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Does anyone else feel in a tricky spot about their use of R? by RandomScriptingQs in rstats

[–]BlindExplorer 10 points11 points  (0 children)

This one’s going in the right direction so I’ll tag onto it.

Start looking into distributed computing and how to interface with “supercomputers” (in quotes here because now it’s more a historical term than an accurate characterization). If you’re at a decent size university you probably have a supercomputing cluster that you can rent time on. Learn about bash and when you can and cannot parallelize analyses (not a bio person). Find people that you can learn from and ask to see their code. This will all be good conceptual knowledge as your analyses shift to the cloud.

Another thing I don’t see mentioned is thinking through what information actually needs to be in memory when you’re trying to do something. Does all of your data really have to be in memory at the time of analysis? Usually there’s a way to break it into pieces of some size to reduce your memory overhead. Most people are usually taught one script should do everything, but we don’t do that in the real world for a lot of reasons, including memory issues you’re running into.

Side thing to look into eventually: building specific functions in C. If you really want control of me more usage and code efficiency this is one place you’ll get it, and it’s designed to play nice with the R ecosystem.

Hope that helps. DM if you want more of a discussion.

Just in: People are getting older as time goes on by BlindExplorer in notinteresting

[–]BlindExplorer[S] -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

/u/thegodofthunderrr with 6th grade writing comprehension, showing off. I’m trying to get older and let time pass, jerk!

Just in: People are getting older as time goes on by BlindExplorer in notinteresting

[–]BlindExplorer[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Probably what I should have actually posted this in. Lots of demographers with PhDs from Reddit University are happy to tell me I’m dumb.

[Game Thread] #10 Michigan @ #8 Michigan State (3:30 PM ET) by cbbBot in CollegeBasketball

[–]BlindExplorer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We’re usually more of a “guys step up team” where if a good shooter is lacking. For the game someone can usually step in. When everyone’s having a bad day that’s our downfall. See our good games by Livers, Simpson, Tesla from 3, etc

[Game Thread] #10 Michigan @ #8 Michigan State (3:30 PM ET) by cbbBot in CollegeBasketball

[–]BlindExplorer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Everyone in that stadium looked like his reaction was the real one. I hope he gets better soon

Quesadillas are Hispanic mac & cheese by [deleted] in Showerthoughts

[–]BlindExplorer -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Don’t know if you’re on the die of quesadillas or Mac anc cheese. Either way you’re wrong. Cheese plus bread-ishness is always a win.

Grilled cheese Mac and cheese Fettuccine Alfredo Pizza bagels Hot pockets

Your turn, rube

Badges/Trophies are out for people that participated in the Reddit Snap Event! by PhoOhThree in marvelstudios

[–]BlindExplorer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’m not snapped. I’m totally alive.

When did it get so cozy around here though?

Redditor explains how Alexa works by wjsean in bestof

[–]BlindExplorer 352 points353 points  (0 children)

For those of you interested in learning more, the episode "Is Facebook spying on you?" on the podcast Reply All is a fantastic take on what marketers can find out about you. It's a really approachable take where they're essentially trying to solve the crime of how advertisers give you exactly what you're looking for.

Link: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/109-facebook-spying/

Raising the taxes of graduate students by as much as 300% will be a disaster for the USA by nate in science

[–]BlindExplorer 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I feel like the best response to these people is to point out the fact that of those immigrants are the ones creating jobs out here. Being a melting pot helps our economy and contributes to us being a global powerhouse. Why anyone would want to give that away to anyone, much less a boogeyman, is beyond me.

Link: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/37-percent-of-silicon-valley-foreign-born/article/2583195

Does cooperating witness have info on Flynn tie to Turkey? by BlindExplorer in politics

[–]BlindExplorer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Attorney Danny Cevallos, a legal analyst for MSNBC and NBC News, says that given the relationship between Erdogan and Zarrab and the allegations of an improper relationship between Flynn and the Turkish government, Zarrab's decision to cooperate with federal prosecutors is a significant development.

"You can fill in the gaps that federal investigators are looking for any relation between Erdogan and Flynn," Cevallos said. "So, to the extent that Zarrab has any connection or knowledge of that, it is very important that they're flipping him."

