October 17, 2020 — We are living in uneasy times. If you want to quantify that, check out the Hedonometer at the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont. According to their analyses, Twitter was a pretty happy place before 2020. Peter Dodds and colleagues on the Hedonometer project wrote in 2015 that human language has a “universal […]
July 4, 2020 — Change comes in increments. Because humans are wired for bias, the bias against people at higher weights is especially hard to escape. But we take heart from explicit signs of such bias erased. Small victories count, too. This week, one such victory came when Bing took down an appalling entry for childhood obesity, filled with […]
November 9, 2014 — Twitter provided concise evidence at ObesityWeek 2014 that obesity affects curiosity in a bad way. We have been thinking for some time about how obesity suppresses curiosity. The same studies seem to get repeated over and over again without really proving anything. Associations between risk factors become so familiar that people start believing a cause and effect […]
