growlix

It seems like there are a lot of commenters claiming to be able to do the same thing who didn't read the abstract:

"...various indirect mechanisms possibly mediating this phenomenon were tested: accommodation, brightness, increases in arousal by increased mental effort. None of these behavioral tests could support an indirect strategy as the mode of action"

The effect of the nudge is definitely the main story here, but the redesigned summons form (Figure 1) seems like a pretty good example of the importance of communication design. While there's certainly still room for improvement, the new forms seem much easier to understand.

Anecdotally, this stereotype seems to exist in the United States as well.

When it comes to data, the 2016 National Household Education Survey by the National Center for Education Statistics shows that 51% of parents selected "A desire to provide religious instruction" as an "important" reason for homeschooling their children, and 67% selected "A desire to provide moral instruction" as an "important" reason for homeschooling [0, in bar plot form; 1, original data].

[0] https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/summaries/reas... [1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2017/2017102.pdf

An interesting perspective summarized here [0] is that the bombings were not just unnecessary to end the war and were conducted as a show of force to the Soviets. They were conducted in an attempt to end the war ASAP, before a planned Soviet ground invasion of Japan so that the US wouldn't have to share control over post-war Japan with the Soviets.

[0] https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-real-reason-america-used-n...

Yup. Post got flagged too. I assume because it's "political", but in my experience HN is very interested in civil liberties.

Only one I've been able to find so far: https://twitter.com/greg_doucette/status/1283452585945583618...

Link to PDF: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19462452

Link to PDF: http://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1043-4

Buzzfeed has an investigative journalism arm[0] that its built over the last ~7 years. They were a 2018 Pulitzer finalist[1].

I assume their clickbait subsidizes their investigative journalism, a business model that gives me hope given the importance of investigative journalism. Unfortunately that hope is tempered by the recent round of layoffs.

[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/investigations [1] https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/staff-buzzfeed-news

Totally reasonable. I was more (be/a)mused than suspicious. I'm excited to see what gets funded!

Very cool idea! Nice to see funding for non-traditional research models.

But I'm a little confused why you made this comment on an earlier HN post about Shannon Labs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17675617

"...officials said Babchenko staged his death in coordination with Ukrainian police as part of an investigation into threats made against his life. The plan had been in place for more than a month...They have made one arrest in connection with the operation." [0]

It's not clear why they faked his death, but apparently it led to something happening.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/30/russian-journa...

I wonder if it's misleading to use the term "brain" here. It's certainly interesting that RNA can modulate the synaptic activity involved in the gill siphon withdrawal reflex, but the system is pretty far from a brain.

I see a lot of child comments using "spatial" to refer to multiple distinct concepts: 1) coordination and movement in space, 2) visuospatial skills (i.e. intuition for 2D and 3D geometry), and 3) navigation. While many tasks make use of multiple of these capabilities simultaneously, there are clear behavioral and neuroanatomical dissociations between them (thought slightly less so between 1 and 2).

Coordination of movement in space (for example something like grasping an object) is more dependent on parietal cortex & the dorsal visual stream (the so-called "where" pathway), and the cerebellum.

"Visuospatial skill", as typified by tasks like mental object rotation, is more ascribable to temporal cortex & the ventral visual stream (the so-called "what" pathway, responsible for object recognition). However, it often requires both ventral and dorsal visual cortex.

Navigation is hippocampus-dependent. However, the hippocampus is not a "GPS". I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. It is a hub for integrating and associating disparate information from across the brain in order to form representations of and the relationships between behaviorally-relevant states. This explains why the hippocampus is also involved in "navigating" abstract state spaces, for example turn-based game states [0] or auditory frequency [1], when they're behaviorally relevant. It gets analogized as a GPS because 1) most of the research involves spatial tasks, so space is the behaviorally-relevant dimension, 2) a certain Nobel Prize winner does not feel the need to update his theory, and 3) "Hippocampus = GPS" is too sexy and intuitive of an analogy, especially for the lay press.

The idea of the hippocampus as an "associative engine" also helps unify its seemingly disparate roles in "navigation" and memory when you consider that a memory is just information from disparate brain areas that's been associated via temporal correlation because of its behavioral relevance. It also explains why researchers observe "place cells" and "time cells" and "head direction cels" and "eye position cells": because these variables are behaviorally relevant (i.e. important for maximizing reward) in the task the animal is performing.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/hipo.22523

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28358077

I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers are exaggerated (or fabricated) in order to facilitate widespread acceptance and adoption of surveillance.

Who decided what constitutes a crime, and who gets convicted and executed? China isn't exactly known for the fairness of its justice system.

