May 9, 2008
Category: Haha, a funny
This is funny. Daniel Drezner, having received the full professor status, lists the benefits:
6) Something better than that stupid f@#%ing pen ceremony. As this site observes, "The scene in the movie A Beautiful Mind in which mathematics professors ritualistically present pens to Nash was completely fabricated in Hollywood. No such custom exists."
In the actual ceremony, colleagues ritualistically present signed and notarized statements in which they confess that they were in error when they labeled your research as "putrid swill" back when you were a post-doc.
...
4) When required to wear full academic regalia, full professors get to wear swords. Nobody better mess with me at commencement.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Jake Young at 3:39 PM • 0 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Linguistics
Language Log has a fascinating article about creole languages and birdsongs:
Zebra finches are among the songbirds who learn their songs by imitating adults, just as human children learn their language by interaction with those who already know it. Male songbirds raised in isolation, without any conspecific adult models during the critical period for song learning, are handicapped for life: they develop only an ill-organized, infantile "subsong". From the example of abused or feral children like Genie, we know that something similar happens with human children.
In both cases, this raises a sort of chicken-and-egg question: if normal development requires an adult model, then which came first, the pupil or the tutor?
One obvious possibility is that the normal pattern is implicit in the species genotype, but requires a combination of cultural evolution and infant learning, repeated over several generations, to develop completely.
...
The cited work by Olga Feher et al. demonstrates this kind of "multi-generational phenotype" (Ofer's phrase) experimentally, in a colony of zebra finches whose founder was an isolate. As each succeeding generation learns songs from the preceeding one, the effects of biases in the learning process accumulate, so that after a few generations, normal zebra finch songs have re-emerged.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Jake Young at 1:49 PM • 0 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Neuroscience
We have known for some time that there is a double dissociation (I will define that term in a minute) between location and identification in the visual system. Neuroscientists speak of a "where" pathway that goes from the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe up into the parietal lobe. Lesions to this pathway produce deficits in locating objects in space using vision. There is also a "what" pathway that goes from the primary visual cortex down into the temporal lobe. Lesions to this pathway produce deficits in identifying objects using vision.
We knew that was true for vision, but there is less evidence that this division exists in hearing. Lomber and Malhotra, publishing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, show that this division does exist. They use a double dissociation experiment in cats.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 1:09 PM • 1 Comments • View blog reactions
May 8, 2008
Category: Haha, a funny
Stephen Colbert skewers as per usual...
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 2:03 PM • 5 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Exercise
Thank you, NYTimes, for clarifying something I have always wondered about: how does running outside compare to running on a treadmill?
A number of studies have shown that in general, outdoor running burns about 5 percent more calories than treadmills do, in part because there is greater wind resistance and no assistance from the treadmill belt. Some studies show, for example, that when adults are allowed to set their own paces on treadmills and on tracks, they move more slowly and with shorter strides when they train on treadmills.
I will say that in my case outside running burns more calories because I go much farther. Running on a treadmill bores me to death, so I don't do it.
Posted by Jake Young at 12:57 PM • 3 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Other People's Work
In honor of Mother's Day, NPR has a great piece on the difficulties of being a modern Mom and delaying having children:
Fertility seems to peak at about age 22, says Marcel Cedars, director of reproductive endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. After that, it gradually declines, and past the age of 35, pregnancy is much harder to achieve.
"Each egg is more likely to be genetically abnormal," Cedars says. "And a genetically abnormal egg is less likely to fertilize, is less likely to develop. It is less likely to implant. If it implants, it is more likely to miscarry."
Amy Harrison, of Norwell, Mass., has found that to be the case. At 38, she has a good job, a nice home and a husband who she thinks "will be a wonderful father," she says. "I finally feel like I'm ready to give a child or children a good home."
Her body isn't as ready. Harrison has endured fertility treatments for two years. "When I look at these people who get pregnant at a drop by accident ... yeah, it makes me very angry," she says, noting she'd wrongly believed she'd succeed as long as she began trying "by the time I was 38 or 40."
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 12:49 PM • 0 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Energy Policy
Bryan Caplan writing in the NYTimes suggests that in spite of making no economic sense whatsoever the gas tax holiday might be a good idea as a symbolic gesture:
The first is that the tax holiday is a relatively cheap symbolic gesture that makes truly bad policies less likely. The main causes of high gas prices are probably factors beyond our control, like rapid growth in China and India and low real interest rates. But voters don't want to hear this; they want politicians to "do something!"
