Free Thought
clock | July 17, 2007ASIS&T 2008 meeting - Joining Research and Practice: Social Computing and Information Science will be held in Milwaukee on October 19-24, 2007. The Program is now available online and it is very exciting. Especially this session ;-)
mixingmemory | July 12, 2007So far we've been talking about different distributions and their parameters. If we're looking at a population with known parameters, then we're going to be dealing with either a normal distribution or a standardized normal distribution (Post I and II). If we're dealing with samples, we're going to use either the sampling distribution of means, if the population parameters are known, or more often, the t-distribution if they're not (post III). Normal and standardized distributions allow us to determine the probability associated with a particular value of a variable in a population, and thus…
mixingmemory | July 8, 2007Before we start in on new stuff, let's recap what we've covered so far. We started with the Central Limit Theorem, which tells us that if a bunch of random variables go into determining the values of yet another variable, then the values of that variable will approximate a normal distribution. The normal distribution is great because the measures of central tendency -- the mean, median, and mode -- converge, and because the measures of spread (variance and standard deviation) can be associated with specific probabilities (derived from the area under the curve in the distribution).
Then we…
mixingmemory | June 29, 2007So here's the first post on statistics. If you know the basics, and I suspect most of you do, then you can just ignore these posts (unless you want to check to make sure I'm getting it right). If you don't know the basics, then hopefully you will when I'm done. Even for those of you who've never taken a stats class, much of this will probably be familiar, but I'm going to start from the assumption that I'm writing for someone who has no knowledge of statistics whatsoever, so bear with me. Alright, let's begin.
The Normal Distribution
In cognitive psychology, two related types of statistics…
clock | June 29, 2007The Newest Artificial Intelligence Computing Tool: People:
A USC Information Sciences Institute researcher thinks she has found a new source of artificial intelligence computing power to solve difficult IT problems of information classification, reliability, and meaning. That tool, according to ISI computer scientist Kristina Lerman, is people, human intelligence at work on the social web, the network of blogs, bookmark, photo and video- sharing sites, and other meeting places now involving hundreds of thousands of individuals daily, recording observations and sharing opinions and information…
drorzel | June 28, 2007I'm going to drop back a bit, and steal an idea from Doug Natelson, who posted about Grand Challenges in condensed matter physics almost two weeks ago. This was prompted by a report from the National Research Council listing such challenges, including things like "How do complex phenomena emerge from simple ingredients?" and "How will the energy demands of future generations be met?" They're certainly grand, and challenging.
So, the question for the audience is:
What are the Grand Challenges in your own field?
If you're a scientist, what are the big questions that need to be answered in your…
developingintelligence | June 26, 2007The best from recent cognitive/brain blogs:
Suspect someone's lying to you? Ask for the story in reverse order. Psyblog also has some suggestions.
A sober look at mind-reading fMRI pattern classification techniques over at Mind Hacks.
Nabokovian reviews a new computational model of short term memory, using a recurrent network.
What's all the hooplah about embodied cognition? Why do some believe that bodies in particular are important for mind? MoaP explains a new spin on the classic mind-body "problem."
The Reasoner: a monthly digest of new research on research in cognitive science,…
bcohen | June 25, 2007The World's Fair sits down with Nanotechnology Scholar Cyrus C. M. Mody to discuss the history, ethics, and policy world of nanotechnology. And other stuff.
Mody is a Science and Technology Studies guy, and now a member of the Department of History at Rice University. He is a leading light in science studies and/of nanotechnology; his work has appeared in numerous professional journals (see end of this post for a select bibliography); he is a sometime participant at nanotechnology and microscopy meetings (his earlier work was on the recent history of probe microscopy); and, of course, he is…
apalazzo | June 23, 2007I was watching Science Saturday, over at bloggingheads.tv, where Horgan & Johnson were talking about the origin of life and RNA (among other things). Also mentioned was Robert Shapiro's article in Scientific American. Shapiro is an advocate of the cell first theory, which I have to say that I don't really get. How would that work? How would this entity self-perpetuate and evolve.
Another item at Science Saturday was a link to this article in the Economist on how RNA research is where all the action is ... from the article:
It is probably no exaggeration to say that biology is now…
drorzel | June 18, 2007Lots of people are down on physics or physicists these days:
Cosma Shalizi is down on power-law fits, or, more precisely, annoyed at people who misuse power-law distributions. He's written a paper about how to use them correctly, and provides a handy list of take-home points on his blog.
Travis Hime is down on the academic job market, and cities that aren't San Francisco. I think he's a little too harsh on academia, but then it's well established that I'm an optimist with a rosy outlook on these matters. I can't help with the Bay Area thing.
Dave Bacon has gotten so down about quantum…
cortex | June 13, 2007Felice Frankel is a model of consilience:
When people call Felice Frankel an artist, she winces.
