knoepfle

While this might be highly burdensome for developers, I much prefer the world where Google reviews even single-line changes to extensions.

Anything that sick people do less is inversely associated with mortality. The "controlling for blah blah blah" stuff can't be believed---are the researchers succeeding at controlling for everything that affects health? Not even close.

If you see a claim about food and health that doesn't spend a huge amount of time talking about the researchers' experimental or quasi-experimental approach, just ignore it.

What is this describing? First-party apps with Facebook integration and/or OS features connecting to Facebook? The leakage of Facebook information onto MS/Apple/Blackberry servers would be concerning, but having Microsoft software connect to Facebook on a user's device sounds harmless (to the extent we trust MS/Apple/Blackberry software to not leak information so accessed). Right now I'm giving Apple similar access to every single communication I make through my computer, to my bank accounts and health records, to all the work I do for my employer.

This distinction wasn't made clear in the story (or I can't read) and it's an important one. Privacy is complicated enough already.

Note also that any distributional assumptions are really only necessary for inference (i.e., tests and confidence intervals) in finite samples (read: small samples); the central limit theorem guarantees the tests work asymptotically, so you're usually going to be fine.

Most of the attention paid to distributional assumptions in regression is wasted, and would be better spent on really thinking through the assumed moment conditions underlying the estimator.

It's actually not even required for that! See http://davegiles.blogspot.com/2011/08/being-normal-is-option... which cites King (1980):

> If the error vector in our regression model follows any distribution in the family of Elliptically Symmetric distributions, then any test statistic that is scale-invariant has the same null and alternative distributions as they have when the errors are normally distributed.

"Pure acid" isn't quite right; it's an aqueous solution with a pH of zero. Zero isn't a special value. You can have negative pH (cf. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ed083p1465).

I wish someone would invent a device that would allow me to roll my eyes even harder at these X is the next Silicon Valley stories.

"The Midwest and Ohio in particular has always had three things going for it in terms of business climate: a cheap, close supply of energy, access to transportation, and a highly trained work force."

And yet the technologically inclined flee for the coasts, where life is expensive. The next Silicon Valley isn't going to be in Nevada, Arizona, Ohio, Kansas; it's probably not going to be in Illinois. It's going to be somewhere with high amenity value to highly productive technical people; i.e., a big international city.

That's not horrifying, that's awesome. But the clickbait title got me to look at it, so I shouldn't criticize.

This is cool as heck, thanks.

Here we go, they contradict themselves later: "Computational general equilibrium (CGE) models provide an example of accepted computerized problem solving in economics."

"Analytical solutions are considered necessary for a model to be accepted as a genuine theoretical contribution."

That's hardly true, the usual macro model is solved numerically using approximate dynamic programming.

Have you seen GPU Ocelot? (http://code.google.com/p/gpuocelot/).

This is a silly example of ex post evaluation of an ex post model. You need to have a holdout sample.

It's made more silly by the fact that they use the universe of Waldo books, so their "strategy" is essentially just "here's approximately the answer".

Why do you prioritize giving work to Americans over those in developing nations?