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Comment A mix of reasonable & silly (Score 1) 136

These arguments seem like a reasonable point mixed in with neurobullshit.

The reasonable point is that people have become very (too?) dependent on their smartphones. The bullshit is that it's part of the mind. No, it's part of your niche. So are lots of other things.

FWIW, I live a perfectly fulfilling life without my phone. I never carry it with me, except when I need a GPS. About 90% of the time, it sits on my desk at home, not in my pocket. I walk over to check it a few times a day for text messages. It's just a device, not a body part.

Comment The "sinking library" myth (Score 1) 36

>Microsoft's library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees.

This is a really common kind of myth. I've heard the same story about libraries at a dozen universities. Snopes even has an article about it.

Comment Conflict of interest (Score 3, Insightful) 43

Consulting is a great way to tank your academic reputation if you aren't careful. If Professor X consults for company Y, and then the professor's research happens to agree with or confirm something Company Y does, Professor X may be seen as a company shill. Every academic who consults has to walk this tightrope.

Comment Love the theater, hate the commercials (Score 1) 74

I love, love, love watching movies on a big theater screen. Except the last time I went, the theater showed 30 minutes of previews for blood & gore horror movies. (The movie I was seeing was a comedy/drama, not horror.) Who the hell comes up with these ridiculous preview pairings? After the third knifing I was ready to walk out.

Comment Badly designed survey (Score 2) 212

This survey is meaningless. You don't ask a general summary question ("How much do you trust the media?") and report the result. You ask specific, neutral questions ("What is your level of trust or distrust of the NY Times on topic X?" "What is your level of trust or distrust of Fox News on topic Y?") and then aggregate the data to produce a summary answer. That is Survey Making 101.

All general summary questions are invalid, period.

Comment These kinds of studies are often flawed (Score 0) 43

These kinds of brain studies are common and they suffer from a subtle problem. When you train an ML model on brain activity from 15 people, the classifier works for those 15 people. It usually does not generalize. Train the model on a different set of 15 people and get different results. Yet the researchers make claims that they've found the elusive brain signature for color or whatever they're looking for. This approach reflects a basic misunderstanding of machine learning.

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