#Difference Between

[humairahhh]

Pinterest is the girls safe place where everything is just cute and polite.

Tumblr is the mens safe place where they say they want to fuck you and pound that pussy until you're bred.

See the difference?

[callmespikey]

Recently, I have been reading a lot of Kevin Lordi's analysis guide of each episode of Ed, Edd n Eddy, and I must say it has been enlightening.

Some of you may be familiar with the character Kevin voiced by actress Kathleen Barr.

It might come as a surprise to some that I am originally from Norway. Interestingly, in the Norwegian dubbed version, Kevin's name was not used in show. This could be due to either his name being unpopular or was uncommon among Norwegian viewers. Instead they opted for the most common Norwegian name at the time "Kjetil," which means "kettle," "cauldron," or "helmet" in Norwegian.

I am both amused by the fact that my name coincides with a character's in a way that bears my own name. Jep that’s right my name is also Kjetil.

[jcmarchi]

Researchers study differences in attitudes toward Covid-19 vaccines between women and men in Africa

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/researchers-study-differences-in-attitudes-toward-covid-19-vaccines-between-women-and-men-in-africa/

Researchers study differences in attitudes toward Covid-19 vaccines between women and men in Africa

While many studies over the past several years have examined people’s access to and attitudes toward Covid-19 vaccines, few studies in sub-Saharan Africa have looked at whether there were differences in vaccination rates and intention between men and women. In a new study appearing in the journal Frontiers in Global Women’s Health, researchers found that while women and men self-reported similar Covid-19 vaccination rates in 2022, unvaccinated men expressed more intention to get vaccinated than unvaccinated women.

Women tend to have better health-seeking behaviors than men overall. However, most studies relating to Covid-19 vaccination have found that intention has been lower among women. “We wondered whether this would hold true at the uptake level,” says Rawlance Ndejjo, a leader of the new study and an assistant lecturer in the Department of Disease Control and Environmental Health at Makerere University.

The comparable vaccination rates between men and women in the study is “a good thing to see,” adds Lula Chen, research director at MIT Governance Lab (GOV/LAB) and a co-author of the new study. “There wasn’t anything gendered about how [the vaccine] was being advertised or who was actually getting access to it.”

Women’s lower intention to vaccinate seemed to be driven by concerns about vaccine safety, suggesting that providing factual information about vaccine safety from trusted sources, like the Ministry of Health, could increase uptake.

The work is a collaboration between scholars from the MIT GOV/LAB, Makerere University’s School of Public Health in Uganda, University of Kinshasa’s School of Public Health in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), University of Ibadan’s College of Medicine in Nigeria, and Cheikh Anta Diop University in Senegal. 

Studying vaccine availability and uptake in sub-Saharan Africa

The authors’ collaboration began in 2021 with research into Covid-19 vaccination rates, people’s willingness to get vaccinated, and how people’s trust in different authorities shaped attitudes toward vaccines in Uganda, the DRC, Senegal, and Nigeria. A survey in Uganda found that people who received information about Covid-19 from health workers were more likely to be vaccinated, stressing the important role people who work in the health-care system can play in vaccination efforts.

Work from other scientists has found that women were less likely to accept Covid-19 vaccines than men, and that in low- and middle-income countries, women also may be less likely to get vaccinated against Covid-19 and less likely to intend to get vaccinated, possibly due to factors including lower levels of education, work obligations, and domestic care obligations.

Previous studies in sub-Saharan Africa that focused on differences between men and women with intention and willingness to vaccinate were inconclusive, Ndejjo says. “You would hardly find actual studies on uptake of the vaccines,” he adds. For the new paper, the researchers aimed to dig into uptake.

People who trust the government and health officials were more likely to get vaccinated

The researchers relied on phone survey data collected from adults in the four countries between March and July 2022. The surveys asked people about whether they’d been vaccinated and whether those who were unvaccinated intended to get vaccinated, as well as their attitudes toward Covid-19, their trust in different authorities, demographic information, and more.

