Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
The most famous Silicon Valley companies are afflicted with an illness known as financialization-untreated, they could share the fate of General Electric or Lucent.
Like General Electric some 25 years under Jack Welch, Apple under current CEO Tim Cook increasingly represents a microcosm of the changing role of U.S. markets as they have become less a vehicle for capital provision, more akin to a wealth recycling machine in which cash piles are used less for investment/research and development, more for share buybacks (which are tied to executive compensation, elevating the incentive for, at a minimum, quarterly short-termism and, at worst, fraud and corporate looting). All in the interests of that flawed concept of "maximizing shareholder value," in which the company's stock price, rather than its product line, drives corporate decisions, determines senior management compensation, and becomes the ultimate measuring stick of success.
The authors surveyed 522 consulting biostatisticians and received sufficient responses from 390.
The absolute worst offense (i.e., being asked to fake statistical
significance) occurred to 3% of the survey respondents.
Another 7% reported being asked to change data, and a whopping 24% --
nearly 1 in 4 -- said they were asked to remove or alter data.
Unequivocally, that is a request to commit scientific fraud.
Of the less serious offenses, 55% of biostatisticians said that
they received requests to underreport non-significant results.
TEDxSydney, Tom Griffiths talk with transcript.
If you want to maximize the probability that you find the very best place, you should look at 37 percent of what's on the market, and then make an offer on the next place you see, which is better than anything that you've seen so far. Or if you're looking for a month, take 37 percent of that time -- 11 days, to set a standard -- and then you're ready to act.
Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.
The internet has made it so easy to gratify basic social and sexual needs that there's far less incentive to go out into the "meatworld" and chase those things. This isn't to say that the internet can give you more satisfaction than sex or relationships, because it doesn't ... [But it can] supply you with just enough satisfaction to placate those imperatives ... I think it's healthy to ask yourself: "If I didn't have any of this, would I be going out more? Would I be having sex more?" For a lot of people my age, I think the answer is probably yes.
Nutrient composition and caloric intake have traditionally been used to devise optimized diets for various phases of life. Adjustment of meal size and frequency have emerged as powerful tools to ameliorate and postpone the onset of disease and delay aging, whereas periods of fasting, with or without reduced energy intake, can have profound health benefits. The underlying physiological processes involve periodic shifts of metabolic fuel sources, promotion of repair mechanisms, and the optimization of energy utilization for cellular and organismal health. Future research endeavors should be directed to the integration of a balanced nutritious diet with controlled meal size and patterns and periods of fasting to develop better strategies to prevent, postpone, and treat the socioeconomical burden of chronic diseases associated with aging.
Here's why restaurateurs are ditching cash in favor of credit.
A private business like a restaurant is not legally required to take
U.S. currency. Massachusetts is the exception: A 1978 law states that
no retailer "shall discriminate against a cash buyer by requiring
the use of credit," the Boston Globe reported.
...
Going cashless has been incentivized by credit card companies like Visa,
which, as part of a promotion in July, offered up to "$500,000 to 50
eligible U.S.-based small business food service owners who commit to
joining the 100 percent cashless quest," per its press release.
Companies that opted in got $10,000 from Visa for tech upgrades,
a significant incentive when credit card companies can get "2 to 5 percent"
of what a small business earns. (A restaurant pulling in $1 million in net
sales per year may pay a credit card company up to $50,000 in transaction
fees - more than what the average full-time hourly employee makes in a year.)
But at least in NYC maybe this classist and racist business model
will be stopped.
NYC Politician Wants to Ban Cashless Restaurants
"In an era when an increasing number of restaurants no longer accept legal tender, it's useful to think about who this system benefits most: the businesses and banks, at the expense of consumers."
Follow friends and discover new ones. Publish anything you want: links, pictures, text, video. All on a platform that is community-owned and ad-free.
What we believe about how memory works affects the decisions we make in many aspects of life. In Patihis, Ho et al. [Patihis, L., Ho, L. Y., Tingen, I. W., Lilienfeld, S. O., & Loftus, E. F. (2014). Are the "memory wars" over? A scientist-practitioner gap in beliefs about repressed memory. Psychological Science, 25, 519-530.], we documented several group's beliefs on repressed memories and other aspects of how memory works. Here, we present previously unreported data on the beliefs of perhaps the most credible minority in our dataset: memory experts. We provide the statistics and written responses of the beliefs for 17 memory experts. Although memory experts held similarly sceptical beliefs about repressed memory as other research-focused groups, they were significantly more sceptical about repressed memory compared to practitioners, students and the public. Although a minority of memory experts wrote that they maintained an open mind about repressed memories - citing research such as retrieval inhibition - all of the memory experts emphasised the dangers of memory distortion.
The search for hay in a haystack characterizes many different areas of math, including the subject of my most recent Quanta article, "Tinkertoy Models Produce New Geometric Insights." There I wrote about mathematicians who are investigating the relationship between geometric shapes and the equations used to describe them. In rare cases, objects can be expressed by simple equations. These are the needles, the shapes we know best: lines, parabolas, circles, spheres.
The overwhelming preponderance of shapes resist such elegant formulation. They may be everywhere, but because you can't write down the equations that describe them, it's hard to establish that even a single one of them exists.
In my article, I explained how techniques from a field called "tropical geometry" serve as an especially sly way of deducing the existence of these ubiquitous geometric objects-the ones that, like the irrational numbers, are everywhere, even if you can't write them down.
New York's empty storefronts are a dark omen for the future of cities.
Separate surveys by Douglas Elliman, a real-estate company,
and Morgan Stanley determined that at least 20 percent of
Manhattan's street retail is vacant or about to become vacant.
...
Walking around the Upper East Side, where I live, I find it
striking how many of the establishments still standing among
the many darkened windows are hair salons, nail salons,
facial salons, eyebrow places, and restaurants. What's the one thing
they have in common? You won't find their services on Amazon.