Dan Q

Kind: Reposts

An Honest Stock Market Update

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NEW YORK — Stocks gained momentum on Monday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing up 48 points, reversing losses from last week’s decline.

Experts hailed both moves as a “remarkable, textbook example of pure statistical chance,” chalking up Monday’s gains to a couple random marginal buyers being slightly more motivated than a few random marginal sellers.

“Imagine you pick 1 million random people from around the world every day,” said Toby McDade, chief investment officer of Momentum Fee Capital Management. “Some days, 51% would be in a good mood, 49% in a bad mood. The next day maybe it’s the opposite. Other days, random chance could mean 8% of people are really pissed off for no real reason. This is basically what the market is on a day-to-day basis,” he said.

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Satire, obviously, but it might as well not be. I’ve long maintained that nobody, not even (and perhaps especially) economists, understand economics. It’s a fundamentally chaotic system and at best your years of training and practice on the stock market will give you the edge over a layperson; the fact that some people appear to be doing better is most-often a result of the fact that those who’ve been lucky historically are more-likely to stay in the game for long enough for you to observe how lucky they’ve been (I’m reminded of the old “tipster scam” where a scammer would send guesses as horse racing tips for free, and then to the people to whom the scammer had by chance sent good tips they’d charge for future tips, with increasing cost for the punter the more times the scammer had gotten lucky by chance).

But enough of my ranting. Go read this funny article.

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100 Years of Periods

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Bitesize introduction to the (mostly-unspoken) history of the last century of sanitary products. It wasn’t so long ago – still within living memory! – that doctors’ advice was not to exercise during your period and that sanitary products had to be packaged in plain containers so as not to embarrass buyers nor sales assistants. Humans have had a long and complicated relationship with menstruation but the largest and fastest period (no pun intended) of cultural change has been only recently, and we now live in a world divided by a huge diversity of opinion and philosophy on the subject. This video covers only a fraction of the story of the recent (Western) social change, but it’s still a strong reminder of how far we’ve come as a culture.

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Brixton To Brighton By Boris Bike

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Boris Bike on the road to Brighton

The Boris bike is a magical creature – aptly named after the former mayor of London ‘Boris Johnson’. I say aptly because the bikes are heavy, chunky, provide the absolute bear minimum service and they are expensive to the public.

At £2 per half hour and with 55 miles ahead of us this was ultimately a race against time, with neither Sergio or I having any experience of long distance bike-riding we trundled off up Brixton Hill and into the uncertainty of the day.

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Another epic chapter in Robin’s year of “52 Reflect”, bringing us ever closer to the end of his year. I particularly enjoyed the part of this story where the duo are stopped by the cops who assume that the Boris bikes they’re riding so-far-from-London have been stolen! (After all, why would anyone in their right mind ride a Boris bike all this way out of the city?).

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Prime and Punishment

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by Josh Dzieza

For sellers, Amazon is a quasi-state. They rely on its infrastructure — its warehouses, shipping network, financial systems, and portal to millions of customers — and pay taxes in the form of fees. They also live in terror of its rules, which often change and are harshly enforced.

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…the only way back from suspension is to “confess and repent,” she says, even if you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. “Amazon doesn’t like to see finger-pointing.”

Suppose you have a competitor on Amazon Marketplace. Based on this article, the following strategies are pretty much fair game and are likely to result in immediate suspension of your competitor’s account:

  1. Posting fake reviews favouring your competitor’s products, then reporting your competitor for manipulating reviews.
  2. Making a copyright claim against your competitor’s username, even though you’d never used it before.
  3. Buying your competitor’s product, setting fire to it, photographing it, and claiming that it did that by itself and is thus unsafe for sale.

Amazon don’t like controversy, so they always side against the seller. A great illustration as to why it’s dangerous when we let companies (like Amazon) have the power of judiciaries without the responsibilities of democracies.

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Jered Threatin

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by Jessica Lussenhop

“We would have been overjoyed if that many people actually turned up.”

Remember Threatin? Earlier this year, this guy and his band played a European tour to… basically nobody. He’d faked having a successful US career, record deal, etc. and persuaded a handful of session musicians to tour with him to venues to whom he’d promised that a significant number of tickets had sold in advance. And it was all a lie.

