spin

If you are strong in Python but weak in math, then I would also recommend #3, (Collective Intelligence, by Segaran)

I agree that his first example, "The Girl Named Florida" was a confusing example.

I feel pretty comfortable with Bayesian statistics, and I thought the other examples that I saw were pretty clear. But his very first example jumps you out to another webpage, and then he mixes it with "the red-haired problem". It was irritating.

His next example, "The Cookie Problem" is the classic intro-to-Bayes example, IMO.

I have often thought about doing something similar to this. Basically, you publish a signed version of your paper on your own website, and then other scientists can sign it with notes. It would be kind of like a "Facebook like" system. (By "sign", I mean a cryptographic signature.)

"82 PhD scientists have reviewed this paper, including 3 people in your close network and 2 more people from your extended network." ...or something like that.

You could do a network-graph search. Start with some professors that you trust, and some keywords that you're interested in and start walking the graph from there.

I don't know what the profit motive would be for someone to build this though. Nor the motive for individual reviewers to carefully review someone's paper and provide detailed useful feedback...

> do we let geniuses just do whatever the hell they want.

I have to say, I am both bemused and slightly offended by your comment. Are you suggesting that famous people don't have a right to Free Speech?

> The answer is...I am not sure.

Well, I'm glad you've taken it upon yourself make this important decision for them.

Actually, I'd love to be able to write SELECT queries in Javascript that were identical to the queries that I write on the server. Yeah, the data comes from an AJAX-JSON call, but then I deal with it exactly the same. I'd love that.

Awarded by the Canadian govt, not the U.S. The United States still admits no wrong-doing.

According to the linked article, "The Syrian government now says that Arar is 'completely innocent.'" (And as you say, the Canadian govt apologized and awarded him damages.) And yet he still has not had his day in a U.S. court, which is the jurisdiction that violated his human rights.

The United States govt can decide to have you tortured for a year, based on suspicion alone (no trial, no judge, no lawyer), and then afterwords, you cannot even complain in a U.S. courtroom about your mis-treatment.

EDIT: my bad, it looks like the US Court of Appeals actually heard the case in 2008. And then dismissed it.

"...most good ideas seem bad initially. If they were obviously good, someone would already be doing them. "

--Paul Graham (yechhh... now I feel like some kind of kiss-ass... but this is something that I keep in mind every day...)

Wow. This is exactly how I practice Japanese. Edit: Actually, I go a bit further and practice my pronunciation with Audacity. I go over a segment, over and over, trying to copy the speaker's accent exactly.

I think that gridspy's comment is worthy of some upvotes. He made a valid point, and in a meta-joke kind of way. I'm perfectly happy with flippant posts, so long as they're not mean, and they add something to the discussion (be it humor or insight or both).

"Perhaps you can share what it is that bothers you enough to prompt your question to me?"

I was noting the incongruity between: 1 - the weight of the article (whether you agree or disagree) and 2 - your criticism of the article (nitpicking capitalization). Hence my comment.

That's what bothers you? Not the subversion of democracy?

> "Can/should we be testing anti-depressants on animals at all?"

Yes, of course. We can test a bunch of mice, rats, and monkeys, and then chop up their brains afterwords and actually look at what happened inside. It's not as good as experimenting on people, but it does tell us something.

> "Is it possible that depression in animals is different than depression in humans?"

This is exactly the question being asked. From the article: "Are we in fact modeling the right things? Do the tail-suspension test and forced-swim test detect antidepressant activity after all?" ie, that is, in fact, exactly the question being asked.

> "Is it possible that lab conditions affect the psychology of the animal?"

Lab conditions absolutely affect the psychology of the animal. In these tests, ideally, what they do is they have two populations of animals. Let's say group-A rats get injected with drug XYZ, and group-B rats get injected with saline (placebo). You then look for differences between the two populations. Ideally, the technicians don't know which rat is getting the drug or not, all they know is that rat#1 gets injection#1, rat#2 gets injection#2. So both populations of rats get the exact same treatment, and you look for differences between the two populations of rats.

(Also, some animals don't mind being in cages, but some do. For example, there's lots of experiments with rats and macaque monkeys, because they don't mind cages or people. Whereas chimps would rather rip your arms off than be caged up or experimented on.)