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 10:59 AM • 4 Comments • View blog reactions
May 7, 2008
Category: Alcohol
There is an interesting article by Brandon Busteed in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about college drinking. Busteed argues that the problem is not the population that addiction specialists tend to focus on: the really heavy drinkers. Rather the problem is in the much more numerous group of moderate drinkers with infrequent binges:
Despite conventional wisdom, the alcohol problem colleges face is not mainly about high-risk drinkers, and the solution is not about intervening with them alone. If it were, we'd have declared success long ago because we have invested so much time, money, and resources doing just that. Yet our studies show that, despite a handful of solid efforts in the realm of primary prevention, most colleges take a group-think approach to identifying and intervening with high-risk drinkers. The solution lies instead in a counterintuitive approach: working with the 80 percent of students who are not frequent heavy drinkers, and changing their ideas about what constitutes normal college drinking habits.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 1:22 PM • 8 Comments • View blog reactions
May 5, 2008
Category: Other People's Work
Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone! Down with that imperialist aggressor Napoleon III! (The painting to the right is Manet's Execution of Maximillian. Supposedly, the chap on the right looks like Napoleon III, in a zinger to his administration which Manet viewed as responsible for Maximillian's death.)
Cosmic Variance has a great post on the physics of chocolate and why it doesn't always solidify the way you want it to:
If you've ever tried to use chocolate in its melted form, you've probably discovered that chocolate has a number of peculiarities that frequently thwart your best culinary efforts. For example, if your melted chocolate becomes contaminated with an errant drop of water, the chocolate siezes up. If you try to reharden chocolate that's been melted (say, in making chocolate covered strawberries), you're frequently left with a matte finish and crumbly texture that in no way resembles the dark glossy chocolate you began with.
The reasons for this should be familiar to any solid state physicist (or at least, they were to the one who made my wedding cake and first clued me in). Cocoa butter, one of the dominant ingredients in chocolate, contains several triglycerides that lock into a crystal form when cooled. However, there is not just one form that the triglycerides can lock into, but six of them (beta(I) through beta(VI)). Each successive form is more stable and has a higher melting point. Almost all commercial chocolate is in the beta(V) form -- from what I can tell, you only get to sample beta(VI) in the afterlife, if you've been very, very good. When chocolate goes all wrong, it is usually a failure of the melted and cooled chocolate to recrystallize into the beta(V) state.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 1:32 PM • 0 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Linguistics
A post over at the Scientist blog laments the difficulty in getting people to acknowledge the English-language bias in science:
Many, perhaps most, scientists are grateful that English has become the international language, but an informative protest comes from Prof. Tsuda Yukio of Japan, who has taught in the U.S.
"Today one speaks of globalization. It's really Americanization....the dollar economy and communication in English. Isn't it appropriate to think about egalitarian communication and linguistic equality? .... When I told Americans that the reign of English causes linguistic discrimination they argued adamantly that the world chose English, so what's the problem?
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 1:31 PM • 22 Comments • View blog reactions
May 4, 2008
Category: Movies
Check out this video of synchronizing metronomes...
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 10:43 AM • 2 Comments • View blog reactions
May 2, 2008
Category: Academia
There is a great blogginghead.tv conversation up between two of my favorite bloggers, Megan McArdle and Daniel Drezner.
They discuss whether academics are bitter. McArdle argues that the labor market makes their lives very unfortunate. Drezner argues that the issue is complicated by the fact that some academics how outside job choices such as industry. They are both probably right.
Posted by Jake Young at 3:53 PM • 3 Comments • View blog reactions
May 1, 2008
Category: Sports Doping
After the whole Floyd Landis thing, I wrote a long post about the science of detecting steroid abuse. The primary test uses something called the T/E ratio to determine whether the athlete has injected steroids. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has a maximum T/E ratio of 4. If an athlete gets greater than four on any test, an investigation gets started.
However, researchers in Sweden have just published a paper suggesting that this test has a possibly fatal flaw.
Schulze et al. show that a gene variant present with alarming frequency in the population allows individuals to inject testosterone without a large increase in their T/E ratio.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 3:25 PM • 1 Comments • View blog reactions
April 30, 2008
Category: Energy Policy
(Keeping with our trend towards a week of economics -- see here and here -- I have another post where I attempt to talk above my pay grade.)
I am as unhappy as anybody about high oil prices making everything on Earth expensive, but I am getting a little annoyed by the Presidential candidates glib statements about how the intend to make it better.
Both Clinton and McCain have come out for a gas tax holiday over the summer. This is a horrible idea for at least two reasons. (1) It will just be a wind fall for oil producers. (2) We need to lower our oil consumption, and high prices are the most effective means for doing so.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 5:14 PM • 26 Comments • View blog reactions
April 29, 2008
Category: Economics
Paging Kara (or some other economist).
