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Hidden history emerges from [#mining] court data http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229750.700-crime-mining-hidden-history-emerges-from-court-data.html Diverging descriptions of types of #crime likened to genetic drift

Back to the future
Jennifer Ouellette
Available online 28 June 2014

QT:{{"

Instead, he turned to information theory, invented by Claude Shannon
in the 1940s. DeDeo’s aim was to reveal gradual changes in the way
crimes were spoken about. He split all the trials into two categories
– trials for violent crimes like murder or assault and trials for
non-violent crimes like pickpocketing or fraud – and then he looked at
the actual words that people used in the courtroom. Information theory
lets you quantify the amount of information given by a word in a
specific context. Using a measure known as Jensen-Shannon divergence,
a word picked at random from the transcript of a trial can be given a
score based on how useful it is for predicting the type of the trial.

So, for example, if you walked into the Old Bailey during Hall’s trial
and heard the word "murdered" uttered in court, how much information
about the type of trial underway would that single word convey? In the
early years of the period they looked at, most crimes involved some
level of violence. "There might be bloodshed, or an eye gouged out,
but the real crime is someone’s wallet got stolen," DeDeo says. "The
casual everyday violence of the past is remarkable."

…
Slowly, however, that changed. By the 1880s, the team found that the
majority of violent language was reserved for talking about crimes
like assault, murder or rape. So you could walk into the courtroom,
hear words like "murdered", "hit," "knife" and "struggled" – all words
from Martin’s testimony in 1801 – and be confident that you were
witnessing a trial for a violent crime rather than a trial for theft.

The analysis reveals a story of the gradual criminalisation of
violence. This is not necessarily evidence that we have become less
violent – as Steven Pinker argues, based on statistics for violent
crime, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Rather, it is a
story of the state gaining a monopoly on violence and controlling its
occurrence among the public. "What is deemed criminal has changed,"
says Hitchcock.

DeDeo likens the shift to genetic drift. If you took two herds of
goats and isolated each for centuries, the herds would gradually
evolve into separate species. Similarly, he sees Old Bailey cases as
populations of violent and non-violent trials. Over time the two types
"speciate" and become distinct from one another (see chart). "In 1760,
the patterns of language used in both kinds of trial are almost
exactly identical," he says. "Over the next 150 years they diverge."
"}}

The Other Cost of #ClimateChange http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/carbon-capture Disincentive to Franciscan v eschatological efforts, eagles v personal CO2 footprint

Dept. of the Environment APRIL 6, 2015 ISSUE
Carbon Capture
Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?

QT:{{"A book that does justice to the full tragedy and weird comedy of
climate change is “Reason in a Dark Time,” by the philosopher Dale
Jamieson. Ordinarily, I avoid books on the subject, but a friend
recommended it to me last summer, and I was intrigued by its subtitle,
“Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed—And What It Means for
Our Future”; by the word “failed” in particular, the past tense of it.
I started reading and couldn’t stop.

….
which argues for a different expensive solution. A problem like this
(a “wicked problem” is the technical term) will frustrate almost any
country, and particularly the United States, where government is
designed to be both weak and responsive to its citizens. Unlike the
progressives who see a democracy perverted by moneyed interests,
Jamieson suggests that America’s inaction on climate change is the
result of democracy. A good democracy, after all, acts in the
interests of its citizens, and it’s precisely the citizens of the
major carbon-emitting democracies who benefit from cheap gasoline and
global trade, while the main costs of our polluting are borne by those
who have no vote: poorer countries, future generations, other species.
The American electorate, in other words, is rationally
self-interested. According to a survey cited by Jamieson, more than
sixty per cent of Americans believe that climate change will harm
other species and future generations, while only thirty-two per cent
believe that it will harm them personally.

Shouldn’t our responsibility to other people, both living and not yet
born, compel us to take radical action on climate change? The problem
here is that it makes no difference to the climate whether any
individual, myself included, drives to work or rides a bike. The scale
of greenhouse-gas emissions is so vast, the mechanisms by which these
emissions affect the climate so nonlinear, and the effects so widely
dispersed in time and space that no specific instance of harm could
ever be traced back to my 0.0000001-per-cent contribution to
emissions. I may abstractly fault myself for emitting way more than
the global per-capita average. But if I calculate the average annual
quota required to limit global warming to two degrees this century I
find that simply maintaining a typical American single-family home
exceeds it in two weeks. Absent any indication of direct harm, what
….

