Automating things is fun, so I decided to spend a day to build a Twitter bot (@daily_axc) that posts a random article. The sources for the daily article will be astralcodexten.substack.com (ACX) and slatestarcodex.com (SSC). These two blogs by Scott Alexander are by far my favorite source of insight on the internet I highly recommend them.
This article explains step by step how you can create such a bot on your own. It is more geared towards beginners. … more
In Academia author lists are source of endless contention. The current system is undeniably unfair.
Almost all of the credit go to the first and last author, while the middle authors often get forgotten. Who gets placed where on a paper is therefore subject to politics and fierce debates. Especially for early career researchers this can be a problem. There are some papers that let you list the individual authors’ contributions, but even that is somewhat opaque. That is … more
For the past few months of my PhD in epidemiology I have worked on forecasting and forecast evaluation. In many places, forecast models have had a huge influence on policy during the Covid-19 pandemic. The Imperial model (code here) for example played an important role in the UK government’s decision to go into a lock-down in March. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) also rely heavily on predictions made by research teams around the world.
Forecasting is hard. … more
If you want, you can create your own Covid-19 vaccine at home and it is actually not that hard to do.
In December 2020, johnswentworth posted the following question on LessWrong: How Hard Would It Be To Make A COVID Vaccine For Oneself? . These are some of the answers they got from user eillasti:
… moreI am not even sure that you need bio/bioinformatics know-how beyond the stuff that you can read up in the wikipedia.
The only
If you are into data science and data visualization, the book Fundamentals of Data Visualization by Claus Wilke is for you. You can buy it on Amazon, but it is also available for free online.
The book explains the concepts of visualizing data in a thorough and in-depth way. While the text is much more about concepts and ideas, you can also look at the code here.
In a new paper called Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial image, researchers took a data set of roughly 1m pictures and were able to predict political orientation with an astonishing accuracy from just a single picture. The pictures were taken from Facebook and a dating site (I assume okcupid?). Using these images, authors were able to predict self-reported political orientation (conservative vs. liberal) … more
Scott Alexander just published a piece titled A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word “Class” and I really like it. It paints a proposal for the Republicans to become the party of the working class.
Scott writes:
… moreIt could appeal to the white working class. Everyone agreed these people were Trump’s base, but the media insisted on emphasizing the “white”, as in “WHITE!!! working class”. Your job is to get people thinking “white WORKING CLASS!!!” instead. […]
If you are interested in how complicated the supply chain of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines are, this article by Jonas Neubert is what you might want to read. It is gives a quite in-depth overview of the manufacturing process and its bottlenecks.
One of the major problems seems to be the coating of mRNA in liquid nanoparticles (LNP). Producing these LNPs is one part, but apparently actually mixing them together with the mRNA is even harder.
One thing … more
There is a very interesting episode of freakonomics on the protestant work ethic. In it, they claim that even today Protestants work longer hours than Catholics do. Germany doesn’t seem to be an especially religious country to me. While the majority is Christian on paper, hardly more then ten percent of people actually go to church regularly.
However: the protestant work ethic still seems to be real according to freakonomics:
… moreSPENKUCH: I find three things. One: yes, Protestantism increases
GME goes stonks – exciting times.
If you’re interested in a deep dive on what’s going on, I found Eliezer Yudkowsky’s post, /r/WallStreetBets is trying something unprecedented in history — and the media’s not reporting on it at all quite interesting.
The summary: The scheme can actually work. The question is whether people on reddit will be able to coordinate not to sell their stocks too quickly.
