Now that it's easy to host lesswrong and hack on the code, you may have gotten excited about adding a feature (facebook likes for articles! or expanded user pages!). So, you take a look at the code and …  oh, it's kind of complicated ... You don’t know how the site works and don’t know how to learn. LessWrong lacks a good introduction to its source code. 

The LW Public Goods Team and Dr_Manhattan would like the process of getting to know the code to be easier. Therefore, we’re sponsoring a prize for the best introduction to the code. The prize fund is currently $250 (ChipIn page; contributions welcome!). Submissions are due by October 25th. The prize will be judged by jsalvatier, Dr_Manhattan, and Morendil. 

The submissions will be judged according to how effective the judges expect them to be at lowering the barriers to working productively on lesswrong.

I'd like to get better at doing literature searches. Luke has written a bit about this, but I still have lots of questions. 

I've mostly been using Google Scholar; it seems OK, but not stellar. What other tools are useful and for what? Added: is there a good way to find papers that cite a many of a set of papers (the idea being that if I find a number of relevant papers, I want to see if there's a review which covers them)?

How do you look specifically for review papers and/or books? For example, I'm interested in cognitive skill acquisition and I've found a review paper from 1996 but I'd like to find recent review papers on the same or closely related topics and haven't had any luck. Are there specific keywords or phrase permutations that often help? Is searching just the papers that cite an older paper useful? Is searching the same journal useful?

How do you search for criticism? Lets say I've found a paper that uses a particular method or theory but I want to know whether there are significant criticisms. Are there phrases that are often associated criticism papers? 

Are there any activities that are especially good for practicing literature searches?

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Biweekly Meetup: Occam's Razor, Repetition and Time's Up

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Biweekly Meetup: Occam's Razor, Repetition and Time's Up

Update: Please use the most recent thread.

The LW Public Goods Team wants to encourage useful research projects (as well other kinds of projects) for the LW community. If you're interested in doing this kind of work, you might run into a problem that is best solved by good outside assistance. Without assistance you might get discouraged and stop working on the project or never even start it. We want to help you avoid that. Do you

• Not know how to interpret a finding and want help figuring it out?
• Need access to a particular paper and need someone with a library subscription to download it for you?
• Need someone to edit your writing?
• Not even know what you're having trouble with, but you know is that you're stuck and need someone to troubleshoot you?

Then, we want to help!

How do you request such help? For now, I think the best way is to post to the discussion section about your problem. That way other interested people can also provide help and be interested in your research. If you feel uncomfortable doing this, you may post to the public goods team mailing list (lw-public-goods-team@googlegroups.com) or if it's not too long after this was posted, post in the comments.

I personally commit to doing at least 3 hours a week of tasks like these for people doing LessWrong related projects (assuming demand for it; I'll be keeping a log) for at least the next month. Morendil has committed to doing at least an hour of this and atucker has promised to some as well.

Our goal is to find out whether this kind of help is effective and encourages people. If this kind of assistance turns out to be valuable, we'll continue to offer it.

If you would like to volunteer some time (a little or a lot), say so in the comments!

The last prize, for the best literature review of spaced repetition, was moderately successful, inspiring a pretty good review of the academic literature on spaced repetition. I am interested in experimenting more with prizes, but I would like to get input other people's input: what are other good topics for future prizes?

The topic should be:

1. Well defined.
2. Not too big. Something someone could understand pretty well in two weeks. 
3. Academically researched.
4. Relevant to being effective.

The Spaced Repetition literature review prize for the best new review of the evidence on Spaced Repetition has ended and the judging panel has made its decision. The prize attracted entries from Duke (entry) and Gwern (entry). After reviewing the submissions separately and then discussing them together, the judging panel unanimously judged Gwern's entry to be the best.

With great pleasure, we now award Gwern the prize of $385. 

Anki cards for Gwern's review are available as the shared deck "Gwern Spaced Repetition Lit Review". If you have improvements or alternate decks, post them in the comments.

The three judges, BenLowell, Guy Srinivasan and John Salvatier (me), are Seattle LessWrongers who volunteered to judge the contest. 

We thank Duke and Gwern for their submissions, as well as users randomwalker, Antisuji, Dr_Manhattan, Benquo, Nick_Roy for contributing to the prize fund.

I've made a non-comprehensive Anki deck (shared as "Cognitive Science in One Lesson Deck") for Lukeprog's Cognitive Science in One Lesson (a summary of Bermudez's Cognitive Science textbook). I focused on the parts about the brain. Please point out errors or post revised versions in the comments.

This is the fourth bimonthly What Are You Working On? thread. Thanks to atucker for reminding me to make this post. Click here to see previous threads. So here's the question:

What are you working on? 

Here are some guidelines:

• Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started, those are for a different thread. 
• Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
• Talk about your goals for the project.
• Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
• Link to your work if it's linkable.

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Biweekly meetup

Discussion article for the meetup : Seattle Biweekly meetup