Jamieson’s larger contention is that climate change is different in
category from any other problem the world has ever faced. For one
thing, it deeply confuses the human brain, which evolved to focus on
the present, not the far future, and on readily perceivable movements,
not slow and probabilistic developments. (When Jamieson notes that
“against the background of a warming world, a winter that would not
….

The meaning of climate-related actions, because they produce no
discernible result, is necessarily eschatological; they refer to a
Judgment Day we’re hoping to postpone. The mode of meaning of
conservation in the Amazon is Franciscan….

The most striking thing about Amazon Conservation’s work is the
smallness of its constituent parts. There are the eight female paco
from which a season’s worth of eggs are taken, the humbleness of the
plastic tanks in which the hatchlings live. There are the conical
piles of dirt that highland women sit beside and fill short plastic
tubes in which to plant tree seedlings. There are the simple wooden
sheds that Amazon Conservation builds for indigenous Brazil-nut
harvesters to shelter the nuts from rain, and that can make the….

"}}

Bright light outdoors is good — but stay in the shade to avoid skin cancer.

The #myopia boom http://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120 Was attributed to books; now epidemiological & lab evidence suggests not enough daylight for kids

QT:{{"

“Rose’s team tried to eliminate any other explanations for this link — for example, that children outdoors were engaged in more physical activity and that this was having the beneficial effect. But time engaged in indoor sports had no such protective association; and time outdoors did, whether children had played sports, attended picnics or simply read on the beach. And children who spent more time outside were not necessarily spending less time with books, screens and close work. “We had these children who were doing both activities at very high levels and they didn’t become myopic,” says Rose. Close work might still have some effect, but what seemed to matter most was the eye’s exposure to bright light.

See the light

Some researchers think that the data to support the link need to be more robust. Most epidemiological studies have estimated children’s time outdoors from questionnaires — but Christine Wildsoet, an optometrist at the University of California, Berkeley, says that such data should be treated with caution. In a small, pilot study of wearable light sensors, she found that people’s estimates often do not match up with their actual exposure. And Ian Flitcroft, a myopia specialist at Children’s University Hospital in Dublin, questions whether light is the key protective factor of being outdoors. He says that the greater viewing distances outside could affect myopia progression, too. “Light is not the only factor, and making it the explanation is a gross over-simplification of a complex process,” he says.

Yet animal experiments support the idea that light is protective. Researchers first demonstrated this in chicks, a common lab model for studying vision. By fitting chicks with goggles that alter the resolution and contrast of incoming images, it is possible to induce the development of myopia while raising the birds under controlled conditions in which only light intensity is changed. In 2009, Regan Ashby, Arne Ohlendorf and Frank Schaeffel from the University of Tübingen’s Institute for Ophthalmic Research in Germany showed that high illumination levels — comparable to those encountered outside — slowed the development of experimentally induced myopia in chicks by about 60% compared with normal indoor lighting conditions. Researchers elsewhere have found similar protective effects in tree shrews and rhesus monkeys.”

"}}

In Search of #Bayesian Inference
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/1/181628-in-search-of-bayesian-inference/fulltext Nice intuition on priors in recovering air-crash wreckage & analyzing mammographs

QT:{{”

In its most basic form, Bayes’ Law is a simple method for updating beliefs in the light of new evidence. Suppose there is some statement A that you initially believe has a probability P(A) of being correct (what Bayesians call the “prior” probability). If a new piece of evidence, B, comes along, then the probability that A is true given that B has happened (what Bayesians call the “posterior” probability) is given by

P(A|B)=P(B|A) P(A) / P(B)

where P(B|A) is the likelihood that B would occur if A is true, and P (B) is the likelihood that B would occur under any circumstances.

Consider an example described in Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise: A woman in her forties has a positive mammogram, and wants to know the probability she has breast cancer. Bayes’ Law says that to answer this question, we need to know three things: the probability that a woman in her forties will have breast cancer (about 1.4%); the probability that if a woman has breast cancer, the mammogram will detect it (about 75%); and the probability that any random woman in her forties will have a positive mammogram (about 11%). Putting these figures together, Bayes’ Law—named after the Reverend Thomas Bayes, whose manuscript on the subject was published posthumously in 1763—says the probability the woman has cancer, given her positive mammogram result, is just under 10%; in other words, about 9 out of 10 such mammogram results are false positives.

