the new republic is not liberal.

razib -- I think you're making an arbitrary distinction on Greenspan. A leader in oncology can work for Genetech or the NCI; a leader in tech can work for Google. Just because someone is not associated with an academic institution doesn't mean they are prohibited from constituting the leadership of an academic field. You can feel free to exchange him for gnxp favorite, lawrence summers if you wish.  
 
BTW Greenspan, Rubin, Summers et. al. WERE the political pressure for deregulation and encouraging the growth of derivatives. 
 
I think taleb would make the same argument blah made -- basically economists lead grad school equipped with weapons of mass destruction. 
 
I agree with you that the incentive structure for finance is messed up and contributed significantly to the mess. However, that's obviously not the sole determinant -- its not like people realized how f'd we were in 2007, when arguably several people were sounding alarm bells. Hell, even 2 months ago, the magnitude was unclear.

The difference between econ and micro bio is that many of the high priests of economics were at the steering wheel during this fiasco and encourage policies that created the mess (Greenspan, Scholes, Manikw, Rubin, etc.). Some have yet to issue their mea culpas. Several people have argued that *economic theory* is the problem (c.f. Taleb).  
 
I am not aware of a single prominent microbiologist or infectious disease specialist that would excuse agri-businesses practices. so your analogy seems incorrect to me.

Unrelated -- but when are we going to see a post on Gladwell's new book? Seems very related to the peeps here.

find the infection behind cardiovascular disease, (atherosclerosis) and you're assured a nobel prize.

dgmacarthur: I just read the abstract of the paper you mention, but they do not mention a measure of Fasting Blood Glucose or Hemoglobin A1C. Both are extremely easy to measure clinical parameters used for the diagnosis of diabetes. So, their results are probably even less applicable, than you already have stated.  
 
p-ter: I'll believe it when I see it. My intuition is, that if you tried to build a classifier from their 30 loci (most, extremely weak), you would wind up with something doing marginally better than tossing a dart -- and clinically useless. Most patients with Crohn's will have low probability/risk scores (using those 30 alleles -- since 90% of the risk is still unexplained, and those patients will be misclassified). Crohn's is also a rare disease, making things worse.

I only read the abstract, and skimmed the tables, but their was no large Odds Ratio reported, most around 1-2. That small of an OR is not large enough to stratify patients or use as a diagnostic, you usually need an OR of at least 3, much better if its like 10 (Pepe 2004, Amer. Journ. Epid).  
 
As the authors report -- what the paper will help with is identification of possible therapeutic targets for drug development. But the study in itself will not effect clinical practice.  
 
There is a good editorial in the June 26th NEJM by Hunter, on the utility of genome wide association studies (or lack thereof) for clinical medicine.

Leiberman is going around telling everyone Hammas has endorsed Obama. I can't even believe the amount of time you guys are wasting on this.  
 
Obviously the world is not black and white.

Something we can all agree on about Wikipedia

agnostic: MSFT is the 3rd largest corporation in America with a market cap of 300 billion dollars, and revenues of 60 billion per year.  
 
Linux was created and is mostly maintained by a distributed loose nit group of developers. MSFT's revenues are twice NIH's annual budget. Somehow, a loose nit group of net developers is able to create product that has 1/3 installed base as MSFT. I think your own comments suggest success. 
 
In terms of IDC numbers, Linux doesn't compete in certain server segments, that are locked down by microsoft's proprietary products (Exchange, Active Directory, etc.). If you want to get an accurate assessment of Linux vs. Microsoft as a server os you have to look at sub-segments of the server markets. 
 
Linux is not the only open source project either, c.f. Apache (50% market share) or Firefox (20% market share).  
 
You previously stated: . My post is a response to that moron's claim that editing Wikipedia is like a calling in life, rather than some hobby.. This is COMPLETELY WRONG. 
 
There are tons of stuff written about this mode of collaboration in the business press and on the bookshelf. I can't explain it to you over blog posts. PICK something up and read it.  
 
