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Weiye Loh

There Is Such A Thing As A Free Coffee | The Utopianist - Think Bigger - 0 views

utopianist.com/...-such-a-thing-as-a-free-coffee

Social Media Starbucks

shared by Weiye Loh on 15 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Overall, the ratio of people taking versus giving is 2-1. Stark has a truly grand vision: “It’s literally giving people hope. Ultimately the goal is for more people to do this kind of thing. I admit it seems a little frivolous to give away coffee to people with iPhones. But imagine if you had a CVS card and you could give someone $10 for their Alzheimer’s medication. The concept of frictionless social giving is very attractive. And this is just the beginning of that.” It’s easy enough to text a number to make a donation during times of disaster, and many do it, but the concern may still exist over “where” the money is going; systems with re-loadable cards are straightforward and in some way more transparent (after all, the users probably have their own, personal, cards), serving to spur people into donating even more. I say let’s expand this — I cannot wait to see it act elsewhere — some sort of school card, perhaps? Download the full-sized card here; before you go, check the balance on Twitter — updated every couple of minutes, Stark wrote the program himself. “Like” Jonathan’s Starbucks Card on Facebook to spread the word; and when you want to donate, simply log on to the Starbucks website and reload card number 6061006913522430.
  • Weiye Loh on 15 Aug 11
     
    Programmer Jonathan Stark, vice president of Mobiquity, has begun a truly cool experiment: sharing his Starbucks card with the world. While researching ways one can pay-by-mobile, Stark took an interesting perspective on Starbucks' system. He realized there was (at the time) no app for Android users, so he simply took a picture of his card and posted it online. He loaded it with $30 and then encouraged others to use it - and reload it, if they see fit. Not surprisingly, people took him up on it. Since those $30, the card has seen over $9,000 worth of anonymous donations. Stark says that "every time the balance gets really high, it brings out the worst in people: Someone goes down to Starbucks and makes a huge purchase. I don't know if they are buying coffee beans or mugs, or transferring money to their own card or what. But as long as the balance stays low, say $20 to $30, it seems like it manages itself. I haven't put any money on it in a while. All the money going through the card right now is the kindness of strangers."
Valerie Oon

Ethics discussion based on new movie, "Surrogates" - 8 views

This movie upset me. I don't think the director developed the premise and plot to the potential it could have reached. Quite a shallow interpretation. But it does raise some intrigue. I'm a bit stu...

technology future empowerment destruction

started by joanne ye on 18 Oct 09 2 follow-ups, last by Valerie Oon on 28 Oct 09
Jun Jie Tan

Animal Cloning: Old MacDonald's Farm Is Not What It Used To Be - 6 views

http://www.actionbioscience.org/biotech/pecorino.html Cloning leads to amazing possibilities such as ability to harvest organs from genetically-engineered pigs to save human lives, to pres...

biotechnology

started by Jun Jie Tan on 21 Oct 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

PLoS ONE: Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning - 0 views

www.plosone.org/...10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0016782

Metaphor Framing Language

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • we find that the influence of the metaphorical framing effect is covert: people do not recognize metaphors as influential in their decisions; instead they point to more “substantive” (often numerical) information as the motivation for their problem-solving decision. Metaphors in language appear to instantiate frame-consistent knowledge structures and invite structurally consistent inferences. Far from being mere rhetorical flourishes, metaphors have profound influences on how we conceptualize and act with respect to important societal issues. We find that exposure to even a single metaphor can induce substantial differences in opinion about how to solve social problems: differences that are larger, for example, than pre-existing differences in opinion between Democrats and Republicans.
Weiye Loh

A 'Good Book,' Absent God - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...16beliefs.html

