purepedantry | May 16, 2007No, this is not like voodoo prediction where they will know what will happen 12 years hence.
All of us, however, are capable in degrees of predicting what is going to happen over short time scales. This predicition falls into two general categories. First, we can predict the behavior of inaminate objects such as knowing how a ball will flight when we hit it just-so with a bat. That implies that we understand how physics work on some inituitive level.
Second, we can understand how animate objects such as people behave. For example, if I see someone removing objects from a container…
purepedantry | May 16, 2007You remember how in The Day After Tomorrow global warming leads to a shutdown of the Gulf Stream and catastrophic cooling of Europe. (This would be before the scene where the cold chases the kid down the hallway of the New York Public Library.) Well, just in case you didn't know, that isn't going to happen:
The idea, which held climate theorists in its icy grip for years, was that the North Atlantic Current, an extension of the Gulf Stream that cuts northeast across the Atlantic Ocean to bathe the high latitudes of Europe with warmish equatorial water, could shut down in a greenhouse world…
purepedantry | May 15, 2007Paul Rubin has an editorial in the Washington Post about how evolution may result in a proclivity towards economic and social conflict:
Conflict was common in the environment in which humans evolved. As primates, which are a very social order, our ancestors lived in relatively small groups in which everyone knew everyone else. Our minds are adapted to deal with populations of that size. Our ancestors made strong distinctions between members of the in-group and outsiders, and we still make such distinctions today -- social psychologists can create in-group and out-group feelings based on…
purepedantry | May 14, 2007Science has an article this week (sadly behind a subscription wall) about a rare disease called Mobius syndrome. Mobius syndrome is a developmental disorder of facial muscle innervation with a variety of presentations; however, the presentation often includes facial paralysis and difficulty in smiling:
The syndrome is named for Paul Julius Mobius, a German neurologist who published an early description of it in 1888. (He was also the grandson of August Ferdinand Mobius, the mathematician of Mobius strip fame.) According to a statement developed at the conference, the syndrome's defining…
purepedantry | May 10, 2007The NYTimes ran an excerpt of a book called Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss -- and the Myths and Realities of Dieting by Gina Kolata. Having read the excerpt -- I haven't read the whole book -- I take issue with how Kolata frames the issue of the genetics of obesity.
My problem with most articles and books discussing genetics -- particularly with respect to behavior -- is that they don't emphasize the concept of an environmental X genetic interaction in determining outcome. It's either all genetics or all environment.
Before, I talk about the genetics of obesity and the…
purepedantry | May 8, 2007Less than a week after I had to correct myself on autism and face perception, I read another article on the subject that has me skeptical.
Let's see if we can apply what we learned before. The conclusions from my earlier piece were a couple: 1) people with autism do not seem to possess a global deficit in face perception although they may evaluate faces differently and 2) the evidence with respect to fMRI is mixed.
Here is the new work (unfortunately not available as a paper yet):
In a report to be presented May 5 at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Seatlle, researchers…
purepedantry | May 8, 2007Call me a self-centered, but I thought that the school voucher wars were an exclusively American issue. I guess not. The Economist summarizes voucher programs in other countries. Apparently several have met with a great deal of success. Money quote:
Harry Patrinos, an education economist at the World Bank, cites a Colombian programme to broaden access to secondary schooling, known as PACES, a 1990s initiative that provided over 125,000 poor children with vouchers worth around half the cost of private secondary school. Crucially, there were more applicants than vouchers. The programme,…
purepedantry | May 7, 2007I know some of the others (among them Jason) have talked about this, but I thought I would mention it. The May 4th issue of Cell has an article by Laura Bonetta about scientific blogging. Money quote:
The concept of scientists reaching out to a lay audience is not new. "Scientists are an opinionated bunch and they have given their thoughts on discoveries or events by speaking with journalists, writing letters to journals, authoring commentaries," says Matthew C. Nisbet, a professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington DC. "Blogs provide a lot more of that…
purepedantry | May 7, 2007The Economist has an interesting article about reforming academia in Europe to make it more transparent and competitive. Resistance is to be expected. Money quote:
Unleashing universities' "full potential", and "mobilising the brainpower of Europe" are at the heart of the commission's plans to create a knowledge-based European economy. And change is indeed coming -- but by accident. The trigger is a modest but worthy scheme called the Bologna process, which is designed to make it easier to compare courses between countries, and to move between them. So a Belgian student who spends a year in…
purepedantry | May 3, 2007Oops:
Children here got more than they bargained for when they tuned in to "Handy Manny" on the Disney Channel this week -- hard-core pornography.
Cable giant Comcast is investigating how the porn was broadcast during the popular cartoon, which is about a bilingual handyman, Manny Garcia, and his talking tools.
Customer Paul Dunleavy was stunned Tuesday morning to find his 5-year-old son watching the broadcast.
"It was two people doing their thing; it was full-on and it was disgusting," the father of three told The New York Daily News.
Well, I guess Manny really is Handy...