Overall, 48.5 percent of men said they had been vaccinated, compared to 47.9 percent of women. Trust in authorities seemed to play a role in people’s decision to vaccinate — receiving information from health workers about Covid-19 and higher trust in the Ministry of Health were both correlated with getting vaccinated for men, whereas higher trust in the government was correlated with vaccine uptake in women.

Lower interest in vaccines among women seemed related to safety concerns

A smaller percentage of unvaccinated women (54 percent) said they intended to get vaccinated, compared to 63.4 percent of men. More unvaccinated women said they had concerns about the vaccine’s safety than unvaccinated men, which could be driving their lower intention.

The researchers also found that unvaccinated women and men over 40 had similar levels of intention to get vaccinated — lower intention in women under 40 may have driven the difference between men and women. Younger women could have concerns about vaccines related to pregnancy, Chen says. If this is the case, the research suggests that officials need to provide additional reassurance to pregnant people about vaccine safety, she adds.

Trust in authorities also contributed to people’s intention to vaccinate. Trust in the Ministry of Health was tied to higher intention to vaccinate for both men and women. Men with more trust in the World Health Organization were also more likely to intend to vaccinate.

“There’s a need to deal with a lot of the myths and misconceptions that exist,” Ndejjo says, as well as ensure that people’s concerns related to vaccine safety and effectiveness are addressed. Officials need “to work with trusted sources of information to bridge some of the gaps that we observe,” he adds. People need to be supported in their decision-making so they can make the best decisions for their health.

“This research highlights linkages between citizen trust in government, their willingness to get vaccines, and, importantly, the differences between men and women on this issue — differences that policymakers will need to understand in order to design more targeted, gender-specific public health interventions,” says study co-author Lily L. Tsai, who is MIT GOV/LAB’s director and founder and the Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT.

This project was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

[brother-hermes]

DEMYSTIFYING KABBALAH

I’m sure a lot of you have run into a lot of backlash online whenever you begin studying the ancient art of Kabbalah. The vast majority of the confusion comes from how we use the term in our modern minds. Sprinkle in several different schools of thought with wildly different takes and it’s no wonder we can’t seem to reach a conclusion. Let’s journey through the various disciplines under the blanket term Kabbalah a bit and clear it a bit.

[greenpanda-basicfakewitch]

Pagan. Witch. Wiccan...whats the difference?

[I can't make heads or tales with this, so take this as you will I did the best I could to make it simple for myself to understand]

“What IS the difference?”

“Wicca is a tradition of Witchcraft that was brought to the public by Gerald Gardner, in the 1950’s. [Source]

There is a great deal of debate among the pagan community about whether or not Wicca is truly the same form of witchcraft that the ancients practised. Regardless, many people use the term Wicca and Witchcraft interchangeably.

Paganism is an umbrella term used to apply to a number of different earth-based faiths.

Wicca falls under that heading, although not all Pagans are Wiccan.

So in a nutshell, All Wiccans are Witches but not all Witches are Wiccans. All Wiccans are pagans but not all Pagans are witches.

Some Witches are pagans but some are not. Some Pagans use the practice of witchcraft while others choose not to.”

__________________________________________________________

Pagan: Is an umbrella term, it is derived from Pagnus, it mostly consists of old traditions before christianity spread, it described people who lived in rural areas and those same country folk were often the last holdouts clinging to their old religions. It passed down by word of mouth and was never a written text. Which is why most religions had been lost to time. Pagan was coined to mean the people who didn’t worship the god of Abraham. 

 [Paganism, in my opinion, would mean the olde traditions of Witchcraft. Not all Pagans are Witches or Wiccans as its both a subset of this religion like a tree branch; it does cross correlate and bleed into the other subgroups occasionally.]