Religion Bible PHilosophy

shared by Weiye Loh on 18 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • That focus on the deity, Mr. Grayling believes, distracts from seeking the good life in the short time we are allotted.
  • Mr. Grayling finds Judaism and Christianity almost self-evidently absurd: “I could never believe the sin committed by Eve in the Garden of Eden was all that serious,” he said. “It would seem to me that knowledge was a good thing to have.” And he does not fret that we need divine commandments to ensure that we treat one another well: “All the stories that fill the newspaper — war, chaos — they are there because they are unusual. They are not as great a story as the millions of acts of human kindness throughout human history.”
  • To make a non-bible look an awful lot like the Bible could be a bad idea. There is an unfortunate history of humanist movements co-opting the forms of religion. In the 19th century, the Frenchman Auguste Comte, for example, tried futilely to start a religion of humanity, modeled on the organization of the Catholic Church, with priests, weekly services and feast days, but without God. “It ignominiously failed, and I think it’s quite right it failed,” Mr. Grayling says.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But while it may be unwise to imitate organized religion, the Bible has many imitable virtues. “One of the charms of the Bible has been you can take a short passage and reflect on it,” Mr. Grayling said. And by aping the form of the Bible, he added, “ ‘The Good Book’ is presented as another contribution to the same conversation as the Bible, about the nature of the good or the good life.”
  • “I think,” the master says, “this book provides resources for thinking about what the good life might be. But we have to think for ourselves. We have to take the Socratic challenge to lead the examined life. You must transcend the teachings and the teachers. Don’t be a disciple.”
Weiye Loh

BBC News - Web creator's net neutrality fear - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...technology-13126777

Net Neutrality Internet

shared by Weiye Loh on 25 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the BBC that legislation may be needed if self-regulation failed. He has been asked by the UK government to negotiate an agreement on an open internet between service providers and content firms like the BBC and Skype. Sir Tim would prefer self-regulation by the internet industry, but progress has been slow. "If it fails the government has to be absolutely ready to legislate," he said. "It may be that the openness of the internet, we should just put into law." Net neutrality, the idea that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally, has been a controversial issue in the United States and is now moving up the political agenda in the UK.
  • Internet Service Providers have claimed that they need to be able to control the growing traffic online, and content creators fear that the result could be a two-speed internet. Sir Tim said that he understands the need for traffic management but any move to discriminate between different content businesses would be a step too far.
  • "What you lose when you do that is you lose the open market," he said. "What the companies gain is that they get complete control of you." But Professor William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute warned that enshrining net neutrality in law had its dangers. "Once you allow the state in, you open the door to all sorts of regulation of the internet controls on content creation," he said.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Sir Tim, who was speaking at the opening of the World Wide Web Consortium's UK offices in Oxford, said that internet access was now becoming a human right. At the same time it was also a very powerful tool for either a government or a large company to get to control of. He warned that this could lead to users being blocked from visiting sites that were not politically correct, or religiously correct, or commercially correct.
Weiye Loh

Do peer reviewers get worse with experience? Plus a poll « Retraction Watch - 0 views

