Random links
- If this is peaceful, how does violence look?
- Most demonstrations probably are "mostly peaceful". How much should you concentrate on the outliers?
- Antidepressants: The Emperor's New Drugs?
- "To answer these questions, my colleagues and I used the Freedom of Information Act to get the data that the drug companies had sent to the FDA in the process of getting their medications approved. What we found was even more shocking that what our 1998 study had shown. The difference between drug and placebo was even smaller in the data sent to the FDA than it was in the published literature. More than half of the clinical trials sponsored by the pharmaceutical companies showed no significant difference at all between drug and placebo. What they did find was differences in side effects, like nausea and sexual dysfunction, produced by antidepressants"
- The genderless child
- Some followup comments to this story: "... But I thought we were supposed to believe that sexual identity is not a choice, but rather an innate condition, that, in the words of Lady Gaga, “I was born this way.” So it is a choice after all?"
- Global warming lull down to China's coal growth
- Basically the argument is that there are short-term reductions in temperature to sulphur particles. A short quote from the article: "... an older gentleman asked me 'why should I believe in this climate change - I was watching Fox News and they said the Earth's temperature hasn't changed in 10 years and has actually gone down'. At that stage I wasn't paying much attention to climate change - I'd returned to working on oil markets - so I went back and checked the data and found that was just about right." I'm a little disturbed by this. Here's-why-temporary-cooling-means-long-term-warming shouldn't transform each-of-the-last-years-was-the-hottest-recorded to there's-been-some-cooling-over-the-last-decade.
- Microsoft’s Android Shakedown
- The problems of software patents... reduced innovation. Other than problems in which there's too much overhead for startups to file patents, you get problems like these "Android has roughly 10 million lines of code. Auditing 10 million lines of code for compliance with 18,000 patents is an impossible task—especially because the meaning of a patent’s claims are often not clear until after they have been litigated." (and that 18,000 figure is just Microsoft's patent collection)
- Scientific Literacy Does Not Increase Concern Over Climate Change; Now Go Shout About It
- "A new study by the Cultural Cognition Project, a team headed up by Yale law professor Dan Kahan, shows that people who are more science- and math-literate tend to be more skeptical about the consequences of climate change. Increased scientific literacy also leads to higher polarization on climate-change issues" - and if you're looking for some shouting...