#Quantifiable Outcomes

[capsulelabs08]

Art and Science of Crafting Effective College Courses

In today’s dynamic educational landscape, the traditional methods of teaching and assessing are undergoing significant transformation. The tectonic shifts in technology and pedagogical research are compelling educators worldwide to rethink course designs, especially in higher education. At the heart of this transformation lies the quest to understand how students genuinely perceive and interact…

[greenfue]

World's wealthiest 10% have contributed to two-thirds of global warming since 1990, study finds

Wealthy individuals have a higher carbon footprint. A new study published in Nature Climate Change quantifies the climate outcomes of these inequalities. It finds that the world’s wealthiest 10% are responsible for two-thirds of observed global warming since 1990 and the resulting increases in climate extremes such as heat waves and droughts. The study assesses the contribution of the highest…

[januaryembrs]

YOU WERE LIKE AN ANGEL TO ME | Spencer Reid x Sunshine!Reader

Request: my DARLING @avis-writeshq says- i’m a menace but i ADORED the spencer fic u posted 🥹 UGH THEYRE SO CUTE YOUR HONOURRRR 👹if it’s okay, may i request another fic with the same couple 🙈 perhaps one day reader is not as sweet or chirpy as she usually is, or she gets injured or threatened in the field? much love and lots of kisses xoxo 🫶

Description: Spencer swore he wanted to hate her. She was too happy, too chirpy, too much for a guy who spent months rotting in prison. But how could he ever hate her when she cried in his chest like that?

Length: 5k (I'm feral for these two)

warnings: post prison reid. Angst. depiction of suicide from the Unsub. gory language used. guns mentioned. mention of $nuff video and other murders. Nothing that hasn't been done on CM already.

authors note: if y'all want to see more with these two just SAY because I am all ears I would die on this ship

There were a lot of times in his time at the BAU that Spencer had wished he could have changed the outcome of their bad guy, surprisingly enough. There was the time they found their UnSub a few minutes too late, and one of the victims fathers decided to take him out then and there with a shotgun to the head. He was just a kid. There was the entire time he was with Tobias Hankel, and he lived in a state of both fear and sympathy for the boy trapped in his own body after years of abuse. There was Nathan Harris, the kid who had stopped him at the subway station and practically begged him for help to stop his urges to murder, only to slit his own wrists before Spencer could get to him because he thought he was tainted. 

He could see how it was easy in their job to get wrapped up in saving the day, in saving everyone they could. He just had hoped, on some stupid grace of a god he didn’t even believe in, that she would have at least remained untouched by the bad luck. 

Spencer had always thought, since the first day he had arrived back into the office after his stint in prison, that she seemed to just waltz through life easier than anyone else. He knew the concept of luck was not quantifiable, that it was just a coincidence that good things happened to some people, and bad things happened to others. He always grouped himself in with the latter, because what was his entire life if not one bad hand of cards after another?

Part of him had been seething with vitriol jealousy when he first met her. He hated how the elevator doors seemed to open without hesitation for her, no waiting required. He hated how her hair never seemed to fall out of place, while his required primping and preening to upkeep. He hated how she was always so happy, whether it had been she’d been given an extra cookie at the bakery for free, or her coffee had just tasted super delicious that morning, or the road works clogging the city had been put on hold the one day she needed to drive into the office. She was one of those people, he had decided, that life just seemed to smile down upon, and she beamed back in that dazzling grin. 

He felt sick to his stomach for ever wishing it gone, especially when she looked like she might never smile again. 

They never liked to say that they had easy cases and hard ones, all of their cases were difficult to process. But this one had been a handful above the rest. 

“UnSub has been killed on site, all units stand down,” Luke said into the radio, and the entire squadron took a sigh of relief, all of them except him. 

Because he saw that look in her eye, the way everything sparkly about her seemed to have vanished.

They had been following Bobbie Wrids for a week. Five bodies in, five men shot between the eyes execution style, almost six by the time they’d arrived on the scene. 

She’d gone with Tara around the front of the abandoned building; Penelope tracked their newest victim, Henry Frond, through his phone pinging off the nearest satellite towers, and it had been straight forward from there. Or at least it should have been. 

Because by the time Spencer and Luke arrived in their own SUV, Penelope had time to access the rest of Henry’s phone, and it was clear to see the victimology behind all six men. 

They were distributing snuff videos of women, some between themselves, some to other usernames on the darkweb, and Bobbie Wrids’ daughter had been one of them.

Bobbie had become somewhat of a vigilante, but he was a grieving father above all. He was a wounded animal chomping at the bit to soothe the ripping pain of his daughter's murder, the same one those men were getting off to. 

Tara and her exchanged a glance as Penelope relayed the information over their headsets, her once serious expression falling into something sombre and sorrowful. How could she arrest a man she couldn’t help but feel sorry for, one she couldn’t help but think wasn’t entirely wrong in his actions. 

“Bobbie Wrids,” Tara’s voice was stern, cutting through the silence of the desolate building. Their footsteps were careful as they made their way through the hallway, down to what had once been a rec-room, or perhaps a staff room, where they knew Bobbie had Henry, “This is the FBI, we’d like to talk,” 

They heard nothing, and she looked up to the older woman hesitantly, her finger hovering over the trigger the way Spencer had taught her. Tara took a minute, knowing she was leading the charge here with the girl being so inexperienced, before she nodded to the door knob and the rookie twisted the handle, pushing the peeling wood open gently. 

Bobbie Wrids stood in the centre of the room, moth eaten couches either side of the damp rug, the ceiling tiles half caved in from wear and tear. Henry Frond was already a pulp in the UnSub’s arms, and yet it was Bobbie that her eyes shot to first, sympathy shooting through every fibre of her being when she saw the distraught look on the father’s face. 

He was grieving. He was grieving his little girl’s death. He was looking for a solution, and this seemed to be his best bet. 

“Bobbie,” Her voice was shaky, her and Tara frozen in the doorway as the man brought the pistol to Henry’s beaten face, cocking it towards his temple before they could even explain themselves. “We’re going to come in, is that okay? We just want to talk, just let us talk-”

They had only edged closer by three paces between them as she was speaking before his knuckles turned white and he squeezed the gun tighter to Henry’s skin, the barrel contorting the flesh, “Don’t come any closer, this pig isn’t worth your mercy,”

“We know,” She said, her and Tara slowly stepping over a fallen ceiling tile, cracking under her boot as she met his desolate gaze for the first time, his head snapping to her. “We know what he did, Bobbie. What they all did.”

His throat bobbed, his bottom lip quivering and the sight of it, a man so broken, forced a frog into her oesophagus, and she willed herself not to cry. 

“They hurt my little girl,” Bobbie choked out, his face turning mauve as the tears began to build behind his eyes, “She was my girl. She was only eighteen.” 

She nodded, his wetted hues seemingly permissive when she stepped closer to where he held Henry hostage. 

“I know, I’m so sorry for what happened to her,” She said, her voice croaky, unstable as she wrenched it into something audible, “I’m so sorry,” 

“He doesn’t deserve mercy, none of them did,” Bobbie spat, his forearm crushing against Henry’s trachea in a vice-like grip. The man floundered, a wheeze coming from his lungs, not that she felt much sympathy for him. 

She sprung into action, flicking her gun onto safety and holstering it, Tara doing the same as she lowered her weapon to her side. He profiled as a vigilante; he had no reason to hurt them. 

“Bobbie, listen, I know they didn’t deserve to walk free, okay?” She said, taking the smallest step towards where the men stood, “But she wouldn’t want this for you, would she?”

The man flinched, his jaw hard as a rock with how he clenched his teeth together, as if holding back a sob. 

“Come on, Bobbie. Let him go, we have enough evidence to get him sentenced. We can get you a plea deal, I know a good lawyer,” She begged, because she wasn’t beneath it, because she knew he was a good man backed into a corner, “Please,”

Maybe it was the way her eyes were soft when she looked at him, or the fact two more agents burst into the room from the hallway, Spencer’s eye immediately falling to where she was stood so close to their UnSub, her gun out of hand. Tara stood by, but that wasn’t good enough for him. He edged with light footsteps until he was behind her, his gaze cautious, never leaving the gun in Bobbie’s hand. 

“Please,” She repeated, and Spencer saw Bobbie’s shoulders drop, every sliver of resolve draining from his body at her gentle tone, a deer approaching a hunter. 

Henry was thrown to the floor, the man practically dead weight as he gasped, almost retching at the feeling of air sucking back into his chest frantically, and Luke and Tara were quick to wrestle him into cuffs, the woman reading him his Miranda rights. 

Spencer almost made a grab for her then, because she was still creeping forward towards the man who had a loaded gun still live in his hand. He didn’t care for one second that the statistics said Bobbie wouldn’t lay a hand on her since she wasn’t part of his list. He didn’t care that every sign pointed to their UnSub being benevolent towards women, especially younger ones, that she fit his daughter’s description. Spencer didn’t care, he wanted her as far away from that gun as possible. 

His heart lurched into his throat when Bobbie did in fact make a lunge for her, just not the way he’d feared. Because she had grabbed him. She’d pulled him into an embrace, a hug, kind and sweet as she always was. 

Spencer cursed her for being so soft. It was going to get her killed. 

“Agent,” His voice was terse, worried if you dug a little deeper than the sharp surface, but she didn’t listen to him. She held Bobbie tight as the man unravelled on her shoulder, falling into heart breaking sobs and it was then Spencer realised she was crying with him. 

“It’s going to be okay, you’re okay,” She was shushing him, the killer, reassuring him he was safe, as if the killing thing wasn’t still between his fingers that clutched at her back with rough hands. 

“They killed my girl, they took her from me, and then they laughed about it,” He wailed, and she nodded, squeezing him even tighter if that was so possible, “No one would listen, the police didn’t listen, I had to do something,”

“I know, I know, I’m so sorry,” This was wrong. She wasn’t supposed to be sympathising with the criminals. But she couldn’t help it, she couldn’t help the gasping urge to comfort the man who had lost his whole world, “I’m listening. Tell me about her,” 

“She was so beautiful,” Bobbie whimpered, sniffling into her shoulder. Spencer felt his chest twinge at the scene. He hated that she was so soft. “She never hurt a soul,”

She cried with him, though hers were choked down as much as she could get them, her wet cheeks the only proof she had ever let them slip. 

“I’m sorry,” She said again, because no matter how many times she repeated those two little words, it would never bring his daughter back, “I can help you,”

He pulled away from her shoulder, and it was only then that Bobbie Wrids even noticed Spencer, his face taut in anxiety as he watched the man’s hands still holding onto her body as if she was the only thing that kept him upright, which Spencer wouldn’t be surprised if it were true. 

He fished the cuffs out of his back pocket, his finger never leaving the trigger as he stared down at their UnSub cautiously. He knew he may be being cruel, knew that ten years ago he would be just as caring as her. But that Spencer was long gone. And what remained was screaming in terror that she was in the line of danger, that she was holding the danger in her bare hands like she didn’t see the jeopardy she was putting herself in. 

