Planet Rationalist

A man pickets a restaurant when they tell him to stop eating so much at their ‘all you can eat’ fish fry. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czq_QIUQIRY I must admit that the idea of stuffing yourself with food just to maximize your money’s return seems to me to be totally bizarre. I just don’t understand the mentality. Do such [...]...

Most people would have seen the recent news reports about the US Census Bureau data showing that say that as of July 1, 2011, the number of non-Hispanic white children under age one in the US dropped to below 50% for the first time. Part of the reason for the increase in minority births is [...]...

It is an honor to be speaking to all of you today.  Before I really get started, I want all of the graduates; the proud parents, relatives, and friends; and my colleagues on stage here from UT to enjoy this moment. 

It is funny, but we all celebrate a lot early in life.  There are now graduation ceremonies from Kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school, and finally college.  As we get older, though, we spend less time celebrating our own achievements.  Eventually, it seems that we just complete things and move on.  In my opinion, it is always worth celebrating our achievements. So, drink this moment in.  And remember to take time to enjoy the things you have done.

Ok.  Now back to business.

I have one last opportunity to say something enlightening to all of you.  Here goes.  “You just never know what is going to happen ...

I mentioned a few days ago a hopeful sign in that a US District Court judge Katherine Forrest had ruled that the NDAA, an awful piece of legislation, was unconstitutional. Glenn Greenwald later wrote also hailing the ruling and examining it in more detail. He highlights the fact that the judge rejected all three of [...]...

Regarding the so-called Dutch Book argument for Bayesian inference (the idea that, if your inferences do not correspond to a Bayesian posterior distribution, you can be forced to make incoherent bets and ultimately become a money pump), I wrote:

I have never found this argument appealing, because a bet is a game not a decision. A bet requires 2 players, and one player has to offer the bets. I do agree that in some bounded settings (for example, betting on win place show in a horse race), I’d want my bets to be coherent; if they are incoherent (e.g., if my bets correspond to P(A|B)*P(B) not being equal to P(A,B)), then I should be able to do better by examining the incoherence. But in an “open system” (to borrow some physics jargon), I don’t think coherence is possible. There is always new information coming in, and there is always additional prior information in reserve that hasn’t entered the model.

As always, click through…

If you want any evidence that drugs have won the drug war, you just need to read the scientific studies on legal highs.

If you’re not keeping track of the ‘legal high’ scene it’s important to remember that the first examples, synthetic cannabinoids sold as ‘Spice’ and ‘K2′ incense, were only detected in 2009.

Shortly after amphetamine-a-like stimulant drugs, largely based on variations on pipradrol and the cathinones appeared, and now ketamine-like drugs such as methoxetamine have become widespread.

Since 1997, 150 new psychoactive substances were reported. Almost a third of those appeared in 2010.

Last year, the US government banned several of these drugs although the effect has been minimal as the legal high laboratories have over-run the trenches of the drug warriors.

A new study just published in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology tracked the chemical composition of legal highs as the bans were introduced.

A key question was whether the legal high firms would just try and use the same banned chemicals and sell them under a different name.

The ...

Update: Here’s the link for those who cannot see the embedded video....

I have lived all my life working in universities, except for two years in a national laboratory which was pretty similar to a university physics department except that there was no teaching involved. It has been a good life for me. But a recent study of graduate students in the life sciences, physics, and chemistry [...]...

This is a fascinating question I got over on Quora.

Short answer: probably the dorsal root ganglion in the blue whale.

Initially I thought it would be a motor axon in the sciatic nerve, but after consideration I'm pretty sure that the dorsal root ganglion (DRG) has a longer axon than the motor information carried in the sciatic nerve (which is the longest nerve in the body, but not axon).

The DRG is a weird neuron because it's unipolar, so it's got a loooong axon, where one end has receptors in the skin and the other end enters the spinal cord, ascends in the fasciculus gracilis all the way up to the medulla in the brainstem, and synapses in the nucleus gracilis before then continuing to send information up to the thalamus and, finally the primary somatosensory cortex for "conscious" perception.


Note that for the sensations in the toes, this means that the axon goes all the way from the toe to the medulla, which is at about the same height as ...

