"psych" entries

Four short links: 12 April 2012

Four short links: 12 April 2012

Financial Data, 21C Learning for Parents, IQ Battles, and Etsy Hacker Grants

  1. Big Data in Finance (PDF, 9M) — Algo trading systems have begun to resemble an arms race. Competition, data, and the race for real-time.
  2. A Parent’s Guide to 21st Century Learning (Edutopia, free registration required to download) — What should collaboration, creativity, communication, and critical thinking look like in a modern classroom? How can parents help educators accomplish their goals? We hope this guide helps bring more parents into the conversation about improving education. (via Derek Wenmoth)
  3. Chess Intelligence and Winning — survey of IQ gaps between contestants needed to win competitions. We could view cops and killers as being involved in a grim contest. In the USA around 65% of all murders are solved. That converts to an average “murder” ELO rating difference between police and murderers of 108 ELO points. It is also known that the mean IQs of murderers and policemen are 87 and 102, respectively. So successfully solving murders is a puzzle then the “a” coefficient is 0.041, and each IQ point difference is worth 7.2 ELO points. I suspect this is masturbatory math extrapolation rather than anything significant or predictive, but the cops-vs-robbers IQ contest was an interesting angle. (via Dr Data’s Blog)
  4. Etsy Hacker Grants: Supporting Women in TechnologyToday, in conjunction with Hacker School, Etsy is announcing a new scholarship and sponsorship program for women in technology: we’ll be hosting the summer 2012 session of Hacker School in the Etsy headquarters, and we’re providing ten Etsy Hacker Grants of $5,000 each — a total of $50,000 — to women who want to join but need financial support to do so. Our goal is to bring 20 women to New York to participate, and we hope this will be the first of many steps to encourage more women into engineering at Etsy and across the industry.
Four short links: 15 December 2011

Four short links: 15 December 2011

Ada Initiative, Ignorance, Social Business, and Web vs Native

  1. Donate to the Ada Initiative — they’re fundraising for their 2012 activities which include events, activities, and resources for women in open technology and culture. They’ve got my money.
  2. The Anosognosic’s Dilemma — first part of a series on how the worst kind of ignorance is about your own failings. Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem—namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it. We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.
  3. Values are Features (Clay Johnson) — Google is actively investing in social and philanthropic causes, from combating human trafficking to open government. Yet it stands head and shoulders above other technology companies, and the biggest (Apple) is last in line. I just don’t see most people buying a crapper product without egregiously broken values; unless Apple is conducting human sacrifices at the Cupertino campus and it ends up on 20/20, most everyone will be happy to keep buying their iStuff.
  4. Apps Are Too Much Like 1990s CDROMs and Not Enough Like The Web (Scott Hanselman) — as a user, more and more, I want to Go Somewhere and get functionality as opposed to Bring Something To Me to get functionality. Managing apps, updates and storage is as pointless as my managing my [tamagotchi].
Four short links: 8 December 2011

Four short links: 8 December 2011

Hedonometrics and Twitter, Pricing Experiments, Crowdsourcing App Dev, and Flashcard Library

  1. Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter (PLOSone) — Tweets involving the ‘fake news’ comedian Stephen Colbert are both happier and of a higher information level than those concerning his senior colleague Jon Stewart. By contrast, tweets mentioning Glenn Beck are lower in happiness than both Colbert and Stewart but comparable to Colbert in information content.
  2. Pricing Experiments You Can Learn From — revealing the data from experiments which showed how to drive people towards higher prices.
  3. 10 Things I Learned at CrowdConf 2011 (Crowdflower) — Using his newly released crowdsourcing platform Coffee & Power, Philip [Rosedale] developed his entire company infrastructure and platform through a globally distributed workforce. 288 contributors in 127 locations worked together to get this startup off the ground in a whole new way. The Coffee & Power platform was built in 1,700 commits ranging from $6 quality checks all the way up to full source-code editing. One element of this process was developing the Hudat iPhone app. In less than a month for $2,485, the Coffee & Power community got this mobile app up and running.
  4. Andi — AGPL3-licensed spaced repetition flashcard system. (via Jack Kinsella)
Four short links: 7 December 2011

Four short links: 7 December 2011

Free Service Isn't Sustainable, Big Data, Crowdsourced Historic Science, and Cognitive Biases