Bobbie pulled away to look at her, the creases around his eyes deep chasms, and even with the smattering of grey hair, the stubble, the cold, empty look of someone with nothing left, she thought he might have been a handsome man once. He looked at her with a ghost of a smile, and one of his callused hands came up to tuck her hair behind her ear as if it had been second nature to him for eighteen years. 

“You’re a sweet girl,” He murmured, and she blinked at him, her chest easing at the way his wails had subsided into something quiet. She could help him, she swore she would help him. He was a good man beneath it all. “But no one can help me anymore, sweet girl,”

And with that he lifted the pistol beneath his chin and pulled the trigger.

—

She heard someone scream before she realised it was coming from her own throat, but her ears were ringing and she couldn’t open her eyes. Her face was wet and hot, and for a second she thought it was tears, but she was beyond crying now. She felt arms pulling her back into a strong chest, and someone was murmuring to her, or perhaps they were speaking normally and the sound of the gunshot had knocked her hearing. Either way, it was like someone had pulled a bag over her head as she brought her shaking hands up to her eyes to wipe. 

She managed to crack her lids then when the sludge was gone, only to see the room still a blurry mess. She could make out, in the haze of blobs and crimson tint, Bobbie’s body slumped to the floor, a dark puddle seeping into the rug as those long arms tugged her out of the room. She only then looked down to her hands where she had rubbed her face and she caught the same claret plasma coating her fingers, her white shirt, her pants, her arms. It covered her head to toe. 

It was in her eyes, she realised when she saw the ichor coating her fingertips. It was blocking her vision, turning the world a vivid wine colour, and she thinks she whimpered, or perhaps it was a moan of horror seeing the puddle beneath Bobbie’s body growing larger by the second. 

“I don’t understand,” She said out loud, her head spinning, and she brought her fingertips up to her eyes again, maybe to get the blood out, god there was so much blood on her face, or maybe because she hoped to everything out there that she would clear her sight and find it all a terrible hallucination, the product of one too many nights of sleepless tossing. 

But when she rubbed her lids again, this time seeing the scene a little better, Bobbie was still dead. She had still been too late. 

“You’re in shock, you need to breathe,” A voice instructed her over her shoulder, and it was from the same person who had their hands around her waist, pulling her away from the crime scene, as CSI filed in from behind them. 

She tried pushing the arms off her, weak because she couldn’t feel anything that wasn’t the horror in her stomach, and it took her a second before she listened to their words and realised she was holding a breath in her chest, the way a toddler does when they’re overwhelmed. 

“I don’t-” She gasped, the air rushing through her lungs, so fast it made her cough, “I don’t understand, I was going to help him- I don’t understand- why?”

“I know, just breathe for me, sweetheart,” Spencer. She only just realised it was Spencer speaking, because he had never called her that and the gentle tone he’d taken was nothing like his usual, civil cadence. He had been dropping a few jokes the past few weeks since she’d driven him home, had been more touchy feely with correcting her form when she was at the shooting range, had delicately touched the small of her back when they were navigating a crowd together. He was slowly cracking from his statuesque expression that hadn’t left his face since he’d gotten out of prison, but the softness with which he held her waist was entirely new. 

“Spencer, I don’t- I don’t get it,” She said, her voice bubbling into a sob as she allowed herself to be pulled away with no fight left in her. He took her into the hallway, turning her body from the sight of his hand lifeless on the floor with little to no effort. She was damn near limp in his arms, “Spencer, I don’t under-understand, I was going to h-help him, why would h-he do that-”

“Shhh, you need to breathe,” He murmured into her hair, trying to lead her out the front of the building and far away from where she’d just been front row seats to a messy suicide, “Come on, just breathe for me, baby, and then we can talk,”

But she wasn’t listening, and he wasn’t offended. Spencer knew it was the shock. He knew the symptoms by how her respiratory system had picked up in a matter of seconds and it was like she had gone from zero to a hundred. She let out a long whine, tears collecting the blood on her lash line and her chest seized into action, gulping down air, too short to do anything for her lungs, and her legs began to buckle beneath the two of them. 

Spencer stopped in the hallway, realising she was in more shock than he must have thought. He knew she was sensitive, hell it was one of his favourite things about her. He knew she felt everything so deeply, burned too easily, like a daisy wilting in a dry heat, or candyfloss melting in his mouth. Spencer knew, as awful as watching death up close was for any agent, it would hit her hardest of all of them. 

He moved around to her front, his hands migrating from her waist up to her shoulders, brushing over her upper arms soothingly. But her body felt numb, her head felt heavy, and her eyes were glazed over, down a rabbit hole entirely away from him, even when one of his hands cupped her wetted cheek gently. 

“Just breathe, hey, look at me,” He tried a firmer tone, and she bent to his will too easily. It was a punch in the gut seeing everything shining and pretty leached out of her eyes, as if she had become soulless in a matter of minutes, as if she had lost all hope in the world the second Bobbie pulled that trigger. She looked like hell, blood still fresh on her cheeks, in her hair, smeared around her eye sockets where she had scrubbed so hard to get it off her skin, “You need to calm down, you’re going to faint if you don’t breathe,”

She nodded, or something close to it, her eyes falling down to the floor, and she seemed to wrestle for control over her chest then. But what came after was worse, Spencer thought. Her brows screwed together, her eyes welling up with more of those fat tears, and her lips dropping into a devastated pout, her eyes trailing over the mess on her uniform, on her hands. 

“Spencer, I don’t understand, I tried to help him, I wanted to help him,” She sobbed, sniffling to herself miserably, and he barely even thought about it when he pulled her into his chest, not caring that her skin would dirty his shirt. 

His hand wound into her hair, stroking her sweetly as she buried her wails into his vest. He used his other arm to pull her close to him, which she seemed to have zero qualms about as she clawed at his back to keep him close, as if she didn’t want to face what was going to happen when they left that building. 

Spencer regretted ever thinking her sunshine was too bright for him. 

–

She hadn’t smiled in a whole week. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She had given Penny a very forced smile when she had fussed over the younger woman the first day she got back, had said thankyou with downcast eyes and a fragile grin when the blonde presented her with a framed picture of a puppy to keep on her desk ‘incase she needed something nice to think about,’

She hadn’t looked at it once, because they both knew it wouldn’t do anything, no matter how much she pretended for Penelope’s sake that she would put it to good use. 

He had taken her out for coffee on him that first day, but by the time they had got to the front of the queue, he had been doing almost all of the talking, which had become rare nowadays since he had come home from Mexico. Usually, it had been her filling the silences, because he knew in her right mind she hated the sound of static nothingness, she found it awkward and unnecessary when she could talk to anyone without thinking about it too hard. 

They had got to the desk, the barista smiling up at him as he ordered his usual, before he turned to look at her as the woman serving asked her what she would like. But she wasn’t listening, she was watching out the window, nothing particularly invigorating beside a bird cleaning its feathers on top of a stop sign. 

He said her name, putting his hand on her back and her head whipped around, her eyes empty as they looked up at him expectantly, “What do you want to drink?” 

She blinked, waking herself from a stupor, and looked at the barista with an embarrassed expression, “Hot chocolate, please,” 

And that was all she really had to say until lunch rolled around, and she excused herself to head home early. Emily smiled at her reassuringly, her eyes wary as she watched their happy-go-lucky rookie head for the elevators with a desolate look in her eyes. 

Spencer hoped she would come around on her own, or maybe even be brave enough to talk to someone about the thoughts rattling around that head of hers, but she just didn’t. She stayed as silent as possible, only ever speaking when spoken to, asking Emily if she could finish off her reports at home, to which the Prentiss woman never protested. 

But Spencer had had enough. He’d worried himself sick over her, and where all thoughts of how endearing and lovely and charming she was had sat in his head before, now it was all just ways he could think to make her smile again. 

It was the following Tuesday by the time he braved action. She had gone home after their midday briefing, apologising to Emily with tired eyes that seemed to be growing more and more heavy by the day, like she hadn’t slept a wink in a fortnight. Which Spencer thought was entirely possible. 

He pulled up to the house Penelope had not so discreetly told him was hers, definitely not because he’d asked, and definitely, definitely not breaching any human resource policies about distributing fellow workers information (meaning Spencer had almost certainly not begged Penelope for the address with those puppy eyes of his he knew could bag him anything). 

The peonies in the window bays were wilting but her house was something out of a fairytale. He wasn’t sure why he was really so surprised. It screamed her, everything about it, from the toadstool post box to the little green, cast iron bench that sat in the garden, the metal forged to look like florets of ivy holding the sitter upright. 

He rapped the brass knocker, the metal cold under his long fingers. Brushing invisible dirt off his shirt, he hoped she would answer as the present squirmed at his feet. 

“Just a second,” He hushed, and as if she heard him, the front door swung open to reveal her bare face he hadn’t seen since he’d helped her wipe the blood from her skin in the back of the ambulance. 

She looked at him with furrowed brows, before they quickly shot to the floor, to her cobbled pathway that had clicked under his shoes, and her face washed with a shock. 

“Oh my god, Spencer!” She crouched to her knees, a slobbery lick immediately meeting her cheek as the Spaniel rubbed his wet nose up to her ear, sniffing her unique smell, as if it was a bag of Class A’s, “I never knew you had a dog,” 

“I don’t,” He replied, kneeling with her to ruffle the soft fur behind the canine’s ear, “This is Ace. He retired from the Bomb Unit a month ago and Penelope sent me his handler’s number. They said he’s the happiest dog in the world,” 

 “I would be too if I stopped so many people from blowing up,” She said, but before he could ask what she meant exactly by that, Ace had jumped up and attacked her entire face with kisses as if he too thought that statement was worth silencing. 

And she laughed. She laughed louder than she had in days, weeks, her eyes crinkling in joy as the little pink tongue stole away her sorrow, tickled away the traces of the blood that had tainted her skin. 

Spencer smiled, his eyes watching her face scrunch in a squeal, hands eventually coming up to the elderly dog’s jowls to gently push him down. 

“Oh, you are the sweetest guy,” She said, and the words had him tugging at the leash to lick her all over again, “Yes you are, you’re the sweetest little guy around, huh?” 

She chuckled, scratching down the mutt’s neck, and her eyes flicked back up to Spencer, who watched her with more intent than she’d realised. 

“Petting and receiving affection from pets causes spikes in serotonin in our brain and reduces anxiety, did you know that?” Spencer said, Ace pushing his muzzle into the palm of her hand to prove a point. 

Her smile wavered slightly, and she looked at his hazel hues that seemed to see right through her, “Look, I’m sorry I’ve been so off lately, I just can’t sleep at the moment-”

 “Don’t apologise,” He cut in, though his tone was kind, and the two of them stood back up to their full height, “What happened was horrifying, even some of the longest serving agents I know would struggle seeing that,” 

She scoffed, unusually pessimistic coming out of her mouth, “You wouldn’t,”

His head tilted, not quite understanding what she meant, because she hadn’t sounded cruel when she said it. Then again, he didn’t think she was actually capable of that emotion. 