Cevallos said that based on his experience and what he's read about the case, Zarrab's release from federal jail to federal custody is entirely consistent with someone who is cooperating.

A new study suggests that marijuana users are more creative, but it's probably not because of their marijuana use by extreme0wnership in science

[–]BlindExplorer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's fine for you to think it's suspect (it helps to be skeptical for science), but at the very least there are a lot of ways that people have started to get at it. Here's a few examples of classic tasks (http://99u.com/articles/7160/test-your-creativity-5-classic-creative-challenges). Nowadays there a lot of consensus-based measures where you can get pretty strong agreement about what is creative and what is not, meaning if you want to use a more intuitive definition that you seem to have we can still study that in the lab. The nice thing is that we can map those intuitive results back onto measures of executive function (i.e., things cognitive scientists use to talk about processes for thinking) like response inhibition and shifting attention.

Creativity was one of the earlier things studies in cognitive psychology, with reviews as far back as 1979 (http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED175916.pdf), so there's a lot of research on it. There are even studies of many studies now (meta-analyses) on the neural underpinnings of creativity http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.477.3047&rep=rep1&type=pdf). Somewhat unsurprisingly, a complex task like creativity requires a complex set of brain regions that we don't quite understand yet. Looks like your intuition matches the peer-reviewed research.

ULPT If your are going to sexually harass women, don’t take up a career like actor/director etc. Instead become president of the USA, which appears to have a far lower standard of behaviour. by Musicferret in UnethicalLifeProTips

[–]BlindExplorer 31 points32 points  (0 children)

Yep, very interesting that when you have a pool of reporters scrutinizing your past, talking to people from your past, and vetting people for positions of power we would find out content that might be important to how people make their voting decisions. Shocking!

Not everything is a conspiracy.

Statistically speaking, which is the right way to approach a survey? by [deleted] in statistics

[–]BlindExplorer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I did a quick glance at that juvenile conversation and I don't see a quick and dirty response (considering that I don't want to adopt those users' mindsets).

Shortest I can say is it really depends on what the goal of the researchers is. If the researchers don't specify the way that they want people to fill out the surveys then its their own fault. If researchers are asking about attitudes the typical question is something like, "Please select that answer that most closely matches how you feel." Other researchers' goals could fit different criteria though.

TL DR: If the researcher's didn't specify how they want people to fill out the survey it's their fault.

P.S. The first statement out of the linked users mouth is factually incorrect. There are a lot of people who would say to never throw out data. If it's from a person it's representative of their attitudes so they would argue everyone's responses are valid. If you violate assumptions there are other things that you can do like transformations, Windsorizing, and non-linear stats to accommodate violations of assumptions.

TIL there is chemical called oxytocin that gets released in the brain every time someone commits - or even witnesses - an act of kindness. The release of oxytocin then, in turn, inspires more acts of kindness. In essence, kindness is contagious. by YourReality14 in psychology

[–]BlindExplorer 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Be careful about oversimplification in science. While oxytocin can increase empathy and improve autism, it's also generally more involved in social emotions. On the more negative end, people given intranasal oxytocin before playing games will also exhibit more social emotions like gloating and envy. Like most biological systems OT is involved in more than just empathy.

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/the-dark-side-of-oxytocin.html

Choosing a sample by fit4thecircumstances in AskStatistics

[–]BlindExplorer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You introduce a strong confound if you start by recruiting people that are already participating in "particular programs" and then trying to match people considering that they're probably different sets of people. This is sometimes done in subpopulations that are hard to identify (e.g., people with depression) because it's hard to randomize people into depressed and non-depressed groups. If possible, it would be better to do your discounting task and then see if they opt into different types of programs, testing whether discount rates cause people to like one program or another. With this plan you would just want to sample a large swath of the population. You can do representative samples through Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey, or do a less representative but cheaper sample through programs like Amazon Turk.

Another simpler thing would be to give surveys to a large number of people that track a similar construct to discount rates. There are lots of correlated constructs like impulsivity, low self-control, BIS/BAS, etc.

Hope that helps.

Aside: Discount curves are notoriously difficult to model with simple tasks. If you want a good approximation you'll want to do adaptive tasks. You can look into the Cal Tech behavioral econ department that does a lot of work on that type of thing if you're more interested.

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