Web Roundup: More Links for March
To score drugs, try a support group for addicts.
Teenage pregnancy — not that big of a deal? “Our results reinforce recent research that finds at most modest adverse causal effects of teen births on the mothers’ adult outcomes.” Summary.
The genes of men who make good cyclists also make them good looking, concludes biologist Erik Postma. The effect size is stronger for women not on contraceptives, providing more evidence that birth control is doing funky things to human attraction. (HT: Tyler Cowen.)
A hurdle model for scientific productivity. In short, there are 8 factors that contribute to scientific productivity. If one is decent at all 8, one will be much more productive than other scientists, and weakness at any one is a sort of choke point. (HT: gwern.)
The structure of the hurdle model reminds me of the “Great Filter” solution to the Fermi Paradox. Intelligent life is rare because it has to travel through so many filters and there are few megaproductive scientists for the same-ish reasons.
During the first 15 years after publication, the median paper is cited 1 time. (Data here.) More than a third of all published papers go uncited.
The CDC has put together a zombie preparedness strategy.
“Authors were also almost twice as likely to commit suicide as the general population.”
Children instructed to gesture with their hands while learning mathematics gain a deeper and more flexible understanding of the material. Fields Medalist Terry Tao describes this sorta thing in a MathOverflow answer, “In one extreme case, I ended up rolling around on the floor with my eyes closed in order to understand the effect of a gauge transformation that was based on this type of interaction between different frequencies.”
Familiar with the studies that say cohabiting before marriage predicts divorce? Well, that’s maybe wrong. This newer study suggests that it’s the age at which people cohabit that matters, not living together in general.
A webcomic for nihilists. I like it. I think I’m going to go stare at the output of my random number generator for a while now.
Aaron Swartz details the viewquake he experienced after reading Chomsky’s Understanding Power. I’ve added it to my to-read list, even though progressives talk about Chomsky like some sort of religious prophet, while AI guys usually call him the worst word they know — postmodernist.
Candy Crush is NP-hard. As is Pac-man, Tron, Doom, Starcraft, Super Mario Brothers, Donkey Kong, and Pokemon. (HT: Pip, Jeremy Kun.)
“Alcohol advertisements don’t just get consumers to switch from one brand to another. They also increase total drinking among youth aged 15-26.“
The brain is a lossy compressor: “I realize it is tempting to use lossy text compression as a test for AI because that is what the human brain does when we read text and recall it in paraphrased fashion. We remember the ideas and discard details about the expression of those ideas.”
Insight from Wikipedia: There is a discrepancy between how international adoptions are regarded (“saving a child”) and how international marriages are regarded (“buying a wife”).
The overlap between “ethicist” and evil genius: “Turning to human engineering as a possible solution, Dr. Roache looks at the idea of life span enhancements so that a life sentence in prison could last hundreds of years. Another scenario being explored by the group is uploading the criminal’s mind to a digital realm to speed up the 1,000 year sentence.”
A “well-sorted” version of the King James Bible, where all the letters have been, well, sorted. “The Well-Sorted Version captured my imagination because it recreates the alienation I felt trying to reconcile the reputation and contents of the Bible.”
Ever wonder how data compression works? (You ought to if you’ve read my post on the relationship between compressibility, interestingness, and creativity.) Scott Vokes gave a presentation on the topic at Strange Loop and the talk is now online.
Golden rice is rice spliced with carrot genes. It has superior nutritional characteristics — more vitamin A, life-saving stuff. The product has been ready to go since 2002, but has been delayed by advocacy groups like Greenpeace. Now, two economists estimate that the delay has, over the past decade, cost 1.4 million life years in India, or about 2 billion US dollars.
Is bureaucracy killing Wikipedia? “The most successful candidates were those who edited the Wikipedia policy or project space; such an edit is worth ten article edits.”
The tale of a boy who didn’t realize he was unable to smell until the age of 14.
The Pirahã people — a tribe of Amazon natives — are able to whistle their language and, curiously, “The language does not have words for precise numbers, but rather concepts for a small amount and a larger amount.” They would make good physicists.
Mnemonics 101: An introduction to memory hacking.
“This paper finds that the share of opposite gender friends has a sizable negative effect on high school GPA.” Lest you jump to conclusions and blame sex-crazed teenage boys, the effect size is significantly larger for females.
“A single high dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called ‘magic mushrooms,’ was enough to bring about a measurable personality change lasting at least a year in nearly 60 percent of the 51 participants in a new study, according to the Johns Hopkins researchers who conducted it.”
What theoretical computer science videos should everyone watch?
I’ve written before about a mathematical problem, the secretary problem, that (naively) suggests people date too few people before marriage. In economics, the idea that people make rational choices regarding marriage is called the “efficient marriage market hypothesis.” Modern marriage markets are about 80% efficient.
[“The more ethnically diverse an area is, the less likely people are to trust others
within that area.”]46
Open borders could double world GDP — equivalent to 23 years of economic growth.
Are fat people friendlier? “Extraversion was positively associated with BMI in men.” (HT: hbd* chick for this and the next three.)
Steven Pinker’s list of dangerous ideas.
Same sex couples are happier than heterosexual ones.
How long until whole brain emulation — mind uploading? Anders Sandberg has a paper out predicting a 50% chance of whole-brain emulation before 2059. (HT: Robin Hanson)