kurtosis

I'm too lazy to look up the ref, but someone told me that the preference for average faces was actually an artifact of the averaging process. It turns out that averaging images of faces also makes the skin look a lot younger and smoother, and therefore more attractive.

Essential question:

send and receive telephone calls

play music with headphones and podcasts

nice maps with gps

basic internet

I have never owned a smartphone before, I like the maps on ipad, and want something more portable

This review is pretty fluffy, what is the best android phone right now?

I actually kind of like it - true "ugliness" can just as elusive as beauty or elegance. See this interesting book - http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/books/review/Finnerty-t.ht...

Are you really sure about this? It sounds equally plausible to me that not knowing both the source and target languages would give one an advantage of not relying on ad-hoc, hard-to-model, human judgements. Being monolingual is more likely to enforce a discipline where one develops an algorithm which would work effectively on all natural languages.

IIRC the 'candide' group was (not intentionally) composed of scientists with no knowledge of both english and french.. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aberger/mt.html

if I was in that situation I would have likely just melted the gold and poured it into a hallowed out brick or something..

Well the deactivation page did automatically say that the users "friends" would "miss" them. Did they actually check with these users to see if they would want their image and identity to be used in this way? If not, then it seems pretty disingenuous to me. How do they know that these users will actually miss them? Why is facebook assuming that my friends would not respect my decision to leave facebook if that was the case..

"my definition of a terrorist is somebody who uses stealth to deliberately target civilians in an effort to affect political change."

Shouldn't the definition of terrorism include the fact that they are violently targeting civilians? Economic or computer terrorism that doesn't actually hurt or kill anyone doesn't meet the definition in my view - and the publishing work or WL definitely doesn't either.

Yes but isn't the possibility that your communications will be disclosed to the public by an anonymous insider already a part of this game? I don't see the naivety or idealism here - It just looks like standard journalism to me. WL has done a lot to make the "game" more interesting by making the possibility of insider leaks more credible than before. There are many reasons why an insider with the story to tell would rather talk to WL than a newsmedia reporter.

why not take the simpler explanation that the reason families have broken up is that they actually weren't that happy?

Also why doesn't having multiple people in a family earning an income lead to an increase in security? i.e. the impact of a (e.g. job loss, illness) can be buffered by the other partner's income.

This confuses me. If it is impossible to time the market, then why does he think it is "pretty clear that the market is getting overheated"? [edit: in the comments he explains that he's looking at "revenues and cash flow and discounted cash flow to get values", but if these are only weak predictors that don't enable one to time the market, why worry?]

Read "Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age" by Larry Bartels. He gives some evidence of the harmful political effects of income inequality. I don't know why it matters whether the scale is increasing - I think it's enough to show that it is harmful. It's honestly a pretty boring book, so more work needs to be done on this.

The logic is simple:

Money buys political influence. Income inequality thus leads to political inequality. The government is corrupted to serve the interests of the superrich.

Sounds like systemic damage to me.

Just a guess,

The city I live in, Berlin has an area of ~821 km^2

Let's suppose that one city block is about 0.2 km x 0.2 km

This implies that there are on the order of 10 km of road per km^2 of area. Thus the length of road is O(10^4) km for one major city. Now if we drive 30 km/h, and there are ~25 intersections per km^2, and the average wait time to turn is 1 minute (I have no idea), then we need 20 + 25 ~ 45 minutes to cover 1 sq km - In reality we will not have a perfectly efficient travelling salesman route and will have to cross some streets more than once so let's say it takes 1 hour per km^2. Thus the entire city can be covered in about 821 hours per car, or about one month / car. If we only allow a 40 hour work week, then it takes about 5 months.

Thus with a modest fleet of 5 cars the city can be updated about once a month. Does this sound right? If so not bad. Of course streetview isn't working here for legal reasons, but this logic should apply to other similar cities.

I think so. At any one point in time, at the frontier of human knowledge, there are many research proposals floating around for what direction we should next expand the frontier. Some of these proposals will lead to valuable gains in knowledge, and profitable technologies. Most will amount to nothing, or at most a footnote in a more important work. It becomes clear after the fact that the funding money should have been invested elsewhere.

So if you are a funding agency, you rank the proposals from best to worst. If you continuously added money to the agencies budget, the quality of the proposals would get lower and lower. I believe that is what one means by diminishing returns.

Another issue: perhaps the increase in happiness with income (I) reported for I < 75k is due to the fact that jobs with higher income have nicer work conditions and colleagues. If this is true it should be possible to make people happier without paying them more. Just arrange matters so that their jobs are more pleasant.

It was always puzzling to me as a child that the people doing the hardest work are paid the least money. (hard in the sense that it physically drains you, and your whole body aches)

I don't understand what you are saying. Who is marginalizing the ambitions of others? Why is it easy? I take it you think that the study is invalid because you called it "crap" and a "joke". I'm honestly not sure - why is it a joke or crap?

Did the poster in the classroom provide any of the many examples of fortunes that began with crime? To say that "every" great fortune began with a crime is false, but certainly many did.

I found this article to be completely unintelligible. It was about as reasonable as a horoscope.

