Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ Long Game
Rss Feed
Sort By: Most Recent | Popular Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
anonymous

How Mitochondrial Eve connected all humanity and rewrote human evolution - 0 views

io9.com/...ty-and-rewrote-human-evolution

shared by anonymous on 25 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • So how did Mitochondrial Eve manage to rewrite the entire story of human evolution? For that matter, what exactly is Mitochondrial Eve? Unlike her biblical namesake, she wasn't the only woman on Earth. In a sense, she's just a quirk of statistics. But if that's the case, then she's easily the most important quirk of statistics who ever lived.
  • In order to find a common ancestor whose genetics have passed on, we need to look for things that are passed down from generation to generation with little or no alteration. Both genders pass along one thing that is unchanged during sexual reproduction. For women, this is the mitochondrial DNA, which is a distinct subset of genetic material found not in the cell nucleus but rather in the mitochondria, the power plants of the cell.
  • By tracing the subtle mutations to mitochondrial DNA that have accumulated over the millennia, we can figure out which groups are most closely related, and ultimately fix the existence of Mitochondrial Eve to a fairly specific time in the past, which is currently estimated at about 200,000 years ago. That pretty much rules out the idea of multiple origins for humanity — otherwise Mitochondrial Eve would have to date back a couple million years, and mitochondrial analysis shows that that simply isn't the case.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • While we don't really have 500 billion different ancestors, we can still look at the reverse of that idea: is there a single common ancestor that every person on Earth shares? As we know with Mitochondrial Eve, that answer is a resounding "yes" - but let's now take a look at the Most Recent Common Ancestor, or MRCA. The name says it all, really - this is simply the most recent person who, through any and all genetic lines, can be connected to every single person alive today.
  • anonymous on 25 Jan 12
     
    This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the discovery of Mitochondrial Eve, the common ancestor of every human alive today. Here's everything you need to know about why the mother of humanity is so important.
anonymous

Annual Forecast 2012 - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...annual-forecast-2012

