whatever things passing by

just a repository of whatever things i'm interested at. think of it as a longer tweet

What people are truly interested in are the genetic basis of complex traits, such as intelligence, personality, and height. Unfortunately complex traits often have a complex genetic basis. A trait such as height, which is highly heritable (i.e., most of the variation in the population is due to variation in genes), turns out to be subject to the control of innumerable genes, each of which has a small impact on the value of the final trait. Then there is the possibility that the heritability is tied up to interaction effects across genes.
Discover Magazine article
In an ecosystem consisting of a thousand organisms, the state of each of which is characterized by ten variables (for example, position, health, water and food levels, whether pregnant), the state of the entire system will be represented by ten thousand variables.
Michael Strevens - Bigger Than Chaos

Would Random Means Better?

It starts with these excerpts on whether random strategies are better than technical strategies…
Many real systems work fine and more efficiently due to the useful role of a random weak noise… Not only physical systems benefits from disorder. In fact, noise has a great influences on the dynamics of cells, neurons and other biological entities, but also on ecological, geo-physical and socio-economic systems.
Standard trading strategies and their algorithms, based on the past history of the time-series, although have occasionally the chance to be successful inside small temporal windows, on a large temporal scale, perform on average not better than the purely random strategy, which, on the other hand, is also much less volatile.
For the individual trader, a purely random strategy represents a costless alternative to expensive professional financial consulting, being at the same time also much less risky, if compared to the other trading strategies.
And some part of me just wanted to test this out. Perhaps this could be done for some sociobehavioral experiments. If, in the long run, random strategies are better than non-random strategies, then might as well stop making predictions, since (as logic follows) they’re only performing well on small temporal windows…
Or maybe it could be implemented in some political voting mechanism… like avianto said…
Correlation analysis assumes the data are bivariate normally distributed, while linear regression assumes a linear relationship between a predictor variable and a normally distributed response variable.
Benjamin M. Bolker - Ecological Models and Data in R

By using what we might call a randomizing agent the questioner had released control of the situation and turned over the decision to his or her god, an interpretation of a mode of decision making that is not restricted to antiquity.

Today there are many people who continue to hold that what are often described as random actions are actually expressions of divine will.

John Tabak, Probability and Statistics
How and When (are) often better science questions than merely What, as this tends to be merely descriptive. The question is not “is there an effect” rather there is interest in the size of the effect and this is measured by estimates of model parameters.
David R. Anderson - Model Based Inference in the Life Sciences
Human brains are really good at the kinds of cognition you need to run around the savannah throwing spears. But we’re terrible at anything that involves probability. It actually gets embarrassing when you look at the category of things we can do accurately, and you think about how small that category is relative to the space of possible cognitive tasks.
Daniel Dewey