culture of science
ddobbs | November 5, 2009
By way of demonstration, the group plugged in stats from the Oct. 11 playoff game between the Angels and the Red Sox:
BOSTON -- Things looked bleak for the Angels when they trailed by two runs in the ninth inning, but Los Angeles recovered thanks to a key single from Vladimir Guerrero to pull out a 7-6 victory over the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday.
Guerrero drove in two Angels runners. He went 2-4 at the plate.
via mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker
ddobbs | November 4, 2009
Just heard of a neat article about why feeling stupid on a regular basis is actually a good sign if you're doing serious scientific research. The article is by a fellow named Martin Schwartz, a professor of microbiology and biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia, and it was published in April of 2008 in The Journal of Cell Science. Here's an excerpt:
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it…
jdupuis | October 27, 2009The September Communications of the ACM has a provocative article by Peter J. Denning and Paul S. Rosenbloom, Computing: the fourth great domain of science (OA version). It's well written and persuasive, certainly worth reading the whole thing.
Science has a long-standing tradition of grouping fields into three categories: the physical, life, and social sciences. The physical sciences focus on physical phenomena, especially materials, energy, electromagnetism, gravity, motion, and quantum effects. The life sciences focus on living things, especially species, metabolism, reproduction, and…
jdupuis | October 25, 2009Registration for Science Online 2010 is open. The conference web site is here and program info is here.
Time is running out. There are currently about 175 registered and the organizers are going to cap it at 250.
I've attended the conference for the past two years and it's a blast. I really enjoyed the sessions as well as the informal times between sessions, at the meals and in the bar.
I've registered already, as has my son, Sam, who's in grade 11. He attended last year and also had a great time. Bora even interviewed him!
There's been a good tradition of librarians attending the…
jdupuis | October 23, 2009TVOntario has produced a very fine documentary based on the life of geometer Donald Coxeter, who lived in Toronto and worked at the University of Toronto for many years. It's called The Man Who Saved Geometry and is based on the book by Siobhan Roberts, King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry.
Two York profs are interviewed in the documentary, Asia Ivic Weiss and Walter Whiteley.
I reviewed Roberts' book a few years ago, here, where you can read about my own minor role in the Coxeter story.
jdupuis | October 20, 2009A few weeks ago Bill Gasarch published his Journal Manifesto 2.0 on the Computational Complexity blog.
Basically, his idea was to start a scholarly publishing revolution from the inside:
Keep in mind: I am NOT talking to the NSF or to Journal publishes or to Conference organizers. I am NOT going to say what any of these people should do. I am talking to US, the authors of papers. If WE all follow this manifesto then the problems of high priced journals and limited access may partially go away on their own. To be briefer: To the extend that WE are the problem, WE can be the solution.
It's a…
jdupuis | October 19, 2009As I mentioned in my previous post, I did a little Q&A about the new outsourcing arrangement that CISTI has negotiated with Infotrieve.
Q1. What's the effect on jobs at CISTI from this move?
As you may know, NRC-CISTI is transforming itself to be well positioned to serve the needs of Canadian knowledge workers now and in the future. This transformation is a major undertaking for the organization and will require a significant transition for NRC-CISTI's workforce.
NRC is working to mitigate the effect on employees by seeking to place as many of the affected employees as possible within…
jdupuis | October 19, 2009Such is the subject line of an email I got from the NRC-CISTI people last week. NRC-CISTI is Canada's National Research Council -- Canada Institute of Scientific and Technical Informamtion. In other words, Canada's national science library. Many of you probably know them for their document delivery service.
The basic message is that the document delivery service has been outsourced to a US company:
NRC-CISTI, Canada's national science library is changing and we are energized by the possibilities as we move forward in the transformation process announced in February 2009.
Today, we are…
ddobbs | October 14, 2009 "The Brite Nightgown," from Donald Fagen's First And Only Solo Tour (2006) -
Dana Blankenhorn, who brings a distinctive mix of skepticism, intelligence, and gruff impatience to his flu coverage, digests some unsettling stats from the JAMA articles. Some of his highlights:
* Health care workers get little protection from fancy masks. Workers given ordinary medical masks had a nearly 1 in 4 chance of getting the disease. The same for those given fancy N95 fitted masks. Many medical workers have been resisting getting the shot.
* Hospitals must be prepared for extraordinary burdens in…
jdupuis | October 13, 2009I rarely mention here when Walt Crawford publishes a new issue of his very fine ejournal Cites & Insights, mostly because I sort of assume you all read it already.
Of course, that's probably not true so I'll remedy the situation partially with this post.
The most recent issue is completely (html) devoted to giving a selective overview of the last year or so's (mostly) blogospheric writing on open access -- think of it as a detailed review article from a volume of an annual review series. The emphasis is on covering important developments and interesting controversies. I was familiar…
ddobbs | October 11, 2009Charlie Houston, right, in 1936 with Pasang Kikuli (center) and British climbing legend Bill Tilman
I used to do a bit of climbing and a lot of climbing reading -- a deep and rich literature.
