You do know that R01 grants aren't exactly done on a secret handshake agreement, right? There are so many hoops academic researchers have to jump through to get federal funding. And I say that as someone who almost lost his job the day after landing a big grant, because I accidentally kept someone out of the loop. Your grant proposal gets reviewed by your department people, by the IRB committee, by the university's office of research, and by internal counsel (if needed) BEFORE it ever leaves campus. And then it gets reviewed by program officers, and many impartial and often vicious grant reviewers. And let's not forget that NIH grant success rates in many institutes are approaching 10%, so likely it won't matter at all because you won't get funded.

And, shockingly, the grant description has been available at NIH.gov since at least 2009: "An important innovation of this phase of the longitudinal study will be careful assessment of social aggression in online communication by providing adolescents with handheld devices and recording and coding the content of their text messaging, Instant Messaging, and email communication."

You personally may disagree with the decision that the project is ethical, but you can't argue that they weren't honest with everyone about what they set out to do.

I know that dread of doing taxes is an American tradition, but at least for me (a single person who rents, has income from only one source, and doesn't own any complicated investments), doing my 1040 takes me two or three hours at most, and a few weeks later I get a deposit in my bank account. Easy money.

Given that this has happened three years in a row, I should probably get my employer to adjust my withholding, but frankly getting $2000 hard cash is a nice "bonus" every spring, and really, what else would I do with the money if I had it earlier? I'm already fully funding my retirement account. I suppose I could put it in a CD for .05% interest or whatever those are paying these days, but the lump sum is more appealing.

So, the data started to decouple from predictions, circa year 2000. It seems rather convenient to say that 1970-2000 matches the model, and then simply ignore 2000-onward.

And could we maybe narrow down that prediction a bit, too? Anything between economic collapse (zero) and "unlimited economic growth" is pretty open-ended. (And what the fuck does the term "unlimited economic growth" actually mean, anyway? Money growing on trees?)

Reading predictions of economic doom always brings to mind a quote from "The West Wing" about how economists and futurologists almost always fail to account for technological progress:

When the iPhone "Find My Friends" app came out last year, I was rather surprised by how many people were opposed to it and refused to share information. "I don't want other people to know where I am all the time" was the most common complaint.

My response at the time was, "do you really think the police/federal government/big telecoms can't already track you?"

If you're going somewhere you don't want other people to know about, leave your phone at home.

I'm a hard science/computer science guy who's livelihood is working on various NIH/NSF projects. A common thread talking to other scientists the past few years has been the theme that the tools for data analysis have not kept pace with the tools for data acquisition. Companies like National Instruments sell sub-$1000 USB DAQ boards with resolution and bandwidth that would make a scientist from the early 1990's weep for joy. But most data analysis is done the same way it's been done since that same era: with a desktop application working with discrete files, and maybe some ad-hoc scripts. (Only now the scripts are Python instead of C...)

The funny thing is, most researchers haven't yet wrapped their brains around the notion of offloading data onto cloud computing solutions like Amazon AWS. I was at an AWS presentation a couple months ago, and the university's office of research gave an intro talking about their new supercomputer that has 2000 cores, only to get upstaged 10 minutes later when the Amazon guys introduced their 17000 core virtual supercomputer (#42 on the top 500 list, IIRC). There's a lot of untapped potential right now for using that infrastructure to crunch big data.

I'm not sure about diabetes, but when my time comes up I'd much prefer a massive heart attack (hopefully with the majority of suffering for me and my family over in less than a day), than a slow, drawn-out battle with cancer. I've seen that a couple times, and used to work next to a cancer center. Cancer is an ugly way to go.

Unfortunately, my family history has many more cases of cancer and Alzheimer's than heart disease, though I've still got a few decades to decide on a strategy. Eating lots more burgers and fries, perhaps? Assuming California doesn't outlaw those...

Even if that's true, keep in mind the lifetime risk for a male developing cancer is on the order of 40% already. 1/1000 is barely background noise.

I was quite the Diet Coke addict for a couple years before cutting way back earlier this year. Still, I wish there were some flavorful beverage that I could enjoy without worrying about whether it'll cause me diabetes or cancer or weight gain, as pretty much all soda/diet soda has been shown to do in high enough doses. I also can't stand coffee (too bitter) or tea (mashed leaves floating in lukewarm water.... mmmm), so it's mainly ice water for me these days.

Is there any chemical California has not added to their list of carcinogenic compounds?

I agree. I'll be keeping my iPad 1 until it dies.

The most exciting thing to me was the other thing that got announced: the 1080p capable Apple TV. I know, for the majority of folks watching movies on a 30-40" LCD TV, 720p vs. 1080p is a wash. But I just put a home theater projector in the basement, and watching 720p on a 90" screen is just as bad as watching standard-def on a 50" LCD.

And with places like Blockbuster going under, it's getting harder to find sources for Blu-ray disc rentals. RedBox is great when they have something, but that's about it. As far as I'm aware this is the first time anybody's offered downloadable (well, legally downloadable) 1080p content. But it's not clear when that will be available, if it's Apple TV exclusive (not available in iTunes on OS X / Windows), etc.

haha, oops... So... about that "anonymous" part... guess it's time to change my /. username again...