I have an economics question. We were discussing monopolistic competition in micro today. So I get how because the quantity produced under monopolistic competition is less than the efficient scale there is some dead weight loss on the level of the firm. The quantity is less than where the marginal cost and the demand curves cross.
Here is my question:
Is there a dead weight loss on the level of the market? Does monopolistic competition result in a dead weight loss as compared to perfect competition? Is it sort of like a tax that way, or am I just comparing apples and oranges?
Anyone who can answer that for me will me my deepest appreciation.
Posted by Jake Young at 10:49 PM • 5 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Textbooks
The NYTimes Editorial Board wrote at piece lamenting the high prices of college textbooks and praising Congressional action to limit them:
College students and their families are rightly outraged about the bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since the 1980s, mainly because of marginally useful CD-ROMs and other supplements. A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell "unbundled" versions of the books -- minus the pricey add-ons. Even more important, it would require publishers to reveal book prices in marketing material so that professors could choose less-expensive titles.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 4:58 PM • 9 Comments • View blog reactions
April 28, 2008
Category: Haha, a funny
This is pretty funny. Check out Dr. Mezmer's Dictionary of Bad Psychology.
Some of my favorites:
Evolutionary Psychology: A branch of psychology, unwittingly inspired by Charles Darwin and Rudyard Kipling, that describes how we behave through made up stores that guess why we had to behave. In this case, the stories are about what traits our ancestors had to evolve 250,000 years ago to survive. At that time, Mother Nature or evolution was especially demanding, and selected those behavioral traits that permitted survival, much like a mom selects out table manners in her kids. Since all the evidence of this selection process has been washed away in the sands of time, this provides a wonderful opportunity for psychologists to act like trial lawyers, and fabricate evidence and design in tightly spinning plots that would do Agatha Christie proud. Evolutionary psychologists provide 'just so' stories to explain everything about human behavor, and all without the troublesome need to assemble proof. Thus, according to EP, we can run fast because our ancestors had to escape cave bears, got smart because they had to know where the cave bears were, and got sexy because they could rescue cave babes from the cave bears.
And:
Popper, Karl (1902-1994) Distinguished philosopher of science and spoil sport. Popper asserted that you cannot have scientific principles unless they can be subject to disproof or test, and that the spirit of science is to make wild and unfounded conjectures, and to challenge them unmercifully. This Socratic spirit of informed self-doubt is thankfully not needed in psychology, where every year we get new books full of untestable conclusions that purport to explain it all, without a doubt. (see Steven Pinker)
Hat-tip: Mind Hacks
Posted by Jake Young at 2:53 PM • 2 Comments • View blog reactions
April 24, 2008
Category: Food
I can tell you from personal experience that being a med/grad student is not an environment that promotes healthy eating. Your schedule is all over bejesus and back, you're poor, and your often stressed. Rising food prices have made eating out at some place healthy a non-starter. Let's just say the easy fast food fix is very tempting.
NPR had a great story this morning about a Harvard medical student -- Michelle Hauser -- who is also a former chef. She has been teaching her classmates easy meals to cook that are also relatively healthy. This is important stuff for more than just student health. Doctors are role-models for things like this. If you can show that you can be busy and eat right, you are much more likely to inspire your patients to as well.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 4:02 PM • 34 Comments • View blog reactions
April 23, 2008
Category: Politics
Boo on you, Barack and Hillary.
Others have this subject amply covered, but I wanted to note that Barack and Hillary have both jumped on the anti-vaccinationist bandwagon. The bandwagon is getting crowded what with McCain already being on it.
Granted, Barack and Hillary did not say something as flagrantly wrong as when McCain cited "strong evidence" that thiomerosal causes autism. But it is still very disconcerting when politicians engage in this sort of flagrant pandering. Don't they have advisers? Don't they have a single person on their staff who can screen out this nonsense?
It just sucks that they have made evaluation that kooks are a much more valuable constituency than people who care about science.
I dream that there will someday be a candidate who comes out strong not just for scientific funding but scientific accuracy -- for making what they say conform with what we know about the world.
Sadly, it doesn't look like any of these three fit the bill.
Posted by Jake Young at 3:59 PM • 2 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Language
(I have been meaning to post this for about two weeks, so if it is a bit dated forgive me.)
Dyslexia is a learning disability characterized by slower reading skills acquisition, and it is associated with certain structural abnormalities in the brain. However, it turns out that different areas of the brain are affected depending on whether your language is alphabetic (like English) or symbolic (like Chinese).