She looked at him, a flash of something vulnerable in her eyes, something like that day he’d held her in the hallway; too fast he almost missed it.

“You’re so brave, Spencer, you’re like invincible. I mean, you survived prison and your mom getting kidnapped and you bounced straight back to work like it was nothing. I can’t even watch a murderer die without spiralling out of control,” She huffed, rubbing the bridge of her nose and before he could respond on just how wrong she was, before he could tell her that that was exactly the opposite of what had happened because he had damn near changed every inch of himself in prison to stop himself from breaking, he caught her murmuring and he thought he might just have been punched all over again, “I wish I was like you,”

His jaw clenched, eyebrows furrowing into a frown as he stepped towards her, and her head shot to him, worried she may have said the wrong thing by mentioning everything that had happened, everything Pen had specifically said was a touchy subject, and she opened her mouth to apologise. 

“Do you know how unbelievably glad I am that you are nothing like me?” Spencer said, his voice bordering on furious and her fumbled for a reply, worried she had truly pissed him off. 

She wouldn’t blame him for hating her. She’d always worried, until perhaps that day they’d gotten into her car and she’d driven him home, that her very essence annoyed him. 

“I’m sorry-” She started, but he shook his head.

“Stop apologising,” He said, his hand reaching up to grab where her fingers tugged together nervously, his hold featherlike, his face softening when he saw her expression, “I don’t want you to be anything like me. I like you just how you are,” 

She sighed, eyes doe like with emotion as she looked at him, “Really?”

He smiled, a rare and genuine smile as she seemed to glow under his words, “Yes, really.” Spencer allowed himself to enjoy the way that the twinkle returned to her expression when he smiled at her with something almost like the old Spencer in him, before he cleared his throat, “We all like you. Everyone on the team likes how you are,”

She paused, nodding to herself as if knocking herself out of a silly daze, and Ace bounced on his hind legs trying to get her attention again. 

“You don’t think I’m too sensitive?” She asked, holding her palm out for the dog to nuzzle at with that wet nose of his. 

Spencer shook his head, “Sensitive is good. It means you feel something. Means you feel the good things deeper too,” 

Her smile was blinding, because she’d never thought of it that way before, and she looked like her old self again. Spencer wasn’t stupid enough to think she was never going to think about Bobbie again, he still thought about that first UnSub he’d tried to save. He still thought about Tobias Hankel. He thought about them all. 

But he was going to make sure she never turned into him. He didn’t think he’d ever forgive himself if she did. He’d protect her sunlight even if it burned him to know he could never have her the way he wanted. Because she was everything good, and he was him. 

She looked down at Ace, the life returning to her as she stood aside for the two of them to enter her house, “Tea?”

Yep. Spencer felt something run hot knowing she would always be out of reach. Didn’t stop him from thinking about it, though. 

[mariacallous]

With vaccination rates among US kindergarteners steadily declining in recent years and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowing to reexamine the childhood vaccination schedule, measles and other previously eliminated infectious diseases could become more common. A new analysis published today by epidemiologists at Stanford University attempts to quantify those impacts.

Using a computer model, the authors found that with current state-level vaccination rates, measles could reestablish itself and become consistently present in the United States in the next two decades. Their model predicted this outcome in 83 percent of simulations. If current vaccination rates stay the same, the model estimated that the US could see more than 850,000 cases, 170,000 hospitalizations, and 2,500 deaths over the next 25 years. The results appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“I don’t see this as speculative. It is a modeling exercise, but it’s based on good numbers,” says Jeffrey Griffiths, professor of public health and community medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, who was not involved in the study. “The big point is that measles is very likely to become endemic quickly if we continue in this way.”

The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000 after decades of successful vaccination campaigns. Elimination means there has been no chain of disease transmission inside a country lasting longer than 12 months. The current measles outbreak in Texas, however, could put that status at risk. With more than 600 cases, 64 hospitalizations, and two deaths, it’s the largest outbreak the state has seen since 1992, when 990 cases were linked to a single outbreak. Nationally, the US has seen 800 cases of measles so far in 2025, the most since 2019. Last year, there were 285 cases.

“We’re really at a point where we should be trying to increase vaccination as much as possible,” says Mathew Kiang, assistant professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University and one of the authors of the paper.

Childhood vaccination in the US has been on a downward trend. Data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from state and local vaccination programs found that from the 2019–2020 school year to the 2022–2023 school year, coverage among kindergartners with state-required vaccinations declined from 95 percent to approximately 93 percent. Those vaccines included MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella), DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis), polio, and chickenpox.

In the current study, Kiang and his colleagues modeled each state separately, taking into account their vaccination rates, which ranged from 88 percent to 96 percent for measles, 78 percent to 91 percent for diphtheria, and 90 percent to 97 percent for the polio vaccine. Other variables included demographics of the population, vaccine efficacy, risk of disease importation, typical duration of the infection, the time between exposure and being able to spread the disease, and the contagiousness of the disease, also known as the basic reproduction number. Measles is highly contagious, with one person on average being able to infect 12 to 18 people. The researchers used 12 as the basic reproduction number in their study.

Under a scenario with a 10 percent decline in measles vaccination, the model estimates 11.1 million cases of measles over the next 25 years, while a 5 percent increase in the vaccination rate would result in just 5,800 cases in that same time period.

In addition to measles, the authors used their model to assess the risk of rubella, polio, and diphtheria. The researchers chose these four diseases for their infectiousness and risk of severe complications. While sporadic cases of these diseases do occur and are usually related to international travel, they are no longer endemic in the US, meaning they no longer regularly occur.

The model predicted that rubella, polio, and diphtheria are unlikely to become endemic under current levels of vaccination. Rubella and polio have a basic reproduction number of four, while diphtheria’s is less than three. In 81 percent of simulations, vaccination rates would need to fall by around 35 percent for rubella to become endemic in the next 25 years. Polio, meanwhile, had a 50 percent chance of becoming endemic if vaccination rates dropped 40 percent. Diphtheria was the least likely disease to become reestablished.

“Any of these diseases, under the right conditions, could come back,” says coauthor Nathan Lo, a Stanford physician and assistant professor of infectious diseases.

To evaluate the validity of the model, the researchers ran a scenario with recent state-level vaccine coverage rates over a five-year period and found that the number of model-predicted cases broadly aligned with the number of observed cases in those years. The authors also found that Texas was at the highest risk for measles.

One limitation of the study was that the model assumed that vaccination rates were the same across all communities within a state. It didn’t take into account large variations in vaccination levels. Pockets of low vaccination rates, like in the Mennonite community at the center of the West Texas outbreak, would likely lead to local outbreaks that are larger than expected given the overall vaccination rate.

The study also didn’t take into account the possibility that vaccination rates could rebound in an area in response to an outbreak. “That’s the thing that we have control over. If you’re able to change that cycle, then that disease won’t spread anymore,” says Mujeeb Basit, associate chief of the Clinical Informatics Center at UT Southwestern Medical Center, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Kiang and Lo say the full impact of decreased vaccination will likely not be seen for decades. “It’s important to note that it’s totally feasible that vaccinations go down and nothing happens for a little while. That’s actually what the model says,” Kiang says. “But eventually, these things are going to catch up to us.”

[luv4arinn]

I Just Wanna Feel

Author’s Note: So—sorry for not posting in weeks, but I had a massive writer’s block, and well… I’m back! I was heavily inspired by THAT Robbie Williams song. Yes, I watched his biopic. Yes, I cried. Yes, I recommend it. And… surprise?! There will be a whole chronology with the others, all themed around Robbie’s songs! Yayy <3!! Consider it a gift? from me for taking so long 🥺. Love you all.

Pairing: Bayverse!Donnie x female reader

Tags: Intense fluff, nerd having an emotional crisis, extreme overthinking, unexpected kisses, Donatello’s mental breakdown, romantic panic, “oh no I messed up” but in HD, happy ending.

The sound of the keyboard echoed through the room—a rhythmic, steady tapping that blended with the low hum of the monitors. The bluish glow from the screens cast irregular shadows across his face, reflecting off the lenses of his glasses with every line of code appearing and disappearing on the monitor.

Donatello was there, as always.

The work was easy. Thinking was easy.

It was like a well-structured algorithm: receive information, process it, execute a plan of action. The world had rules, patterns, probabilities—formulas that predicted outcomes with near-absolute precision. No matter how chaotic a situation seemed, there was always a logical solution waiting to be uncovered.

Computers don’t lie.

Data has no biases, no whims. It doesn’t suffer irrational fluctuations. It doesn’t beat faster without reason. It doesn’t have to remind itself to breathe.

But then…

There’s you.

And everything falls apart.

Not immediately. Not like a fatal error shutting down the system in the blink of an eye. It’s more subtle. Like an unexpected variable in an equation that had, until now, been perfect. Something that doesn’t fit into the rigid structure of his world—but something he can’t ignore either.

He thinks about it often. About how his brain operates like a well-calibrated machine, each thought clicking into the next like the teeth of a moving gear. Logic is his native language. Reason, his compass.

And yet, when it comes to you, all that logic becomes blurred.

The gears grind.

The code becomes erratic.

The equation fills with unknowns.

Because when you step into his space, when your voice disrupts the steady rhythm of his keyboard, when you lean over his desk without a second thought for the scattered circuits and switch off his monitor without warning…

His first instinct is to think. Analyze. Quantify.

What does this mean?

Why does his heart react this way?

Why does his skin register the shift in temperature more intensely when you’re near?

But thinking doesn’t give him answers.

Feeling does.

And that is terrifying.

Because feeling isn’t predictable. Feeling has no neatly arranged lines of code, no graphs to chart behavioral patterns, no equations with exact solutions.

Emotions, in themselves, are a chaotic system.

And you…

You are the anomaly he still doesn’t know how to decode.

Nights shouldn’t feel this short when spent alone in front of a screen. And yet, when his mind drifts to the memory of a laugh, the fleeting image of a glance, the echo of an accidental touch… time dissolves in a way not even quantum physics could explain.

When he feels the weight of his name on your tongue. Like an access key to a system he never thought anyone would try to hack.

And he watches you from the corner of his eye as you lean closer, and in that instant, every variable in his mind shifts. Every equation rewrites itself.

A shiver runs down his shell.

Feeling.

He knows because his chest tightens with an undefined pressure, a sensation he can’t attribute to any specific physiological variable. His heart rate isn’t elevated from exertion. He’s not under attack. He’s not in danger.

So why does his body react as if he is?

There’s no equation to explain this.

Because if there were, he would have solved it long ago. He would have identified the problem, broken it down into its components, eliminated any errors. But every time he thinks he’s close to an answer, another unknown appears, shifting all previous solutions out of place.

Music filters through his headphones, slow and melancholic.

“I just wanna feel, real love…”

A shiver runs down his spine.

His body reacts to the sound before his mind does. It’s absurd. It’s ridiculous. There is no logical reason why a progression of chords and a set of words arranged in a certain way should have this effect on him.

