January 2011
90 posts
Guilt by Free Association - WSJ.com: So he fears for his safety because a crank-caller urged him to resign from office? How does that not make him a cry-baby? The connection to the Arizona shooting, however, is just bizarre. Lin has gone beyond guilt by association and entered the realm of guilt by free association: China, Chinese-American, lawmaker, shooting, Arizona. It’s as if she’s...
The mismeasurement of science | Michael Nielsen: There’s a slightly surreal quality to all this activity. If even Einstein demonstrably made enormous mistakes in judging his own research, why are the rest of us trying to measure the value of science systematically, and even organizing the scientific systems of entire countries around these attempts? Isn’t the lesson of the Einstein story that we...
koala punch
Sam Harris: A Response to Critics: For those unfamiliar with my book, here is my argument in brief: Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds — and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomenon, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature...
Contraponto a Nicolelis « Química de Produtos Naturais: As generalizações de Nicolelis são muito questionáveis porque as diferentes universidades federais brasileiras são diferentes. E algumas têm condições administrativas melhores do que outras. (…) Como dito no artigo publicado na Science a que Nicolelis se refere mais adiante na sua entrevista, durante a época da ditadura militar...
The New York Times publishes another advertisement as news - Numbers Rule Your World: The New York Times strikes again. Here is another article which makes you wonder if it is a press release by companies selling personal DNA test kits, or is it serious science/health reporting? The article claims that there are two new studies which support removing restrictions to the sales of personal DNA test...
On Science Publishing § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM: The outdated—but wildly profitable—business models based on the print medium have led to skyrocketing costs for scholarly journals over the past 30 years, costs that greatly outpace increases in cost of living. This is at odds with the rapidly decreasing costs of digital publication and distribution. Even worse, the paper-based status quo relies on...
Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving - Magazine - The Atlantic: The military’s problem is a deeply anti-entrepreneurial personnel structure. From officer evaluations to promotions to job assignments, all branches of the military operate more like a government bureaucracy with a unionized workforce than like a cutting-edge meritocracy. Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving - Magazine - The Atlantic: ...
Folha Online - Pensata - Kennedy Alencar - HH repete FHC e Lula - 11/08/2006: Entre 1995 e 2002, o então presidente Fernando Henrique Cardoso era frequentemente acusado de ter dito “esqueçam o que escrevi”. FHC nega a frase, mas a versão era muito boa e colou.Citações equivocadas - Wikiquote: “Esqueçam o que eu disse; esqueçam o que eu escrevi” - supostamente justificando a...
TropIKA: Is climate change driving up malaria case numbers? New findings contribute to the debate: Following reports of the spread of the disease into some of these regions, it has been suggested that such an extension of the geographical range of malaria is a result of – and provides evidence of – global warming. While warmer conditions would indeed facilitate increased breeding and survival of...
9 Free Ning Alternatives And Some Open Source Solutions: I’ve yet to see a good breakdown of some of the better free Ning alternatives out there so I thought I would give it a shot. I found most of these sites in the comments and blog posts of other despaired Ning network creators. I’ve also tried to track down these other networks reactions to Ning’s announcement. Hopefully this will help you...
Falsehoods: Human Universals : Greg Laden’s Blog: Color naming could be thought of as a pattern of additive complexity, or complexity on demand, shaped by the nature of the physical environment (the way light works and the way the eye works) in which the phenomenon plays out, but the magnitude of the elaboration determined by culture. If we found a culture in which there were only six...
Hidden Jesus found photos theCHIVE:
(where my comment is being held) The Real Blogger Status: Security Change To BlogSend Leaves BlogSend Email Distribution Broken: And having added “no-reply@blogger.com” as a member, go into “Management tasks” - “Manage members”, and edit the entry for “no-reply@blogger.com”. Ensure that “Member is allowed to post” is selected, if you...
The Real Blogger Status: Putting Anchors, and HTML, In Your Posts: At the top of this article, we have an invisible (“blind”) anchor. You don’t see it, though it’s there. <a name=”HTMLTutorial”></a> And here, we have a plain old hyperlink, but one pointing to that anchor. From here, we can jump (back) to the <a...
Folha.com - Fotografia - Mestres da camuflagem:
Edit remote files locally via SCP/RCP/FTP - Vim Tips Wiki: To use, all you need is to specify the protocol, user, host and path to the file you want to edit: * vim scp://konimi@vim.org//var/www/html/rtc_functions.php * gvim scp://konimi@vim.org//var/www/html/tips/add_tip.php Every time you write the file (:w etc) the file will get copied over to the source and you will be brought back to...
