2020-3030

The last line of the article says, "The ultimate concern is a panopticon of a single federal database with everything that the government knows about every single person in this country,” Venzke says. “What we are seeing is likely the first step in creating that centralized dossier on everyone in this country.”

The article also mentions how DOGE is integrating voting records from PA and FL.

Americans should reject this, but any administration will be tempted to keep it once such systems are made.

Would you want to elaborate about the calculations/estimates and share any top readings you've found?

In many cases, the purpose of education depends on socioeconomic class or what you, your parents, and/or your social groups decide to take for yourselves.

Nearly everybody promotes widespread basic literacy for social cohesion and basic employment functionality, but higher skills are more of a battle ground. Many people do not want others to progress past the basics for a variety of reasons. One is a fear of "overproduction of elites", another is fear of competition from fully developed people with nice critical thinking skills (cue up George Carlin and his comments on critical thinking).

I'm interested in all time estimates for educational programs, know about Finland's general time frames for youth education, don't know about other national norms, and am happy to hear any suggested readings or other ideas.

Test out what happens to you when you alter sleep habits. How much uninterrupted sleep do you prefer and when? What are the effects of naps during the day on metrics you care about? Keep the traditional sleep log, and track your other related behaviors & habits like eating/nutrition, exercise, etc. National averages are useful, but nothing beats learning how our own bodies function in various situations.

Here is one example paper https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28545315 and while it isn't a direct example of how to find your own ideal sleep patterns, it does highlight the relationship between sleep and body weight in the study population and it again mentions the 6-8 hour recommended minimum sleep period. This source might be better https://www.sleepfoundation.org/excessivesleepiness/content/...

Thanks for mentioning your site and have you seen http://scaleofuniverse.com/ ? I sometimes use that site as a lecture tool when a larger context of time and space is useful.

This is one reason it is not included. Cue up the John Taylor Gatto reading list.

Yes, deliberate abuse of the laws would be the main problem and nobody could be trusted to run such a lucrative fine program. It would just be another excuse to treat people like piggy banks and to rob them as often as possible.

Confirms what I expected - not new in the world, but new to many/most people.

There is definitely memory, but HN also has new members. If repeat topics move up to a top location, this probably reflects the number of people who hadn't yet seen the topic. "Not new, but new to you."

We know who gets to decide - the owners of the communications platform and those who influence them. If Apple wanted to be more inclusive in the decision making, they could choose to do so.

It would be good to have pesticide and hazardous chemical amounts per serving listed along with the other ingredients. What an eye opener that would be. I wonder what it would take to accomplish this given that contamination happens throughout production and distribution.

All is not lost, the story of Gravity Payments is an unfolding example and experiment of a company owner, Dan Price, taking positive actions for employees including large wage increases. https://gravitypayments.com/thegravityof70k/

Dan took a thought and turned it into a real experiment. I believe the results are very positive in terms of profits, much higher wages for workers, higher customer retention, and deservedly good PR. https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergeorgescu/2018/01/24/what-...

I like your method because it shares what you learn with others while helping you repeat and process the material.

And what good is it to plow through book after book if we remember little or nothing? Quite a few universities also don't give people any time to reflect between courses so modern schooling and many people's reading habits are geared more to the initial stimulation of reading and less to memory.

I'm a firm believer in taking notes, reflecting, and explaining the ideas to others for anything we really want to remember or master.

All hail the 10-15 min toilet nap and locks on bathroom doors. Yes our country as a whole underestimates and stigmatizes healthy sleep patterns. People and companies which recognize the great benefits of short mid-day brain resets/toxin flushes (naps) are excellent but uncommon. Two cups of coffee won't accomplish what one 10-15 min afternoon nap achieves. It also matters what and how much you eat for lunch because the wrong foods or amounts can cause drowsiness even in well-rested people. I find that vegetarian meals make me less sleepy than meat-heavy meals.

Iceland successfully identified, prosecuted, and jailed specific bankers for their roles during the 2008 financial crisis https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-03-31/welcome-t... and this article mentions "market manipulation and fraud".

