jenna newman phd
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jennanewman.bsky.social
jenna newman phd
@jennanewman.bsky.social
2.1K followers 860 following 320 posts
fed govt: public health, public safety. deep breaths, long horizons.

+ science comms + strategic comms + public sociology
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jennanewman.bsky.social
💔
“The world should know her name. Sarah Beckstrom, 20 West Virginia National Guard On November 26th, while standing her post near the White House, Sarah was attacked without warning. She wasn't in a confrontation. She wasn't seeking danger. She was simply doing her job with quiet integrity and the kind of heart you can't teach. She fought through the night. But on November 27th, she passed away. An innocent young woman - a daughter, a teammate, a friend - taken far too soon by senseless violence. To her family: we are holding you close. To her fellow Soldiers: we grieve with you. To Sarah: we honor your life, your service, and your love. Share her name. Share her story. #Military #USArmy” SPC Sarah Beckstrom
November 28, 2025 at 5:20 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
thankful.
Pier pond sound sky blue Marsh pier sound clouds sun sky blue
November 27, 2025 at 6:40 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
TDB:

"If empathy has now become a distasteful personal failing; if surveillance capitalism has become the default shrugged-off business practice; if the environmental impacts of AI are waved away….”
Ms. Borsook predicted that when the tech world had amassed sufficient money and power, it would start imposing its beliefs on everyone outside the valley. "If empathy has now become a distasteful personal failing; if surveillance capitalism has become the default shrugged-off business practice; if the environmental impacts of A.I. are waved away: then we are alas living in the tech-driven culture I saw headed our way 30 years ago," Ms. Borsook said in an interview. "It's terrible that I was right." Her prescience did her no favors. "Cyberselfish," published in 2000, was such a setback to her career that she refers to it as "T.D.B." - That Damn Book. She never wrote another. She spent years as an Airbnb superhost in exchange for free rent. Now, at 71 and in poor health, she lives a precarious life in the East Bay of San Francisco, dependent on a Go Fund Me that friends set up.
November 27, 2025 at 1:14 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
“The toupee of ‘love feathers’…

For us, it would be a bit like sitting in the front row of a theater & trying to look up while wearing a baseball cap”🧪
“The toupee of "love feathers" of male golden and Lady Amherst's pheasants compromised their binocular vision- especially their ability to look above them-by an average of 41% more than that of their female counterparts. For us, it would be a bit like sitting in the front row of a theater and trying to look up while wearing a baseball cap. When the birds moult in September and October, their vision improves because of shedding of the cranial ornaments. In addition to being the first known case of sex-based vision difference in birds, the team says, the find represents the first known case of a bird's visual field changing as the year progresses.”
November 26, 2025 at 3:57 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
screenshot for those who may see this after she chill pills
[V3cam] Kīlauea volcano, Hawaii (south Halemaʻumaʻu crater)
November 26, 2025 at 3:37 AM
jennanewman.bsky.social
Also. Great explanation of how the training process produced a ChatGPT model that was “absurdly sycophantic, lavishing [users] with unearned flattery & telling them they were geniuses…