Siok et al. present evidence in PNAS that English and Chinese languages utilize different brain systems and that as a consequence dyslexia presents differently in English and Chinese speakers.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 3:58 PM • 15 Comments • View blog reactions
April 22, 2008
Category: Psychology
The NYTimes has a great interview with Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert:
What we've been seeing in my lab, over and over again, is that people have an inability to predict what will make us happy -- or unhappy. If you can't tell which futures are better than others, it's hard to find happiness. The truth is, bad things don't affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That's true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.
So the good news is that going blind is not going to make you as unhappy as you think it will. The bad news is that winning the lottery will not make you as happy as you expect.
Read the whole thing.
Gilbert is the author of Stumbling on Happiness, which I highly recommend picking up if you have time. It is not a self-help book instructing people on how to be happy. Rather he expands the argument that people are fundamentally bad at predicting what will make them happy. Their poor predictions result in strategic errors in decision making. He does have some concrete suggestions about what makes people happy more consistently, but mostly it is a book about psychology.
After reading it, however, I was struck by a philosophical question.
Why are humans so bad at predicting the future? And it isn't just our own happiness that we are bad at predicting. Philip Tetlock shows in his book Expert Political Judgment that human beings are likewise piss-poor at predicting the future of complex systems.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 3:36 PM • 5 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Autism
The subpeona against Kathleen Seidel has been quashed.
ENDORSED ORDER granting MOTION to Quash Subpoena.
Text of Order: "Granted. Attorney Clifford Shoemaker is ordered to show cause within 10 days why he should not be sanctioned under Fed R Civ P 11 -- see Fed R Civ P 45(a)(2)(B) which requires that a deposition subpoena be issued from the court in which the deposition is to occur and Fed R Civ P 45 (c)(1) commanding counsel to avoid burdensome subpoenas. A failure to appear will result in notification of Mr Shoemaker's conduct to the Presiding Judge in the Eastern District of Virginia."
So Ordered by Magistrate Judge James R. Muirhead.
(Entered: 04/21/2008)
And the can of mighty whoop-ass was opened, and the just layeth the smack down upon the wicked. Amen.
Mr. Shoemaker now has a little legal problem. See the tiny tear fall down my cheek. Oh wait, you can't because this is the Internet. Oh wait, you also can't because it is too small to be observed by the human senses.
(I love waking up to good news. This is going to put a smile on my face all day.)
Hat-tip: Liz Ditz
Posted by Jake Young at 7:48 AM • 4 Comments • View blog reactions
April 21, 2008
Category: Autism
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Kathleen Seidel, a blogger at neurodiversity.com, who was being intimidated via subpeona by a lawyer for anti-vaccinationists. The lawyer, Clifford Shoemaker, represents plaintiffs in a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers alleging that mercury in their vaccines caused autism in children.
The subpeona filed by Mr. Shoemaker was particularly intrusive, and Seidel filed a motion to quash. The motion to quash has not been responded to yet. Also, Ms. Seidel is now receiving gracious and helpful legal council from the 1st Amendment team at Public Citizen.
There are two updates on this front:
1) No one has heard a word from Mr. Shoemaker about the Seidel subpeona. Could it be that we have slimed your name so horribly that you are afraid to make a stink? Could it be that you realize that your subpeona doesn't have a prayer in open court? Your little scheme didn't work the way you hoped, did it Mr. Shoemaker? That is the happy news.
2) The sad news is that some people have been hearing from Mr. Shoemaker. He has issued another subpeona to Dr. Marie McCormick. Dr. McCormick chaired a committee for the Institute of Medicine that evaluated the safety of vaccines.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 2:46 PM • 4 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Haha, a funny
This is from the Onion:
University of Iowa neuroscientists studying spatial learning and the effects of stress on memory announced Tuesday that a little son-of-a-bitch mouse ruined an experiment on cognitive performance by effortlessly navigating a maze that researchers spent nearly a year designing and constructing.
The test subject, a common house mouse, briskly traversed the complicated wooden maze in under 30 seconds or, according to the study's final report, roughly 1/8,789,258 as long as it took the lab to secure funding for the experiment. According to researchers administrating the standard Y-maze test, the fucking bastard never even broke his stride during the first trial, always selecting the correct route while consistently avoiding blind dead-end alleys.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 1:37 PM • 2 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Other People's Work
Eddie Izzard eyes entering European Union politics. Well that would at least make things more interesting.
So much excellence on NPR lately.
Robert Krulwich explains why -- though radio and television communications have long been projected into space -- it is unlikely that aliens are listening. Short answer: the inverse square law causes the power of such transmission to decline below the microwave background radiation at about the edge of our solar system.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 1:37 PM • 0 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Media
As many of you may/may not know, my two wonderful colleagues and I organize an interdisciplinary lecture series on science communication, called the Science Communication Consortium. It followed on the heels of the framing debate, after I invited Chris and Matt to speak at New York Academy of Sciences last year.
