Science
drorzel | October 9, 2010Via Sheril, Science Friday on NPR needs money:
We at SciFri are facing severe financial difficulties, i.e. raising money. NSF [National Science Foundation] has turned us down for continuing funding, saying they love what we do, we are sorely needed, but it's not their job to fund us. At the same time, NPR has said the same thing, telling us that if we want to stay on the air, etc, we now have to raise all our own money. Despite what listeners may think, NPR only gives us about 10 percent of our funding.
Emmy's suggested solution was "They should have me on to talk about physics. And bunnies…
drorzel | October 8, 2010On the way to get SteelyKid from day care last night, I flipped on ESPN radio in the vain hope of getting a baseball score, but wound up listening to former Mets manager and freelance jackass Bobby Valentine talking about how difficult batting is, which included the statement:
And the whole thing is over in a mega-second!
A mega-second, of course, is 1,000,000 seconds, or a bit less than twelve days. That's awfully long for an at-bat in baseball, though it might not be unreasonable for cricket.
Subsequent comments made clear that Valentine was trying for "millisecond," though it remains…
drorzel | October 7, 2010I'm shamelessly stealing this question from James Nicoll, who asked it about science fiction. The question is a play on the famous comment that only of order a thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground record, but every one of them went on to start a band.
So, the question is, who is the Velvet Underground of science? That is, who is the best example of somebody whose work was only read by a tiny number of people, but ended up being incredibly influential on those people and subsequent generations?
The physics example that comes to mind immediately is Sadi Carnot. Carnot wrote a…
drorzel | October 7, 2010Between travel and general work craziness, I completely forgot to note that the UK version of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog has gone on sale:
The title for this edition is How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, and the vanity search keeps turning up mentions to it in the Guardian Bookshop, so I guess they like their dog physics with extra quantum in Britain. Anyway, if you've been waiting and wondering when there would be a version with fewer idiomatic Americanisms, it's here, and available from the usual sources.
This brings the in-print edition tally to five, that I know of: the…
drorzel | October 6, 2010The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2010 goes to Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki for giving people a reason to care about palladium. OK, it might not be the only reason-- I'm not actually sure what palladium is used for other than organic synthesis and cold fusion-- but it's the context in which I'm most likely to hear the element mentioned.
I don't pay that much attention to the Chemistry prize, so my reaction to this was mild surprise that it hadn't already won. Palladium catalyzed reactions turn up often enough when people are talking about making organic molecules for some…
drorzel | October 5, 2010The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Geim and Novoselov for their work on graphene, a material consisting of one-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms in a hexagonal array. This is one of those prizes that was basically inevitable, as graphene is one of the hot materials of the last couple of years. Hardly a week goes by without a couple of press releases touting some amazing new potential application.
Joerg Heber has a nice explanation of the basics of graphene, including some cautionary notes about overhype. From an experimentalist's perspective, the really cool thing about this prize is…
oracknows | October 5, 2010One of the favorite fallacious arguments favored by pseudoscientists and denialists of science is the ever infamous "science was wrong before" gambit, wherein it is argued that, because science is not perfect or because scientists are not perfect, then science is not to be trusted. We've seen it many times before. Indeed, we saw it just yesterday, when promoters of quackery and anti-vaccine cranks leapt all over the revelation that American scientists had intentionally infected Guatemalan prisoners with syphilis without their consent as part of an experiment in the 1940s. They didn't attack…
pharyngula | October 4, 2010I would never have guessed this one. The Nobel Prize in Medicine has gone to Robert G. Edwards for his pioneering work in in vitro fertilization. It surprises me because it's almost ancient history — he is being rewarded for work done over 30 years ago. It's also very applied research — this was not work that greatly advanced our understanding of basic phenomena in biology, because IVF was already being done in animals. This was just the extension of a technique to one peculiar species, ours.
I don't begrudge him the award, though, because the other special property of his research was that…
oracknows | October 4, 2010If there's one thing that burns me about so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) clinical trials, it's how unethical many of them are. This is particularly true for trials that test modalities that, on the basic science grounds alone, can be dismissed as so highly implausible and with such a low prior probability of success that it is unethical to subject patients to risk with close to zero potential for benefit. Perhaps the most egregious example of such a clinical trial is the Gonzalez protocol in pancreatic cancer, a cornucopia of woo and quackery including up to 150…
drorzel | October 2, 2010A quick check-in from Tuscaloosa, where we're getting ready to head out for the football tailgating. While I've got a minute, though, here are the slides from my public lecture, via SlideShare:
What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics
View more presentations from Chad Orzel.
