Matt Leifer › Likes

As someone who blogs about science and occasionally about politics, I am contractually obligated to link to this article. Fortunately, it's also good and interesting. - Chad Orzel

"I have a lot of complicated misgivings about the implications of this overall approach in its reconsideration of the public sphere, deliberative processes, the act of persuasion, and our models of subjectivity, agency and consciousness. But I have a simpler objection to this particular subset of the bigger paradigm. Namely, that it is not irrational or unreasonable to regard scientific claims which recommend or insist upon particular public policy initiatives with sharply pronounced skepticism across the board. Not because science itself requires a particular form of skepticism (though it does) but because such skepticism is evidence-based, derived from the history of the relationship between policy, the modern state, and science, a history which even non-experts have often viscerally experienced or witnessed." - Chad Orzel

"The Expert got a chair and a cup of coffee and sat in the computer room – these were the days when they had rooms specifically dedicated to computers, after all – and watched it as the attendants queued up a large print job. He waited until it crashed - which it did. Everybody looked to The Expert – and he didn’t have a clue what was causing it. So he ordered that the job be queued up again, and all the attendants and technicians went back to work. The Expert sat down in his chair again, waiting for it to crash. It took something like six hours of waiting, but it crashed again. He still had no idea what was causing it, other than the fact that it happened when the room was crowded. He ordered that the job be restarted, and he sat down again and waited. By the third crash, he had noticed something." - Chad Orzel

Appears to be a complete draft text of Judea Pearl's book on causality. I've had the final chapter especially recommended to me. - Michael Nielsen

what a joy of discovery it was when I read the final chapter, some years ago- I felt I had been missing out on an intellectual revolution that had happened under my nose - Alex Holcombe

Pearl's papers, including many for his famous work on inferring causality. Given the standard statistical trope that "correlation doesn't imply causation", it's obvious to ask what exactly does imply causation?" Much of Pearl's work is an attempt to answer this question. - Michael Nielsen

What would be really nice would be to leverage Zemanta for this. I stopped using the Tiny MCE editor because it wasn't compatible with Zemanta when I first set things up. Should possibly go back and have another look. - Cameron Neylon

IMHO, someone should build a reference management solution for Wordpress that is a comprehensive as Drupal's biblio module http://drupal.org/project... - Matt Leifer

"Unfortunately, the way we practice science is not designed to move on the timescale of an individual’s disease." - Daniel Mietchen from Bookmarklet

MathJax is an open source JavaScript display engine for mathematics that works in all modern browsers. - Michael Nielsen

mount | column -t - Geoffrey Bilder

Government Health Warning: Links to The Oatmeal can seriously damage your productivity. - Matt Leifer

"After many years of publishing papers, I have come to recognise wide diversity among journal editors. This variation has major consequences for authors, and it is important that they recognise the creature they are dealing with, if they want their work to be published in as timely and painless a way as possible. I have therefore developed a tripartite system of classification to guide authors." - AJCann from Bookmarklet

"I know it might seem like a crazy idea, but do you ever listen to music without doing anything else? The musicians sweated over the tiniest details of the music and sound when they recorded it, so why not give it your undivided attention? Is music worth savoring? Then again, it's not just recorded music, a lot of people can't keep their mouths shut at concerts. Sometimes they quiet down at the end of a tune to applaud, and go on yammering when the music starts again. The crowd at City Winery here in New York jabbered their hearts out the night I saw Dr. John in August. I paid more than $100 for the ticket, food, and drink, so I assume everyone else there spent about the same, but more than half the crowd talked, loudly, through Dr. John's long set. The woman sitting next to me wasn't talking; she was too busy texting and e-mailing, and the light from her phone was hugely distracting. Her boyfriend was into the music, but she was sitting next to me so he wasn't blinded by her phone. They say times are tough, but I can think of better ways of blowing $100 for a night of music you totally ignore." - Eric - seven eleven from Bookmarklet

I've read somewhere that back in the day, operas were social events, so I'll bet that people talked their way through those, too. It's nice to sit and listen carefully to music sometimes, but I think it's often been intended as an accompaniment to other activities throughout human history. That's nothing new. I think our ancestors might be puzzled to see us sitting down to listen quietly instead of getting up to dance along. - Kamilah Reed (K. Gill)

Ah rub it in. I have to take all blame for c2cbio. Just no time. - Deepak Singh

Translate idiotic jargon - Geoffrey Bilder

A detailed investigation of everybody's favorite science-and-religion organization includes lots of vague insinuations but not much evidence of sinister behavior. - Chad Orzel

agreed, it's very insightful, very powerful... - Andrew Su

@ Daniel - thanks. I'll alert Josh ! - Graham Steel

Speaking as a truly stubborn interdisiplinary, this really hits home for me. - Chris Granade from Bookmarklet

I neat commentary on how bad media has gotten. - Chris Crewdson

Good grief. - Chris Granade

"We describe an experiment of transforming large collections of LaTeX documents to more machine–understandable representations. Concretely, we are translating the collection of scientific publications of the Cornell e–Print Archive (arXiv)using the LaTeXtoXML converter which is currently under development." - Dan Hagon

Statistics applied incorrectly = bad science - Khalid Mirza from Bookmarklet