February 2012
81 posts
Simple Solutions to Everyday Problems Gallery :...
Simple Solutions to Everyday Problems Gallery : theCHIVE Simple Solutions to Everyday Problems Gallery : theCHIVE
In a sport full of phonies, Lionel Messi never...
In a sport full of phonies, Lionel Messi never dives (Video) : theCHIVEThis video isn’t about a bunch of amazing kicks and goals. It’s about staying on your feet when the rest of the soccer world tries to get a penalty called instead.
modern restroom -- thechive pics
Meanwhile, in Africa (27 photos) : : theCHIVE
Still More Of The 10 Best Amazon Reviews. Ever. |...
Still More Of The 10 Best Amazon Reviews. Ever. | Fast Company“This book is a god-send, all this time, I have been knitting with wolverine hair. Let me tell you, it has been a rough time for the wolverine knitting industry, so I thought I’d try something new. After shaving my dog, I knit the gift of a small pillow for my daughter to take to her friend during her Justin Bieber themed...
BioMed Central Blog : How to explore a metagenome
BioMed Central Blog : How to explore a metagenomeIn a timely overview of meta-genomics, Thomas et. al. provide an accessible primer for scientists who may be new to the research area, for example the ecologist, evolutionary biologist, microbiologist or clinician. The Review article, published in Microbial Informatics and Experimentation, introduces the typical steps in a meta-genomics...
textos sobre o bolsa-família
Governo federal tenta reverter evasão escolar | Educação | band.com.br - Band.com.br Ao menos dois milhões de crianças e adolescentes contemplados pelo Bolsa Família estão fora da escola. As informações foram obtidas pelo Ministério do Desenvolvimento Social e Combate à Fome, segundo a colunista da BandNews FM, Mônica Bergamo. Bolsa Família: Mitos e Realidades ...
Nature Editorial: If you want reproducible...
Nature Editorial: If you want reproducible science, the software needs to be open sourceAnother justification for keeping code closed is selfish: to slow down the competition by keeping the results of hard work to yourself. Daniel Lemire, a computer scientist and professor, responded to this argument elsewhere by pointing out that open sourcing his code not only makes his work repeatable, but...
On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical...
On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning I take Chomsky’s points to be the following: Statistical language models have had engineering success, but that is irrelevant to science. Accurately modeling linguistic facts is just butterfly collecting; what matters in science (and specifically linguistics) is the underlying principles. Statistical models are incomprehensible;...
Lecciones de la recesión | Economía | EL PAÍS --...
Lecciones de la recesión | Economía | EL PAÍSLa colección de siete artículos que arranca hoy bucea hasta el final de la Edad Media para emerger en la Gran Recesión. En este apretado recorrido por grandes crisis económicas, los historiadores se adentran en el siglo XVII, en el funesto inicio del siglo XIX, en las réplicas de la Gran Depresión en la década de 1930, en la primera etapa del franquismo...
NEURONS V FREE WILL | More Intelligent Life
NEURONS V FREE WILL | More Intelligent Life The art of neuro-imaging has been in full swing for not much more than a decade. In a study of its reliability, two psychologists at the University of California at Santa Barbara concluded in 2010 that the discipline had emerged from infancy, but was still rather a mixed-up adolescent. That may be an understatement as far as experiments on thinking,...
proibido colar cartazes -- pracas do brasiu pics
Kibe Loco » PRACAS DO BRAZIU (PARTES 1581 A 1600)
Philosophy of science as it was taught to John...
It’s Only A Theory: Philosophy of science as it was taught to John RawlsOne crucial distinction between the use of a theory in natural science, as opposed to its use in ethics, is that in the former the subject matter is the empirical laws expressed by different causal relations, and whenever the theory does not explain these the theory must be modified; whereas in the latter, the subject...
Anti-anti-science -- "Science has to learn to talk...
Anti-anti-science | Responsible InnovationMy over-riding impression is that ‘anti-science’ is a term that is imaginary and unhelpful. It describes almost nobody and it gets us nowhere. Climate deniers are not anti-science, they are anti- a political view that considers environmental protection as important. Creationists, too, have moral objections to the implications of an evolutionary worldview....
