian casualties were not worse than other comparable wars, and that even Gazan data sets show that to be the case.

The thread to which Haviv refers is here

[literaryvein-reblogs]

How to Read a Scientific Article

THE THREE-PASS APPROACH

The key idea is that you should read the paper in up to 3 passes, instead of starting at the beginning and plowing your way to the end.

Each pass accomplishes specific goals and builds upon the previous pass:

The first pass gives you a general idea about the paper.

The second pass lets you grasp the paper’s content, but not its details.

The third pass helps you understand the paper in depth.

At the end of the first pass, you should be able to answer the 5 Cs:

Category: What type of paper is this? A measurement paper? An analysis of an existing system? A description of a research prototype?

Context: Which other papers is it related to? Which theoretical bases were used to analyze the problem?

Correctness: Do the assumptions appear to be valid?

Contributions: What are the paper’s main contributions?

Clarity: Is the paper well written?

Purpose of the Sections of Empirical Articles

Section — Use it for

Abstract — This is a great section to read to find out if the article will be relevant to your own research.

Introduction — This section gives you an overview of work that has been done on topics relating to the hypothesis of the article, and will often lead you to other relevant work that has been done in your area of interest.

Method — This section will help you understand the design of the experiment. This is particularly useful if you'd like to replicate the study.

Results — The results will tell you what the author/s found in the course of their experiment.

Discussion — The discussion section is typically easier to read than the method and results section, and it will help the reader understand the implications of the results of the experiment.

References — This is a great place to look to find articles that are related to the one you are reading. If you're looking to build your own literature review, the references are a great place to start.

The Anatomy of a Scientific Paper

Some initial guidelines for how to read a paper:

Read critically: Reading a research paper must be a critical process. You should not assume that the authors are always correct. Instead, be suspicious. Critical reading involves asking appropriate questions.

Read creatively: Reading a paper critically is easy, in that it is always easier to tear something down than to build it up. Reading creatively involves harder, more positive thinking.

Make notes as you read the paper. Use whatever style you prefer. If you have questions or criticisms, write them down so you do not forget them. Underline key points the authors make. Mark the data that is most important or that appears questionable. Such efforts help the first time you read a paper and pay big dividends when you have to re-read a paper after several months.

After the first read-through, try to summarize the paper in one or two sentence.

If possible, compare the paper to other works.

Write a review that includes:

a one or two sentence summary of the paper.

a deeper, more extensive outline of the main points of the paper, including for example assumptions made, arguments presented, data analyzed, and conclusions drawn.

any limitations or extensions you see for the ideas in the paper.

your opinion of the paper; primarily, the quality of the ideas and its potential impact.

The guide below details how to read a scientific article step-by-step.

First, you should not approach a scientific article like a textbook— reading from beginning to end of the chapter or book without pause for reflection or criticism. Additionally, it is highly recommended that you highlight and take notes as you move through the article.

Skim the article. This should only take you a few minutes. You are not trying to comprehend the entire article at this point, but just get a basic overview. You don’t have to read in order; the discussion/conclusions will help you to determine if the article is relevant to your research. You might then continue on to the Introduction. Pay attention to the structure of the article, headings, and figures.

Grasp the vocabulary. Begin to go through the article and highlight words and phrases you do not understand. Some words or phrases you may be able to get an understanding from the context in which it is used, but for others you may need the assistance of a medical or scientific dictionary. Subject-specific dictionaries available through our Library databases and online are listed below.

Identify the structure of the article and work on your comprehension. Most journals use an IMRD structure: An abstract followed by Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion. These sections typically contain conventional features, which you will start to recognize. If you learn to look for these features you will begin to read and comprehend the article more quickly.

 Read the bibliography/references section. Reading the references or works cited may lead you to other useful resources. You might also get a better understanding of the basic terminology, main concepts, major researchers, and basic terminology in the area you are researching.

Reflect on what you have read and draw your own conclusions. As you are reading jot down any questions that come to mind. They may be answered later on in the article or you may have stumbled upon something that the authors did not consider. Here are some examples of questions you may ask yourself as you read:

 Have I taken time to understand all the terminology?

Am I spending too much time on the less important parts of this article?

Do I have any reason to question the credibility of this research?

What specific problem does the research address and why is it important?

How do these results relate to my research interests or to other works which I have read?

6. Read the article a second time in chronological order. Reading the article a second time will reinforce your overall understanding. You may even start to make connections to other articles that you have read on this topic.

Identify Key Information

Whether you are looking for information that supports the hypothesis in your own paper or carefully analyzing the article and critiquing the research methods or findings, there are important questions that you should answer as you read the article.

What is the main hypothesis?

Why is this research important?

Did the researchers use appropriate measurements and procedures?

What were the variables in the study?

What was the key finding of the research?

Do the findings justify the author’s conclusions?

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 ⚜ More: Notes & References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Boss politics antitrust

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy

Xi Jinping inaugurated his second term with an anti-corruption purge that ran from 2012-2015, resulting in a massive turnover in the power structures of Chinese society.

At the time, people inside and outside of China believed that Xi was using the crackdown to target his political enemies and consolidate power. Certainly, that was the effect of the purge, which paved the way for reforms to Chinese law that have effectively allowed Xi to hold office for life.

In 2018, Peter Lorentzen (USF Econ) and Xi Lu (NUS Policy) published a paper that used clever empirical methods to get to the bottom of this question:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181222163946/https://peterlorentzen.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Lorentzen-Lu-Crackdown-Nov-2018-Posted-Version.pdf

Working from the extensive data-files published during the corruption trials of the purged officials, Lorentzen and Xi Liu were able to estimate the likelihood that an official had really been corrupt. They concluded that overwhelmingly, the anti-corruption purges did target corrupt officials, some of them very highly placed.

But when they considered the social graph of those defenestrated officials, they found that they came from blocs that were rivals of Xi Jinping and his circle, while officials who were loyal to Xi Jinping's were spared, even when they were corrupt.

In other words, Xi Jinping's anticorruption efforts targeted genuinely corrupt officials – but only if they supported Xi's rivals. Xi's own cronies were exempted from this. Xi did use the anticorruption effort to consolidate power, but that doesn't mean he prosecuted the innocent – rather, he selectively prosecuted the guilty.

Donald Trump will be America's next president. He campaigned against "elites" and won the support of Americans who were rightly furious at being ripped off and abused by big business. The Biden administration had done much to tackle this corruption, starting with July 2020's 72-point executive order creating a "whole of government" approach to fighting corporate power:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Trump will have to decide what to do about these efforts. It's easy to say that Trump will just kill them all and let giant, predatory corporations rip, but I think that's wrong. After all, the Google antitrust case that the DoJ just won started under the last Trump administration. Trump also sued to block the absolutely terrible merger between Warner and AT&T.

I think it's safer to say that Trump will selectively target businesses for anticorruption enforcement – including antitrust – based on whether they oppose him or suck up to him. I think American business leaders know it, too, which is why every tech boss lined up to give Trump a public rim-job last week:

https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/i_wonder

Trump killed the AT&T-Time Warner merger to punish CNN. He went after Google to punish "woke" tech firms. That doesn't make AT&T, Time Warner or Google good. They're terrible monopolists and the US government should be making their lives miserable.

Trump will not need to falsify evidence against corporations that are disloyal to him. All of America's big businesses are cesspits of sleaze, fraud and predation. Every merger that is being teed up now for the coming four years is illegal under the antitrust laws that we stopped enforcing in the Reagan era and only dusted off again for four years under Biden. They're all guilty, which means that Trump will be able to bring a valid case against any of them.

This will create a trap for people who hate Trump but don't pay close attention to anticorruption cases. It's a trap that Trump sprung successfully in his first term, when he lashed out at the "intelligence community" – the brutal, corrupt, vicious, lawless American spy agencies that are the sworn enemies of working people and the the struggle for justice at home and abroad – and American liberals decided that the enemy of their enemy was their friend, and energetically sold one another Robert Mueller votive candles:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Over the next four years, Trump will use antitrust and other corruption-taming regulations to selective punish crooked companies. He won't target them because they're crooked: he'll target them because they aren't sufficiently loyal to him.

If you let your hatred of Trump blind you to the crookedness of these companies, you lose and Trump wins. The reason Trump will find it easy to punish these companies is that they are all guilty. If you let yourself forget that, if you treat your enemy's enemy as your friend, then Trump will point at his political rivals and call them apologists for corruption and sleaze – and he'll be right.

It is possible for Trump to fight corruption corruptly. That's exactly what he'll do. But just because Trump hates these companies, it doesn't follow that we should love them.