Wiccan: Wiccan was coined when Gerald Gardner came across a Witches coven and began to site and record all of his findings, and published his book in the 1950's, [Personally I thought Margarat Murray, was the founder but alas...[

He had based Wicca on findings from the old Pagan traditions; however other pagans and witches were happy to practise their own spiritual path without converting to wicca.

Therefore “PAGAN.” Is an umbrella term that includes many different spiritual belief systems- Wicca is just one of many.

Christian > Lutheran or Methodist or Jehovah's Witness. Pagan > Wiccan or Asatru or Dianic or Eclectic Witch.

People who practise witchcraft aren’t always wiccans and Pagans and hold their craft separate from the two groups. And most witches use their own religions to include in their craft. There are witches who embrace the Christian god alongside the Wiccan Goddess- Alongside Judaism, and Atheist witches who practise magic but do not follow a deity.

____________________________________________________________

Wicca.

Wicca is a religion of empowerment, it is taking control of your life and your future. Wicca is living in tune with Nature and about creating a balance between all things, light and dark, black and white, masculine and feminine.

 Wiccans believe in a god and goddess.

The goddess gave birth to the universe including the god who is her consort, so the goddess is all things. We believe that everything is connected through the goddess, we are the universe and the universe is inside us. 

Everything is connected.

We are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe of the same stuff the stars are made of. All of Nature is connected by a universal force, Wiccans call this magic [ Crowley, changed magic to Magick to differentiate the magic around us and separate it from Magician parlour tricks/ trick mirrors and smoke/glass]

*When we do Spells, chants or incantations we connect to this force, Wicca is a peaceful religion. There is NO satan or Devil in Wicca. That would be Satanists.

"The devil is a ‘Christian’ concept and has nothing to do with Wicca, we do not have any demons, Wiccans believe in a law that decrees ‘Harm none’ We believe in Karma, that any bad we give out will come back to us three-fold."

[scentedpoetrywitch]

which color pf princess daisy is even so much more ?

[postersbykeith]

[study-tonight-1]

[anths-girl]

This IS actually useless information...and also funny as fuck... 😆

guy who is fun-ruiningly pedantic about the differences between a labyrinth and a maze

[witchhickx]

Mean Girls (2004) House MD (2009)

[atalana]

the curse of adhd:

i will remember with absolute clarity, when the thought strikes me that i have a text to send someone, that this is the fourth time in three days i've attempted to send this specific text

i will forget, in the time it takes me to pick up my phone, that i picked it up intending to send a text

[sam4s]

I just saw them on the street

[jcmarchi]

Revealing causal links in complex systems

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/revealing-causal-links-in-complex-systems/

Revealing causal links in complex systems

Getting to the heart of causality is central to understanding the world around us. What causes one variable — be it a biological species, a voting region, a company stock, or a local climate — to shift from one state to another can inform how we might shape that variable in the future.

But tracing an effect to its root cause can quickly become intractable in real-world systems, where many variables can converge, confound, and cloud over any causal links.

Now, a team of MIT engineers hopes to provide some clarity in the pursuit of causality. They developed a method that can be applied to a wide range of situations to identify those variables that likely influence other variables in a complex system.

The method, in the form of an algorithm, takes in data that have been collected over time, such as the changing populations of different species in a marine environment. From those data, the method measures the interactions between every variable in a system and estimates the degree to which a change in one variable (say, the number of sardines in a region over time) can predict the state of another (such as the population of anchovy in the same region).

The engineers then generate a “causality map” that links variables that likely have some sort of cause-and-effect relationship. The algorithm determines the specific nature of that relationship, such as whether two variables are synergistic — meaning one variable only influences another if it is paired with a second variable — or redundant, such that a change in one variable can have exactly the same, and therefore redundant, effect as another variable.

The new algorithm can also make an estimate of “causal leakage,” or the degree to which a system’s behavior cannot be explained through the variables that are available; some unknown influence must be at play, and therefore, more variables must be considered.

