December 2010
80 posts
BBC News - Germans wrestle with multicultural identity: Mr Piening’s angst about integration comes as Germany is undergoing a period of deep introspection about its identity. President Christian Wulff said recently: “Islam is part of Germany.” That prompted Chancellor Angela Merkel to say that “multiculti” - she used the slightly disparaging term for multiculturalism...
Estudiar sin esfuerzo, un objetivo imposible - Faro de Vigo: Sólo hay un secreto para que los adolescentes de Corea del Sur hayan obtenido el primer puesto en los exámenes de PISA: estudian más de diez horas diarias. Tienen culturalmente arraigado que es la única forma de vencer la pobreza. Entre eso y convertir el colegio en una fiesta vacua hay un término medio. No se puede progresar sin...
Ten Science Stories You Should Have Read | Surprising Science: Is your office rather empty this week? Looking for something to read to fill the time? How about some great science and nature stories from Smithsonian? Here are my ten favorites from the past year:
Edge: ART AND HUMAN REALITY: A Talk With Denis Dutton: And now he is changing the direction of aesthetics. Many people believe that this consilience between the arts, humanities, and sciences represents the future of the humanities, revitalizing them with a progressive research agenda after the disillusionments of postmodernism. Dutton has written the first draft of this agenda. He has defended a...
On Meaningful Observation § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM: And so I’ve begun to wonder recently whether STEM needs something to give it some STE(A)M—an “A” for art between the engineering and the math to ground the bits and bytes in the physical world before us, to lift them up and make them human. What if America approached innovation with more than just technology?
The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired - WikiLeaks - Salon.com: But what is incontrovertibly true is that a Wired contributer — who just so happens also to be Poulsen’s prosecutor and long-time source — played a key role in putting Lamo in contact with government authorities in order to inform on Manning. Poulsen never mentioned any of that, and — even once...
The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code - Joel on Software: The Joel Test 1. Do you use source control? 2. Can you make a build in one step? 3. Do you make daily builds? 4. Do you have a bug database? 5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? 6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule? 7. Do you have a spec? 8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? 9. Do you use the...
NCBI ROFL: A new scientific source of bias: SILLY bias. Analysis of citations of BMJ’s Christmas articles. | Discoblog | Discover Magazine: “We analysed the scientific impact of systematic reviews and randomised trials published in the BMJ Christmas issues 1997-2006. The articles were mostly interpreted correctly as humorous, but the humorous dimension was overlooked with surprising ease. The...
Guest Blog: Pimp My Virus: Ocean Edition: They were looking for respiratory disease-causing bacteria of the sort that cause Legionnaires’ Disease, and they found several, including a new one they named Bradfordcoccus. Except Bradfordcoccus was not a bacterium. Bradfordcoccus, once outed more than 10 years later, would become on its discovery the world’s largest known virus, an entire...
Observations: In praise of scientific error: Lehrer describes how many, or even most, published scientific papers prove to be wrong. In a range of examples from biomedicine and psychology, Lehrer tells of a “decline effect.” The discovery paper does all the right statistical tests and infers a significant result. Follow-up studies reproduce the result, but find a lower statistical...
Serious Question: Would You Eat Soylent Green? | Science Not Fiction | Discover Magazine: So, in the spirit of ethical inquiry, I’d like to do some thought experiments. We’re all rational, scientifically minded individuals. In what situations would a reasonable person eat food made of people? Let me set up some scenarios for you, and you tell me how much you’d love to eat Soylent Green (which is...
Marginal Revolution: Paul Krugman’s predictions from 1998: Many of Krugman’s current false (modal) predictions stem from his claims that if left-wing politicians would “get tough” and take their case directly to the public, good progressive results will follow. I view that claim as a move into a non-scientific mode of thought. While it is sometimes true, usually it is...
Buzz by Terence Tao: Suppose one has n states, each with populations [; P_1, P_2, P_3, …, P_n ;] . One wishes to divide these states into R congressional districts, by assigning the i^th state some number R_i of districts, such that [; R_1 + … + R_n = R ;], where each R_i is at least 1 (so R needs to be at least n).http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntington-Hill_method
Simpler story: All of those folks had an incentive to ignore subprime. Ideology was just window-dressing. They liked their jobs. They wanted to stay in them. Helping Wall Street or at least not rocking Wall Street’s boat was the politically savvy thing to do. Ignore what people say is their motivation. Look at what they do. What Treasury Secretaries and Fed governors and Fed Chairmen do is protect...
One-Fourth of DNA Born by 2.8 Billion Years Ago | Wired Science | Wired.com: sciencenewsAbout 27 percent of all gene families that exist today were born between 3.3 billion and 2.8 billion years ago, two researchers from MIT report online December 19 in Nature. The surge of gene births — which the scientists have dubbed the Archean expansion — predate some important changes in Earth’s early...