annual forecast stratfor

shared by anonymous on 25 Jan 12 - Cached
  • In this period, the European Union has stopped functioning as it did five years ago and has yet to see its new form defined. China has moved into a difficult social and economic phase, with the global recession severely affecting its export-oriented economy and its products increasingly uncompetitive due to inflation. The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq has created opportunities for an Iranian assertion of power that could change the balance of power in the region. The simultaneous shifts in Europe, China and the Middle East open the door to a new international framework replacing the one created in 1989-1991.
  • Our forecast for 2012 is framed by the idea that we are in the midst of what we might call a generational shift in the way the world works.
  • the driving force behind developments in Europe in 2012 will be political, not economic.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • Normally, we would predict failure for such an effort: Sacrificing budgetary authority to an outside power would be the most dramatic sacrifice of state sovereignty yet in the European experiment -- a sacrifice that most European governments would strongly resist. However, the Germans have six key advantages in 2012.
  • First, there are very few scheduled electoral contests, so the general populace of most European states will not be consulted on the exercise.
  • Second, Germany only needs the approval of the 17 eurozone states -- rather than the 27 members of the full European Union -- to forward its plan with credibility.
  • Third, the process of approving a treaty such as this will take significant time, and some aspects of the reform process can be pushed back.
  • Fourth, the Germans are willing to apply significant pressure.
  • Fifth, the Europeans are scared, which makes them willing to do things they would not normally do -- such as implementing austerity and ratifying treaties they dislike.
  • The real political crisis will not come until the sacrifice of sovereignty moves from the realm of theory to application, but that will not occur in 2012.
  • The economic deferment of that pain is the sixth German advantage. Here, the primary player is the ECB. The financial crisis has two aspects: Over-indebted European governments are lurching toward defaults that would collapse the European system, and European banks (the largest purchasers of European government debt) are broadly insolvent -- their collapse would similarly break apart the European system.
  • In 2012, the Kremlin will face numerous challenges: social unrest, restructuring Russia's political makeup (both inside and outside of the Kremlin) and major economic shifts due to the crisis in Europe.
  • Russia will continue building its influence in its former Soviet periphery in 2012, particularly by institutionalizing its relationships with many former Soviet states. Russia will build upon its Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan as it evolves into the Common Economic Space (CES).
  • This larger institution will allow the scope of Russia's influence over Minsk and Astana, as well as new member countries such as Kyrgyzstan and possibly Tajikistan, to expand from the economic sphere into politics and security as Moscow lays the groundwork for the eventual formation of the Eurasian Union, which it is hoping to start around 2015.
  • In the Baltic countries -- which, unlike other former Soviet states, are committed members of NATO and the European Union -- Russia's ultimate goal is to neutralize the countries' pro-Western and anti-Russian policies
  • Russia will continue managing various crises with the West -- mainly the United States and NATO -- while shaping its relationships in Europe.
  • Russia will attempt to push these crises with the United States to the brink without actually rupturing relations -- a difficult balance.
  • Numerous factors will undermine Central Asia's stability in 2012, but they will not lead to a major breaking point in the region this year.
  • Iran's efforts to expand its influence will be the primary issue for the Middle East in 2012.
  • In 2012, Saudi Arabia will lead efforts to shore up and consolidate the defenses of Gulf Cooperation Council members to try to ward off the threat posed by Iran, but such efforts will not be a sufficient replacement for the United States and the role it plays as a security guarantor.
  • Iran's goal is for Syria to maintain a regime -- regardless of who leads it -- that will remain favorable to Iranian interests, but Iran's ability to influence the situation is limited, and finding a replacement to hold the regime together will be difficult.
  • Despite its rhetoric, Turkey will not undertake significant overt military action in Syria unless the United States leads the intervention -- a scenario Stratfor regards as improbable -- though it will continue efforts to mold an opposition in Syria and counterbalance Iranian influence in Iraq.
  • Hamas will take advantage of the slowly growing political clout of Islamists throughout the region in hopes of presenting itself to neighboring Arab governments and the West as a pragmatic and reconcilable political alternative to Fatah.
  • Three things will shape events in East Asia: China's response to the economic crisis and possible social turmoil amid a leadership transition; the European Union's debt crisis and economic slowdown sapping demand for East Asia's exports; and regional interaction with the U.S. re-engagement in the Asia-Pacific region.
  • While Beijing knows that rolling out another massive fiscal stimulus and bank loans as it did in 2008-2009 is unsustainable and would put the economy at risk, it sees few other short-term options and thus will use government-led investment to sustain growth in 2012.
  • As it learned from the Tiananmen Square incident, CPC factional infighting exploited at a sensitive time is a serious risk, and we expect to see measures to ensure ideological and cultural control throughout the Party and down through the rest of society.
  • The United States will continue to consider a political accommodation with the Taliban, but such accommodation is unlikely to be reached this year.
  • The most important development in South Asia is Pakistan's ongoing political evolution.
  • Regardless of any change in party, Mexico's underlying challenges will remain. The country's drug war rages on, with Los Zetas having consolidated control over most of Mexico's eastern coastal transportation corridor and the Sinaloa cartel having done the same in the west.
  • Brazil will spend 2012 focused on mitigating shocks to trade and capital flows from the crisis in Europe. However, with only 10 percent of Brazil's gross domestic product dependent on exports, Brazil is much less vulnerable than many other developing countries.
  • anonymous on 25 Jan 12
     
    "There are periods when the international system undergoes radical shifts in a short time. The last such period was 1989-1991. During that time, the Soviet empire collapsed. The Japanese economic miracle ended. The Maastricht Treaty creating contemporary Europe was signed. Tiananmen Square defined China as a market economy dominated by an unchallenged Communist Party, and so on. Fundamental components of the international system shifted radically, changing the rules for the next 20 years. We are in a similar cycle, one that began in 2008 and is still playing out."
anonymous

Making Holes in Our Heart - 1 views

www.kk.org/...making_holes_in.php

technology

shared by anonymous on 24 Jan 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 24 Jan 12
     
    "If we are honest, we must admit that one aspect of the technium is to make holes in our heart. One day recently we decided that we cannot live another day unless we have a smart phone, when a dozen years earlier this need would have dumbfounded us. Now we get angry if the network is slow, but before, when we were innocent, we had no thoughts of the network at all. Now we crave the instant connection of friends, whereas before we were content with weekly, or daily, connections. But we keep inventing new things that make new desires, new longings, new wants, new holes that must be filled."
anonymous

The Technium: Undetectable Technology - 0 views

www.kk.org/...undetectable_te.php

technology

shared by anonymous on 24 Jan 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 24 Jan 12
     
    Karl Schroeder, science fiction author of the novel Permanence, writes about the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox says that if there is an infinite universe there must be an infinite number of civilizations at advance stages that would emit evidence of their presence, but as far as we see in any direction, there are none. The skies should be full of aliens, but are not. Why not?
anonymous