This Man Was Almost Elected President of the...
This Man Was Almost Elected President of the United States! | The Beacon Goods like phones and televisions produced as recently as a decade ago don’t measure up to what is available now. Twenty-first century capitalism is more productive than capitalism ever has been. Mr. Gore is especially critical of the financial system, and the fact that investors rapidly turn over their portfolios. This...
BBC News - Meet the only man alive who has been to...
BBC News - Meet the only man alive who has been to the deepest ocean On 23 January 1960, two explorers, US navy lieutenant Don Walsh and Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard, became the first - and still the only - people to dive 11km (seven miles) to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. As a new wave of adventurers gear up to repeat the epic journey, Don Walsh tells the BBC about their remarkable deep-sea...
Why Is Data Visualization So Hot? | Visual.ly Blog
Why Is Data Visualization So Hot? | Visual.ly Blog Let’s look at the classic instructive example, Anscombe’s Quartet, devised by statistician Francis Anscombe to demonstrate this very issue. The four following data sets share many characteristics: mean, variance, correlation, and regression
Sciencegeek Fundamentals #5: In which an...
Sciencegeek Fundamentals #5: In which an inflatable pool shows us why media often gets science wrong. «With science you have the awesome power of expert peer review in your corner. It’s not perfect, it can be slow, it can influenced by various pressures, it might not even reach a consensus; but overall, there’s probably not a better way to figure out whether a piece of knowledge is valid or not.
The Secret Life of Bees -- The world's leading...
The Secret Life of Bees | Science & Nature | Smithsonian MagazineBoth swarms and brains make their decisions democratically. Despite her royal title, a honeybee queen does not make decisions for the hive. The hive makes decisions for her. In our brain, no single neuron takes in all the information from our senses and makes a decision. Millions make a collective choice.
Scientific reputations and clashing worldviews
Scientific reputations and clashing worldviews « Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week #AcademicSpring In contrast, once someone has been caught plagiarizing or falsifying data, their scientific reputation is permanently shot. If we can’t trust some of your data, we can’t trust any of it.(…) Businesses by and large do not work to the same tolerances of honesty. Thanks to marketing,...
Knight Science Journalism Tracker » Blog Archive »...
Knight Science Journalism Tracker » Blog Archive » Dot Earth, more: A climate campaigner who, his judgment ‘blinded’ he says, tricked Heartland Institute.Reality, as a source for many of us who have reported climate reveals, is not so glorious. Peter Gleick, a hydrologist and climate policy analyst, a MacArthur Foundation fellow, and longtime arguer for sturdy policies to soften the...
Elsevier have a right to price their journals as...
Elsevier have a right to price their journals as they see fit, but they must be honest in their reasoning and not attack boycotters with untruths. | Impact of Social Sciences But the reality is that my journal was founded as a commercial venture by a commercial publisher, Academic Press, later taken over by Elsevier. It was they that took the risk initially, and it is they that get the rewards...
John Cook - Google+ - Applied statistics can be...
John Cook - Google+ - Applied statistics can be incredibly ad hoc. When I wro…If you test your model using data generated by its assumptions, that’s a bare minimal standard: if you don’t do well in that case, hang it up and go home. But you could do robustness tests, modeling your data to have one distribution but testing it with data from another. If you use real data and...
Scholarly Publishing in Transition - 4 Strategies...
Scholarly Publishing in Transition - 4 Strategies for avoiding the Innovator’s Dilemma Markets in transition give rise to fascinating anomalies. Take the car as an example. When they first appeared in the 1860s automobiles (then steam-powered) were capable of travelling much faster than horse-drawn vehicles. Yet the British government thought they were potentially so dangerous to other road...
How should researchers talk about science to the...
How should researchers talk about science to the public? | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional Not everyone is comfortable with running a school workshop but there are many other ways to communicate science. School magazines, such as the Review series or Catalyst, are continuously looking for contributors. Blog posts tend to be a lot shorter and less formal than scientific articles....