Backup more than 1000 starred items? - Google Reader Help: I’d like to export these starred articles into an xml file, so that I can browse them through a local reader (currently NewsFire on the Mac, though I have no strong preferences) when I’m off-line. I know I can get an xml file like the one I want like this:...
Asking the Right Questions - Expert Labs: I was interested to see what the other Q&A giants offered their members for guidance, so went poking around: Quora cofounders Charlie Cheever and Adam D’Angelo offer advice in the official topic for Quora question guidelines, explain why they recently banned survey questions, and what makes a bad question. Yahoo! Answers frowns on chatty...
Scientists face ‘shocking levels’ of vilification over discoveries - Science, News - The Independent: Sir Paul said many scientists felt under attack from critics in the blogosphere and the mainstream media, but rather than retreating into their ivory towers they needed to speak directly to the people who paid their wages. “Scientists have got to get out there. They have to be...
Political Times - After the Tucson Shooting, Is the Anger Gone? - NYTimes.com: Beverly Gage, who teaches 20th-century history at Yale, points to the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building by union activists in 1910, which provoked a national debate on workers’ rights. (…) Professor Gage also cites the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. The South had...
Interview With Derk Haank, CEO, Springer Science+Business Media: Not Looking for Sympathy: Subsequently, in 2008, Springer bought OA publisher BioMed Central (BMC), an acquisition that made Springer the world’s largest OA publisher in one fell swoop. What was the attraction of BioMed Central? A: It was twofold. First, BioMed Central’s area of activity—life sciences and biomedicine—is...
Heroic Naturalists or Imperialist Dogs? - NYTimes.com: The truth is that many of the species discovered by early naturalists had already been known to local people, sometimes in great detail, long before outsiders arrived to describe them scientifically. Moreover, the naturalists often depended on knowledgeable locals to show them what was there, and seldom gave proper credit for the help. But to...
rent-seekers: too ambitious to follow the natural...
Letter to Warner Brothers: A Night in Casablanca — Chilling Effects Clearinghouse: You claim that you own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without permission. What about “Warner Brothers”? Do you own that too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about the name Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were. We were touring the sticks...
Epiphenom: Why we are all different (and not all religious): A quick survey just of European history will quickly show that the last two assumptions don’t hold. There have been countless examples of religious anti-conservative movements - the Protestant reformation is just the most obvious example, but there are numerous others, like the anti-slavery movement and the 12th century...
Science and its spam filter « through the looking glass: In some respects, science has always had a spam filter. On one side there’s a commitment to free debate, on the other side there is frustration with those who are seen as at best time-wasting and at worst, mendacious. Science has always sought to break, or at least not be limited by, social boundaries. At the same time science has...
In the Wake of Science Online (#scio11): Supporting New Bloggers : The Thoughtful Animal: There is a bit of a Matthew effect (named for Matthew 25:29), in the online science ecosystem where the most tweeted/linked individuals and posts get more and more exposure in a continuing upward cycle, while the least tweeted/linked individuals and posts get caught in a downward cycle (or at least,...
Math: The Black Diamond Trail of Science Writing (#scio11) | The Loom | Discover Magazine: The first question you have to answer, always, is “Why should my reader care?” If you can’t answer that, then stop. Whatever else you say, it’s going to be a failure. It’s true that answering that question with current pure math research can very challenging, because it’s so very far from removed from...
Funny GIFS I love theCHIVE:
Accelerating Future » Yes, The Singularity is the Biggest Threat to Humanity: Why is the Singularity potentially a threat? Not because robots will “decide humanity is standing in their way”, per se, as Aaron writes, but because robots that don’t explicitly value humanity as a whole will eventually eliminate us by pursuing instrumental goals not conducive to our survival. No explicit...
Dryad data file: Dryad Home: Dryad is an international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences. Dryad enables scientists to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, and perform synthetic studies. Dryad is governed by a consortium of journals that...
looks like doxygen for python on-the-fly
Python Object Graphs — objgraph v1.6.0 documentation:
objgraph is a module that lets you visually explore Python object graphs.
You’ll need graphviz if you want to draw the pretty graphs.
I recommend xdot for interactive use. pip install xdot should suffice; objgraph will automatically look for it in your PATH.
PyX - Python graphics package: PyX is a Python package for the creation of PostScript and PDF files. It combines an abstraction of the PostScript drawing model with a TeX/LaTeX interface. Complex tasks like 2d and 3d plots in publication-ready quality are built out of these primitives.
Learn to love uncertainty and failure, say leading thinkers | Edge question | Science | The Guardian Economies are self-organised emergent processes of people trying to make a living, and democracy is a bottom-up emergent political system “specifically designed to displace top down kingdoms, theocracies, and dictatorships”. But most people don’t see things that way, said Shermer....