These are probably less comprehensible that some of my other talks, as I deliberately avoided putting much text on the slides, which I think works better for this kind of presentation. The down side, of course, is that it's not as obvious what some of the slides mean, if you don't know the intended flow of the…
oracknows | October 1, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times, thanks to R01 deadlines. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in September 2007 that, shockingly, as far as I can tell I've never "rerun" before. Remember, if you've been reading less than three years it's probably new to you, and, even if you have been reading more than three years, it's fun to see how posts like this have aged.
As I usually do on Thursday nights, I was perusing my legendary Folder…
oracknows | September 30, 2010It just occurred to me that it's been a long, long time since I've done this, but how about an open thread to while away the time until the NIH R01 grant application is submitted, and that gloriously irritating and outrageously beautiful not-so-Respectful Insolence that you all crave can come roaring back with a vengeance? Come on, you know you want it. If we're lucky, maybe Jake Crosby or even Dr. Jay will come out and play.
Grant writing has that effect on me.
In the meantime, I think a video from a most excellent 1980s band sums up the situation when it comes to grant funding these days…
catdynamics | September 30, 2010So, what do we make of the NRC Rankings?
What drives the different rankings, and what are the issues and surprises?
First, the R-rankings really are reputational - they are a bit more elaborate than just asking straight up, but what they reduce to is direct evaluation by respondents without evaluating quantitative indicators.
Doug at nanoscale puts it well - the S-Rankings are really generally better indicators...
A new index W = R - S has been named the "hard work" index.
BTW - you can't take (R+S)/2 and call it a rank - you need to rank the resulting score and count the ordinal position…
catdynamics | September 29, 2010Dear Computer Science departments of the United States:
I am very sorry that commercial citation services do not adequately follow those conference proceedings in Comp Sci, in which your best work is traditionally published.
Since it is important to you to know, why do you not set up a tool to automatically do citation indexing for your own field.
We did.
You can then let the citation services data mine your tool to import the data that you want put out there, or not.
You have the tools, you have talent, you have the people.
Just do it.
Love,
Astronomy & Physics.
PS: feel free to hack…
drorzel | September 28, 2010I am in Alabama at the moment, the temporary owner of a ginormous Ford SUV and a hotel room that even I think is a little more air-conditioned than strictly necessary. Which means that it's time for the How to Teach Physics to Your Dog mini-tour of the Southland. On Wednesday, I'll be driving to and speaking at Berry College at 8pm, then on Thursday, I'll be driving across Alabama to speak at the University thereof at 7:30.
If you're within striking distance of either of those places, come on by and see the talk-- I've got an all-new public lecture for this trip, and I promise it will be…
ably | September 28, 2010According to the Thomson Reuters National Science Indicators, an annual database that records the number of articles published in about 12,000 internationally recognized journals:
- The Asia-Pacific region increased its global share of published science articles from 13 percent in the early 1980s to just over 30 percent in 2009
- China is leading the way, having increased its share of articles to 11 percent in 2009 from just 0.4 percent in the early 1980s
- Japan is next, accounting for 6.7 percent, followed by India with 3.4 percent
- The proportion of articles from the United States dropped…
catdynamics | September 28, 2010The NRC rankings are out.
Penn State Astronomy is ranked #3 - behind Princeton and Caltech.
W00t!
PSU doing the mostest with the leastest.
The Data Based Assessment of Graduate Programs by the National Research Council, for 2010, is out, reporting on the 2005 state of the program.
The full data set is here
EDIT: PhDs.org has a fast rank generator by field.
Click on the first option (NRC quality) to get R-rankings, next button ("Research Productivity") to get the S-rankings, or assign your own weights to get custom ranking.
Astronomy S-Rankings:
Princeton
Caltech
Penn State
Berkeley…
catdynamics | September 28, 2010Two aspects of the NRC rankings are that a) it took so long that the results are dated and people will selectively choose to use or ignore them as suits best (and then rely on the 1995 rankings instead I gather)
and, b) the process was so hard and unpleasant it will never be done again...
Hmm, that sounds familiar.
We can fix that.
See, the arduous part of the NRC was the data mining - gathering the metrics after they'd been defined.
It took a long time and required iterations and debate.
But, this is precisely the sort of thing that can be automated.
At least in large part.
eg. the…
catdynamics | September 28, 2010With about 100,000 metrics collected on 5,000 or so program, there are bound to be errors.
In particular, a lot of the metrics are of the form:
out of N people, how many, k, do/do not have the property we are measuring
This is then reported as percentages.
These percentages must be of the form: (1 - k/N)*100
where k, N are integers.
Yet they are clearly not.
There are several explanations for this, all of which are likely correct:
First of all, there are what look like clear transcription errors; reversed digits, or duplicate or omitted digits. Somebody entered these numbers by hand on…