More Data on the Impact of Government Spending on...
More Data on the Impact of Government Spending on Growth and Employment - By Veronique de Rugy - The Corner - National Review OnlineRamey’s work on the impact of government spending on the private sector and employment is consistent with the work of many other economists. For a fascinating and balanced discussion about the impact of government spending on the economy and more, I would recommend...
No Student Left Untested by Diane Ravitch |...
No Student Left Untested by Diane Ravitch | NYRblog | The New York Review of BooksNew York’s education officials are obsessed with test scores. The state wants to find and fire the teachers who aren’t able to produce higher test scores year after year. But most testing experts believe that the methods for calculating teachers’ assumed “value-added” qualities—that is, their abilities to produce...
Medios estatales: gana la propaganda por Salvador...
Medios estatales: gana la propaganda por Salvador Camarena » Blogs Internacional EL PAÍS Carlos Lauría, coordinador senior del programa en de las Américas del CPJ, publica en “Prensa estatal: Fines políticos desplazan interés público” un recuento sobre una tendencia marcada de gobiernos de Latinoamericana de generar medios supuestamente de interés público, pero que en realidad tienen una...
only for the old and weak -- thechive pic
Funny signs full of WTF : theCHIVE
kid with a spoon -- thechive pic
Daily Afternoon Randomness (38 Photos) : theCHIVE
safety shop, secret nuclear bunker -- irony pics...
Ironic Photos Gallery : theCHIVE Ironic Photos Gallery : theCHIVE
Genome Biology | Full text | The Research Works...
Genome Biology | Full text | The Research Works Act: a comment Of course, this is quite the opposite of what RWA actually represents, which is additional government regulation contrary to the spirit of the free market. In fact, market forces scare traditional publishing models, because left to their own devices they will arrive at the most efficient use of capital, which is undoubtedly,...
Theory of Citing -- Handbook of Optimization in...
Abstract - SpringerLink The great majority of misprints are identical to misprints in articles that earlier cited the same paper. The distribution of the numbers of misprint repetitions follows a power law. We develop a stochastic model of the citation process, which explains these findings and shows that about 70–90% of scientific citations are copied from the...
All genomes are dysfunctional: broken genes in...
All genomes are dysfunctional: broken genes in healthy individuals « Genomes Unzipped So here’s the thing: the greater the predicted functional impact of a sequence variant, the more likely it is to be a false positive. The reason for this will be pretty clear to the Bayesians in the audience (large-effect variants have a very low prior), but can take a while to fully appreciate for those...
What Is It Like to Talk Batty? at Steven Landsburg...
What Is It Like to Talk Batty? at Steven Landsburg | The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics, and PhysicsRational expectations is a theory of equilibrium (i.e. the outcomes that you get when decision-makers interact); expected utility is a theory of optimization (i.e. the choices made by an individual decision-maker). When Nagel throws around...
Survival in academia, the tenure track not taken...
Survival in academia, the tenure track not takenA new study published in this week’s issue of Science looks at the hard reality of academic success. The study found that, in STEM fields, anyone who gets hired as an assistant professor has less than a 50 percent chance of living out their career in academia. The median time that an individual spends as a STEM professor: 10.9 years....
Original ‘Charlotte’s Web’ Illustrations, 1952 |...
Original ‘Charlotte’s Web’ Illustrations, 1952 | Retronaut
Oxford Nanopore Doesn't Disappoint
Omics! Omics!: Oxford Nanopore Doesn’t Disappoint Imagine a sequencer which requires minimal sample prep, generates just under a gigabase in less than a day’s time for $1000 in consumable cost. Reads are 10s of kilobases long (if your input DNA is) and can read off base modifications, albeit with a 4% raw error rate distributed uniformly along the read. Sounds a bit like a PGM or...
A colleague wrongfully disses modern evolutionary...
