briandh

The fMRI results shown come from a self-described pilot study with only 3 subjects per group [1] [2].

> Results must be interpreted with caution due to the small number of participants and a fixed-effects analysis. However, the results are intriguing and statistically significant despite the small group size. They suggest that further fMRI investigations of children exposed to MeHg and PCBs are warranted and that this technique deserves to be used in neurotoxicity studies in general.

[1] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuro.2011.04.001 (the study)

[2] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ S147 4-4422(13)70278-3 (a review containing a revised image based on that study -- the one that is included in the Atlantic piece)

It's the website of the House Judiciary Committee, which is controlled by Republicans, and hence can and does challenge the President. In turn, the White House website, which is controlled by Democrats, can and does challenge Congress.

Both sites could, of course, adopt a stance of editorial neutrality. I would prefer they not, though -- both are fundamentally political organizations, so to do so would be eliding their true nature.

Not really. Its president and CEO is a self-described libertarian [1] and FreedomWorks is co-plaintiff in Rand Paul's NSA lawsuit [2].

[1] http://reason.com/archives/2014/08/10/being-a-libertarian-in... [2] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1017524-rand-paul-co...

AMLogic seems to be decent, though I haven't had to delve into it personally so I can't say for sure how complete their source releases are. See here, for instance: http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/

As mentioned by other commenters, the Creator series has sets with more generic pieces. And you can easily buy large quantities of generic pieces, at least in the US.

For instance: http://smile.amazon.com/LEGO-Classic-Large-Creative-Brick/dp...

And the City series strikes me as striking a decent balance between generic and speciality pieces.

> I have signed up for updated versions of courses I had finished earlier simply because I wanted to show three minutes of lesson 4.2 to someone, and I've told my students to "sign up" for course X because its materials at week 4 explain a particular concept very well, and I'd recommend them to watch that - but the materials aren't available if you don't sign up.

Yes, I really wish Coursera et al would have "lecture archives" which didn't require login or, if they did, didn't require joining a class. This would help boost their completion rates, so it would be mutually beneficial. I suppose a few of the partner universities might like having restrictions on their content, though.

Two reasons similar/in addition to the ones already mentioned:

The obvious one: MOOCs usually involve small or no payment and are not typically part of a degree program. Everyone who has attended a traditional college has taken one or several classes where they disliked the material, the format, or the faculty but kept taking it anyway because it was a required course, they needed the credit hours to stay in good standing, or they had already paid nontrivial tuition and/or fees for it. For most MOOCs, if you are even mildly disappointed, you can just drop out with little remorse.

The second, less obvious one: on Coursera, I bookmark courses (including ones I have only tenuous interest in) months ahead by enrolling in them. Then when the course starts, I judge whether I still have the time or interest (I usually don't), and if not, drop out. I don't know if this is common, but if it is, then it would have an impact.

I'd also be curious to know how pacing impacts completion rates. Personally, while some platforms treat it as a selling point, I find it very difficult to complete self-paced courses. On the other hand, some people may miss one or two deadlines in a non-self-paced MOOC and simply give up.

QUIC is not a replacement for HTTP; it works below it. See https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lmL9EF6qKrk7gbazY8bIdvq3...

An important caveat from the inclusion criteria (touched on in the body of the IEEE piece, to their credit):

> We chose to exclude measures that have only been replicated by a single research group to ensure all data included in and conclusions generated by this review accurately reflect the effects of tDCS itself, rather than any unique device, protocol, or condition utilized in a single lab.

If you looked at the (paywalled) appendix Table S3, you will see that (by eye) 100-something measures have been excluded.

The researchers had justifiable reasons for doing so and it is a decision I (as a non-expert, granted) agree with, but it means the headline is incorrect; the analysis found no effect for a certain set of measures (albeit quite a few -- more than I want to type or count) in four domains.

Also, like all good articles it includes a few paragraphs on limitations; I found the following one particularly interesting (and probably relevant to "brain hackers", of which I am not one):

> This paper only explores cognitive measures undertaken during or following one session of tDCS. As noted in the results section, there are many studies which have utilized a multiple-day stimulation paradigm. It is wholly possible that several sessions of tDCS are required in order for a reliable effect to be seen. In this instance, it has been argued tDCS impacts cognition via repeated exposure and, possibly, overnight consolidation.

You are not comparing like to like. Those are individual experiments; this is a meta-analysis. In fact, the first study you mention was included in the analysis.

Why would SRI protect against a MITM, who can simply change the embedded hashes? (not to mention that there's plenty of non-"resource" content that would not be hashed in the first place, yet an attacker might want to change)

Unless my understanding of SRI is totally wrong, it is to protect against malicious changes to third-party resources, usually by the hosts of those resources (or someone attacking them) or a poisoned cache thereof, not to guard against MITM.

I am happy about this, but note that besides the (fairly narrow) "public safety" exception mentioned in the article the order also exempts joint task forces and joint federal-state investigations [1]. I don't know how those work, but my cynical expectation is for those activities to increase to make up for some of the lost revenue.

[1] http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/AGassetforfetureorder.p...

That article is off-base; MediaTek, which is probably the most advanced of those listed, is Taiwanese.

"TV sticks" of this form factor have been all the rage on AliExpress, DealExtreme, and the like, although their popularity seems to have waned somewhat compared set-top-boxes (I read somewhere that it was due to trouble managing heat while customers demanded more powerful processors, but I don't know). See http://www.google.com/cse?q=tv+stick&sa=&cx=partner-pub-8120... and http://liliputing.com/?s=tv+stick

They've mostly run on ARM and Android, with some hobbyists loading more traditional Linux distros on. Probably the most notable exception that I know of is the following: http://liliputing.com/2014/12/100-bay-trail-pc-stick-can-run...

