the Socio-Economic and

Stratifying the Digital Divide: Analysis of Socio-Economic Influences on Internet Performance

arXiv:2605.30809v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite numerous technological advancements, the digital divide remains a pressing issue affecting millions worldwide. We present a framework for diagnosing internet inequality at the Census Block Group level by pairing approximately 170 million crowdsourced Ookla speed tests (2021--2025) with U.S. Census demographics across six metropolitan regions. After quantifying and correcting for sampling bias, we use Random Forest regression with...

Synthetic Personalities: How Well Can LLMs Mimic Individual Respondents Using Socio-Economic Microdata?

arXiv:2606.04592v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based digital twins promise to scale and accelerate market research, but most published twins are either coarse persona bots conditioned on a few demographic questions or detailed individual-level twins built on purpose-collected surveys and interview transcripts. Neither setup speaks to the operationally most relevant case for marketing practice: building detailed individual twins from the pre-existing heterogeneous panel data that firms...

Towards a holistic understanding of Selection Bias for Causal Effect Identification

Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Selection bias is pervasive in observational studies. For example, large scale biobanks data can exhibit ``healthy volunteer bias'' when respondents are healthier and of higher socio-economic status than the population they are meant to represent. Recovering causal effects from such sub-population is an important problem in causal inference, as estimating average treatment effects (ATE) from selected populations can result in a severely biased estimate...

Towards a holistic understanding of Selection Bias for Causal Effect Identification

arXiv:2605.13430v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Selection bias is pervasive in observational studies. For example, large scale biobanks data can exhibit ``healthy volunteer bias'' when respondents are healthier and of higher socio-economic status than the population they are meant to represent. Recovering causal effects from such sub-population is an important problem in causal inference, as estimating average treatment effects (ATE) from selected populations can result in a...

The OAD Flagship Ecosystem

arXiv:2606.03966v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The International Astronomical Union's Office of Astronomy for Development (IAU OAD) uses astronomy as a tool to address societal challenges and contribute to sustainable development. Building on more than a decade of project funding and implementation, the OAD has developed a portfolio of flagship projects that represent tested and scalable applications of Astronomy for Development across thematic areas including socio-economic development,...

River wildlife moves freely once dams are removed, but so too can invasive species

River wildlife moves freely once dams are removed, but so too can invasive species Gaby Clark Scientific Editor Andrew Zinin Lead Editor Almost a quarter of all freshwater species are threatened with extinction. The removal of human-made barriers from rivers, such as dams and weirs, is a popular way to restore water flow and sediment transport to its natural state and allow fish and other aquatic wildlife to move more freely. There are more than 1.2 million barriers in European rivers.

28L women get Rs 3,000 each under Bengal's Annapurna Yojana on day 1

Over 28 lakh women across the state have received Rs 3,000 each under the state’s Annapurna Yojana as the process of direct benefit transfer (DBT) to the beneficiaries’ accounts kicked off on Wednesday. Chief minister Suvendu Adhikari, who officially switched on the benefit transfer at Nabanna, said, “In the last three days, we have received and verified 28,25,769 enrolments. We have transferred Rs 3,000 to the bank accounts of these beneficiaries.”

Climate change: How do heatwaves affect pregnancies across Europe?

As heatwaves become more frequent and intense, pregnant people face significant consequences. But are they all equally at risk? Europe experienced an "unprecedented and historic" heatwave in the last week of May, with temperatures across parts of the continent reaching around 10°C to 15°C above the average for this time of the year.

Pakistan: Male contraception still taboo despite looming demographic crisis

Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight

This week I want to try something a little different. Rather than taking apart a particular fantasy military system, I thought I might try to lay out a more general sense of how military systems tend to map on to societies, both because such general historical frameworks are handy for thinking about the past, but also because they make useful rules of thumb for imagining fantastical societies. So essentially here we are asking: how do societies end up with the sort of armies they have?