BTW, in terms of your projects (2) has already been done very thoroughly in medicine (c.f Ionnadis). (6) There are too many physicists already trying to do sociology and get published in nature and science with results of questionable utility. (that was circa 2000-2003, c.f. barabasi)

Caledonian: There is an article in Nature about the comparable accuracy of Wikipedia vs. Britannica. Feel free to look it up yourself. Although the article has some flaws, obviously, things are not as bad as you think.

Agnostic: Linux is not a desktop operating system -- its a server operating system. Linux has been widely adopted by IBM, Google, Oracle, Sun, etc. Another free unix variant, developed on a similiar model to linux is the back-end to Mac OS X. If that isn't success, I'm not sure what is. Further, that success is not limited to the tech sector as many of the top business journalists have repeatedly spoken about the linux model of organization (James Surowiecki, being one who easily comes to mind). This is not "geek propoganda". Surowiecki is not a geek, he's one of the preeminent business journalists in the country.  
 
BTW, My background is in machine learning, genomics, and medicine.

My post is a response to that moron's claim that editing Wikipedia is like a calling in life, rather than some hobby. 
 
Shirkey is not saying this. That's why I am saying you obviously completely missed his point. Shirkey's point is that information technology allows us to collaboratively turn some of our mental downtime / hobby time into something very, very useful. And not just a personal skill, but something that can be extremely useful for everyone. For instance, it would be very easy for me to write / edit a wiki entry on anything I'm an expert on. Instead of watching another re-run of friends, I might one day decide to spend 20 minutes and do just that.  
 
The reason I say study the history of Linux is not because its an interesting technical story. Linux is an interesting story in human organization. The utility of Linux is also very easy to measure in $'s (unlike wikipedia), so it makes the case extremely crystal clear. The main points behind the story of Linux is a chapter in several recent business books (e.g. the wisdom of crowds), so its not a large commitment.

Agnostic, like I stated, it doesn't seem like you have a tech background at all -- decentralization is like a key meme of the past decade or so. Wikipedia takes advantage of that meme. Linux took advantage of that meme.  
 
The basic model of science does not apply to every single human endeavor. It seems like you got confused along the way and think if its not science, its not useful.  
 
If you want to understand what Shirkey is saying, I suggest you start by reading about the history of Linux and GNU tools. Like I said, you are missing the entire ship.

this is one rather incoherent post. Wikipedia is great as an overview for a topic you are not familiar with at all. Wikipedia is not a standard reference textbook for your sub-sub-sub specialized field of research. Wikipedia is not for scientific research. 
 
When you contribute anything to Wikipedia, you are basically writing for a broad audience.  
 
The reason academics don't contribute as much as you would want it is because they have no incentive to contribute. (1) will not help with tenure. (2) Takes too much time to get community cred.  
 
It seems like only people who really hate Wikipedia are authoritarians who have very little technical (read: computer science) background.  
 
BTW, there is a very direct, useful analog to Wikipedia in another domain -- open source software projects.

Only somebody with an EQ of 3 would think Obama is going to be received in the muslim world the same way as Leiberman. If this is "conservative logic" -- it is severely broken. I don't have data on hand, but I'd bet $$ that as soon as a poll of the muslim world is done -- comparing the presidential candidates, obama will do pretty well. Mostly because of his story, kenyan, muslim relatives, immigrant. But also, because he was the only one willing to talk to the iranians before dropping bombs.

Herrick, thanks for the link.

tangentially related, I'm surprised no one here has commented on this recent take down of g. I have seen it now linked to from several other places approvingly. The statistical arguments make sense to me, would be interested in a counter-point.

The money is worth it, but no direct clinical implications....  
 
"Thus, although our findings can be the 
source of valuable physiological insights, their contribution to the familial clustering and individual risk prediction of T2DM is relatively small." 
 
Other chronic diseases might be the same (HTN, dyslipidemia, etc.) -- where genetic markers really don't help in risk prediction or patient stratification. That would be dissappointing.

no nobel lauretes on that list...