A second article mentions, "He argues the crimes themselves are simple matters such as embezzlement, merely with a complicated “wrapping” of financial jargon around them." https://www.ft.com/content/dcdb43d4-bd52-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d.... This shows that prosecutions and imprisonment are possible for bank actions related to the 2008 financial crisis. Iceland's special prosecutor also believes that similar crimes were carried out in many other countries so the opportunity for prosecution was therefore possible.

I see articles like these as useful reminders that human actions have consequences which need to be understood and mitigated if they are bad enough.

We don't want to become numb to the signs of systematic and widespread problems.

On the general topic of pollution and what it takes to organize effective responses, a friend recommended this article https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-b...

Great habit. Trash picking is excellent because people throw out such great stuff. Perfect working condition, sometimes perfect condition period, sometimes just good for materials. One such Mr. trash picking is shown here with his pile of motors and hand made power tools ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d_EN4jB_BI ) though I don't know if this is the video in which he mentions the pile of free motors he has. Another great trash-rescue proponent is DiResta (youtube maker person, seen in glorious trash picking mode here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epBIl4zDk8c ).

It is not criminal yet, but it is wrong enough that it could be. Cheating is in violation of university academic integrity policies and those aiding and abetting that cheating share responsibility.

As more companies and individuals smell the money to be made off tempting students to use this form of "contract cheating", governments are considering legislative responses which could result in the creation of criminal penalties for essay mills. ( https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/21/plan-to-cr... )

Beyond any possible governmental responses, the essay mills create a large pool of risk just by collecting user data. What happens if criminals target the essay mills, looking for lists of people who may then be blackmailed? What if the essay mills themselves decide to cash in on the extortion potential? Cheating and cheating support are both dirty enough activities that people would probably not want that to be exposed. Google for "essay mills blackmail".

The more advanced a person becomes in their career, the higher their extortion value. How many future politicians, leaders, or other influential people are creating extortion/security risks for themselves? As an employer, how many frauds are in your company and what risk do they bring with them? What ethics do they bring with them or fail to bring with them? How many product failures, delays, firings, lawsuits, sexual harassment cases, violations of company policy and general anti-social behaviors are caused by the group of people who enjoy cheating for personal gain? Will the essay mill companies realize they have large lists of corrupt and corruptible people? Will other companies want to buy these lists so they can know more about who to hire or not hire and for what positions? Will credit companies start using this to adjust people's credit scores?

For all of the people with no regrets for using or participating in the contract cheating of essay ghostwriting and sales - would this turn into regret if the activity was exposed? For that matter, do government intelligence agencies already know who did what or at least have that data laying around?

The more I think about this, the more it seems like such a stupid risk. You can stay stupid by preventing your own learning, corrupt yourself, participate in the corruption of others, reduce literacy, reduce the value of institutional degrees, reduce trust in educational institutions, create an electronic trail of your cheating, and all for the low price of lifetime risk of exposure, extortion, and lower literacy.

What could go wrong?

You are absolutely correct about the need for people to be making decisions. A small number of people have already averted what could have been global nuclear war (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/27/vasili-arkhi... and other similar articles and especially item #8 on this list http://metro.co.uk/2016/07/18/13-times-the-world-came-close-...)

Yes, the problem of killing innocents via flawed algorithm is noted in this article https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...

The Retraction Watch website http://retractionwatch.com/ is one good method of highlighting retracted work. For researchers in any given field, keeping current on literature is hard work given the pace of publication but does include seeing retractions.

So, the answer to your question depends on which researchers we mean. Experts in a field have the best chance of noticing relevant retractions in their own field. If you are a researcher in one field who has interests in many other fields, it is probably much less likely that you will be able to follow the retractions in those peripheral fields. That is why Retraction Watch and other mechanisms of highlighting such errors is useful.

In addition to the other comments, what interested me about the findings mentioned in the 2016 quantamag article was the shared problem solving required to answer Joe Corbo's sense that there was a pattern to be found in the distribution of retinal cells.

To conclusively identify the pattern, the biologists needed to contact a theoretical chemist who studied optimal object packing density. Looking at the rest of that 2016 article shows the possible shared mechanisms and mathematics behind not just the hyperuniformity found in chicken retinas, but the same packing phenomena in other systems/objects. It is exciting to find organizational principles which can be seen in many different systems.

