Interesting Links: April 10, 2019

Business, News, Science, Technology, or whatever gets my attention.

Straight from my RSS feed:

The top-10 from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

1. Free online tax filing? Yeah, that'll soon be illegal thanks to rare US Congressional unity - From the article: The extraordinary measure – preventing a government agency from developing software to interact with its own systems – is the result of intense lobbying on the part of the software companies who fear that a free IRS filing system would undercut their profits.
2. The Importance of Predefined Rules and Prespecified Statistical Analyses - John P. A. Ioannidis, author of Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, weighs in on the topic of "p values" in scientific journal. He acknowledges that modern scientific research needs to do better at dealing with uncertainty, and that p values are frequently misunderstood, but says it's not clear that abandoning p values would make anything better. He also points out that many decisions in life are binary. For example, studies are funded - or not; FDA approvals are granted - or not; New medicines will be used or they won't.
3. Infographic: A Map of Bitcoin Forks - Bitcoin's history condensed into a single picture.
4. Your Move, Gold Critics: Please Explain What Money Is - John Tammy challenges "gold critics" to explain why a high-volatility commodity like bitcoin, or even low-volatility commodities like most fiat currencies are better monies than gold.
5. The Replication Crisis Is Good for Science - Eric Loken, Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology, at the University of Connecticut offers these arguments: (i) Replication attempts are 'good science operating as it should'; (ii) Awareness of the replication crisis is promoting better behavior among scientists; and (iii) It is helping scientists to improve their intuitions about statistics.
6. Scientists Spot Beautiful Optical Illusion at Bottom of the Sea - A youtube video of an underwater exploration shows trapped hot fluid from hydrothermal vents shimmering at the junction where it meets cooler water fromthe open ocean.
7. STEEM Physics - Classical Mechanics - Explaining the Physics behind Mechanical Gyroscopes - @drifter1 explains the history and physics of the mechanical gyroscope, and also how the gyroscope differs from an accelerometer.
8. BREAKING The fate of Brexit is now in the hands of 27 E.U. leaders - EU leaders have scheduled an emergency meeting for tonight (April 10) to decide whether the UK leaves on Friday with no deal, or if they'll grant an extension for continued negotiations. All 27 EU countries must agree for an extension to be granted.
9. Wells Fargo sells retirement, trust business in $1.2B deal - The seller is Wells Fargo & Co. subsidiary, Wells Fargo Bank. The buyer is Iowa-based Principal Financial Group, and they acknowledge that layoffs are a possibility.
10. A leading AI conference is trying to fix the field’s reproducibility crisis - Conference organizers for the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NeurIPS) have updated their submission requirements to include a reproducibility checklist.

Note: Sharing a link implies interest, not endorsement or agreement.

Thanks to SteemRSS from @philipkoon, @doriitamar, and @torrey.blog for the Steem RSS feeds.

Please feel welcome to discuss any of those links in the comments.