There is a hypothesis called the Sapir-Whorf Thesis (also known as linguistic relativity) in language that one can only think what one’s language permits you to think, and indeed forces you to think. This idea that some conceptual scheme can … Continue reading →

The latest Johnny Depp/Tim Burton movie is a remake or parody--I'm not sure which--of the old "Dark Shadows" gothic soap opera. Here are two blurbs from an ad for the new movie, together with context from the reviews from which they were taken....

If you're a native speaker of American English, a Dutch linguist needs your responses to an accent questionnaire:

In this questionnaire we will ask you as a native U.S. English speaker to rate the pronunciation of different speakers, some of whom were born outside the U.S. We ask you to rate how native-like the pronunciations are. While we offer a set of 50 speech fragments, you are free to rate as few or as many as you'd like (of course we'd prefer more, but there is no required minimum).

The Obama administration can be characterized by at least three features: vast over-reaching in its claim to executive power, egregiously violating people’s liberties, and indulging in excessive secrecy. Whistleblowers have provided a valuable service in letting us know what is going on and exposing wrongdoing and the administration has been a vigorous prosecutor of leakers [...]...

A fantastic short film about what you might see when your mind is uploaded to an online storage cloud in 2052. It’s subtitled “the Singularity, ruined by lawyers”.

The piece is by futurist Tom Scott who obviously sees the consciousness uploading business far more pessimistically than me.

Personally, I’m going to get uploaded to a linux server. It’s be completely free but won’t support all my mental states.

Yes, I’ll be doing software jokes in the afterlife. No, you won’t have to humour me.
 

Link to fantastic video ‘Welcome to Life’ (via @SebastianSeung)

Aureliano Crameri writes:

I have questions regarding one technique you and your colleagues described in your papers: the cross validation (Multiple Imputation with Diagnostics (mi) in R: Opening Windows into the Black Box, with reference to Gelman, King, and Liu, 1998). I think this is the technique I need for my purpose, but I am not sure I understand it right. I want to use the multiple imputation to estimate the outcome of psychotherapies based on longitudinal data. First I have to demonstrate that I am able to get unbiased estimates with the multiple imputation. The expected bias is the overestimation of the outcome of dropouts.

I will test my imputation strategies by means of a series of simulations (delete values, impute, compare with the original). Due to the complexity of the statistical analyses I think I need at least 200 cases. Now I don’t have so many cases without any missings. My data have missing values in different variables. The proportion of missing values is lower than 30%.

So I would proceed as ...

The scientific method begins with a hypothesis about our reality that can be tested via experimental observation. Hypothesis formation is iterative, building off prior scientific knowledge. Before one can form a hypothesis, one must have a thorough understanding of previous research to ensure that the path of inquiry is founded upon a stable base of established facts. But how can a researcher perform a thorough, unbiased literature review when over one million scientific articles are published annually? The rate of scientific discovery has outpaced our ability to integrate knowledge in an unbiased, principled fashion. One solution may be via automated information aggregation. In this manuscript we show that, by calculating associations between concepts in the peer-reviewed literature, we can algorithmically synthesize scientific information and use that knowledge to help formulate plausible low-level hypotheses.

Oh man I've been waiting to write this post for over a year now. I'm so. Flippin'. Excited.

I'm really proud to announce that our paper, "Automated Cognome Construction and Semi-automated Hypothesis Generation" has been accepted for publication in ...

Even though I’m hardly a gamer, I couldn’t miss the fact that the highly-anticipated new game Diablo III was released this week. It’s difficult not to notice when half of your friends suddenly decide not to leave home for a … Continue reading →

Submitted by FrankAdamek 1 comment

I am sick to death of hearing about the Facebook IPO. Although I was one of the earliest people to create a Facebook account (and it still exists) I abandoned it a long time ago and do not even respond to friend requests anymore. I have thought seriously about closing it altogether but refrained from [...]...

‘He who is contented is rich.’ ~Lao Tzu

Post written by Leo Babauta.

There has been little in my life that has made as much an impact as learning to be content — with my life, where I am, what I’m doing, what I have, who I’m with, who I am.

This little trick changes everything.

Let’s take a look at my life before contentedness:

I was addicted to junk food and fast food, and overweight and unhealthy. I bought too many things on impulse, owned too much clutter, and was deeply in debt and struggling to make it to the next payday. I was unhappy with who I was, wanted desperately to change, tried a thousand different programs and books. I was always worried I was missing out on exciting things, and wanted so much to be out doing the fun things everyone else was doing. I was always changing the way I did things, because it seemed everyone else had a better system or tools. I strove to meet goals, because ...