And yet, here he is.

Fingers hovering over the keyboard, motionless—caught between the instinct to keep working and the strange, undeniable realization that… he can’t.

Not because he’s tired.

Not because he lacks information.

Not because there’s a problem that requires more processing.

But because, for the first time in a long time, the data isn’t the most important thing.

The screen flickers with information he should be absorbing, but he isn’t. His glasses reflect numbers and graphs that would normally hold his full attention, but his gaze is empty, unfocused.

The room remains unchanged—draped in shadows, illuminated only by the bluish glow of his monitors and the faint blinking of LED lights from his equipment.

The mission had been difficult. The margin of error had been higher than he liked to admit.

It wasn’t often that his calculations failed.

But sometimes, calculations weren’t enough.

Sometimes, reality simply… refused to adhere to logic.

“Feel the home that I live in…”

His jaw tightens.

He doesn’t know how that song ended up on his playlist.

But he has a reasonable theory.

One that involves Mikey, his blatant disregard for personal privacy, and his insistent need to “help him connect with his emotions.”

(Sure. Right.)

And yet…

The lyrics hit him harder than he’d like to admit.

It’s not the melody itself. It’s not the chords or the rhythm. It’s the way the words seem to slip through the cracks in his mind, seeping into the spaces that logic has never quite managed to seal shut.

“I just wanna feel, real love…”

Donnie exhales slowly, his fingers still hovering over the keyboard, motionless.

He thinks about the battle.

The mistakes.

The risks they took.

Numbers flash through his mind like a simulation running in reverse—impact probability, the margin of error in his calculations, the reaction speed needed to avoid damage. Fractions of a second where the difference between victory and absolute disaster depended on decisions made under pressure.

But more than anything—he thinks about you.

He thinks about the way, at the end of the fight, you rushed to check if he was okay.

About how, without even thinking, your hands—warm, alive—ran along his arm, searching for injuries he had already identified and dismissed milliseconds before with his visor.

He could have told you it wasn’t necessary.

That he was unharmed.

That he had concrete data to prove it.

But he didn’t.

Because logic dictates that worry should be extinguished by facts.

But feeling…

Feeling dictates that your touch lingers, even after you’ve gone.

That the sensation of your skin against his stays beyond his capacity for reasoning.

That the light pressure of your fingers on his forearm still burns in his memory, like an unsolved equation looping endlessly in his mind.

“Come and hold my hand…”

Donnie closes his eyes.

He could turn the song off.

He could erase the anomaly from his system.

He could rewrite the equation, adjust the variables, find a way to rationalize what he feels.

But… he doesn’t want to.

Because for the first time in his life, the result of a problem doesn’t matter as much as the unknown.

He doesn’t just want to think.

He wants to feel.

He wants to understand why being with you feels like the only constant that truly matters.

And then—you arrive.

Without warning, without fanfare, without the slightest idea that the world inside Donatello’s mind is teetering on the edge of a collapse even he can’t explain.

The lab door slides open smoothly—barely a whisper against the silence, thick with static electricity and the faint murmur of music in his headphones.

He notices everything.

The shift in air pressure.

The sound of your footsteps, softened against the floor.

The faint scent of shampoo and fabric laced with the chill of the night.

The way the temperature in the room rises by just a fraction of a degree when you step inside.

But he doesn’t turn around immediately.

Because he doesn’t know what to do with the anomaly that you are in his equation.

He doesn’t know where to place you within the rigid parameters of his logical, structured world.

His operating system slows, his brain—so used to processing information with the precision of a surgeon—stalls in an endless loop, searching for a resolution that refuses to exist.

And then—your voice.

“Donnie?”

Soft. Not because you’re hesitant, but because you know him. Because somehow—through a method he can’t quantify—you can read the tension in his shoulders. You can see the way his fingers have stopped typing, even though the screen is still waiting for input.

He closes his eyes for just a moment, as if that alone might be enough to reboot him, to restore the control that feels like it’s slipping through his fingers.

He knows he should say something.

He knows he should act normal.

But his normal means efficiency, speed, precise answers delivered at the exact right moment.

And right now, every command in his mind is failing.

You watch him with quiet curiosity, tilting just slightly toward him—just enough for the air between you to feel heavier, more tangible.

“Everything okay?” you ask, voice soft in that way that completely disarms him. Then your gaze sharpens slightly, scanning him with quiet scrutiny. “Are you hurt?”

He doesn’t answer immediately.

Instead, he looks at you.

His mind runs an automatic analysis of your expression—eyes slightly narrowed, lips barely pressed together, the faintest crease in your right brow, as if you’re already calculating the probability that he’s lying.

Logic dictates that he should reassure you with data. That he should tell you his visor has already run a full diagnostic scan and that his physical condition is optimal. That there is no rational reason for concern.

But then his gaze drops.

And he sees his own hand, still resting on the desk—still tense.

And for the first time in a long time, he chooses to do something without overthinking it.

He looks at you again.

His throat feels dry. Without realizing it, he wets his lips—a quick flick of his tongue over skin cracked from hours without proper hydration.

Then, in a voice so quiet it barely sounds like his own, he asks:

“Can I… hold your hand?”

It’s not the kind of question anyone would expect from him.

And he knows it.

Because it doesn’t fit his usual patterns. It’s not something that makes sense in any logical context.

But right now, logic is utterly useless to him.

Your lashes flutter in subtle surprise, as if the words take a few extra seconds to fully register.

“What?”

His instincts scream at him to backtrack, to rephrase, to find a way to explain what even he doesn’t fully understand.

But he doesn’t.

“I want to…” He inhales, trying to reorganize his thoughts. “I mean, just—”

He shuts his eyes for a second, frustration flickering across his face. He has never felt this clumsy with words before.

When he opens them again, you’re still there. You haven’t moved. You haven’t looked away.

And somehow, that alone gives him the courage he’s lacking.

“I just… want to feel it.”

The truth escapes him so easily, so quietly, that it almost embarrasses him.

Your expression shifts.

It’s not amusement.

It’s not rejection.

It’s something softer. More intimate.

And without questioning it—without hesitation or unnecessary words—you let your hand slide over his.

Not hurriedly.

Not hesitantly.

Just with the quiet certainty of someone who understands exactly what he’s asking for.

And when your fingers intertwine with his, Donnie feels every equation, every algorithm, every carefully structured rule in his mind… simply dissolve.

As if they had never really mattered in the first place.

“Well?” you ask, your voice carrying a faint attempt at lightness.

Donnie knows you’re trying to sound casual, that you’re masking your uncertainty behind a relaxed tone. But he notices.

He notices the delicate dusting of pink on your cheeks, the almost imperceptible tremor in your lower lip, the way your thumb brushes against the back of his hand—like you’re adjusting to the contact just as much as he is.

And something inside him… softens.

His lips curve, at first unconsciously—a smile, small and barely formed. Then, from deep in his chest, a quiet laugh escapes, unbidden and genuine, as weightless as the air after a storm.

It’s not mockery. It’s not disbelief.

It’s something purer. Something real.

—Nothing, —he murmurs, his thumb moving awkwardly against your skin— Just… this is nice.

The confession catches him off guard.

Because he hadn’t planned it.

Because he hadn’t filtered it through his logic before speaking.

Because it simply happened.

And then, you look at each other.

Maybe for too long.

Maybe just long enough for the world around you to blur into a distant murmur, as if nothing else exists except the space you occupy together.

He finds himself mesmerized by you.

Fascinated.

But not in the way he is fascinated by a new equation, by an unexpected pattern in the data, by the perfect symmetry of a well-designed structure.

This is different.

This is raw.

This is visceral.

This is feeling.

His other hand, trembling in a way he doesn’t understand, lifts with a slowness that borders on reverence.

And when his fingers brush against your cheek, the touch is so light it feels like an experiment in itself.

He feels.

He feels the warmth of your skin beneath his fingertips, the way it molds so effortlessly to his touch, the way your body leans ever so slightly toward him—responding to an equation he hasn’t yet written but, for the first time, doesn’t feel the need to solve.

He feels the erratic pounding of his own heart, too fast, too unsteady, as if it has forgotten its natural rhythm.

He feels the heat gathering in his chest, expanding outward like a shockwave, defying all logical explanation.

And then, he hears you sigh.

Small.

Soft.

Almost imperceptible.

But he feels it.

He feels the warmth of your breath against his skin, the subtle vibration of your exhale in the nonexistent space between you.

Feels,

feels,

feels.

As if every one of his senses—once so meticulously calibrated to process information—has now been repurposed for a single objective:

You.

Your warmth seeping into his skin.

Your quiet, rhythmic breathing.

The barely-there weight of your gaze resting on him.

The familiar scent of you, imprinting itself onto some hidden corner of his mind he never thought necessary.

Just you.

Only you.

Nothing else exists.

Nothing else matters.

And then—without thinking, without calculating, without rationalizing it into exhaustion like he always does—

he kisses you.

It’s brief. Just a brush of lips.

A moment suspended between doubt and need, between impulse and fear.

A single heartbeat contained in a single point of contact.

And then—

He hears you gasp.

His entire body locks up. Every muscle goes rigid with a tension so sharp it’s almost painful.

His brain—so efficient, so precise, so relentless in its ability to analyze every variable in a situation—enters a total shutdown.

He stares at you, eyes wide, pupils blown.

Oh, no.

No, no, no.

He misread everything.

What the hell was he thinking?

You don’t see him that way.

Why would you?

Why would you ever?

Shame crashes over him like an unstoppable wave. His stomach twists, his skin burns, his heart clenches into an invisible fist that threatens to crush it from the inside out.

He pulls back, his hands loosening, his voice catching in his throat.

—Oh, God, I didn’t mean to— —he stammers, his voice cracking under the weight of his own panic. His thoughts are a mess of unsolved equations, of probabilities collapsing into a singularity of pure dread— I just… I thought it was a good moment, I—

—Yes.

Your voice cuts through his spiral.

His brain short-circuits.

—It was.

…

What?

His breath halts.

The air thickens, pressing in from all sides, as if the entire universe has stopped—right here, right now, in these words, in this reality he never accounted for.

And then—

You close the distance.

You are the one to bring your lips back to his.

And his mind—his brilliant, overanalyzing mind—

for the first time in his life—goes completely silent.

And he simply—feels.

[creampuffqueen]

The Genetics Behind Bending

As I’m sure many of you are aware by now, I have a slight fascination with genetics. I find them so cool and intriguing, like a fun puzzle for me to solve. As such, I’ve recently been trying to figure out the genetic component behind bending in the universe of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Here’s what I’ve figured out so far!

A few notes:

Within the ATLA universe, bending seems to have both a genetic and a spiritual component. “Spirituality” is sort of hard to quantify. While it does seem to play somewhat of a role, for this post I am operating under the assumption that bending is mostly genetically linked

This ties into another thing, which is the… sort of? Canon information that all Air Nomads are airbenders. I can’t remember exactly where it was said, but it was said at some point. I am largely ignoring that in this post as well, though I will be giving some reasons as to why most Air Nomads are also airbenders

Sub-bending techniques will also not be discussed. While bending is largely genetic, sub-bending doesn’t seem to follow any kind of pattern of inheritance. Not to mention that some sub-bending techniques can only be developed through external factors (i.e. combustionbending). For simplicity’s sake I am only discussing the 4 main bending types, though if someone wanted to use what I have started to figure out the genetics behind sub-bending, be my guest!

