Michael Nielsen › Comments

Any help would be much appreciated! My search fu has failed :-( - Michael Nielsen

John - that Bell and Kastelic paper is exactly what I was looking for. The vague number I remember from my engineer was 650, so I think the paper is even describing the same project. It's perfect! Thankyou. - Michael Nielsen

"The Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President and the White House Open Government Initiative is launching a “Public Access Policy Forum” to invite public participation in thinking through what the Federal government’s policy should be with regard to public access to published federally-funded research results. To that end, OSTP will conduct an interactive, online discussion beginning Thursday, December 10. " - Michael Nielsen

Not Science2.0, deleted from the room. - Michael Nielsen

"DARPA, the Defense Department's research arm, recently sponsored a "Network Challenge" in which groups competed to find ten big red weather balloons that were positioned in public places around the U.S. The first team to discover where all the balloons were would win $40,000." A team from MIT won, using a clever method of sharing the cash with volunteers. MIT let anyone join their team, and they paid money to the members who found balloons, as well as the people who recruited the balloon-finders, and the people who recruited the balloon-finder-finders. For example, if Alice recruited Bob, and Bob recruited Charlie, and Charlie recruited Diane, and Diane found a balloon, then Alice would get $250, Bob would get $500, Charlie would get $1000, and Diane would get $2000. Multi-level marketing meets treasure hunting! It's the Amway of balloon-hunting! - Michael Nielsen

Background on the Guardian's climate change editorial project - printed in 56 newspapers in 45 countries, the negotiations behind the project were interesting. - Michael Nielsen

Disturbing. - Michael Nielsen

The story of IBM's team of software testers in the 1960s: "Team members began to affect loud maniacal laughter whenever they discovered software defects. Some individuals even grew long mustaches which they would twirl with melodramatic flair as they savaged a programmer's code. And the things they did to software went beyond all bounds of rational use testing and were more akin to software torture. The crazier things got, the more effective the team became. To be clear, the Black Team took all of this quite seriously, and there was nothing akin to camaraderie with the rest of the development team. Programmers had a certain amount of respect for the Black Team, but by and large, they feared them. A member of the Black Team was the last person a programmer wanted to see walking towards him, and more than one programmer was reduced to tears while having his code evaluated by the Black Team." - Michael Nielsen

Yes: "I have argued that universities will move to a superstar market for teachers in which the very best teachers use on-line instruction and TAs to teach thousands of students at many different universities. " - Michael Nielsen

The impression of a winner-takes-all situation may in fact be illusive. Clearly there will be popular expositors and the internet gives them a platform to reach a much wider audience than a single lecture theater. However the internet also allows individual learners to ability to consume material very specific to their personal learning interests - possibly far beyond a traditional... more... - Dan Hagon

Fascinating reflections from a former parapsychology researcher. Goes off the rails in various ways, but still intriguing. An interesting general question to ask oneself is what's the biggest self-deception you've ever engaged in? - Michael Nielsen

Linked mostly because I love the title. It'd make a great wiki project. Instead of notability or neutrality requirements, the requirements for a subject to go in would that it have to be a serious but truly counterintuitive idea. (I did get a chuckle out of "Ann Coulter should be a feminist icon", an idea somebody has apparently attempted to pursue seriously, one presumes with limited success.) - Michael Nielsen

Stimulating article by Clive Thompson about open source hardware. Starts off with Arduino, but eventually branches out, with many fascinating tidbits along the way. I especially like the story about the Linksys router whose firmware was GPL, and thus fair game to be improved by amateurs - and improved it was, turning a run-of-the-mill wireless router into something far more useful. - Michael Nielsen

"Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide." - Michael Nielsen

I still think that's one of Schneier's best pieces. - Christopher Granade

A 2005 analysis of open source projects at SourceForge - the most interesting finding is that by far the most frequently used license is GPL and LGPL - more than 10 times as many projects used GPL as used BSD, for example. - Michael Nielsen

Interesting article by Diamond. Not quantitatively convincing, of course - it's an NYT op-ed - but does challenge much conventional wisdom in the green movement. - Michael Nielsen

Interesting article by Diamond. Not quantitatively convincing, of course - it's an NYT op-ed - but does challenge much conventional wisdom in the green movement. - Michael Nielsen

The Tetris effect occurs when an activity to which people devote sufficient time and attention begins to overshadow their thoughts, mental images, and dreams. It is named after the video game Tetris. In the game a player rotates and moves different falling tetrominoes, or shapes made up of four adjacent square blocks. If the player can arrange the shapes so there are complete horizontal lines of blocks without any gaps, those lines are eliminated. The aim of the game is to eliminate as many lines as possible before the shapes ultimately fill the screen. - Michael Nielsen

