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I second this. I've just spent the summer putting together an online experiment for a student along similar lines:

https://www.doesmyrobotunderstand.me/ (please, feel free! We need subjects...)

I wish I'd known about the Javascript face analysis beforehand! And also how hard it would be to learn Javascript ;) And how to do that cool embedded video thing.

limbicsystemon U.S. backs down in fight with Harvard, MIT over student visas

I was talking recently to an Indian colleague whose son was admitted to McGill as an CS undergraduate. He had a very smooth transition through Canadian customs. Then was met right on the other side by representatives from McGill who provided a phone (to call his mother in India), a meal, and then talked him through the process of working with Canadian immigration to apply for permanent residency in a few years if he wanted to stay. The contrast with the US approach could not be starker.

limbicsystemon An analysis of the Lego City deep space rocket

In this high altitude video sequence of 'Lego Earth' I see no evidence of familiar coastal outlines. Case closed? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvlXACoVVIo

limbicsystemon Radioactive WW2 night vision test (1941)

Thanks!

limbicsystemon Pheromone in baby mouse tears makes females less interested in sex (2018)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21212322/

Sort of...

limbicsystemon The secret of academic success, or fun filled failure if you prefer

In the UK it's exactly the opposite. Here's the best case (UCL - a super research intensive university): https://www.ucl.ac.uk/students/fees-and-funding/how-ucl-uses... Most other universities rely far more on teaching. Tuition fees also have the advantage that they are constant and relatively easy to predict while grants last a few years at best (and of course you do have to >do< something with them so they are not pure profit. Broadly, grants are the delicious froth on top of the tuition fee latte.

limbicsystemon Ask HN: What landing page do you love?

And 'andn' and 'youll'. But still pretty cool...

limbicsystemon If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014)

York reporting in: https://www.york.ac.uk/solar/

limbicsystemon Close Encounter with a Gigantic Jet

The book "Echopraxia" by Peter Watts has exactly this in it. It's a great read!

limbicsystemon Driving an Ambulance in the Age of Narcan

Un-hugged link https://web.archive.org/web/20190907135002/https://hazlitt.n...

limbicsystemon Pictures of the Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory from the Early 1970s

And I was delighted to discover that Phoenix, which happened to be my first ever email server, ended up here: http://www.computermuseum.org.uk/

Along with lots of other cool things including possibly the first Sun workstation. Worth a visit.

limbicsystemon Everything Is Correlated

It is true that, as Fisher points out, with enough samples you are almost guaranteed to reject the null hypothesis. That's why we tell students to consider both p values (which you could think of as a form of quality control on the dataset) and variance explained. Loftus and Loftus make the point nicely: p tells you if you have enough samples and any effect to consider, variance explained tells you if it's worth pursuing. Both are useful guides to a thoughtful analysis. In addition, I'd make a case for thinking about the scientific significance and importance of the hypothesis and the Bayesian prior. And to put a positive spin on this, given how easy it is to get small p values, big ones are pretty much a red flag to stop the analysis and go and do something more productive instead.

limbicsystemon Unveiling the first-ever image of a black hole [video]

Or was it the Revd. John Michell? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michell

limbicsystemon Zebras’ stripes discourage biting flies from landing

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.181325

limbicsystemon Our Language Affects What We See

To be fair, there have been >some< replications. My favourite is Gilbert et al, PNAS, 2006 where they more or less replicate the same effect with a different colour set in English speakers >AND< show that it is stronger in the left hemisphere (consistent with it being linked to language). http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/ai/whorfhypothesis06.pdf

limbicsystemon Our Language Affects What We See

No. They were surprised that the exact same light/dark blue discrimination was faster for Russian speakers.

limbicsystemon Remastered 1964 films show origins of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

Can confirm - the tour of SLAC is (or was in the early 2000s) a great experience. Apart from the squirrels sitting on the klystrons, I remember a lot of great engineering and 'forward planning': For example, highway 280 was not built when they started construction - but they knew it was coming so they pre-built that bridge that runs 280 over the beamline so that future highway work would not interfere so much with their operations. And they had only just invented lasers - they knew that by the time they had finished construction they would be able use this new invention to align the tubes but they weren't quite there yet with the laser physics so they just left an empty laser calibration tube ready for when someone (machinists?) had completed that part of the engineering (hopefully!). Also I was impressed that their measurement precision is such that they can detect and compensate for the movement of the continental plate associated with the Pacific tides.