If you read much about American climbing history, you'll read about Charlie Houston, who made one of the most dramatic and tragic attempts at K2 in 1953, pioneered the modern study of high-altitude physiology, practiced and taught medicine for decades, and at one point ran the Peace Corp. Amazing man. He was one of many physicians and scientists who have loved climbing and made huge contributions in…
ddobbs | October 5, 2009Never know what'll top the charts. Top post was a post I put up in January, "Pfizer takes $2.3 billion offl-label marketing fine." That post reported the news (via FiercePharma) that Pfizer had tucked away in its financial disclosure forms a $2.3 billion charge to end the federal investigation into allegations of off-label promotions of its Cox-2 painkillers, including Bextra. (Lot of money ... but it didn't quite wipe out the company's 2008 net income.) The company had set aside the money as part of a deal it was negotiating Justiice. Finalizing the deal, however, took until September. At…
ddobbs | October 1, 2009
Last week the Times ran a story by Andrew Pollack, Benefit and Doubt in Vaccine Additive, that covered some of the ground I trod in my Slate story, "To Boost or Not to Boost: The United States' swine flu vaccines will leave millions worldwide unprotected. Pollack also had the room to explore something I lacked room for -- the fascinating history of adjuvants, and the strange mystery of how they work.
Like so many things that work in medicine, adjuvants were discovered more or less by accident -- and were in fact a "dirty little secret" in a fairly literal sense. As the Wikipedia entry…
jdupuis | September 30, 2009It's time for the annual Mocking of the Thomson session.
Check out my previous iterations of this amusing pastime: 2002, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008.
Yes, I've been at this for a while, but to no avail. My main point in all this is to make clear that I don't believe that the Nobel prizes are chosen on the basis of citation count. Sure, there's going to be a correlation between the two, but the causation is extremely weak. Thomson's constant hawking of their "Citation Laureates" is, in my opinion, self-serving and wrong-headed.
And yes, they do get them right occasionally, but that's because…
jdupuis | September 24, 2009Predicting the future is tricky business. Trust me, I know.
But there's two ideas I always like to keep in mind when I put my futurologist's hat on:
The future will be at least as diverse as the present, probably more so. But not likely less.
There's no guarantee that things will change for the better. There's also no guarantee that things will change for the worse. The only thing you can be sure of is that it'll be hard to get any agreement on which is which.
These two ideas are closely connected in my mind, compelling me to (hopefully) think realistically and honestly, if not always…
jdupuis | September 21, 2009That's the question asked by Lance Fortnow in a recent Communications of the ACM Viewpoint article (free fulltext).
Fortnow's article continues a discussion about scholarly communication patterns in computer science that's been going on for a while in the "pages" of the CACM. I've blogged about it a couple of times here and here.
Fortnow's main idea is that CS needs to get past the youthful stage of using conferences as the main vehicle for disseminating new ideas and move to a journal-based model, like most of the rest of scientific disciplines. In the end, it's all about peer review:…
ddobbs | September 17, 2009
My latest piece for Slate examines the unsettling consequences of the United States' choice of swine flu vaccines.
The good news about these vaccines is that, to judge by the first vaccine trial results, published last week, they appear to work fast, safely â and at about a half to a quarter of the doses that the CDC expected. This means we effectively have about two to four times as many vaccines as we had figured we would. Since we ordered 195 million doses, we could vaccinate damn near the whole country.
If the fast-tracking efforts continue to work and the flu peaks closer to Christmas…
ddobbs | September 15, 2009OK. Animals first, then everybody else.
(Other) Animals
Want Your Own Dinosaur? Place Your Bids
Jellyfish numbers rise My son and I saw this last year when we were at the EuroScience conference (highly recomennded) in Barcelona (ditto). The beaches had warnings of whole rafts of these. Determined to get wet in the Med, I dipped my toes.
Forget Apple, Here's the Real Snow Leopard
Everybody else
Top soldiers denounce torture.
Earlier Model of Human Brain's Energy Usage Underestimated Its Efficiency Covered heavily, but maybe you missed it.
Alison Bass, whose book "Side Effects" just…
ddobbs | September 14, 2009I regret I can't treat at more, um, length, the following weighty matters:
Size Matters; So Do Lies Nate Silver finds that Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, speaking of the 9/12 tea party rally in DC, " did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long."
Dr. Nobody Again Questions JAMA Disclosure Policies in which Philip Dawdy and Jonathan Leo, a dangerous combination, butt heads with JAMA
Self-Destruct Button, Activiated! Baucus and Conrad decide maybe Joe Wilson had a point after all. Swine Flu Mystery in Healthy Young Puts Focus on Genetics, Deep Inhaling (…
ddobbs | September 11, 2009The ever-valuable Neuroskeptic, channeling Stanley Kowalski ("I knew a girl once said she was the glamorous type. She said to me, 'I am the glamourous type.' I said, 'So what?'"), asks just WTH it means to show that brain scans of earthquake survivors show that "trauma alters brain function."
The authors link their findings to previous work with frankly vague statements such as "The increased regional activity and reduced functional connectivity in frontolimbic and striatal regions occurred in areas known to be important for emotion processing". But anatomically speaking, most of the brain…