If this is priced well it will be interesting to see how it impacts that landscape.

A quick search of Dr. Nardi reveals that he has a financial interest in the MBTI, being the author and/or publisher of many "educational" works on type (see, e.g., here: http://www.radiancehouse.com/psych.htm ).

I did not see any peer reviewed journal articles by him on personality in a Google Scholar author search for his name, only books and a single conference paper.

Finally, looking at the most recent CV I saw -- http://www.darionardi.com/webcv.html -- only one of the papers in the "personality" section is actually from a journal, and it is, lo and behold, a Type-centric journal. And half of the conference papers are for the Association for Psychological Type International.

As appeals to authority go, he is a poor one.

Because, in addition to jhallenworld's point that not all economically relevant companies are publicly traded, not all publicly traded companies are listed on exchanges in their own countries.

>>Assembling high tech iPhone components

>My Xiaomi is pretty much every bit as good as an iPhone and 1/4 the cost.

Without taking Simonh's "side" here, you are missing his point, which is that the high-quality screens and advanced ICs are overwhelmingly designed and manufactured outside of China, especially in the countries he listed.

Even a low-end Xiaomi model uses a MediaTek (Taiwanese) SoC fabbed by TSMC (Taiwanese).

China may be moving toward more domestic production of such components, e.g., with modems and SoCs by Spreadtrum; SoCs by AllWinner, RockChip, AmLogic, etc.; or fabbing by SMIC. (On the other hand, I'm not aware of a major Chinese manufacturer of DRAM, NAND, or smartphone displays, for instance. I'd be interested in hearing about them if anybody knows of some.)

In other words, to counter him, it's not sufficient simply to show a Xiaomi phone; you must also show a BOM for one with primarily Chinese parts. As far as I know, one does not exist.

> Are there any sources (besides this rather fantastical article) that BGI-Shenzhen is conducting large-scale research into the genetics behind human intelligence

Yes, that is well known, e.g., http://www.nature.com/news/chinese-project-probes-the-geneti... (depending on how you define large-scale -- see the piece).

> if so that research is going towards some sort of comprehensive national eugenics policy?

Now that, as far as I know, is mere speculation, albeit speculation that has been bandied about by many more individuals than just the author of this piece.

Interestingly, one plant (partially owned by Google) recently applied for a Treasury grant to pay off its DoE loan [1]. As far as I know it has not been approved, but I'd be interested to know whether any companies have successfully done this.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/articles/ivanpah-solar-project-owners-...

Check http://lowendbox.com/ , though YMMV.

It's not just the nominal rate.

The average effective corporate tax rate is also quite a bit higher for the US than other developed countries; according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Bank, 27.9% versus an OECD average of 15.9%. [1 citing 2] The right wing think-tank AEI reported a smaller disparity of about 9% a few years earlier. [3] For what it's worth, these rates are fairly variable over the years.

So "huge numbers" seems like quite a stretch.

Moreover, I used the broader term "policies" rather than "rates" for a reason. The US's worldwide taxation scheme, for instance, is in itself problematic.

[1] http://barbwire.com/2014/10/15/analysis-are-us-corporate-tax...

[2] http://www.doingbusiness.org/~/media/GIAWB/Doing%20Business/...

[3] http://www.aei.org/article/economics/fiscal-policy/taxes/rep...

The "fair share" rhetoric so frequently deployed in these contexts would be more convincing if US corporate tax policy was more in line with international norms and if less tax revenue funded policies ranging from wasteful to downright immoral.

There is. Just long-press it and hit "Forget network".

An idea along these lines is that of the Honduran ZEDEs: http://fee.org/the_freeman/detail/startup-city-redux

(I'd link to a less ideological source but libertarians and their fellow travelers are the ones giving them the most comprehensive coverage and the Wikipedia article is atrocious.)

There's no need to "psychoanalyse" the field to find out why people repeat (with variations -- which is an important detail) the Milgram experiments; (nearly) all research papers contain clear statements about their motivations.

Certainly, you can see those explanations and disagree with them, but the author makes no mention of them, nor does he even link to the papers. Heck, he doesn't even link to popular press writeups of them, which is usually maddening enough!

> The post is attacking a straw man.

It's a straw man, but not his straw man. Pull up popular press articles about iOS8's disk encryption and you'll find that a disturbing number of them uncritically claim that it's meant to thwart the NSA. It's been driving me crazy.

What you are describing would be more precisely called an anarcho-capitalist solution. There are a lot of self-described libertarians who would not endorse it.

> The chip is probably manufactured in China

Available info indicates that the A8 is fabbed on a 20nm process by both Samsung and TSMC [1]. For Samsung, that would indicate production in either the US or South Korea [2]; for TSMC, that would indicate production is in Taiwan [3].

[1] http://recode.net/2014/09/23/teardown-shows-apples-iphone-6-...

[2] http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/foundry...

[3] http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov...

I don't know about "the same way", but Andrew "bunnie" Huang had a cool talk and post about hacking the firmware of SD cards and had this to say about security:

> om the security perspective, our findings indicate that even though memory cards look inert, they run a body of code that can be modified to perform a class of MITM attacks that could be difficult to detect; there is no standard protocol or method to inspect and attest to the contents of the code running on the memory card’s microcontroller. Those in high-risk, high-sensitivity situations should assume that a “secure-erase” of a card is insufficient to guarantee the complete erasure of sensitive data. Therefore, it’s recommended to dispose of memory cards through total physical destruction (e.g., grind it up with a mortar and pestle).

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3592

> Aren't USA judges voted in?

This case is being heard by a federal court, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Federal judges are appointed by the president with the consent of the Senate.