kem

5 ms·

1.
by kem 9y ago
I'm speechless, but also habituating to that feeling. It's as if we reincarnated oil barons from the early 1900s and appointed them all to lead the government without telling them it was 2017.
2.
by kem 9y ago
Pay-to-publish has its own problems. I think the current model has issues, and there should be a movement in general toward open dissemination of research, but I'm not sure the PLoS model is much better in a lot of ways. Maybe not wors
3.
by kem 9y ago
Not bad to think about this, but I think much smaller changes would have huge effects. Thinks like approval or rank voting, for example. I don't understand why these minor changes don't get implemented.
4.
by kem 9y ago
I think there's a bigger problem the article is getting at, that people are kind of missing or downplaying, which is the culture around math skill acquisition and ability. It's obvious this guy had a love of math and ability in it
5.
by kem 9y ago
I appreciate this article being posted, and have the utmost respect for NumPy developers. The urgency and discrepancy between use of certain important open-source libraries, and their support, is bewildering sometimes. As I was thinking abo
6.
by kem 9y ago
There are pretty low-hanging fruit out there, though. Approval voting or ranking are almost universally agreed to be better than what we have (in most places--some places do have that). That alone would make a huge change. Independent distr
7.
by kem 9y ago
fwiw, it's important to remember that there's a lot of diversity involved. In my university, for example, the library pushes hard for movement toward open public standards. I've also seen junior faculty make efforts to publ
8.
by kem 9y ago
Not really an expert in this particular area, but the research I'm aware of kind of suggests if anything the opposite is true, depending on what you mean by "the ability to learn new things." There's some cognitive decli
9.
by kem 9y ago
Your point is important, although I think farmers' political impact exceeds their voting power, especially in GOP-voting communities. I know from personal experience that this issue and related issues have become very salient to farmer
10.
by kem 9y ago
Regulatory capture, advertently or inadvertently, is one of the elephants in the healthcare room. I'm tired of all the discussion (on both sides) totally ignoring this issue.
11.
by kem 9y ago
I agree with the "not necessarily" part, but one thing that concerns me is in seeing large, critical institutions, like large hospitals and universities, outsourcing critical infrastructure off-premises. If you look at operational
12.
by kem 9y ago
"as long as there are good competitors around"--that's the key, and not something I necessarily trust to be the case. Net neutrality, for example, would be a non-issue if there were good competition, but there's not.
13.
by kem 9y ago
FWIW, I think now technically indexing can either be 1- or 0-based.
14.
by kem 9y ago
As someone who used Python and R, and also Julia, my take on Julia has changed over time. My overall assessment is that yes, it's definitely worth getting your feet wet with. It has all the advantages of R or Python (for numerics, a po
15.
by kem 9y ago
FWIW, I'm not sure why infidelity is so stigmatized. With all the things going on in the world that seems so minor in the grand scheme of things. Also, presumably the secretary is an adult, so they're two consenting adults (yes, I
16.
by kem 9y ago
I've published in mathematical/statistical areas as well as applied ones, and my sense is that interpersonal difficulties are more acute, but also more transparent, in math and statistics, for lack of a better way of putting it. M
17.
by kem 9y ago
There's kind of "converse" problems too, that I think is the focus of the linked article, in that there's an epidemic of hype in academics, math, and the sciences. So it's not just that people of high ability are be
18.
by kem 9y ago
... this is like walking through a minefield, but here it goes. A lot of the illnesses they're talking about in the article, like IBS, lower back pain, and CFS have a strong psychosomatic component to it for a lot of people. They essen
19.
by kem 9y ago
Legislators who stand up to nonsense like this need to be supported for protecting children against an overreaching state. The law is absurd in what it targets, but even if children were actually guilty of a crime (as opposed to just engagi
20.
by kem 9y ago
I had a similar reaction. The headlines might as well been "extremely skilled climber makes wildly risky bet and lives to tell the tale." Sure he's skilled; sure he is strategic. What I want to know is could he do this over a
21.
by kem 9y ago
Survivorship bias needs to be taught in schools at a young age, like in kindergarten. It's so insidious.
22.
by kem 9y ago
On the other hand, I didn't think of it until I read this. It made me a little satisfied, and then it made me quite angry.
23.
by kem 9y ago
One of the things I wondered when I read this story is if it would be possible to develop software that would somehow circumvent this type of situation. For example, using autoencoding or something to lose watermarking details intentionally
24.
by kem 9y ago
But this isn't about the NSA, it's about state-level secretaries of state offices.
25.
by kem 9y ago
That's similar to my take here. Whether or not Trump actively colluded with Russia to affect election results, he's still behaving abnormally about the issue. I mean, if you step back and look at this, and just give Trump the bene
26.
by kem 9y ago
A monolithic private institution doesn't inspire confidence in me any more than a monolithic public one. I don't see the purpose in switching one for the other, and would probably rather see it run by the government. If it was rep
27.
by kem 9y ago
It's hard to tell from either article what's going on. The Science piece you linked provides a bit more detail, but I wouldn't say those details are particularly damning (about half of the audited healthy participants didn&#x
28.
by kem 9y ago
Your comment about business administration threw me for a loop--I couldn't tell if you were being sarcastic or not anymore. These sorts of articles always strike me as naive, and the discussions sort of disingenuous. I'll go along
29.
by kem 9y ago
Blockchain-based contracts seem like a useful thing in the abstract, but I've always had two questions that no one has really been able to satisfactorily answer. These might have been answered, though, because it's been awhile sin
30.
by kem 9y ago
Not to absolve Purdue's responsibility in this, but I do think this exposes the fraud that is the US healthcare system. First and foremost, it illustrates that drug regulation is basically a failure, and that the FDA and physicians can

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