Predicting Google Shutdowns. "In the following essay, I collect data on 350 Google products and look for predictive variables. I find some while modeling shutdown patterns, and make some predictions about future shutdowns. Hopefully the results are interesting, useful, or both."
Gwern exhaustively analyzes Google products past and present with an eye to establishing what's not long for the bitverse. tl;dr?
Results.
posted by mwhybark
on May 4, 2013 -
87 comments
Is Psychometric g a Myth? - "As an online discussion about IQ or general intelligence grows longer, the probability of someone linking to statistician Cosma Shalizi's essay
g, a Statistical Myth approaches 1. Usually the link is accompanied by an assertion to the effect that Shalizi offers a definitive refutation of the concept of general mental ability, or psychometric
g."
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Apr 11, 2013 -
113 comments
"
Brain training games don't actually make you smarter." Looking at recent meta-analyses and replication attempts of studies showing increased cognitive abilities gained from brain-training games, the New Yorker article comes to the conclusion that the results are suspect and these games haven't been shown to improve cognitive abilities broadly. Currently, brain training is a multi-million-dollar business.
posted by tykky
on Apr 9, 2013 -
61 comments
The Most Dangerous Equation If you have never taken the time to read any statistics, then take the time to read this short chapter excerpt. In order to understand the world a bit more accurately and be able to interpret data for public policy, understanding De Moivre’s equation and sample variability is very significant.
posted by SollosQ
on Mar 16, 2013 -
24 comments
With a database of over 5,000 scientists, from Nobel prize winners to postdocs and PhD students,
Sense About Science works in partnership with scientific bodies, research publishers, policy makers, the public and the media, to change public discussions about science and evidence.
They make these scientists available for questions from civic organizations and the public looking for scientific advice from experts,
campaign for the promotion of scientific principles in public policy, and
publish neat guides to understanding science intended for laypeople. [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb
on Feb 28, 2013 -
9 comments
Psychohistory, the imaginary scientific field created by Isaac Asimov in his "Foundation" series,
may no longer be fiction:
Song Chaoming, for instance, is a researcher at Northeastern University in Boston. He is a physicist, but he moonlights as a social scientist. With that hat on he has devised an algorithm which can look at someone’s mobile-phone records and predict with an average of 93% accuracy where that person is at any moment of any day. Given most people’s regular habits (sleep, commute, work, commute, sleep), this might not seem too hard. What is impressive is that his accuracy was never lower than 80% for any of the 50,000 people he looked at.
Full article at The Economist.
posted by Strange Interlude
on Feb 26, 2013 -
39 comments
Yesterday, the Nielsen Company
released a report showing that same-sex partnered households in America shop about 16% more than the average US household. Broken down into categories, Nielsen observes that gay couples drink a ton, while lesbian couples eat an awful lot of cottage cheese.
posted by schmod
on Jan 31, 2013 -
63 comments
The practice of lying to one's children to encourage behavioral compliance was investigated among parents in the US (N = 114) and China (N = 85). The vast majority of parents (84% in the US and 98% in China) reported having lied to their children for this purpose. Within each country, the practice most frequently took the form of falsely threatening to leave a child alone in public if he or she refused to follow the parent. Crosscultural differences were seen: A larger proportion of the parents in China reported that they employed instrumental lie-telling to promote behavioral compliance, and a larger proportion approved of this practice, as compared to the parents in the US. This difference was not seen on measures relating to the practice of lying to promote positive feelings, or on measures relating to statements about fantasy characters such as the tooth fairy.
Findings are discussed with reference to sociocultural values and certain parenting-related challenges that extend across cultures. [HTML] --
[PDF] [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb
on Jan 23, 2013 -
82 comments
The Nature of Computation -
Intellects Vast and Warm and Sympathetic: "I hand you a network or graph, and ask whether there is a path through the network that crosses each edge exactly once, returning to its starting point. (That is, I ask whether there is a 'Eulerian' cycle.) Then I hand you another network, and ask whether there is a path which visits each node exactly once. (That is, I ask whether there is a 'Hamiltonian' cycle.) How hard is it to answer me?" (
via)
[more inside]
posted by kliuless
on Dec 1, 2012 -
19 comments
"We have little trouble recognizing that a chess grandmaster’s victory over a novice is skill, as well as assuming that Paul the octopus’s ability to predict World Cup games is due to chance. But what about everything else?" [
Luck and Skill Untangled: The Science of Success]
posted by vidur
on Nov 20, 2012 -
16 comments
A Vast Left-Wing Competency: "How Democrats became the party of effective campaigning — and why the GOP isn’t catching up anytime soon." Sasha Issenberg, author of
The Victory Lab, has been writing a series of posts on Slate that focus on different aspects of "the new science of winning campaigns".
[more inside]
posted by flex
on Nov 8, 2012 -
103 comments
Tails of the Unexpected: "Normality has been an accepted wisdom in economics and finance for a century or more. Yet in real-world systems, nothing could be less normal than normality. Tails should not be unexpected, for they are the rule." An eminently human-readable explanation of why normal models fail to describe the uncertainties of our abnormal world.
[more inside]
posted by ecmendenhall
on Jun 9, 2012 -
19 comments
Last night, author and farmer Wendell Berry delivered
a powerful lecture [video; full text
here includes portions not delivered verbally] to a full house on the occasion of his accepting the National Endowment of the Humanities' Jefferson Award. The famous
PC holdout has appeared
previously in the blue, but this lecture is not to be missed. Here is soul nourishment for the long-time Berry follower, and for the newcomer a superb introduction to one of our time's greatest intellects.
[more inside]
posted by maniabug
on Apr 25, 2012 -
27 comments
galton.org is an exhaustive website devoted to the
life and works of the statistical pioneer and "father of eugenics" Francis Galton, inventor of the scatterplot, the correlation coefficient, fingerprint identification, and who knows what else. Almost all of Galton's
books and
papers are reproduced here, some in scanned form and some in searchable .pdf, from his major books to his letters to
Pigeon Fancier's Journal. A short selection after the fold.
[more inside]
posted by escabeche
on Apr 25, 2012 -
11 comments
Almost one year after Congressional Republicans tried to
limit the definition of rape to only include "force" (
previously), the Department of Justice is redefining the term--but this time to
to expand it dramatically:
The outdated definition that has been governing national rape statistics since 1929, “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will,” has been updated to "penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” According to Susan D. Carbon, director of the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women, the previous definition “excluded an untold number of victims.” For the first time, men will be included in national rape statistics, as well as those raped while unable to give consent due to intoxication or other mental and physical incapacity.
posted by zombieflanders
on Jan 6, 2012 -
47 comments