The other elements I like are that any study of receptors and neural organization, connection, and communication is that this outside-in approach ties in with study of the whole visual system and can connect other neurophysiological and cognitive findings. Not only is this relevant for some specialists, but many people are curious about the conscious experiences and capabilities of other species so learning about this may generate popular interest depending on the findings.

As a commentator (twic) mentions below, one of his colleagues did not care about the receptor packing patterns in her data. However, what one person ignores or deems a waste of time, another can pick up and use. Somewhere out there is a graduate student who is frantically looking for a finding to publish so I bet someone would be interested in looking at the control, visualization, quantification, or prediction of receptor spacing. I don't work at the cellular level, but this sounds fundamental. Mr. Twic - any reason not hand off your observation to an undergraduate or other interested party?

The number of hypothesis tests is problematic (alpha inflation / familywise error rate) and the authors simply mention, "Another limitation was that we did not correct for multiple tests in the analyses as this was a pilot trial."

However, identifying their study as a pilot study does not excuse the lack of correction for multiple tests. These procedures are well known so failing to use them leads to maximum likelihood of ending up with false positives. The study then provides the best case scenario with the highest likelihood for false positives and seems to highlight the authors' desire to avoid failures to detect effects.

There is always a statistical trade off between reducing the numbers of failures to detect and reducing the number of false positives, so readers will be left to their own devices to decide if the authors' approaches and interpretations were justified.

The study's strength of argument is reduced by: * The authors' self-description of the study as a pilot study with a small sample size, * no corrections for multiple testing, * use of a non-representative sample ("Only approximately 15% of the screened volunteers were included in the study, and our recruitment method yielded a sample of motivated, educated, physically healthy subjects concerned about age-related memory problems. The sample, therefore, was not representative of the general population.") * PET brain imaging results self-described as "exploratory" (I take the word exploratory to mean "ourselves and others need not trust these results or interpretations" or at least "different results would not be unexpected")

What I find least appealing is the lack of a specific conflict of interest statement even while there is explanation of authors' financial interests in the substance being studied and the company selling it. As noted in the article, "Industry Sponsorship and Financial Conflict of Interest in the Reporting of Clinical Trials in Psychiatry " from the American Journal of Psychiatry ( https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/appi.ajp.16... ), "Author conflict of interest appears to be prevalent among psychiatric clinical trials and to be associated with a greater likelihood of reporting a drug to be superior to placebo." (Perlis et.al, 2005) and this explains the primary conclusions of the current study - better than placebo.

We can't fault the inventors of the substance, holders of the patent, and those with financial interests in the company which sells the product to want to test their product and promote positive findings, but how objective are the investigators and how rigorously are they trying to apply the notion of falsification to their own ideas?

They lose everything with falsification and negative results would undermine the parent company's claims that, "Theracurmin® product is one of the most advanced and studied, highly bioavailable forms of curcumin in the marketplace." http://theravalues.com/english/ . Looking on the research page, there are only a small number of studies shown at http://theravalues.com/english/research-clinical-trials/ . All positive outcomes of course.

All of the current supporting studies are listed at http://theravalues.com/english/literature-published-articles... so does anyone want to open up each of those studies and look at the sample sizes in each one?

In one of the supporting studies for Theracurmin® (https://www.nature.com/articles/srep39551), the sample size was six rats. In a second study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21603867) the sample size was 6 people.

What sample sizes do we see in other studies? How many other studies of this substance are equally as weak in terms of sample size? 6 rats here, 6 people there, 40 people here... not convincing. If anything, the strong marketing hype based on such studies makes me more wary and less trusting of the marketing and scientific claims.

Given the Theravalues clinical trials website promotes the product for for "Progressing malignancies, Mild cognitive impairment (the study highlighted in the parent post), Heart failure / diastolic dysfunction, Cachectic condition, Osteoarthritis, Crohn’s disease, Prostate-Specific Antigen after surgery" I'm left with distrust.

Kudos to the efforts to begin product testing and this sort of research is time consuming and expensive, but studies with sample sizes of 40 people do not support the company's marketing hype. If this study is positive enough for the authors to obtain more grant funding and run a much larger and better clinical study then I would be interested to see what is found then, but happier even still if authors with no financial or personal conflicts of interests ran the study.

Writing posts seems more like freeworking to me so the value of reading what others write gets balanced by the opportunity costs of contributing.

