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"The combined effort of more than 50,000 online video game players may help scientists better understand how proteins fold, solving one of biochemistry's greatest conundrums." By Nicholette Zeliadt at Scientific American on August 4, 2010.

"Nearly 1 million children in the United States are potentially misdiagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder simply because they are the youngest - and most immature - in their kindergarten class, according to new research by a Michigan State University economist." At Lab Spaces on August 17, 2010.

"Where the Objectivist metaphysics seriously leads its partisans astray is on the issue of free will and human nature. For Rand, free will is axiomatic, which means, "self-evident" and "fundamentally given and directly perceived." Now whether free will is self-evident I will leave for another post. Here I'm only interested in specific facts that are sacrificed on the alter of Rand's free will." By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on October 5, 2010.

"Find a quiet location. Keep a routine. Focus on one subject at a time. It all seems like sound advice for students who need to hit the books, but recent studies indicate the conventional wisdom is all wrong. New York Times reporter Benedict Carey has written about the research. He tells NPR's Neal Conan that though a lot of ideas about learning make intuitive sense, they're actually way off." At Talk of the Nation at NPR on October 25, 2010.

"If you live in the United States, you probably have an opinion on the best way to reduce the deficit. And you probably know almost nothing about the topic. I certainly fall into that category. If you listen to pundits and politicians, you're getting your information from professional liars. If you're reading books, you're getting your information from professional liars who also write well. If you read newspapers and magazines, you're getting only the information that someone has decided will be good for sales. If you say you "do your own research," you're probably a liar, possibly an idiot, and maybe some sort of analytical genius. And frankly, I can't tell you guys apart." By Scott Adams at his blog on November 8, 2010.

"A pioneering research effort could shrink the world's most powerful supercomputer processors to the size of a sugar cube, IBM scientists say. The approach will see many computer processors stacked on top of one another, cooling them with water flowing between each one." At Kurzweil, but by BBC News on November 12, 2010.

"If the success of sites like Gowalla, Foursquare, and other game-like forms of social media tells us much, it's that people will do *anything* for a virtual badge. The attempt to capitalize on this behavior has been called gamification, since it borrows some of the reward structures of game mechanics and applies them to everyday tasks. While the premise behind it has been around for a while, as Wikipedia notes, it has started to get more attention from venture capitalists, developers, and researchers in 2010." By Jason B. Jones at The Chronicle on November 3, 2010.

"Suppose there are 1000 possible hypotheses to be tested. There are an infinite number of false hypotheses about the world and only a finite number of true hypotheses so we should expect that most hypotheses are false. Let us assume that of every 1000 hypotheses 200 are true and 800 false. It is inevitable in a statistical study that some false hypotheses are accepted as true. In fact, standard statistical practice guarantees that at least 5% of false hypotheses are accepted as true. Thus, out of the 800 false hypotheses 40 will be accepted as "true," i.e. statistically significant." By Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution on September 2, 2005.

From Lab Spaces on April 12, 2010.

From Politifact. A basic explanation.

"As adolescents move from elementary school into their middle or junior-high years, changes in friendships may signal potential academic success or troubles down the road, say University of Oregon researchers."

"Peter Tu of GE Global Research went to Maker Faire in San Mateo in May and wrote a piece about what he witnessed there. Like many others, he was impressed with Stephen Voltz and Fritz Grobe's talk about the "1-10-100 Principle" for experimenters. "

"For the first time researchers have monitored the brain as it slips into unconsciousness. The new imaging method detects the waxing and waning of electrical activity in the brain moments after an anaesthetic injection is administered."

The comments are a hoot. "My views on foreign policy tend to diverge from mainstream libertarian doctrine. Take American hegemony. Many people are predicting (usually with glee) the demise of American power (see, for example, Ronald Dworkin). Regardless of the accuracy of these predictions, I think libertarians have reasons to support American global hegemony. Realistic alternatives to hegemony are the international state of nature, balance of power, and governance by an international institution such as the United Nations. The state of nature is undesirable for well-known Hobbesian reasons: defensive efforts would undermine productive cooperation. Balance of power is inherently unstable; sooner or later will morph into hegemonic power. And, at least in today's world, governance by an international institution would be plagued by legitimacy deficits and agency costs that would surely threaten liberal values. So, if we are going to have hegemony as the only arrangement capable of providing global public goods, the United States is the least bad because American institutions and culture embody liberal values. Any likely competitor is certainly to be worse for those who cherish liberal values. I believe history supports this, too: three times during the 20th century the United States saved liberal culture from onslaughts by illiberal forces. Objections to hegemony are often condemnations of means rather than ends, and I certainly agree with those where applicable. Let us concede that the United States sometimes pursues moral ends (say, helping other nations achieve freedom) with immoral means (say, bringing about unjustified collateral harm). Citizens in liberal democracies must oppose the use of immoral means, even for a good cause. However, this kind of criticism cannot be a wholesale condemnation of hegemony, because there are world powers, such as the Soviet Union, who pursue immoral ends. Surely these cannot be saved even when they use moral means (whi

Over at Charlie's Diary, Mr. Stross articulates why he's not super-enamored of the Singularity. He begins: "I periodically get email from folks who, having read "Accelerando", assume I am some kind of fire-breathing extropian zealot who believes in the imminence of the singularity, the uploading of the libertarians, and the rapture of the nerds. I find this mildly distressing, and so I think it's time to set the record straight and say what I really think. Short version: Santa Claus doesn't exist." The Long version commences...here are excerpts.

"In the United States alone, 20 million people suffer from peripheral neuropathy, a condition that involves nerve degeneration and sometimes extreme pain, often without any explanation. Now we've found the culprit for this mysterious pain...and it's all one gene's fault. "

New research from the University of Michigan shows that most members of Generation X are happy, active, and not full of angst.

So quit whining and try to make a positive difference, already! Sincerely, The Oldest Gen Y

Damn straight.

"By cutting off federal funding for research and stymieing data collection and sharing, the National Rifle Association has tried to do to the study of gun violence what climate deniers have done to the science of global warming. No wonder: When it comes to hard numbers, some of the gun lobby's favorite arguments are full of holes."

"We are now in the early phases of selecting the president of the United States. Vast amounts of money are being raised, plans are being laid, opposition research is underway and the first significant scandal has broken with the discovery that Hillary Clinton used a non-government email account for government business. Ahead of us is an extended series of primaries, followed by an election and perhaps a dispute over some aspect of the election. In the United States, the presidential election process takes about two years, particularly when the sitting president cannot run for re-election."