In this simple setting, it is clear how to construct the prior, since there is plenty of data available on cancer rates. In such cases, the use of Bayes’ Law is uncontroversial, and essentially a tautology—it simply says the woman’s probability of having cancer, in light of her positive mammogram result, is given by the proportion of positive mammograms that are true positives. Things get murkier when
statisticians use Bayes’ rule to try to reason about one-time events, or other situations in which there is no clear consensus about what the prior probabilities are. For example, large passenger airplanes do not crash into the ocean very often, and when they do, the
circumstances vary widely. In such cases, the very notion of prior probability is inherently subjective; it represents our best belief, based on previous experiences, about what is likely to be true in this particular case. If this initial belief is way off, we are likely to get bad inferences.

“}}

Tiny Internal Tornadoes Bring Drops to Life
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/24/science/tiny-internal-tornadoes-bring-drops-to-life.html Results from evaporation & surf. tension differences betw #water & PEG

QT:{{”

“The coloring turns out to be incidental. What is important is that food coloring contains propylene glycol. The combination of that fluid with water holds the droplets together and makes them move.

Water evaporates more quickly than propylene glycol and has greater surface tension. These differences result in continual movement inside a droplet. But the “little tornado inside” the drop reaches a balance that actually holds the droplet together, Dr. Prakash said.

The droplet moves when a change in relative humidity alters the tornado. Evaporated water from one droplet is a subtle but powerful signal, because it increases the humidity near another drop. That changes the second drop’s rate of evaporation, which disturbs the internal balance, and the dance begins.

By varying the percentages of the two fluids, the researchers were able to get droplets to move in ways that seemed mysterious — they sorted themselves according to their internal composition, formed a straight line and even climbed vertically.

The moving droplets could be useful. For instance, a mist might be used for cleaning surfaces, because the drops don’t leave any bit of themselves behind when they move.”

“}}

Disappearing Young Scientists http://on.wsj.com/1v4GvUk Michael Levitt on implications of #budget cuts for starting researchers HT @oselsayed

QT:{{”
What’s behind the shortage? Mr. Daniels suggests several reasons, including longer postdoctoral training; a system of applications, demonstrable data and peer review, and a shift in research costs to universities—which typically narrows awards to seasoned, tenured researchers. But perhaps the simplest explanation came from Nobel laureate Michael Levitt of Stanford, who said last year that senior scientists were once able to renew their existing grants and let young scientists compete for unawarded grant money. Now after budget cuts, older scientists are competing “against the kids,” and usually winning.
“}}

Is Biomedical Innovation Happening Outside the Peer-Reviewed Literature? http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2110977 Focuses on diagnostics company, #Theranos

QT:{{”
This Viewpoint discusses the need for scientific transparency when biomedical innovation takes place outside of the peer-reviewed literature.
“}}

by J Ioannidis

Disease-disease relationships through the incomplete interactome, by @barabasi http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6224/1257601.abstract #Network modules for 226 diseases

QT:{{”
Altogether, disease genes associated with 226 of the 299 diseases show a statistically significant tendency to form disease modules based on both Si andP(ds) (fig. S4).
“}}

#Quantum internet could keep us safe from spying eyes http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329873.000-quantum-internet-could-keep-us-safe-from-spying-eyes.html#.VQOzLBDF87M Uses photon states for intercept-proof key distribution (#QKD)

QT:{{"
That something is called quantum key distribution (QKD). The technique
transmits photons in particular quantum states to generate a secure
cryptographic key, with which you can encrypt data sent over an
ordinary, non-quantum connection. QKD is far more secure than standard
cryptography, which relies on hard mathematical problems that can
theoretically be cracked, given enough computing power. Any attempt to
intercept a quantum key, however, will disturb the photon’s quantum
states, alerting users not to use the key (see "Unbeatable security")."}}

The Yale graduate school regulations governing dissertations includes a paragraph that indicates that only two dissertation committee members need Yale appointments:

QT:{{
“Registered doctoral candidates must have a principal adviser with an appointment on the Graduate School faculty. The Graduate School requires that each dissertation be read by at least three persons but not more than five, at least two of whom are ladder or ladder-track faculty members at Yale. All readers must hold the Ph.D. degree as well as a faculty position or be considered otherwise qualified to evaluate the dissertation…”
}}

http://www.yale.edu/printer/bulletin/htmlfiles/grad/policies-and-regulations.html#dissertation