"The Royal Society’s motto ‘Nullius in verba’ is taken to mean 'take nobody’s word for it’. It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment."
Quotes, photos, and other notes from and about Technology, China, and the future.
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December 16, 2018
November 21, 2018
"We actually have these glands in our armpits that are not really sweat glands. Their only job is to feed armpit bacteria. So, you have very special microbes in your armpit that, historically, must have had a pretty important role that we still don’t really understand. Because those glands are feeding those bacteria so much, we shed lots of those microbes around the house"
January 16, 2018
"The answer to the ‘‘good bug, bad bug’’ question is not dichotomous, but rather one of context."
—
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chom.2017.12.008
Many good examples of microbes that appear helpful in one context but are harmful in another, and vice versa.
January 11, 2017
Foreign experience and your moral compass
The positive effects of foreign travel are well-publicized: people who have seen the world tend to show more creativity and curiosity than those who stick to the familiar of their own home.
But this new study by Lu, JG et al, carefully concludes that foreign experience has the downside of making people more likely to behave dishonestly as well.
I looked at the paper and have these comments:
- 8 separate studies all show a small decrease in moral behavior when people spend more time traveling in foreign countries.
- When effects were found, the sizes were small (p < 0.05, but usually p > 0.001) and of course I can see many obvious ways the studies may have been skewed (e.g. some of the measures were self-reported, the tests were of proxies for moral behavior (e.g. tell the subject that the app is broken so please don’t cheat), and of course they didn’t report how many other studies they may have (intended to perform) but didn’t and therefore didn’t report, etc.)
- But it’s interesting that the effects went in the same direction in all of these disparate studies. The conclusion is also consistent with other research on changes that accompany foreign travel.
- Interestingly, people who have breadth experiences (i.e. live in a country for a long time), show less of this effect than those who have breadth experiences.
Read the original here:
Lu, Jackson G., Jordi Quoidbach, Francesca Gino, Alek Chakroff, William W. Maddux, and Adam D. Galinsky. “The Dark Side of Going Abroad: How Broad Foreign Experiences Increase Immoral Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 112, no. 1 (2017): 1–16. doi:10.1037/pspa0000068.
August 6, 2016
"
whole almonds provide about 20 per cent fewer calories than originally thought. At first glance, the study results beg the question, how can a food’s calorie count suddenly change when the composition of the food itself hasn’t?
The answer is that David Baer, PhD, and his team from the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) used a new method of measuring the calories in almonds, which built on traditional methods and allowed the researchers to determine the number of calories from almonds that are actually absorbed during digestion.
Resulting data showed a 28-gram serving of almonds (about 23 almonds) has 129 calories versus the 160 calories currently listed on food package labels.
"
January 29, 2015
"Politics in a democracy is still based on getting people to agree with you, not making them afraid to disagree. The historical record of political movements that sought to expand freedom for the oppressed by eliminating it for their enemies is dismal."
December 17, 2014
"Here’s the truth: the Chinese state is not fragile. The regime is strong, increasingly self-confident, and without organized opposition. Its economic management is competent and pragmatic. Its responsiveness to social pressures on issues such as the environment is imperfect, but well-informed by research and public opinion surveys. It derives real legitimacy from its consistent demonstrated ability to raise living standards, provide a growing range of public goods, and maintain a high level of order while mostly letting people do what they want in their daily lives (unless what they want is to organize against the government). Like any large state, China has large problems, but the Party’s rule is not threatened by umbrella-wielding students in Hong Kong or striking schoolteachers in Heilongjiang, any more than the American regime is threatened by rioters in Ferguson."
July 20, 2014
"the time and money required for each new therapeutic undertaken by a conventional pharmaceutical company is roughly equivalent to what it took to complete the Human Genome Project"
— Individualized Cancer Treatment Coming — But Only If Underdogs Prevail
July 12, 2014
"
Generally, health is just so heavily regulated. It’s just a painful business to be in. It’s just not necessarily how I want to spend my time. Even though we do have some health projects, and we’ll be doing that to a certain extent. But I think the regulatory burden in the U.S. is so high that think it would dissuade a lot of entrepreneurs. … it’s so heavily regulated. It’s a difficult area.
I can give you an example. Imagine you had the ability to search people’s medical records in the U.S.. Any medical researcher can do it. Maybe they have the names removed. Maybe when the medical researcher searches your data, you get to see which researcher searched it and why. I imagine that would save 10,000 lives in the first year. Just that. That’s almost impossible to do because of HIPPA. I do worry that we regulate ourselves out of some really great possibilities that are certainly on the data-mining end.
"— Fireside chat with Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin | Khosla Ventures
June 28, 2014
Larry Summers: Median wages vs. productivity
“during a period in which median wages have been stagnant over the last
30 years, median wages in terms of automobiles have almost doubled”
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