retractionwatch.wordpress.com/...wers-get-worse-with-experience

Peer Review Academic Research Academic Journal

shared by Weiye Loh on 22 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • We’re not here to defend peer review against its many critics. We have the same feelings about it that Churchill did about democracy, aka the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. Of course, a good number of the retractions we write about are due to misconduct, and it’s not clear how peer review, no matter how good, would detect out-and-out fraud.
  • With that in mind, a paper published last week in the Annals of Emergency Medicine caught our eye. Over 14 years, 84 editors at the journal rated close to 15,000 reviews by about 1,500 reviewers. Highlights of their findings: …92% of peer reviewers deteriorated during 14 years of study in the quality and usefulness of their reviews (as judged by editors at the time of decision), at rates unrelated to the length of their service (but moderately correlated with their mean quality score, with better-than average reviewers decreasing at about half the rate of those below average). Only 8% improved, and those by very small amount.
  • The average reviewer in our study would have taken 12.5 years to reach this threshold; only 3% of reviewers whose quality decreased would have reached it in less than 5 years, and even the worst would take 3.2 years. Another 35% of all reviewers would reach the threshold in 5 to 10 years, 28% in 10 to 15 years, 12% in 15 to 20 years, and 22% in 20 years or more. So the decline was slow. Still, the results, note the authors, were surprising: Such a negative overall trend is contrary to most editors’ and reviewers’ intuitive expectations and beliefs about reviewer skills and the benefits of experience.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • What could account for this decline? The study’s authors say it might be the same sort of decline you generally see as people get older. This is well-documented in doctors, so why shouldn’t it be true of doctors — and others — who peer review?
  • Other than the well-documented cognitive decline of humans as they age, there are other important possible causes of deterioration of performance that may play a role among scientific reviewers. Examples include premature closure of decisionmaking, less compliance with formal structural review requirements, and decay of knowledge base with time (ie, with aging more of the original knowledge base acquired in training becomes out of date). Most peer reviewers say their reviews have changed with experience, becoming shorter and focusing more on methods and larger issues; only 25% think they have improved.
  • Decreased cognitive performance capability may not be the only or even chief explanation. Competing career activities and loss of motivation as tasks become too familiar may contribute as well, by decreasing the time and effort spent on the task. Some research has concluded that the decreased productivity of scientists as they age is due not to different attributes or access to resources but to “investment motivation.” This is another way of saying that competition for the reviewer’s time (which is usually uncompensated) increases with seniority, as they develop (more enticing) opportunities for additional peer review, research, administrative, and leadership responsibilities and rewards. However, from the standpoint of editors and authors (or patients), whether the cause of the decrease is decreasing intrinsic cognitive ability or diminished motivation and effort does not matter. The result is the same: a less rigorous review by which to judge articles
  • What can be done? The authors recommend “deliberate practice,” which involves assessing one’s skills, accurately identifying areas of relative weakness, performing specific exercises designed to improve and extend those weaker skills, and investing high levels of concentration and hundreds or thousands of hours in the process. A key component of deliberate practice is immediate feedback on one’s performance. There’s a problem: But acting on prompt feedback (to guide deliberate practice) would be almost impossible for peer reviewers, who typically get no feedback (and qualitative research reveals this is one of their chief complaints).
  • Weiye Loh on 22 Apr 11
     
    92% of peer reviewers deteriorated during 14 years of study in the quality and usefulness of their reviews (as judged by editors at the time of decision), at rates unrelated to the length of their service (but moderately corre
Weiye Loh

Effect of alcohol on risk of coronary heart diseas... [Vasc Health Risk Manag. 2006] - ... - 0 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...17326330

Alcohol Bias Researh Methodology

shared by Weiye Loh on 22 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Studies of the effects of alcohol consumption on health outcomes should recognise the methodological biases they are likely to face, and design, analyse and interpret their studies accordingly. While regular moderate alcohol consumption during middle-age probably does reduce vascular risk, care should be taken when making general recommendations about safe levels of alcohol intake. In particular, it is likely that any promotion of alcohol for health reasons would do substantially more harm than good.
  • . The consistency in the vascular benefit associated with moderate drinking (compared with non-drinking) observed across different studies, together with the existence of credible biological pathways, strongly suggests that at least some of this benefit is real.
  • However, because of biases introduced by: choice of reference categories; reverse causality bias; variations in alcohol intake over time; and confounding, some of it is likely to be an artefact. For heavy drinking, different study biases have the potential to act in opposing directions, and as such, the true effects of heavy drinking on vascular risk are uncertain. However, because of the known harmful effects of heavy drinking on non-vascular mortality, the problem is an academic one.
  • Weiye Loh on 22 Apr 11
     
    Studies of the effects of alcohol consumption on health outcomes should recognise the methodological biases they are likely to face, and design, analyse and interpret their studies accordingly. While regular moderate alcohol consumption during middle-age probably does reduce vascular risk, care should be taken when making general recommendations about safe levels of alcohol intake.
Weiye Loh