All right, with that out of the way, let’s get into it!

A few quick terms for anyone unfamiliar with genetics:

Gene: A chemical compound that codes for specific proteins in your body that make you… you! Passed from parent to offspring

Allele: An alternate form of a gene. For example, a gene codes for overall eye color, and the alleles for this gene are brown, blue, green, etc. A person can only have two allele per gene, but more than two alleles for a gene may exist in a population

Dominant vs. Recessive: When a dominant allele is present, it hides the presence of the recessive allele so the recessive allele is not expressed, or physically seen

Phenotype vs. Genotype: Phenotype is the physical expression of a gene, whereas genotype is the actual genetic makeup of a gene. Depending on the pattern of inheritance, the phenotype may not express all alleles present in the genotype

The main problem I kept encountering while trying to figure this out was that non-bending parents could produce bending children, AND bending parents could produce non-bending children. This means that bending can’t exactly follow your typical pattern of inheritance, where there is a single dominant and a single recessive allele. If bending is dominant, then two non-benders couldn’t have a bending child. If non-bending is dominant, then two benders couldn’t have a non-bending child. 

So now what?

For starters, I worked on figuring out specifically how the different types of bending would work inheritance-wise. I ended up deciding to treat the bending gene in a similar way to how blood-type genetics works, with multiple different alleles and a codominance style of inheritance. 

Codominance is when both alleles on a specific gene are expressed at the same time. This is how you get AB blood types. The person has both an A and a B allele, and the two are expressed together. 

Now time for my favorite part – the punnett squares!! For this gene, I opted to have 5 different alleles: non-bending, airbending, firebending, waterbending, and earthbending. No type of bending is dominant over another, because all of these alleles can be codominant. 

(A punnett square is basically just an easy tool for predicting different gene outcomes of offspring based on their parents’ genes. It can also be used to show all possible allele combinations for a certain gene.)

This gene is referred to as the bending type gene, and I decided to represent it with the letter B. To show what type of bending the allele is for, it also has a dash mark with another letter. For example, airbending is represented with B-A. Five different alleles means twenty-five different possible combinations, which I have right here:

What’s the deal with the highlighted squares? Well, I had to decide which combinations would result in a person actually being able to bend. Genes are what code different proteins in our body, each protein playing an important part in making up our body. This gene, bending type, would specifically code for proteins that… make bending possible. Not chi paths, as I’ll touch on that aspect later, but this gene determines the exact type of bending a person is able to do. Remember, these alleles are codominant, meaning both will be expressed together.

For this gene, I decided that the non-bending allele, B-N, would be an allele that results in no bending protein being developed whatsoever. This is similar to how O blood-type works, as the O allele creates zero antigens in the blood. But, also like the O blood-type allele, if a different allele is present, such as A or B, it is that allele that will be seen in the phenotype as there is still at least one allele coding for a protein. This is how two people with A or B blood types can have a child with an O blood type! And this is also how the bending type gene works. If a person has at least one bending allele, they will be able to bend. 

However, there is also the fact that bending types don’t mix. You cannot have someone who is both an earthbender and an airbender, or any combo of bending. (Outside of the Avatar, but their extra bending abilities are a result of having the Avatar Spirit, not genetics). To this end, I decided to get a little bit loose with the rules (because hey, it is a fantasy universe). This is not how this scenario would work out in real life, but it makes enough sense that I think the rule-bending is acceptable. 

The body can only code for one type of bending at a time. If you have one bending type allele and one non-bending type allele, you will be able to bend. If you have two bending alleles of the same bending type, you will also be able to bend. But, if you carry bending alleles of two different bending types, you will be a non-bender. This is because the body cannot make two different types of bending proteins, only one.

Effectively, this means there are multiple ways to be a non-bender; though all non-benders will be phenotypically identical regardless of why they can’t bend. The highlighted cells of the above punnet square represent allele combinations that will result in someone being able to bend. Out of 25 possible combinations, only 12 will result in benders, meaning with this specific allele scenario, only 48% of people will be benders.  

The reason I chose to go this route is because in order to make this gene work like it would in the real world, I would have to create a dominance hierarchy between the different bending types. Such as, Airbending is dominant to Firebending which is dominant to Waterbending and so on and so forth. But if this were how it worked, that would mean that one type of bending is more dominant than any other type – and that just doesn’t feel right for the ATLA universe. 

Another possibility of making this work more like the real world is by making a multi-bending genotype a lethal gene combination. Meaning that zygotes/embryos with a multi-bending genotype will not survive. Honestly this being the case could provide some lore on why the 4 Nations are so segregated by bending type – people would certainly notice that mixed bending families struggle with infertility, as depending on the parents’ genes up to one hundred percent of all gene combinations would result in a non-viable embryo. Perhaps people would notice this and begin to believe it was better to stay with people of their own bending type. 

But I’m trying to keep this light, so bending the rules a bit it is! Though people can feel free to use any of these scenarios in their own worldbuilding if they wish. 

A quick recap of what’s been covered so far because I can’t stop rambling:

The bending type gene codes for a specific protein that dictates what element a person can bend

There are 5 alleles in the population, with the non-bending allele coding for no bending protein. This makes it functionally recessive but the inheritance pattern is still technically codominant

A person with two different bending type alleles will not be able to bend. Benders result from having two of the same bending type allele or having one bending allele and one non-bending allele

People with different bending type alleles and people with two non-bending alleles will both be non-benders, making them phenotypically identical

Now, there are still a few issues when it comes to inheritance. Although this gene accounts for the different bending elements, it still doesn’t guarantee that our known bending families would work out. 

For example, Katara and Sokka have non-bending parents, but one of them is a bender and one of them is a non-bender. If both parents have two non-bending alleles, Katara couldn’t be a bender. It’s highly unlikely either parent would be a non-bender due to having different bending alleles, as the Southern Water Tribe is highly isolated during this time. So how did they get one of each?

To solve this issue, I decided to make the genetics of bending dependent on a linked gene system.

Chromosomes contain all of the genetic material in a cell. Genes mix together during reproduction, creating an embryo with genes from both parents. To do this, the chromosomes are broken apart into tiny chunks. The chunks are pretty random, but genes found closer on a chromosome are more likely to be inherited together. When certain “chunks” of genes are often inherited together, these genes can become linked, meaning they depend on each other for expression. They are still separate genes with separate alleles, but they are linked together and will affect one another. Oftentimes these linked genes code for very similar functions of development, but sometimes not. In humans, the genes for hair color and eye color are linked, which makes certain combinations of these two much more likely, i.e. blonde hair and blue eyes. 

So, which genes on the chromosome of an ATLAverse human are linked? Obviously the bending type gene, but the other gene responsible for bending is a gene I’m calling the bending ability gene. 

Remember how I said I’d be discussing the concept of chi paths later? Well, this is it! The bending ability gene is what creates chi paths in benders! Although chi is a somewhat… nebulous… concept in the universe, it clearly is at least somewhat physically present in the body because of things like healing and chi-blocking. This gene creates those chi paths, and if you also have genes that give you bending, those chi paths are what are used to physically bend the element you have the genes for. 

This gene is a bit simpler, having only two alleles and a basic dominant/recessive inheritance pattern. Here’s the punnett square, with the different alleles being represented by the letters A and a: 

Again, it’s a basic dominant/recessive inheritance pattern. The dominant gene is represented by A, and the recessive by a. A represents the allele that codes for bending chi paths, while a represents the allele that does not create bending chi paths. If a dominant gene is present in the genotype, the person will have bending chi paths.

I do believe there are other genes regarding chi paths, as even non-benders have chi and chi paths, but bending ability is a gene that codes specifically for bending chi paths. 

So, these two genes are linked. What exactly does this mean?

Well, it means there are now three different ways a person can be a non-bender, although all three ways are phenotypically identical. It also means that bending can be hidden within the phenotype, making bending itself effectively a recessive trait in certain instances. 

Let’s break it down a bit more. Here are the genetic requirements for being able to bend:

Must have at least one bending allele on the bending type gene

Bending alleles either have to be identical (homozygous) or expressed only with a non-bending allele (heterozygous)

Must have at least one dominant allele on the bending ability gene

If all those requirements are met, congrats, you can bend! But if even one of those requirements isn’t met, you’ll be a non-bender. I know it seems like I’m making non-bending more common but… actually, I sort of am. Benders are a large focus in the ATLAverse, but if you look at the population of side and background characters, being a non-bender actually seems to be quite common. 

Here are a few more worldbuilding/lore points where this gene system makes a lot of sense:

Katara being the only waterbender in her tribe for a generation. Waterbenders were targeted and systemically captured by the Fire Nation, resulting in these very specific gene combinations required to bend being removed from the population. Without benders to pass down these genes, less and less people would carry them, meaning less and less people being benders

An explanation for why almost all Air Nomads are also airbenders. The Air Nomad population is relatively small compared to the other nations, meaning a smaller gene pool and less diversity in the alleles present. This means most likely, the Air Nomads just had a higher presence of bending alleles in their population compared to other nations, resulting in more benders

A way for families to be mixed in both bending ability and bending type, like Aang and Katara’s family

Perhaps even an explanation for the Harmonic Convergence airbenders. Some folks were non-benders due to their bending type gene, some were non-benders due to their bending ability gene. Harmonic Convergence could have possibly edited these alleles, giving the capacity to bend to those carrying an airbending gene, and giving those who already had the capacity to bend a gene that would allow them to bend air

Along this same line, explaining what exactly energybending does to give and take away bending. Energybending is basically gene editing, which I feel even kind of makes sense with the name. Energybending, editing your genes, therefore your energy? Anyone get me? Which further explains how Yakone was able to father two waterbenders despite having his bending taken away. He still had waterbending genes, but his bending ability gene was edited with energybending

Hopefully this all makes sense! I really, really like genetics…

Okay, so we have our two linked genes and know what makes a bender or a nonbender. Time to have some fun with punnett squares to see how these genes would play out in our favorite ATLAverse families!

Here’s how to make a punnett square that predicts the outcomes of multiple genes:

Get the genotypes of our two parents. For this example, I’ll be using Katara and Aang. Include both alleles present for both genes being looked at

Katara: Aa/B-NB-W, and Aang: AA/B-NB-A. I gave Aang homozygous dominant bending ability alleles due to the aforementioned higher presence of bending alleles in the Air Nomad population

Now, we make our gene combos. Either allele for a gene can be inherited, so we make sure to cover all our bases. Because these genes are linked, alleles from both genes will be inherited together, so we essentially predict all possible ways these alleles could be mixed

Katara’s allele combos: A/B-N, A/B-W, a/B-N, a/B-W. Aang’s allele combos: A/B-N, A/B-A, A/B-N, A/B-A

Make our punnett square and see what combos result!