  1. Don’t Be a Free User (Maciej Ceglowski) — pay for your free services, else they’ll go away.
  2. Katta — Lucene for massive data sets in the cloud. (via Pete Warden)
  3. Old Weather — crowdsourced transcription of old nautical journals to yield historical information for climate researchers. (via National Digital Forum)
  4. Siddhartha Mukherjee Talks About Cancer (Guardian) — fascinating profile of the author of a “biography of cancer”. Touches on the cognitive biases we’re all prone to, and their damaging effects on patients. Mukherjee cites a study which found that women with breast cancer recalled eating a high-fat diet, whereas women without cancer did not. But the very same study had asked both sets of women about their diets long before any of them developed cancer, and the diet of those who now had breast cancer had been no more fatty than the rest (via Courtney Johnston)
Four short links: 6 December 2011

Four short links: 6 December 2011

Dispel Your Illusions, Simple Mac OS X Apps, Assisted Translation, and AutoTagging

  1. How to Dispel Your Illusions (NY Review of Books) — Freeman Dyson writing about Daniel Kahneman’s latest book. Only by understanding our cognitive illusions can we hope to transcend them.
  2. Appify-UI (github) — Create the simplest possible Mac OS X apps. Uses HTML5 for the UI. Supports scripting with anything and everything. (via Hacker News)
  3. Translation Memory (Etsy) — using Lucene/SOLR to help automate the translation of their UI. (via Twitter)
  4. Automatically Tagging Entities with Descriptive Phrases (PDF) — Microsoft Research paper on automated tagging. Under the hood it uses Map/Reduce and the Microsoft Dryad framework. (via Ben Lorica)
Four short links: 24 November 2011

Four short links: 24 November 2011

Libraries and the Internet, Cheap Multicore, Online Exceeds Print, Perpetuating Ignorance

  1. Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong — I was asked to provocatively help focus librarians on the opportunities offered to libraries in the Internet age. If I ask you to talk about your collections, I know that you will glow as you describe the amazing treasures you have. When you go for money for digitization projects, you talk up the incredible cultural value. ANZAC! Constitution! Treaties! Development of a nation! But then if I look at the results of those digitization projects, I find the shittiest websites on the planet. It’s like a gallery spent all its money buying art and then just stuck the paintings in supermarket bags and leaned them against the wall. CC-BY-SA licensed, available in nicely-formatted A4 and Letter versions.
  2. Green Array Chips — 144 cores on a single chip, $20 per chip in batches of 10. From the creator of Forth, Chuck Moore. (via Hacker News)
  3. The Atlantic’s Online Revenue Exceeds Print — doesn’t say how, other than “growth” (instead of the decline of print). (via Andy Baio)
  4. On the Perpetuation of Ignorance (PDF) — ignorance about an issue leads to dependence leads to government trust leads to avoidance of information about that issue. Again I say to Gov 2.0 advocates that simply making data available doesn’t generate a motivated, engaged, change-making citizenry. (via Roger Dennis)
Four short links: 11 November 2011

Four short links: 11 November 2011

Technocracy's Blind Spot, Progressive Enhancement, Libraries and ebooks, and Library Fablab

  1. Nudge Policies Are Another Name for Coercion (New Scientist) — This points to the key problem with “nudge” style paternalism: presuming that technocrats understand what ordinary people want better than the people themselves. There is no reason to think technocrats know better, especially since Thaler and Sunstein offer no means for ordinary people to comment on, let alone correct, the technocrats’ prescriptions. This leaves the technocrats with no systematic way of detecting their own errors, correcting them, or learning from them. And technocracy is bound to blunder, especially when it is not democratically accountable. Take heed, all you Gov 2.0 wouldbe-hackers. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Country Selector — turns a dropdown into an autocomplete field where available. Very nice! (via Chris Shiflett)
  3. Ebook Users Wanted — Pew Internet & American Life project looking at ebooks, looking for people who use ebooks and tablet readers in libraries.
  4. The Public Library, Complete Reimagined (KQED) — the Fayetteville public library is putting in a fab lab. [L]ibraries aren’t just about books. They are about free access to information and to technology — and not just to reading books or using computers, but actually building and making things. (via BoingBoing)