Freakonomics » "Conspicuous Conservation" and the Prius Effect - 0 views

www.freakonomics.com/...servation-and-the-prius-effect

Economics Environment Car Climate Change

shared by Weiye Loh on 22 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • Two young economists, Steve and Alison Sexton, have been looking into this question. (Not only are the Sextons twins, but their parents are also economists, and Steve is a competitive triathlete.) The result is an interesting draft paper called “Conspicuous Conservation: The Prius Effect and WTP [Willingness to Pay] for Environmental Bona Fides.” When you drive a Prius, the Sextons argue, there’s a “green halo” around you. You make new friends; you get new business opportunities. In an especially “green” place like Boulder, Colo., the effect could be worth as much as $7,000.
  • The Sextons focused on the distinctive design of the Prius — which was no accident. Honda, Ford, Nissan and other car makers sell hybrids, but you can’t pick them out on the road (the Civic hybrid, for instance, looks just like a Civic). The Prius is unmistakable. It marks whoever is driving it as someone who cares about the environment; it’s an act of “conspicuous conservation,” an update of Thorstein Veblen’s “conspicuous consumption.” Here’s how Steve Sexton describes it: SEXTON: A sort of “keeping up with the Joneses”-type concept but applied to efforts to make society better. I will be competing with my neighbors to donate to a charity, for instance, or to reduce energy conservation or environmental impacts.
  • Weiye Loh on 22 Apr 11
     
    when people make environmentally sound choices, how much are those choices driven by the consumers' desire to show off their green bona fides?
Weiye Loh

Unhappy meal: Data retention bill could lure sex predators into McDonalds, libraries - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...s-into-mcdonalds-libraries.ars

Anonymity Internet Crime Data Privacy

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • mandatory data retention legislation. The bill that they have proposed requires that Internet Service Providers, such as Comcast and Time Warner, save records of the IP addresses they assign to their customers for a period of 18 months.
  • Data retention is a controversial topic and loudly opposed by the privacy community. To counter such criticism, the bill's authors have cunningly (and shamelessly) named it the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. This of course means that anyone who opposes data retention must go on record as opposing measures to catch sexual predators.
  • The bill includes a curious exception to the retention requirements: it doesn't apply to wireless data providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, or operators of public WiFi networks, such as Starbucks and McDonalds. When questioned about this, a Republican committee staffer told CNET in May that the wireless loophole was added because wireless networks are designed in such a way that IP addresses are assigned to multiple users or accounts and they are "not technologically capable of retaining the type of data that law enforcement needs because that's not how their system works."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • This explanation is completely bogus. Wireless providers, like wireline broadband providers, are quite capable of retaining logs of the IP addresses they temporarily issue to their customers. Many wireless providers, such as Sprint and Verizon, already retain IP logs for at least a year. The true explanation for the loophole is, I believe, that the wireless carriers have powerful and remarkably effective lobbyists.
  • Weiye Loh on 13 Jul 11
     
    In this opinion piece, a cybersecurity researcher argues that loopholes in a new data retention bill push those wanting to use the 'Net anonymously into cafes, libraries, and fast food restaurants. The following op-ed does not necessarily represent the opinions of Ars Technica.
Weiye Loh

Crashing Into Stereotypes, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty - 0 views

econlog.econlib.org/...crashing_into_s.html

Stereotype Movie Statistics

shared by Weiye Loh on 15 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • The trite official theme of the movie - the evils of narrow-minded prejudice - could have sunk the whole project. But as in a lot of compelling fiction, the official theme of Crash contradicts the details of the story. If you are paying attention, it soon becomes obvious that virtually none of the characters suffer from "narrow-minded prejudice." No one makes up their grievances out of thin air. Instead, the characters mostly engage in statistical discrimination. They generalize from their experience to form stereotypes about the members of different ethnic groups (including their own!), and act on those stereotypes when it is costly to make case-by-case judgments (as it usually is). In the story, moreover, stereotypes are almost invariably depicted as statistically accurate. Young black men are more likely to be car thieves; white cops are more likely to abuse black suspects; and Persians have bad tempers. Of course, the story also makes the point that some members of these groups violate the stereotype. But that "insight" is basic to all statistical reasoning.
  • the rule in Crash is that busy people see others as average members of their groups until proven otherwise.
  • It is particularly interesting that Crash illustrates one of the deep truths of models of statistical discrimination: The real social conflict is not between groups, but within groups. People who are below-average for their group make life worse for people who are above-average for their group. Women who get job training and then quit to have children hurt the careers of single-minded career women, because they reduce the profitability of the average woman. This lesson is beautifully expressed in the scene where the successful black t.v. producer (Terrence Howard) chews out the black teen-ager (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) who unsuccessfully tried to car-jack him: You embarrass me. You embarrass yourself.
  • Weiye Loh on 15 Jul 11
     