Clearly, users liked flattery too much.”🧪
“The A/B testers had liked HH, but in the wild, OpenAl's most vocal users hated it. Right away, they complained that ChatGPT had become absurdly sycophantic, lavishing them with unearned flattery and telling them they were geniuses. When one user mockingly asked whether a "soggy cereal cafe" was a good business idea, the chatbot replied that it "has potential." By Sunday, the company decided to spike the HH update and revert to a version released in late March, called GG. It was an embarrassing reputational stumble. On that Monday, the teams that work on ChatGPT gathered in an impromptu war room in OpenAI's Mission Bay headquarters in San Francisco to figure out what went wrong. "We need to solve it frickin' quickly," Mr. Turley said he recalled thinking. Various teams examined the ingredients of HH and discovered the culprit: In training the model, they had weighted too heavily the ChatGPT exchanges that users liked. Clearly, users liked flattery too much.” “OpenAl explained what happened in public blog posts, noting that users signaled their preferences with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to the chatbot's responses. Another contributing factor, according to four employees at the company, was that OpenAl had also relied on an automated conversation analysis tool to assess whether people liked their communication with the chatbot. But what the tool marked as making users happy was sometimes problematic, such as when the chatbot expressed emotional closeness. The company's main takeaway from the HH incident was that it urgently needed tests for sycophancy; work on such evaluations was already underway but needed to be accelerated. To some A.I. experts, it was astounding that OpenAI did not already have this test. An OpenAI competitor, Anthropic, the maker of Claude, had developed an evaluation for sycophancy in 2022.”
November 23, 2025 at 8:43 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
Altman:“‘for a v small % of users in mentally fragile states there can be serious problems.’
But…OpenAI may be understating the risk. Some of the ppl most vlnrble to the chatbot's unceasing validation…were those prone to delusional thinking, which studies have suggested cld incl 5–15% of the pop”🧪🛟
'ChatGPT Can Make Mistakes' Throughout this spring and summer, ChatGPT acted as a yes-man echo chamber for some people. They came back daily, for many hours a day, with devastating consequences. A California teenager named Adam Raine had signed up for ChatGPT in 2024 to help with schoolwork. In March, he began talking with it about suicide. The chatbot periodically suggested calling a crisis hotline but also discouraged him from sharing his intentions with his family. In its final messages before Adam took his life in April, the chatbot offered instructions for how to tie a noose. Making It Safer With the M.I.T. study, the sycophancy update debacle and reports about users' troubling conversations online and in emails to the company, OpenAI started to put the puzzle pieces together. One conclusion that OpenAI came to, as Mr. Altman put it on X, was that "for a very small percentage of users in mentally fragile states there can be serious problems." But mental health professionals interviewed by The Times say OpenAI may be understating the risk. Some of the people most vulnerable to the chatbot's unceasing validation, they say, were those prone to delusional thinking, which studies have suggested could include 5 to 15 percent of the population.
November 23, 2025 at 7:27 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
“‘If the results are bad & we don't publish & they leak,’ this [Meta] employee wrote, according to the brief, ‘is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research & knowing cigs were bad & then keeping that info to themselves?’"🧪🛟
In late 2019, according to the brief, Meta designed a "deactivation study," which found that users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week showed lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Meta halted the study and did not publicly disclose the results, stating that the research study was biased by the "existing media narratives around the company." (A Meta spokesperson told TIME that the study was initially conceived as a pair of one-weeks pilots, and researchers declined to continue it because it found that the only reductions in feelings of depression, anxiety, and loneliness were among people who already believed Facebook was bad for them.) At least one Meta employee was uncomfortable with the implications of this decision: "If the results are bad and we don't publish and they leak," this employee wrote, according to the brief, "is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves?" Indeed, in December 2020, when the Senate Judiciary Committee asked the company in a set of written questions whether it was "able to determine whether increased use of its platform among teenage girls has any correlation with increased signs of depression" and "increased signs of anxiety," the company offered only a one-word answer: "No." To the plaintiffs in the case, the implication is clear: "The company never publicly disclosed the results of its deactivation study. Instead, Meta lied to Congress about what it knew."