Get Smarter - Newsweek The top 1 percent of a population owns 40 percent of the wealth; the top 2 percent of Twitter users send 60 percent of all tweets; medical care for the most expensive one fifth of patients accounts for four fifths of total spending. “These figures are always reported as shocking,” notes Shirky, as if anything but a nice bell curve were an aberration, but Pareto distributions...
Book review: Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape Some of our current policies may be rationalized, by some people, some of the time, on grounds that invoke libertarian free will. Whether they really depend on that idea is another matter. If Harris is right, some policies, such as those relating to criminal justice, may need to be rethought from the ground up; but it remains to be seen how far they’d...
Sam Harris Doesn’t Get Morality « Ockham’s Beard Harris’ broader project – one to which I’m sympathetic – is done a disservice by his refusal to engage with moral philosophy and metaethics, at least beyond engaging to the point of skimming the surface and dismissing it out of hand
ESP Report Sets Off Debate on Data Analysis - NYTimes.com: For decades, some statisticians have argued that the standard technique used to analyze data in much of social science and medicine overstates many study findings — often by a lot. As a result, these experts say, the literature is littered with positive findings that do not pan out: “effective” therapies that are no better than a placebo;...
El líder era el infiltrado · ELPAÍS.com: No llegaron a convencer al jurado de que los planes de ocupar la central eléctrica de Eon tenían como objetivo impedir la emisión de 150.000 toneladas de carbono y ayudar así a reducir el impacto del cambio climático y, por tanto, deberían ser absueltos. Pero el juez les impuso penas mínimas porque actuaron movidos por buenas intenciones.
Daily Afternoon Randomness (42 Photos) : theCHIVE:
Make Way for Ethanol (na revista Science): Most of the factors mentioned in Service’s News story are peculiar to the United States. Brazil, for example, did not experience the recent economic downturn, does not have a “blend-wall” (ethanol production approaching the maximum amount that can be accommodated in 10% gasoline blends) or policy uncertainty relative to bioethanol, and is confident...
Contas Abertas - Quase 40% dos recursos reservados a obras preventivas de desastres foram destinados à Bahia: Enquanto as chuvas castigam os estados de Pernambuco e Alagoas, números do próprio governo federal mostram que o uso político das verbas públicas resultam em tragédia. De 2004 a 2009, a Defesa Civil reservou R$ 933 milhões no Orçamento da União para obras preventivas de desastres. Desse...
Daily Afternoon Randomness (48 Photos) : theCHIVE: the randomness 36 Daily Afternoon Randomness (48 Photos)
The not-so-great Islamist menace: So in most of Europe, there was no terrorism. And where there was terrorism, the trend line pointed down. As for who’s responsible, forget Islamists. The overwhelming majority of the attacks — 237 of 294 — were carried out by separatist groups, such as the Basque ETA. A further 40 terrorists schemes were pinned on leftist and/or anarchist...
A true cultural topography · Razib Khan’s total feed: To the primitive mind gods are real beings, and they have power to affect this world. Even “conservative” and “traditional” Western religion has to some extent been purged of the magical and demon-haunted in a way that Islamic religion obviously has not (the same can be said of South Asian, African, and Latin American societies, but they...
The Climate of Krugman - HUMAN EVENTS: How about Florida Democrat Alan Grayson condemning his opponent as a “religious fanatic” and calling him “Taliban Dan Webster?” What about when Democrat James Clyburn of South Carolina falsely accused Tea Party members of hurling racial epithets at him? Do you suppose the heavily deployed Democrat meme of insinuating voters were stupid for acting against...
Kanjorski ponders ‘nuts,’ bolts from blue - Roderick Random - The Times-Tribune: “That Scott down there that’s running for governor of Florida,” Mr. Kanjorski said. “Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him. He stole billions of dollars from the United States government and...
Lenore Skenazy: Eek! A Male! - WSJ.com: And so it goes these days, when almost any man who has anything to do with a child can find himself suspected of being a creep. I call it “Worst-First” thinking: Gripped by pedophile panic, we jump to the very worst, even least likely, conclusion first. Then we congratulate ourselves for being so vigilant.
George F. Will - The charlatans’ response to the Tucson tragedy: The craving is for banishing randomness and the inexplicable from human experience. Time was, the gods were useful. What is thunder? The gods are angry. Polytheism was explanatory. People postulated causations. And still do. Hence: The Tucson shooter was (pick your verb) provoked, triggered, unhinged by today’s (pick your...
Flashback: How Clinton exploited Oklahoma City for political gain | Washington Examiner: Later, under the heading “How to use extremism as issue against Republicans,” Morris told Clinton that “direct accusations” of extremism wouldn’t work because the Republicans were not, in fact, extremists. Rather, Morris recommended what he called the “ricochet...