A colleague wrongfully disses modern evolutionary theory « Why Evolution Is True Shapiro, it seems, has devoted much of his writing to pointing out that the modern theory of evolution (“neo-Darwinism”) is deeply flawed and needs a new paradigm. (…) This uptake of DNA between species, also called “horizontal gene transfer” (HGT) happens sometimes, and although rare (especially in...
Why Pinterest Is Playing Dumb About Making Money -...
Why Pinterest Is Playing Dumb About Making Money - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The AtlanticNonetheless, once the story broke that Pinterest was quietly making money off its users (the horror!), the company started to backpedal on its practices. That reached full bloom in a Wall Street Journal article yesterday in which various Pinterest parties (CEO, board member) fell all over themselves to...
The Catastrophe of Success - Andreas Kluth -...
The Catastrophe of Success - Andreas Kluth - Harvard Business ReviewSomething odd and interesting happens to a lot of people who become very successful. Once the initial thrill wears off, they come to perceive their success as “a catastrophe” and even as “a kind of death,” as the playwright Tennessee Williams famously put it (…) The idea that disaster, or failure, can...
Nanopore NGS
CoreGenomics: How does a nanopore sequencer work? A nanopore is a very small hole, the generally under 1nM in width in a membrane of some kind. It can be made from a biological molecule or ‘punched’ into a solid surface using an electron beam. Nanopore sequencing has a very simple basic principle, DNA strands or single nucleotides are driven through a nanopore electrophoretically. As each...
Grasping at straws | Scholarly Communications @...
Grasping at straws | Scholarly Communications @ DukePublishers are not afforded any period of copyright protection by the copyright law, anymore than plumbers or ophthalmologist are. This kind of misinformation is intended to create the illusion that publishers’ business models are somehow favored by federal law and thus inviolate, but that is not true. Only one group is afforded copyright...
Cormac McCarthy on the Santa Fe Institute’s Brainy...
Cormac McCarthy on the Santa Fe Institute’s Brainy Halls - The Daily BeastFrom a certain perspective, the opposition between humanists and scientists seems superficial. Authors like George Eliot and Charles Dickens read or were influenced by Darwin, and Darwin was a great lover of novels. He wrote in his autobiography that novels “have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I...
vendo - duvido, livro do pde reginaldo rossi,...
Kibe Loco » PRACAS DO BRAZIU (PARTES 1561 A 1580) Kibe Loco » PRACAS DO BRAZIU (PARTES 1561 A 1580) Kibe Loco » PRACAS DO BRAZIU (PARTES 1561 A 1580)
a verdade por trás das placas editadas - kibeloco...
Kibe Loco
Krugman, Human Weakness, and Desert, Bryan Caplan...
Krugman, Human Weakness, and Desert, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty Two questions for Paul, one economic, one moral: 1. (…) Probably the wisest strategy for the poor would be to (a) take the money to make their lives better now, but (b) keep working hard to permanently escape poverty by finishing school, acquiring job skills, and delaying parenthood. But how...
How to Swap the Obama Budget for an Optimistic...
How to Swap the Obama Budget for an Optimistic Economic Growth Agenda - Forbes Here are some ways to do the fiscal year 2013 kickstart that the budget reneges on: Privatize: During the 1990s, proposals to spin off commercial components of federal labs to private industry, and to allow employee buyouts, were common. This, the opposite of the modern spending approach, needs congressional champions....
Why a Big Mac Costs Less Than a Salad -...
Why a Big Mac Costs Less Than a Salad - NYTimes.com
Engrish Funny: In Soviet China..
In soviet china
João Pereira Coutinho - Resposta a Vladimir...
Folha.com - Colunistas - João Pereira Coutinho - Resposta a Vladimir Safatle - 13/02/2012 Sobre a grosseria, digo apenas isto: no meu texto, em nenhum momento teço considerações pessoais sobre Safatle. Não há uma linha sobre a sua ascendência cultural; e nunca me passaria pela cabeça atribuir-lhe qualquer maleita psiquiátrica. Que Safatle tenha evocado a minha condição de português para,...