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According to a speech given in 2016 by Dr. Michael Bracken, an epidemiologist from Yale University, as much as 87.5% of biomedical research is wasted or inefficient.

To his point, "Waste is more than just a waste of money and resources. It can actually be harmful to people's health."

He backed his staggering statistic with these additional stats: 50 out of every 100 medical studies fail to produce published findings, and half of those that do publish have serious design flaws. And those that aren’t flawed and manage to publish are often needlessly redundant.

What we need is NOT more funding, but we desperately need to improve the research and funding processes to make them more relevant, more efficient, and more reliable.

1. Publicly funded studies should yield open source research data that is freely available, so that studies can be repeated and experimental methodologies be improved and scrutinized.

2. We need to prioritize randomized clinical intervention trials over weak and questionable epidemiological surveys that often only muddy the waters and hinder our ability to draw sound conclusions.

3. Consequentialism should drive research funding. We need better and more formalized ways to identify gaps in our current knowledge, and to identify the potential impact of research before funding it. We don't need to allocate our current proportions of funding into research on subjects that are already very well understood or unlikely to drive policy and decision making. For example, more studies showing that exercise is good for you aren't likely to have a large impact moving forward.

Here's a more in-depth link to Dr. Bracken's speech:

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/while-ni...

People make a lot of noise about the missing function keys. But the keys that I miss the most on my 2018 Macbook Pro are the "E" and "SHIFT" keys.

"If I were misusing a word."

Just trying to help ;-)

What we call "Computer Science" is the discrete analogue of differential equations. It has absolutely nothing to do with software engineering. CS programs don't teach software engineering, which can be thought of as "how to design, build, grow, and maintain an effective software system in a team environment." Since most Universities prioritize research faculty over teaching faculty, software engineering skills are generally undeveloped in fresh college graduates, and tend to be passed along by mentors and senior engineers in software teams to junior engineers.

Shy of Universities hiring prominent open source software developers to serve as part-time teaching faculty, I don't know how we could push the transfer of these skills into the university setting and expose students to this knowledge at an earlier age.

Although it's a pleasant read, it doesn't take into account opportunity cost. Everything I do every day requires me not to do something else. There are valuable jobs that aren't urgent that never get done until I automate my way out of my current role. Russell always did treat economics as a zero sum game, when in reality it's quite expansive.

There are also jobs that need doing today and are physically possible to do, but nobody is doing them because we haven't invented them or realized they are possible yet. The Romans could have employed scientists to photograph the surface of Pluto. Physics haven't fundamentally changed since then. Only our understanding of what is possible has changed. A thousand years from now, people will marvel at all the jobs we in the early 21st century could have been doing to advance the quality of life for people around the world (and indeed all life on Earth), had we only known those things were possible.

I love the way they used color and plain English to describe that function. It would be awesome if a general app for this sort of color coded simple translation were available to help kids learn about mathematics. It'd have to be more inclusive for people with dichromacy and anamalous trichromacy, but there could be settings in the app to compensate for that.

When a publication like The Atlantic Monthly, one of the most venerable and critically acclaimed bastions of the English language, literature, and culture, refers to them as "Legos" (http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/02/-em...), it means you can finally crawl down off your absurd high horse and give it a rest. Thank you for your service, sir. Here's your lapel pin. There's a doctor down the hall if you need to talk about your feelings.

A good roadmap for a new distributed web should be broken down by OSI model layer, showing what protocols and technologies exist that need to be replaced, what levels of the OSI model they span, and identifies single points of failure lower in the stack that must be accommodated. Too few people understand how brittle the web is by its reliance on the "magical" underpinnings of the Internet continuing to "just work".

For example, let's say we want privacy, anonymity and high availability for something fundamental like name lookups. It's not enough to simply replace DNS with namecoin (L7), if there's a critical vulnerability in openssl on linux that could force a fork in the network, possibly leading to existing blocks getting orphaned (L6), if every single session that goes through AT&T gets captured, and the corresponding netflow stored in perpetuity for later analysis and deanonymization (L5), if this application's traffic could be used for reflection amplification attacks (L4) due to host address spoofing (L3). One might try to get around those issues by direct transmission of traffic between network endpoints (asynchronous peer-to-peer ad hoc wireless networks via smartphones or home radio beacons, for example), but then you not only need to deal with MAC address spoofing and VLAN circumvention, (L2) but with radio signal interference from all the noisy radios turned up to max broadcast volume, shouting over one another, trying to be heard (L1) and accomplishing little more than forcing TCP retransmissions higher up in the stack.

And really what's the point, when you can't even trust that the physical radios in your phone or modem aren't themselves vulnerable to their fundamentally insecure baseband processor and its proprietary OS? Turns out, what you were relying on to be "just a radio" has its own CPU and operating system with their own vulnerabilities.

