The memo is referring to neuroticism as it is used in the Big Five personality assessment. I hate the connotation of that word (I'm a man but score very high on the neuroticism scale), but it is unfortunately used in real psychological research.

(The link in the non-stripped version of the memo makes it clear that's what he's talking about - I'm not sure if it's there in all distributed versions of the memo. Even though neuroticism has a distinct meaning in psychology, it was stupid to use that word in the memo because it is so easily misunderstood. Not everyone is familiar with the big five personality test or will follow the links in a highly controversial memo, so it is very likely that some will latch onto a word like that with the results you outlined. Choosing the proper words is particularly important when jargon overlaps with commonly used language.)

They have been applying technology to real world problems. They used the exact same method to reduce their data center cooling bill by 40%.. They're also using it to assist doctors in quick, accurate diagnosis.

Go makes a nice test bed because the rules are well defined, it's easy to judge success, and nobody get hurt if you screw up. But playing games is not their ultimate goal.

Thanks for linking real research, but your studies don't support your claim.

The McCollough and Reedy papers showed that diet does make a difference in life expectancy, but they said that adherence to any of a number of different healthy dietary guidelines had nearly the same effect. The diets tested were high in "fruit, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and legumes," but they also permitted moderate amounts of meat and low fat dairy. (In fact, the only kind of meats the dietary guidelines avoided were red and processed meats.)

The Fraser study used Seventh Day Adventists as the study group. Some Adventists are vegan, but others are lacto-ova vegetarians. All are supposed to eat a balanced diet and avoid gluttony.

The conclusion of the Martinez-Gonzalez study states, "Among omnivorous subjects at high cardiovascular risk, better conformity with an FP (food pattern) that emphasized plant-derived foods was associated with a reduced risk of all-cause mortality." There's nothing vegan about this study; it suggests eating more plant based foods has a positive correlation with mortality even for those who don't want to become strict vegetarians.

Now maybe there is some research to support a vegan diet, but these studies don't do that. They do suggest that making fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and legumes the core of a well-balanced diet is important.

The Korean drama Misaeng / Incomplete Life does a great job of capturing some of the pressures of Korean office culture. I was drawn into it because the main character was once an aspiring Go professional and there are frequent references to the game throughout the show, but the office drama is really the centerpiece of the show.

A lot of the comments seem to be defending the necessity of the "chaff." That seems to miss the point of the article. The authors aren't criticizing the extra code (much of which IS necessary to make the code functional, readable, and maintainable), they're suggesting that recognizing that only a small subset of the code defines the core functionality can be used in interesting ways. Programmers already take advantage of this in a variety of ways: we have auto-complete in our IDEs, we use web frameworks that write a lot of glue code so we can focus on the problem at hand, and we (sometimes) use newer languages that remove the need for a lot of scaffolding code.

Their application section gives an idea of what they really have in mind: natural language programming for simple tasks, search for common tasks across diverse code bases, and summarizing code functionality using auto-generated "minsets." There are probably a lot of other tasks we could accomplish if we were reliably able to distill a large block of code to its semantic core.

Your anecdote actually proves the point of the article - if there is already a high concentration of delinquent behavior, kids introduced into that environment are likely to behave poorly themselves. The question is whether it works the other way: would you have a better chance of reforming the behavior of an individual problem student if you placed him with the honors class?

There is some free software I've been wanting to run that only works under windows... this might finally give me a reason to install Parallels on my Macbook.