November 23, 2025 at 5:34 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
Meta’s 2020 research project, Project Mercury, “gauge[d] the effect of ‘deactivating’ Facebook & Instagram, according to Meta docs obtained via discovery…’ppl who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness & social comparison,’ internal docs said.”🧪
In a 2020 research project code-named "Project Mercury," Meta scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of "deactivating" Facebook and Instagram, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery. To the company's disappointment, "people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison," internal documents said. Rather than publishing those findings or pursuing additional research, the filing READ states, Meta called off further work an oN APP internally declared that the negative study findings were tainted by the "existing media narrative" around the company.
November 23, 2025 at 5:10 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
“He used the term ‘garbage in, garbage out’…The rater avoids using generative AI &has also ‘advised every family member &friend of mine to not buy newer phones that have AI integrated in them, to resist auto updates if possible that add AI integration, & to not tell AI anything personal’, he said.”🧪
"I asked it about the history of the Palestinian people, and it wouldn't give me an answer no matter how I rephrased the question," recalled this worker, requesting anonymity, having signed a nondisclosure agreement. "When I asked it about the history of Israel, it had no problems giving me a very extensive rundown. We reported it, but nobody seemed to care at Google." When asked specifically about the situation the rater described, Google did not issue a statement. For this Google worker, the biggest concern with Al training is the feedback given to AI models by raters like him. "After having seen how bad the data is that goes into supposedly training the model, I knew there was absolutely no way it could ever be trained correctly like that," he said. He used the term "garbage in, garbage out" ', a principle in computer programming which explains that if you feed bad or incomplete data into a technical system, then the output would also have the same flaws. The rater avoids using generative Al and has also "advised every family member and friend of mine to not buy newer phones that have Al integrated in them, to resist automatic updates if possible that add AI integration, and to not tell Al anything personal", he said. theguardian.com
November 23, 2025 at 12:58 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
this.
Ocasio-Cortez speaks as then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) listens during a news conference in 2021 at the Capitol. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
November 23, 2025 at 12:27 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
Job security:
Federal government employee > street performer, or poet
"Listen, we KNOW your dream is to be a federal government employee, were just asking you to consider a career with more job security, like a street performer, or a poet." WRITER & ARTIST TERESA BURNS PARKHURST MAD
November 23, 2025 at 2:41 AM
jennanewman.bsky.social
“Every major epidemic we've had recently is a virus or from a family of viruses we’ve known about for some time prior &that has likely been circulating in some form for millennia….So if we got better at just diagnosing every case that came into the clinic, we would be prepared for every epidemic.”🧪🛟
"People were devastated," says Sabeti, "and panicked. So I was reeling at that point" — in part, she says, because so much of this suffering was avoidable. "Every major epidemic we've had recently is a virus or from a family of viruses we ve known about for some time prior and that has likely been circulating in some form for millennia," explains Sabeti. "So if we got better at just diagnosing every case that came into the clinic, we would be prepared for every epidemic." Sabeti and Happi considered an inspiring possibility: What if the active monitoring of viruses could happen on the ground in Africa by Africans? "We really thought, 'OK, now it is time to empower the local health care workers, to detect these pathogens that are circulating,' " says Happi. In other words, to enable them to "do things by themselves."
November 23, 2025 at 1:20 AM
jennanewman.bsky.social
“Our case, together with anecdotal accounts in the media, support that preferential immersion into interactions with Al chatbots at the exclusion of human interaction may be a risk factor or ‘red flag’ for emergent Al-associated psychosis.”

