Elsewhere on the Interweb (3/13/08) : Pure Pedantry

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Jake Young is a MD/PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in NYC getting a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience. He holds a BS and MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University. If a volcano were to erupt Pompei-style in Central Park, his body would be preserved in a scoliotic posture over his lab desk. Archeaologists would later conclude that he spent most of his day training rats to perform tricks, until he went blind building electrical equipment by hand using a dissecting microscope. But, still, he died happy...because science is cool.

Pure Pedantry is a blog about science -- social sciences and otherwise -- as well as academic and scientific culture. No one can live on science alone, so I also like to dwell on pop culture, periodically explore the humanities, and indulge in other types of geeky goodness.

DISCLAIMERS: 1) Jake Young is not a licensed physician (yet). He is merely a medical student. The information published on this site is not intended for use in medical decision-making. Please seek advice from a licensed, medical professional before making any health decisions. 2) The opinions expressed are my own. They do not represent the views of SEED magazine or the educational establishments I currently attend or attended in the past.

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Elsewhere on the Interweb (3/13/08)

Category: Other People's Work
Posted on: March 13, 2008 1:13 PM, by NotoriousLTP

Paul Krugman on an economic theory of trade for interstellar trade (Hat-tip: Slashdot):

This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest rates on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved
...

Interstellar trade, by contrast, involves wholly novel considerations. The most important of these are the problem of evaluating capital costs on goods in transit when the time taken to ship them depends on the observer's reference frame; and the proper modelling of arbitrage in interstellar capital markets where -- or when (which comes to the same thing) -- simultaneity ceases to have an unambiguous meaning.

...

This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.

Cute.

The US Patent and Trademark Office upholds two of three WARF patents:

The US Patent and Trademark Office has upheld the two remaining stem cell patents out of a contested trio held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), according to the final ruling posted last week by the USPTO.
The third patent was upheld in a ruling last month (read more here) and can still be challenged by appeal. Last week's rulings are final and cannot be appealed.

"The patent office has conducted a thoughtful and thorough review of all three patents and we applaud this final decision on our two most important base stem cell patents," Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of WARF said in a statement.

The two patents are known as "780" and "806" (for US Patents. 5,843,780 and 6,200,806) and cover technology on culturing and maintaining human embryonic stem cells from pre-implantation embryos. This was the original work of James Thomson, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who led one of two research teams to successfully reprogram adult skin cells into pluripotent cells last November.

For what the hell I am talking about here, read this.

The Rule of Law is correlated with countries being richer though not necessarily with greater growth.

Steve at Of Two Minds makes clear that brain training games are a load of nonsense:

Everyone and their mother is getting into the brain training game - researchers, the health care industry, video game companies, you name it! But... Every single one of them is a huckster trying to rip the elderly off (whether they realize it or not). Nearly every single one of these brain training systems simply takes established psychology experiments that we normally pay people to do since they are so damn boring and repackages them in a slightly glizier way to make you feel better for spending $299.95.

I talk about how crossword puzzles fail to slow cognitive decline here.

Orac on the Broken Pipeline and why NIH funding problems are not just the Bush administrations fault:

The problem with the Broken Pipeline effort is that it puts all the blame in one place. To wax Biblical, universities are pointing out the mote in the Bush administration's eye and ignoring the plank in their own. An acknowledgment that universities share in at least part of the blame for the plight of the twelve promising young researchers profiled in the Broken Pipeline report would have made the Broken Pipeline effort more convincing--to me, at least. In its present form, this report strikes me as simply asking for more money to prop up a broken biomedical research system, with twelve talented young researchers used in much the way some charities use children with cancer to extract money from donors. Perhaps it's time for a more radical change than just throwing more money into the same system. Sure, more money is clearly needed, but without systemic changes, how do we know we won't be in the same situation five years from now?

Read the whole thing.