Katara & Aang, Aa/B-NB-W x AA/B-NB-A

I know this looks a bit chaotic, but it’s easy to interpret once you know what you’re looking for!

From this combination of genes 50% of the offspring would be non-benders, 25% would be airbenders, and 25% would be waterbenders. All the offspring have the capacity to bend due to the presence of an A allele in all combinations, but not all offspring are benders due to the presence of non-bending alleles and multiple bending alleles. 

Considering Katara and Aang have one kid of each outcome, this totally checks out! Some of the genes could also be adjusted in this scenario which would increase/decrease certain outcomes, but I felt this one was the most accurate to their family in canon. 

One more, just because (god i need new hobbies). This time, let’s go backwards, and try and figure out the genotypes of Hakoda and Kya that would result in two non-benders having both bending and non-bending kids.

Same steps as before! Here’s what I worked out:

Hakoda & Kya, Aa/B-NB-N x aa/B-NB-W

From this gene combination, only 25% of offspring would be able to bend. The other 75% would be non-benders. Again, I personally feel this is an accurate representation. Katara was a rarity in her tribe at the time. 

Again, these allele combos could be changed to increase or decrease the amount of benders or non-benders, depending on your preference. I’m just providing examples so hopefully anyone who reads this will be confident in making their own bending punnett squares!

I’ve worked out punnett squares for all sorts of families and ships, but I’ll stop here. I will say that one of the drawbacks for this scenario is that if you want non-benders to have bending children, the non-bending parents cannot be non-benders in the same way. 

What this means is that if both parents are non-benders because they have recessive bending ability alleles, none of their children will be able to bend, no matter what alleles they have for their bending type gene. The reverse is true as well; if both parents are non-benders for having two non-bending alleles on the bending type gene, it doesn’t matter what alleles they have for bending ability. I don’t think this is a very huge limit, but it is something to keep in mind if you’re wanting to work within the scenario I’ve established. 

And… there we have it! This has been such a fun little side project to work on, and I hope I was able to explain my thoughts in an understandable way! If you have any thoughts or questions don’t hesitate to comment or shoot me an ask, or if you just want to see me making punnett squares for your favorite families!

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy!

[regtheseeker]

sherlock is about to make the vow for his best friend as his best man at the wedding. turns out he brought the love letter that he wrote to john, instead of vow papers. and he starts to read with the same emotion:

“ Dear John,

It is, of course, a statistical impossibility that this letter would ever see the light of day. I wrote it for no audience but myself, as an exercise in folly, as if arranging words into coherence would silence them in my mind. And yet, here it is in my hand, at the very moment I should be delivering vows for your wedding. A mistake—one I should have foreseen, but apparently, even I am not immune to the failings of sentimentality. Or perhaps I wished for this error. The human mind is so much more dishonest than we like to believe.

Regardless, I have the floor, and if I am to humiliate myself, I shall at least do it with precision.

There are many things about love that remain, to me, uncharted territory. It is an abstraction that defies logic, a chemical defect of the losing side, a distraction for lesser minds—or so I thought. I have studied its symptoms, noted its patterns in others, dismissed it as a mere evolutionary trick. And yet, despite all reason, it has happened to me. Not as a sudden, violent epiphany, nor as a slow, creeping realization. It was always there. You were always there.

You, with your maddening contradictions—brave and reckless, kind and stubborn, ordinary and yet utterly singular. You, who saw me and, against all instinct, stayed. Who tolerated my arrogance, my coldness, my insufferable nature, and called it good. I have no frame of reference for that.

I have tried to quantify what you are to me. I have failed. You are not data to be analyzed, nor a puzzle to be solved. You are simply… John. And if I were capable of the kind of belief that others possess, the kind that moves mountains and calms seas, I would say that you were made for me. But that is not how the world works. No cosmic force aligned our paths, no divine hand orchestrated our meeting. You chose me. That is so much more meaningful than fate.

And now, you are choosing someone else.

It is not my place to object, nor would it change the outcome if I did. I have observed the way you look at her. I have noted the ease with which you move toward her, the way you trust her to be your home. You deserve happiness, and I—fool that I am—would rather eviscerate myself than stand in its way.

But allow me this moment, this final indulgence, to say what I should have said long ago:

I love you.

Not in the way poets write or films romanticize, not in the way I have read about but never fully understood. I love you in the only way I know how—completely, irrevocably, in every glance, in every word unsaid, in every moment I have chosen you without even realizing there was a choice to be made.

It changes nothing.

You will marry. You will live your life, and I will remain precisely where I have always been—just within reach, but never close enough. I will watch. I will endure. And if ever you should need me, I will be there, as I have always been, as I will always be.

Sherlock Holmes. ”

[windcarvedlyre]

In the post I just reblogged I especially like the wording of

he's genuine when he calls the others his friends, but it's still second to seeing himself as their stepping stool for their hope

because I think that summarises Komaeda pretty well. I've been thinking about that for ages but struggled to fully iron out my thoughts. Here's my latest attempt to.

Komaeda can be (relatively) normal sometimes

It would be incorrect to say Komaeda never sees people as anything but their talents and/or is constantly subservient to them. He at least tries to socialise with other people as, well, people, not always making things about their talents, even if a lack of filter and difficulty empathising with people outside of things that can be logically inferred create problems for him anyway. On top of proactively pushing his views in conversations and trials he can still, say, tease Souda for Sonia's avoidance of him:

And in the prologue he pretty much threatens Hanamura over his predatory behaviour:

and later follows up on this by intervening when Hanamura tries his bullshit on Sonia again anyway. If he stuck to his ideology 100% of the time, acting more like he does as Servant in UDG, one could argue he could have stood back, avoided imposing his will on an Ultimate in any way and left Sonia to 'overcome' that 'hurdle' herself, but it seems like he has some limits.

Additionally, he's aware that he can weird people out, and in at least FTE 5 he links his ideology to that:

but despite his filter issues he still manages to hold back his more extreme views- plus most of the paranoia we see in Island Mode- throughout the prologue and most of chapter 1. Was he trying to make a good first impression? I've talked about his Shot Through The Heart event and its implications before; that fear of pushing people away by being weird could easily extend beyond Hinata. Either way, he has at least some ability to tone himself down and engage with people more normally- at least in the short term and if his mental state is relatively good. He seems more openly self-aware in the prologue and chapter 1 as well.

This is all before we even start to unpack DR2.5; I touch on the ideology aspect of it later, but it also establishes that he subconsciously has a more nuanced understanding of his classmates' relationships with talent and a desire to be friends with them on more equal footing.

However,

His ideology still overrides that a lot

One of the themes Kodaka claims to have written him with is "the fear of someone you can’t empathise with/someone that can’t empathise". While he can be more nuanced during low-stakes socialisation, whenever he's engaging with the killing game himself his complexes go into overdrive and seem to take precedent over any empathy or sympathy he has for others.

Positive outcomes and anyone he sees as having potential to bring them about get abstracted into 'hope'. Death and suffering get abstracted into 'despair'. He tunnel visions on the former 'outweighing' the latter because that's how the world works for him.

Those things aren't really quantifiable in practice, though. How can you weigh a horrifying kidnapping against winning a lottery when you're already rich? Or getting accepted into the institution you revere against developing terminal illnesses that could kill you before you even graduate? But that's how he sees things. Telling yourself that everything you're going through will be worth it might be the only way to live with his luck without crumbling. Relatedly, an ideology under which everyone's potential is predetermined and there's no point in striving for more:

might resonate an awful lot with someone whose life is more of a rollercoaster he feels strapped to than something he's ever steered. He's had a lot of extremely good and bad things happen to him that he's never really done anything to earn; all he can do is roll with the punches and hope he gets a chance to make his existence useful eventually.

DR2.5 indicates that some deep part of him does resent this, resents the concept of talent as he views it, and would rather excise his concept of 'hope' from his mind entirely and effectively advocate for the opposite:

which could track with this exchange from his final FTE in DR2, which doesn't say that would be good but doesn't say it's bad either:

But an emphasis should be placed on deep. The hesitation of the latter makes it sound like it's not something he's allowed himself to think about much. If his ideology is partly a coping mechanism, if he allowed himself to consciously question whether his idea of 'hope' is actually worth the 'despair', whether his lack of a real talent means his life actually has less worth, whether a talented/talentless binary that determines the course of people's lives without them having any agency even exists in the first place, et cetera... he would also have to acknowledge that his life is hell. That the world has been extremely unfair to him, that no amount of lottery money can compensate for a life without love, and that maybe he has potential that might never be fulfilled because of his terminal illnesses. Maybe everyone else that has died in ways he'd attribute to his luck- much likelier than not to be 'talentless' like him- had worth too.

But he doesn't do that, at least most of the time, so processing the killing game through his talent/hope complex it is.

And it's one thing to apply those ideas to his own suffering, but when he finds himself in a situation with other people... where deaths are inevitable and he has some ability to influence this... it gets ugly.

When you crush whether people live or die and the wide range of ways the survivors could be affected by that into two abstract quantities, fixating on one value being larger than the other, the lives of anyone with talent become interchangeable. He speaks about his classmates as a collective here- 'Ultimates' and 'symbols of hope' and 'everyone' and 'them'- even though his actions would require anything from one to all but one of them to die. Because it doesn't matter who specifically dies (he's happy to orchestrate a murder with anyone) or how many (siding with a murderer is on the table for him as long as their 'hope' has potential to outweigh everyone else's).

It's fitting that when he eventually lived up to his promise, dying to make himself a stepping stone for hope, he didn't even know who it was that he spared or took with him. It was chosen at random. This gets visually hammered in the way the Closing Argument gives everyone but him the grey silhouette treatment.

Whether he was trying to increase the hope of the talented or take out a bunch of fellow terrorists with him, his treatment of them when it came to murder cases reduced them to one aspect of themselves in a way that was utterly dehumanising. I feel like there were still cracks in that- signs he, for example, felt bad about what happened to the Ultimate Imposter- but that's something I want to save for another post.

In non-killing game contexts like UTDP and DRS he doesn't toy with anyone's lives in the same way; the above behaviour was technically making the most of a preexisting awful situation (at least from his point of view) and we only see him force people into new ones as Servant. It still seems to be the case, however, that he doesn't really mask his views long-term and they affect how he interacts with Ultimates to the point of making them uncomfortable. The post linked at the start covered a great Komaeda-Souda DRS scene on this; the Komaeda-Momota UTDP scene below is also really relevant.

Momota correctly clocks that Komaeda's admiration of him is... maybe not quite aimed at him as a real person. He drops it because of Komaeda's reaction- presumably he'd misattributed the off vibes to Komaeda being inauthentic- but it still feels like Komaeda's engaging with him as some abstract vessel for talent and hope to some extent.