[cobbled-peach]

˗ˏˋ જ⁀➴ camisado

"can't take the kid from the fight, take the fight from the kid, sit back, relax, sit back, relapse again"

Part 1 | [Part 2]

cw: GN!reader. Pure angst for this one baby, literally zero comfort (I'll make it up to you in pt 2 xx). Talks of addiction, taking drugs, anxiety + panic attacks and withdrawl symptoms. (pls let me know if i missed something!!!). Both reader and Spencer sort of cannot communicate and are not slaying but they mean well a/n: this started as just a character study but I kinda fell into the deep end and got quite caught up in it so its inadvertantly a LOT more than just a character study, sand so I divided it up into something more cohesive. w/c: 5.4k

It’s impossible to prove a hypothesis.

You can run an experiment a thousand times, collect a thousand successful results, only to watch the 1001st experiment fail. Empirical data only takes you so far, giving the illusion of certainty. Until it doesn't.

Science deals in probabilities, assumptions – not guarantees. Spencer Reid knows this better than most.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when he started thinking of his addiction like a science experiment.

Maybe it was easier that way. A coping mechanism – reduction as self-defence. He could lessen the weight of it, condense something so vast and devastating into variables and charts and numbers in a feeble attempt to soften the struth. An attempt to strip it of its emotional weight and file it away under “manageable.” As if the cravings could be measured or quantified. Understood.

He frames the parameters in his mind with clinical precision. Independent variable: the drug. Dependent variable: his behavior. Control group: the version of himself from months ago, when the spiral hadn’t yet begun. Before the late nights. Before the secrets. Before the lies.

Addiction is just a problem like any other. A system which he can study, decode and master.

He creates his hypothesis: he can control it. He can use one more time, and still be fine. Each addition to his hypothesis only strengthens his willpower:

If I time it right, no one will notice. If I maintain structure, I won’t lose control. If I’m careful, my life will reman intact.

But addition doesn’t care for logic, nor does it follow the rules of scientific inquiry. It doesn’t operate within a sterile lab, patiently waiting to be measured.

There are no constants. No peer-reviewed journals to validate his pain or explain it away. There’s only the truth: the shaking in his hands, the crawling of his skin, the nausea that comes in waves, the sleepless nights that stretch into oblivion. Only the raw data of his descent: chaotic, unquantifiable and unforgiving.

The data never replicates, and the experiment keeps failing.

Again. And again. And again.

The variables start to mutate. The outcome blurs. The method falls away.

Still, he clings to the process. Records the collapse like data points, hoping objectivity will save him.

Day 6: Forgets to eat.

Day 9: Lies to Garcia about the bags under his eyes.

Day 12: The first time he brings it into the building. Doesn’t use. Just wants to know its there.

Day 16: Snaps at Prentiss mid-briefing. Doesn’t apologize.

Day 19: Blanks on a case. Morgan has to cover for him.

Day 22: Tells you it’s “just anxiety.”

Day 25: Uses before a profile. Feels sharper. Lies to himself and says it helps.

Day 28: Uses again. No excuse this time.

By now, he knows he can’t control it.

Fine. He can create a new hypothesis.

Compartmentalization. He tells himself he can seal the chaos in a box, keep the infection contained. Let the rest of his life remain untouched.

His work. His friends. You.

Especially you.

He tells himself that love and addiction can coexist, as long as they don’t overlap. As long as the two worlds remain separate. He can maintain the boundaries.

But love isn’t a constant either.

And addiction… it leaks. It slips through the cracks to taint everything it touches.

He forgets to reply to your messages. Forgets what day it is. Forgets to tune in when you speak.

He tells himself he’s tired. You tell him you’re worried. He smiles. Lies. Makes promises. You both watch as love falls into the contamination zone, becomes tangled in the variables he can’t control.

Watch as it starts to fail.

It starts like most mornings.

Spencer wakes to sunlight bleeding in through the blinds. Amber-toned light, catching dust motes in midair – it makes the room look almost serene. The sun streaks across the hardwood, illuminating coffee stains and the faded outline of where a rug used to be. Gentle, unassuming. The morning is pretending like nothing is wrong.

Outside, early traffic hums. A low, steady drone overlayed with birdsong and the sharp, impatient honk of a horn. Somewhere inside the apartment, a faucet drips in an uneven rhythm. He thinks of it like an erratic metronome, counting down time he doesn’t want to acknowledge.

He shivers. The sheets are tangled low around his legs – his doing, no doubt. He’s been tossing again. Restless, even in sleep. Maybe even more so in sleep. Dreams come with sharp edges now. Inescapable.

Your leg is resting lightly over his calf. Casual. Trusting. As if your body still believes in him, even if your mind has started to doubt.

You stir beside him, just a stretch. Your fingers graze his hand in a featherlight gesture, asking a question without a voice. He curls away in response. Rolls onto his side. Pretends to be asleep.

You don’t press. You never do. Not anymore.

You just rise, silent and soft, padding across the cool floor toward the bathroom. There’s the familiar clink of your toothbrush, a muffled yawn, the gentle hum when you finish. He used to join you for this. Brushing teeth side by side, heads bowed under the mirror light, elbows bumping and smiles shared. He always thought that was one of the most intimate things a couple could do – a quiet, unspoken routine shared between two people.

Today, he just stays in bed, weighted by guilt. Anchored to the mattress, hoping it’ll keep him from drifting. The drug is still in his system, softening the world and smoothing the edges that keep cutting him open.

You move to the kitchen next. Cupboards creak and mugs clink. The coffee machine whirs, beginning its little dance. The scent of coffee reaches him moments later. Overly sweet – his favorite. You always remember. He never asks.

He pushes himself upright, legs over the edge of the bed and feet meeting the cold floorboards. He imagines walking into the kitchen with you. Imagines wrapping his arms around your waist and resting his chin on your shoulder the way he used to. Imagines you leaning into him, whispering a song under your breath.

Instead, he stays where he is. Elbows on knees, head in hands. The light seems colder now that he’s facing it directly. Less gold, more white-blue. Less morning, more mourning.

He strains to hear you. The soft thud of your footsteps, the sound of cups and cabinets, your soft breath. The peaceful repetition of a ritual he used to be a part of, but now avoids and observes from afar.

Spencer wishes you would hate him. It would make things simpler. Cleaner. He wishes you’d scream, or cry, or slam the door and tell him to go to hell. Wishes you’d throw a mug just to watch it shatter.

But you don’t. You never do. You just remain; quiet and present.

Hopeful, maybe. Or resigned.

Last night had been bad.

The tremors came again, starting in his fingers and crawling up his hands and arms like static. He blamed the case. Said he felt “off.” The lie came so easily, as they all did lately. He crawled into bed, trying not to vomit or shake the mattress.

You didn’t say a word. You left a glass of water o the nightstand. Crawled in beside him. Pressed a kiss to his shoulder. The gesture broke him a little more.

He could hear the unspoken questions, the palpable worry in your body despite you saying nothing.

But what help can you offer someone who won’t accept it? How can you save a man who insists he isn’t struggling?

His mind feels quiet now, though. Usually spinning in overlapping questions and unrelenting memory, it’s finally still. False peace. A chemical silence.

He tells himself that his planned retreat is love. Letting you go before he destroys you completely.

He’s rehearsed it in his mind like a script. Over and over. A breakup: surgical and precise, a clean and final incision.

Version one: He says, “I can’t do this. It’s not your fault.” You cry quietly. Nod. Let him leave. He walks away without looking back.

Version two: You already know. You’ve known he was planning this for weeks. You tell him it’s okay. That you understand. That you love him. He ends up on the floor, sobbing. Can’t let go. Doesn’t leave. Prolongs the pain even more.

Version three: You scream. You throw something – maybe a glass. You call him a coward. He welcomes it, embraces the heat. It makes him feel real. Makes the leaving easier. Makes him feel like he isn’t the only villain in the story.

He’s practiced every scenario.

A thousand internal rehearsals. Different lines. Different outcomes.

Only one of them will break the cycle.

He doesn’t hear you come back in, but suddenly you’re there, setting his coffee down on the bedside table with the softest clink, like you’re trying not to wake him even though he’s already up, stiff-spined and quiet.

‘Spence?’

Your voice is thick with sleep, but still laced with warmth. It twists something deep in his chest.

He swallows. His mouth is dry, like he’s been breathing through it all night. Almost like his body is trying to cough out whatever truth he keeps trying to choke down.

‘Sorry,’ he says, though he doesn’t know what for. A pre-emptive apology, maybe. A reflex. ‘What time is it?’

‘Almost eight.’

The sheets rustle as you sit beside him. The mattress dips beneath your weight, and he feels the subtle pressure of your presence before your chin touches his shoulder. Light and familiar, just resting against him.

He flinches. Barely, but enough.

You feel it. Don’t pull away.

‘Is everything okay? Is this about the case?’

It’s not. You both know its not.

He considers lying anyway. Considers giving you numbers. He could offer up statistics about trauma and cognitive decline. Something familiar and in the realm of fact, clean and clinical and easy to categorize.

But nothing comes out.

Silence answers for him. It stretches between you, getting thinner by the second.

