ramblingrain

Read about Paul Erdös... not all math is the Riemann Hypothesis, there is yeoman's work connecting things and whatever...

It is the not knowing, the unknown unknowns and known unknowns which result in the max entropy distribution's appearance. When we know more, it is not Gaussian. That is known.

The first source I clicked into was a meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials.

What you say sounds true about chronic illness and isolation. These researchers are looking at research done using actual interventions and real results.

What should they do to analyze this more than RCTs and then meta-analysis of RCTs?

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s... Tackling social disconnection: an umbrella review of RCT-based interventions targeting social isolation and loneliness

This reminds me of bouncing on a trampoline. I'm a human not a computer

It sounds like it doesn't have any guarantees regarding topology. Or maybe it's so simple or does?

Let's be positive my friends

  > Many of us worked in fields where good research tends to be more nuanced and open to interpretation

Why, can't you just tell them "it's not a science, it's more like performance art."

After I gave my 5,000th ride on Uber I had a beer. I thought. I pondered. I devised the iniquity experiment.

(1) N drivers authorized on the Rideshare platform are engaged.

(2) these N drivers drive simultaneously and in a similar geographic preference- as if they live in the same neighborhood, but also are optimizing as drivers do. And yet drawn home.

(3) pricing, earnings, etc. are recorded per driver and compared across drivers on the Rideshare platform(s).

Now we engage the experimental component. With N drivers we can have N/2 drivers engage in behavior A or behavior B. Then, when the Rideshare platform denies they do this or that depending on that or this, there is good evidence that is not the case. Statistical evidence. Tallyho, bandits!

The problem is price fixing, right? Milk, really?

Yes, except the driver will never have his child in a car seat in the front apologetically. And the passenger will pay in excess, but to the stock market and not the driver.

Driver pay gets adjusted this way too. Lyft and Uber. No tolls, traffic jams (at least) can cause this.

Timber is still the original and main purpoes of state forests in Oregon and Washington.

The article is discussing federal forests. The timberlands in Oregon are owned by private, federal and state entities.

Forests managed for for timber by the state are protected differently, like, first to get sprinkler lines in a wildfire. They are a crop which is invested in and harvested. Federal forests are easier to log after a burn anyway, and you can log outside the burn with that cover. The United States Forest Service (USFS) is actually, basically, a road building and logging company, but owls and so on really got in the way for a couple decades. We're figuring out how to keep logging. We're capitalists.

The only state forests with old growth are going to be the "experimental" state forests in the Cascades and the Olympic and Coast ranges. Otherwise we woulda logged 'em. I mean there are old growth pine trees and juniper in Oregon and Washington east of the Cascades, a few, but those aren't timberlands.

https://oregonforests.org/forest-ownership-map

Isn't this like the exact opposite of the conclusions of the HapMap project?

Yea, I did that.

The important thing is to understand that life is expensive. The main expenses are cars, houses and families. How many of each of those do you want?

You need to understand wealth correctly before sacrificing a career. I am not sure if I should have spent more time making tech money or more years making nothing.

You should stay in tech long enough to establish the situation you need. Most professions pay dramatically less and require dramatically more.

Not everyone needs to journey the same. I wouldn't go to therapy unless if it were free and the drugs were too.

Who the f is this... making a downright suspicious amount of sense.

A lot of science is dismissed here with a "sample size too small" complaint. That's usually invalid... power depends on sample size and effect size together.

But the problem with observational studies is real, especially here. Let's complain about that and also investigate childhood trauma and regular cannabis use.

Musk trollin' hard tonight, damn...

Can you write your thoughts more directly? I don't understand what you're trying to say.

White male privilege is different from the disadvantages low-income people face. There are 50 daily effects of white privilege in McIntosh's original essay, most of which are about how if one is not white then their motivations and successes may often be seen through a lens of their race.

The idea that a white male from a rural, low-income community has the same advantage as a white male from a middle or upper class urban area is weird to me. This is about socioeconomic status, not race. Your Onion quote fails to differentiate, but... it's The Onion, isn't it.

White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack: http://amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_status

I would like to suggest that the general sentiment here is true in some other modern scientific disciplines. In other words, I don't think it's because psychology is transitioning to a more formal scientific approach that causes these difficulties. I think it has to do with a misalignment of incentives in the present academic world, and the difficulty of the statistical inference framework.

These problems of reproducibility occur in basic cancer research articles as well. Amgen proved this and wrote a paper detailing issues [1].

Academics are valued for their papers, citations and grants. And papers are difficult to publish if one fails to find an effect. The researcher has some incentive to find the right numbers because their job is, in a way, on the line.

There's lots of writing about the tension between "publish or perish" [2] and scientific integrity. It manifests in p-values often, but p-values are the dominant statistical tool right now in most fields. I think you will see the same tension regardless of your tools for doing science.