Times Higher Education - Publish or be damned: More now insist that each paper must “make a distinctive theoretical contribution” rather than creatively employ existing theory, prioritise replication in order to eliminate rogue findings or address the needs of practitioners. Particular forms of theorising and research thus become privileged over others. The elite journals have a...
News: New Measures of Scholarly Impact - Inside Higher Ed: These days, the availability of “usage data” — information on how many times a digital article has been downloaded, and in what context — means that people like Bollen can track the spread of an idea in a scholarly community using the same principles that epidemiologists use to track the spread of a virus in a village. Usage data do not...
American RadioWorks: Fast Food and Animal Rights - Kill Them With Kindness, Page 1: Temple Grandin is convinced that she knows how animals feel during their final moments in the slaughterhouse. And she’s harnessing that power to ease the moment when millions of animals die. In some ways, you can glimpse her connection with animals if you join her at the end of the day, after she’s...
Guest Blog: Five Things You Never Knew About Penguins!: Among their long list of superlatives, penguins can survive sub-freezing temperatures and gale force winds, dive over 1600 feet deep, hold their breath for more than 15 minutes, and survive with no food for weeks by living off stored fat [1].
A chaga do Cristianismo | Dicta & Contradicta: Segundo Jonhson, a religião cristã estava dividida em duas forças: a papista e a milenarista. A primeira era arraigada à instituição católica e seus poderes terrenos sobre o mundo espiritual; a segunda era uma seita formada por homens independentes que queriam formar sua própria igreja, denunciando a corrupção do catolicismo e prevendo o anúncio...
NABT2010: This year’s Evolution Symposium features four exciting speakers whose research in molecular evolution is revolutionizing our understanding of familiar and compelling examples of evolution. Learn more about Sean Carroll’s work in Drosophila wing coloration and Hopi Hoekstra’s research into the underlying molecular mechanisms of coat color in beach mice. Butch Brodie...
Krugman-in-Wonderland: Paleo-Krugmanism: Robert Wenzel has an excellent commentary on what Krugman says, and I want to emphasize with Mr. Wenzel that Ron Paul knows the difference between money supply and monetary base. (…) Krugman then shows a graph which has both the monetary base and the CPI and — Lo and behold! — the rate of inflation does not match the monetary base....
Times Higher Education - Research intelligence - Rip it up and start again: Dr Neylon believes that if scholarly communication were redesigned from scratch for the digital age, it would look radically different. Most significantly, the monopoly of the journal article would be smashed. He conceded that articles would still have their place, but added that they fail to maximise funders’ return...
Wikileaks and 21st Century Statecraft « P U L S E: In her speech Clinton worried that “technologies with the potential to open up access to government and promote transparency can also be hijacked by governments to crush dissent and deny human rights”. Her allusion was, no doubt, to Iran and China – yet this is exactly what we have seen happen in the US post-Cablegate.
Dunning–Kruger effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it...
Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The Economist: But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour. With more PhD students they can do more research, and in some countries more teaching, with less money.
Stem-cell transplant wipes out HIV : Nature News: What is clear is that this is not a treatment most HIV-positive people would want to receive. The risks involved with a bone-marrow transplant far outweigh those that come with years of antiretroviral drug therapy, even considering the troublesome side effects of these drugs. Before receiving the transplant, recipients are...
Yahoo closing down Delicious; but why won’t Carol use the F-word? | Technology | guardian.co.uk: See, she goes through the entire memo without mentioning the one thing that Yahoo has that everyone adores, yet doesn’t realise – mostly – is a Yahoo property: Flickr. And you know what else? It’s a content property – even if it’s content that Yahoo hasn’t generated in its...
Stealth Socialism - WSJ.com: So why did he and congressional Democrats opt for a complicated, ostensibly private and legally dubious means of accomplishing the same end? Because outright socialism was a bridge too far politically. But ObamaCare’s stealth socialism, in which private companies play the role of tax collector so that individuals are forced to do business with them, may be a...
Guest Blog: Divine intervention via a microbe: By consuming the bacteria and allowing them to re-colonise their gut the nematodes engage in a trade off, they have to carry the bacteria from prey to prey but in return the bacteria kill the insect and kill all other microbes that could potentially harm both the nematode and themselves. The wounds of the soldiers healed faster and without infection...
10 Alternatives To Delicious.com Bookmarking: There are several alternatives available and, if you’re like me, you’re going to have to test some of them out until you find the one that best fits how you like to save bookmarks and later search for them. You’ll also want to export your existing delicious.com bookmarks and, if possible, import them into the new service you choose. Instructions on...
DIY Biotech Hacker Space Opens in NYC | Wired Science | Wired.com: A cadre of science entrepreneurs recently opened Genspace, the world’s first government-compliant community biotech laboratory. The bedroom-sized facility was two years in the making and, for a $100-per-month membership, anyone can use the space for whatever experiments they dream up.
NASA’s arsenic life-form scientist answers critics: “We look forward to working with other scientists, either directly or by making the cells freely available and providing DNA samples to appropriate experts for their analyses, in an effort to provide more insight into this intriguing finding.” Wolfe-Simon and her co-authors have remained largely silent since the controversy...
