Unterbahn

I think this is for a fishing reel. I want a tshirt of it. When I was in high school we used to print patents on laser printers and use turpentine and an iron to transfer it onto tshirts…

Related to visual interpretation in complex systems:

The view afforded by MRI led to a new causal story: Back pain was the result of abnormalities in the spinal discs, those supple buffers between the vertebrae. The MRIs certainly supplied bleak evidence: Back pain was strongly correlated with seriously degenerated discs, which were in turn thought to cause inflammation of the local nerves. Consequently, doctors began administering epidurals to quiet the pain, and if it persisted they would surgically remove the damaged disc tissue.

But the vivid images were misleading. It turns out that disc abnormalities are typically not the cause of chronic back pain. The presence of such abnormalities is just as likely to be correlated with the absence of back problems, as a 1994 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine showed. The researchers imaged the spinal regions of 98 people with no back pain. The results were shocking: Two-thirds of normal patients exhibited “serious problems” like bulging or protruding tissue. In 38 percent of these patients, the MRI revealed multiple damaged discs. Nevertheless, none of these people were in pain. The study concluded that, in most cases, “the discovery of a bulge or protrusion on an MRI scan in a patient with low back pain may frequently be coincidental.”

From ” Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us,” Jonah Lehrer
November 30th 2006 : http://m.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_causation/all/1

I dunno why you need shapeways when you can order full-size materials in cube form from Alibaba, mostly minimum order ~10 tons:

Limestone cubes
Granite cubes (various colors)

Metal cubes (aluminium, brass, copper, iron, lead, and zinc)
Tantalum cubes (toxic?)

Glass cubes

Wooden cubes
More wooden cubes

Soil cubes

even food:

Bouillon cubes

Because of the large number of workers recruited to the area for the Manhattan Project, the Army planned a town for project workers at the eastern end of the valley. The time required for the project’s completion caused the Army to opt for a relatively permanent establishment rather than a camp of enormous size.

The architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) was contracted to provide a layout for the town and house designs.[13] SOM Partner John O. Merrill moved to Tennessee to take charge of designing the secret buildings at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.[14] He directed the creation of a town,[15] which soon had 300 miles of roads, 55 miles of railroad track, ten schools, seven theaters, 17 restaurants and cafeterias, and 13 supermarkets. A library with 9,400 books, a symphony, sporting facilities, church services for 17 denominations, and a Fuller Brush Company salesman served the new city and its 75,000 residents.[16] Prefabricated modular homes, apartments, and dormitories, many made from cemesto (bonded cement and asbestos) panels, were quickly erected. Streets were laid out in the manner of a “planned community.”

from Oak Ridge, TN on Wikipedia

Also good if you’re doing screencast tutorials… don’t need to clean up your desktop at all first!

https://github.com/blackant/benfords-law

Hmm, tried it out and it looks okay…

https://github.com/jywarren/benfords-law (with added data)
Set up a mirror site with my data (until testingbenfordslaw.com updates): http://benfords-law.unterbahn.com/

It appears that Benford’s Law has been challenged as a means of detecting vote fraud: http://www.vote.caltech.edu/drupal/node/327 (thanks, Andrew!)

With increasing frequency websites appear to argue that the application of Benford’s Law – a prediction as to the observed frequency of numbers in the first and second digits of official election returns — establishes fraud in this or that election. However, looking at data from Ohio, Massachusetts and Ukraine, as well as data artificially generated by a series of simulations, we argue here that Benford’s Law is essentially useless as a forensic indicator of fraud. Deviations from either the first or second digit version of that law can arise regardless of whether an election is free and fair. In fact, fraud can move data in the direction of satisfying that law and thereby occasion wholly erroneous conclusions.

(Thanks to Molly Sauter for pointing me at Panos Ipeirotis’ work)

Hunting down through Panos Ipeirotis’ posts, this demographics of AMT is great:

Turkers come from:

United States: 46.80%
India: 34.00%
Miscellaneous: 19.20%

Based on a survey, it also includes gender, income, and many other questions.

http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2010/03/new-demographics-of-mechanical-turk.html

More, and perhaps even more helpful:

Alex Felstiner’s paper “Working the Crowd: Employment and Labor Law in the Crowdsourcing Industry”

“encourages legislatures to clarify and expand legal protections for crowdsourced employees, and suggests ways for courts and administrative agencies to pursue the same objective within our existing legal framework. It also offers voluntary “best practices” for firms and venues involved in crowdsourcing, along with examples of how crowd workers might begin to effectively organize and advocate on their own behalf.”

http://works.bepress.com/alek_felstiner/1/

Felstiner writes that well-meaning employers are limited to ensuring fair minimum wages, but cites more broadly “the information asymmetries that tilt the scales against crowd workers.” That separates the *ability to be fair* from the *willingness to be as fair as the system permits*. I am much more concerned about whether the use of AMT — even at ethical wage levels — encourages a structurally unfair system.

While this paper (hmm, gotta see if I can get access somewhere) hints at some suggestions for ethical use:

Amazon Mechanical Turk: Gold Mine or Coal Mine?
Karën Fort, Gilles Adda, K. Bretonnel Cohen
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/COLI_a_00057

John Horton writes about laborer *perceptions* of fairness in AMT:

The Condition of the Turking Class: Are Online Employers Fair and Honest?
http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.1172

I’d love to see a survey of crowdsourcing venues and an examination of whether laborers are structurally able to pursue fair conditions/wages/protections.

“Rich people paying rich people to tell middle class people to hate poor people.”