Lunch at the Labs

Some web links I found to be of interest:

• Combating bad science
  Sloppy researchers beware. A new institute has you in its sights.

  Dr Ioannidis has been waging war on sloppy science ever since, helping to develop a discipline called meta-research (ie, research about research). Later this month that battle will be institutionalised, with the launch of the Meta-Research Innovation Centre at Stanford.

  METRICS, as the new laboratory is to be known for short, will connect enthusiasts of the nascent field in such corners of academia as medicine, statistics and epidemiology, with the aim of solidifying the young discipline.

• The Only Way to Stop Illegal Immigration
  

  Workplace enforcement is minimal. Fines are small. Amid all the political bellowing about the border, no one in Washington pays much attention to employers' practices.

  The only way to make meaningful progress is to end the lure of employment.

• Global warming: Who pressed the pause button?
  The slowdown in rising temperatures over the past 15 years goes from being unexplained to overexplained.

  Gavin Schmidt and two colleagues at NASA's Goddard Institute quantify the effects of these trends in Nature Geoscience. They argue that climate models underplay the delayed and subdued solar cycle. They think the models do not fully account for the effects of pollution (specifically, nitrate pollution and indirect effects like interactions between aerosols and clouds). And they claim that the impact of volcanic activity since 2000 has been greater than previously thought. Adjusting for all this, they find that the difference between actual temperature readings and computer-generated ones largely disappears. The implication is that the solar cycle and aerosols explain much of the pause.

• Big Company CEOs Just Aren't Worth What We Pay Them

  A recent paper by J. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School and Philippe Jacquart of France's EMLYON, seem to have finally established that paying top dollar simply doesn't get a better job done. And, in fact, it might actually get a worse one done.

• There is no gender gap in tech salaries

  New research shows that there is no statistically significant difference in earnings between male and female engineers who have the same credentials and make the same choices regarding their career.

• Why Is the Merger Called Mayonnaise Loved -- & Hated -- so Deeply?

  As mayonnaise has conquered the world, it has also divided its eaters. Paul Rozin, professor of food psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, says mayonnaise "splits people into likers and dislikers, with few in the middle."

  The magic of mayonnaise is in the egg yolk, which contains substances that stabilize the oil and water in a mixture called an emulsion.

  The experts on food aversion I spoke with generally agreed that the slimy texture of mayo is responsible for much, if not most, of the disgust people feel towards it.

• The simple, sensible -- and impossible -- fix for the Internet in the USA
  

  Look around at your home now. You don't have four different water mains coming in with only one hooked up. You don't have five different power lines waiting on the pole. You don't have three different telephone networks run down your street. You have one of each. In some places you may have a selection of power companies, but no matter which you choose, power is delivered via the same lines. You may even pick among telephone companies, but again, the service is delivered through the same physical telephone lines.

  There is no reason for requiring that competing broadband Internet access providers in a market deploy their own last-mile networks. Heck, as taxpayers, we've already subsidized the Internet build-out of the United States to a massive degree. We've already paid for these networks.

  Perhaps that should be the deal struck with Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Sure, go ahead and create the largest cable company in the world -- but only if you become a common carrier and allow competition throughout your network. You can play, but you must allow competitors access to your last-mile infrastructure for fixed prices, and they can compete with you fair and square. If Comcast and Time Warner squawk and say other companies don't have to do the same, perhaps we do exactly that. Fair is fair, after all.

• Publishers Withdraw More than 120 Gibberish Science and Engineering Papers

  The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

• Is It Normal to Hoard?
  Hoarding shows us at our best, and worst.

  Modern science has clearly revealed why hoarding deserves the designation of "disorder": It is reflected in physical differences in how the brain is wired. At the same time, it is something that reflects to us some of the qualities and decisions with which we all struggle: Consumerism, attachment, decision-making, time management-and, at some level, survival. I'm left wondering if it is any coincidence that it was in 2013, when society demands so much from us in each of these capacities, that hoarding has taken on full-fledged disorder status in the DSM-V handbook.

• Investing's Biggest Irony: Everyone Thinks They're a Contrarian
  "You never know what the American public is going to do, but you know they will do it all at once."
  - Bill Seidman

  Even when everyone around you is giving an obviously wrong answer, your tendency to second-guess yourself, not want to embarrass yourself, and your natural desire to fit in can trump every bit of rationality you think you have.

• Revealing the secret corruption inside PBS's news division
  

  In recent years, this campaign has seen public television stations ignore PBS's own rules about editorial control and pre-ordained conclusions. Indeed, stations across the country have started airing programming from wealthy ultraconservative foundations and corporate interests looking to promote their political messages through the PBS brand.

• Why Walking through a Doorway Makes You Forget
  

  Why would we have a memory system set up to forget things as soon as we finish one thing and move on to another? Because we can't keep everything ready-to-hand, and most of the time the system functions beautifully. It's the failures of the system-and data from the lab-that give us a completely new idea of how the system works.

• What Do You Believe In?

  We readily recognize that facts are not the same things as truth. Facts are true by definition (or they wouldn't be facts), but they require analysis, understanding and interpretation to become useful and actionable, to become truth. Logically, we should decide what the facts are as objectively as we can and then interpret the facts to come to a consistent set of beliefs about them. But that's not how it usually works. We try to jam the facts into our pre-conceived notions and commitments or simply miscomprehend reality such that we accept a view, no matter how implausible, that sees a different set of alleged facts, "facts" that are used (again) to support what we already believe. Since we quite readily see poor thinking in others but fail to see it in ourselves (on account of bias blindness) and live in a highly polarized society wherein commonly accepted facts are increasingly rare, beliefs (at least the beliefs of people who disagree with us) are not generally held in high regard.
  ...

  We are ideological creatures through-and-through. We prefer stories to data consistently, no matter how fanciful the story or how rigorous the data. It can be maddeningly difficult for us to separate fact from belief. Thus it is very dangerous business indeed to lose sight of what works in order to massage our egos, feel comforted or score ideological points.
  ...

  I'd love to be able to act upon facts alone, of course, assuming I can come to a fair approximation of them. But facts without interpretation are still useless.

• Today I Found Out
  Learn Interesting Facts Every Day

  near daily "interesting fact" articles from various, extremely well credentialed authors

• The College Bubble And Why We Avoided It
  Take Mark Twain's advice: don't let schooling interfere with your education.

  Multi-part series about the college bubble. So far:

  1. The First Person in My Family NOT to Go to College
  2. Captive Consumers: How Colleges Prepare Students For a Life of Debt
  3. Student Loan Interest: Compounding the Problem

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is quoted as having said "Figures don't lie, but liars figure".
Here are a few links to help understand statistics and the numbers behind the news.

• More Or Less: Behind the Stats
  On BBC Radio 4 Tim Harford explores the truth about the numbers used in public arguments.

  Tim Harford investigates numbers in the news. Numbers are used in every area of public debate. But are they always reliable? Tim and the "More or Less" team try to make sense of the statistics which surround us.

• Statistics Done Wrong
  Free online book by Alex Reinhart on how to do statistics.

  "Statistics Done Wrong" is a guide to the most popular statistical errors and slip-ups committed by scientists every day, in the lab and in peer-reviewed journals. Many of the errors are prevalent in vast swathes of the published literature, casting doubt on the findings of thousands of papers. "Statistics Done Wrong" assumes no prior knowledge of statistics, so you can read it before your first statistics course or after thirty years of scientific practice.

• FiveThirtyEight

  Nate Silver's web site uses data-driven analysis to understand the numbers behind the news in politics, economics, science, life and sports.

  Formerly a feature of The New York Times it is now under the auspices of ESPN. Nate Silver gained fame for correctly predicting the winner of all 50 states and the District of Columbia in the 2012 presidential election.

• The Dismal Art of Economic Forecasting
  Book review of Walter A. Friedman's "Fortune Tellers: The Story of America's First Economic Forecasters".

  The failure of forecasting is also due to the limits of learning from history. The models forecasters use are all built, to one degree or another, on the notion that historical patterns recur, and that the past can be a guide to the future. The problem is that some of the most economically consequential events are precisely those that haven't happened before. Think of the oil crisis of the 1970s, or the fall of the Soviet Union, or, most important, China's decision to embrace (in its way) capitalism and open itself to the West. Or think of the housing bubble. Many of the forecasting models that the banks relied on assumed that housing prices could never fall, on a national basis, as steeply as they did, because they had never fallen so steeply before. But of course they had also never risen so steeply before, which made the models effectively useless.