TED talks are well known to policy wonks and geeks. I find many of them quite interesting and have linked to them. But while many people know of them, not so many know that the audience at TED conferences tend to be the well-heeled because it is for members only and the cost of attending [...]...

I read the works of psychologist Erich Fromm (1900-1980) voraciously when I was younger. His wrote about how humans suffered from a sense of alienation due to their estrangement with nature and with other people, and that this was a source of many mental problems and destructive behavior because they sought to fill that need [...]...

Proper financial planning that provides for our financial needs in retirement is perhaps the prototypical example of willful blindness. We all know that most people have not saved enough to provide for a sustainable long-term income in retirement. The core issue here is that we (as a society and as individuals) are making consistently bad financial decisions that affect our futures, beginning with how we pay for college.

Sure, it’s always easier to simply ignore the long-term issues and plan to deal with them later in life.  As humans, we have an enormous behavioral bias to focus on the now and not on the future.  In his recent Ted talk, Shlomo Benartzi estimates that only 11% of Americans are saving enough to meet their future financial needs. This is, in my opinion, a disaster in the works.

What are we thinking?

Benartzi explores the ways that our innate behavioral biases allow us to ignore the looming crisis. He frames the question of how and why people make consistently bad decisions in a range of ...

Several people have emailed us in the past few days asking about the new evaluation of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), published in The Lancet last week. It has received significant attention in the development blogosphere (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here).

The evaluation argues that the MVP was responsible for a substantial drop in child mortality. However, we see a number of problems.

Summary

• Even if the evaluation’s conclusions are taken at face value, insecticide-treated net distribution alone appears to account for 42% of the total effect on child mortality (though there is high uncertainty).
• The MVP is much more expensive than insecticide-treated net distribution - around 45x on a per-person basis. Therefore, we believe that in order to make an argument that the MVP is the best available use of dollars, one must demonstrate effects far greater than those attained through distributing bednets. We believe the evaluation falls short on this front, and that the mortality averted by the MVP could have been averted at about 1/35th of the cost ...

I do not directly trade in stocks although like anyone with a retirement account, someone is trading on the stock market with my savings. My lack of interest may be related to my lack of interest in gambling generally and to my lack of a desire to make more money. I have a job that [...]...

On Friday, July 20, at the 2012 meeting of the Council of Writing Program Administrators in Albuquerque NM, there will be a session called "Help Wanted: Sharing Data for Research on Reading and Writing".  Here's the proposal that was submitted for this session:

Should there be a large, open collection of student writing, representing the range of ability and accomplishment among American high school and college students today? We think so, but we’d like to hear your opinions.

“We” are a group of linguists, psychologists, computer scientists, and writing-program professionals.; and we believe that that a large collection of student writing, as part of a larger collection of texts and annotations, would provide an essential basis for many important kinds of research.

Our general idea is to create an open and evolving dataset of both student writing and expert writing, combined with an open and evolving collection of layers of annotation. The annotations might be linguistic (syntax, word senses, co-reference, discourse structures), editorial (mistakes, infelicities, suggested corrections), or psychological (eye tracking, EEG or ...

My column for BBC Future from last week. The original is here. Thanks to Martin Thirkettle for telling me about the demo that leads the column.

Our brains are programmed to cancel out all manner of constants in our everyday lives. If you don’t believe it, try a simple, but startling experiment.

The constant whir of a fan. The sensation of the clothes against your skin. The chair pressing against your legs. Chances are that you were not acutely aware of these until I pointed them out. The reason you had somehow forgotten about their existence? A fundamental brain process that we call adaptation.
Our brains are remarkably good at cancelling out all sorts of constants in our everyday lives. The brain is interested in changes that it needs to react or respond to, and so brain cells are charged with looking for any of these differences, no matter how minute. This makes it a waste of time registering things that are not changing, like the sensation of clothes or a chair against your ...

A video on the history of human sacrifice is available from Science magazine as part of their special issue on human conflict.

Sadly, all the articles are locked behind a paywall but the video is free to view and has science writer Ann Gibbons discussing how the practice evolved through the ages and how archaeologists have been uncovering the evidence.

If you can’t stump up the cash for what looks like a genuinely fascinating issue there’s more discussion from the latest edition on the podcast where the science of racism and prejudice is explored.
 

