Web Roundup: Links for April

• A sociology-style deconstruction of the pick-up community.

• Nearly twice as many black men than black women are looking for a long-term relationship, or so they report.

• Moravec’s paradox: “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”

• Gay men are three times more likely to suffer from an eating disorder than straight men and are disproportionately interested in plastic surgery.

• “Computers are far better than humans at recognizing the difference between real and fake pain in the faces of test subjects.”

• “I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.”

• Advice on how to do research from Manuel Blum. “Turing machines are incredibly more powerful than Finite Automata. Yet the only difference between a FA and a TM is that the TM, unlike the FA, has paper and pencil. Think about it.” Insightful throughout.

• Are there any imperative algorithms that can’t be translated efficiently into functional ones? (Answer: no.)

• Reproducibility of research does not correlate with journal impact factors.

• To catch a criminal, law enforcement sometimes elicit “reverse-order alibis,” e.g. telling the events in the reverse order that they happened. (HT: Kaj Sotala)

• “Surprise is a strong attractor of human attention, with 72% of all gaze shifts directed towards locations more surprising than the average, a figure rising to 84% when focusing the analysis onto regions simultaneously selected by all observers.”

• Vladimir Voevodsky has a set of (non-technical) slides up on the importance of the univalent foundations program — rethinking the foundations of mathematics — and its relationship with computer assisted proof.

• Neat study from PLoS one: a man’s IQ is reflected in his face and can be “read” by observers, while a woman’s IQ cannot. Or, to put it another way, if you think you know how smart some woman is after looking at her, you’re wrong. They found no correlation between actual IQ and attractiveness, but there was a correlation between perceived IQ and attractiveness. (HT: hbd* chick)

• Both men and women rated stronger males with larger, more variable and faster arm movements as better dancers.

• In a Finnish sample, those with higher creatine levels went on to earn more — 1 standard deviation in levels being worth a 6.8% increase in earnings. (Creatine is commonly supplemented by athletes.) (HT: gwern for this and the next.)

• A recent study examining Chinese censorship policy finds that the censors target any mention of collective action, not criticism of the state.

• “There are probably three or four [unobserved planet-like objects] that are three times the size of Pluto, and the biggest of these objects … is probably the size of Mars or the size of the Earth.”

• Reptiles can sneeze.

• High-frequency trading: no big deal? “Based on the vast majority of the empirical work to date, HFT and automated, competing markets improve market liquidity, reduce trading costs, and make stock prices more efficient.”

• “A foreign language feels less emotional than the mother tongue.”

• Should we be worried about increased corporate control and complexity of Linux?

• In 1554, Sir James Hales drowned himself. The court then convicted him of “self-murder” and his estate was forfeited to the crown.