limbicsystemon The Hippies Were Right: It's All about Vibrations, Man

I wonder... Professor Schooler is a pretty high-profile scientist (https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=3UEI9NIAAAAJ&hl=...). But I don't see any publications with Tam Hunt (who seems a little... eccentric? (https://www.collective-evolution.com/2018/03/21/carl-jungs-s...). I wonder if this is just some guy who has managed to get 'visitor status' at UCSB and is taking an unwitting scientist's work out of context? In what sense is he a 'colleague'?

limbicsystemon A bipartisan plan to end surprise ER bills

It's pretty simple: https://www.nuffieldhealth.com/ https://www.bupa.co.uk/

limbicsystemon The Bell System Technical Journal

This little beauty https://archive.org/details/bstj39-5-1125 is, I believe, the first description of computer-generated random dot stereograms by Bela Julesz. Note that the original paper came with a free pair of Fresnel lenses stuck in an envelope at the end to help you fuse the images. Those were the days...

limbicsystemon Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research

Zotero rocks! I encourage all my students to use it as well even though the University has a license from Endnote. Power tip: reduce the number of characters searched from the default 500000 to more like 10000 for large (>5k) libraries otherwise I find it slows down quite a bit.

limbicsystemon Weber–Fechner law

W/F is cool. But it's not the whole story. The dipper function (https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/APP.71.3.435) describes a deviation from W/F behaviour that seems to represent a direct link between population neuronal activity and perception : basically, neurons respond in a sigmoidal way to increasing input and hitting the steep part of the sigmoid reduces your discrimination threshold. After a while you are past that steep bit and back to the boring old W/F regime.

limbicsystemon Tree of Life

This one is much easier to use and you can get common ancestors (toggle the 'relate' switch) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/labs/lab/evolution/research#/ev... What I love about it is typing in two things that seem fairly distant like humans and fruit flies and then seeing it zoom in quite way to show that they come off a relatively late branch.

limbicsystemon No evidence to support link between violent video games and behaviour

No. In fact quite the opposite. A good meta-analysis https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/20192553/ suggests a statistically significant link. The US military spends a lot of money to desensitize recruits to violent killing. In the limit, would we really be surprised if a hyperrealistic video game had at least some of the same effect as basic training?

limbicsystemon How many colours were there in a medieval rainbow?

I don't know about 'by hue' but almost all colors are not in the rainbow. The spectral locus is a line that runs around the edge of a 2D color space (technically 3D if you include luminance as well...).

7D if you are a mantis shrimp.

limbicsystemon How many colours were there in a medieval rainbow?

Hannah Smithson at Oxford has a beautiful research programme looking at medieval descriptions of rainbows and their relation to modern color spaces: here's an example that combines scholarly study of illuminated manuscripts and data from the Hubble Space Telescope. https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/publications/464345

Interesting additional fact: 'rainbows' are not the same thing as the pure spectra that you might get from a prism.

limbicsystemon A glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs

Right. I'm the Chair of a (neuroscience and psychology) departmental graduate school and I also sometimes sit in on departmental PhD 'scholarship' interviews. One of the questions we ask is 'Given that your chances of gaining a job in academia are only about 1 in 8, what do you think you will do when you finish graduate school?'. Then, when they arrive, we show them, a discuss, a version of this picture

http://thegradstudentway.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/02...

during the induction lecture on their first day. They are all still there on day 2. I like to think they are smart enough to know what they are doing and that the only people who are still writing phd 'glut' articles like this are those whose ideas about graduate training were formed a few decades ago.

limbicsystemon Image Correction for Color Blindness

If you can't see the number 45 in the first image you probably do have red/green colorblindness. But you can still see the other color dimension (blue/yellow) just fine - so most likely you are seeing some but not all of the colors in the second image.

limbicsystemon Image Correction for Color Blindness

Sorry about that - it will come up eventually - it's being hit pretty hard right now. There's a cache here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...