The Future's War on Cancer - 0 views

blogs.smithsonianmag.com/...the-futures-war-on-cancer

shared by anonymous on 24 Jan 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 24 Jan 12
     
    The term, "war on cancer" wasn't coined in the 1970s but dates back at least to the early 1900s. Somewhat ironically, a series of promotional cards packaged with cigarettes in the 1930s included a card that explained how the latest cutting edge technology could help win the "War on Cancer."
anonymous

Paula Deen has Diabetes and takes Victoza. So What? - 0 views

www.weightymatters.ca/...en-has-diabetes-and-takes.html

fitness weight-loss

shared by anonymous on 23 Jan 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 23 Jan 12
     
    Celebrity TV chef with obesity who makes repulsively, insanely, calorificly obscene foods (like the bacon, fried egg, doughnut burger of hers pictured up above) develops type II diabetes, doesn't tell anyone for 3 years, and then not only has a big reveal, but signs a deal to endorse an injectable hypoglycemic medication. So what?
anonymous

Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did - 1 views

www.dailykos.com/...artin-Luther-King-actually-did

shared by anonymous on 18 Jan 12 - Cached
  • So yes, Dr. King had many other goals, many other more transcendent, non-racial, policy goals, goals that apply to white people too, like ending poverty, reducing the war like aspects of our foreign policy, promoting the New Deal goal of universal employment, and so on.  But his main accomplishment was ending 200 years of racial terrorism, by getting black people to confront their fears.  So please don't tell me that Martin Luther King's dream has not been achieved, unless you knew what racial terrorism was like back then and can make a convincing case you still feel it today.  If you did not go through that transition, you're not qualified to say that the dream was not accomplished.
  • anonymous on 18 Jan 12
     
    My father told me with a sort of cold fury, "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south." Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this.  If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don't know what my father was talking about.   But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished.  Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches. He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.
  • Erik Hanson on 19 Jan 12
     
    The trick is that Dr. King accomplished that and kept dreaming bigger, and in a very short timespan. We get into these problems defining "dreams." (Is the "American Dream" merely about financial opportunity, the goal of using that opportunity, about freedom and opportunity more generally?) Dr. King did dream about mobilizing the community to confront the terrorism and oppression of blacks (which, while still extant in mostly systematic respects, saw great progress under the SCLC). But he kept pushing, kept dreaming. He pushed for an end of more indirect repression in law, policy, business and the economy. The reverend doctor's stance on Vietnam wasn't just about pacifism, but also about a draft system that let college-bound kids out the back door while upping conscription of minorities and the economically disenfranchised. Because ultimately Dr. King was dreaming of a perfect world--literally. You don't catch that from some of his more political and public speeches, but it's clear in his sermons that he was dreaming of the return of God's "Promised Land," the New Jerusalem.
anonymous

How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...stephen-colbert.html

shared by anonymous on 11 Jan 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Jan 12
     
    There used to be just two Stephen Colberts, and they were hard enough to distinguish. The main difference was that one thought the other was an idiot. The idiot Colbert was the one who made a nice paycheck by appearing four times a week on "The Colbert Report" (pronounced in the French fashion, with both t's silent), the extremely popular fake news show on Comedy Central. The other Colbert, the non-idiot, was the 47-year-old South Carolinian, a practicing Catholic, who lives with his wife and three children in suburban Montclair, N.J., where, according to one of his neighbors, he is "extremely normal." One of the pleasures of attending a live taping of "The Colbert Report" is watching this Colbert transform himself into a Republican superhero.
anonymous

Заброшенные здания, недостроенные здания, военные объекты, брошенная техника,... - 1 views

lana-sator.livejournal.com/160176.html

military russia

shared by anonymous on 11 Jan 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Jan 12
     
    Incredible pictures of a Russian rocket facility.
anonymous

Occupy protests trigger envy, ire in Generation X - 2 views

online.wsj.com/...b5d0242b49324069e8806f94a.html

generations

shared by anonymous on 05 Jan 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 05 Jan 12
     
    "The generation that gave the term "slacker" new meaning is looking with measures of rivalry, regret and tart bewilderment at a movement its successor mobilized in the name of "the 99 percent." For some members of Generation X, the cohort sandwiched between the Baby Boomers and the so-called Millennial age group of many Occupy Wall Street protesters, the demonstrations represent a missed opportunity in their own youth to take up the cause of combatting economic inequality."
  • Erik Hanson on 10 Jan 12
     
