We created the concept of the "microcovid" as a new quantitative unit for risk. One microCOVID is a one-in-a-million chance of getting COVID-19. An activity that’s 20,000 microCOVIDs means that you have a 2% risk of getting COVID every time you do it. An activity that’s 20 microCOVIDs (or 0.002%) is relatively safe, as you could do it every week for a year and still have only accumulated about a 0.1% chance of getting COVID. https://www.microcovid.org/ (more)

Data dredging (data fishing, data snooping, equation fitting, p-hacking) is the misuse of data analysis to find patterns in data that can be presented as statistically significant, thus dramatically increasing and understating the risk of false positives. This is done by performing many statistical tests on the data and only reporting those that come back with significant results... Conventional tests of statistical significance are based on the probability that an observation arose by chance, and necessarily accept some risk of mistaken test results, called the significance. When large numbers of tests are performed, some produce false results, hence 5% of randomly chosen hypotheses turn out to be significant at the 5% level, 1% turn out to be significant at the 1% significance level, and so on, by chance alone. When enough hypotheses are tested, it is virtually certain that some falsely appear statistically significant, since almost every data set with any degree of randomness is likely to contain some spurious correlations. If they are not cautious, researchers using data mining techniques can be easily misled by these apparently significant results. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging (more)

see Vaccination

Scott Alexander on Bounded Distrust. (Deciding what you can believe from an untrustworthy source.) (more)

Scott Alexander: There's A Time For Everyone. Last week I got married. I met her two years ago. (more)

Ben Goldhaber: First, do no harm - how the FDA crippled America's response to COVID-19. This is a partial account of how the FDA and the medical establishment failed America in fighting COVID-19, and how the inherent structure of the FDA made the pandemic worse. They prevented individuals and companies from creating and providing timely drugs and tests to combat COVID-19, contributing to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and trillions of dollars of lost economic output. (more)

Steven Johnson: We Need A Standard Unit Of Measure For Risk. “The average weekly chance that a boosted person died of Covid was about one in a million during October and November… That risk is not zero, but it is not far from it. The chance that an average American will die in a car crash this week is significantly higher—about 2.4 per million.” There was a flurry of controversy last week about David Leonhardt’s “The Morning” newsletter in the Times (more)

Matt Webb: Risk: micromorts, microCOVIDs, and skydiving. I find these kind of calculators useful to educate my intuition. (more)

Gordon Brander: Block reference mechanisms. Writing is linear, serial, and one side-effect of communicating serially is that you have to force ideas into some sort of order. (more)

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe.[8] Ukraine borders Russia to the east and northeast, Belarus to the northwest, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary to the west, Romania and Moldova to the southwest, and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south and southeast, respectively. It has an area of 603,628 km2 (233,062 sq mi), making it the largest country entirely within Europe, after Russia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine

see Douglas Engelbart

The simplest workspace for decentralized teams Easily plan projects, track tasks, and stay organized with a single collaborative workspace that combines freeform documents with structured project management. https://www.clarity.so/ (web3 collaborationware, software forge) (more)

product manager, expertise researcher (more)

I'm researching ways to give people more agency in computing, so they can compose, tweak, and even build their own tools. I'm currently a Computer Science PhD student at MIT in the Software Design Group, and I also collaborate with the Ink and Switch industrial research lab. Before that, I spent five years as an early engineer/designer at Panorama Education (YC S13). https://www.geoffreylitt.com/ (more)

Tools for Thought dev, see his LabNotes https://alexanderobenauer.com/

Neil Mather: Collaborative memory palaces. I think I would like some kind of virtual experience where I have my own Memory Palace, the method of loci, the visual virtual space in your head where you walk through as you recall things. But not just for recall, for construction too. I would invite other people in and they help me build it and I help on theirs too, we build them together. (Webs Of Thinkers And Thoughts, Virtual ThinkingSpace) (more)

Zoe EMail app. (more)

Phillip J. Windley, Ph.D. s a Principal Engineeer and leads Enablement Engineering in the Office of Information Technology at Brigham Young University where he is responsible for developing university technology strategies and leading efforts to achieve them. Dr. Windley also directs a laboratory, Pico Labs, of full time and student researchers at BYU. Pico Labs creates Internet of Things technology aimed at creating connected devices that are as distributed and decentralized as possible. Pico Labs is responsible for Picos, an actor-based programming system that supports people-centric, reactive programming on the Internet of Things. http://phil.windley.org/ (more)

Jon Udell has been writing about the Personal Cloud (Personal Server) idea for the last 6mo. (more)

Phil Windley Internet Of Things Start Up, 2012-2014 (more)