Storage is a fascinating issue, but I doubt the enteric nervous system would store or process any of the information we find in the central nervous system including personality or personality-related memory.

Instead, we do know that the synaptic and hormonal communication between the brain and ENS allows for bi-directional influence. This is to say that no information about personality is expected to be stored in the ENS, but that signals from ENS and gut microbiome can influence the brain systems supporting the person-specific complex of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors known as "personality".

We see very short term behavioral, emotional, and cognitive changes when people get grumpy from hunger and everybody can remember feeling their stomach growl or feeling hunger pangs. We might consider these as "bottom up" signals from the digestive system to brain. Similarly, top-down signals also have an effect on digestive systems. Just thinking of a taking a bite of a big juicy burger, smelling and sipping a freshly brewed cup of coffee, or eating a hot cheesy slice of pepperoni pizza along with a cool refreshing drink may precipitate salivation or other responses from the digestive system.

When looking at the ENS, we also need to look at the gut microbiome. It is clear that sensations and activity within the enteric nervous system and the gut microbiome influence central nervous system function, including behaviors we would associate with personalty.

For an study of correlations between gut microbiome and infant temperament see (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25449582).

For the semi-famous mouse gut microbe swap resulting in behavioral change see this article (https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/accumulating-glitches/b...)

For a 2014 review of human and animal studies on gut microbiome, brain, and behavior relationships see this article (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4259177/).

For a study about the influence of gut bacteria on different aspects of memory in rats, check out, "Long-term multi-species Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium dietary supplement enhances memory and changes regional brain metabolites in middle-aged rats." (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28602659).

If you like considering the location of memories, one of my favorite concepts in memory is the role of the "perineuronal net". There are now many articles on that topic. For the longest time memory research focused on neurons and neuronal information processing so it is good to see more attention paid to the structures outside of and around neurons.

You are correct that course sizes matter to educational outcomes for a variety of reasons. If the groups are too small, it is possible that nobody has enough of what is needed for the class and everybody flounders, requiring intensive instructor led tutoring and learning. This brings us back to the 1:1 situation.

If we are interested in how many students are required to support peer to peer learning, you might enjoy the following articles (popular and academic) about how Harvard physics professor, Dr. Eric Mazur has embraced and studied peer-to-peer instruction. This should provide a partial answer to your questions.

1) Eric's Harvard Profile https://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/mazur) 2) A good story/video about the development of his peer-to-peer, active learning methods (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI). 3) One of Harvard's articles about his educational work. (https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2012/03/twilight-of-the-lect... 4) A list of Dr. Mazur's publications (https://academictree.org/physics/publications.php?pid=66072) 5) Eric's 2015 papers on peer learning a) 2015 - Dowd JE, Araujo I, Mazur E. Making sense of confusion: Relating performance, confidence, and self-efficacy to expressions of confusion in an introductory physics class. Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research. 11. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.11.010107

b) 2015 - Miller K, Schell J, Ho A, Lukoff B, Mazur E. Response switching and self-efficacy in Peer Instruction classrooms Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research. 11. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.11.010104

Googling for "ideal group size for peer to peer learning physics" brings up articles from Vanderbilt University and those mention groups of 2-4 or 5-7.

As there are many different models of peer learning, this article does a nice job of discussing practice and the theory behind peer to peer instruction (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29128431)

My personal beliefs and experience is that people tend to like groups of 6 or fewer and the groups which speak the most among themselves range from 2-5 people. The limitations are that at least 1 person in the group must be advanced enough to help the others learn.

Last, if we look at apprenticeship models of learning, we are back to the 1:1 ratio (expert : learner). However, any single student can also have multiple 1:1 "teachers" and apprenticeships/internships usually include a peer group which engages after the 1:1 instruction. We see this in music and sports with individual sessions with a variety of experts followed by group work or performances with varied sized groups.

I hope you enjoy!

Thanks for posting this article and it is indeed disturbing. It looks like there is just an insane amount of mind scrambling content that nobody should let themselves or their children experience. Given the Medium author's informal but useful initial analysis, this seems like a ripe topic for a formal psychological and technological analysis by some poor dissertation student or group of students who could survive the content and uncover much more about the origins, intent, extent, and consequences of this type of media.

Thanks for saving us time!