Also. That “bullshit” cite—scientific unicorn spotting 🧪
“Our case, together with anecdotal accounts in the media, support that preferential immersion into interactions with Al chatbots at the exclusion of human interaction may be a risk factor or "red flag" for emergent Al-associated psychosis. Chatbots built on LLMs generate predictive text that makes sense, seems plausible, replicates human interaction, and mirrors the content and interaction style of the user without being designed for accuracy. It is well known that chatbots can produce bad advice, bogus citations, and grossly inaccurate responses and frank misinformation tha some have labeled "hallucinations"15 or 'bullshit."18 Despite these known foibles, experiments have demonstrated that users tend to overestimate the accuracy of LLM responses'® and that trust in LLMs is predicted by attributions of intelligence rather than anthropomorphism.20 Additionally, the proclivity for Al engagement is associated with lower literacy or objective knowledge about Al as well as the tendency to "perceive Al as magical and experience feelings of awe" when witnessing Al's ability to execute tasks."? Such findings suggest that deification-that is, regarding Al chatbots as a kind of superhuman intelligence or god-like entity -might be another risk factor for Al-associated psychosis.”
November 22, 2025 at 6:47 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
“Crum is a psychologist who studies s’thing deceptively simple. She examines how beliefs shape physiology. Not in the loose mystical way that phrase sometimes gets tossed around. Her work cuts closer to the bone. The body is not a passive machine. It responds to expectation. It listens to mindset.”🧪
“Crum is a psychologist who studies something deceptively simple. She examines how beliefs shape physiology. Not in the loose mystical way that phrase sometimes gets tossed around. Her work cuts closer to the bone. The body is not a passive machine. It responds to expectation. It listens to mindset. She has built a career showing that what we think about stress, food, exercise, illness and treatment can tilt the body's response in measurable ways. Her early work came out of a moment most of us would ignore. While studying stress at Yale she realized that stress itself was not always the enemy. The fear of stress could be worse. The belief that stress is damaging primes the body to show more harmful patterns. The belief that stress can sharpen performance nudges the system toward resilience. Not wishful thinking. Observable biology. Shifts in cortisol. Changes in blood vessel constriction. A different hormonal conversation between mind and body.”
November 21, 2025 at 2:56 AM
jennanewman.bsky.social
“‘Amid the fentanyl era, short-term treatment is simply not enough,’ said @drscotthadland.bsky.social “Clinicians, insurers, &health systms should do everything possible to help young ppl continue medication for at least a year or longer. This is a key step toward reducing youth overdose deaths’”🧪🛟
“The study analyzed data on 11,649 youth aged 13-26 who initiated buprenorphine in Massachusetts between 2014 and 2020. Using the Massachusetts Public Health Data Warehouse - a comprehensive statewide dataset linking medical, pharmacy, and mortality records - the team identified four patterns of medication use: high adherence for 12 months (24%), low adherence for 12 months (28%), discontinuation after 3-9 months (16%), and discontinuation in under 3 months (33%). Compared to youth with high adherence for 12 months, those who stopped within 3-9 months had an 82% higher risk of opioid overdose, while those who stopped in under 3 months had a 76% higher risk. Youth who were on medication for 12 months but had low adherence had a 46% higher risk.“
November 18, 2025 at 4:57 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
“Enrollment in majors dominated by men declines…The shift out of [STEM] is consistent w/students being willing to accept a compensating differential [anticipated safety] for lower pay. The shift out of arts implies that students are also willing to give up creative pursuits for anticipated safety.”🧪
Figure 2: Prevalence of Incidents by Major Notes: This figure shows the count of ASMD incidents by major in the institution x major analysis sample.
November 16, 2025 at 1:28 AM
jennanewman.bsky.social
RIP Kai Erikson
“The experience of [collective] trauma, at its worst, can mean not only a loss of confidence in the self, but a loss of confidence in the surrounding tissue of family &community, in the structures of…govt, in the larger logics by which humankind lives, in the ways of nature itself…”🧪
“In summary, then, the hardest earned and most fragile accomplishment of childhood, basic trust, can be damaged beyond repair by trauma. Human beings are surrounded by layers of trust, radiating out in concentric circles like the ripples in a pond. The experience of trauma, at its worst, can mean not only a loss of confidence in the self, but a loss of confidence in the surrounding tissue of family and com-munity, in the structures of human government, in the larger logics by which humankind lives, in the ways of nature itself…” Notes on Trauma and Community / Kai Erikson (1991) https://www.jstor.org/stable/26303923 By collective trauma, on the other hand, I mean a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality. The collective trauma works its way slowly and even insidiously into the awareness of those who suffer from it, so it does not have the quality of suddenness normally associated with "trauma." But it is a form of shock all the same, a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective source of support and that an important part of the self has disappeared. ... "I" continue to exist, though damaged and maybe even permanently changed. "You" continue to exist, though distant and hard to relate to. But "we" no longer exist as a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger communal body. . . . (Erikson 1976, 154)” Notes on Trauma and Community / Kai Erikson (1991) https://www.jstor.org/stable/26303923
November 14, 2025 at 2:49 AM
jennanewman.bsky.social
❤️OBX❤️ (and💔)