The Beeb managed to secure an interview with him and he’s now claiming that this was his plan all along. I don’t buy it, but maybe. In any case, it’s an interesting glimpse behind the curtain and into the mind of this strange, strange man.

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Having a second child worsens parents’ mental health

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by The Conversation

For many parents, the decision to have a second child is made with the expectation that two can’t be more work than one. But our research on Australian parents shows this logic is flawed: second children increase time pressure and deteriorate parents’ mental health.

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New research shows that while it’s true that having a child will, on average, improve the mental health and wellbeing of parents, having a second makes it worse again. I’m not sure I needed to read this research to feel like this was true, but it’s interesting to read that it’s statistically true as well as on a personal level.

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These Dragon Christmas Decorations Are Tearing a Neighborhood Apart

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by River Donaghey

Dragons

A Louisiana woman’s unusual Christmas decorations have inadvertently ignited a beef on her street—because they’ve apparently got her boring-ass neighbors worried that she’s a member of a “demonic cult.”

Author Diana Rowland just wanted to celebrate the spirit of the holiday season by, naturally, setting up a bunch of inflatable dragons on her front yard. Of course, dragons are an appropriate and welcome addition to a lawn at any time of the year, bringing a nice Khaleesi vibe to an otherwise routine patch of grass—but one neighbor wasn’t having it.

Rowland took to Twitter last Friday to post an anonymous letter one of her dragon-hating Grinch neighbors left, calling her decorations “totally inappropriate” and laying on some very thick self-righteous trash about “the true meaning of Christmas.”

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Just glorious. The real joy of this story is that after the owner of all the dragons posted online about them (and about the snotty note she’d received from her anonymous neighbour) she quickly received donations allowing her to expand her lawntop collection of the beasts, so now there’s even more of them.

Not Christmassy enough for you yet, anonymous neighbour? Perhaps she can be persuaded to, I don’t know, construct some kind of nativity scene with them or something…

 

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Browsers

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by Jeremy Keith

I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser for a while now, and I can heartily recommend it. You should try it (and maybe talk to your relatives about it at Christmas). At this point, which browser you use no longer feels like it’s just about personal choice—it feels part of something bigger; it’s about the shape of the web we want.

Very much this. I’ve been using Firefox as my primary browser since I began (gradually) switching from Opera in 2005, but it’s never been more important than it is now that people know about and use Firefox. The rest of his post, which summarises the news I was talking about the other week and everything people have said since, is well-worth reading too.

We need a new movement: a movement of developers, influencers, and tech enthusiasts who loudly, proudly, use Firefox as their primary web browser. We use it on our desktops. We use it on our laptops. We use it on our phones. All of us test sites in it. Some of us write plugins for it. The bravest of us write code for it. But none of us, not one, takes it for granted.

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Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial

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by BMJ

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Conclusion

Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention.

However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps.

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Representative study participant jumping from aircraft with an empty backpack. This individual did not incur death or major injury upon impact with the ground

As always, when the BMJ publish a less-serious paper, it’s knock-your-socks-off funny. In this one, a randomised trial to determine whether or not parachutes are effective (compared to a placebo in the form of an empty backpack) at preventing death resulting from falling from an aircraft, when used by untrained participants, didn’t get many volunteer participants (funny, that!) until the experiment was adapted to involve only a leap from a stationary, grounded aircraft with an average jump height of 0.6 metres.

Silly though this paper is, its authors raise a valid point in the blog post accompanying their paper:

That no one would ever jump out of an aeroplane without a parachute has often been used to argue that randomising people to either a potentially life saving medical intervention or a control would be inappropriate, and that the efficacy of such an intervention should be discerned from clinical judgment alone. We disagree, for the most part. We believe that randomisation is critical to evaluating the benefits and harms of the vast majority of modern therapies, most of which are unlikely to be nearly as effective at achieving their end goal as parachutes are at preventing injury among people jumping from aircraft.