“The significance of our method lies in its versatility across disciplines,” says Álvaro Martínez-Sánchez, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “It can be applied to better understand the evolution of species in an ecosystem, the communication of neurons in the brain, and the interplay of climatological variables between regions, to name a few examples.”

For their part, the engineers plan to use the algorithm to help solve problems in aerospace, such as identifying features in aircraft design that can reduce a plane’s fuel consumption.

“We hope by embedding causality into models, it will help us better understand the relationship between design variables of an aircraft and how it relates to efficiency,” says Adrián Lozano-Durán, an associate professor in AeroAstro.

The engineers, along with MIT postdoc Gonzalo Arranz, have published their results in a study appearing today in Nature Communications.

Seeing connections

In recent years, a number of computational methods have been developed to take in data about complex systems and identify causal links between variables in the system, based on certain mathematical descriptions that should represent causality.

“Different methods use different mathematical definitions to determine causality,” Lozano-Durán notes. “There are many possible definitions that all sound ok, but they may fail under some conditions.”

In particular, he says that existing methods are not designed to tell the difference between certain types of causality. Namely, they don’t distinguish between a “unique” causality, in which one variable has a unique effect on another, apart from every other variable, from a “synergistic” or a “redundant” link. An example of a synergistic causality would be if one variable (say, the action of drug A) had no effect on another variable (a person’s blood pressure), unless the first variable was paired with a second (drug B).

An example of redundant causality would be if one variable (a student’s work habits) affect another variable (their chance of getting good grades), but that effect has the same impact as another variable (the amount of sleep the student gets).

“Other methods rely on the intensity of the variables to measure causality,” adds Arranz. “Therefore, they may miss links between variables whose intensity is not strong yet they are important.”

Messaging rates

In their new approach, the engineers took a page from information theory — the science of how messages are communicated through a network, based on a theory formulated by the late MIT professor emeritus Claude Shannon. The team developed an algorithm to evaluate any complex system of variables as a messaging network.

“We treat the system as a network, and variables transfer information to each other in a way that can be measured,” Lozano-Durán explains. “If one variable is sending messages to another, that implies it must have some influence. That’s the idea of using information propagation to measure causality.”

The new algorithm evaluates multiple variables simultaneously, rather than taking on one pair of variables at a time, as other methods do. The algorithm defines information as the likelihood that a change in one variable will also see a change in another. This likelihood — and therefore, the information that is exchanged between variables — can get stronger or weaker as the algorithm evaluates more data of the system over time.

In the end, the method generates a map of causality that shows which variables in the network are strongly linked. From the rate and pattern of these links, the researchers can then distinguish which variables have a unique, synergistic, or redundant relationship. By this same approach, the algorithm can also estimate the amount of “causality leak” in the system, meaning the degree to which a system’s behavior cannot be predicted based on the information available.

“Part of our method detects if there’s something missing,” Lozano-Durán says. “We don’t know what is missing, but we know we need to include more variables to explain what is happening.”

The team applied the algorithm to a number of benchmark cases that are typically used to test causal inference. These cases range from observations of predator-prey interactions over time, to measurements of air temperature and pressure in different geographic regions, and the co-evolution of multiple species in a marine environment. The algorithm successfully identified causal links in every case, compared with most methods that can only handle some cases.   

The method, which the team coined SURD, for Synergistic-Unique-Redundant Decomposition of causality, is available online for others to test on their own systems.

“SURD has the potential to drive progress across multiple scientific and engineering fields, such as climate research, neuroscience, economics, epidemiology, social sciences, and fluid dynamics, among others areas,” Martínez-Sánchez says.

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

[differenceguide]

What is the difference between?

Want to know differences between things? You found the right place..

Click here - https://differenceguide.com

[louisegluckpdf]

labs that are also churches. to me

(1. annie dillard, teaching a stone to talk 2. the deep underground neutrino experiment, a.k.a. DUNE 3. the large hadron collider 4. the sudbury neutrino observatory)