“Some of Pullen’s photographs are less about the trauma of the moment than about the sheer craziness of it, an almost giddy dismantling of what we probably should never have considered secure. Others manage to capture the improbable & stern beauty of catastrophe. And some do both.”
A local relaxes in an old hot tub, which was uncovered during Hurricane Joaquin, at the Lighthouse View Motel, in Buxton, on October 5, 2015. Sand from the island partially covers up the informational sign in Coquina Beach, on November 23, 2024. A truck is covered by sand, following surges from a winter storm in Rodanthe, on May 11, 2022. A powerful winter storm causes the ocean to surge into the Outer Banks Motel, in Buxton, on December 8, 2014.
November 13, 2025 at 11:04 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
“The sharp rise in younger women wanting to leave the US has created a large gender gap btwn them & their male counterparts.

Today’s 21-percentage-point gap btwn younger men (19%) & women (40%) wanting to leave the US is the widest Gallup has recorded on this trend.”🧪
Two in Five Younger Women Want to Leave U.S. Permanently Ideally, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move PERMANENTLY to another country, or would you prefer to continue living in this country? Graph (200&-2025): % Would like to move permanently to another country (US adults, Women 15-44) Graph (200&-2025): % Would like to move permanently to another country (US adults, Men 15-44, Women 45+, Men 45+) Desire to Migrate Rises Among Both Single and Married Younger Women in the U.S. Ideally, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move PERMANENTLY to another country, or would you prefer to continue living in this country? Graph: (2008-2025): % Would like to move permanently to another country (among women 18-44) — Married, Single/Never been married
November 13, 2025 at 10:49 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
the simple fact that *this many* of you (us) have *THIS MANY* books that changed you (us) —

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
James Baldwin, 1963 (Life Mag)
Beneath the spectacular subhead "Doom and glory of knowing who you are," Baldwin — who had read his way from Harlem to literary celebrity — considers the unparalleled empathic gift of reading: You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/05/24/james-baldwin-life-magazine-1963/
November 12, 2025 at 3:05 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
@pgourevitch.bsky.social ‘s *We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda*

Guttingly gorgeous. Spawned a dissertation and an irreparably changed heart.
*We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda* / Philip Gourevitch
November 12, 2025 at 2:49 AM
jennanewman.bsky.social
More on 2024 PIT Count results on Veterans experiencing homelessness
🧪🛟

www.huduser.gov/portal/sites...
One in every three individuals experiencing homelessness reported having experienced chronic patterns of homelessness, or 152,585 people. This is the highest number of individuals experiencing chronic patterns of homelessness counted in the PIT. Individuals experiencing chronic patterns of homelessness have increased by 27 percent since data was first collected in 2007. Sixty-five percent of all individuals experiencing chronic patterns of homelessness, or more than 99,500 people, were counted in unsheltered locations. This is also the highest number recorded since data collection began. The national inventory of beds for people currently experiencing homelessness increased by 13 percent between 2023 and 2024. This increase was driven by increases in emergency shelter beds, which increased by 18 percent between 2023 and 2024 and have doubled since 2007. Transitional housing, meanwhile, has steadily decreased over time - declining by 4 percent between 2023 and 2024 and by 60 percent since 2007. However, this reduction since 2007 does not necessarily mean that transitional housing beds were completely removed from the national inventory. Often transitional housing programs realize they function more like emergency shelter and convert their project type to align better with the way they actually function. In other cases, transitional housing programs converted to permanent housing projects, including transition-in-place and rapid rehousing….
November 11, 2025 at 6:21 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
And then…just now, just so happened to read this — via library book, of course: *Hello Beautiful* @annnapolitano.bsky.social
“THE LOZANO LIBRARY OVERLOOKED A THREE-WAY INTERSECtion in the center of Pilsen. Sylvie loved every inch of the spacious library and the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that showed whatever light and weather the city had to offer. She loved how the library welcomed everyone and how the librarians dutifully answered every question presented to them, no matter how arcane or ridiculous.”
November 9, 2025 at 5:23 PM
jennanewman.bsky.social
“Critical gains in reducing firearm-related harm are now in jeopardy.
Recent fed admin actions &funding withdrawals threaten to dismantle the foundational infrastructure that undergirds public safety…the US faces a grave risk of backsliding into patterns of preventable violence &inequitable harms”🧪🛟
“Critical gains in reducing firearm-related harm are now in jeopardy. Recent federal administrative actions and funding withdrawals threaten to dismantle the foundational infrastructure that undergirds public safety in the United States. These actions encompass the termination of crucial research funding, the curtailment of gun law enforcement, and possible repeal of evidence-informed firearm regulations, all of which pose a direct risk to the public's collective safety and are likely to undermine the progress achieved in recent years. Absent continued intervention, the United States faces a grave risk of backsliding into patterns of preventable violence and inequitable harms.” “The implications of this reversal are far reaching. Firearm violence, including suicide, remains the leading cause of death among children and adolescents and contributes significantly to racial, geographic, and socioeconomic health disparities. .12 Exposure to firearm violence-whether direct, witnessed, or anticipated—is linked to psychological distress, chronic illness, functional impairment, and premature mortality. 13 These harms disproportionately affect communities of color, and firearm suicide places a particularly heavy burden on residents of rural areas.14 The dismantling of firearm violence prevention systems jeopardizes the capacity of communities across the United States to respond effectively to these risks, and consequently the likelihood of preventable firearm-related harm will almost certainly rise.”
November 9, 2025 at 2:21 PM