One of the Collison questions is
Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?
Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance. The results were replicated. He asks in his paper that identified the "2 Sigma Problem": how do we achieve these results in conditions more practical (i.e., more scalable) than one-to-one tutoring?
In a related vein, this large-scale m…
Links since the last links post, plus a broader discussion of Peter Thiel’s recent public appearences.
In my last links post I said that retracted papers are like zombies that keep going, getting more citations. But it could be worse! It could be that it is cited more approvingly after it gets retracted!
What if you let Word2Vec loose on a corpus of materials science literature? Not only the learned embeddings make sense, but also may help make predictions about what materials will work in the futur…
It has been argued that in developed countries, or more concretely, in countries with higher gender equality, women are less represented in the STEM fields. Here I look at this claim and its veracity. This post was prompted by the comments of an anonymous reader, whom I thank for his thoughtful discussion of the issue at hand.
Addendum
Note (2019-07-01): @rubenarslan sent me some good points about this post; I am noting down here the key points.
The correlation is probably not as strong, and the CIs around…
It has been argued that the rate of scientific or technical progress is slowing down. When there is not enough of something, the two common solutions is to use more resources for that end, or to use them better. I'm of the view, though this would take another post to explain, that the problems that science suffers have more to do with how science is done (funded, organized, produced) rather than how much money is gets, in general. I spend a lot of time online [citation needed] and more recently I've seen mo…
Inspired by Alexey Guzey's list
As a general rule, I usually do some research before buying stuff, The Wirecutter is the one place I recurrently visit for advice, but I spend some time reading reviews before buying anything, with more time for more expensive stuff.
Physical world stuff - Tech
Laptop: I use a Dell XPS 15 (16 GB RAM, 512Gb HD, glossy screen). I work in Ubuntu almost exclusively. Even after being forced to use MacOS at work, that hasn't made me prefer Ubuntu less. Maybe I'm too used to the hot…
Lighthouse provision in Edo period Japan. Like the post-Coase literature, it reveals an interesting interplay of public and private.
Quantifying how much worse sleep deprivation makes you at writing code
The next big thing in battery technology?
A brief history of financial regulation in the US, its aims and its consequences.
Medical nihilism: dentistry edition.
Consider the maxim that everyone should visit the dentist twice a year for cleanings. We hear it so often, and from such a young age, that we’ve i…