However, RCTs are vulnerable to pre-existing beliefs about standard of care, whether or not these beliefs are justified. Our attempts to recruit in-flight passengers to our ambitious trial were first met with quizzical looks and incredulity, predictably followed by a firm, “No, I would not jump without a parachute.”  For the majority of the screened population of the PARACHUTE trial, there was no equipoise—parachutes are the prevailing standard of care. And we concur.

But what if we provided assurances that the planes were stationary and on the ground, and that the jump would be just a couple of feet? It was at this point that our study took off. We set out in two groups, one at Katama Airfield on Martha’s Vineyard and the other at the Yankee Air Museum in Ann Arbor. One by one, our study subjects jumped from either a small biplane or a helicopter, randomised to either a backpack equipped with a parachute or a look-a-like control. As promised, both aircraft were parked safely on terra firma. The matchup was, unsurprisingly, a draw, with no injuries in either group. In the first ever RCT of parachutes, the topline conclusion was clear: parachutes did not reduce death or major traumatic injury among people jumping from aircraft.

But topline results from RCTs often fail to reveal the full story.  We conducted the PARACHUTE trial to illustrate the perils of interpreting trials outside of context. When strong beliefs about the standard of care exist in the community, often only low risk patients are enrolled in a trial, which can unsalvageably bias the results, akin to jumping from an aircraft without a parachute. Assuming that the findings of such a trial are generalisable to the broader population may produce disastrous consequences.

Using humour to kickstart serious conversations and to provide an alternative way of looking at important research issues is admirable in itself.

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To Protect Migrants From Police, a Dutch Church Service Never Ends

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by Patrick Kingsley

…[A] marathon church service, which started more than six weeks ago, and hasn’t stopped since, can never take a break.

Under an obscure Dutch law, the police may not disrupt a church service to make an arrest. And so for the past six weeks, immigration officials have been unable to enter Bethel Church to seize the five members of the Tamrazyan family, Armenian refugees who fled to the sanctuary to escape a deportation order.

The service, which began in late October as a little-noticed, last-gasp measure by a small group of local ministers, is now a national movement, attracting clergy members and congregants from villages and cities across the Netherlands. More than 550 pastors from about 20 denominations have rotated through Bethel Church, a nonstop service all in the name of protecting one vulnerable family.

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Beautiful story of the Dutch church that’s been running a non-stop service (with over 500 pastors from various denominations contributing in shifts) for six weeks and counting in order to protect from deportation a family who’ve been taking refuge inside. The whole piece is well worth your time to read, but aside from the general joy and good feels that fill it, I was also impressed by how widely it’s inspired preachers to try things that are a little different:

Some preachers simply reuse services and sermons they gave at other churches. But others have used the opportunity to try something new, turning the church into a kind of greenhouse for liturgical experiments.

Ms. Israel read from a modern reinterpretation of the biblical story of King David and his wife Bathsheba, told from Bathsheba’s perspective. One minister incorporated meditative song into her service, and another interspersed prayers and hymns with sermons from Martin Luther King Jr. During one all-nighter, Mr. Stegeman even brought along a harpist.

Of course, let’s not forget that this is another one of those happy-news-stories-with-an-underlying-sad-story. Given that the family in question, according to the article, have successfully appealed against their deportation twice, and furthermore the duration of their stay so far should at least grant the children amnesty under Dutch law, it sounds like their deportation shouldn’t really be happening in the first place! It’s great that a community has come together to protect them, but wouldn’t a better happy story be if the country that’s supposed to be protecting them were doing so, instead, so that the community didn’t have to?

Still; a little cheer there, at least.

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If your kid stops believing in Santa this year…

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by Imgur

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“In our family, we have a special way of transitioning the kids from receiving from Santa, to becoming a Santa. This way, the Santa construct is not a lie that gets discovered, but an unfolding series of good deeds and Christmas spirit.
When they are 6 or 7, whenever you see that dawning suspicion that Santa may not be a material being, that means the child is ready. I take them out “for coffee” at the local wherever. We get a booth, order our drinks, and the following pronouncement is made: “You sure have grown an awful lot this year. Not only are you taller, but I can see that your heart has grown, too. [ Point out 2-3 examples of empathetic behavior, consideration of people’s feelings, good deeds etc, the kid has done in the past year]. In fact, your heart has grown so much that I think you are ready to become a Santa Claus.

You probably have noticed that most of the Santas you see are people dressed up like him. Some of your friends might have even told you that there is no Santa. A lot of children think that, because they aren’t ready to BE a Santa yet, but YOU ARE.

Tell me the best things about Santa. What does Santa get for all of his trouble? [lead the kid from “cookies” to the good feeling of having done something for someone else]. Well, now YOU are ready to do your first job as a Santa!” Make sure you maintain the proper conspiratorial tone.

We then have the child choose someone they know–a neighbor, usually. The child’s mission is to secretly, deviously, find out something that the person needs, and then provide it, wrap it, deliver it–and never reveal to the target where it came from. Being a Santa isn’t about getting credit, you see. It’s unselfish giving.

My oldest chose the “witch lady” on the corner. She really was horrible–had a fence around the house and would never let the kids go in and get a stray ball or Frisbee. She’d yell at them to play quieter, etc–a real pill. He noticed when we drove to school that she came out every morning to get her paper in bare feet, so he decided she needed slippers. So then he had to go spy and decide how big her feet were. He hid in the bushes one Saturday, and decided she was a medium. We went to Kmart and bought warm slippers. He wrapped them up, and tagged it “merry Christmas from Santa.” After dinner one evening, he slipped down to her house, and slid the package under her driveway gate. The next morning, we watched her waddle out to get the paper, pick up the present, and go inside. My son was all excited, and couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. The next morning, as we drove off, there she was, out getting her paper–wearing the slippers. He was ecstatic. I had to remind him that NO ONE could ever know what he did, or he wouldn’t be a Santa.

Over the years, he chose a good number of targets, always coming up with a unique present just for them. One year, he polished up his bike, put a new seat on it, and gave it to one of our friend’s daughters. These people were and are very poor. We did ask the dad if it was ok. The look on her face, when she saw the bike on the patio with a big bow on it, was almost as good as the look on my son’s face.

When it came time for Son #2 to join the ranks, my oldest came along, and helped with the induction speech. They are both excellent gifters, by the way, and never felt that they had been lied to–because they were let in on the Secret of Being a Santa.”

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First up: why do people post galleries of images of text to Imgur? At that point, you’re taking some information, making it take up more space, be readable by fewer people, be harder to translate, inaccessible to robots, and result in less-readable text. It drives me nuts. Anyway, I converted the original images (which you can find behind the link if you really want) into text, above, thereby improving the entire thing immeasurably.

That minor rage out of the way: I’m not a fan of telling children that Santa is “real” in the first place, but if you’re going to do that, the approach promoted by the author of the above might come a close second. I’ve always seen the concept of Santa as being the representation of the spirit of anonymous gift-giving, and I love it for that reason. Just like the Easter Bunny representing the spirit of hiding chocolate eggs for other people to find, this approach fosters honesty, maturity, and the joy of the season and doesn’t have to detract from the magic of Christmas.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

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The Hu – Yuve Yuve Yu

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by The Hu

Mongolian folk rock. Until right now, you probably didn’t even know that this was missing from your life.

Be sure to switch on the translated subtitles (assuming you don’t speak Mongolian): they’re not perfect, but they’re good enough to get the idea. Awesome.

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Emails to Melbourne’s trees

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Melbourne gave 70,000 trees email addresses so people could report on their condition. But instead people are writing love letters, existential queries and sometimes just bad puns.

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In an effort to facilitate better tracking of the health of their trees, the city of Melbourne assigned an email address to each of them and allowed them to be looked-up using a map. The thinking was that people could email if a tree needed attention by the council, and the human that processed the email would automatically be able to determine the location of the plant.

But people started emailing the trees themselves. And not just people who’d seen them in person: people from all over the world. From “You are just outside my work and you make me happy :)” to “I love the way the light looks through your leaves and how your branches come down so low and wide it is almost as if you are trying to hug me. It is nice to have you so close, I should try to visit more often.” Delightful.

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