Link to locked special issue.
Link to video.
Link to podcast

Robin Hanson (Overcoming Bias) describes the eventual futures fallacy.

I’ve noticed that recommendations for action based on a vision of the future are based on an idea that something must “eventually” occur. For example, eventually:

• We will run out of coal, so we’d better find replacements soon.
• Earth will run out of stored energy of fossil fuels and radioactivity, so we’d better get ready to run only on sunlight.
• [... long list of examples snipped here ...]

The common pattern: project forward a current trend to an extreme, while assuming other things don’t change much, and then recommend an action which might make sense if this extreme change were to happen all at once soon.

The fallacy stems from three unwarranted assumptions:

• the assumption that the current trend will continue (example: current rates, and rates of increases, of oil and petroleum consumption)
• the assumption that other things won’t change much by the time the predicted disaster eventually occurs (example: current ability to extract petroleum)
• the assumption that it is better to take ...

After having a Weekly Link Roundup to summarize the months that were, cataloging the gap between blog break, it’s time to summarize the relatively mere week that was. Welcome to the twenty-ninth Weekly Link Roundup, here to offer you even more slices of essay summaries, essay commentary here and elsewhere, and links to other fun places!

 

Essays!

I’m going to be doing this a touch differently from now on — instead of providing a new summary specific to this roundup, I’m just going to write the summary that is included on the essay itself. This will save me time, while making you lose out on very little, if anything at all.

This week I wrote five essays, but since I don’t recount essays counted in previous roundups, I’ll only list the two here:

• Wednesday, May 16 >> TheraminTrees’s Atheism, Part III – Skeptical Theism: “I’ve recently been looking at TheraminTrees’s videos about atheism and examining the arguments he puts forth for not believing in Gods. This essay furthers my specific ...

Are you a Republican - or do you know one - who is sincerely fretful about the GOP’s ticket for the coming quadrennial?  Well, there's good reason (on many levels.) But it appears there is hope!  Or at least a fun wish fantasy, written and published with stunning speed by a master science fiction author, John Barnes. In a quick-topical (and hilarious) shortie-novel that’s set right now!  In the few weeks before this year’s Republican National Convention.

RAISE THE GIPPER! is more a sudden piece of performance art than anything else. Staged precisely for a given moment in time, it fits into the tradition of such old-time favorites as The Mouse that Roared and Rally Around the Flag, Boys.

And it gives Republicans their utter wish fantasy, especially after wading through a primary season filled with dismal choices.  Picture the scenario -- Ronald Reagan, risen from the dead, tanned-rested-and-ready (hampered only slightly by the lack of a pulse) to lead the GOP to victory!

Think it’s all one-sided? Well, Barnes has some clever ...

From Harvard Business Review (part of an op-ed written by Lauren Stiller Rikleen):

The new millennium has not brought much progress for women seeking top leadership roles in the workplace. Although female graduates continue to pour out of colleges and professional schools, the percentages of women running large companies, or serving as managing partners of their law firms, or sitting on corporate boards have barely budged in the past decade.

Why has progress stalled? A recent study suggests the unlikeliest of reasons: the marriage structure of men in the workplace.

A group of researchers from several universities recently published a report on the attitudes and beliefs of employed men, which shows that those with wives who did not work outside the home or who worked part-time were more likely than those with wives who worked to: (1) have an unfavorable view about women in the workplace; (2)think workplaces run less smoothly with more women; (3) view workplaces with female leaders as less desirable; and (4) conside female candidates for promotion to be less qualified ...

Contrary to the popular American belief that it was Columbus who discovered that the Earth was round, that fact was not only known a long time before, the circumference of the Earth had actually been calculated to high accuracy 2,200 years ago. In this video clip, Adam Savage of Mythbusters explains how Eratosthenes calculated the [...]...

David Coppedge had a job most computer experts would kill for. He worked for NASA as a computer specialist, as a team leader on the Cassini mission, oriented towards the exploration of Saturn. Coppedge is also a Creationist, though, and he claims that this got him fired after 15 years on the job.

Of course, NASA and Caltech have a very different version of the story. They say Coppedge was confrontational, aggressive, and refused suggestions for retraining when it became apparent his position was in danger due to reductions in the project. There is also the matter of just how his Creationism manifested itself. It appears Coppedge frequently advocated so-called “Intelligent Design” to his co-workers, and even handed out free DVDs (produced by a company on whose board he sits) discussing the scientific evidence for Creationism which, if the DVDs were accurate, is at least a nice gesture, since you can always use another blank DVD.

