Warwick Blogs

The authors' of the paper feel it is being misinterpreted and tried to submit errata to PNAS:[1] They tried to change the following sentence: “These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results.” To “These results question the validity of a number of fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of weakly significant neuroimaging results.” Link to discussion in /r/NeuroScience: https://www.reddit.com/r/neuroscience/comments/4ri72b/the_software_for… [1] http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/nichols/entry/errata_for_cluster/

"the 'damages' of breaking the contract is equal to the 'consideration' of fulfilling the contract" This is categorically incorrect. Damages for breach of contract are supposed to put you back in the position you'd have been in had the contract been performed. It's not related to the value of the consideration. Consideration is one of the things needed to make a contract binding in English law (along with offer & acceptance, and "intention to create legal relations"). Jurists still debate the rationale for consideration, but the best answer I've found is that contract in English law is seen as an exchange or a “bargain”. There is no gratuitous contract, donations are not contractual right. By comparison, a contract under French law is based on "consent of the parties" and the theory of individual autonomy. There's no requirement for consideration. In a "mutual NDA", consideration is easy to find; each party agrees not to disclose confidential information disclosed by the counterparty. Another way to make an agreement binding without consideration is to sign it as a deed. https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/anneprudhomme/entry/consequences_of_illega…

I'm glad that this is the approach that they are taking. There have been plenty of issues with fMRI false positives due to misconfigured software. The most famous would probably be the IG Nobel winning study that detected brain activity in a store-bought salmon: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/ignobel-prize-in… https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/fmri-gets-slap-in-the-face-with-… Later studies called into question the results of between 10% and 40% of historic fMRI studies: https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/nichols/entry/bibliometrics_of_cluster/ https://www.pnas.org/content/113/28/7900

Freemarket choices of what to spend money on can certainly have problems. It'd be bold to assume that the dictator's choices will be better for their people, though. The USSR spent its money on tanks: https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/the_soviet_economy_1/. Will China be different? Or sometimes, are tanks the right choice? Let's hope not.

They are _encoded_ as ASCII. But they very explicitly support arbitrary octets. The interpretation of those octets, and the timing of decode is where the fun starts. Quick quiz: How many hierarchy elements are present? http://example.com/one%2Ftwo/three If your Apache config has a proxy for `/one`, does that url match? What is the value of the utf8 param? http://example.com/frosty?utf8=%26%C7 application/x-www-form-urlencoded historically didn't specify encoding either. So POST doesn't save you. It is bad, and just gets worse. HTML/HTTP are just a bit too old to benefit from the genius of Ken Thompson. They started absolutely ignorant of character encoding. Berners-Lee was a physicist who just wanted to share some cat memes. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1738#section-2.2 https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/kieranshaw/entry/utf-8_internationalisatio…

Here is a source [1]. That analysis roughly breaks down as 1/4 loss each from infant mortality; famine and Stalin’s terror; and WWII. [1] https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/was_the_soviet/

> The only reason WW2 had more combat casualties than WWI is that the USSR decided to defend their country with a meat wall of unprepared soldiers. That generation of Russians had like an 80% casualty rate or something crazy like that. Nearly wiped out an entire generation. I read that claim quite often, it's not entirely accurate: "The Buzzfeed claim is overstated, although not by a wide margin. Around two thirds (more exactly, 68%) of the original 1923 male birth cohort did not survive World War II. But the war is not the most important reason for the poor survival rate; almost half of them died before the war broke out." More: http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/was_the_soviet/

A Google search for "world war 2 mortality demographics" pops this out: http://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol13/16/13-16.pdf It discusses problems with the records leading to difficulties in figuring out such statistics (they go on to model the death rate vs age for the war years). edit: Here's another interesting link from that search: http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/was_the_soviet/

Mixed taps are all over the US and many other places in the world and have been for a while and we have no water safety issues from this. Water safety has nothing to do with it: "Most bathroom sinks in Britain still have separate hot and cold taps today, 60 years after Mr. Churchill’s conversion and decades after nearly all dual taps were scrapped in the U.S. and most vanished from continental Europe. For reasons of thrift, regulations and a stubborn attachment to tradition, the British have resisted the tide of plumbing history. Even when they renovate old homes, many choose two-tap systems, and builders often install them in new, low-end housing. Separate taps account for an estimated 40% of all bathroom-faucet sales in the U.K." From: http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/mhillebrandt/entry/british_peculiarities_i/

For some reason I had this image pop up in my head. http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/images/lblackwell/2005/04/15/dont_worry_maa…