Free Thought
jdupuis | March 20, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, is from June 22, 2008.
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This is a book with a profoundly split personality. It's like two books warring in the bosom of one volume. It's a bit…
dgreen | March 18, 2011Jack Hassard wishes us well (and tasks us with being as provocative as we can) in his blog named after his book, The Art of Teaching Science (Oxford, 2004). Summarizing his own approach to science education, he credits Jacob Bronowski as his main inspiration, especially his belief that reasoning and imagination work closely together. Hassard quotes Bronowski at perhaps his most provocative: "You may have been told, you may still have the feeling that E=mc2 is not an imaginative statement. If so, you are mistaken."
Georgia Tech's Mark Guzdial, in his Computing Education blog, takes exception…
tlambert | March 8, 2011With Donald Roberts about to give testimony before Congress it is instructive to look at his Senate testimony on October 6, 2004.
Just as the use of DDT in house spraying brought spectacular reductions in malaria,
declining use of house spraying brought spectacular increases in malaria. ... Data from Asian countries show similar
relationships. Figures 2-5 contrast malaria rates in recent years with the years when DDT was
used. The data represent annual parasite indexes (a population-based index of malaria
prevalence) during the period from 1995-99 compared with identical data from 1965-69.…
mikethemadbiologist | March 4, 2011The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) recently announced that it will shut down the Short Read Archive (SRA). The SRA stored the semi-processed data for genomics projects, so researchers could examine the raw data for a genomics project. The reason given by NCBI is "budget constraints." While I'm saddened by this, I'm not surprised, since the volume of data produced by a single genome center is tremendous, to the point where the storage and data upload are prohibitive:
when several centers were collaborating to test new sequencing technologies, the data were so large,…
mspringer | February 27, 2011Here is a picture of the earth, with latitude and longitude lines in ten-degree increments:
Despite the fact that each vaguely rectangular area formed by the intersection of those lines forms a 10 degree by 10 degree region, the actual square-mile area of each rectangle varies. The ones near the poles are smaller than the ones near the equator. It turns out that the area of a little square patch of land with sides given by some fixed interval of latitude and longitude will be proportional to cos(φ), where φ is the latitude. (NB: for those who're used to seeing sin(φ) in their spherical area…
mikethemadbiologist | February 23, 2011
Matthew Yglesias writes regarding Moore's Law, which states that CPU transistor counts double every two years:
My pet notion is that improvements in computer power have been, in some sense, come along at an un-optimally rapid pace. To actually think up smart new ways to deploy new technology, then persuade some other people to listen to you, then implement the change, then have the competitive advantage this gives you play out in the form of increased market share takes time. The underlying technology is changing so rapidly that it may not be fully worthwhile to spend a lot of time thinking…
oracknows | February 21, 2011Why haven't we cured cancer yet?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we cure cancer?
If we can harness the atom, why can't we cure cancer?
How many times have you heard these questions, or variants thereof? How many times have you asked this question yourself? Sometimes, I even ask this question myself. Saturday was the two year anniversary of the death of my mother-in-law from a particularly nasty form of breast cancer, and, even though I am a breast cancer surgeon, I still wonder why there was nothing in the armamentarium of science-based medicine that could save her from a several…
drorzel | February 20, 2011
What Watson Can Learn From the Human Brain | Wired Science | Wired.com
"Watson won. That set of microchips will soon join the pantheon of machines that have defeated humans, from the steam-powered hammer that killed John Henry to the Deep Blue supercomputer that battled Kasparov. Predictably enough, the victory inspired a chorus of "computer overlord" anxieties, as people used the victory of microchips to proclaim the decline of the human mind, or at least the coming of the singularity.
