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The article quickly discussed fecal transplants, which seem to be an extremely promising and underexplored avenue (for obvious reasons) for dealing with obesity without surgery. I always figured if I got seriously overweight I would try it. I first heard about it from the Freakonomics blog (different episode than was mentioned in another comment: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/freakonomics-radio-the-power...)

I actually quite like the Yahoo Sports iOS app, it's way better than the bloated, buggy, ad-ridden disaster that the ESPN iOS app is. I used to use Yahoo Finance like some others here also. And their RSS reader was pretty decent before. There's some non-terrible pockets of Yahoo still hanging around.

You're thinking of a currency transaction report (CTR), which has a standard of $10,000 instead. Banks file SARs against customers so that the feds can follow up. No one would work with cash above that limit if they had to file a SAR every time.

Though when banks see transactions over $5,000, they will sometimes write SARs. It sounds like you're mixing and matching the concepts and standards of CTRs and SARs, which seems like a reasonable enough mistake.

I also agree that when stuff is this complicated for what seems like no good reason, the answer is often money laundering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_transaction_report https://www.ffiec.gov/bsa_aml_infobase/pages_manual/OLM_015....

I read the first book in My Struggle and quite enjoyed it. In some ways, the author is a real curmudgeon but he's also very open and self-aware about it along with his anxieties and everything else, which was refreshing.

Also his memory is apparently extremely good and the book was rich in detail. My friend tells me book 2 is good and more focused on his kids. I'm sure I'll read it eventually.

Seconded. This link was huge to me when learning AWS products.

It's a little known feature where you can get Spotify to sync local files across devices by putting both devices on the same wi-fi network. It's a pain, though, and it sometimes fails in the ways I'm talking about (I still use the feature anyway).

Is this with uploaded music? If so, it could be an issue with regular music syncing deleting or having them become unavailable. That feature is super finicky and iffy and I only ever do manual syncs to mostly avoid it.

Another fun classical music bug is when you try to share those songs in Discord and they break the stream, probably because the titles are too long.

I was talking about the instruments, but yes vibrato would be one way that would be mirrored in the human voice.

I can confirm all of this learning Dvorak. Having seen this with myself and others, it really is like a short version of learning a language and seems to use the same part of my brain. There's that period where you're not good in either layout and you need to get something done like you're saying (but after all the fun initial gains) and that's when most folks quit. If you can push past that week or so, it seems you're good. It's painful though.

And yeah, I can still touch-type in Qwerty too, but it feels like contorting my hands in knots. I can type it in fine, I just never noticed before how crazy you have to move your hands to do it.

My experience was definitely different. Just switching my keyboard layout to Dvorak was enough to slay my RSI. It's been 15 years with no pain since. I've done all the others on this list, they didn't seem to have an impact for me.

In a history of music class I took, they casually suggested that all instruments closest to the sound and expressiveness of a human voice were among the most popular (see saxophones and guitars with tremolo). This seems to be yet another example of that.

This was my exact experience in learning an alternate keyboard layout. Worked out great for RSI and I've never looked back (though it was painful to start).

It's a combination of sample size and effect size. The larger one is, the more I'm willing to give on the other.

Of course there are exceptions and what I said doesn't capture all cases (like with massive fixed costs or unique kinds of studies), you're right. I find it's a pretty good rule of thumb, though.

What I'd like to know is if the "irreproducibility crisis" is really some combination of "sample size was too small" and "effect size was too small". When I went through a lot of these studies myself and saw the ones that don't reproduce, I saw this theme over and over. "P-hacking" is less of a concern to me when the effect is real and widespread.

It's so bad now that for any article/study, I look at the sample size first. If it's too small (especially < 100) or they don't say I just ignore it. And if you don't publish or give some estimate of your effect size I just think about it directionally but don't give it much weight mentally.

For those that enjoy this sort of thing, you may also like the backyard wrestling documentary "The Backyard" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0309326/?ref_=nv_sr_4). It's violent and disturbing in places, but also often hilarious and silly.

I wanted to post this exact reply and saw you had already posted it. Highly recommended, I think about this podcast episode a lot.

Tipping is often associated with both corruption and racism:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/09/05/study...

http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

I have actually almost entirely stopped using Uber after they made tipping part of the app. I've worked in a place with tipping, and my experience directly corroborates those links.

This is so true for me as well. I actually use more SQL, Bash, and even MS Access DBs and Excel pivots connecting to text files to get the data in the right, aggregated shape first. Then I load into R or Python as you say so I can work with the data in memory.

