cf sociogenic

Obesity may have a Social (Sociogenic) component. A study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition finds that how much tweens and teens eat can be influenced by how much their friends weigh... Lead researcher and clinical psychologist Sarah Jeanne Salvy says her research demonstrates an eye-opening social theory: obesity can be contagious. (more)

Geoffrey Litt: Dynamic documents // LLMs + end-user programming. Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software. We recently published an essay about Potluck, a research project I worked on together with Max Schoening, Paul Shen, and Paul Sonnentag at Ink and Switch. (more)

Ink and Switch: Dispatch 001: On Embark and Lude. As of today we have three active research tracks: local first software, programmable ink, and malleable software. We’re about a dozen researchers around the world (more)

The Power of Positive People. Are you spending time with the right people for your health and happiness? While many of us focus primarily on diet and exercise to achieve better health, science suggests that our well-being also is influenced by the company we keep. (sociogenic) (more)

Teri Kanefield is an American attorney, award-winning author,[1][2] and social media commentator on legal matters of public interest. A graduate of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, she specialized for twelve years in representing indigent clients on appeal from adverse rulings (a focus she often brings to her legal commentary). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teri_Kanefield

Teri Kanefield: The Anti-Democratic Opposition: The opposition can be blunted and, with constant work, can be prevented from weakening or toppling the democratic institutions, but anti-democratic opposition can never be eliminated because (1) too many people have what political psychologists call an anti-democratic personality and (2) once you eliminate the opposition, you cease to be a democracy because eliminating the opposition cannot be done using democratic means. (more)

see conservative

John Birmingham: What if they had a Culture War and Tay Tay didn't turn up? She didn’t have to endorse Joe Biden to earn her place in Fox News’ 24/7 Two Minutes of Hate. She just had to be Taylor Swift. (more)

Teri Kanefield: Things To Do. So, how do we strengthen democracy? The cure for what ails us is more democracy, or what Obama calls “citizenship” (more)

Americans increasingly in favor of an authoritarian crackdown, according to new poll. An alarming number of Americans on both sides of the political spectrum say they favor abandoning democracy in favor of authoritarianism, violence, and secession, according to a poll of 2,008 Americans conducted this summer by Project Home Fire. (more)

Robert Reich: Mainstream media (MSM) is playing into Donald Trump’s neo-fascist hands. I’m sticking with democracy and the Guardian. The reason I write a column for the Guardian is the same reason I read it daily: I trust it. (more)

Opinion | Enough with all the fatalism about a Donald Trump dictatorship. Are you afraid of a Donald Trump dictatorship? Well, know this: The only thing you have to fear is fear of Tyrannus Trumpus itself. (more)

Zeynep Tufekci: A Strongman President? These Voters Crave It. For her and many others, she said, his most important quality was strength: He had the fortitude to keep the country safe, avoid new wars and ensure the economy hummed along... Sharp readily conceded that not everything Donald Trump said was great, but she saw that as part of the right personality to be president. “You gotta be a little crazy, maybe, to make sure other countries respect and fear us,” she said (more)

The best predictor of whether someone is a Donald Trump supporter is how Authoritarian they are. 49 percent of likely Republican primary voters I surveyed score in the top quarter of the authoritarian scale—more than twice as many as Democratic voters. My poll asked a set of four simple survey questions that political scientists have employed since 1992 to measure inclination toward authoritarianism. These questions pertain to child-rearing: whether it is more important for the voter to have a child who is respectful or independent; obedient or self-reliant; well-behaved or considerate; and well-mannered or curious. Respondents who pick the first option in each of these questions are strongly authoritarian. (They should poll teachers about their students this way.) Take activated authoritarians from across the partisan spectrum and the growing cadre of threatened (scared of Terrorism) non-authoritarians, then add them to the base of Republican general election voters, and the potential electoral path to a Trump presidency becomes clearer.

The Beginning of the End of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’? Over the past three decades, the Gender and Identity Development Service at the Tavistock Clinic in London has seen thousands of British children for gender dysphoria, with a British minister noting a more than 4,000 percent increase of referrals for girls alone in the last decade. But on Thursday, Britain’s National Health Service announced that it was closing down Tavistock for good—and, in effect, rebuking the common American medical approach known as “gender-affirming care” for treating children with gender dysphoria. (more)

The fight-or-flight or the fight-flight-freeze-or-fawn[1] (also called hyperarousal or the acute stress response) is a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response (more)

Geoffrey Litt, Max Schoening, Paul Shen, Paul Sonnentag (of Ink and Switch) on Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software. There’s a certain joy to scribbling down a note, whether in a physical notebook or a digital notebook app. We can write down information in whatever messy format we want, with no formal ceremony. (more)

Environments that make it easy for anyone to learn to code and build/customize apps for themselves (cf situated software, spreadsheet)

cooking how-to book; see also recipe, recipe database