Tadeu

When you look for overall trends, you often poke around the data in aggregate, but when you zoom out too far, you could miss details or within-category variation. Sometimes when you zoom in, you see a completely opposite trend of what you saw overall. This is known as Simpson's Paradox. Lewis Lehe and Victor Powell explain in a series of small, interactive charts.

Why does this matter?

Simpson's paradox usually fools us on tests of performance. In a famous example, researchers concluded that a newer treatment for kidney stones was more effective than traditional surgery, but it was later revealed that the newer treatment was more often being used on small kidney stones. More recently, on elementary school tests, minority students in Texas outperform their peers in Wisconsin, but Texas has so many minority students that Wisconsin beats it in state rankings. It would be a shame if Simpson's paradox led doctors to prescribe ineffective treatments or Texas schools to waste money copying Wisconsin.

The takeaway lesson: Remember to look at the details. [Thanks, Victor]

Apenas dois. Faltam apenas dois episódios para a Odisseia de Walter White chegar ao seu tenebroso fim. Mas não se desespere! A AMC também quer que a série dure um pouquinho mais.

Para isso, os dois episódios subiram para 75 minutos de duração cada com comerciais, o que provavelmente significa que devem ter uma hora de duração ininterrupta.

Além disso, o canal quer agradecer aos fãs por toda a audiência, e fez um pôster especial para a ocasião. Com uma imagem do solitário RV nas planícies do Novo México, o pôster acompanha a frase “Obrigado a todos que fizeram o Mau ser tão Bom”, mostrando que de fato aconteceu uma química por parte a série e dos espectadores.

Você está preparado?

Via Deadline

Stephan Martins quer ver o circo pegar fogo.

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Now that the weather finally is cooling down, it's time for a fun rainy day activity for the youngsters. While you'll do the fun part on a sunny day by applying NeverWet to your sidewalk with a stencil, the real pay off occurs when it rains and the area you painted stays dry.

Link

beben-eleben:

Me updating into iOS 7.0

Esse dia foi louco.

Ela ficou lá só tirando onda.

appleteeth:

The most unsexy book on the planet

setbabiesonfire:

sodomymcscurvylegs:

dorkly:

Culture of Violence

For Elisabeth Hasslehack.

Best thing I’ve seen all fucking day.

popular shared this story from Consumerist.

(threefatcats)

There are a lot of things our bodies do that we don’t tell them to — our lungs know to breathe, our hearts know to beat, and we can grow humans in our bellies — but before now, you might’ve thought brewing beer involuntarily would be an impossibility. It’s not, it’s called auto-brewery syndrome, and it means basically what its name implies: Your body brews beer in your stomach without you even having to invest in one of those home-brew kits that are all the rage with your brother-in-law who posts about it constantly on Facebook.

While this might at first seem kind of awesome and miraculous to the average beer drinker, the reality actually sounds a lot less fun. In the case of a 61-year-old man who yes, liked to do some home brewing, he only knew at first that he kept getting dizzy, reports NPR’s The Salt blog.

When he went to the ER to get to the bottom of things, nurses gave him a Breathalyzer test and figured he was just drunk because his blood alcohol concentration was at 0.37% — almost five times the legal limit. But he claimed he hadn’t sipped nary a drop of booze that day.

Some medical professionals thought maybe he was just drinking on the sly and claiming he didn’t have a problem.

“He would get drunk out of the blue — on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime,” says the dean of nursing at the Texas hospital he visited. “His wife was so dismayed about it that she even bought a Breathalyzer.”

But she and a gastroenterologist wanted to track down the true source of his apparent self-drunkenness. So they locked him in a hospital room without liquor for 24 hours and checked his blood for alcohol while he ate a lot of carbs, noting his blood alcohol content all the way. It rose 0.12% at one point without drinking a drop.

The medical team finally traced it to an overabundance of brewer’s yeast in his gut. Which means his intestinal tract was acting like his very own internal craft brewery. Blood & Guts IPA, perhaps?

Turns out he was infected with a specific species of yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), so that any time he drank or ate a lot of starch, the yeast would ferment the sugars into ethanol, getting him drunk. The medical professionals called it a case of “auto-brewery syndrome” in a recent issue of the International Journal of Clinical Medicine.

Before you get any ideas about supplementing your diet with this yeast so you can get drunk on the cheap, you should know that it’s probably not a great idea and also likely won’t happen to you. The yeast has to settle in and live in your gut for a while, and can cause other problems, notes a microbiologist at Duke University.

“Researchers have shown unequivocally that Saccharomyces can grow in the intestinal tract,” he told The Salt. “But it’s still unclear whether it’s associated with any disease” — or whether it could make someone drunk without drinking.