He counts seven seconds exactly before you shift away from him. He records it like a data point, adding it to the line in his ever-growing graph of failure.

You lean back against the headboard, wrapping your fingers around your mug. You sip it slowly. The smell of his own coffee reaches him again. Sweet and familiar. Grounded in a time before everything broke.

Your movements are careful. Each shift, every breath, calibrated around him like you’ve mapped his problems and have built your mornings around avoiding them. You’re not naturally quiet in the mornings. He knows that. You’d sing sometimes, badly and too loud, and bang drawers open without care. But now you measure each movement, minimizing the noise because you know it unsettles him when he’s wound too tight.

Another thing he hates. You adjust, without even being asked.

He joins you after a long moment, settling beside you. Not close enough to feel the warmth from your body. His eyes fall to the mug you selected for him. His mug, in your apartment. The faded yellow one, that’s more a dull cream than anything now.

He left it here by accident over a year ago, when weekends were tentatively spent in each other’s presence. Fresh and new. He remembers when he first found noticed it tucked in your cabinet between your own mismatched sets. His chest had gone still and warm.

Now it just feels like a piece of evidence. Proof that he’s infiltrated a life he doesn’t belong in. An outlier in your apartment.

He doesn’t reach for it right away. When he finally does, his hands tremble.

Your eyes flick down. That’s all it takes.

And suddenly you’re both back there. Three months ago. His apartment. Your hand wrapped around his wrist. Eyes wide with something deeper than fear. You were crying, but so softly that he almost didn’t register it. The needle had been on the counter, hidden beneath a tissue like something sacred and shameful all at once. A relic he didn’t know how to bury.

There had been begging. On both sides.

You telling him that it was dangerous. That you were scared. That he was killing himself slowly.

Him promising (over and over and over) that this was the last time. That he’d stop. That you couldn’t tell his team.

You’d desperately searched for solutions, tried to jump hurdles and find ways to help without exposing the situation to his team, to the world. You’d lost count of how many times you’d hit dead ends.

He continued with his promises. Seemed to get better for a while, but inevitably sunk down again. You wanted to believe he could get better. Maybe part of you did.

‘So,’ you say, voice softer now. It drags him back to the present like a lifeline, though he wishes he’d remain drowning. ‘You didn’t sleep?’

It’s phrased as a question, but it’s not. It’s a gentle accusation.

‘I slept some,’ he lies.

You don’t believe him. How could you? The evidence is all there. Red-rimmed eyes, sunken cheeks, a slow, syrupy fatigue that not even coffee can fix.

You nod, but your silence screams.

He sips his coffee. Too sweet. Perfect.

It tastes of normalcy. He watches the sun paint your shoulder – still cold, but warmer now it’s touching you. For a second he wants to pretend. Pretend this morning is just like any other, that he’s still the man who deserves your soft kindness.

But then you say, suddenly and very quietly:

‘I found something this morning.’

You don’t say what. You don’t need to.

He freezes. The blood drains from his face. The bathroom bin.

He’s been sloppy lately. Too tired to be cautious. Except this time it was perfectly planted. An excuse to initiate the end.

‘Do you hate me?’ he asks.

‘No.’ It’s immediate. Truthful. Your voice cracks anyway.

Your body folds in on itself, curling your arms around your knees, mug forgotten on the nightstand. Forging a shield around yourself. It makes you look smaller than usual. More fragile.

And in that shape, he sees it. Not anger. Not resentment. But heartbreak.

A slow, dull heartbreak. Bruised and tarnished. Despite it, you’re still here. Still hoping. Still loving him through the destruction.

Spencer stands abruptly. The weight pressing down on his chest has become too heavy, the consequences of his actions gaining in on him. Your apartment suddenly feels too small, Suffocating. He escapes to the kitchen, clutching his coffee mug.

‘Spence—’

You rise immediately and follow him. The way you say his name is tentative and fragile, like the first crack in a piece of glass. The first real fluctuation in his carefully controlled experiment.

He ignores you, pretending not to hear, and allows himself to be carried by the momentum of his own restlessness and panic. The ceramic of his mug feels too heavy, his nerve endings too attuned to the realness of it. When he sets it down, the sound echoes unnaturally loud. A shout in the silence.

‘Spencer.’

Your voice holds more weight this time. It’s a deliberate attempt to break through the barrier he’s created.

He exhales sharply through his nose. ‘What?’

You take a cautious step forward. Not accusing, just trying to close the ever-widening space between you.

‘Talk to me. Please.’

‘I am.’ His words are hollow as he gestures between you. ‘We’re talking.’

‘No, you’re avoiding,’ you correct, unwilling to back down. ‘I want to know what I can do for you. I can find you a new support group—’

His hands rise as he blocks out the rest of your words, pressing his palms firmly to his eyes. An attempt to press his feelings back inside. He fights the rising tide of panic and shame. Fights all the words threatening to spill out. Fights himself.

Fails.

‘I’ve tried!’ The calm snaps as his voice cracks, a sharp edge to his words that surprises even him. He pulls inward again, as if shielding himself from his own confession. It’s out in the open.

He feels sick – whether it’s the drug wearing off, or the anxiety squeezing his chest, he can’t tell.

‘I know…’ you begin, gentle, trying to reach him.

‘I tried,’ he repeats. His voice is softer. Desperate now. Raw. ‘I really did try. You think I wanted this? I don’t—’

‘Then let me in,’ you cut in, voice measured despite the frown on your face. ‘Let me help. Stop trying to get through this on your own.'

He grits his teeth. ‘I’m trying to protect you.’

‘From what? From you? You’re not the danger here, Spence. The silence is. Your lack of communication is. I don’t want to get you in trouble but you’re not leaving me with many options—’

He shakes his head. Starts pacing the kitchen like an animal in a cage. ‘You don’t get it.;

‘Then help me get it.’

‘You can’t!’ His voice cracks, and his hands tremble at his sides. He worries that he’s going to start crying. They already feel glassy, starting to sting, but he refuses to break down so early on.

‘Can’t what?’

‘You can’t understand what it’s like in my head. It’s loud. All the time. Noise and chaos and—’ His voice falters. He blinks away the building tears. ‘And I can’t get it to be quiet. The only time it’s silent is when I—’

He cuts himself off too late. The words hang in the air.

When I have it in my veins.

It’s not news. It never is. But it still hears to hear. Still lands like a punch to the gut.

You close your eyes, steading your breath and swallowing the sting of it. A moment to process, and then you exhale shakily.

‘I love you,’ you say, voice trembling. The truth, used as a mechanism to get him to see reason. A desperate attempt to pull him back to safety.

‘Don’t.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t say that right now.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it makes this harder,’ he says.

‘This?’

He doesn’t answer.

The fierceness that takes over you then is startling. Shocking even to him.

‘No.’ You straighten, and your hands ball into fists at your sides. ‘Tell me. Tell me what you mean. Because I’m so tired of trying to decipher your half-sentences and prematurely ended conversations.’

He swallows hard. The silence suffocates the two of you.

‘I think we should break up.’

The wors fall like shards of glass. Sharp. Brutal. Irrevocable.

No rehearsed sincerity. No apology. Just the brutal truth. The 1001st experiment – failing harder than he could’ve ever predicted.

‘You’re really going to do this?’ you ask, voice breaking as you stare at him like he’s morphed into a stranger in just a few seconds. ‘You’re really going to do this now?’

Behind the hurt in your expression is confusion. You don’t understand. How can he push you away when he needs you the most? When he needs the support and guidance?

He nods once. Empty. Silent. The air seems to vanish, completely sucked from the room.

‘You think walking away is protecting me?’ It comes out as a demand, bottom lip trembling so hard it’s difficult to speak. ‘That—what? Making me sit here alone, wondering what I could’ve done differently—is going to help me?’

‘It’s not about you.’

‘That’s bullshit.’ The words bite, and he feels like he’s been struck by a whip. ‘Everything you do affects me, Spencer. Every time you lie. Every time you shut me out. I’m constantly hoping you’ll throw me just a scrap of truth. Just one honest thing.’

He takes a moment to look at you. To observe the cracks in your armor, the exhaustion behind your eyes.

And he knows: he’s breaking you.

‘I’m trying to protect you,’ he repeats. His voice holds no weight now, feeling threadbare.

‘Then talk to me,’ you plead, your voice breaking around the edges. ‘Let me in. Let me be in it with you. That’s what a relationship is, Spencer.’

‘I can’t.’ His jaw tightens. ‘I don’t want you to watch me fall apart.’

‘I already am watching. I have been. For months.’

The words land like a punch. He doesn’t outwardly flinch, but you see something change behind his eyes. It’s like the breath has been knocked out of him, and he’s trying not to show it.

If he could rewind time, he would.

Five minutes – so he could stop himself from saying the words that fractured this moment.

Five weeks – so he could prevent himself from taking and erase every relapse he never told you about.