Boat tragedy: How Australians became complicit in the horror of Christmas Island | Richard Flanagan | Comment is free | The Guardian: If 30 Australians drowned in Sydney Harbour it would be a national tragedy. But when 30 or more refugees drown off the Australian coast, it is a political question. Not that Australia has a refugee problem. Last year just 5,500 people sought asylum – less than 2% of...
WikiLeaks Founder Assange Free on Bail - NYTimes.com: Gemma Lindfield, who was representing the Swedish government, urged the court to separate the contentions over the WikiLeaks releases from the sexual accusations. Ms. Lindfield argued that a series of well-known people who have stepped up to support Mr. Assange, including the film directors Ken Loach and Michael Moore and Jemima Khan, a...
thoughts on thoughts » Blog Archive » Why is science talking about freewill?: Science is about the physical reality. Scientists themselves can also think about things outside of physical reality but that is not science. So why is there a trickle of papers dealing with freewill? I ask this because I cannot find anything for freewill to be free-from other then the processes of matter and...
Time to democratise science - opinion - 14 December 2010 - New Scientist: Before 2007, many university economists were happy to provide the justifications for deregulation, liberalisation and credit expansion that the financiers paid them handsomely to produce - with disastrous results. (…) There is no good reason I can see why science funding could not be made subject to democratic...
beer photos in hq theCHIVE: Been a lot of talk about beer on theCHIVE last couple days… (28 HQ Photos)
the chivers favorite beers theCHIVE: I wasn’t trying to accurately rank the best beers in the world or anything. But I’ve already received dozens of emails from people, countries, and college campuses who feel like their beers deserve exposure to our many Chivers.
The Psychology of People Against Profit, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty: They found a strong negative relationship (r=-.62) between perceived profit and perceived social value. Check out the fun scatter plot - and see what’s in the lower right-hand corner. More amazingly, they found that the correlation between actual profit and perceived social value worked...
Photoshopped world war 2 photography with modern pictures theCHIVE: Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov is an amateur photographer and vintage postcard collector who married his two passions into a very cool series of then-and-now photos with the help of our friend Photoshop. It really puts history into perspective and shows we’ve come a long way in a short amount of time.
Creepy crawlies: Amazing Scanning Electron Microscope pictures of insects and spiders - Telegraph: A coloured scanning electron micrograph of the head of a human flea (Pulex irritans)
Ideas: The Intensive Margin: Math vs Econ: The answer, I suspect, takes us back to Ricardo’s distinction between the intensive and extensive margins of cultivation. Expanding production on the intensive margin means getting more grain out of land already cultivated, expanding it on the extensive margin means getting more grain by bringing new land into cultivation. In economics, the...
The 2nd scientific revolution. | The Renaissance Mathematicus: Many disciplines such as chemistry, the life sciences and the earth sciences had been the subject of much attention in the 17th century but it was first in the 19th century that they became scientific disciplines in the modern sense. Building on the work of people such as Lavoisier and Dalton chemistry became a real science in the 19th...
Ranking Programming Languages by Size of Community and Number of Projects: Scatter plot of programming language rankings Drew Conway and John Myles White of the website Dataists decided to try ranking programming languages using a new system: the size of the community and the number of projects. In Conway’s blog post about the results, he admits that there’s no perfect way to find data...
Top 50 Programming Quotes of All Time | TechSource: 50. “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.” - Rick Cook 49. “Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.” - Alan Kay. 48. “Walking on...
:: Revista da Cultura ::: Antonio Candido de Camargo é um jovem pesquisador que se graduou em Ciências Moleculares pela Universidade de São Paulo (USP). A escolha se deu porque não queria fazer um curso engessado, mas com flexibilidade e oportunidade de explorar outros campos, como já acontece em graduações dos Estados Unidos e Europa. No curso, apesar de “beber” conhecimento em várias áreas, se...
Astrogator’s Logs » Blog Archive » The Agency That Cried “Awesome!”: Last week, NASA administrators forgot why we came. They forgot the agency’s mission, they forgot science, they forgot their responsibility to their own people and to the public. Instead, they apparently decided that “All publicity is good, as long as they don’t misspell your name.” (…) We got an agency which...
Philosophy Talk: The Blog: Disagreement: But, if I measure a length twice, and come up with different results, common sense suggests the true length may be somewhere in between. Measure a third time, or split the difference. But the tree is either a redwood or a cedar. The fact that Ken and I come to different conclusions is really not evidence that it’s some kind of hybrid. (…) The...
Volts and Vespa: Buzzing about Photoelectric Wasps | Retort: Entomologists have noticed, however, that Oriental hornets dig most feverishly at mid-day, when the sun is most intense, unlike other wasp species that concentrate their labors in the cooler early morning hours. That unusual behavior prompted the late Jacob S. Ishay of Tel-Aviv University to begin years of investigation into whether the...