Solving this from the top down with a "killer app" is impossible without addressing each layer of the protocol stack. Each layer in the network ecosystem is under constant attack. Every component is itself vulnerable to weaknesses in all the layers above and below it. Vulnerabilities in the top layers can be used to saturate and overwhelm the bottom layers (like when Wordpress sites are used to commit HTTP reflection and amplification attacks), and vulnerabilities in the lower layers can be used to subvert, expose, and undermine the workings of the layers above them. The stuff in the middle (switches) are under constant threat of misuse from weaknesses both above AND below.

It might be tempting for an app developer to read this blog post and think "Oh wow, what a novel idea! Why is nobody doing this?" But in reality, legions of security and network researchers, as well as system, network, and software engineers around the world toil daily to uncover and address the core vulnerabilities that hinder these sorts of efforts.

The economic motivations that drive FOSS development haven't really been done justice in the peer-reviewed literature on the subject. We used to say "Money, Glory, and Fun" were the reasons, and to some extent that was and remains true. However, I think there's always been quite a lot more to it. After the collapse of the dot-com bubble, there were a LOT of developers, particularly junior level developers, who couldn't find the kind of work they wanted and hoped to find after college, and committing to Open Source projects was a great way to get a kind of apprenticeship with some of the best development teams in the world. Participating in those efforts exposed new developers to new ideas, new ways of building software with distributed development teams, and more often than not exposure to world-class software. The monetary value of that sort of software engineering apprenticeship is hard to gauge, as you typically can't get its equivalent in a corporate internship, and many university CS programs rightly prioritize computer science over software engineering skills.

Circa 2009, while attending graduate school at the University of Minnesota, I was a student of Dr. Nick Hopper, whose CS research team were intensely focused on ways to deanonymize TOR traffic using an impressive variety of techniques. One that stood out was using statistical analysis of netflow to correlate browsing patterns. Considering that last-mile bandwidth providers also gather netflow and often provide flow data to three letter agencies, being able to map flows from known exit nodes to last mile service providers isn't rocket surgery. After an early initial exposure to some of their research, I never placed any trust in TOR. I still have a quote from Dr. Hopper on my laptop login screen, to serve as a reminder: "The problem with privacy on the Internet is that people believe it exists."

Freedom to assemble doesn't guarantee access to private venues. Contrary to intuition, all spaces on the Internet are private spaces.

"A Source Book in Mathematics" by David Eugene Smith. ISBN 0486646904.

Short description: The writings of Newton, Leibniz, Pascal, Riemann, Bernoulli, and others in a comprehensive selection of 125 treatises dating from the Renaissance to the late 19th century — most unavailable elsewhere. Grouped in five sections: Number; Algebra; Geometry; Probability; and Calculus, Functions, and Quaternions. Includes a biographical-historical introduction for each article.

Because there's no 'National wants a 24" Asus 1ms thin-framed LED gaming monitor, Logitech gaming controller, 5.1 surround audio, and ATS Acoustic Foam Corner Base Traps Forecasting Service'. It's logical to pick out geographic major events from current services and ship batteries, tarpaulins, baby formula and bottled water to them. But for everything else, you need fancier machine learning and lots of training data, and not everyone has that. Walmart doesn't have my wish lists. Amazon does.

Edit: Before anyone mentions it, don't buy those bass traps. They're not big enough to do the job for low frequencies. For that you need a pallet of rockwool and a weekend carpentry project ;-)

Of course they were playing word games. Could the mixture of lawyers and cryptography possibly yield anything else?

Second step is total media silence for a few news cycles.

Of course, you're right about this. I think the comparison detracted from my point, and it was insensitive to people for whom cancer is not a metaphor. So, really it failed on two counts. I'm sorry about that, and am grateful for the feedback.

I was trying (without much success) to highlight a possible underlying principle in organizational development and growth of a local economy, not to imply that Amazon (or any other business) invites comparison to a devastating disease, because I don't believe they do. That town would be better off if Amazon had a half dozen strong competitors just like it, in factories across the street. I just think a town can't rest all its hopes in one company. I grew up in a town with about 600 households and 800 or so people working in one factory. When that factory went away, it was very hard on the local economy, for the families who relied on it, for the schools, and generally for everyone in the community. It seems, and I might be wrong about this, that local policies to encourage and reward entrepreneurial growth and diversification of the local economy could have provided a stronger buffer against the inevitable end of its once solid manufacturing sector. I've been pretty fortunate since then to live in places where there were hundreds of employers competing in dozens of industries, and which had a healthy cultural ferment, many different ideas to talk about, and innovation bubbling up all over the place.

"Using token leaky buckets for congestion feedback control in packets switched networks with guaranteed boundedness of buffer queues":

http://www.nt.ntnu.no/users/skoge/prost/proceedings/ecc03/pd...