-

I feel like there's more I should cover here but this took way longer than expected- it's now past 5am- so I'll stop there. Hopefully it still illustrates the main point: Komaeda's a character full of contradictions and that very much applies to his views of the talented. He doesn't completely reduce people to talent-based caricatures but part of him still kind of does, and the degree to which that affects his behaviour varies a lot with the circumstances he's in.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Reference saved in our archive

"Just a cold." "No big deal." "Back to normal."

Abstract Background The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted public health, with emerging evidence suggesting substantial effects on maternal and neonatal health. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to quantify the prevalence and risk of respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) in newborns born to mothers infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19.

Methods We conducted a literature search in Embase, PubMed, and Web of Science up to April 20, without language or date restrictions. Observational studies reporting on the prevalence or risk of RDS among newborns from mothers with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection were included. Quality assessment was performed using the JBI tool. Statistical analysis was performed by using R software version 4.3.

Results Twenty-two studies met the inclusion criteria. The pooled prevalence of RDS among newborns born to COVID-19-infected mothers was 11.5% (95% CI: 7.4–17.3%), with significant heterogeneity (I² = 93%). Newborns from infected mothers had a significantly higher risk of developing RDS, with a pooled risk ratio (RR) of 2.69 (95% CI: 1.77 to 4.17).

Conclusion Newborns born to mothers with COVID-19 have a substantially increased risk of developing RDS. These findings emphasize the need for vigilant monitoring and appropriate management of pregnant women with COVID-19 to mitigate adverse neonatal outcomes.

[primordialsoundmeditation]

**Card of the Day**

The Star: Faith, Hope, Optimism, Inspiration, Promise, Comfort, Spiritual Growth

This is a card of faith, hope, optimism, and perseverance. It is a card of inspiration, trust, promise, relief, and spiritual growth. It is the power of positive thinking and a positive attitude. There is promise of a brighter future with The Star, even after it seems we have gone through some of the darkest times ever, or that our darkest moments might yet still lie ahead. Some of the greatest stories ever told about achievement and of dreams coming true were born out of depression, disappointment, pain, and loss. Many of the most revered songs in this world are those that touched us because of the depths of despair they portrayed, and yet, somehow we still believed there was hope.

This is not a strategically planned and executed outcome, but more of a reaching down deep within ourselves to find that courage, and confidence, as well as the will to keep moving on in the face of opposition and against all odds. Sometimes it is not a thing which makes any sense. Sometimes it cannot be explained or quantified. It is just there, and we reach for it; cling to it; draw strength from it. This is our strength. This is our will. This is our faith. This is our hope.

On another level in a reading, this is a card that can be representative of a guardian angel watching over you. It is also a time to use your intuition and astrological knowledge for guidance as well. When this card appears, creative pursuits and special talents should be encouraged. A health concern may not be as big as once thought. Good fortune is coming your way. This is a card that says if you want something bad enough, and are willing to work hard and put the whole of your efforts in it, you will be successful. The only other thing to do is to have faith and believe that, yes, you can make it through.

*from The Mythic Tarot

Words of wisdom by the Lit Messenger

[damnmmmmmmmmmm]

But I doubt she will be able to even get pregnant- she is not really healthy and I am pretty sure she must have been on birth control of most of her life… So the chances of a baby is zero 😂/ and not to shit on her age but she is over 40 years old, she never had kids, when you are 40 your chances to have a baby are droping 40% and i heard that they can drop even lower like 2% every month when you are not pregnant and she is months away from her 41 bday. So adding to it her unhealthh diet, alcohol and she smoke before its not healthy at all. //

Not to defend AW she's rich enough and unemployed enough that if she wanted kids, she'd have had kids because there was nothing to prevent her from doing so, let's be real), but there is a lot of misinformation about fertility in this conversation that is really harmful and needs to be countered.

The data that was used to determine what constitutes an "older" pregnancy was originally taken from population studies of women in 1800s France. There are a lot of reasons why those women might have seen declines in their fertility that may or may not still be broadly applicable to women today. Nobody has repeated those studies using data from the post-WWII era, let alone the post-birth control era, so a whole lot of factors like better nutrition at all stages of the lifespan, better medical care (ie, vaccinations to prevent the contraction of illnesses, antibiotics to treat bacterial infections, etc.), and the introduction of various forms of hormonal birth control (let alone various forms of fertility treatments) have not been accurately measured. Also, we have no way of quantifying how much individual behavior impacted those original women's fertility: Did their husbands lose interest in them and turn their attention to younger women or prostitutes? Did the household run out of money to afford more children, so the couple switched their activities to ones that wouldn't risk pregnancy? Did the women just pull a Lysistrata at a certain point and refuse to cooperate with their husbands' advances unless they changed some behavior the wives didn't like? We don't know. And there are too many unknown factors to draw sound conclusions.

) Starting and ending values in statistics are really important, and a lot of fertility statistics get tossed around without any reference to those essential starting points, usually because the people citing the statistics either have an agenda (to threaten younger women and shame older women who don't already have children) or because they just didn't understand them in the first place and so accepted what the person with the agenda was telling them. You say the chances of getting pregnant at 40 have dropped 40% - from what reference value? 2% each month - from what reference value? Baseline fertility at age 18-20 (or worse, at onset of menstruation) is a different marker than baseline fertility at 25 or 30 or 35 or 40. And is the drop per month, per year, or per instance of intercourse? Those are all totally different numbers. This is the same thing that happens with statistics about birth defects and pregnancy complications being "higher" in older women. We get scaremongered at that things are so much riskier - when really the odds of a complication go from a *fraction* of a percent to a low-single-digit (like 1-4) depending on the thing in question.

Statistics are guidelines for population-level analysis, not individual outcomes. I have someone in my family with a (literally) one-in-a-million genetic mutation. It took multiple years of medical testing to find out why they were having certain really weird health issues. The chance of having it is in the .0003% range - statistically impossible until you're the lucky idiot it happens to. Same with pregnancy. Your chances may be dropping by some unspecified amount each year and even each month, but there is no saying that "chances of getting pregnant are basically 0" until menopause has finished, and even then, there are now apparently some treatments that can bring some level of fertility back (enough for egg retrieval, and you don't need to be actively cycling for your uterus to carry a pregnancy to term). It might be unthinkably expensive, but if someone wants a kid badly enough, there are still options, and new ones are still being developed.

What often gets left out of the conversation about all of this is that part of the struggle for older women in getting pregnant is that, generally, their partners are older men. Women are born with all the egg cells they'll ever have; they undergo a maturation process later on during our monthly cycles, but the genetic information in them isn't degrading. Men, however, are making new cells every day, and those copies do degrade, just like every other replicating cell in the body. The older they get, the riskier pregnancy for their partners becomes, and the harder it becomes for them to even get pregnant. But even that's a generalization because a reasonably healthy older man who has taken care of himself for his whole life might still be able to father children better than a younger man who doesn't take care of himself at all.

Tl;dr: "she's too old to get pregnant" and similar bullshit is damaging to all women. We all hate AW and the shippers here, and it would be nice to tell them all to go take a hike because this particular fantasy of theirs is impossible, but that is not a good enough reason to repeat harmful rhetoric that hurts all women. Don't feed the trolls who want to limit us to our reproductive capacity (and then claim that we're all practically shriveled up and infertile by 35).

The statistics on fertility are totally cooked and mostly ideologically biased in ways we really don't want to be reinforcing.

[xyymath]

📊 The Mathematics of Understanding Society: Statistics in Social Sciences

1. Reliability: Quantifying Consistency

Reliability ensures that statistical results are consistent across time and methods. It is measured through techniques like:

Test-Retest Reliability: Same participants, repeated measures.

Inter-Rater Reliability: Agreement between multiple observers.

Internal Consistency: Correlation of test items, often measured using Cronbach’s Alpha.

Formula for internal consistency:

where N is the number of items, cbar is the average covariance between item pairs, and v is the total item variance.

2. Validity: Ensuring Relevance

Validity measures whether data reflects the intended concept. Types include:

Construct Validity: Evaluates how well a test aligns with theoretical concepts.

Criterion Validity: Measures correlation with related, independent outcomes.

Content Validity: Assesses if the test covers the full scope of the concept.

3. Sampling Theory: Representing Populations

In statistics, sampling bridges finite data and infinite populations. Randomized methods minimize bias, while stratified or cluster sampling improves efficiency. The Central Limit Theorem (CLT) guarantees that sampling distributions approximate normality for large sample sizes.

where SE is the standard error, sigma is the population standard deviation, and n is the sample size

4. Minimizing Bias

Bias skews results, reducing reliability and validity. Statistical techniques such as blind sampling, control groups, and adjustments for confounders mitigate these effects. Weighted averages or regression adjustments help correct sampling bias.

5. Significance Testing: Inference in Social Sciences

Statistical tests like t-tests and ANOVA assess relationships in data. P-values determine significance, while effect sizes (e.g., Cohen’s dbar) quantify practical importance.

Example: For comparing group means, the test statistic t is:

where Xbar is the sample mean, s^2 the variance, and n the sample size.

6. Predictive Modeling

Social scientists employ regression models for predictions, such as linear regression:

where β0 is the intercept, β1 the slope, and ϵ the error term.

7. Ethics and Transparency

Statistical transparency is non-negotiable. Misinterpretation or manipulation (e.g., p-hacking) compromises the integrity of findings. Open data and replication strengthen credibility.

"It's easy to lie with statistics. It's hard to tell the truth without statistics"  Darrell Huff

References : (and further reading material)

source one

source two

source three

[proustiansleep]

“Among the accomplishments of the Enlightenment, one amplified considerably by industrial apparatuses, is the dubious fabrication of the atomized human individual, a magical figure separated from the world by his mastery over it. This construct is resistant to implications of Copernican traumas, as it continues to appreciate not only humanity but individual humans at the radiant center of the action. As this figure came to organize systems in its own image, its synthetic replication through micro-economics and social psychology set the stage for its cohesion into what is called, by design, the User. In practice, however, the User is not a type of creature but a category of agents; it is a position within a system without which it has no role or essential identity. The User of this layer is not the universal persona that collapses design research into reductive and manipulative psychologism, a fixed term toward which design must orient its interfaces and artifacts, but as a model that is not given in advance and must be construed by interfaces and constructed for platforms. Its position at the top of The Stack, where driving agency is situated momentarily, is slippery, fragile, and always enmeshed in its own redefinition, an uncertainty that underwrites the formation of subjectivity in general, always a manifest image cobbled in relation to available technologies of self-reflection, from cave walls at Lascaux to Quantified Self Apps.

