Lone Gunman

Bring­ing to mind some­thing I wrote about last week (The Quar­ter­life Cri­sis), this advice to those 25 and over is more eti­quette les­son than anti­dote to the 20-something malaise.

It is time, if you have not already done so, for you to emerge from your cocoon of post-adolescent dither­ing and self-absorption and join the rest of us in the world. Past the quarter-century mark, you see, cer­tain actions, atti­tudes, and behav­iors will sim­ply no longer do, and while it might seem unpleas­ant to feign a matu­rity and solic­i­tous­ness towards oth­ers that you may not gen­uinely feel, it is not only appre­ci­ated by oth­ers but nec­es­sary for your con­tin­ued survival.

Three that par­tic­u­larly struck a chord:

• Develop a phys­i­cal aware­ness of your sur­round­ings (“You […] need to learn to sense oth­ers and get out of their way.”).
• Have some­thing to talk about besides col­lege or your job (“Be inter­ested so that you can be interesting”).
• Rude­ness is not a sig­ni­fier of your impor­tance (“Be civil or be elsewhere”).

via Kot­tke

A lon­gi­tu­di­nal study of health and men­tal lucid­ity in the aged—focusing on the huge retire­ment com­mu­nity of Laguna Woods Vil­lage south of Los Angeles—is start­ing to show some results.

From study­ing mem­bers of the so-called ‘super mem­ory club’ (peo­ple aged 90+ with near-perfect cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties) it is being sug­gested that not all men­tal activ­i­ties are equal when it comes to staving off demen­tia, and social intere­ac­tions may be vastly more impor­tant that pre­vi­ously thought.

The researchers have also demon­strated that the per­cent­age of peo­ple with demen­tia after 90 does not plateau or taper off, as some experts had sus­pected. It con­tin­ues to increase, so that for the one in 600 peo­ple who make it to 95, nearly 40 per­cent of the men and 60 per­cent of the women qual­ify for a diag­no­sis of dementia.

So far, sci­en­tists here have found lit­tle evi­dence that diet or exer­cise affects the risk of demen­tia in peo­ple over 90. But some researchers argue that men­tal engage­ment — doing cross­word puz­zles, read­ing books — may delay the arrival of symp­toms. And social con­nec­tions, includ­ing inter­ac­tion with friends, may be very impor­tant, some sus­pect. In iso­la­tion, a healthy human mind can go blank and quickly become disoriented.

via Mind Hacks

Thanks to my mod­er­ate knowl­edge of sta­tis­tics, I know that I have a lot more to learn in the field and should never make assump­tions about data or analy­ses (even my own).

Because of this I share a griev­ance with Zed Shaw who says that “pro­gram­mers need to learn sta­tis­tics or I will kill them all”. Required read­ing and advice not just for pro­gram­mers, but for every­one who looks at data, cre­ates mod­els, or even reads a newspaper.

I have a major pet peeve that I need to con­fess. I go insane when I hear pro­gram­mers talk­ing about sta­tis­tics like they know shit when its clearly obvi­ous they do not. I’ve been study­ing it for years and years and still don’t think I know any­thing. This arti­cle is my call for all pro­gram­mers to finally learn enough about sta­tis­tics to at least know they don’t know shit. I have no idea why, but their con­fi­dence in their lack­ing knowl­edge is only sur­passed by their lack of con­fi­dence in their per­sonal appearance.

My rec­om­men­da­tion? Read this arti­cle to realise that you know noth­ing, and then pick up a copy of John Allen Pau­los’ Innu­mer­acy and Dar­rell Huff’s How to Lie with Sta­tis­tics in order to realise that you know even less than you thought (but a hell of a lot more than the aver­age person).

Hal Var­ian is the Chief Econ­o­mist at Google, engaged pri­mar­ily in the design of the company’s ‘adver­tis­ing auc­tions’; the auc­tions that hap­pen every time a search takes place in order to deter­mine the adver­tis­ing that appears on the results page.

After intro­duc­ing us to this con­cept, Steven Levy looks at Google’s “across-the-board empha­sis on engi­neer­ing, math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las, and data-mining” and how these ‘Google-style auc­tions’ are applic­a­ble to all sorts of appli­ca­tions.

You can argue about [AdWords’] fair­ness, but arbi­trary it ain’t. To fig­ure out the qual­ity score, Google needs to esti­mate in advance how many users will click on an ad. That’s very tricky, espe­cially since we’re talk­ing about bil­lions of auc­tions. But since the ad model depends on pre­dict­ing click­throughs as per­fectly as pos­si­ble, the com­pany must quan­tify and ana­lyze every twist and turn of the data. Susan Woj­ci­cki, who over­sees Google’s adver­tis­ing, refers to it as “the physics of clicks.”

[…] “Google needs math­e­mat­i­cal types that have a rich tool set for look­ing for sig­nals in noise,” says sta­tis­ti­cian Daryl Preg­i­bon, who joined Google in 2003 after 23 years as a top sci­en­tist at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs. “The rough rule of thumb is one sta­tis­ti­cian for every 100 com­puter scientists.”

Key­words and click rates are their bread and but­ter. “We are try­ing to under­stand the mech­a­nisms behind the met­rics,” says Qing Wu, one of Varian’s min­ions. His spe­cialty is fore­cast­ing, so now he pre­dicts pat­terns of queries based on the sea­son, the cli­mate, inter­na­tional hol­i­days, even the time of day. “We have tem­per­a­ture data, weather data, and queries data, so we can do cor­re­la­tion and sta­tis­ti­cal mod­el­ing,” Wu says. The results all feed into Google’s back­end sys­tem, help­ing adver­tis­ers devise more-efficient campaigns.

After com­pil­ing a few ‘top ten’ lists of clas­sic for­eign affairs books, Stephen Walt—professor of inter­na­tional affairs at Har­vard University—compiles a more digestible ver­sion: the top ten arti­cles in the field of inter­na­tional rela­tions.

The ten arti­cles Walt rec­om­mends are below, but click through to the orig­i­nal to see his rea­son­ing behind each choice and to check out the comments.

1. Albert Wohlstetter’s The Del­i­cate Bal­ance of Ter­ror (pdf).
2. Man­cur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser’s An Eco­nomic The­ory of Alliances (pdf).
3. Ken­neth Waltz’s Inter­na­tional Struc­ture, National Force, and the Bal­ance of World Power.
4. Robert Jervis’ Hypothe­ses on Mis­per­cep­tion (Sum­mary).
5. Michael Doyle’s Kant, Lib­eral Lega­cies, and For­eign Affairs (Sum­mary).
6. John Ruggie’s Inter­na­tional Regimes, Trans­ac­tions, and Change: Embed­ded Lib­er­al­ism in the Post­war Eco­nomic Order (pdf).
7. Alexan­der Wendt’s Anar­chy is What States Make of It (pdf).
8. Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink’s Inter­na­tional Norm Dynam­ics and Polit­i­cal Change (pdf).
9. William C. Wohlforth’s The Sta­bil­ity of a Unipo­lar World (pdf).
10. Alexan­der George’s Case Stud­ies and The­ory Devel­op­ment: The Method of Struc­tured, Focused Com­par­i­son (pdf).

If any­one spots full-text ver­sions of arti­cles 3, 4, 5 and 10, please do let me know and I’ll update the post.