In 1980 Joachim Lambek showed that the types and programs used in computerscience form a specific kind of category. This provided a new semantics for talking aboutprograms, allowing people to investigate how programs combine and compose to createother programs, without caring about the specifics of implementation. Eugenio Moggibrought the category theoretic notion of monads into computer science to encapsulateideas that up to that point were considered outside the realm of such theory.

The paradigm shift brought on by Einstein’s theory of relativity brought on the real-ization that there is no single perspective from which to view the world. There is nobackground framework that we need to find; there are infinitely many different frame-works and perspectives, and the real power lies in being able to translate between them.It is in this historical context that category theory got its start.

Agreementis the good stuff in science; it’s the high fives.But it is easy to think we’re in agreement, when really we’re not. Modeling ourthoughts on heuristics and pictures may be convenient for quick travel down the road,but we’re liable to miss our turnoff at the first mile. The danger is in mistaking ourconvenient conceptualizations for what’s actually there. It is imperative that we havethe ability at any time to ground out in reality.

For me the interesting part of Stiegler’s work is the idea that it is technics that invents human beings; it is technics that constitutes the human.

Les représentants de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) annoncèrent leur objectif de ramener le délai de traitement des documents à six semaines en moyenne

“Many random number generators in use today are not very good. There is a tendency for people to avoid learning anything about such subroutines; quite often we find that some old method that is comparatively unsatisfactory has blindly been passed down from one programmer to another, and today’s users have no understanding of its limitations.”— Donald Knuth; The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2.

TPOT is a Python tool that automatically creates and optimizes machine learning pipelines using genetic programming. Think of TPOT as your “Data Science Assistant”: TPOT will automate the most tedious part of machine learning by intelligently exploring thousands of possible pipelines, then recommending the pipelines that work best for your data.

Max Planck, when asked how often science changes and adopts new ideas, said, “with every funeral.” And for better or worse, they happen pretty regularly.

Who among us could predict anything five years into the future? What kind of science would science be if it could make reliable predictions about stuff five years out? Science is about what we don’t know yet and how we’re going to get to know it.

I know how crazy that sounds, but it is of course exactly the right way to proceed. If you are reviewing a grant, you should be interested in how it will fail—usefully or just by not succeeding. Not succeeding is not the same as failing. Not in science.

Too often you fail until you succeed, and then you are expected to stop failing. Once you have succeeded you supposedly know something that helps you to avoid further failure. But that is not the way of science. Success can lead only to more failure. The success, when it comes, has to be tested rigorously and then it has to be considered for what it doesn’t tell us, not just what it does tell us. It has to be used to get to the next stop in our ignorance—it has to be challenged until it fails, challenged so that it fails.

According to Mark T. Mitchell, professor of political science at Patrick Henry College in Virginia: Gratitude is born of humility, for it acknowledges the giftedness of the creation and the benevolence of the Creator. This recognition gives birth to acts marked by attention and responsibility. Ingratitude, on the other hand, is marked by hubris, which denies the gift, and this always leads to inattention, irresponsibility, and abuse.

Davidson shocked his professors by taking off for India to explore meditation practice and Buddhist teachings. After three months there and in Sri Lanka, he came back convinced he would do meditation research. He was quickly disabused of this notion by his professors, who let him know that if he had any hope of a career in science, he’d better stow the meditation and follow a more conventional path of research. He became a closet meditator and an affective neuroscientist—a deep student of the emotions.

as Brent Tully (known for his discovery of supergalaxies) observed: “It’s disturbing  that there is a new theory every time there is a new observation.”

when the built environment ceases to accommodate behavioral requirements, people seek to correct the problem through construction, renovation, or moving to a different building

However, if an open access version of a text is available, this must always be treated as the primary text. Here the commercial version of the text becomes the secondary version and it should always be cited second and in a manner that makes this completely clear. For instance, after the primary reference to the full text, you could write: ‘Also available as: ….’

Laboratory analysis of those samples found compounds that are toxic to humans, including acetone and methylene chloride — powerful industrial solvents — along with oil.

warns us against equating changes in scientific understanding of a sense such as smell, what is called “osmology,” with experiential transformations. Attending to the history of smell, he tells us, is also valuable in undermining simple binary oppositions between boundaried individuals and their englobing environ- ment, the basis of Cartesian subject/object dualisms. Instead, it helps situate us in a more fluid, immersive context, where such stark oppositions are understood as themselves contingent rather than necessary

There’s a scale for how to think about science. On one end there’s an attempt to solve deep, fundamental questions of nature; on the other is rote uninteresting procedure. There’s also a scale for creating products. On one end you find ambitious, important breakthroughs; on the other small, iterative updates. Plot those two things next to each other and you get a simple chart with four sections. Important science but no immediate practical use? That’s pure basic research — think Niels Bohr and his investigations into the nature of the atom. Not much science but huge practical implications? That’s pure applied research — think Thomas Edison grinding through thousands of materials before he lit upon the tungsten filament for the lightbulb.

Annual Reviews is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Annual Review of Anthropology. http://www.jstor.org The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity

Wouldn’t it be useful, both to the scientific community or the wider world, to increase the publication of negative results?

Unlike most popularizers (at least of mine), this post didn’t describe a completed piece of research. It just served just an opportunity to riff about an idea I found interesting. But blogging made me realize this idea could be more interesting than I had realized. A “motivated view” of empathy could, for instance, help in understanding illnesses like autism and psychopathy, or thinking up techniques to “grow” empathy. I figured it’d be worth sinking some more effort into it, and wrote a long form academic article on the subject. After much work and a long (but productive) peer review process, that article was published just last week! More importantly, the ideas in that piece—taken over by my students—now drive much new work in my lab that might not have happened otherwise.

developed a specific coding scheme for volunteers to follow. As a supplement to that scheme, the following tutorial can be used to gain more facility with identifying article structure and und

Hence the man who makes a good guess at truth is likely to make a good guess at probabilities

It is a subject that can be treated systematically

"science" which can teach us to do under all circumstances the things which will insure our happiness and success.