Five months – to a Monday morning where he didn’t curl away from your touch, but welcomed you against his chest with open arms.

But time isn’t a variable he can control.

So he stays frozen. Like the stillness will ground him. If he doesn’t move, maybe the moment won’t progress forward.

Your face is unreadable now. He hates that. That’s what cuts deepest, he thinks. He used to be able to read you like a book. Once, he could even name every emotion before you even spoke it aloud – guilt in the twitch of an eye, love in a half-formed smile. Now, all he sees is distance. A stranger across the room. A closed door where open windows used to be.

‘I don’t want to fight,’ he says quietly. Final.

A beat of silence.

‘So that’s it?’

‘I can’t keep pulling you under with me,’ he says it. That line is rehearsed. It comes out sounding practiced, like it’s been spoken too often in the mirror. Even so, it lands jagged and half-shattered, just like everything else he’s touched lately.

There’s no screaming. No slammed fists or doors. Just something hollow. A quiet devastation. You feel it crack open your chest, the silence louder than any argument.

You take a step back. Not from anger, but from instinct. A recoil. He watches the moment with a clenched jaw, eyes misty like he’s already halfway gone.

Maybe if he yelled, things would make more sense. Maybe if he cried, you could believe that breaking up was hurting him too. But he just stands there. Still. Detached. Resigned.

‘Breaking up…’ You say the words carefully, like it physically hurts to speak them. ‘You don’t mean it.’

‘I do.’

‘No, you don’t.’ He’s unsure if you’re trying to convince yourself or him. ‘You’re just scared.’

He shrugs. Defeated. ‘Maybe. But that doesn’t make what I’m saying untrue. I’m breaking up with you.’

‘I don’t need you to be perfect, Spencer,’ you say, stepping toward him. ‘I just need you. The you who spoke to me. The you who let me carry even a little bit of the weight.’

He shakes his head. The words fall out bitter and painful. ‘You think this—’ he gestures vaguely between you, hand faltering mid-air, ‘—is a relationship? This is a time bomb. Every relapse, every lie – I drag you with me. And I can’t keep doing that to you.’

‘You don’t get to decide what I can or can’t handle.’

‘Yes, I do,’ he says. His voice cracks under the strain and his hands tremble now. ‘Because when you look at me like I’m breaking your heart by just existing—’ He stops. Swallows hard. ‘It kills me. I’m not putting you through that again.’

You throw your hands up. Not angry, just wrecked. The tears come slow at first, before you can even realize you’re crying, like your mind is still trying to pretend things might be okay, but your body knows it’s not.

‘Stop acting like what you’re doing is noble, Spencer,’ you whisper. ‘Stop weaponizing love to justify walking away.’

‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

The silence after is deafening.

You don’t say what you’re thinking. Too late. You already have.

Instead, the two of you just stand there, not touching, not moving. The faucet drips lamely behind you. The birds continue singing outside. Oblivious, out of place – not caring that your world is falling apart.

‘Please.’

It comes from you finally. Your voice is so low it nearly disappears into the air between you. You aren’t begging. Not really. It’s something smaller than that. A final chance.

‘I don’t know how to be better,’ he admits, voice as quiet as yours. ‘I want to. I swear, I want to. But I don’t know how.’

‘Then let me help.’

You close the gap between you. A few fragile steps that feel like miles. When you stop, it’s with your heart wide open and bared. Your hands lift, almost touching him, but not quite. He leans in, forehead resting against yours.

His hands remain clenched into fists at his sides. He knows that if he touches you, really touches you, he’ll stay. And if he stays, he’ll keep breaking your heart into smaller, sharper pieces.

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmurs, tone just shy of grief. ‘I wish there was a gentle way to leave you.’

And that’s when you feel it. The subtle shift. The air in the room changing. A certain ending.

It doesn’t end with a scream. It doesn’t end with a slammed door. It ends in the space between your bodies. In barely held restraint. In the inch he keeps between your hands.

Then he steps back, and the moment breaks.

You don’t follow. He doesn’t look back.

When he leaves, you let him go.

He doesn’t slam the door, though he wishes he could.

He wishes there was a clean, decisive sound. Something loud enough to match the shattering in his chest. Something final.

But there’s only a soft click as the door eases shut behind him, the apartment trying not to wake the grief sleeping in its corners.

He stands in the hallway. Motionless. It smells faintly like burned toast and over-watered plants. A dog barks from a floor below. The banality of it – the normalcy – makes him want to scream.

He counts his steps, just to drown out everything else in his mind.

Seven to the elevator. Ten seconds down. Twenty-four more to the front door of the building. The mundanity makes him cringe. Something should be stopping him from walking out. It shouldn’t be this easy.

He catches his reflection in the glass of the door. A brief flicker. He looks away before the mirror can accuse him, before he can see the guilt in his eyes.

You’re still upstairs. Maybe on the couch. Maybe still standing where he left you. He hopes you’ve stopped crying. Knows the tears are probably still falling.

When he steps out onto the street, the morning hits him harder than expected. Too bright. Too warm. The lightness feels unfair. A child is laughing down the block. Somewhere, a child laughs. A care radio blasts a pop song. The world is still going, indifferent to how he’s feeling.

The world hasn’t ended. Not for them.

He takes a deep breath, hoping the air will ground him. Fill his lungs and center him. It doesn’t. So he walks. Not fast, and not with purpose.

He just moves, one foot in front of the other, and hopes the momentum will save him. Like distance will undo the damage.

Still no particular destination. Work, maybe. He’s due in, he thinks. He just knows he can’t go back to you, even if that’s where his heart wants to go.

The air bites at is skin. Colder now that he’s moving. Maybe it just feels that way because he’s raw, stripped of the warmth that lived in your voice, your touch, your home. He starts to move faster, hoping the breakup won’t catch up with him.

Halfway down the block, it starts.

A too-shallow breath. A heartbeat that comes too fast. A tremor that doesn’t start in his hands, but originates from somewhere deeper. Somewhere ungraspable. He blinks rapidly, trying to control the way his chest won’t open up properly.

He rounds a corner too sharply. His vision warps at the edges. Every footstep feels like it echoes, the street unstable beneath him.

His own name flickers in his mind like static. He tried to ground himself in language, in familiarity, pleading for it to pull him back from whatever this is.

I’m not okay. I’m not okay. I’m no okay.

His pulse thuds unevenly. His ribs feel like they’re contracting, his chest turning to stone. The air won’t come in properly. He opens his mouth, gasps in ragged drags of oxygen. It feels like he’s breathing through a piece of gauze.

Somehow, though he doesn’t remember the walk there, he finds himself outside the BAU building.

He grips the brick wall beside the entrance like it’s the only thing holding him upright. His knees buckle and his slides down, curling in on himself. His arms brace across his knees – still clothed in soft pajamas – and he hangs his head low.

He’s trying not to fall apart in public. Trying not to be a problem. But the breaking inside is too loud. He looks insane, probably. Can’t bring himself to care.

He gasps again, and presses a hand to his chest. The other grips at his hair.

Parasympathetic regulation. He knows the terms. Tells himself he can breathe. Four-count inhale. Five-count exhale. He keeps losing count.

He digs his palms into his eyes. He wants to vanish into the dark behind his eyelids, wants the pressure to stop the noise. He wants to erase the world. Wants to go back.

A sound escapes him. One that is part breath, part sob. Low and fragile and unfamiliar.

Then:

‘Reid?’

He doesn’t respond. Just keeps breathing – or, trying to.

Footsteps. Quick and purposeful.

The voice again, closer. ‘Spencer?’

He hears it clearer this time. Morgan.

And then Morgan is there, crouched beside him without hesitation. Morgan doesn’t say much. He doesn’t freak out of panic. He just stays. Solid and steady.

‘Hey,’ he says gently. ‘Breathe. You’re okay. You’re right here with me, alright?’

Spencer wants to nod. Wants to speak. But his breath stutters again, getting caught. Morgan mirrors a breath. Slow. Deliberate. Exaggerated.

‘In and out with me, Pretty Boy. One—two—three—’

A pause. Breathing in unison.

‘That’s it,’ Morgan says, voice softly coaxing. ‘Keep going. I’ve got you.’

Spencer latches onto the rhythm. Not perfectly. Not easily. But slowly. His heartbeat begins to come down from its frantic pounding.

He leans his head back against the cool brick wall. Lets it ground him. Still shaky, but better.

‘I can’t… I can’t go in,’ he rasps. His voice sounds foreign in his own mouth. Dry and hoarse and cracked.

‘That’s okay,’ Morgan says immediately. ‘We don’t have to move. We’ll just sit here.’

And they do.

The silence between the isn’t empty. It’s full of everything Spencer can’t say yet. He grips his knees until his knuckles turn white.

‘I think…’ He swallows. ‘I think I broke it. Whatever I had, I ruined it. I told them…’ his voice catches as he takes another gulp of air. ‘I just left them.’

