What I Read or Listened to This Week


Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:

  • Facebook Lenses - A unique perspective to the reaction to the drop on Facebook’s stock price.

  • CatBoost - the new generation of gradient boosting - Anna Veronika Dorogush

  • How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions - As I was reading this I was wondering how I hadn’t heard this story before and then I saw that the court case started September 10, 2001.

  • YANSS 133 – How politics became our identity - We have turned politics into an us versus them game. “Our conflicts are over who we think we are, rather than reasoned differences of opinion” The problem in trying to make this better is that the people most in need of improvement are the people least likely to try to understand someone else’s perspective - people who are part of very homogeneous groups.

  • How to Be a Smart Consumer of Social Science Research - “The immediate answer is to not rely too much on any one study. Whenever possible, look for meta-analyses or systematic reviews that synthesize results from many studies, as they can provide more-credible evidence and sometimes suggest reasons why results differ.” Also consider sample size and how participants were selected. Small samples may target people that would result in the largest effect so the effect would be smaller on the entire population. Most importantly, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

See also