Links for 2010-07-23

"Say you're unemployed and you decide to work your tail off to land a new job, so you send out 40 résumés a week. Half of the companies might decide to do a credit-check before getting back to you. This sets off alarm-bells at the credit-rating agencies. Twenty credit-checks in one week? There goes your credit score. And there goes your hope of landing a new job.

This is what the use of credit scoring in employment decisions means: Looking for a job disqualifies you from being hired."

"I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower."

Henri Poincare, eat your heart out: "In the journal Review of Scientific Instruments, which is published by the American Institute of Physics, researchers report on a new way to accurately synchronize clocks. The new method uses both GPS and the Internet to set clocks within 10 nanoseconds of a reference clock located anywhere on Earth."

"Ethan mentions how some speculative theories are not testable, or at least not currently testable. If it isn't testable it really shouldn't be considered a theory at all, but even ignoring that issue, this points toward the idea that there is a spectrum of the quality of a theory as well. Some theories are better than others, because they do a better job of precisely predicting behavior and/or explain a wider range of phenomena. Some very elegant theories are on the "Ruled Out" side of things, because they were the proverbial beautiful theory slain by the ugly fact, but by virtue of being testable, they were still higher quality than some other "theories" that cannot be (easily) checked. Phlogiston was a better-constructed theory than Brontosauruses being thin at one end, thicker in the middle, and thinner again at the other end, even though the former is ruled out and the latter is true except for a naming issue. "

"This particular post serves a double purpose: highlighting an important event in the history of physics and highlighting an important moment of my personal interest in said history!

The event in question is the publication of a letter in the Physical Review in 1937, "Visible radiation produced by electrons moving in a medium with velocities exceeding that of light," by P.A. Cerenkov. This was the first English paper published on the observation of what is now known as Cerenkov radiation, a discovery that has found numerous applications and made its discoverer a co-winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics."

"The goal of Reach for the Stars is to train graduate students in communicating their complex research to people of all ages and to bring computational thinking into the K-12 classroom.

"The idea is to couple a fellow and a teacher with each pair becoming a critical ingredient for making a successful program," said Vicky Kalogera, professor of physics and astronomy... "Fellows and teachers will work closely all school year to develop lesson plans for the classroom that integrate computational thinking and scientific inquiry-based learning."

Each fellow will spend an average of 10 to 15 hours per week at his or her school. Guided by the fellows, students will learn how to draft questions and search for answers and how to use online computational research tools while working on various projects. In addition to teaching, fellows will meet regularly with teachers to compare best practices and develop curricula that introduce students to the research process."

A plot classifying astronomers based on publications and Google search results. You can tell it's an astronomy figure because 1) it's a log-log plot, and 2) one of the axes is backwards.

"[E]ditors do the things for text that designers did for visual products. They standardize rules; they enforce consistency; they provide the key for the map; they make things right.

And yet, in recent years, they've seemed expendable, perhaps because they were still around. Now, though, they're disappearing. Text goes online with less editing than it would have ever gone into magazines or newspaper. More and more of us writers are working without their services. More and more people are writing without ever having being edited. Maybe now people will realize what editors did: their presence will be felt in their absence. "

"The real metric for seeing if [the iPhone antenna] is a "flaw" is to do a proper analysis of performance and the analysis, for the most part, was absolute crap. Most of it concentrated on how much the signal dropped when you held the phone the "wrong" way, and went no further. BFD. That's a science fair project. When you attenuate a signal, it goes down. When you short out an antenna (or at least change the capacitance or change the resistance of it, whatever was actually happening), you will lose signal. What the analyses lacked is any sort of context for these numbers, and while careful data-taking is important, the real tough part about science is in proper interpretation -- figuring out what the data mean. And few of the stories did that. Diminished signal is not proper context, because all phones do that when you cover the antenna. All that these numbers show is that the phone works better when you don't cover the antenna. Confirming this is not going to get you to Sweden. "