For anything that is situated in the User layer of The Stack—he, she or it—the interplay between technical delineation and stable self-image is volatile. In that it is entwined with feedback loops up and down the layers, the position of User is obviously in some ways always “cybernetic,” but it does not bend toward any homeostasis or necessary resolution. It is a limited effector of processes bubbling up and down layer to layer. To and from its location, the User is both an initiator and an outcome. I would argue that anthropocenic humanism is not a natural reality into which we must awake from the slumber of machinic alienation; rather it is itself a symptomatic structure powered by—among other things—a gnostic mistrust of matter, narcissistic self-dramatization, and indefensibly pre-Copernican programs for design.” — Benjamin Bratton, The Stack

[sayheykid]

hi youre the first person [who doesnt like the outcome of the mlb postseason] that showed up when i searched baseball and i need ANSWERS !!! i only really recently got into mlb so im out of the loop but why do people call certain teams “evil”??? is it just trash talking or is it like a serious accusation or are people just mad over teams spending lots of money please help im so confused

hi! you picked a hell of a time to get into baseball lol. i'll do my best to explain.

i don't think any team is quantifiably evil in any real way, but it's a combination of factors. Yes, these two teams spend a lot of money (iirc they're the two most expensive teams in the league) and they've been spending money for years to be consistently pretty good. The dodgers have been in the playoffs every year for the last decade, the yankees have made it every year except one since 2017.

because these teams spend so much money, they have some of the biggest players in the game. these are names like shohei ohtani, aaron judge, juan soto, mookie betts, freddie freeman etc. good players on good teams get marketed more -> they get pushed by the league to the point where you can't escape them -> people who don't really care about those players or their teams start to resent hearing about them. i used to be ambivalent about judge, now i actively dislike him. i used to LOVE ohtani, and while he's still the only dodger i want to see succeed, i also don't want every post i see on instagram to be about him.

also, both teams are known to have pretty obnoxious fanbases, not to mention they're both extremely big market teams (more people follow these teams than teams like detroit or washington) no matter who wins, either team is going to be even more inescapable than they already are.

overall, the general sentiment is while yes, it's fun to hate these teams because they're big and successful, it's also just a very boring matchup because we've been hearing about them all year. there's no surprise, there's no excitement, you basically just know they're going to hit a bunch of home runs and we'll see highlights for the next five months. idk. there's no soul in this matchup and i wish they could both lose but also sports fans are known for being dramatic.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Steve Stewart-Williams

Published: Mar 5, 2025

Do teachers exhibit gender bias when grading students’ work? If so, in which direction does the bias go? Are teachers more likely to favor boys or favor girls?

These are the questions explored in a fascinating 2020 paper by Camille Terrier, published in the Economics of Education Review. Terrier compared children’s marks on gender-blind national exams with non-blind marks given by their teachers. The findings revealed a persistent marking bias in favor of girls. Although the effect wasn’t huge, Terrier found persuasive evidence that the bias contributes to boys falling behind in school.

Below are some excerpts from the paper. You can read the whole thing here for free.

Background

Boys are increasingly falling behind girls at school. This disadvantage has important consequences: boys who fall behind are at risk of dropping out of school, not attending college or university, and/or being unemployed. In OECD countries, 66% of women entered a university program in 2009, versus 52% of men, and this gap is increasing. In Europe, 43% of women aged 30–34 completed tertiary education in 2015, compared to 34% of men in the same age range. Because this gap has increased by 4.4 percentage points in the last ten years, there is a growing interest in identifying its roots.

Method

I use a rich student-level dataset… that follows 4490 pupils from grade 6 until grade 11. To quantify teachers’ gender biases in math and French, I exploit an essential feature of the data: it contains both blind and non-blind scores. An external grader without knowledge of student’s characteristics provides schools with blind scores. These scores are presumably free of teachers’ biases. Teachers provide non-blind scores for in-class exams… This data allows me to study the effect of teachers’ gender biases on pupils’ progress, schools attended, and course choices.

Quantifying Teacher Bias

[D]espite the commonly held belief that girls are discriminated against, teacher biases favor girls… Figs. 1 and 2 display the distributions of blind and non-blind French scores at the beginning of grade 6… [G]irls’ average score is 0.434 points higher than boys when the score is blind and 0.460 when it is non-blind.

[ Figs. 1 & 2. Test scores for each sex are standardized such that 0 represents the average score. ]

[T]he story is different in mathematics. Figs. 3 and 4 show that boys outperform girls when grades are blind, but the opposite is true when teachers assess their own pupils: girls’ average score at the beginning of grade 6 is 0.147 points lower than boys when the score is blind, but it is 0.170 points higher when the score is non-blind.

[ Figs 3 & 4. Test scores for each sex are standardized such that 0 represents the average score. ]

Knock-On Effects of Teacher Bias

This favoritism, estimated as individual teacher effects, has long-term consequences: as measured by their national evaluations three years later, male students make less progress than their female counterparts… For two classes where the achievement gap between boys and girls would be identical in 6th grade, quasi-randomly assigning a teacher who is 1 SD more biased against boys to one of the classes decreases boys’ progress in that class relative to girls by 0.123 SD in math and by 0.106 SD in French. Over the four years of middle school, teachers’ gender bias against boys accounts for 6% of boys falling behind girls in math… Moving to other outcomes, I find that having a teacher who is one SD more biased in math increases girls’ probability of selecting a scientific track in high school by 3.6 percentage points compared to boys’. Teachers’ average bias in math reduces the gender gap in choosing scientific courses by 12.5%… If teachers’ biases are mainly driven by statistical discrimination, we might expect end-of-year grades to be less biased (and the variance to be smaller) because teachers acquire information about students during the year. On the other hand, if teachers’ biases are mainly taste based, bias should not change over time.1 In that case, end-of-year in-class grades should produce similar bias variance than first-semester grades. The mean and variance of the bias are very similar at the beginning of the year and at the end, suggesting that gender favoritism is mainly taste based.

--

Abstract

I use a combination of blind and non-blind test scores to show that middle school teachers favor girls in their evaluations. This favoritism, estimated as individual teacher effects, has long-term consequences: as measured by their national evaluations three years later, male students make less progress than their female counterparts. On the other hand, girls who benefit from gender bias in math are more likely to select a science track in high school. Without teachers’ bias in favor of girls, the gender gap in choosing a science track would be 12.5% larger in favor of boys.

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That is, biased marking puts individuals on a science track who would otherwise not qualify, while removing individuals who otherwise would qualify. This is the same situation as Affirmative Action, which artificially altered the natural/unbiased class composition, and which was struck down as unconstitutional.

Some years ago, the very accurate point was made that mean intelligence between males and female is the same, so there's no reason to think girls are any less capable than boys.

Now that the education gender gap has inverted, a common excuse for doing nothing is that, "girls are just smarter than boys." That is, we've pivoted from "all disparities are discrimination" to "these disparities are not just normal but good, ackshully," and we're being gaslighted to pretend we forgot that mean intelligence is the same, even though we've known for years that sex discrimination by teachers is a real thing.

[mcginnlawfirm]

Can I handle a personal injury claim without a lawyer?

Dealing with the aftermath of an accident can be overwhelming, especially when it comes to filing a personal injury claim. You may be considering handling it on your own, but navigating the legal complexities without professional guidance can lead to costly mistakes. At McGinn Law Firm, we’re here to help you every step of the way, ensuring your rights are protected and you receive the compensation you deserve. 

Do You Qualify for a Personal Injury Claim?

Not all injuries lead to a personal injury claim. To know if your situation qualifies, it’s essential to assess the type and severity of your injury. Common injuries that often lead to claims include:

Broken bones

Traumatic brain injuries

Spinal cord injuries

Severe burns

Whiplash and other neck injuries

Soft tissue injuries

If your injury occurred due to someone else’s negligence, you likely have grounds for a valid claim.

What Compensation Can You Receive?

Once you’ve determined that you’re eligible for a claim, understanding what compensation you can pursue is key. Generally, personal injury claims fall under three types of damages:

1. Economic DamagesThese are the financial losses you can directly calculate, such as:

Medical expenses: Costs for treatment, therapy, prescriptions, and follow-ups.

Lost wages: Income lost while recovering.

Property damage: Repairs or replacements for items damaged in the incident.

2. Non-Economic DamagesThese are harder to quantify and deal with the emotional and physical toll of your injury:

Pain and suffering: Compensation for the physical pain and emotional hardship you’ve endured.

Loss of enjoyment: A reduction in your quality of life.

Emotional distress: Anxiety, depression, or other mental health impacts resulting from the injury.

3. Punitive DamagesIn certain cases, you may be entitled to punitive damages. These aren’t meant to compensate you but to punish the at-fault party for reckless or harmful behavior and prevent future incidents.

Understanding Contributory Negligence

Contributory negligence is an important factor that could affect your claim. If you were partially responsible for the accident, your compensation might be reduced based on how much of the fault lies with you. Knowing how this works will help you gauge the potential outcome of your case.

The Cost of Hiring a Personal Injury Lawyer

One of the biggest concerns people have when considering a lawyer is the cost. Fortunately, many personal injury lawyers, including McGinn Law Firm, work on a contingency fee basis. This means you don’t pay unless you win your case, which makes it easier to get the legal support you need without the financial burden of upfront fees.

Common Mistakes People Make When Filing a Claim Alone

If you choose to handle the claim by yourself, there are several pitfalls to watch out for:

Admitting fault: Saying something that implies you were at fault can reduce your chances of getting compensation.

Accepting a low offer: Insurance companies may offer a settlement that’s far below what you deserve, hoping you’ll take it quickly.

Poor documentation: Failing to keep thorough records of your injuries or losses can hurt your case.

Avoiding these mistakes is essential for a successful claim.

Pros and Cons of Handling Your Claim vs. Hiring an Attorney

When deciding whether to represent yourself or hire an attorney, here’s a look at both sides:

Advantages of Self-Representation

Cost savings: You won’t have to pay legal fees upfront.

Control: You have full control over your case and negotiations.

Disadvantages of Self-Representation

Limited legal knowledge: The legal process can be complicated, and unfamiliarity with laws and procedures may leave you at a disadvantage.

Weaker negotiation skills: Insurance companies often have skilled negotiators who may pressure you into accepting less than you deserve.

Advantages of Hiring an Attorney

Expertise: An experienced lawyer knows how to build a strong case and navigate the legal system.

Stronger negotiation: Attorneys are skilled at handling insurance companies and pushing for fair settlements.

Peace of mind: You can focus on recovery while your attorney takes care of the legal work.

Mistakes to Avoid if You Handle the Claim Alone

If you’re handling your own claim, take care to:

Gather solid evidence: Take photos, gather witness statements, and keep detailed medical records.

Document your pain: Keep a journal tracking how your injury affects your daily life.

Follow medical advice: Make sure you attend all follow-up appointments and stick to your treatment plan.

Negotiating with Insurance Companies

When negotiating with insurance companies, remember they aim to settle for as little as possible. Stay calm, stick to the facts, and don’t rush to accept the first offer. Be prepared to counter offers until you feel the amount is fair.

How a Personal Injury Can Impact Your Life

A personal injury can affect more than just your physical health. It might disrupt your daily routine, strain your relationships, and even cause emotional challenges. Recognizing this broader impact is essential when determining the compensation you deserve.

While it’s possible to handle a personal injury claim on your own, having professional support can simplify the process and lead to better outcomes. If you’re unsure where to start, reach out to McGinn Law Firm. We can help you assess your case and decide whether legal representation is the right move for you.