Tag: research

National Cancer Institute on Cannabis and Cannabinoids

National Cancer Institute has an interesting update on cannabis … Basically, marijuana is not yet universally approved as a medical treatment for cancer (only in a few states for now), but quite a few large studies suggest that not only it’s not harmful, but quite helpful for both cancer treatment and post-treatment relief.

usa

I think this is a good step in the direction of “the world is not black and white”.  We’ve been tagging everything as just good or bad for way too long.  It’s time to start looking at benefits and side effects in a bit more detail.

namechk – check domain and social networks name availability

namechk is a handy tool for those who’s looking for new domains and social network profile names.  In one go you can see an overview of what’s available and what’s not.

namechk

You are your phone

Fig 1
Barcode of smartphone use over two weeks.Black areas indicate times where the phone was in use and Saturdays are indicated with a red dashed line. Weekday alarm clock times (and snoozing) are clearly evident.

Here are a couple of quotes from the “You are your phone” article:

Even obscure variables such as how frequently a user recharges the phone’s battery, how many incoming text messages they receive, how many miles they travel in a given day or how they enter contacts into their phone — the decision to add last name correlates with creditworthiness — can bear on a decision to extend credit.

and

The test subjects used their phones more than five hours a day, on average. Much of that usage went on unconsciously, the researchers found. When the subjects were asked to estimate how often they checked their phone during a day, the average answer was 37 times. The tracking data revealed, however, that the subjects actually used their phones 85 times a day on average, more than twice as often as they thought.

It’s an interesting read, though not too surprising.

Money vs. happiness

It’s been said many times that you can’t buy happiness with money.  The Washington Post runs the article about the research that begs to differ:

Not only did the extra income appear to lower the instance of behavioral and emotional disorders among the children, but, perhaps even more important, it also boosted two key personality traits that tend to go hand in hand with long-term positive life outcomes.

The first is conscientiousness. People who lack it tend to lie, break rules and have trouble paying attention. The second is agreeableness, which leads to a comfort around people and aptness for teamwork. And both are strongly correlated with various forms of later life success and happiness.

How Complex Systems Fail

How Complex Systems Fail – a very concise, yet complete paper on how complex systems fail.  It’s not system or industry specific.  Here are just the bullet points:

  1. Complex systems are intrinsically hazardous systems.
  2. Complex systems are heavily and successfully defended against failure.
  3. Catastrophe requires multiple failures – single point failures are not enough…
  4. Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them.
  5. Complex systems run in degraded mode.
  6. Catastrophe is always just around the corner.
  7. Post-accident attribution accident to a ‘root cause’ is fundamentally wrong.
  8. Hindsight biases post-accident assessments of human performance.
  9. Human operators have dual roles: as producers & as defenders against failure.
  10. All practitioner actions are gambles.
  11. Actions at the sharp end resolve all ambiguity.
  12. Human practitioners are the adaptable element of complex systems.
  13. Human expertise in complex systems is constantly changing.
  14. Change introduces new forms of failure.
  15. Views of ’cause’ limit the effectiveness of defenses against future events.
  16. Safety is a characteristic of systems and not of their components.
  17. People continuously create safety.
  18. Failure free operations require experience with failure.