My colleagues and I believe that framing is one small component of the larger systemic problem of deteriorating science communication, and began organizing a series of lectures to delve deeply into other critical areas. We hope that this dialogue will flesh out the broader issues of how and why science can be communicated more effectively to the media, policymakers, and politicians; through advocates, educators, and outreach programs.
With all this, we hope to promote science literacy and the public's support for science. And, perhaps research scientists will see some new changes and improvements to their lives, as well.
So...I was inspired to write about this today because I noticed that today's SB buzz hits on tenure track priorities. Science communication efforts certainly aren't incorporated in most/all tenure decisions. But, so long as a academic scientist is publishing scholarly research, shouldn't he/she also be rewarded for participating in public outreach, a little science writing for lay audiences (even a la ScienceBlogging), or public advocacy? It's disheartening to me that this type of work isn't equally recognized and respected in academia - at least not yet. And, as many researchers have pointed out, there certainly aren't enough hours in the day to do it all. My colleagues Liz and Katie and myself are all graduate students splitting our time between our dissertation research, organizing the SCC, and participating in other outreach programming, and we all recognize that our labwork has taken a hit as a result. Perhaps if tenure or promotion considerations expanded their definition of what a scientist can be, science literacy would face a brighter future.
We discuss these issues in a recent interview by the delightful John Timmer at Ars Technica; also, check out the first part of the interview with Liz and Katie.
Our next SCC event will be held this Thursday. If you're in the NYC region, it'd be lovely to see you there. Find out more, below the fold...
Read on »
Posted by Kate at 10:46 AM • 0 Comments • View blog reactions
April 20, 2008
Category: Technology
Everyone seems to be worried about when the Internet will implode.
From the Economist Tech.view:
And not just because of the popularity of such file-sharing programs with music fans. The sizes of the files they handled increased dramatically. Music tracks and podcasts used to be offered for streaming at 128kbps; versions at 256kbps or even 320kbps are now common.
Video has an impact, too. Though online video-rental and distribution has only recently begun in earnest, all those HDTV sets sold over the past few years will shortly make high-definition downloads the norm. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings is "4k video", which promises four times the resolution of today's HDTV, and needs a whopping 6gbps (gigabits per second) to fill the screen.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 5:20 PM • 0 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Economics
The occasional 7-dwarf orgy notwithstanding (and you cannot convince me it never happened--I just know there was a night with a full moon and an opportunistic bottle of peach schnapps...), when most Western fairy tales end with "and they all lived happily ever after", they mean a prince and a princess. The ideal of one man and one woman united in marital bliss is so pervasive in the developed world that sometimes it takes an egghead (or a pervert) to question why.
That is exactly what three researchers (so eggheads it is) at Hebrew University have done. In a paper in this month's AER, Eric Gould, Omer Moav and Avi Simhon undertake to address the mystery of why the developed world is so uniformly monogamous, when the developing world (and much of human history) is polygynous.
Read on »
Posted by Kara Contreary at 5:30 AM • 11 Comments • View blog reactions
April 19, 2008
Category: Economics
Tyler Cowen breaks down the thinking that a carbon cap with dividends is better than a carbon tax:
A broader question is whether the carbon dividends in fact make the citizenry better off. First there is the question of the incidence of the initial carbon tax, which of course falls on individuals one way or another. Second, does just sending people money, collectively, make the populace better off? Aggregate demand effects aside, will the fiscal stimulus make the citizenry as a whole better off? No. Will printing up more money and sending it to everyone, even if that is popular, make people better off? No.
...
I fear versions of this idea whose (possible) popularity rests on tricking voters. Being pro-science also means being pro-economic science. (Emphasis mine.)
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Jake Young at 3:33 PM • 1 Comments • View blog reactions
April 18, 2008
Category: Neural interfaces
Here is a different approach to measuring brain activity in humans. Researchers in Japan are placing a sheet of electrodes inside the skull but on top of the cortex.
Researchers at Osaka University are stepping up efforts to develop robotic body parts controlled by thought, by placing electrode sheets directly on the surface of the brain. Led by Osaka University Medical School neurosurgery professor Toshiki Yoshimine, the research marks Japan's first foray into invasive (i.e. requiring open-skull surgery) brain-machine interface research on human test subjects. The aim of the research is to develop real-time mind-controlled robotic limbs for the disabled, according to an announcement made at an April 16 symposium in Aichi prefecture.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 12:55 PM • 0 Comments • View blog reactions
Jake Young is a 