    It's probably because I was born on the time divide between generations, but I definitely see the connection. You can't be a fan of The Clash (or even the pro-union Dropkick Murphys) without at least picking up some of these notions.
anonymous

Biggly Body Index - 3 views

www.biggly.com/biggly.php

bodybuilding

shared by anonymous on 03 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 03 Jan 12
     
    This page offers an online BMI calculator but much more than that, it's a BBI calculator! BMI stands for Body Mass Index and it is an official medical definition but it suffers from a major problem, which is that it is pretty useless for bodybuilders. A lean ripped bodybuilder is likely to score highly on the BMI, with a false fat or "obese" classification. In contrast to the BMI the Biggly Body Index or BBI takes a variety of different aspects of your physique and then calculates an overall score, up to a maximum of 100%. To be 100% Biggly is not easy. It is more than simply "not fat" and you'll score low if you're too skinny too, because it is based around the ideal human physique, such as the ideal hip to waist ratio etc.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Erik Hanson on 04 Jan 12
     
    I like this a lot, in large part because an 87% BBI makes me feel a lot better than a 25 BMI does.
  • anonymous on 04 Jan 12
     
    Agreed. If I have learned anything from Wii Fit, it's that BMI is a big fat lie. Great slogan, no?
  • Erik Hanson on 04 Jan 12
     
    It makes Mii fat. :(
anonymous

Reddit's Guide to Fitness [Infographic] - 1 views

www.greatist.com/...reddits-guide-to-fitness

shared by anonymous on 31 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 31 Dec 11
     
    Here's the link. I thought it would be interesting to post it since it takes much of what has been posted in the fittit subreddit and credits it when needed. Plus, the infographic layout is pretty. Probably a really good source to pass around like a pamphlet to those with New Years Resolutions.
anonymous

Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie - 0 views

www.mensjournal.com/...print

shared by anonymous on 15 Dec 11 - Cached
  • Weight machines, on the other hand, are far more insidious because they appear to be a huge technological advance over free weights. But quite the opposite is true: Weight machines train individual muscles in isolation, while the rest of you sits completely inert. This works okay for physical therapy and injury rehab, and it’s passable for bodybuilding, but every serious strength-and-conditioning coach in America will tell you that muscle-isolation machines don’t create real-world strength for life and sport.
  • Most gyms do include a few token free weights, but think about where you’ll find them: around the edges of the room, like fresh fruits and vegetables in a supermarket that gives all the prime middle-of-the-store shelf space to Frosted Flakes and frozen cheesecake. Truly indispensable gear — like the good old-fashioned adjustable barbell rack, the sine qua non of any remotely serious gym — has, by contrast, become a downright rarity. As for niche but no less important equipment like an Olympic lifting platform, forget about it: The lawyers would never let it through the door.
  • Here’s the problem: If you’re in the fitness-equipment business, free weights are a loser.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • Commercial health clubs need about 10 times as many members as their facilities can handle, so designing them for athletes, or even aspiring athletes, makes no sense.
  • Next up, shake hands with that nice, buff guy in the “trainer” shirt, and confess that you really don’t have a clue how to use a gym but that you’re into outdoor sports and you want to stay fit enough to have fun on weekends. He’ll nod a lot and pretend to take notes. Then he’ll measure your body fat with some high-tech-looking device and ask you lots of questions, ultimately convincing you to hire him twice a week.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 Dec 11
       
