Science
catdynamics | September 27, 2010We are now just 12 hours from the release of the National Research Council Data Based Assessment of Graduate Programs.
The tension is just overwhelming...
An interesting thing about the 2010 NRC rankings is the methodology, and a final version seems to have been settled upon.
As you know, Bob, the primary purpose of the new methodology is to make sure Princeton wins, and Harvard is suitably humbled provide a robust and objective ranking of US graduate programs, for the ages, which is not a subjective grossly lagging metric.
The complaints about the methodology have already started to bubble…
pharyngula | September 27, 2010It's a contest: the Nobel prizes will be announced next week, and right now you can make guesses about who will win and submit them for a chance at prizes.
Let's see…Michael Egnor for Physiology/Medicine, Dembski for physics, and Behe for Chemistry…
No, only guess those if you want to guarantee that you'll lose.
drorzel | September 27, 2010It's that time of year again-- the Swedes will be handing out money to famous scientists, with the announcements of who's getting what starting one week from today. Thus, the traditional Uncertain Principles Nobel Prize Picking Contest:
Leave a comment on this post predicting the winner(s) of one of this year's Nobel Prizes. Anyone who correctly picks both the field and the laureate will win a guest-post spot on this blog.
The usual terms and conditions apply. If you don't have anything you'd like to guest-post about, you can exchange your guest post for a signed copy of How to Teach Physics…
catdynamics | September 26, 2010 The National Research Council releases its data based ranking of US graduate programs on Tuesday September 28th.
NRC website with methodology and FAQ on rankings
The rankings are much perused and much abused, by anyone from prospective grads, to axe-wielding provosts.
The last rankings were done in 1995, and used the classic "reputational" method.
Basically NRC grandees called their old muckers back at the unis and asked them who was any good, starting, please, with Harvard, Princeton and Yale...
It worked, though the methodology was somewhat criticized and the results were most definitely…
pharyngula | September 26, 2010
It's a python digesting a rat, imaged with a combination of CT, MRI, and considerable image processing, and it's lovely. There is also a time series taken over 132 hours of the rat being digested.
All right, it's not so pretty a picture if you're a rat.
drorzel | September 23, 2010One of the things I've been stressed about lately is next week, when I'm making a trip to the South, specifically Georgia and Alabama. As I mentioned here earlier, the original inspiration was a get-together with friends from college for the Florida-Alabama football game next Saturday, but it seems a shame to go all that way and not do something book-related, so I have arranged to give four talks in two days. Two of these are research colloquia, but the other two are public lectures that might be of interest to readers of this blog or How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
First, on Wednesday,…
drorzel | September 21, 2010Got a big box in the mail today, which included author copies of two Asian editions: the Japanese edition, which I had seen before, and this:
That is, obviously, the Chinese edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I say "obviously" mostly because I know that edition was about ready to roll out-- I can't say anything about the actual characters on the cover, other than that they don't include any katakana, and thus it's not the Japanese edition, and they're not hangul characters, meaning it's not the Korean edition. Other than that, I got nothing.
If you can read Chinese, and provide a…
pharyngula | September 21, 2010People are always asking me for the source of those nice t-shirts that illustrate how long we've diverged from a given species. I think the name must be hard to remember: they're at evogeneao.com. Now there's a little software widget that will be just as neat-o.
Look up TimeTree, and remember to show it to the kids. This is a page with a simple premise: type in the name of two taxa (it will accept common names, but may give you a list of scientific names to narrow the search), and then it looks them up in the public gene databases and gives you a best estimate of how long ago their last…
oracknows | September 20, 2010A critical aspect of both evidence-based medicine (EBM) and science-based medicine (SBM) is the randomized clinical trial. Ideally, particularly for conditions with a large subjective component in symptomatology, the trial should be randomized, double-blind, and placebo-controlled. As Kimball Atwood pointed out just last week (me too), in EBM, scientific prior probability tends to be discounted while in SBM it is not, particularly for therapies that are wildly improbable strictly on the basis of basic science, but for both the randomized clinical trial remains, in essence, where the "rubber…
oracknows | September 19, 2010A friend of mine at work sent this video to me in great amusement.
I just hope he wasn't making a comment on my behavior when it comes to dealing with our biostatisticians. I have, of course, seen investigators approach biostatistians this late in the game. Not that I've ever flirted with this sort of behavior, of course.
catdynamics | September 18, 2010A few years ago Ball Aerospace pulled a cute stunt
Ball Aerospace logo - from telestarlogistics blog (click to embiggen)
Using the QuickBird
0.6m telescope.
Note the white dashed lines on the tarmac on the road are resolved.
Not bad.
(cf here the later WorldView-2 first light image of Dallas airport)
catdynamics | September 16, 2010There are some things to be said for staring at scatterplots and times series plots
Calculated Risk, in case you hadn't heard, is one of the best economics and finance blogs on the Net.
Bill at CR is a demon for generating plots:
This one is Business Outlook Survey - question is, of course, what is the instantaneous second derivative.
Or look at Government Employment - Fed, State and Local, and now, with Education sector excluded!
There is the Infamous Employment vs Recession chart
and
why you should go to university... (click to embiggen)
- modulo opportunity costs of course
CR…
catdynamics | September 16, 2010"...To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An foolish notion:"
Yes, everyone has linked the latest, greatest XKCD:
So painful, so true.
Fortunately the other thing about physicists, is that we have a great sense of humour.
And we need it.
Steve Hsu has been doing some provocative ruminating along these lines.
This of course leads to classification of physicists, there being two types:
Type I is smart.
Type II is hard working.
Type Ib/c is smart and hard working, and therefore really sub-category of Type II
while Type Ia is smart but lazy.
Type IIn is hard…
drorzel | September 16, 2010In a place I can't link to, I encountered the somewhat boggling statement that "Nature leans more in the direction of Popular Science than Critically Peer Reviewed [Journal]." Thus, a quick poll:
Nature is:online surveys
Context is for the weak.
tsmith | September 16, 2010Interesting discussion over at The Spandrel Shop and Cackle of Rad on doing field work in the sciences--and the potential dangers that might be encountered. Now, Prof-like Substance and Cackle of Rad are discussing field work along the lines of biological sample collection, sometimes in the middle of nowhere, which isn't something I've ever done. However, we have our own issues when carrying out our epidemiological field sampling; more after the jump.
For new readers, my lab works on emerging infectious diseases, and zoonotic diseases (which can pass between animals and humans) in particular…
krandall | September 14, 2010By Dr. Mark R. Showalter
Planetary astronomer at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute
It was just a few months ago that Stephen Hawking was making headlines with his bold assertion that extraterrestrial beings, if they exist, are best avoided. His argument was based in part upon the fact that the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the "New World" didn't work out so well for the Native Americans who were already here. However, upon closer inspection, Hawking's ideas fell apart. Even if nomadic tribes of ETs are really out there looking for a handy source…
drorzel | September 14, 2010Not long ago, a new preprint on the fine structure constant got a bunch of press, nicely summed up by the Knight Science Journalism Tracker last week. I meant to say something about this last week, but what with it being the first week of classes and all, I didn't find the time.
I still think it's worth writing about, though, so after a reproduction of the key figure, we'll have the usual Q&A-format explanation of why I don't quite trust this result:
So what's this all about? The preprint in question is the latest in a series of attempts to measure possible changes in the fine structure…
pharyngula | September 14, 2010The Encyclopedia of Life is a cool tool which is a sort of wikification of taxonomy — it allows a large number of contributors to add descriptions of species with the goal of eventually documenting all 1.8 million known species in a single searchable source. Look at the page for my experimental animal, Danio rerio; lots of information in a standard format with links and references. Thumbs up!
However, there's a problem here: the sources. To organize that much data, a large mob of contributors are needed, and that means some fairly open policies to allow contributors have been instituted, and…
catdynamics | September 13, 2010Later this month, the National Research Council will, finally, release the much awaited and much anticipated Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs.
Every 10 years, roughly, the NRC publishes graduate program rankings, the last having been come out in 1995...
The rankings will be released tuesday 28th September 2010.
Today the participating universities will be told how to get embargoed prior access to the data for their own institutions, so they can prepare for the public release, next week the actual embargoed data will be released to each institution.
4838 graduate program…
oracknows | September 13, 2010Regarding this whole skeptic thing, if there's one thing I've learned about pseudoscience and bizarre, unscientific beliefs, it's that, just when I think I've seen it all, the world slaps me in the face (facepalm, to be precise) to show me that I haven't seen it all after all. Such was what happened when a truly bizarre conference started popping up around the skeptical blogosphere at blogs like Pharyngula, Unreasonable Faith, and Starts With A Bang. If you think that one thing that kooks can't deny is that the earth revolves around the sun, you'd be wrong. Witness the Galileo Was Wrong…