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neutralidon IQ Matters Less Than You Think

Extending the computer analogy, what would be ideal characteristics for the software architecture of a successful scientist?

neutralidon How Mammals Maintain Symmetry During Development

The associated paper to the article is:

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article/file?id=10.137...

p.15 has a summary of what they propose, e.g., density of p21+ chondrocytes, as an inhibitor:

"Because we found that the extent of compensatory proliferation does not linearly correlate with cell density—but it does with the proportion of p21+ chondrocytes — we posit that density plays a permissive rather than an instructive role and that stress signals emanating from p21+ chondrocytes are needed as well."

neutralidon Coconut oil is 'pure poison', says Harvard professor

According to a recent Lancet article [1]:

"Atherosclerosis was common in four preindustrial populations including preagricultural hunter-gatherers. Although commonly assumed to be a modern disease, the presence of atherosclerosis in premodern human beings raises the possibility of a more basic predisposition to the disease.

[1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/www/external/labor/agi...

neutralidon On Intelligence in Cells: The Case for Whole Cell Biology (2009) [pdf]

While I am skeptical of attributing personality changes due to cell memory from organ transplanting, is it possible for a cell or a cell collective to have information (memory) embedded as a dynamical system? Theoretically, it may be possible to embed memory into a dynamical system [1].

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/105/48/18970

neutralidon Wilbur Wright's Letter to the Smithsonian (1899)

> If the latter features are of interest to our Government, we shall be pleased to take up the matter either on a basis of providing machines of agreed specification, at a contract price, or, of furnishing all the scientific and practical information we have accumulated in these years of experience, together with a license to use our patents; thus putting the Government in a position to operate on its own account.

I took this to mean that they were inquiring whether the government would be interested in a system manufactured according to specifications agreed to by both parties (or just providing the IP according to a license agreement), not necessarily for a pre-existing system. Necessary modifications to a system do not make for a fully developed machine.

If you're implying that the Wright brothers are not looking for R&D funding like Langley, I agree. They made that explicit in a later letter to the government. It's too bad that the government gave funding to Langley yet somehow rejected contracts to complete a working system with the Wright brothers, despite their initial successes.

neutralidon Wilbur Wright's Letter to the Smithsonian (1899)

http://wifcon.com/anal/analwright.htm

neutralidon Wilbur Wright's Letter to the Smithsonian (1899)

Early on, Langley (and the Smithsonian Institute), who opposed the Wright brothers, was funded by the military early on failed flights whereas the Wright brothers were unable to secure funding even though they had a working prototype. Considering such opposition, it seems only natural that they would be careful about the licensing of their patents. Wright brothers certainly weren't patent trolls, since trolls typically don't even have a working prototype and are uninterested in commercializing the technology.

neutralidon Wolfram Alpha Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat

If you know how to formulate the problem well (which is typically half the problem anyway), Mathematica is great for providing closed-form solutions, if there is one. In CS graduate school, it would provide general closed-form solutions that I'd never have thought of. Most everyone else brute-forced a solution numerically or simplified the problem to specific cases, which is fine but you get so much more insight from the general analytical solution, if one exists.

neutralidon 21% of Windows users plan to switch to Mac, says survey, vs. 2% Mac to Windows

As a note, for Mac OS X Sierra, if you press Option while copying, the pathname is copied.

neutralidon A Mathematician's Secret: We're Not All Geniuses

https://www.quora.com/What-college-majors-have-on-average-st...

You could use GRE test scores to compare across subject majors. There may be saturation at the top where further differentiation between majors could be possible if the exam material were sufficiently more difficult.

neutralidon A Mathematician's Secret: We're Not All Geniuses

> In short, we over-reward those at the top and dismiss the rest. It’s an unhelpful and unnecessary bias that facilitates hero worship, undermines the goal of nurturing creativity and discourages valuable contributions to communities, worthy causes and scientific projects.

This happens in every research community. The hero worship also tends to over-fund certain areas because of how the agenda is effectively set by a few researchers.

One way that may help fix this is if there's a way to generate a crowd-sourced network of links whose purpose is to plot as a graph the current gaps and challenges of the field. It's perhaps easier in fields with clear subject boundaries like physics.