What you're saying is also confirmed by research recently cited in the excellent book The Domestic Dog (and may also be driven by in-breed variance): https://www.amazon.com/Domestic-Dog-Evolution-Behavior-Inter...

Great read for people looking for a more rigorous treatment of dog behavior and psychology.

I agree. I had a similar experience and was thrown into a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. It was so bad I stopped using their site and just started buying directly from airlines.

Some of those folks have even automated blood sugar detection and insulin management, creating basically an artificial pancreas. It's pretty cool (open source) software if people want to learn more, called Nightwatch.

Even if I am in the 29% (which is less likely, statistically speaking) along with my friend who also did the training and couldn't do this voluntarily, that's only one part of my argument. I'd still like to see the source for that data. It would contradict research that I've read. And voluntary movement still won't address onset, offset, and intensity of muscle contractions. In addition, voluntary facial movements will often be unilateral (one-sided) or asymmetric in some facet (stronger on one side than another) as well, among other concerns.

"But we now know that most people – around 71% - can voluntarily contract the inner portion of the orbicularis oculi."

I can't find the source for this anywhere online. My experience with over 100 hours of practice in front of a mirror (don't ask) and the research I've read suggests otherwise. And even if you can voluntarily contract your orbicularis oculi, you'll need to have the proper onset/offset times and constant intensities for muscle contraction, which are just as hard to fake and easy for a trained observer to spot.

I suggest the "crow's feet" from a Duchenne Smile is still a reliable indicator of feeling happy for all those reasons, if observed appropriately. It was far easier to fake a real smile by thinking of something happy, which is why facial recognition is still much better for emotion detection than lie detection.

There is sort of a feedback loop based on the reports you do file, whether the Fed ends up accepting or complaining about them, and also (sadly) news reports. It works OK.

Monitoring structuring mostly works fine at larger banks. The problem here is that the IRS doesn't have the same network of analysts and other quality control measures. At a bank, someone can take their money elsewhere and be held liable. The IRS has a smaller budget and much less incentives (very hard to switch governments) and so there's a failure.

I always find it interesting that procedurally generated games like Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac only embrace procedural generation to a certain extent. They stitch the levels together in a procedural way and in some cases the items and things are random. But, crucially, the hundreds of rooms (or tiles) aren't random, but instead lovingly handcrafted. It's funny when I see a unique room repeat after a hundred hours (like the Isaac room that has a bunch of keys in a key shape). Maybe that's one way to solve these mimetic issues and is similar to the suggestion by Kate Compton given in the article.

"Going from imperative programming to functional programming has been a powerful paradigm shift for us to think about financial processing and accounting. We can now think of this system as a straightforward actor/handler system rather than getting mired in complicated SQL-join logic."

Though whether SQL is a functional language (or a programming language at all, if you're talking ANSI SQL) is a subtle question, I would at the very least not describe it as a traditional imperative programming language. I think this is an important distinction for the article because, contrary to what this article suggests, I've found SQL to be quite helpful for understanding functional and declarative programming concepts. That said, it might be a lot easier to express the types of tasks in the article as straight-forward functions rather than getting wrapped up in all this set-based talk in SQL.

Many of the graphics here violate visual best practices, which can make them very misleading (the scatter plot in particular). The most egregious is the use of a log-scale on three of the graphics, which isn't highlighted at all. Humans don't compare and interpret log scales well (see The Elements of Graphing Data by Cleveland, etc.). I would've much rather seen percentages (say on return on investment) or break out the analysis into tiers that were more comparable.

I agree. If medical treatments make sense in specific cases, of course use them. And sometimes combination treatments are the best (as mentioned in this thread). But hopefully this is preceded by a talk about cost/benefit of all approaches and the weighted risks (including doing nothing), something that doesn't seem to be happening in a lot of cases in the US.

Adding to this article (I'm not a medical professional and not giving advice), the same inferior medical outcomes are attributed to most, if not all forms of back surgery. Physical therapy outperforms most or all back surgery with much fewer side effects, etc. This is covered extensively in the book How Doctors Think (https://www.amazon.com/How-Doctors-Think-Jerome-Groopman/dp/...) as well as articles like this Ars Technica one: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/doctors-lower-back-p.... You see the same with exercise outperforming anti-depressants in most cases, again with much fewer side effects. (For example: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/for-depre...)

The kicker is that doctors will often refuse these same treatments when offered, which is not a good reflection on their efficacy (again covered in How Doctors Think). This is not an indictment of modern medicine (which is often very effective on acute care), just a recognition of the limitations.