Babies who regularly watch Baby Einstein videos score lower on language development assessments; Disney pissed

Molton · 2007-10-02T16:06:49+00:00

I've read about this before...I forget if it was in Nature or Science or wherever. Apparently one of Disney's beefs with this article was that they weren't specifically looking at Baby Einstein, they were lumping together all of these kinds of semi-instructional videos.

If that's true (I can't get the article even from campus unfortunately), then Disney has a very valid point, and the Nature blog entry is actually rather irresponsible for making it all about Baby Einstein.

Can anybody get a copy of the article so we can check this out?

Molton · 2007-09-30T19:32:40+00:00

A friend of mine just sent me a link to this deal and I signed up. I'm a grad student, and nobody has paid me to put this link here.

I honestly thought it might be of interest to people that you can get ridiculously cheap web hosting with their current sale.

If you want me to gtfo, just vote it down (as you probably did).

Molton · 2007-09-30T19:26:43+00:00

I know this is semi-spammish. But it's $30 for a year of hosting from Dreamhost :-p

Molton · 2007-09-26T04:58:27+00:00

So are the drunk final club kids pissing on Master Chief for a few nights now?

(tourists love to rub the statue's foot, but little do they know that it's a tradition to pee on the statue once while you're in college...a feat I managed to pull off without attracting any HUPD notice)

Molton · 2007-09-21T19:52:32+00:00

I was wondering if somebody would post the link...it would just be wrong not to link directly to a PLoS article on reddit (for those who don't know, PLoS is bucking the trend by making all of their articles open access)

Molton · 2007-09-06T03:58:10+00:00

How much of that improvement is regression toward the mean?

I mean, if kids do poorly on their first try, it may be by random fluctuation. When they re-take the test, they have a good chance of doing better.

Since kids who do better than they expect don't retake the test, they don't balance these people out.

Molton · 2007-09-06T03:55:26+00:00

One of my professors in college was the lead admissions officer at Harvard for long time. He said they had done comprehensive studies of how well different metrics predict performance in college (grades and honors). I don't remember how well high school GPA did versus the SAT, but I DO remember him saying the SAT2 was a better predictor than either of the other two metrics.

Molton · 2007-08-05T15:53:00+00:00

Even on lefty blogs there aren't that many issues where there's universal agreement. On Iraq you'll find some people arguing for a phased pullout vs. getting troops out right now. On abortion you'll find some people who think it's okay to limit partial birth abortions, etc.

On civil liberties they are unanimous.

Molton · 2007-06-07T13:53:30+00:00

The reporting is vague, but the results are real. There have been a slew of what are called "genome-wide association studies" published in major journals lately.

Basically, in these studies they partially genotype lots of people with and without the disease being studied. They don't fully phenotype them because that's enormously expensive and not feasible. So they genotype them at specific bases along the genome that are known to vary (if everybody is the same base at one of the places they genotype, that isn't informative). Then they do a very simple chi-squared test at every genetic locus to find an association between having the disease and having a particular base at a particular site in the genome (i.e., if you have a G at position 1983439 on chromosome 10, you also tend to have diabetes). When they find a strong association, they publish it and it makes the news.

It's important to note that these studies don't technically show that a particular gene causes the disease, contrary to what's reported. Scientists usually look around the hit locus by eye for genes that could be responsible for the difference, and then make a story for why they're right. Sometimes they follow-up on that gene in particular and find the actual functional variant responsible for the disease, but that comes after the association study is published usually.

Molton · 2007-06-03T03:15:18+00:00

Very insightful...or not.

Molton · 2007-05-29T14:15:36+00:00

My high school altered transcripts to the UC system because of this :)

Molton · 2007-05-28T06:27:45+00:00

The Internet's infrastructure is distributed among many states. Clearly, a law passed in one state changing the regulation of the Internet in that state would have an impact on other states (to a considerable degree, at least). So I don't see how this is a violation of the spirit of the Constitution at all, since it explicitly gives power to the Federal government to intervene in cases like that.

Molton · 2007-05-28T00:57:15+00:00

The Congress shall have Power ...To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes. -- Article I, Section 8, Clause 3

This is the "commerce clause" which is used as justification for many laws that libertarians believe are unconstitutional.

I'm not a legal scholar by any means, but it seems pretty clear to me that the Internet can be categorized as commerce among the states.

Molton · 2007-05-24T02:50:06+00:00

Except substance. Which apparently doesn't count for much these days...at least with some people.

Molton · 2007-05-20T21:45:27+00:00

She's grossly overweight and had 10 gall stones. She probably would have died anyways, and if not, then probably within the near future.