And the quantity, youth, and low latency of organs for transplant exclude every possibility except harvesting.

ISIS desires to create an authoritarian regime and commit acts of violence and destruction against most of the world's population.

The Falun Gong desires to exist.

On the "Delusion <-> Con Artist" continuum, I'm inclined to think she's more on the delusion end. If your intent is to defraud, you'd want to avoid a domain that's 1) scientifically accountable, and 2) subject to heavy oversight and regulation. She seems smart enough to know that.

This Vanity Fair piece provides a fair amount of character background: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/elizabeth-holmes-the...

In addition to the mechanisms described by others, it seems that antibiotics alter the microbiome in a manner that affects nutrient metabolism.

source: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11400

abstract: Antibiotics administered in low doses have been widely used as growth promoters in the agricultural industry since the 1950s, yet the mechanisms for this effect are unclear. Because antimicrobial agents of different classes and varying activity are effective across several vertebrate species, we proposed that such subtherapeutic administration alters the population structure of the gut microbiome as well as its metabolic capabilities. We generated a model of adiposity by giving subtherapeutic antibiotic therapy to young mice and evaluated changes in the composition and capabilities of the gut microbiome. Administration of subtherapeutic antibiotic therapy increased adiposity in young mice and increased hormone levels related to metabolism. We observed substantial taxonomic changes in the microbiome, changes in copies of key genes involved in the metabolism of carbohydrates to short-chain fatty acids, increases in colonic short-chain fatty acid levels, and alterations in the regulation of hepatic metabolism of lipids and cholesterol. In this model, we demonstrate the alteration of early-life murine metabolic homeostasis through antibiotic manipulation.

Also that "brainwaves" have meaning beyond the behavior, brain region, and context in which they're being examined.

Your comprehension seems spot on to me, though maybe you feel like you're missing something given the apparent discrepancy between the hype vs. value of this research. I think there are two relevant factors here:

1) MIT is very good at publicity and press.

2) Causal neuroscience experiments are still technically challenging to implement in complex behaving organisms (e.g. monkeys and humans). We have methods such as microstimulation (invasive) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (non-invasive), but these methods are pretty ham-fisted. They indiscriminately activate (or deactivate) all the neurons in and passing through a given volume in the brain (optogenetics is promising in this regard, but it's still a nascent technology in monkeys). So while this study may appear weak because it's correlational, it may actually represent a meaningful step forward in the field.

The study's design cannot address causality. They report a correlation between beta rhythms and the subjects' behavior.

It's unclear whether local field potentials (LFPs), of which "beta rhythms" are one specific frequency band (approximately 12-30hz), are actually a mechanism that the brain uses to transmit information. Information is known to be transmitted via the discharges of single neurons; LFPs represent the aggregate activity of tens of thousands of neurons within ~3mm of a recording electrode. It's possible that these aggregate voltage fluctuations feed back onto the activity of single neurons [0], but LFPs are generally considered an emergent property of populations of neurons as opposed to an information transmission mechanism in their own right.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2727

Interesting that this stems in part from misinterpretation of confidence intervals. The referenced paper, A Statistical Error in the Estimation of the Recommended Dietary Allowance for Vitamin D [0], seems like an excellent example to illustrate how (and how not) to interpret confidence intervals.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4210929/#!po=22...

It is amazing how many of these control rooms are just huge surfaces covered in dials and instruments that lack any representative structure of the system they are monitoring and controlling.

This seems to be a pretty significant step in miniaturization. It seems noteworthy that the animals perform more trials of the task with this implant as compared to an older, larger implant. However, the article is misleading: this device does not record EEG signals, which are recorded from the surface of the scalp and comprise the aggregate activity of millions of neurons across multiple cubic millimeters of cortex. It records LFPs (local field potentials), which are the aggregate activity of thousands to tens of thousands of neurons in a hundreds of µm to single mm volume around the electrode, and single neuron activity. EEGs are also recorded non-invasively, which could lead one to think that this implant isn't invasive.

Direct link to PDF: http://unbounce.com/docs/The-Unbounce-Conversion-Benchmark-R...

There's an interesting New Yorker article from a few years ago that profiles some the firms and individuals involved in taste/scent making: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/23/the-taste-maker...

The associated paper, for those that desire the "full" version: http://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/pub/d20/d20...

The security architecture described here seems pretty clever. Is this degree of security unique across mobile devices? If the phone in question was from a different manufacturer or ran a different OS, would the FBI have to ask its creator for help?

Let us honor Justice Scalia's memory by refraining from interpreting or contextualizing any prose for the remainder of the day.