“It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof. / It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, nor the sapphire. / The gold and the crystal cannot equal it: and the exchange of it shall not be for vessels of fine gold. / No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies.”
Another 477 days are past, so what have I been up to? In roughly topical & chronological order, here are some major additions to gwern.net:
Statistics:
Google Alerts: analysis of all my emails from Google Alerts to see whether/when they started to be less useful.
Google shutdowns: compiled dataset of past & present Google products for a survival analysis attempting to investigate common claims about why Google abandons things & predict which would be shutdown in the next 5 years. So far the model’s predictions are doing well.
power simulation of the penalty from omitting important covariates in logistic regression
did some spaced repetition research using the Mnemosyne logs: found weekly & time of day effects on memory performance - with a clear circadian rhythm; while my results aren’t conclusive, my analysis of 48m flashcard reviews from the public database finds that the best time for recalling your flashcards seem to be noon. (I haven’t looked at time correlates with next review, though.)
QS:
DNB meta-analysis expanded with a dozen or so studies & a new covariate (whether payment reduces gains: it doesn’t)
2013 Lewis meditation quasi-experiment: A Quantified Selfer and a few other guys did some meditation while doing an arithmetic game; turned out to be a perfect application for multilevel modeling
Sleep and lunar phases: A recent paper claimed that there’s a phase-of-the-moon effect on circadian rhythms; since I have so much sleep data on myself, I thought I’d see if there’s any effect…
an LSD microdosing self-experiment (while there was a lot of criticism, I still regard as worthwhile and setting a new benchmark for any future research in that area.)
an analysis of whether a particular vendor on Silk Road is a federal mole (probably not, but some have claimed he was the source of the bad fake IDs Ross Ulbricht ordered)
betting all and sundry that BlackMarket Reloaded & Sheep Marketplace will be busted or shut down within a year (no takers; my 1-year predictions were correct, but my 6-month predictions drastically underestimated the risk)
doxed the owner of Sheep Marketplace (see http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=9spTATw6 & https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/182368464/2013-11-03-sheepmarketplace-doxxing.maff )
I have begun systematically spidering all operational black-markets, and wrote a bit on how my complacency about free-market mechanisms lead to no serious archiving early on
Book reviews: for the LW media threads, I began writing book reviews on GoodReads, but why let them keep my reviews? So I wrote a Haskell program to parse my GoodReads ratings & reviews into Pandoc Markdown and make my own backup.
I researched an old family friend in his 90s who has never been willing to talk about his government work during the Cold War & found some stuff using released Census records; he has since passed away.
“It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof. / It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, nor the sapphire. / The gold and the crystal cannot equal it: and the exchange of it shall not be for vessels of fine gold. / No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies.”
Another 477 days are past, so what have I been up to? In roughly topical & chronological order, here are some major additions to
gwern.net:Statistics:
QS:
Black-markets:
Bitcoin:
Tech:
Literature/fiction
Sand, on:
compiled & expanded anthology of my poems
Misc:
Site:
I began A/B testing my site design to try to improve readability:
I began a newsletter/mailing-list; the back-issues are online: