Links for 2010-09-09

  • "I'm perfectly willing to believe that the data one uses for one's thesis is gathered in three months, and my experience is similar, but that's not the whole story. A Ph.D. is not just the dissertation -- you can't just write off the experience leading up to it. To claim that you could just walk into the lab and take data means that you had the requisite knowledge and lab experience, which you must have acquired as an undergraduate. And I don't believe it."
  • "You see, when the metric system was first adopted in Europe, it created a standardized unit system. This proved useful to merchants selling their wares by weight, but more relevant to myself as a scientist, it provided a means for creating scientific recipes, for providing the utterly essential aspect of reproducibility to scientific experiments. However, now the standardization exists even with the English system, given a simple unit conversion. But why not adopt the metric system to avoid situations like the Mars orbiter and make me less confused when I cross the border to Canada and see speed limit signs telling me to do 80? Because it would be too huge of a paradigm shift. Allow me to illustrate my point."
  • "Sabine Hossenfelder, FQXi Member, recently won an FQXi Mini-Grant through which she has requested the Foundational Questions Institute grant a "Most Courageous Postdoc" prize of US$1000. The winner will also be offered membership to FQXi. The main criterion for the prize is the courage and effort a postdoc has put into his or her research on foundational questions in physics and cosmology."
  • "We selected 526,000 OkCupid users at random and divided them into groups by their (self-stated) race. We then took all these people's profile essays (280 million words in total!) and isolated the words and phrases that made each racial group's essays statistically distinct from the others'.

    For instance, it turns out that all kinds of people list sushi as one of their favorite foods. But Asians are the only group who also list sashimi; it's a racial outlier. Similarly, as we shall see, black people are 20 times more likely than everyone else to mention soul food, whereas no foods are distinct for white people, unless you count diet coke."

  • As the SF/Fantasy awards season for 2009 winds down--the Hugo Awards were just announced this past week--it's time to take a look at 2010. This year, thus far, has been very different. A kind of sea-change has occurred, with the majority of the best work coming from relatively new voices rather than established writers. This insurgency hasn't been in the service of a movement or a particular subgenre, and perhaps it's more powerful because of being non-denominational. In a year with four good months still to go, some astonishingly talented writers have published wonderful and worthy work. Will this new energy be reflected come next year's award season? One can only hope.

    Here, then, in no particular order other than the alphabetical, is a list of my personal "best of 2010," to date. No fewer than six are first novels, and not all of them are without flaws, but they represent the most exciting and interesting SF/F I've read so far--admittedly, with a fair amount of reading left to go.

  • For his study, "The Human Speechome Project," he embedded 11 cameras and 14 microphones in the ceilings of his home, and set them to record for an average of 12-14 hours a day. Now Roy and his team have begun the enormous task of trying to make sense of the data--all 120,000 hours of it.
  • "Physicists have been able to manipulate tiny particles over miniscule distances by using lasers for years. Optical tweezers that can move particles a few millimeters are common.

    Andrei Rode, a researcher involved with the project, said that existing optical tweezers are able to move particles the size of a bacterium a few millimeters in a liquid. Their new technique can move objects one hundred times that size over a distance of a meter or more."

  • "[T]here's ample evidence there that there are physicists, both male and female, who clearly tip the scale in terms of attractiveness. So what about this contest? Ah, this is where we dive into the depth of the world of superficial. I want to have a contest where we nominate the physicist who we think is attractive, and then we all vote on them! How much fun is that? :)

    So here are the rules:

    1. Anyone can nominate a physicist who he/she thinks is a candidate for being the most attractive. The deadline for nomination is Sept. 15, 2010."

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