[1] Drug development: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish

I replied a few levels up mentioning kaolin spray (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaolin_spray).

For more information about 'particle films' (like kaolin spray) see this document. There are numerous compounds mentioned and very interesting references too. These techniques also can be mixed with conventional pesticides and achieve the same efficacy as pure pesticide.

Particle Films: A New Technology for Agriculture - http://blog.meyvelitepe.org/images/Book_Chapter_Particle_Fil...

"At the present time, a commercial particle film material, Surround crop protectant, is being used in about 90% of the Pacific Northwest pear market for the early season control of pear psylla and approximately 20% of the Washington State apple market to reduce sunburn damage."

In WA some apple orchards are sprayed with kaolin (a fine white clay). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaolin_spray. Diatomaceous earth is also used on some crops. Both of these are like... mechanical insecticides.

This page lists many "less toxic" insecticides - http://www.clemson.edu/extension/hgic/pests/pesticide/hgic27....

The replies in this thread from people claiming to be farmers are odd -- what crop? It seems pretty important. It sounds like it's hard to grow certain wine grapes some places, ok, but why do we have lists of the 'best' and 'worst' fruits/veggies to buy organic? They have less pest problems to begin with is my assumption, but I'm not really a farmer [beyond 10'x10' of herbs and veggies in the backyard].

The dietary effects on health are poorly understood. Nutrition studies are fraught with difficulties and have spawned a resurgence in methodology concerning "measurement error" in the field of statistics. You don't really know how much pizza you ate last year, but the survey will ask you to estimate it somehow... and this kind of measurement is 'noisy'.

Conventionally-grown food looks like organically grown food on steroids, to me. I suppose from the outside a human on steroid may look healthy -- Mr Universe, even -- but we know all is not well inside.

I'm not saying that's really related, but there is substantial evidence for real differences in the makeup of food grown conventionally vs organically.

Citations 10-15 in the paper the original article pertain to this - protein expression differences across fertilization types.

Quantitative proteomics to study the response of wheat to contrasting fertilisation regimes - http://vwordpress.stmarys-ca.edu/bdf2/files/2013/05/wheat-an...

"... The abundance of 111 protein spots varied significantly between fertilisation regimes. Flag leaf N and P composition were significant drivers of differences in protein spot abundance, including major proteins involved in nitrogen remobilisation, photosynthesis, metabolism and stress response."

No. It sounds to me like the Stanford study failed to find a significant difference. That's different from demonstrating equivalence. There are some quotes in the article about how this disagrees with another study (not the Stanford one, but nonetheless). The paper itself quotes the paper you reference and draws many comparisons. This sounds like another look, with more data, and the Stanford study was by no means final. All of these are meta-analyses of hundreds of papers, so it's a pretty new area of statistical analysis and a very difficult one.

I haven't read the papers yet. For me, organic food means I'm not paying someone to add XYZ to the environment, and I like that. The risk assessment has not been done, and (see other comments) environmental affects are widespread and very troubling.

- full paper, source article: Higher antioxidant concentrations and less cadmium and pesticide residues in organically-grown crops: a systematic literature review and meta-analyses. http://csanr.wsu.edu/m2m/papers/organic_meta_analysis/bjn_20...

- full paper, Stanford article: Are Organic Foods Safer or Healthier Than Conventional Alternatives? http://media.dssimon.com/taperequest/acp75_study.pdf

This seems pretty interesting if you read the description of the brain region.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claustrum

I find this more interesting than 'rebar through the eye' style stuff like the Phantoms in the Brain book by this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilayanur_S._Ramachandran

It's more interesting since they mention consciousness, though I don't know what they're really talking about.

I think stuff like 'rebar through the eye' has revealed interesting 'machine learning'-type defects, like funny ways your vision can be messed up and see at a very low fps, unable to perceive most quick motion.

But machine learning is popular and stuff because it works, unlike strong AI and consciousness, which are pretty difficult to get any handle on.

This doesn't surprise me. And I am actually quite curious, because after almost two years working at Amazon.com I quit, thinking Amazon.com was Google was Every Corp > 1000 headcount.

Since then, I haven't had the stomach to interview or consider another job. After much reflection, I think it all had to do with Amazon.com, the working conditions, and the tone of the place.

I got it in my head that all corporate jobs are basically like Amazon.com: you sign away all of your intellectual property rights, accept working on things you don't control and take home a nice, better-than-almost-everyone paycheck to wash it down.

I could tell strange stories of working at Amazon.com (I was in a non-traditional engineering role) but they seem more or less pointless.

How does someone go from working at Amazon.com to a small workplace, with passion and freedom? I have floundered! And the oxygen is running out.

Anyway, I wouldn't recommend working there.