Morgan doesn’t ask questions. He just listens.

Spencer closes his eyes again, not to shut Morgan out, but to try and hold something inside. He feels it cracking anyway. Slowly. A quiet and ruinous cave-in.

No tears fall. He doesn’t have the energy left for that. He just sits with the ache. The guilt. The weight.

Someone walks into the BAU behind them. The buzz of the door opening and closing. Footsteps fading away. Spencer keeps his head down throughout.

Morgan rests a hand on his shoulder. It’s not heavy. Just present. And Spencer doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t recoil. Just breathes.

They sit like that as the sun rises higher, casting long shadows on the sidewalk. The world keeps going. The day unfolds without waiting. They remain together. Breathing in sync. Still and unmoving, because motion might shatter what’s left of Spencer’s composure.

Spencer thinks about his hypothesis again.

You can run the experiment a thousand times and get the same result.

But it only takes one failure to prove you were never in control.

if you made it this far, thank you for reading!! I rewrote and edited this so many times i think i went crazy and decided this was the best it would be!!! I have a taglist now! Please comment if you want to be added, or go to this post here. taglist: @abbyy54 @curatedbylucy @cynbx @enchantedtomeetcoffee @goobbug @internallysalad @jeuj @leparoleontanee @mrs-cactus69 @readbyreid @redorquid @santinstar @shortmelol @thoughtwriter @whitenoisewhatanawfulsound @written-in-the-stars06

[spr1ngpvrinbwunnie]

Another headcanon request: How would Harley do his interviews with the test subjects (children)? Is he gentle with them? What is he like? Like with the paper recording his and Quinn’s interactions, especially with y/n in the room

🧠 Harley Sawyer’s Interview Style With Test Subjects (Children) - Headcanon 👁️

📽️ Setting: Clinical but “friendly” façade

The interview rooms are always monitored with cameras and audio.

A child-friendly set design: warm lights, toys scattered subtly, maybe even posters.

On the surface, it’s meant to look like a safe space — to build trust. But it’s all fabricated. Every element in that room was calculated by Harley to manipulate response and compliance.

🧊 His Demeanor When Alone with a Subject

Unnaturally calm, with a slow and measured tone.

He smiles — but it’s too perfect. Too practiced. Like a predator learning the mask of a father.

Speaks in simplified language, almost as if reading off a script, but his eyes are too focused — not on the child, but on the results.

Often takes notes during their speech, but not in response to what they say emotionally — only in reaction to useful data: "vocal strain," "emotional resistance level," "immediate trust factor."

If the child seems nervous or shy, he’ll lean in and drop his voice to something soothing, almost fatherly. But it’s mimicry — he’s studied how empathy looks. He doesn't feel it.

🧪 When Testing Psychological Boundaries

Subtly introduces unsettling or leading questions:

“Do you ever feel lonely here?”

“Would you like it if you could stay like this forever?”

“Do you think people forget children who don’t do special things?”

He’s not just looking for answers — he’s measuring attachment styles, emotional vulnerabilities, and how far he can push loyalty.

🧍‍♀️ When You Are in the Room

And this is where things really change.

His tone becomes noticeably more performative.

He watches you more than the child — as if your perception of him is more important than anything the subject says.

If you disapprove or flinch, he’ll cover his more manipulative lines with sarcasm or dry humor:

“Don’t give me that look, I’m just asking questions. You’re the one who said I needed to work on my people skills.”

He’ll reign in his darker impulses if you’re visibly uncomfortable — for the moment.

You are the only person who’s ever made him question if he’s gone too far. And even then… he gets defensive.

“I’m not hurting them, Y/N. I’m understanding them. If you want to make something perfect, you have to take it apart first.”

🧒 Harley + Quinn (Yarnaby) Interactions on Paper

Quinn’s case file is thick, and most interviews with him were one-on-one, without oversight — except for a few where you insisted on being present.

In those earlier transcripts:

Harley’s questions with Quinn are oddly encouraging, even doting in a way: “You’re doing so well, Quinn. See? I knew you were special.”

Quinn often responds hesitantly at first, then more eagerly over time — Harley feeds him praise like candy, deliberately making himself the only source of validation in Quinn’s life.

Subtle red flags litter the files: isolating language, dependency conditioning, manipulation cloaked as mentorship.

If you’re in the room during those interactions:

Quinn often looks at you for reassurance, sensing something is off. Harley gets tense when that happens, his smile tightens.

“Eyes on me, Quinn. We’re working. Y/N’s just observing.”

If you challenge him after, he’ll deflect:

“You want me to stop now? After how far he’s come? Don’t act like this is cruel, Y/N. You’ve seen how happy he gets when he feels useful.”

💔 When Harley Is Feeling the Pressure

If his methods are questioned by higher-ups — or even by you — his interviews become sloppier, more emotionally volatile...

He might snap if a child doesn’t answer correctly. His voice sharpens. He might end the session abruptly.

He WON'T hurt them during interviews — but the psychological pressure rises fast.

If you confront him afterward, he’s either:

Coldly detached: “They’ll survive. The data’s clean.”

Or explosively defensive: “If you don’t like what you see, leave. But don’t stand there and pretend you understand what I’m doing.”

🧸 Personal Notes in His Files (Private)

Hidden between the formal recordings are pages of deeply personal, conflicting thoughts about certain subjects (especially Quinn).

Notes scribbled in a rush: “Why is he still scared of me?” / “Dependency reached. Don’t fuck this up.”

Mentions of you: “Y/N distracted subject. Too soft. Too… much.”

One margin note reads:

“If I’d had someone like them when I was his age... Would I have turned out the same?”

Harley is not gentle — but he knows how to act gentle. His interviews are manipulative, emotionally strategic, and designed to gain loyalty or extract data.

With you in the room, he modulates himself — sometimes even pretends to care — but it’s not fully altruistic; it’s because you see through him and that unnerves him more than he admits.

Despite himself, part of him wants you to believe he’s good. That he’s not a monster. But under that mask, it’s still Harley: desperate for recognition, control, and the illusion of love through obedience.

[copperbadge]

Hi Sam! I wanted to ask if you feel lately like you've been getting anything positive out of your therapy, because a lot of your initial thoughts about it kind of mirror mine. I'm very logical (except when I'm upset at myself) and very skeptical, so I feel like a therapist either isn't going to tell me anything new, or that I'm going to just disregard it because I can't trick myself into believing things that I just plain don't believe.

But I'm also starting to come to a realization, two years after my ADHD diagnosis and letting go (without therapy!) of most of the executive dysfunction-fueled self worth issues I was having, that I'm kind of Not Okay in other ways. I'm safe —going to work every day and doing my job so I won't lose my livelihood and have never had a self harm urge in my life— But I'm not really okay. I'm having major self esteem issues related to my personality separate from the executive dysfunction that are putting me in a bad place. I don't want to take antidepressants for reasons I won't go into but that means my other option is therapy and... I don't know if I'm a person that therapy will actually work on. I found a lot of validation in some of your perspectives, about affirmations being bullshit and "mindfulness" exercises feeling impossible and useless, about not having an inner monologue and how that might be causing issues with traditional methods. So I was just wondering, do you feel like therapy is working now that you've been in it longer?

I've wasted a lot of money on "elective" (and ultimately useless, back to square one) medical nonsense this year and I'm not eager to waste more, but I've also met my insurance deductible so it's the best time to try it if I'm going to.

I mean, it depends on the modality a little but I don't think trying basic talk therapy can hurt, as long as you find a decent therapist. And it's better to try it now when you're feeling Mostly Okay than waiting until you are Really Not Okay. But this entire paragraph comes with a lot of context so....

A lot of what I talked about in terms of struggling with mindfulness, etc. was less related to the therapy I am still in than it was to the DBT class I took at Therapist's suggestion. We were both aware that she was basically throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck, and while it was an interesting class I don't think for me it was helpful. As you mention, I struggled with affirmations and visualization since neurologically I'm not really set up for those; I don't think they're objectively bullshit but I do think there's an assumption within the mental health industry that they will have function for everyone and that's simply untrue, and the expectation that it will is very damaging. I also struggled with the physical-intervention aspects (called TIPP usually) which didn't work at all for me and felt frankly like doctor-approved self harm. DBT can get very culty, which set off a ton of red flags for me -- possibly false flags, but they still waved real big.

And that's because I also have a lot of trust issues surrounding therapy. To the point where, the minute one of the people running the DBT class made actually quite gentle fun of me for asking a question he couldn't answer, I checked out on anything he said. We were learning about a DBT concept called Wise Mind and I asked, "If wise mind is an identifiable mental state, how do we know if we're in it?" and when he couldn't quite answer beyond "It's different for everyone" I said, "But if we know it's real there must be some kind of common denominator, a measurable data point," and he said "Well, Sam, you're not going to levitate" and the rest of the class laughed. Sorry bud, this is almost certainly an over-reaction, but I'm me and you lost me when you came at me instead of just admitting you didn't know. (Also it turns out I just live in Wise Mind like 80% of the time which is one reason I couldn't tell.)

