links for 2009-04-07

He may still say no, but... "By certifying that his state will accept the federal money, the governor, who has opposed the stimulus law from the beginning, gets 75 more days to apply for the $700-million"

The paper argues that many recent studies in social neuroscience — and, by implication, in several other types of neuroscience — suffer from a severe statistical flaw.

At issue are the brain-imaging studies that appear in the newspaper almost every day: studies that attempt to find correlations between, say, jealousy or gambling and specific regions of the brain. To oversimplify, the “Voodoo” paper argues that most such studies report spuriously high correlations because neuroscientists don’t adequately guard against the possibility that the brain patterns they see are simply random.

I want to know more.

The book’s strongest sections, though, come when Mr. Lih, a Wikipedia administrator since 2004, uses his inside knowledge to shed light on some seldom-discussed turning points in the site’s history. Look up the entry for any smallish American town, Mr. Lih notes, and you’ll probably be visiting a page created by Ram-man — a contributor who made “the most controversial move in Wikipedia history” by dispatching an army of robots to build articles out of data from the U.S. census. Dig into the history of the otherwise unassuming entry on Gdansk, Poland, and you’ll stumble upon “perhaps the most famous ‘edit war’ in Wikipedia history.”

A trend: "Harvard University plans to stop printing its course catalogs, faculty and student handbooks, and the Q Guide—which publishes the results of each year’s course evaluations—after this semester, the Harvard Crimson reports. Starting in the fall, these guides will be published exclusively on the Web."

Yawn. ...all in all its just a...nother brick in the wall! Part II. Part III still to come. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Brick_in_the_Wall

"What I find missing in the Mac vs. PC debate generated by the "Laptop Hunters" commercials: Compromise. Buyers with limited budgets must make compromises and they rarely get exactly what they want. The ads do show this kind of decision process, even if briefly. My laptop buying would follow a series of perceived and some actual compromises to get as much of what I wanted within a given budget.... I spent more to get a Windows laptop than I would have for a good-enough Mac notebook. Other criteria mattered more than price."