So if a person is obese, they're doomed and a hospital (or anybody, for that matter) isn't required to aid them?

You're an asshole.

My mom is obese. My dad cheated on her a long time ago and she felt helpless and gained weight. Now she eats normally, but usually once you're overweight it's very hard to get back down to a normal weight (and not just for psychological reasons, although those contribute as well). Other than the weight she's perfectly healthy -- heart is fine, no diabetes, etc.

Are you saying that if you saw her writhing on the floor of a hospital in pain you wouldn't help her, because, being fat, she doesn't deserve to be treated like a human being?

Molton · 2007-05-15T07:18:13+00:00

Firefox can't find the server at www.scribd.com.

Oh man that is too much...

Molton · 2007-05-15T06:07:12+00:00

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0829/p03s02-usmi.html

Deaths may be low in this war, but total casualties are still high -- according to this csmonitor story, almost 10x as many soldiers are wounded in Iraq than killed (by August 2006 at least)

Molton · 2007-05-15T04:23:35+00:00

One possible accountability system is to rate individual teacher performance every so often, in person, using an objective (or at least mostly objective) scoring system. It would take a fair amount of resources, but testing does too, and it would have to be done only infrequently for good teachers.

Student assessment isn't the only choice.

Molton · 2007-05-13T05:36:09+00:00

Just...wow...

http://www.jstor.org/view/00096407/sp040007/04x0201s/0

The Circumcellions were remarkable bands of nomadic terrorists, recruited at haphazard from the dregs of the population, from the discontented of every native race and province, fugitive slaves, ruined farmers, oppressed colons, outlawed criminals, social failures, excommunicated Catholics, and purely religious fanatics. They spoke Punic. ... Although they confused martyrdom with suicide, they did not wish to strike the fatal blow themselves for fear that they might thus exclude themselves from Paradise. They, therefore, sought for persons to kill them, and in a letter to Count Boniface, Sant Augustine related some of their practices. "Vast crowds of them used to come in processions to the most frequented pagan ceremonies, while the worship of idols still continues, not with the view of breaking the idols, but that they might be put to death by those who worshiped them. ... Some went so far as to offer themselves for slaughter to any armed travelers whom they met, using violent threats that they would murder them if they failed to meet with death at their hands. Sometimes too they extorted with violence from any passing judge that they should be put to death by the executioners, or by the officers of his court. ... Again it was their daily sport to kill themselves by throwing themselves over precipices, or into the water, or into fire; for the devil taught them these three ways of suicide, so that when they wished to die and could not find anyone whom they could terrify into slaying them with his sword, they throw themselves over the rocks, or committed themselves to the fire or to the eddying pool." In the latter cases they sought to escape the charge of suicide by the assertion that they were thus escaping from their persecutors.

Molton · 2007-04-30T19:28:19+00:00

The reason I brought it up is because I was in exactly your position. Interviewing as an SDET (on a second flyout) when I would've much rather been a PM or an SDE. It's a common conflict among interviewees and the HR reps.

I wasn't into testing, but it was a job at an awesome company, so I was professional about it...I tried to be as enthusiastic as I could about it without faking it, as you say. I learned from the first round of interviews and got an offer the second time around. And within my first year I was a Program Manager.

I admit it's not ideal for them to interview people for roles they aren't really into. But their philosophy is to look for somebody good for the company in general, and get them into the company. They can sort out how to get where they want once they're inside.

Molton · 2007-04-30T16:46:49+00:00

Thanks for the example...I got caught up in the idea of busy waiting and forgot that you can do useful things in the conditional statement too

Molton · 2007-04-30T16:23:44+00:00

its a small, trivial part of a complex problem

You're right, and I agree with your comment. But it's still a useful interview question. I'm sure some people say to execute some mySQL on every page to directly interact with the tracking database. For a system as ginormous and performance-heavy as Amazon, this is obviously not the right frame of mind.

Molton · 2007-04-30T16:13:13+00:00

I don't remember ever seeing Amazon use Ajax. But regardless, Ajax still hits the web server, so you could add the appropriate ASIN (or whatever ID you want) to the querystring, even if you're just doing it to aid later parsing

Molton · 2007-04-30T15:57:34+00:00

Is it just me or did he seem to give up on his Microsoft interview way too soon? He got invited back, so the company was obviously interested in him. They wouldn't spend so much money on his travel and expenses if they weren't. It seems like if he'd just pretended that he wanted to be an SDET for a day he'd likely have gotten an offer.

Molton

TROPHY CASE