Personally, I was a little turned off by the whole event -- it felt like a big marketing campaign for IBM…
hrynyshyn | February 17, 2011Media outlets both main and sidestream are abuzz (atwitter?) with the story that scientists are finally daring to link specific weather events with anthropogenic climate change. A pair of papers in Nature are to blame. One, Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes, concludes that the titular events "have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of data-covered parts of Northern Hemisphere land areas." The other manages to summarize the whole thing in its tile: "Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to…
mikethemadbiologist | February 13, 2011Links for you. Science:
Women "computers" of World War II (great post, but no reason to put computers in quotes--at the time, computing was a full-time job)Opposing industrial-scale pig farming -- in EuropeOne database to hold them allAnglerfish: Lophius piscatoriusRavens stressed by 'gang life'
Other:
New Video Shows Planned Parenthood Employees Doing Their JobAdbusters: The left built Huffington, and we can tear it down tooSpeculation is the main driver behind higher world food prices - the evidence is there in the dataThe Wrong Crisis: The FCIC forgets the housing bubbleTyler Cowen and "…
drorzel | January 29, 2011
The 'scandal' of the kilogram (Blog) - physicsworld.com
"That's the name of the game in metrology these days - finding a way of defining mass without just resorting embarrassingly, as we do now, to a lump of metal in the basement of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) outside Paris and saying "that's a kilogram". After all, periodic inspections of the lump have shown it's been changing its mass slowly over time. As laser physicist Bill Phillips from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) told delegates during one question-and-answer session on Monday, "…
mikethemadbiologist | January 26, 2011Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays this blogger from links. Science:
Leapin' BlenniesScience Online 2011: Even when we want something, we need to hide it.CloVR: A genomics tool for automated and portable sequence analysis using Virtual Machines and Cloud computingSolar car speed record smashed
Other:
The Blue Collar LifeBeacon Hill: It's Time for 2 + 2The Data Shows that State "Beggar Thy Neighbor" Policies Don't Work.NYT: "You Think Houses Are a Slow Sell? Try a Yacht" (the last sentence is brilliant)Mass Supreme Court to Consider Whether Buyers Out of Faulty…
jdupuis | January 24, 2011The Chicago Way: A respected style manual advises scholars against open access
To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test
Tenure and all that
Arsenic, cold fusion and the legitimacy of online critique
Teen's Bubble Ball game tops iTunes free app chart (used library book to learn programming)
The Invisible Computer Lab
Academic Boredom
How I Think About E-Books
45% Of Students Don't Learn Much In College
My Students Know Far Less Than I Ever Expected
Blogging with the Invisible Community - and Why It Matters
On building a better blogosphere
The Cowbell of Communications
Social Media,…
drorzel | January 17, 2011
Drug experiment - The Boston Globe
"[N]early a decade later, there's evidence that Portugal's great drug experiment not only didn't blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon's troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment and,…
drorzel | January 13, 2011
Pimp My Novel: Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity
"The sample sizes aren't quite identical yet, folks (232 votes this round compared to 342 last round), but currently 54% of those of you who responded own an e-reader, as opposed to only 42% in June 2010. Granted, this is an entirely unscientific survey, but it seems to me that e-reading is on the rise. Not that we couldn't have guessed this already.
Speaking of e-books, I thought I'd take a moment to rehash the two primary ways they're sold: via either the agency model or the wholesale model. How does this affect you?"
(tags: publishing…
drorzel | January 12, 2011Another response copied/adapted from the Physics Stack Exchange. The question was:
What are the main practical applications that a Bose-Einstein condensate can have?
Bose Einstein Condensation, for those who aren't familiar with it, is a phenomenon where a gas of particles with the right spin properties cooled to a very low temeprature will suddenly "condense" into a state where all of the atoms in the sample occupy the same quantum wavefunction. This is not the same as cooling everything to absolute zero, where you would also have everything in the lowest energy state-- at the temperatures…
jdupuis | January 9, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This post, from April 4, 2009, covered two books:
Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow
Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why It's Still Broken by…
drorzel | January 9, 2011
Graphic Stories for your Hugo 2011 Nomination Consideration | Tor.com | Science fiction and fantasy | Blog posts
"As I noted the last time around, there seems to be a trend for Hugo nominators to stay comfortably inside their reading boxes--comics by folks already famous in other corners of SFF, like Neil Gaiman or Paul Cornell, or easily accessible webcomics that deal with comfortable tropes. (Which is not to say that Girl Genius wasn't a deserving winner; just that it's been two years in a row, now.) Compare the Eisner Awards with the Hugo for Graphic Story and there are startling…
sb admin | January 7, 2011As part of his Gene Week celebration over at Forbes, Matthew Herper has a provocative post titled "Why you can't have your $1000 genome". In this post I'll explain why, while Herper's pessimism is absolutely justified for genomes produced in a medical setting, I'm confident that I'll be obtaining my own near-$1000 genome in the not-too-distant future.
Matt's underlying argument is that while sequencing costs will continue to drop, obtaining a complete genome sequence that is sufficiently accurate for medical interpretation will require additional expenses (increased sequence coverage to…
dgmacarthur | January 7, 2011As part of his Gene Week celebration over at Forbes, Matthew Herper has a provocative post titled "Why you can't have your $1000 genome". In this post I'll explain why, while Herper's pessimism is absolutely justified for genomes produced in a medical setting, I'm confident that I'll be obtaining my own near-$1000 genome in the not-too-distant future.
Matt's underlying argument is that while sequencing costs will continue to drop, obtaining a complete genome sequence that is sufficiently accurate for medical interpretation will require additional expenses (increased sequence coverage to…