(Sorry, the joke…
purepedantry | May 3, 2007Just to show that I have way too much time on my hands, I went last night and collected the best science themed music videos that I could find on YouTube. Feel free to suggest more if I missed some.
1) Weird Science by Oingo Boingo...classic...so classic...
I don't think I had ever seen this video; I've seen the movie, just not the video. Seems like they filmed it in some strange sweat shop with huge rotating gears pushed by women with feathered hair -- all very scientific. In fact, my lab looks exactly like that. And don't forget the mannequins. No science can be conducted without…
purepedantry | May 2, 2007The Freakonomics guys have a simply hysterical article in the New York Times magazine about monkey economics. The article discusses how monkeys possess the mental apparatus for economic valuation including the use of money. They train the monkeys to use silver tokens as currency to trade for food, and then they show that the monkeys behave very similarly to humans in a variety of situations. Money quote:
The capuchin is a New World monkey, brown and cute, the size of a scrawny year-old human baby plus a long tail. ''The capuchin has a small brain, and it's pretty much focused on food and…
purepedantry | May 2, 2007The Great Global Warming Swindle was a documentary that aired in March on UK TV organized by Martin Durkin of Wag TV. The documentary purports to debunk several of the claims made by climate scientists on global warming. (Just to be clear I have not seen this documentary.)
Anyway, Roger Pielke notes that several scientists and activists have issued an open letter to the Martin Durkin protesting his distribution of the film over DVD:
We do not dispute your right to make a programme that includes different opinions about climate change. We are not seeking the censorship of differing…
purepedantry | May 1, 2007I live in Manhattan, and it has always been a source of fascination how prices got so exorbidant. While I am somewhat protected from market forces -- I live in school-subsidized housing -- even with the help I have a room only slightly wider than my mattress and a shower just about big enough to stand sideways in.
Anyway, Free Exchange had this great post on why is so ridiculous here in Manhattan:
The problem, after all, is just as pronounced in New York's the rental market. The current vacancy rate for apartments in Manhattan is less than 1%. Rents of several thousand dollars a month for…
purepedantry | May 1, 2007Earlier this week in the post Neurological "Personhood," I made a comment about individuals with autism. My comment was as follows:
1) Some individuals do not show normal development in the system of identifying personhood described. For example, individuals with autism sometimes show deficits in this area. What does the fact that this system is not universal say about ethical behavior? Clearly, many autistic people are still getting there, but they must be getting to ethical behavior by some other route.
I realized later on that I was not being particularly clear about where I was going…
purepedantry | April 30, 2007Want to know when to use Standard Deviation (SD) as opposed to Standard Error (SE) or a Confidence Interval (CI)? Then you should read this really useful paper in JCB about error bars in scientific papers. Here is just a sampling of their useful rules:
Rule 3: error bars and statistics should only be shown for independently repeated experiments, and never for replicates. If a "representative" experiment is shown, it should not have error bars or P values, because in such an experiment, n = 1...
Rule 4: because experimental biologists are usually trying to compare experimental results with…
purepedantry | April 30, 2007If this works, this guy is going to make a bagillion dollars:
By giving ordinary adult mice a drug - a synthetic designed to mimic fat - Salk Institute scientist Dr. Ronald M. Evans is now able to chemically switch on PPAR-d, the master regulator that controls the ability of cells to burn fat. Even when the mice are not active, turning on the chemical switch activates the same fat-burning process that occurs during exercise. The resulting shift in energy balance (calories in, calories burned) makes the mice resistant to weight gain on a high fat diet.
The hope, Dr. Evans told scientists…
purepedantry | April 30, 2007They didn't need to go out and make artificial snot. It's allergy season...I got plenty for them right here:
Researchers at The University of Warwick and Leicester University have used an artificial snot (nasal mucus) to significantly enhance the performance of electronic noses.
The researchers have coated the sensors used by odour sensing "electronic noses" with a mix of polymers that mimics the action of the mucus in the natural nose. This greatly improves the performance of the electronic devices allowing them to pick out a more diverse range of smells.
A natural nose uses over 100…
purepedantry | April 27, 2007I had the great pleasure of working in labs as an undergrad. Most of my classmates now did as well. Part of the good experience was the ability to really narrow down what type of science I was most interested in; part of it was the more mercenary goal of getting the experience that was necessary to get into graduate school.
Anyway, Science has just published a large survey of undergraduate researchers including their demographic characteristics along with what they are looking for in research (sadly it is behind a subscription wall). Particularly, the survey looks at what factors in…
purepedantry | April 27, 2007Ronald Bailey at Reason reviews an interesting article in the American Journal of Bioethics by Martha Farah and Andrea Heberlein and the responses to it. Farah and Heberlein argue that while an innate system for the detection of personhood exists in the human brain, it is so prone to being fooled by clearly non-person objects that it suggests that no reasonable standard for personhood can exist. Many commenters took issue with that argument.
Money quote:
Farah and Heberlein contend that the personhood brain network evolved because as an intensely social species, our ancestors' survival was…