      This is known as the *Chiropractor* approach.
  • these days, it’s all about “functional fitness,” a complex integration of balance and stability and strength.
  • My conversion moment came in a garage-like industrial space next to an ATV rental yard in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I was lying on a concrete floor, near puking, having just humiliated myself on the king of all strength exercises, the old-school back squat. “The best thing I can do for an athlete,” coach Rob Shaul said to me as I struggled to get up, “is to make him strong. Strength is king, and you’re fucking little-girl weak.”
  • I jumped on a plane, slept in a motel, gulped a crappy coffee, drove down a lonely highway, and presented myself. Beneath the Mountain Athlete banners, I saw nothing but dumbbells, barbells, iron weight plates, braided climbing ropes hanging off the ceiling, pull-up bars, and dip bars. No mirrors, no TVs, no music, no elliptical trainers, no weight machines, and, to my annoyance, absolutely no rubber bands or stability balls.
  • He ordered us over to the barbell racks, telling us to work our way up to the heaviest squat we could do once. I realized that I had never done this particular test in my life. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that I’d never even done plain old squats. Wasn’t it far better to squat on a stability ball and get all that additional balance and core work?
  • The rest of the session — more barbell moves, along with push-ups, pull-ups, and dips — revealed more of the same. I was, in a word, weak. Not even middle-aged-lady weak — little-girl weak.
  • True sport-specific training, for literally everybody except elite athletes, isn’t sport-specific at all. It’s about getting strong, durable, and relentless in simple, old-school ways that a man can train, test, and measure. Nobody does crunches training this way, nobody watches television from the stationary bike, and 60-year-old women dead-lift 200 pounds and more.
  • And now I knew this wasn’t about a gym or about gym equipment; it was about an ethos, an understanding that nothing on Earth beats the fundamentals, a commitment to regular, measurable improvement in everything that a gym trainer won’t teach, for fear you’ll walk away bored: push-ups, pull-ups, bench presses, squats, dead lifts, and even such military-seeming tests as just how fast you can run a single mile.
  • TRUTH 3: ONCE YOU “GET IT,” YOU’LL LOVE IT.
  • Shaul’s guys out in Wyoming get massively strong and powerful on precisely three gym sessions a week, each lasting an hour and no more. Louie Simmons, the single biggest name in gorilla-style competitive power lifting, will tell you that 45 minutes is the max length of any smart training session.
  • Strength means how much you can lift once
  • Power is a more slippery term that means “speed strength,” or how much you can lift very, very quickly
  • Muscle mass can be a liability in sports like climbing, where it’s all about strength-to-weight ratio, but mass helps enormously with games like rugby and football, and it can support strength and power
  • Muscular endurance means how many times you can lift a given weight in a row without stopping
  • Down the road, if you’re like me, you’ll want to train multiple aptitudes at once: strength, power, and endurance.
  • Every serious strength-and-conditioning coach sticks to the basic barbell movements, because our bodies don’t operate as single muscles — they operate as a whole.
  • First: The human body adapts to stress. Throw us in ice-cold water every day and we’ll sprout subcutaneous fat for insulation; expose us to the desert sun and our skin will darken. What this means for getting in shape is that each week, you have to stress your body a little more than last time — lift a little heavier, run a little harder. Muscles weaken with exhaustion after a workout, but then they recover and typically, a few days later, go into what’s known as “supercompensation,” a fancy word that just means bouncing back a little stronger than before.
  • Finally, keep it simple; understand that variety is overrated. Variety does stave off boredom — it’s fun to mix in new exercises all the time — but a guy who hasn’t trained in a long time, if ever, will get stronger faster on the simplest program of squats, dead lifts, and presses, three times a week.
  • To get it just right, keep meticulous records, writing down every rep and every lift so your targets for each workout are easy to spot and your gains are easy to measure.
  • This simple formula is 90 percent of what you need to know, and you now officially know more than the buff 25-year-old doing your gym-membership orientation.
  • “Somewhere inside every man’s body,” Brown told me, lying in a La-Z-Boy, “there’s a weak link, a weak muscle waiting to fail. My job is to find that muscle and make it strong.”
  • two problems: First, if you have powerful prime movers from doing muscle-isolation machines at the gym but weak stabilizers because you rarely get to play a sport, you can’t access all your strength when you, say, bang off a mogul on a ski hill
  • Second, and worse still, the strength of the prime movers can shred your unstable joints.
  • He returned to the matters at hand, telling me that my weak knees and shoulder, my tight neck and spastic lumbar, were absolutely typical of a middle-aged recreational athlete with a desk job who spends all day slumped over and slack and then goes out and plays hard. Ignore this stuff, he said, and keep training, and I was guaranteed to get injuries that could set me back for a year. The good news, Brown told me, was that joint stability in each area could be traced to a remarkably small number of tiny stabilizer muscles. And while you could spend a fortune on physical therapists, trying to get them to tell you the same thing, you could also just start exercising those stabilizers. “I’m not reinventing the wheel here,” Brown told me. “This is just better-mousetrap kind of stuff.”
  • One book in particular, Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training, inspired me to start with the very first of the Fundamental Four: strength. I liked the clarity of the word, and I liked the idea of keeping life simple, learning one aptitude at a time. Many pros will tell you that strength is the place to start, because once you’ve built pure strength, you’ll have no trouble adding power, size, and endurance. I decided to just follow Rippetoe’s bare-bones old-school program.
  • Before Starting Strength, I didn’t even know what a dead lift was, but my dead lift went from 135 pounds to 335. My bench press went well over my body weight. At age 42 — 6-foot-2 and gangly and 20 years into complaining about a bad back and bum knees, and right when any doctor or physical therapist would have told me it was time to embrace the low-impact elliptical — my back squat hit 275, going below parallel. My thighs got so big I couldn’t fit into most of my jeans, and I had to start shopping for new T-shirts.
  • But there’s an even better reason to build pure strength. I’ve come to believe that men don’t go to gyms just to avoid heart disease or support our weekend sports. It’s worth getting strong because we go to gyms in large part to maintain a little goddamned self-respect, and to blow off steam, and to insist, against all odds, that we do remain fiercely vital physical beings. And trust me, there’s nothing like watching your dead lift skyrocket to make you feel vital. It’s the happy exhaustion, the sense of hard work well done, with a clear purpose; it’s the rush of seeing your body change, fat turning into lean mass.
  • anonymous on 15 Dec 11
     