This matter will be resolved in court. I know where my suspicions lie in the matter of Creation Safari ...

By Daichi Sasaki

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following text has been edited from a machine translation. I have tried to be as faithful to the original as possible. The title is mine – MD

I came to visit the United States, and specifically to visit California, earlier this year. Before my visit I wrote to Mike Darwin and to some others in cryonics to learn where the underground facility was where the Cryonics Society of California (CSC) cryonics patients were found decomposed in 1979. No one could tell me where to find the facility. I went to Oakwood Cemetery in Chatsworth, and inquired of the management as to where the facility had been located. The cemetery management was not of any help and they informed me that, unless I had relatives interred there, I would have to leave the premises.

I returned to the cemetery the next day, this time on foot (without a driver) and spent the day from the time the cemetery opened until nearly sunset looking for the place where the CSC facility ...

According to the Washington Post, he has signed an Executive Order that subjects anyone (Americans or foreigners) to penalties if they obstruct the administration’s preferred policies in Yemen. President Obama issued an executive order Wednesday giving the Treasury Department authority to freeze the U.S.-based assets of anyone who “obstructs” implementation of the administration-backed political transition [...]...

I had no idea that neurons came in such a beautiful diversity of shapes. Each of these neurons has a different function, too: A. Purkinje cell B. Granule cell C. Motor neuron D. Tripolar neuron E. Pyramidal Cell F. Chandelier cell G. Spindle neuron H. Stellate cell.

The image, drawn by science journalist Ferris Jabr, comes from a post of his on the Brainwaves blog, explaining the discovery of the neuron—and the first realizations that not all neurons looked the same. It's the first part of a new series he's working on called "Know Your Neuron".

When the leading anatomists of the 19th century examined fragile nervous tissue with the best microscopes available to them, they identified cell bodies that sprouted many tangled projections. German histologist Joseph Gerlach’s observations convinced him that the fibers emerging from different cell bodies fused to form a continuous network, a seamless web known as the “reticulum.” His ideas were popular. Many researchers accepted that, unlike the heart or liver, the brain and nervous system could ...

Singularity University Announces Inaugural Synthetic Biology Accelerator Program

Startup founders will develop and launch transformative companies in the emerging field of synthetic biology at new Silicon Valley SynBio Startup Launchpad

Mountain View, CA (May 17, 2012)– Singularity University today announced the companies selected to participate in its inaugural synthetic biology accelerator program, SynBio Startup Launchpad. The program will nurture aspiring SynBio entrepreneurs seeking to apply the rapid-cycle, low-cost approaches employed by tech and biotech startups. Synthetic biology is genetic engineering using software-based design tools coupled with low-cost DNA synthesis and assembly.

The SynBio Program was conceived by Andrew Hessel, Co-Chair of SU’s Biotechnology and Bioinformatics track, and John Cumbers, Ph.D, a synthetic biologist working at NASA Ames Research Center. As Andrew Hessel explains, “advances in technology are allowing scientists to treat DNA, our genetic code, the same way people use code for software programming.”

The SynBio Startup Launchpad is Singularity University’s first formal initiative to support startups developing exponentially growing technologies. “The SynBio program brings together a powerful community seeking to support ...

Singularity University Welcomes Sandra Miller, Former Kauffman Foundation and Stanford Biodesign Executive, to Direct New Venture Activities, Including SU Labs

Mountain View, CA (May 16, 2012) — Singularity University (SU) has announced the appointment of Sandra Miller, an entrepreneurship education expert, as Managing Director of New Venture Development. Ms. Miller will be responsible for SU’s first incubation program, SynBio Startup Launchpad, while also working closely with Vice President of Strategy & New Venture Development Gabriel Baldinucci. Singularity Labs will be the model for SU’s work “after the classroom” and will encompass faculty and alumni research, new company generation and incubation, and innovation services for larger companies around the world.

“Sandra brings specialized experience to Singularity University and we are very excited to have her as a senior member of the Singularity University team. Sandra’s acumen in developing innovative entrepreneurship programs and advising early stage ventures is a perfect fit for SU, as we expand our offerings beyond education into the realm of catalyzing and mentoring companies around the world to solve humanity’s grand ...