In the first place, the photographs she makes don't sell. She knows this, she says, because after she received a Guggenheim grant in 1995, she started taking her work to galleries. "Nobody wanted to bother looking," she said.
In the second place, her images are not full of emotion or ideology or any other kind of message. As she says, "My stuff is about phenomena."
As first an artist in residence and now a research scientist at M.I.T., and now also a senior research fellow at the Institute for…
drorzel | June 4, 2007Once again, physics news stories are piling up in my RSS reader, so here's a collection of recent stuff:
My old group at NIST has done cool things with Bose-Eisntein condensates in an optical lattice. They load atoms into a regular array of sites, and then split each site into a double well, which is a classic test system for quantum theories. This is cool not only because it was done by people I know, but also because it's really similar to work that I did as a post-doc.
A French group has made a single electron source, that produces, well, single electrons more or less on demand. Like…
developingintelligence | June 4, 2007Suppose that one day your computer's hard drive stops working, but everything else about the machine is fine. Your friend has an identical computer in which the hard drive works fine, but the keyboard suddenly stopped working. Based on this "double dissociation" between the two different problems, can you safely assume that the "hard drive system" and the "keyboard system" rely on distinct underlying mechanisms?
For years, cognitive neuropsychologists have felt safe in making equivalent assumptions about brain damage. If one type of damage leads to difficulty on task A, but not task B, and…
clock | June 4, 2007Graduate of the University of Belgrade (Serbia), City University (UK) and UNC-Chapel Hill (USA), with a Masters from University of Belgrade, Danica Radovanovic is currently in Belgrade without a job and she is looking for one either in Serbia, in Western/Northern Europe or in the USA.
Danica is the tireless Serbian pioneer in all things online: blogging, open source, Linux, science blogging, open science, social networking software, online publishing, eZine editing, etc. She is the force behind putting Serbian science online and making it open. She has done research on Internet use in…
goodmath | June 1, 2007All week, I've been buried by a wave of requests to write about LOLCODE today. Normally, I do try to honor requests from readers, but from the time I started my friday pathological languages, I've always tried to stick to languages that actually had *something* interesting about their semantics. LOLCODE is funny because of its goofy grammar; but it's really incredibly dull semantically. And while there are lots of programs written in it,
there's no implementation (at least not yet).
Anyway, what I decided to do instead is a twistedly beautiful language called [Sortle][sortle]. Sortle is a…
sporte | May 27, 2007An introduction to our Alaskan NSF Chautauqua course and a pre-course assignment.
I don't know how well this will work, but I thought it might be interesting this year to experiment with blogging about our course and sharing some of our experiences with the rest of the world. Here's your chance readers, if you'd like to do some of the assignments, you are very welcome to follow along and give it a try.
tags: plants, Alaska, NSF Chautauqua courses, bioinformatics, sequence analysis, evolution, wound inducible genes, moose
I'm not likely to get all the assignments or course info posted on-…
oracknows | May 25, 2007I've been meaning to go through the recent meta-analysis of Avandia published by the New England Journal of Medicine that purported to show major increase in the risk for cardiac events (myocardial infarctions and cardiac death) in patients who use Avandia, but somehow never got around to it. I'm not sure I need to now, given how, via Kevin, MD, I've found this rant byThe Angry Pharmacist, who has looked over the meta-analysis and found that there is considerably less there than meets the eye and that the value of the study is considerably different than what has been reported in the press.…
clock | May 21, 2007First, I tentatively reserved a spot for myself for the Science Foo Camp on August 3-5, 2008 in Mountain View, CA.
Then, there is nothing for a long time, then three conferences I want to go to, and for all three I have some degree of negotiations about presenting about Open Science or science blogging or in some way being involved, and all three are almost simultaneous:
ConvergeSouth 2007 in October 19-20, 2007, in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The 2007 Microsoft eScience Workshop at RENCI at the Friday Center in Chapel Hill, NC on October 21-23, 2007
ASIS&T: Joining Research and Practice…
clock | May 19, 2007Chapel Hill is really becoming a big center for bringing together scientists (of which there are so many in the area) and techonology innovators (of which there are also many in the area). Not just the Science Blogging Conference, either!
Renaissance Computing Institute and Microsoft are organizing The 2007 Microsoft eScience Workshop at RENCI at Friday Center in Chapel Hill, on October 21-23, 2007:
It is no longer possible to do science without doing computing.
The use of computers creates many challenges as it expands the realm of the possible in scientific research and many of these…
j7uy5 | May 14, 2007
From CNN Money:
href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/">Microsoft
takes on the free worldMicrosoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a
big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants
royalties from distributors and users. Users like you, maybe.
Fortune's Roger Parloff reports.
FORTUNE Magazine
By Roger Parloff, Fortune senior editor
May 13 2007: 1:06 PM EDTFree
software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often
high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and
then copied at…