But basic talk therapy outside of DBT is just...you talk at someone about your problems and come up with ways to try and solve them, which is a lot more straightforward and way less frustrating. You have to be an active participant, you have to both have a goal and be willing to discuss reaching it, but that goal can be as simple as just "figure out what my mental health goals should be" at first. You don't have to learn like, vocabulary for it.

The thing is, while I have seen some improvement in regulation issues, I also struggle with basic talk therapy. Most people, and this blew my mind, see measurable improvement in nine to eighteen therapy sessions. A lot of people don't go long-term, they just are having a moment and get help getting through the moment and then can disengage, with their therapist's approval.

I was in therapy consistently from the age of nine to eighteen and only stopped because I reached legal majority and physically refused to go.

Not one minute of those nine years did I want to be there. And, because none of the three therapists I saw across those years actually explained to me why I was there or how therapy worked, for me it felt like "Your punishment for having feelings is to speedrun every feeling you had this week in an hour, to a stranger." There was also what my current therapist believes to be some extremely unethical behavior going on, which didn't help.

So it has taken actually a lot of time to get to a place where I would even allow her to understand what help I need. I've been in therapy for about a year (generally weekly but there have been some gaps) and it has only recently gotten deeper than very basic interpersonal problem-solving.

Like, two weeks ago I told her, "I had a thought this week that I couldn't tell you about something I was doing because then you'd have material on me" (meaning blackmail material) "and that's a fucked-up thing to think." And once I'd actually identified it as fucked up I had zero issue telling her about it, wasn't even nervous as I did so. Who's she going to tell? She's literally legally constrained from telling.

I think well over half of what she does is either validate that whatever emotion I'm having is normal, affirm my reactions so I don't keep believing I behaved weirdly, or praise something I've done that was a positive act. Does this work? Not always, because I'm unfortunately very aware that it's part of her job to do those things. But yeah, sometimes. Even if you don't fully believe it, "Hey that was a really smart move" is nice to hear. Sometimes she helps me come up with a plan for stressful future events or (rarely) behavior modification, and sometimes she either provides me with research or points me towards research I can do on my own. We don't do meditation or affirmations or stuff like that.

Like, last week I brought up the fact that I hadn't really ever thought about how if I have a disability that causes emotional dysregulation and I got it from my parents, they also likely had undiagnosed emotional dysregulation when raising me. So she said I should look into research on children with emotionally dysregulated parents. I was pretty annoyed by what I found (the ONE TIME adults are the focus instead of the kids is the ONE TIME I needed to learn about the kids, really?) but it led to something that was both informative and upsetting, so we discussed that. And when I was stumped about how to move forward with the information, she suggested that my general coping mechanism of writing about it was probably a good plan.

(At which point I just silently advanced my powerpoint presentation to the next slide, where I had a series of quotes from the Shivadh novels where Michaelis, acting as a parent, repeatedly does the exact opposite of the upsetting thing, because I realized even before the meeting that it's an ongoing theme in my work whenever I deal with people being parents. It's a good thing she has a sense of humor and also that I do.)

So yeah. Going into therapy you have to be ready to reject a therapist if you don't like them or if they get weird and pushy, you have to be ready to be a self-advocate, but you are the client; it shouldn't be super difficult to find someone who can at least walk you through what you want from it and agree not to do the stuff you don't want, and if you want to stop going you just...stop going.

Good luck, in any case! I hope you get what you need, whether or not that ends up being therapy.

[creature-wizard]

Critical thinking tip: Beware of false equivalencies!

A false equivalence is a claim that two or more things that might appear superficially similar are actually the same, when in reality they aren't really comparable at all.

An example of this is when young Earth creationists (who proclaim that Earth is only 6000 years old and everything in Genesis happened literally) claim that they are simply just interpreting the same facts differently from other scientists, as if it's just like the famous rabbit-duck illusion where one is equally justified in seeing either a rabbit or a duck.

But the reality is that young Earth creationism simply doesn't work like this. Instead, their "science" is based on cherry picked data and ad hoc reasoning to try and dismiss the many facts real scientists discover that constantly show that young earth creationism just isn't very likely. Radiometric dating, tree ring data, and geological data consistently show that the Earth is quite a bit older than 6000 years. YEC responses to this often boil down to "well maybe physics just worked differently back then" (here's one example of this), and of course they never do any real tests or research to show that this is a real possibility. Moreover, they invent some absolutely bizarre claims to supposedly disprove evolution - like falsely claiming that the Second Law of Thermodynamics prohibits it.

All of this shows us that YECs aren't just scientists who interpret the data correctly - they are politically-motivated spin doctors using the aesthetic of science to make themselves look more credible. This is why when someone claims that their fringe idea is just as scientifically credible as a mainstream one, you have to ask yourself if that's really true. Are they following the scientific method and accepting results that don't align with what they wanted? Or are they engaging in special pleading and relying on fake evidence?

(By the way, I recommend Gutsick Gibbon's YouTube channel as a resource debunking YEC claims!)

Another form of false equivalence is when someone claims that mystical experiences and intuition are just as valid for determining what's going on in the world as genuine scientific research. But when we consider that something as wrong as World Ice Theory came from an apparently mystical dream, we have to consider that these kinds of experiences can be extremely misleading. We also know that professional psychics' yearly predictions have a high rate of failure. (Some examples. More examples. And some more examples. And even more examples!) We know that a tool such as the Ouija board can enhance memory recall, but when we're really honest about the accuracy of mystical information-gathering means, we have to admit that they're just no substitute for research and study.

So when someone asserts that two things are basically the same, or are fundamentally equivalent or fungible, ask yourself - are they really, though? And then do the research to find out!

[linkhundr]

So NFTgate has now hit tumblr - I made a thread about it on my twitter, but I'll talk a bit more about it here as well in slightly more detail. It'll be a long one, sorry! Using my degree for something here. This is not intended to sway you in one way or the other - merely to inform so you can make your own decision and so that you aware of this because it will happen again, with many other artists you know.

Let's start at the basics: NFT stands for 'non fungible token', which you should read as 'passcode you can't replicate'. These codes are stored in blocks in what is essentially a huge ledger of records, all chained together - a blockchain. Blockchain is encoded in such a way that you can't edit one block without editing the whole chain, meaning that when the data is validated it comes back 'negative' if it has been tampered with. This makes it a really, really safe method of storing data, and managing access to said data. For example, verifying that a bank account belongs to the person that says that is their bank account.

For most people, the association with NFT's is bitcoin and Bored Ape, and that's honestly fair. The way that used to work - and why it was such a scam - is that you essentially purchased a receipt that said you owned digital space - not the digital space itself. That receipt was the NFT. So, in reality, you did not own any goods, that receipt had no legal grounds, and its value was completely made up and not based on anything. On top of that, these NFTs were purchased almost exclusively with cryptocurrency which at the time used a verifiation method called proof of work, which is terrible for the environment because it requires insane amounts of electricity and computing power to verify. The carbon footprint for NFTs and coins at this time was absolutely insane.

In short, Bored Apes were just a huge tech fad with the intention to make a huge profit regardless of the cost, which resulted in the large market crash late last year. NFTs in this form are without value.

However, NFTs are just tech by itself more than they are some company that uses them. NFTs do have real-life, useful applications, particularly in data storage and verification. Research is being done to see if we can use blockchain to safely store patient data, or use it for bank wire transfers of extremely large amounts. That's cool stuff!

So what exactly is Käärijä doing? Kä is not selling NFTs in the traditional way you might have become familiar with. In this use-case, the NFT is in essence a software key that gives you access to a digital space. For the raffle, the NFT was basically your ticket number. This is a very secure way of doing so, assuring individuality, but also that no one can replicate that code and win through a false method. You are paying for a legimate product - the NFT is your access to that product.

What about the environmental impact in this case? We've thankfully made leaps and bounds in advancing the tech to reduce the carbon footprint as well as general mitigations to avoid expanding it over time. One big thing is shifting from proof of work verification to proof of space or proof of stake verifications, both of which require much less power in order to work. It seems that Kollekt is partnered with Polygon, a company that offers blockchain technology with the intention to become climate positive as soon as possible. Numbers on their site are very promising, they appear to be using proof of stake verification, and all-around appear more interested in the tech than the profits it could offer.

But most importantly: Kollekt does not allow for purchases made with cryptocurrency, and that is the real pisser from an environmental perspective. Cryptocurrency purchases require the most active verification across systems in order to go through - this is what bitcoin mining is, essentially. The fact that this website does not use it means good things in terms of carbon footprint.

