Some web links I found to be of interest:
Nassim Taleb opines:
Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information.
andif I generate (by simulation) a set of 200 variables -- completely random and totally unrelated to each other -- with about 1,000 data points for each, then it would be near impossible not to find in it a certain number of "significant" correlations of sorts. But these correlations would be entirely spurious.
Over 150 of the world's greatest minds answer the Edge question of the year. Edge is an online salon for intelligent conversation (unlike TED).
Domestic and feral cats are significant predators of a wide range of prey species.
the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States -- both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it -- kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat.
Jared Diamond on the importance of being attentive to hazards that carry a low risk each time but are encountered frequently.
Consider: If you're a New Guinean living in the forest, and if you adopt the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees whose odds of falling on you that particular night are only 1 in 1,000, you'll be dead within a few years.
Researcher Ted Kaptchuk searches fpr the real ingredients of fake medicine.
researchers have found that placebo treatments--interventions with no active drug ingredients--can stimulate real physiological responses, from changes in heart rate and blood pressure to chemical activity in the brain, in cases involving pain, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and even some symptoms of Parkinson's.
andeven patients who knew they were taking placebos described real improvement, reporting twice as much symptom relief as the no-treatment group.
An article in The New Yorker, Annals of Science describes how some bacteria and other microorganisms make us sick while many others keep us alive.
We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother's birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms--a hundred trillion or more. They are bacteria, mostly, but also viruses and fungi (including a variety of yeasts), and they come at us from all directions: other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, pets, even the air we breathe. They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, fill the space between our teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; these cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh, all told, about three pounds--the same as our brain. Together, they are referred to as our microbiome--and they play such a crucial role in our lives that scientists like Blaser have begun to reconsider what it means to be human.