We could then observe how individual knowledge contributions have helped (are helping) progress the growing knowledge "surface." Young researchers could also observe areas of neglect and attack those instead of going where everyone else is. Reward people who grow the knowledge surface, irrespective of their background.

neutralidon The First Time America Freaked Out Over Automation

With the advent of word processors and spreadsheets, work shifted from secretaries to other already employed office workers.

https://newrepublic.com/article/121712/slow-death-secretary

A similar shift is occurring with paralegals. Combine AI with massive legal data, firms could drastically reduce the hours of legal staff:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/technology/lawyers-artifi...

The same could occur for support staff in the medical field, e.g., radiology.

Doctors and lawyers themselves are unlikely to be as affected in the next several decades, except they may be under pressure to take up more clients or including more sophisticated analyses increasing workload. Job requirements will likely require higher and higher levels of education.

neutralidon Why do so few people major in computer science?

Based on % total majors, interesting how biomed has been inversely related to engineering (and most of CS) except in the last decade where they're all growing at a higher rate than math + physics. Would be interesting to relate this to:

- the perception of U.S. manufacturing (affects engineering) '80s: http://www.epi.org/publication/manufacturing-job-loss-trade-...

- perception of CS (dot-com & bust: '94-'01): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

neutralidon Which Airline Kicks Off the Most Passengers?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/04/11/united...

> United spokesman Jonathan Guerin said Tuesday that all 70 seats on United Express Flight 3411 were filled, but the plane was not overbooked as the airline previously reported.

neutralidon Qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers’ productivity

> It is very important for a designer to recognize all the parts of a design that are not easy wins, that is, there is no proportionality between the effort and the advantages.

In optimization, if you make an analogy between speedup / improvement with advantages / effort, you get Amdahl's Law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

"[T]heoretical speedup of the execution of the whole task increases with the improvement of the resources of the system and that regardless of the magnitude of the improvement, the theoretical speedup is always limited by the part of the task that cannot benefit from the improvement."

neutralidon Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons

I haven't heard about the programming conference effect. That makes sense. Proving it out involves exposing the theory to a wide range of adversarial inputs to demonstrate robustness.

There seems to be a similar trend in mortality with respect to getting treated in a teaching hospital vs nonteaching hospital:

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/patient-advice/articles...

At teaching hospitals treatments, may be very conservative as well (perhaps even more so than at non-teaching hospitals) with residents whose teaching is freshly learned.

neutralidon Toddlers’ grammar skills not inherent, but learned, new Stanford research says

What's interesting is that Google's Translate, via neural network training, seems to have found an efficient structure underlying many languages:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2114748-google-translat...

neutralidon Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons

> Team members who believe in their leadership tend to be more effective. Patients who believe in their care have better recovery rates.

There may be other factors regarding recovery rates perhaps counter-intuitive with respect to the presence of leadership (or appearance of leadership). Somewhat related:

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/startling-benefit-cardiology-me...

"High-risk patients with certain acute heart conditions are more likely to survive than other similar patients if they are admitted to the hospital during national cardiology meetings, when many cardiologists are away from their regular practices."

neutralidon Physics as a Way of Thinking (1936) [pdf]

The focus is on the subtle impact of using some framework for analysis rather than the gross impact of individual bias (obviously that's an issue every scientist should be and probably is aware of).

For example, statistical causal models are widely used in the social sciences. After searching within the field, I looked for a problem associated with explanation ambiguity due to how the models were framed (or could be equivalently framed leading to alternate explanations) and found this paper:

MacCallum, R. C., Wegener, D. T., Uchino, B. N., & Fabrigar, L. R. (1993). The problem of equivalent models in applications of covariance structure analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 114(1), 185-199. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.114.1.185

I'm not sure if they could extend their approach using manifold theory and an equivalence class for the set of models, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone did something similar. It could then be an example of a coordinate-free approach to data analysis in psychology.

neutralidon Physics as a Way of Thinking (1936) [pdf]

Sometimes, symmetry reductions become easier using a coordinate-free approach. This means that you could better determine invariances in the system without having a bias towards a particular coordinate system. Philosophically, finding commonality in systems is powerful and any bias (coordinates) distorts those commonalities making them harder to perceive. From the article, I inferred that finding coordinate-free approaches in social sciences could be fruitful.

neutralidon Physics as a Way of Thinking (1936) [pdf]

> When you say "coordinate-free" do you mean "independent of any fixed frame of reference"?