But why not use something like Patreon? I can't tell you. My guess is that Patreon is a monthly recurring service and they wanted something one-time. Kollekt is based in Helsinki, and word is that Mikke (who is running this) is friends with folks on the team. These are all contributing factors, I would assume, but that's entirely an assumption and you can't take for fact.

Is this a good thing/bad thing? That I also can't tell you - you have to decide that for yourself. It's not a scam, it's not crypto, just a service that sits on the blockchain. But it does have higher carbon output than a lot of other services do, and its exact nature is not publicly disclosed. This isn't intended to sway you to say one or the other, but merely to give you the proper understanding of what NFTs are as a whole and what they are in this particular case so you can make that decision for yourself.

[mysticstronomy]

ARE WE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE??

Blog#436

Saturday, September 14th, 2024.

Welcome back,

Are humans unique and alone in the vast universe? This question--summed up in the famous Drake equation--has for a half-century been one of the most intractable and uncertain in science.

But a new paper shows that the recent discoveries of exoplanets combined with a broader approach to the question makes it possible to assign a new empirically valid probability to whether any other advanced technological civilizations have ever existed.

And it shows that unless the odds of advanced life evolving on a habitable planet are astonishingly low, then human kind is not the universe’s first technological, or advanced, civilization.

The paper, published in Astrobiology, also shows for the first time just what “pessimism” or “optimism” mean when it comes to estimating the likelihood of advanced extraterrestrial life.

“The question of whether advanced civilizations exist elsewhere in the universe has always been vexed with three large uncertainties in the Drake equation,” said Adam Frank, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester and co-author of the paper.

“We’ve known for a long time approximately how many stars exist. We didn’t know how many of those stars had planets that could potentially harbor life, how often life might evolve and lead to intelligent beings, and how long any civilizations might last before becoming extinct.”

“Of course, we have no idea how likely it is that an intelligent technological species will evolve on a given habitable planet,” says Frank. But using our method we can tell exactly how low that probability would have to be for us to be the ONLY civilization the Universe has produced. We call that the pessimism line. If the actual probability is greater than the pessimism line, then a technological species and civilization has likely happened before.”

Using this approach, Frank and Sullivan calculate how unlikely advanced life must be if there has never been another example among the universe’s ten billion trillion stars, or even among our own Milky Way galaxy’s hundred billion.

The result? By applying the new exoplanet data to the universe’s 2 x 10 to the 22nd power stars, Frank and Sullivan find that human civilization is likely to be unique in the cosmos only if the odds of a civilization developing on a habitable planet are less than about one in 10 billion trillion, or one part in 10 to the 22nd power.

“One in 10 billion trillion is incredibly small,” says Frank. “To me, this implies that other intelligent, technology producing species very likely have evolved before us. Think of it this way. Before our result you’d be considered a pessimist if you imagined the probability of evolving a civilization on a habitable planet were, say, one in a trillion. But even that guess, one chance in a trillion, implies that what has happened here on Earth with humanity has in fact happened about a 10 billion other times over cosmic history!”

For smaller volumes the numbers are less extreme. For example, another technological species likely has evolved on a habitable planet in our own Milky Way galaxy if the odds against it evolving on any one habitable planet are better than one chance in 60 billion.

But if those numbers seem to give ammunition to the “optimists” about the existence of alien civilizations, Sullivan points out that the full Drake equation—which calculates the odds that other civilizations are around today—may give solace to the pessimists.

“Thanks to NASA's Kepler satellite and other searches, we now know that roughly one-fifth of stars have planets in “habitable zones,” where temperatures could support life as we know it. So one of the three big uncertainties has now been constrained.”

Frank said that the third big question--how long civilizations might survive--is still completely unknown. “The fact that humans have had rudimentary technology for roughly ten thousand years doesn’t really tell us if other societies would last that long or perhaps much longer,” he explained.

But Frank and his coauthor, Woodruff Sullivan of the astronomy department and astrobiology program at the University of Washington, found they could eliminate that term altogether by simply expanding the question.

“Rather than asking how many civilizations may exist now, we ask ‘Are we the only technological species that has ever arisen?" said Sullivan. “This shifted focus eliminates the uncertainty of the civilization lifetime question and allows us to address what we call the ‘cosmic archaeological question’—how often in the history of the universe has life evolved to an advanced state?”

That still leaves huge uncertainties in calculating the probability for advanced life to evolve on habitable planets. It's here that Frank and Sullivan flip the question around. Rather than guessing at the odds of advanced life developing, they calculate the odds against it occurring in order for humanity to be the only advanced civilization in the entire history of the observable universe. With that, Frank and Sullivan then calculated the line between a Universe where humanity has been the sole experiment in civilization and one where others have come before us.

Originally published on https://science.nasa.gov

COMING UP!!

(Wednesday, September 18th, 2024)

"IS IT POSSIBLE TO STOP TIME??"

[mariacallous]

In early April of this year, after more than a decade of litigation and a $90-million settlement, Mark Zuckerberg sent me forty bucks on Venmo.

To be clear, it wasn’t Zuck personally. That $40.67 was my cut of the payout from a class action lawsuit: the “Facebook Internet Tracking Litigation” case (not to be confused with the “Facebook, Inc. Consumer Privacy User Profile Litigation,” payment pending). Since January, I’ve secured other payouts of $21.65, $20.04 (twice), $14.81 and $12.60 as a result of class action settlements, and there are almost certainly more to come.

If you spend enough time on the internet, odds are that you too have stumbled into the class action expanded universe. You’re not alone: According to a recent defense attorney interest group report, there was $42 billion in class action settlements reached last year, “the third highest value we have tallied in the last two decades, trailing only the settlement numbers from 2023 ($51.4 billion) and 2022 ($66 billion).” Given the proliferation of corporate monopolies, legal cases brought against tech companies will naturally include more and more claimants and bigger and bigger settlements. Ads marketing these lawsuits are popping up on social media and, while most people ignore them, there are Facebook groups, lawyers, and hunters like myself, all dedicated to chasing down these payouts.

On top of that, a change in federal rules in 2018 laid the groundwork to make email the most common class-action notice delivery method—so it’s entirely possible that right now, hiding in a spam folder, there’s an unread message declaring that you’re already part of one. Open the email, enter your class member code, maybe provide some receipts (unless it’s a “no-proof” settlement), and pick your delivery method; they have Venmo, Zelle, prepaid cards, paper checks, direct deposit, etc. After a couple of years, boom! Instant money.

But while applying to get some of that money has never been more convenient, the vast majority of eligible claimants will never see a dime: A 2019 study by the Federal Trade Commission put the claims rate for class actions at an outrageously low 4 percent by weighted mean.

Take cases about data breaches or privacy violations. There were more than 250 million users in the class of those affected by the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal—essentially, everyone in the US with a Facebook account. Out of the eligible class size of 250 million, only 17 million valid claims were filed. There’s the spate of recent “social media addiction” cases looking for more class members by (ironically enough) advertising on Instagram, plus the semi-recent class action that chastised the once-mighty Juul for targeting teens, and the very, very recent Lopez v. Apple Inc. settlement, which could give folks $20 per Siri-enabled device if you sign up by July 2.

Many people ignore these messages—assuming they’re a scam, or thinking the payout isn’t worth the hassle. But other people, like April Phelps, are filing claims with gusto.

“I check daily,” says Phelps, a Memphis-based health care worker who estimates she’s received almost $8,000 since 2023 by keeping up with the various postcards, emails, and online advertisements that work to bring eligible claimants into a class action. “Out of a seven-day week, no more than about two and a half hours—probably 30 minutes or so a day—just to scroll through and see if there's been any updates or any new settlements that impact me. I'll check my junk mail too, just to make sure.”

I found Phelps on a 30,000-plus-member Facebook group set up by Top Class Actions, a news site that tracks and offers updates on various ongoing class actions. People in the TCA Settlements & Payouts group help confused first-timers navigate eligibility, answer questions about when settlement payments might come in and post updates about case results. These kinds of sites are what I recommend to people who ask, because since 2021, I’ve become “class action guy,” reminding family members to file claims, check their spam folders, and get that money.

Technically, I was party to my first class action all the way back in 2016, with litigation related to the Aliso Canyon gas leak, which WIRED reported as the “worst climate disaster in US history” at the time. That process was mainly via email and on the phone, and the payout took seven years to show up—but in the meantime, I kept searching for “settlement” in my email.

In 2021, that led me to Mansour v. Bumble Trading Inc., a settlement in California based on claims that Bumble was discriminating against male users by only letting women message first. I signed up, waited for my payout, and after that was Rivera et al. v. Google LLC (Google photos storing face data without consent), plus Sosa v. Onfido (biometric privacy violation), California v. Vitol (manipulated gas prices), even Milan v. Clif Bar & Co. (misleading labels on Clif Bars), and my beloved Facebook Internet Tracking Litigation.

