LessWrong Help Desk - free paper downloads and more (2014)

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Jan 16, 2014

Over the last year, VincentYu, gwern and others have provided many papers for the LessWrong community (87% success rate in 2012) through previous help desk threads. We originally intended to provide editing, research and general troubleshooting help, but article downloads are by far the most requested service.

If you're doing a LessWrong relevant project we want to help you. If you need help accessing a journal article or academic book chapter, we can get it for you. If you need some research or writing help, we can help there too.

Turnaround times for articles published in the last 20 years or so is usually less than a day. Older articles often take a couple days.

Please make new article requests in the comment section of this thread.

If you would like to help out with finding papers, please monitor this thread for requests. If you want to monitor via RSS like I do, many RSS readers will give you the comment feed if you give it the URL for this thread (or use this link directly).

If you have some special skills you want to volunteer, mention them in the comment section.

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Bjelakovic G, Gluud LL, Nikolova D, Whitfield K, Wetterslev J, Simonetti RG, Bjelakovic M, Gluud C. Vitamin D supplementation for prevention of mortality in adults. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2014, Issue 1. Art. No.: CD007470. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD007470.pub3.

Does anyone know if Cochrane publishes the data they use in their meta analysis? I have a suspicion that meta analysis generally does not make good use of the available data. In their vitamin D analysis, they have shockingly large confidence intervals compared to the amount of data they have. I'd like to check that theory.

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Does anyone know if Cochrane publishes the data they use in their meta analysis?

I had a look. It turns out Cochrane does publish all their usable data, and they seem to be ungated! Here's a link to the data for this meta-analysis. (The link to this data is provided in the gated HTML article, but there doesn't seem to be a link from an ungated page, so I wonder if these data are supposed to be freely accessible... In any case, all their data are currently ungated and accessible by appending '/downloadstats' to the appropriate URL.)

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That's really amazing!

First of all thanks for the service. I'll launch the first request and see how it goes :)

I'm interested in Odifreddi chapters, title "Ultrafilters, dictators and gods", from the book "Calude, Paun (eds) - Finite vs infinite, contributions to an eternal dilemma - Springer Verlag - 2000". You can find more details here

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Books are easier than chapters.

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In case anyone is interested, I have a similar paper supplying project here: http://www.ccapprox.info/pod/eng/

Just putting that out there. In case the admins of this site want to try to collaborate somehow, I am all for, so feel free to write me :-)

All the best,

Gene

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Dr. I. J. Good; "The Human Preserve"; Spaceflight 7 (September 1965):167-170 (note that this is the magazine published by the British Interplanetary Society, ISSN 0038-6340; they don't sell back-issues that far, don't appear to have been scanned by IA or Google Books, and only seems to be available through universities with print collections that far back like UWash)

In The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett, there's an interesting endnote:

Good and Everett were acquainted: both did work for IDA’s communications division in Princeton (probably cryptographic tasks for the National Security Agency). Among Everett’s papers is a copy of a treatise by Good called “The Human Preserve.” It speculates that our galaxy is secretly governed by telepathic “Chief Entities” who preserve inter-stellar law and order in what amounts to a galactic zoo. Good said that self-replicating intelligent machines would long ago have taken over the zoo were it not for intervention by the Chief Entities, whose beneficent occupation saves us from descending into anarchy. The analogy between guardianship by the Chief Entities and the American national security state’s promotion of its role as a “global policeman” was intentional.

We're all familiar with his essay on superintelligent machines, and it seems this links up.

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This claims to be a version from 1980. It appears to have scans of the illustrations from 1980, but retyped text.

See Good's bibliography:

391. "The human preserve" (an invited contribution to a symp. on extraterrestrial life held by the Institute of Biology and the British Interplanetary Society, May 1964), JRNSS (1964), 370-373; and Spaceflight 7 (1965), 167-170 and 180 (See #476)
[JRNSS = J. Royal Naval Science Service]
476. "Life outside the earth", The Listener 73 (June 3, 1965), 815-817. Japanese translation in The Japan Tiles Weekly, Aug. 28, 1965, pp. 14-15. (See #s 391, 597, and 644.)
597. "The Cosmic Club", Context 2 (1968), 2-9 and 36. (See #s 391, 476 and 644.)
644. "The chief entities", Theoria to Theory 3 (April 1969), 71-82. (See #s 391, 476, 597 and 1298)
1298. "The chief entities", a shortening of #644 for Cosmic Search 2, No. 2 (Spring 1980), 13-17.

Supposedly, the Listener has been digitized, but it's probably not available at many American universities.

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Criminal offending as part of an alternative reproductive strategy: Investigating evolutionary hypotheses using Swedish total population data

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You can download that through http://libgen.org/scimag/index.php ; I've reuploaded to https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/182368464/2014-yao.pdf

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