Link of the day: Du kannst alles hacken – Du darfst dich nur nicht dabei erwischen lassen
This video is a talk of the 35th Chaos Communication Congress 2018. Linus Neumann and Thorsten Schröder give an extremely entertaining talk about how (not) to hack something on the internet. Highly recommandable, but in German.
Link of the day: Top Charities Recommended by GiveWell
GiveWell is an organization that does very thorough research about the effectiveness of money given to charity. Each year they publish a list with charities they recommend. If you’re planning to donate some money for Christmas, have a look at this list.
Link of the day: The t-test and its robustness to non-normality.
The t-Test usually assumes normality for observations in the groups to be compared. But as it actually just requires that the means of the observations follow a normal distribution, this assumptions may be relaxed somewhat and the t-test proves to be quite robust against the violation of the normality assumption. This posts gives a detailed overview.
Link of the day: why targeted advertising fails so miserably
Collecting every single bit of information from internet users is a giant industry. However, nobody actually seems to be able to do anything useful with the data. This blog posts gives an interesting perspective on the matter.
Semelparity is a reproductive strategy whereby certain species of animals (sometimes both sexes, sometimes only males) only survive one mating episode and die shortly after mating. This serves as a strategy to maximize reproductive fitness – even at the cost of the current generation. Semelparity has evolved multiple times in independent environments. It is much less common among mammals though, as the females are required to care for their children. Some examples are: – – – – – – – … more
Link of the day: Does modern medicine increase life expectancy?
This paper by Sundeep Mishra from 2016 explores different ways in which modern medicine has tried to increase life expectancy. It seems that the effects of almost any drug and treatment are dwarfed by the effects of a healthy life-style.
Medical interventions work the better the sicker the patient. For healthy individuals, Metformin and mTor-inhibitors seem to be promising targets for increasing life expectancy.
Link of the Day: Are placebos powerless?
Scott Alexander reviews a paper which posits that the placebo effect is actually close to non-existent in most cases. The reason that we might observe such a high placebo effect might just be regression to the mean: if you’re sick you are likely going to get better, no matter whether you take a pill, a placebo or nothing.
The internet is full with podcasts. Here is a list of podcasts that I recommend. They mostly come from politics, tech, society and science and almost all of them are rather information-heavy. If you enjoy thinking critically about complex and interesting questions, those podcasts are for you.
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Malcolm Gladwell revisits things in the past that have been overlooked and misunderstood. From questions like “How did the friendship between Frederick Lindemann and Winston Churchill lead to so many … more
Do animals engage in prostituion? That depends on your definiton of prostitution. But there certainly is some evidence that animals at least engage in transactional sexual behavior. Wikipedia lists three examples: Penguins, Chimpanzees and Capuchin monkeys. While that hardly constitutes prostitution, some female Adélie penguins sometimes mate with single males and use that as an occasion to steal pebbles from them that they can use for nest building.
Chimpanzees seem to engage in long term relationships where female chimpanzees sleep … more
Clownfish live together in small groups with one large female fish and one or several smaller males. The smaller males cater for all the needs of the females and are eventually rewarded with the permission to fertilize her eggs. All clownfish are born male. They only have an opportunity to become female once the female in their group dies: The largest of the males undergoes a sex change and gets promoted to be the next female.