    Gym machines are boring, CrossFit is sadistic, and dieting sucks. Luckily, none of them is essential to being truly fit. Through years of trial and error - and humiliation at the hands of some of the world's top trainers - the author discovered the secrets to real health.
anonymous

Myth #1: Stretching prevents injuries - 0 views

www.outsideonline.com/...Myth-1.html

shared by anonymous on 15 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Get over it: The jury is still out on the best pre-workout alternative, but dynamic stretching, which incorporates a range of body movements rather than muscle isolation, doesn’t stress tissues to the point of activating the nervous system’s protective instincts. If you’re a diehard stretcher, use this five-minute dynamic-stretching routine to warm you up for the race: 1. Jumping jacks (set of 20)2. Skipping, forward and backward (one minute)3. High-leg marches: walk forward, ­kicking each leg up in front of you with knees locked, like a tin soldier (one minute)4. Kick your own butt: hop on one leg, kicking the other leg backward, touching your buttocks (set of ten per leg)
  • anonymous on 15 Dec 11
     
    Truth: It could ruin your 10K time
anonymous

Freakonomics: What Went Wrong? - 0 views

www.americanscientist.org/...issue.aspx

shared by anonymous on 13 Dec 11 - Cached
  • Oster’s work stirred debate for a few years in the epidemiological literature, but eventually she admitted that the subject-matter experts had been right all along. One of Das Gupta’s many convincing counterpoints was a graph showing that in Taiwan, the ratio of boys to girls was near the natural rate for first and second babies (106:100) but not for third babies (112:100); this pattern held up with or without hepatitis B. In a follow-up blog post, Levitt applauded Oster for bravery in admitting her mistake, but he never credited Das Gupta for her superior work. Our point is not that Das Gupta had to be right and Oster wrong, but that Levitt and Dubner, in their celebration of economics and economists, suspended their critical thinking.
  • In SuperFreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner use a back-of-the-envelope calculation to make the contrarian claim that driving drunk is safer than walking drunk, an oversimplified argument that was picked apart by bloggers. The problem with this argument, and others like it, lies in the assumption that the driver and the walker are the same type of person, making the same kinds of choices, except for their choice of transportation.
  • Such all-else-equal thinking is a common statistical fallacy. In fact, driver and walker are likely to differ in many ways other than their mode of travel. What seem like natural calculations are stymied by the impracticality, in real life, of changing one variable while leaving all other variables constant.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • This unavoidable tradeoff between false positive and false negative errors is a well-known property of all statistical-prediction applications. Circling back to check all the factors involved in the problem might have helped the authors avoid this mistake.
  • How could an experienced journalist and a widely respected researcher slip up in so many ways? Some possible answers to this question offer insights for the would-be pop-statistics writer.
  • Leave friendship at the door: We attribute many of these errors to the structure of the authors’ collaboration, which, from what we can tell, relies on an informal social network that has many potential failure points.
  • Don’t sell yourself short: Perhaps Levitt’s admirable modesty—he has repeatedly attributed his success to luck and hard work rather than genius—has led him astray. If he feels he is surrounded by economists more exceptional and brilliant than he is, he may let their assertions stand without challenge.
  • Maintain checks and balances: A solid collaboration requires each side to check and balance the other side. Although there’s no way we can be sure, perhaps, in some of the cases described above, there was a breakdown in the division of labor when it came to investigating technical points.
  • Take your time: Success comes at a cost: The constraints of producing continuous content for a blog or website and meeting publisher’s deadlines may have adverse effects on accuracy.
  • Be clear about where you’re coming from: Levitt’s publishers, along with Dubner, characterize him as a “rogue economist.”
  • Use latitude responsibly: When a statistician criticizes a claim on technical grounds, he or she is declaring not that the original finding is wrong but that it has not been convincingly proven. Researchers—even economists endorsed by Steven Levitt—can make mistakes. It may be okay to overlook the occasional mistake in the pursuit of the larger goal of understanding the world. But once one accepts this lower standard—science as plausible stories or data-supported reasoning, rather than the more carefully tested demonstrations that are characteristic of Levitt’s peer-reviewed research articles—one really has to take extra care, consider all sides of an issue, and look out for false positive results.
  • anonymous on 13 Dec 11
     