You can get this about research. Its haunting my dreams, my waking hours, and the time I spend in the bathroom. - Dave Bacon

When I first bought Guitar Hero, I played for something like 6 hours one weekend day. That night, I dreamt of flaming colored shapes flying towards me. Glad I'm not the only one. :) - Chris Miller

Interesting to watch a collaboration develop in the comments on Bill Gasarch's post. - Michael Nielsen

There's a lot of work being done by astrophysicists in virtual worlds, and they're now getting quite organized about it: "The Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA) is a professional scientific and educational, non-profit organization based in virtual worlds [VWs] (currently in Second Life [SL], but with an intent to expand its presence in other venues as the VWs evolve)." - Michael Nielsen

When I was an intern at Argonne National Lab in 1995, I was lucky enough to have a couple other interns show me the virtual reality cave in their building. I was able to walk around some molecular structure (don't remember what) and also mingle with and feed simulated fish. It was incredible, and completely obvious to me that it was by far the best way to explore and understand 3-D... more... - Steve Koch

An interesting attempt to establish a virtual market associated to scientific publications. - Michael Nielsen

Paper by Piet Hut on virtual labs and virtual worlds. - Michael Nielsen

Stimulating. The essential argument is that genome-wide association studies will fail to deliver the goods linking genes to disease (I'm not so pessimistic: I just think it's likely to be harder than people initially thought, hardly a unique situation in the history of science), but they will cause a whole lot of privacy and genetic screening issues. That is, we'll get the problems without the payoff. Lots of interesting incidental observations, including the claim that replication of genome-wide association studies has been difficult. If anyone has relevant links on that claim, I'd love to hear about them. - Michael Nielsen

Fascinating article about perceived (vs actual) differences in IQ. According to the article, men on average slightly overestimate their IQs, and women on average slightly underestimate theirs. - Michael Nielsen

Chromoscope is amazing - view the Milky Way at many different wavelengths. - Michael Nielsen

Cool. I think it is only based on 6 wavelengths and then does a weighted average in between. - Andrew Lang

I don't buy this - parapsychologists who consistently get negative results ("still no telepathy") are thrown out of the tribe - but it's intriguing nonetheless: "Imagine if, way back at the start of the scientific enterprise, someone had said, "What we really need is a control group for science - people who will behave exactly like scientists, doing experiments, publishing journals, and so on, but whose field of study is completely empty: one in which the null hypothesis is always true. "That way, we'll be able to gauge the effect of publication bias, experimental error, misuse of statistics, data fraud, and so on, which will help us understand how serious such problems are in the real scientific literature." Isn't that a great idea? By an accident of historical chance, we actually have exactly such a control group, namely parapsychologists: people who study extra-sensory perception, telepathy, precognition, and so on." - Michael Nielsen

I'm interested in joining the testing. Need to agree on criteria for comparison before starting, though. - Daniel Mietchen

Should we include some discipline-specific ones or are we going for general-purpose only? - Daniel Mietchen

"I have wondered for years, as magazines, newspapers, and other news organizations have been hemorrhaging money and employees, why someone hasn't gone into the contract fact-checking business. Like, it could be an extension of Snopes.com. There's a huge redundancy in every publication having their own research desks, so they could lay off all of their fact-checkers and then outsource the job to the new, independent company that the best of them then all go to work for. Meanwhile, the company could also be hired by anyone else. Then, when the public sees the "Fact-Checked by MiniTrue (SM)" seal on someone's independent blog, they know the information there has the same credibility as the big boys." - Michael Nielsen

Interesting - there was a related piece in the Boton Globe last week - http://tinyurl.com/ygpqxn7 - Candy Schwartz from twhirl

"In 1891, James William Lambert was involved in the first automobile accident in world history. The accident occurred in Ohio City, Ohio. Lambert's vehicle -- the first single-cylinder gasoline automobile, which was carrying Lambert and James Swoveland, hit a tree root, causing the car to careen out of control and smash into a hitching post. Injuries from this accident were minor. Lambert proceeded to patent over six hundred inventions, mostly affiliated with the automobile industry. " - Michael Nielsen

The Wikipedia article on Nicholas Carr's well-known article. Something I find fascinating is how good the Wikipedia article is - maybe Google is making us stupid, but Wikipedia certainly isn't. - Michael Nielsen

An insightful take on the CRU climate hack. - Michael Nielsen

Beautiful video showing Second Life. - Michael Nielsen

Much more interesting than the traditional approach, which seems to be a hybrid of the Microsoft and Google approaches. - Michael Nielsen