Why smart people are stupid

“When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether.” Jonah Lehrer contemplates the size of your bias blind spot.
www.newyorker.com

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

“We wanted the book to be freely available (that is under the terms of a license compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines of course). There was a condition though: a liberation fund had to be completed to ensure we had a decent compensation for the work that the book represents. This fund reached its target of €25K in April 2012.” Raphaël Hertzog and Roland Mas hope that you will enjoy the book.
debian-handbook.info

In cancer science, many discoveries don’t hold up

“‘We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure,’ said Begley. ‘I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they’d done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It’s very disillusioning.’” Sharon Begley talks to former head of global cancer research at Amgen, Glenn Begley.
www.reuters.com

Seeing terror risk, US asks journals to cut flu study facts

“Ever since the tightening of security after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, scientists have worried that a scientific development would pit the need for safety against the need to share information. Now, it seems, that day has come.” Denise Grady and William Broad report on moves by the US government to effectively censor influenza research.
www.nytimes.com

Airport security — this house believes that changes made to airport security since 9/11 have done more harm than good

“Spending billions to force the terrorists to alter their plans in one particular way does not make us safer. It is far more cost-effective to concentrate our defences in ways that work regardless of tactic and target: intelligence, investigation and emergency response.” Bruce Schneier debates the former head of the Transportation Security Administration, Kip Hawley, on airport security. This is from the first of Schneier’s three statements on the topic.
www.economist.com 20 March, 23 March, 28 March

Sebastian Junger remembers Tim Hetherington

“You and I were always talking about risk because she was the beautiful woman we were both in love with, right? The one who made us feel the most special, the most alive? We were always trying to have one more dance with her without paying the price.” Sebastian Junger writes after the death of photojournalist Tim Hetherington in April 2011.
www.vanityfair.com

Facebook can tell you if a person is worth hiring

“But there’s another good reason for checking out a candidate’s Facebook page before inviting them in for an interview: it may be a fairly accurate reflection of how good they’ll be at the job.” Kashmir Hill reports on a study that will be read by HR consultants the world over.
www.forbes.com

The eurozone, the ant and the grasshopper

“When the ants and the grasshoppers are distributed across the division separating surplus from deficit nations within a badly designed monetary union, the stage is set for a depression that sets all against all in a vicious spiral from which only losers can emerge.” Yanis Varoufakis explains why he thinks that countries in the euro zone can neither bail out nor be bailed out of the current crisis.
www.channel4.com

Der Anruf des Bundespräsidenten

In German
“Für alle, die keine Fans der ‘Bild’ sind, ist es schon schwer erträglich zu lernen, daß der Bundespräsident das Blatt als eine Art Verfassungsorgan behandelt. Besonders deprimierend aber ist der Umstand, daß er auch in dieser einseitigen und insgesamt übersichtlichen Kommunikation zu keinem klaren Wort fähig ist.” Nils Minkmar explores Christian Wulff‘s attitudes towards the editorial independence of the press.
www.faz.net

“German President Wulff reportedly sought to prevent tabloid Bild from publishing a damaging article about his private loan arrangements.”

The curse of TINA

“Think Tanks surround politics today and are the very things that are supposed to generate new ideas. But if you go back and look at how they rose up—at who invented them and why—you discover they are not quite what they seem.” Adam Curtis looks at the history of the Think Tank in the UK and asks why modern politics, for all its Think Tanks, seems so paradoxically short of new ideas.
www.bbc.co.uk

At 52, an exonerated man is victorious in the ring

“Four rounds in a boxing ring could not undo 26 years in prison, but Dewey Bozella made the most of them, winning a unanimous decision Saturday at the Staples Center in Los Angeles in what he says will be his only professional fight.” Peter Applebome reports on Dewey Bozella’s debut as a professional boxer. Death penalty, anyone?
www.nytimes.com

This story immediately reminds me of Rubin Carter, a man who was wrongly convicted and spent 20 years in jail.

This Dianamania is a slur on Jobs

“What the Jobs hyperbole means is that your world is no bigger than your media. Or your computer. There can’t be a more tragic expression of the internet’s self-absorption.” Following the media’s response to the death of Steve Jobs, Andrew Orlowski would like to keep things in perspective.
www.theregister.co.uk

Meanwhile, Richard Stallman is not sitting on anybody’s fence and declares Steve Jobs to have had a predominantly “malign influence on people’s computing”.