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Medical benefits of dental floss unproven
...The federal government has recommended flossing since 1979, first in a surgeon general's report and later in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans issued every five years. The guidelines must be based on scientific evidence, under the law.
Last year, the Associated Press asked the departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture for their evidence, and followed up with written requests under the Freedom of Information Act.
When the federal government issued its latest dietary guidelines this year, the flossin
1,500 scientists lift the lid on reproducibility
Survey sheds light on the ‘crisis’ rocking research.
University Innovation and the Professor's Privilege by Hans K. Hvide, Benjamin F. Jones
...National policies take varied approaches to encouraging university-based innovation. This paper studies a natural experiment: the end of the “professor’s privilege” in Norway, where university researchers previously enjoyed full rights to their innovations. Upon the reform, Norway moved toward the typical U.S. model, where the university holds majority rights. Using comprehensive data on Norwegian workers, firms, and patents, we find a 50% decline in both entrepreneurs
Related to Disguised Queries:
Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology by Nick Haslam
...Many of psychology's concepts have undergone semantic shifts in recent years. These conceptual changes follow a consistent trend. Concepts that refer to the negative aspects of human experience and behavior have expanded their meanings so that they now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before. This expansion takes “horizontal” and “vertical” forms: concepts extend outward to capture qualitatively new phenomena and downward to cap
Cryptography Pioneers Receive 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award
...Whitfield Diffie, former Chief Security Officer of Sun Microsystems and Martin E. Hellman, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, are the recipients of the 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award, for critical contributions to modern cryptography. The ability for two parties to communicate privately over a secure channel is fundamental for billions of people around the world. On a daily basis, individuals establish secure online connections with banks, e-commerce sites, email server
Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
This is the first direct detection of gravitational waves and the first observation of a binary black hole merger.
Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-faith Online Discussions by Chenhao Tan, Vlad Niculae, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lillian Lee.
...Changing someone's opinion is arguably one of the most important challenges of social interaction. The underlying process proves difficult to study: it is hard to know how someone's opinions are formed and whether and how someone's views shift. Fortunately, ChangeMyView, an active community on Reddit, provides a platform where users present their own opinions and reasoning, invite o
Evaluating gambles using dynamics by Ole Peters, Murray Gell-Mann
...Gambles are random variables that model possible changes in monetary wealth. Classic decision theory transforms money into utility through a utility function and defines the value of a gamble as the expectation value of utility changes. Utility functions aim to capture individual psychological characteristics, but their generality limits predictive power. Expectation value maximizers are defined as rational in economics, but expectation values are only meaningful in the presence of ensemble
Evidence for a distant giant planet in the Solar System
...Recent analyses have shown that distant orbits within the scattered disk population of the Kuiper Belt exhibit an unexpected clustering in their respective arguments of perihelion. While several hypotheses have been put forward to explain this alignment, to date, a theoretical model that can successfully account for the observations remains elusive. In this work we show that the orbits of distant Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) cluster not only in argument of perihelion, but also in physical space. We dem
Why boredom is anything but boring
Implicated in everything from traumatic brain injury to learning ability, boredom has become extremely interesting to scientists.
Can Economics Change Your Mind?
Economics is sometimes dismissed as more art than science. In this skeptical view, economists and those who read economics are locked into ideologically motivated beliefs—liberals versus conservatives, for example—and just pick whatever empirical evidence supports those pre-conceived positions. I say this is wrong and solid empirical evidence, even of the complicated econometric sort, changes plenty of minds.
Can economics change your mind?
...Where to start? I could write a whole ongoing blog on this question (wait…). In
Iran's blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web
Hossein Derakhshan was imprisoned by the regime for his blogging. On his release, he found the internet stripped of its power to change the world and instead serving up a stream of pointless social trivia
Why too much evidence can be a bad thing
...(Phys.org)—Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made.
In a new paper to be published in The
The science myths that will not die
False beliefs and wishful thinking about the human experience are common. They are hurting people — and holding back science.
The Strangest, Most Spectacular Bridge Collapse (And How We Got It Wrong)
...Bridge building has been bedeviling humans for a long time, probably since the 1st century. That may explain why, even when they can't carry lots of people or things, bridges are particularly good at carrying lots of meaning: breaking, burning, going too far, going nowhere; the bridges between cultures, across generations, the ones we’ll cross when we come to them. To this day, however, the meanings of Gertie's collapse and that unforgettable footage—"among the most dramatic an
The aim of the game is simple. try to guess how correlated the two variables in a scatter plot are. The closer your guess is to the true correlation, the better.
Notes on the Oxford IUT workshop by Brian Conrad
...Since he was asked by a variety of people for his thoughts about the workshop, Brian wrote the following summary. He hopes that a non-specialist may also learn something from these notes concerning the present situation. Forthcoming articles in Nature and Quanta on the workshop will be addressed at the general public. This writeup has the following structure:
Background
What has delayed wider understanding of the ideas?
What is Inter-universal Teichmuller Theory (IUTT = IUT)?
What happened at the confe
Researchers orbit a muon around an atom, confirm physics is broken