Various web links I found to be of interest recently:
One of the most interesting people I've run across, contemplates his life and dying.
And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life -- achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one's life as well, when one can feel that one's work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.
He died August 30 2015. One eulogy,
The ballooning demand for misplaced and misunderstood metrics, benchmarks, and performance indicators is costing us big.
The attractions of accountability metrics are apparent.
Yet like every culture, the culture of accountability has carved out
its own unquestioned sacred space and, as with all arguments from
presumed authority, possesses its characteristic blind spots.
In this case, the virtues of accountability metrics have been oversold
and their costs are underappreciated. It is high time to call
accountability and metrics to account.
...
Clearly, the attempt to measure performance, however difficult it can be,
is intrinsically desirable if what is actually measured is a reasonable
proxy for what is intended to be measured. But that is not always the case,
and between the two is where the blind spots form.
...
Gaming the metrics also takes the form of diverting resources from
their best long-term uses to achieve measured short-term goals.
Reproducibility Problems
The amount of funding available to scientific research hasn't
kept up with the growing number of scientists in training. To get a
bite of the funding pie, many scientists have been led astray. How
many? Witness the ten-fold rise in the number of retractions issues
in scientific literature, nearly half of which may be the result
of fraud.
...
Scientists need to balance their work on research that pushes
the boundaries of science with less eye-catching studies that
simply strengthen convictions on what we already know.
Presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid
and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to
misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.
People tend to think of not knowing as something to be wiped out
or overcome, as if ignorance were simply the absence of knowledge.
But answers don't merely resolve questions; they provoke new ones.
The idea that particular individuals drive history has long been discredited. Yet it persists in the tech industry, obscuring some of the fundamental factors in innovation.
Musk's success would not have been possible without, among other
things, government funding for basic research and subsidies for
electric cars and solar panels. Above all, he has benefited from
a long series of innovations in batteries, solar cells, and space
travel. He no more produced the technological landscape in which he
operates than the Russians created the harsh winter that allowed them
to vanquish Napoleon. Yet in the press and among venture capitalists,
the great-man model of Musk persists, with headlines citing, for
instance, "His Plan to Change the Way the World Uses Energy"
and his own claim of "changing history."
...
Hero myths like the ones surrounding Musk and Jobs are damaging in
other ways, too. If tech leaders are seen primarily as singular,
lone achievers, it is easier for them to extract disproportionate
wealth. It is also harder to get their companies to accept that
they should return some of their profits to agencies like NASA and
the National Science Foundation through higher taxes or simply less
tax dodging.
Hosted by Judith Curry Professor and former Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and President (co-owner) of Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN)
A forum for climate researchers, academics and technical experts from other fields, citizen scientists, and the interested public to engage in a discussion on topics related to climate science and the science-policy interface.
A balanced discussion in my opinion.
Our telephone habits have changed, but so have the infrastructure and design of the handset.
When asked, people with a distaste for phone calls argue that they are
presumptuous and intrusive, especially given alternative methods of
contact that don't make unbidden demands for someone's undivided attention.
...
But when it comes to taking phone calls and not making them,
nobody seems to have admitted that using the telephone today is a
different material experience than it was 20 or 30 (or 50) years ago,
not just a different social experience. That's not just because our
phones have also become fancy two-way pagers with keyboards,
but also because they've become much crappier phones.
It's no wonder that a bad version of telephony would be far less desirable
than a good one. And the telephone used to be truly great, partly because
of the situation of its use, and partly because of the nature of the
apparatus we used to refer to as the "telephone"--especially the handset.
High Levels of Lead and Cadmium Found by As You Sow in Two Samples of the Trendy Meal Replacement Powering Silicon Valley Coders
Harriet Hall, M.D. The SkepDoc
I'm an equal opportunity skeptic. I'm skeptical about alternative medicine, pseudoscience, and quackery; but I apply the same standards of skepticism to conventional medicine. I don't write about conventional medicine so much, because I don't need to. Science itself is inherently skeptical and scientific medicine is self-criticizing and self-correcting. When better evidence comes along medical practices change
Another interpretation is that people are just getting older.
From 1990 to 2010, life expectancy increased and there are more old people
now. Everyone knows that dementia is more common in old people.
So an ageing population will, all else being equal,
inevitably suffer more dementia.
...
As 'control conditions', they consider deaths from cancer and heart disease
in the 75+ group. These deaths have not increased from 1990 to 2010 --
in fact they have fallen. The authors argue that since cancer and heart
disease are diseases of old age too, the "people are just older"
argument would equally well apply to those diseases, yet neurological
diseases have increased more, so there must be more than just an age effect.
The problem is that this is comparing apples to oranges. For one thing, cancer and heart disease are often treatable, and we're getting better at treating them. There have been lots of new drugs, treatments and screening programs for cancer and heart disease since 1990, so it's no surprise that death rates fell. Dementia, on the other hand, is not treatable, nor are many other neurological disorders.
Every battery has a finite lifespan, and this is given as the
"recharge cycle" or "battery cycle." Put simply, this is the number
of charge/discharge cycles that a battery is expected to endure
before it is no longer fit for service.
...
If you only let your battery discharge by 25 percent,
then doing this four times counts as a single cycle.