Yeah but what about the long term side effects of "lack of attention, anxiety and other issues", which aren't just possible, but probable!

I would Love it if referee reports were published with papers. Why waste all of the unpaid time and research of the referees by compressing their opinions into a yes/no/revise decision? This would improve the quality of the reports, and make the process of reading papers much easier. One of the most difficult parts of reading a paper is trying to decide for yourself if the methods or conclusions of the paper are flawed. The referee reports are a valuable counterpoint from people who probably know more about a topic than you do!

"Unknown unknown solutions haunt the mediocre without their knowledge."

Discovering new solutions and ideas often involves a lot of naivety - Making progress often requires a willingness to approach a problem with a truly fresh perspective, free of the prejudices and blindness that come from having too much depth in a field.

While I can't always find the discipline for this - I like to try and attempt a problem on my own, even when I strongly suspect that there is an existing solution better than anything I could invent. I am surely less competent than someone who knows the existing solution and applies it without hesitation, but the more competent expert is less likely to improve his methods unless he is willing to move beyond established methods where he risks screwing up.

Intelligence can emerge from stupidity.

This is actually a heuristic for solving the reinforcement learning problem: there is a known tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. If the vast bulk of the solution space is crap and you know this then you are less likely to explore and find a better solution.

see: http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/%7Esutton/book/the-book.html

Honest Criticism: Too slow. I don't like being put on hold. Please just make it fast.

It makes me happy and amused to hear langauge chauvanism from a non-european! Why am I not-surprised to learn that chinese sounds perfectly logical to a native speaker!

The examples he gives are quite bogus though - how would someone without the experience in chinese learn that a "bus" is a "public wagon" instead of a "fat car" or a "wheeled boat" or a "shared ride"? Is there some rule you can learn?

I've also been trying to learn the german language and there are many many examples of compounds like this - I have made up many that are completely logical to me, but get only confused looks from people. e.g. "einziehen" is to settle-in but "ausziehen" is to remove your clothes.

"chandelier" is actually quite logical if you follow the historical emergence of the word from the french word for "candlestick"

The standard advice I've heard is: Work for defense companies to learn the technology, and then leave to transfer this technology toward peaceful (and often lucrative) applications. Swords into Ploughshares.

While I believe that this advice is technically true - it avoids a very critical issue and is thus misleading. The more important questions are: How "good" do you have to be to get an outcome comparable to the average lawyer or physician (or MBA grad)? How many other people are this good? How different are the outcomes between people who are "good" and those who are not "good"?

You could make the same argument about playing professional basketball or football. If you are "good" you won't have any problem finding work and you will make a lot of money. The problem is that only a vanishingly tiny minority qualifies for this standard, and players that are only marginally not good enough to make it to the NBA have significantly worse outcomes.

Computer programming is a fun intellectual challenge. If you want a conventionally successful career study law or medicine - professions which take protecting their wages and bargaining power seriously. Computer programming is something where you must be motivated by a love of the craft. I remember reading Stroustroup's C++ when I was in high school and he pointed out the trend toward the "deskilling" of computer programming. His comments had a somewhat cynical disillusioned tone to them and they turned me away from programming. When I have seen how the careers of some of my high school friends developed and how they feel about the experience I'm glad that I ran across Stroustroup's "advice"

If this technology becomes more widespread, I would expect to see people wearing clothing in public that covers their faces: hoods, hats, and thick sunglasses. I've heard the widespread presence of surveillance cameras cited as one reason for the popularity of hoodies in London. People can adapt to this type of technology without too large of a disruption to their lifestyle.

In some ways it would be nice because it would make it would make it more socially acceptable to walk around with your face concealed. Many people would prefer to do this so they can leave their house and still avoid unwanted social contact.

Perhaps the sad fact is that being entertaining and being accurate are conflicting goals. Who wants to listen to a complex explanation for why the "fifteen minutes of videotaped conversation" method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottman )for predicting the likelihood of divorce is flawed due to overfitting issues (see http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2010... for details)

Gladwell doesn't let complex facts get in the way of a good story.

A very nice introduction - There is a also a lot of interesting material on these topics in the academic literature. Here's a couple of nice examples:

(1) M. Newman's publications contain a wealth of ideas and insights into these topics:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/pubs.html

Also, much credit goes to Barabasi who made many contributions to this field and did much to popularize it (along with Watts and Strogatz)

http://www.barabasilab.com/pubs-revart.php

For the future, there are many interesting possibilities in the study of dynamical processes on networks (e.g. reaction-diffusion / message passing / synchronization) - for a high level treatment see this excellent review:

Critical phenomena in Complex Networks http://arxiv.org/abs/0705.0010

I'm too lazy to look this up, but did the video get smaller or larger with the iteration number? This is more interesting to me than the look

It is the boltzmann equation of kinetic theory. It is a differential equation for a 6 dimensional function f(r,v) which describes the number of particles at location r, with velocity v. This distribution changes as the particles fly through space and collide with one another. It has important applications in the theory of hot dilute gases (e.g. rocket engines) and the theory of conductivity in solid-state physics. There are already practical approximations and numerical methods used by physicists who need practical answers to these problems so I think this is mostly of interest to mathematicians...