    If you really want to improve your group's image, telling other groups to stop stereotyping won't work. The stereotype is based on the underlying distribution of fact. It is far more realistic to turn your complaining inward, and pressure the bad apples in your group to stop pulling down the average.
Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: IPCC and COI: Flashback 2004 - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...cc-and-coi-flashback-2004.html

Politics Science Activism NGO

shared by Weiye Loh on 21 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • In this case the NGOs and other groups represent environmental and humanitarian groups that have put together a report (in PDF) on what they see as needed and unnecessary policy actions related to climate change. They put together a nice glossy report with findings and recommendations such as: *Limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees (Celsius, p. 4) *Extracting the World Bank from fossil fuels (p. 15) *Opposing the inclusion of carbon sinks in the [Kyoto] Protocol (p. 22)
  • It is troubling that the Chair of the IPCC would lend his name and organizational affiliation to a set of groups with members engaged actively in political advocacy on climate change. Even if Dr. Pachauri feels strongly about the merit of the political agenda proposed by these groups, at a minimum his endorsement creates a potential perception that the IPCC has an unstated political agenda. This is compounded by the fact that the report Dr. Pachauri tacitly endorses contains statements that are scientifically at odds with those of the IPCC.
  • perhaps most troubling is that by endorsing this group’s agenda he has opened the door for those who would seek to discredit the IPCC by alleging exactly such a bias. (And don’t be surprised to see such statements forthcoming.) If the IPCC’s role is indeed to act as an honest broker, then it would seem to make sense that its leadership ought not blur that role by endorsing, tacitly or otherwise, the agendas of particular groups. There are plenty of appropriate places for political advocacy on climate change, but the IPCC does not seem to me to be among those places.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Organized by the New Economics Foundation and the Working Group on Climate and Development, the report (in PDF) is actually pretty good and contains much valuable information on climate change and development (that is, once you get past the hype of the press release and its lack of precision in disaggregating climate and vulnerability as sources of climate-related impacts). The participating organizations have done a nice job integrating considerations of climate change and development, a perspective that is certainly needed. More generally, the IPCC suffers because it no longer considers “policy options” under its mandate. Since its First Assessment Report when it did consider policy options, the IPCC has eschewed responsibility for developing and evaluating a wide range of possible policy options on climate change. By deciding to policy outside of its mandate since 1992, the IPCC, ironically, leaves itself more open to charges of political bias. It is time for the IPCC to bring policy back in, both because we need new and innovative options on climate, but also because the IPCC has great potential to serve as an honest broker. But until it does, its leadership would be well served to avoid either the perception or the reality of endorsing particular political perspectives.
  • Weiye Loh on 21 Jun 11
     
    Consider the following imaginary scenario. NGOs and a few other representatives of the oil and gas industry decide to band together to produce a report on what they see as needed and unnecessary policy actions related to climate change. They put together a nice glossy report with findings and recommendations such as: *Coal is the fuel of the future, we must mine more. *CO2 regulations are too costly. *Climate change will be good for agriculture. In addition, the report contains some questionable scientific statements and associations. Imagine further that the report contains a preface authored by a prominent scientist who though unpaid for his work lends his name and credibility to the report. How might that scientist be viewed by the larger community? Answers that come to mind include: "A tool of industry," "Discredited," "Biased," "Political Advocate." It is likely that in such a scenario that connection of the scientist to the political advocacy efforts of the oil and gas industry would provide considerable grist for opponents of the oil and gas industry, and specifically a basis for highlighting the appearance or reality of a compromised position of the scientist. Fair enough?
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