It’s not that I have a personal vendetta against these companies. I still eat the Clif Bars. But by gosh, the law says I’m owed some money, these companies probably did do something wrong (even if they don’t admit it), and frankly, the payout feels a bit like winning in a legal system designed for people to lose. Why wouldn’t I take it?

That’s close to the story I was told by Phelps, as well. She says she’s been on the lookout for class actions since 2021, when she found out she was party to litigation against Blue Cross Blue Shield via a notice hidden in her junk mail.

“More people need to start paying attention, because if you miss a deadline, in some cases, for a $10,000 cheque, you’re going to be upset,” she says. “I wish I was getting $10,000, but some people are eligible to receive that, and they don't take it seriously because they don't do their research.”

Phelps says that the most helpful avenue for staying informed has been the smattering of groups on Facebook, where people answer questions, offer advice, and upload pictures of payouts: Venmo, Zelle, prepaid cards, and paper checks. Phelps says the group helped her evangelize a couple of friends and her mom into class action consciousness.

“It's not like these are poor defenseless companies, right? They committed an error,” she says. “If more people pay attention, honestly, I feel like these manufacturers or these businesses will stop being so quick to offer things to us without doing their research.”

Despite how helpful these groups have been for some people, they’re still a poor substitute for an official government portal, says Amanda M. Rose, a professor of law at Vanderbilt University.

“There’s been a lot of enthusiasm for technology solving these problems, although we see … that it hasn’t necessarily borne itself out,” she says.

Rose adds that a federally run website and support system (ClassAction.gov, say) could help increase claim rates, cut down on confusion, and create a database for researchers looking to make policy suggestions on public oversight of class actions. Without that infrastructure, the void is filled by third-parties (like the absurdly named “ClaimClam,” called out by the DC attorney general last year), who can use AI to identify potential class members in lawsuits and settlements, get them to submit claims via their platform and then take a cut of their settlements. ClaimClam also charged consumers “15%, and in some cases 40%,” of their claim, while also misleading them to think that settlements were guaranteed, and hiding that the law firm they were recommending was also co-owned by the same founder, according to a settlement between the company and the office of the DC attorney general. Even the top aggregator sites, like ClassAction.org or the aforementioned TopClassActions.com, are private companies that can earn referral fees from law firms for offering info on the class actions.

The lack of a federal database also makes it difficult to track down claimants who have changed addresses, determine if the legalese has been effectively translated into plain English, or figure out if the notices are getting past the spam filter—and all of these problems are exacerbated by a glaring lack of data on record. Are the claims settlement administrators who are charged with finding eligible class members doing a thorough job? According to Rose, solving these issues has always been a problem, but no one in particular is keeping track.

“You can't even have an intelligent public policy debate about these matters without having better insight into them,” says Rose.

That argument touches on one of the core pillars in American jurisprudence supporting class actions—as a type of public service in the form of a deterrent.

“At least in our legal culture, we have decided that we should make it possible for people with small value claims to bring them all together,” says Deborah Hensler, professor of dispute resolution at Stanford Law School.

“Perhaps a large number of people have claims, but the claims are worth fairly small amounts of money. Maybe they lost $25 each? A corporation could make a lot of money by collecting lots and lots of $25,” she says. “But individually, going to court for $25? Forget it.” Thus, class actions.

According to Hensler, class actions in one form or another have been part of US law for centuries. A dispute in 1820 over the estate of a deceased general, West v. Randall, is widely considered the first, though Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legal segregation in 1954, is probably the most well-known example. She considers their prevalence to be a function of an American court system that has fewer barriers to entry than many others, including much lower court filing fees, the option for lawyers to advertise, and legal representation on contingency (which is widely regulated or outright disallowed in many other countries).

“When you have a system that is so law-oriented, and you have a lot of lawyers and you have a way for people to find lawyers, even if they don't have very much money, then you have a way for lawyers to make money by taking people's cases,” Hensler says. “Then when some issue arises—like Facebook privacy—there are some lawyers who say ‘That’s interesting, maybe I could bring a class action.’”

Because the legal precedent is so complex, Hensler says there are many laws on the books allowing class actions to be brought for everything from the aforementioned privacy violations to the spate of recent class actions with wide political implications, like J.G.G. v. Trump, where a judge ordered deportation flights of Venezuelan men to be turned back, an order the Trump administration ignored.

“The current cases are on behalf of people who are claiming they have been improperly, illegally treated by the Trump Administration,” Hensler says. “They're trying to get the courts to say ‘Stop doing this,’ not just for one person, but for all the people like them.”

Aside from their use in recent immigration cases, class actions as legal tools are actually in a bit of a hard place. The Class Action Fairness Act, signed into law by the Bush administration in 2005, made it easier for defendants to shift their cases to federal court from the state level, a move that ultimately made class actions harder to certify, slower to resolve, and more expensive to pursue.

Instead, plaintiffs’ lawyers have shifted toward mass torts, mass-claim litigation, and multidistrict litigation—approaches that involve coordinating large numbers of individual claims, rather than trying to certify a single class. In the pre-internet era, coalescing that many claimants would be Sisyphean; in 2025, it’s almost smooth sailing.

“The underlying issue is that modern society produces mass injuries, mass complaints, mass everything,” Hensler says. “We've done a pretty good job in this country of trying to come up with procedures for dealing with this ‘mass claim’ phenomenon—a better job than virtually every other country in the world—but we haven't figured it out yet.”

Something that shouldn’t be hard to figure out is that regardless of the particular legal avenue, the class or mass action notifications are just going to keep coming—so people like Phelps and I will keep scanning social media and checking our spam folders. Maybe in a couple more years, I’ll get a notification about another forty bucks. And until then, I’ll keep scrolling, filing, and quietly cashing in, because if corporations can profit off our data, habits, and mistakes, the least we can do is get paid back when they screw up.

It’s not justice, exactly—just the version we’re left with in a system where accountability is slow, flawed, and monetized. But until something better comes along, I’m not leaving free money on the table. You shouldn’t either.

[the-music-maniac]

Why is the daddy dom characterization so common with pre-nibelheim Sephiroth in fanfics. Does that look like a man who knows how to fuck, to you?

If someone does anything sexy in front of him, he would give them the Seph equivalent of a frog blink. That man is tired.

Lol jokes aside, I suspect for someone who has had his bodily autonomy dictated by lab techs and Hojo for the entirety of his life, he wouldn't be raring to have one night stands with complete strangers in his free time. Sure you could argue that sexual intercourse would be a way to regain a little control of autonomy, but I don't think it's likely when it would be with strangers that - not only never sees Sephiroth as anything but the famed legend (an image he doesn't like btw) which is likely accompanied by unwanted expectations of what he's like in bed, but complete strangers that could've also been sent to like. Assassinate the most important asset that Shinra has?

My point being that I don't think Sephiroth really had any safe space to explore what he likes for something like sex - and since it isn't necessary for his duty as a soldier, and may even count as unwanted distraction and vulnerability - Sephiroth likely discarded any interest in it entirely. That is, if he had any interest at all in the first place. You could also assume he could explore it with people he IS close with (ex. Angeal, Genesis etc.) but in those scenarios he wouldn't exactly know off the bat what he likes, or be self assured in any sense.

Trigger Warning (implication of SA/dubious consent): Of course you could also explore the darker side of this, which is that Sephiroth has experience because he didn't have a say in it, bc the company used him/trained him as an asset in this aspect as well. Which is an entirely different discussion to be had, so I won't go into it any further here.

And I think despite the suggestive shit that post-nibelheim Seph says to Cloud, his mind is not on anything sexual in actuality. He's likely aware of the effect flirtation and innuendo can have on people - disgust or interest or whatever would distract an opponent. Or he's just entirely unaware of - or does not care how else his words can be taken. He's a drama queen, but his goals have been pretty clear post insanity, and they have nothing to do with something as mundane as sex. So his demeanour after Jenova isn't that applicable (also we know that square Enix was like heehee we figured you would like this dialogue, so there is also that).

Basically, while I understand Sephiroth is a cool character for exploring fantasies (valid, go ham) - in terms of if you're trying to be accurate to canon characterizations, fics where he's written as a suave dom/top gets a bit of a question mark from me??

I feel like what makes more sense for ships involving pre-nibelheim Seph (including those sefikura time travel fixits that I'm mildly obsessed with) would be uncertainty. Here is finally someone who he actually feels safe to explore this aspect with, and it's natural for exploration to involve stumbles. And I don't think Seph would rule out submission or bottoming as an option in regards to himself either. Or switching/versatility. As someone trained to be objective or logical when tackling anything really - he would probably go about it methodically. So why not try it all to gather data?

What his and his partners' eventual preferences are gonna be is author's choice of course lmao

Also a disclaimer before I end it here - this post is purely because I find discussion on this interesting. If you disagree, or just wanna write what you wanna see, definitely do that and disregard what I've said. Fanfic is supposed to be self indulgent, so who gives a shit what other people think.