Basically, this kind of case is very rare and you shouldn’t try gut-brewing at home. Stick to the lagers and the pilsners that you’re used to.

Auto-Brewery Syndrome: Apparently, You Can Make Beer In Your Gut [The Salt]

niknak79:

"I fixed it"

Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day! If you’ve got a deck, today would be a good day to swab it. Or you could just kick back with a bottle o’ rum and read pirate comics!

Calvin and Hobbes

Here is our world divided equally into territories of about 10m people, with existing boundaries taken into account.

"The logic of the map does not entirely discount existing ethnic or national boundaries, but neither is it beholden to them. The particular political rationale behind these divisions is not addressed - whether these are independent nation-states or provinces of a world government is left to the imagine of the viewer. The map is rather meant to provide a visual representative of the radically unequal distribution of the world’s population."

Zoom in: Pacific Rim, south-east Asia, the subcontinent, western Europe. [via MeFi]

A Field Guide to Procrastinators

A neat paper from Schoenmakers et al of the Dutch Donders Institute reports on Linear reconstruction of perceived images from human brain activity

It introduces a new mathematical approach for decoding (or ‘brain reading’) the image that someone is looking at, pixel-by-pixel, based on the pattern of neural activity in their visual cortex.

The results were not bad:

On the top row, you’re looking at the actual letters shown to a volunteer during fMRI scanning. Beneath that, the estimated ‘reconstructed’ images, based purely on the corresponding brain activity.

Here’s where it gets crowd-pleasing and meta: in response to each of a certain six letters, the decoder estimated another output:

So you could say that we have a case of Brain Reading Reads “Brains” From A Reading Brain.

Note, however, that in this case all of the stimuli were single letters in the set B,R,A,I,N,S, albeit written in a variety of fonts.

So, although the decoder was attempting to reconstruct a raw image – not just pick one from a range of options as in many studies of this kind – it is perhaps no surprise that it always produced an output that had “lettery” features.

The method (a linear Gaussian algorithm) seems novel, however, in that it’s based on estimating the stimulus-response properties of each point (voxel) in the visual cortex.

I get a feeling that it’s less of a ‘black box’ than those other methods based on searching for whatever arrays of voxels happen to be associated with different stimuli.

Schoenmakers S, Barth M, Heskes T, & van Gerven MA (2013). Linear reconstruction of perceived images from human brain activity. NeuroImage PMID: 23886984

The post Brain Reading Reads “Brains” From A Reading Brain appeared first on Neuroskeptic.

Flickr user: Andreas Poike

High-frequency trading is the practice where automated systems search for minor differences in price of stocks that can be exploited for small financial gains. Executed often enough and with a high enough investment, they can lead to serious profits for the investment firms that have the wherewithal to run these systems. The systems trade with minimal human supervision, however, and have been blamed for a number of unusually violent swings that have taken place in the stock market.

A new paper has gone searching through historic trading for these sorts of glitches and ended up finding a lot of them—over 18,000—all of which took place too fast for human intervention to have driven them. When they generated a mathematical model of this trading, they found that they showed indications of many traders executing a similar strategy, exactly as you'd expect from automated trading systems. The rise in this style of trading appears to be an emergent property of computerized trading, and it seems to have reached an inflection point near the start of the financial crisis.

The primary victims of these glitches? The stocks of the investment banks themselves.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Veja esse gif e agrave sua depressão de início de semana.

Quanta desgraça, cara. :’(

Contribuição da Mariana Paixão @CapinaGrupo

breathesuniverse:

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

- Carl Edward Sagan

In 1941, as the British War Office searched for ways to help Allied prisoners escape from German POW camps, it found an unlikely partner: John Waddington Ltd., the U.K. licensee for Monopoly. “Games and pastimes” was an approved category of item to be included in care packages sent to captured soldiers, so Waddington’s set about creating special sets to be sent to the camps.

Under the paper surface of each doctored board was a map printed on durable silk showing “escape routes from the particular prison to which each game was sent,” Waddington’s chairman Victor Watson told the Associated Press in 1985. “Into the other side of the board was inserted a tiny compass and several fine-quality files.” Real French, German, and Italian currency was hidden in the stacks of Monopoly money.

MI-9, the intelligence division charged with helping POWs escape, smuggled the games into prison camps, where prisoners would remove the aids and then destroy the sets in order to prevent their captors from divining the scheme.

“It is not known how many airmen escaped thanks to these Monopoly games,” writes Philip Orbanes in The Game Makers, his 2004 history of Parker Brothers, “but 35,000 POWs did break out of prison camps and reach partisans who helped them to safety.”

(Thanks, Ron.)

More stress.

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tastefullyoffensive:

The Potoo bird always looks like it just saw something horrifying. [via]