purepedantry | May 19, 2008Steven Wiley, writing in the Scientist, discusses the contradiction of the recent fad for "hypothesis-free" research:
Following a recent computational biology meeting, a group of us got together for dinner, during which the subject of our individual research projects came up. After I described my efforts to model signaling pathways, the young scientist next to me shrugged and said that models were of no use to him because he did "discovery-driven research". He then went on to state that discovery-driven research is hypothesis-free, and thus independent of the preexisting bias of traditional…
purepedantry | May 17, 2008Zimbabwe is in the midst of skyrocketing inflation (check out this chart in the Economist), so this story -- while amusing -- is not entirely unexpected:
I had lunch in Mutare yesterday, a town in Zimbabwe on the Mozambique border.
To give you a benchmark -- bread is currently over 110 million a loaf; on 22nd April it was 40 million per loaf.
The lunch bill: soup -- 50 million, oxtail -- 600 million, coffee -- 50 million, with no charge for the pink ice cream.
During the meal, one of my mates was drinking beer -- 750ml bottles of Castle Lager (fondly called bombers). He ordered a fifth one,…
purepedantry | May 16, 2008The WSJ has a fascinating article on the economics of bubbles and why it might be rational to support a bubble until it bursts:
Bubbles often keep inflating despite cautions such as Mr. Greenspan's famous warning of "irrational exuberance." Tech stocks rose for more than three years after he said that, in late 1996. Markus Brunnermeier, 39, thinks he understands why this happens.
Growing up near Munich, Germany, he expected to become a carpenter like his father. A building slump dissuaded him, and after stints in a tax office and the army he enrolled at the University of Regensburg.
He had…
purepedantry | May 16, 2008This is a cool story, but not for the reason the authors are attributing. Researchers at Princeton showed that bacteria can evolve to anticipate future environmental changes. Here is the coverage in Science:
Researchers already know that microbes can mount simple responses to changes in their environment, such as acidity fluctuations, by altering their internal workings. If the changes are regular enough, bacteria can respond ahead of time. But systems biologist Saeed Tavazoie of Princeton University wondered if microbes were capable of more sophisticated reasoning. Could they, for example…
purepedantry | May 14, 2008Two good articles on libertarian politics this week.
First, the Economist covers Freedom House's "How Free?" report on the US:
But the verdict on the Bush years is nevertheless sharp. "How Free?" not only details and condemns the administration's familiar sins, from Guantanamo to extraordinary rendition to warrantless wiretapping. It reminds readers of its aversion to open government. The number of documents classified as secret has jumped from 8.7m in 2001 to 14.2m in 2005 -- a 60% increase over three years. Decade-old information has been reclassified. Researchers report that it is much…
purepedantry | May 14, 2008Not Exactly Rocket Science has a great post showing that sloths in the wild may be slow, but aren't actually that sleepy:
Rattenborg captured three female brown-throated three-toed sloths in the Panamanian rainforest and fitted them with the recording cap, a radio-telemetry collar to reveal their locations and an accelerometer to record their movements. After several days of monitoring, the recorders revealed that the sloths slumbered for only 9.6 hours every day, more than 6 hours less than the data from captive animals would have us believe. REM sleep made up about 20% of total sleep, a…
purepedantry | May 14, 2008Well that is reassuring:
A new University of Alberta study of almost 600 of its graduates (ages 20-29 years old) tracked mental health symptoms in participants for seven years post-graduation and looked at how key events like leaving home and becoming a parent were related to depression and anger. Graduates showed a significant decrease in depressive symptoms over the seven years. Expressed anger also declined over time after graduation, suggesting improved mental health.
The researchers also found that while home may be a haven for young people in the early years of adulthood, the longer…
purepedantry | May 12, 2008Recently, there were a set of posts arguing for different models of the effects of the minimum wage on employment. Megan McArdle argues that perfect competition models of the effects of minimum wage on the labor market implies that increases in the minimum wage will raise unemployment. Kathy G at Crooked Timber disagrees. She argues that a more accurate model of the minimum wage is a monopsony model. Monopsony is the opposite of monopoly meaning that there is one buyer -- in this case one employer. (Feel free to ignore the very bloggeresque sniping.)
Basically the core disagreement seems…
purepedantry | May 9, 2008This is funny. Daniel Drezner, having received the full professor status, lists the benefits:
6) Something better than that stupid f@#%ing pen ceremony. As this site observes, "The scene in the movie A Beautiful Mind in which mathematics professors ritualistically present pens to Nash was completely fabricated in Hollywood. No such custom exists."