At the end of each day, in a University town, you might sit down to enjoy a meal or a cup of coffee at a local café, and strike up a conversation with a complete stranger. The two of you might find quite a lot to talk about, trading ideas and perspectives on different subjects, and ideas would flow between you, like heat from a hot cup of coffee into cold hands. But in a one-shop town (like the one I grew up in, or the one in this story), at the end of the day, what do these hard working people have to talk about? Moving packages. The insult of everyone having the same job is compounded by the injury of every moment of the job being the same as the next. Nobody needs to talk, because there's nothing new to say. There's no "heat" exchange, because everyone is in the same pressure cooker with everyone else. There's no differentiation, just accumulation. Organizations and organisms, to be healthy, need specialized organs. Accumulation without differentiation is what we call "cancer".

I sincerely recommend working at a large University as an alternative to this. Instead of one large company it is a constellation of large companies. They are almost always desperate for more good talent, and in many cases the innovations you can bring to the table can benefit the entire community, not just shareholders and customers. Otherwise, all of these points hold true.

"No Secrets, Anywhere"

I paid for my undergraduate education (97-03) by dropping out to work as a full time consultant. Because I did this twice, it took several extra years to graduate. For grad school, I worked a full time night job and missed out on the quintessential grad student experience of being a TA, getting to know the faculty, making friends, and being a part of the grad student and research community. I did manage to finish grad school with no debt, but I'll never know whether it was worth missing out on the social academic experience. It may technically be possible to pay for higher education through hard work, but the opportunity cost is hard to appreciate for those who do.

Reading through many of the responses, they're almost all phrased in terms of "X does Y better than Z" comparisons, directly ignoring your amusing and insightful comment.

At this point, the only thing that could save ordinary users from the melee of competing Open Source configuration management frameworks is an illustration by Randall Munroe.

(My hacker senses are tingling. If you listen very carefully, you can just barely hear a new eponymous law being born.)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb1 bs=512

Boom. Problem solved.

Nothing in his editorial comes as a surprise. David Brooks remains the same neoconservative apologist that he was in the spring of 2003, when he was beating the war drums for President Bush. Show me a David Brooks editorial and I'll show you a point in an unbroken ideological party line that goes back for more than a decade. He even got a guest appearance in David Brooks' new book "So Wrong for So Long", highlighting his role in propagandizing the Iraq war. All that said, his argument is lacking an important detail as well--the recognition of culture and society on the Internet. We're not all solitary loners, naked against the machine of the state. We're a global culture that is based on free exchange of information, as well as open, informed, and vigorous debate, and a fluid voluntary participation in social groups and organizations that is nothing like the clubs or companies of yesteryear. Our culture is strong enough to be building toward an immense demographic shift in U.S. politics. Tomorrow's senators and congressmen are today's high schoolers and college kids. We aren't likely going to allow a system of lifelong surveillance to jeopardize the future integrity of our social structures either. On the whole, I'm not too swayed by Mr. Brooks' arguments.

The neighborhood squirrel serenades the sunrise each morning as a sort of mammalian metronome for about an hour, filling me with questions about rhythmic chanting and the mammal brain. It's like a 60 decibel woodblock, only three octaves higher. That wakes me up. I don't recommend it for your alarm clock app.

Money, glory, and fun actually get me out of bed.

This was exactly my experience as well. Then I was introduced to Mirantis Fuel which uses Cobbler/Puppet to do bare metal provisioning and remote configuration.

I'm curious whether you could use the 3D vertex coordinates and use principal component analysis to find an appropriate viewing angle. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfTMmoDFXyE

PCA is often overused but for this specific use case it seems very well suited.

I have a license, and my wife has a car, but I don't drive. Haven't, with some exceptions on vacations and long road trips, since about 1998. Having grown up in a rural community where driving was compulsory, I made it a goal, upon moving to a large city to attend University, that I would live close to grocery stores, restaurants, and my workplace so that I could walk and ride my bicycle to work and class. It was a conscious lifestyle choice, and I still adhere to it, 15 years later.

Side benefits are immense. I walk or ride somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 miles each year. Overall, the pedestrian commute energizes me in the morning, and helps me quickly recover and decompress at the end of the day. The money that would otherwise go into a second vehicle, fuel, insurance, and maintenance instead goes toward higher quality food.

Going on a media counteroffensive is probably better than trying to change his name and experiencing backlash in the form of the Streisand effect. People would think that he had something to hide, which he doesn't. Going to the press shows humility, which in this case is the antidote to shame.

We have two in my office, and we make software completely unrelated to the domain of design or manufacturing. We recognize the value in curiosity and in engaging with new technologies, so we foster a workplace where experimentation and play are valued as part of the creative process.