    In our analysis of the Freakonomics approach, we encountered a range of avoidable mistakes, from back-of-the-envelope analyses gone wrong to unexamined assumptions to an uncritical reliance on the work of Levitt's friends and colleagues. This turns accessibility on its head: Readers must work to discern which conclusions are fully quantitative, which are somewhat data driven and which are purely speculative.
anonymous

An Open Letter from America's Port Truck Drivers on Occupy the Ports - 1 views

cleanandsafeports.org/...ck-drivers-on-occupy-the-ports

shared by anonymous on 12 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 12 Dec 11
     
    We have been elected by committees of our co-workers at the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle and Tacoma to tell our collective story. We have accepted the honor to speak up for our brothers and sisters about our working conditions despite the risk of retaliation we face. One of us is a mother, the rest of us fathers. Between the four of us we have six children and one more baby on the way. We have a combined 31 years of experience driving cargo from our shores for America's stores.
  • Erik Hanson on 13 Dec 11
     
    I was going to comment that ~7 years experience per person might not be enough to get respect. They've updated the numbers now, though. 5 members, 11 kids, 46 total years experience. That last guy brought in 5 kids and 15 years experience.
anonymous

Woman Who Attacked ObamaCare Apologizes After Breast Cancer Diagnosis - 0 views

jezebel.com/...-after-breast-cancer-diagnosis

shared by anonymous on 08 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 08 Dec 11
     
    Today in a L.A. Times op-ed, a woman who was so upset with President Obama for having "let down the struggling middle class" that she switched her registration from Democrat to Independent and altered her Obama bumpers sticker to read "Got Nope" is apologizing to the President. She says that while she was angered by Obama's plan, she's suddenly come to appreciate it, now that she's benefitting from it personally.
anonymous

A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain - 0 views

blogs.scientificamerican.com/...ion-why-you-are-not-your-brain

shared by anonymous on 07 Dec 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 07 Dec 11
     
    Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science. In sharp contrast is dualism, a theory of mind famously put forth by Rene Descartes in the 17th century when he claimed that "there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible… the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body." In the proceeding centuries, the notion of the disembodied mind flourished. From it, western thought developed two basic ideas: reason is disembodied because the mind is disembodied and reason is transcendent and universal.
anonymous

A Look at America's Geography Shows That the Tea Party Is Doomed - 1 views

www.alternet.org/...s_that_the_tea_party_is_doomed

shared by anonymous on 30 Nov 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 30 Nov 11
     
    Even as the movement's grip tightens on the GOP, its influence is melting away across vast swaths of America, thanks to centuries-old regional traditions.
anonymous

Tom Bissell on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - 1 views

www.grantland.com/...kyrim-makes-strong-man-crumble

shared by anonymous on 29 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 29 Nov 11
     
    And you start walking. Soon enough, you're discovering cities, towns, forts, and caves, all of which are filled with weapons you can wield, gold you can spend, spells you can cast, and books you can - theoretically, at least - read. This isn't even to mention all the people you're meeting, many of whom have problems they need assistance with. A troll has been stealing cabbage and they need you to stop it. Bandits have set up shop in a nearby cave and they need you to go clean them out. The world is about to end and they need you to prevent that from happening. That all of these tasks wind up seeming equally pressing is either the central failure of Oblivion or its great and cunning secret.
« First ‹ Previous 481 - 500 of 1518 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page