In the actual ceremony, colleagues ritualistically present signed and notarized statements in which they confess that they were in error when they labeled your research as "putrid swill" back when you were a post-doc.
...
4) When required to wear…
purepedantry | May 9, 2008Language Log has a fascinating article about creole languages and birdsongs:
Zebra finches are among the songbirds who learn their songs by imitating adults, just as human children learn their language by interaction with those who already know it. Male songbirds raised in isolation, without any conspecific adult models during the critical period for song learning, are handicapped for life: they develop only an ill-organized, infantile "subsong". From the example of abused or feral children like Genie, we know that something similar happens with human children.
In both cases, this raises a…
purepedantry | May 9, 2008We have known for some time that there is a double dissociation (I will define that term in a minute) between location and identification in the visual system. Neuroscientists speak of a "where" pathway that goes from the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe up into the parietal lobe. Lesions to this pathway produce deficits in locating objects in space using vision. There is also a "what" pathway that goes from the primary visual cortex down into the temporal lobe. Lesions to this pathway produce deficits in identifying objects using vision.
We knew that was true for vision, but…
purepedantry | May 8, 2008Stephen Colbert skewers as per usual...
"If we go to smaller cars, soon we'll be just like Europe."
Hat-tip: Greg Mankiw and Tyler Cowen
purepedantry | May 8, 2008Thank you, NYTimes, for clarifying something I have always wondered about: how does running outside compare to running on a treadmill?
A number of studies have shown that in general, outdoor running burns about 5 percent more calories than treadmills do, in part because there is greater wind resistance and no assistance from the treadmill belt. Some studies show, for example, that when adults are allowed to set their own paces on treadmills and on tracks, they move more slowly and with shorter strides when they train on treadmills.
I will say that in my case outside running burns more…
purepedantry | May 8, 2008In honor of Mother's Day, NPR has a great piece on the difficulties of being a modern Mom and delaying having children:
Fertility seems to peak at about age 22, says Marcel Cedars, director of reproductive endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. After that, it gradually declines, and past the age of 35, pregnancy is much harder to achieve.
"Each egg is more likely to be genetically abnormal," Cedars says. "And a genetically abnormal egg is less likely to fertilize, is less likely to develop. It is less likely to implant. If it implants, it is more likely to miscarry."…
purepedantry | May 8, 2008Bryan Caplan writing in the NYTimes suggests that in spite of making no economic sense whatsoever the gas tax holiday might be a good idea as a symbolic gesture:
The first is that the tax holiday is a relatively cheap symbolic gesture that makes truly bad policies less likely. The main causes of high gas prices are probably factors beyond our control, like rapid growth in China and India and low real interest rates. But voters don't want to hear this; they want politicians to "do something!"
During our last big energy crisis, in the 1970s, "something" turned out to be a salad of populist…
purepedantry | May 7, 2008There is an interesting article by Brandon Busteed in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about college drinking. Busteed argues that the problem is not the population that addiction specialists tend to focus on: the really heavy drinkers. Rather the problem is in the much more numerous group of moderate drinkers with infrequent binges:
Despite conventional wisdom, the alcohol problem colleges face is not mainly about high-risk drinkers, and the solution is not about intervening with them alone. If it were, we'd have declared success long ago because we have invested so much time, money, and…
purepedantry | May 5, 2008Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone! Down with that imperialist aggressor Napoleon III! (The painting to the right is Manet's Execution of Maximillian. Supposedly, the chap on the right looks like Napoleon III, in a zinger to his administration which Manet viewed as responsible for Maximillian's death.)
Cosmic Variance has a great post on the physics of chocolate and why it doesn't always solidify the way you want it to:
If you've ever tried to use chocolate in its melted form, you've probably discovered that chocolate has a number of peculiarities that frequently thwart your best culinary…
purepedantry | May 5, 2008A post over at the Scientist blog laments the difficulty in getting people to acknowledge the English-language bias in science:
Many, perhaps most, scientists are grateful that English has become the international language, but an informative protest comes from Prof. Tsuda Yukio of Japan, who has taught in the U.S.
"Today one speaks of globalization. It's really Americanization....the dollar economy and communication in English. Isn't it appropriate to think about egalitarian communication and linguistic equality? .... When I told Americans that the reign of English causes linguistic…