I grew up and now work in Ann Arbor. Posting as anonymous, for obvious reasons. First, some background. Ann Arbor Public Schools has become a reference model for how not to run a school district. The district routinely has nationwide searches at great expense to find a new superintendent, simply because (1) the average tenure of a superintendent in Michigan is less than two years and (2) none of them are stupid enough to come to a district as dysfunctional as Ann Arbor.

The current superintendent came from a rural district in Pennsylvania, and was old enough to actually retire from her old district to take the job here. But hell, at least she was available.

The tech crisis is at least real. Those really are eMacs being used in the classrooms... yes, the eMac that Apple stopped making in 2005. The district has a budget deficit of $14 million, due to a perfect storm of decreasing state funding (Michigan is not exactly a bastion of tax revenue), decreasing local property values, and fewer students (the #1 local tax payer and #2 employer, Pfizer, pulled out in 2007).

The odd thing is, the district is, by many measures, not bad. But that's due primarily to high student achievement due to the relatively educated population (over 70% of Ann Arbor residents have a 4-year degree or more). Meanwhile, we have high schools that are too big, middle schools that are a disaster, and elementary schools that are actually OK (but not great). On a side note, did I mention that my father teaches for AAPS, and I went to private school? Yeah...

It seems that predicting doom and gloom about the next round number in gas prices has become an American tradition (see $3 gas in 2005, $4 gas in 2008, etc). On the contrary, overall it's been a good thing - it's lead to conservation and fuel-efficient vehicles, just as economics would predict. 10 years ago the notion of getting Americans to use less gasoline year-over-year was crazy talk... now it's reality.

In early 2008 I traded in my old '90s Toyota truck for a Ford Escape hybrid. Many of my friends thought I was crazy. "Gasoline prices will never make it worthwhile, you're wasting your money on hybrid tech, Ford will never be profitable again", etc... Now Ford is more profitable than ever and builds vehicles on par with Toyota/Honda quality (that Escape is at 60,000 miles and hasn't had any service except oil and air filter changes). And gas prices averaging more than $4 over the lifetime of the vehicle did make the purchase worthwhile, especially with the hybrid tax credit.

The other really interesting thing going on right now is that the US "is the closest it has been in almost 20 years to achieving energy self-sufficiency", according to a recent Bloomberg report. Apparently domestic oil output is the highest it's been since 2003, and (even better) the amount of oil we import from the Middle East has fallen to 15% from 23% in 2009. The sooner we're not relying on places like Iran and Saudi Arabia for our day-to-day energy needs, the better.

I think people today are generally spoiled by good customer service at large retailers like Amazon or Best Buy, where the business writes off 1-2% of asshole customers who consume most of the customer support resources as the cost of doing business.

The problem is, that doesn't extend to small businesses, where one bad customer can quite literally eat up a majority of the proprietor's time and energy, and the business doesn't have the depth to just send the customer free stuff to make them happy. Had that happen with a scout troop I volunteer for a couple times, where one obnoxious parent consumed hundred of hours of volunteer time before they were told to leave.

If I were a physician, I'd certainly trade one marginal (in the economic sense) customer for the freedom from losing sleep at night about whether their child is dying from one of any number of untreatable disastrous diseases. If my patients are going to argue with me about whether vaccines are, in fact, the greatest medical development for humanity in the past two centuries, how on earth am I supposed to be able to get them to consent to any other medical science?

This.

I live in a large mid-western college town. Recently a PhD I work with told me that he's decided to send his kids to one particular elementary school, a public school near the University campus. The school is actually somewhat inconvenient for his family - it's not anywhere near where they live. So why send the kids there? Because this particular school has the quantitatively the highest student achievement of the 20+ elementary schools in the area.

Except, what he didn't realize is the selection bias of those students. The kids at that school are mostly the kids of financially-stable, education-valuing college professor parents who all happen to live in that prosperous campus area. There's absolutely nothing special about the teachers, or administration, or facilities, or curriculum. It's just that the kids in each grade are starting out a couple steps above average.

Don't get me wrong, peer education is still valuable, even though the traditional classroom model does its best to discourage that. But when it comes to education it's easy to make the wrong decisions for all the right reasons.

It's been probably 15 years since I read Accidental Empires, but I remember there being some passage in the book where he talked about how somebody (Stewart Brand, maybe?) was trying to persuade him to publish the book as hypertext, with internal references and links. The idea was the book was not so much a linear story as it was a documentary of a lot of moving parts in an industry that's been moving incredibly fast for 30 years, and hypertext would be the ideal way to present that. Of course, now, this just means another Wiki site, but at the time it seemed like a pretty radical idea.

I know Cringely catches a lot of flack here and elsewhere for being a bit too hyperbolic, but I've always respected him for being one of the few high-profile tech writers who will genuinely go out on a limb (often correctly) to call the shots of where he thinks a particular tech or company is going. You won't catch Pogue or Mossberg doing that, and most other tech writers just parrot from PR statements. IIRC, he just wrote a blog post recently that he plans to retire later this year, but I hope he keeps writing one way or another.