Yes. Einstein's field equation can be derived using differential geometry, e.g. a coordinate-free approach. Prof. Smith discusses the evolution from egocentric (early Greek) to absolute fixed-frame (Newtonian) to coordinate-free (relativistic).

neutralidon Physics as a Way of Thinking (1936) [pdf]

Prof. Smith describes how social sciences could benefit from the modern, coordinate-free approach in physics. He also wishes for a tighter coupling in social sciences as we've seen historically with physics (theory) and engineering (practice).

Interesting article.

neutralidon What I Heard from Trump Supporters

The irony of your post getting downvoted instead of getting discussed further on a thread discussing how dissenting non-mainstream liberal views are disapproved of in SV.

Appears like ideologues regardless of their affiliation enjoy suppressing dissenting views instead of discussing them further with people that have opposing views.

neutralidon Theories about a link between the human mind and quantum physics

> QM just doesn't add _any_ new explanations or make any predictions for consciousness. Until it does, or we meet something we really cannot explain, it does not make sense to obsess over it.

As an aside, how would scientists develop/validate explanations for long-term behaviors, i.e., behaviors that occur over a longer period incrementally with low-energy processes? I think we're lucky to have have astronomical data to observe physics at logarithmic time scales, but I wonder about the general case of low-energy, long-term system behavior that may not exhibit itself in astronomy.

neutralidon Multiplying and dividing with Hindu-Arabic numerals and with Roman ones

https://www.cnet.com/news/ancient-indian-aircraftspaceship-o...

neutralidon Multiplying and dividing with Hindu-Arabic numerals and with Roman ones

Wikipedia's entry and discussion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Indian_mathematics/Archiv...

While there is some level of whitewashing going on, there's a lot of hyperbole of what was discovered during the Vedic period.

Not sure why there's even a need to amplify/attenuate the contributions. There are Indian mathematicians today who are making significant contributions. Probably more productive to focus on mathematical developments in general rather than assigning credit to the past. Assigning credit to a culture is problematic. What about the culture enabled the mathematical development?

Perhaps one day we'll move past assigning credit and towards purely developing ideas in the spirit of the Upanishads written in anonymity.

neutralidon Ask HN: What device do you use to read academic papers with?

Macbook:

- Bibdesk (http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net): archiving papers (automatic rename / custom citekey generation), Google Scholar bibtex extraction, and bibtex interface w/ TeXShop

- Google Drive: storing archive ... it's not a great archive solution because of google's special system of renaming files, however stuck with it because of work

iPad:

- Goodreader: fast PDF renderer

I wish there was a bibdesk app for the ipad linking to goodreader.

neutralidon Network programming with Go (2012)

There are horizontal lines on Safari in the upper left corner that closes the sidebar.

If I don't close the sidebar, for whatever reason, Safari blanks the page on mouseover.

neutralidon John Carmack on the Government

Carmack probably experienced a lot of government waste in aerospace. It's an industry that's long been dominated by subsidized government programs. On the other hand, Carmack should have experienced the dramatic development of the electronics industry, basically the break up of large electronics corporations into a vertically integrated semiconductor industry. Government had a huge role to play in that. The same thing needs to happen to the aerospace industry and other technology areas, e.g., health care, transportation, comm, etc..

One of the major reasons that the semiconductor and software industry took off is because of agencies like DARPA, where program managers are rotated (never permanent). If we continue to have careerists in charge then, unlike DARPA, we're bound to have inefficiencies develop. We would benefit from a reorganized government, where only small term-limited crack teams are kept in civil service and rotated to address gaps and challenges. This is how the Obamacare website was changed from a dysfunctional site being developed by a politically connected contractor selected/overseen by civil service to a more robust site developed by a volunteer crack team from SV. So, I disagree with Carmack in that it's possible to reformulate government to make it more effective and have government fund risks that private sector is unlikely to take due to short-term profit perspectives.

Despite the perceived waste in defense and other tech centers, I would guess the waste in the state department dwarfs everything. Not sure what to do about this area.