Science
awild | September 8, 2008The much-hyped Encyclopedia of Life has started adding content for the ants, mostly by harvesting photos and text from Antweb. The interface is a little odd, as EoL layers Antweb's up-to-date information over the obsolete ITIS taxonomy, losing taxa whose status has changed over the past decade. We clearly need a centralized taxonomic infrastructure if EoL is going to run smoothly. As it stands, we're still better off just going to Antweb directly.
drorzel | September 8, 2008I gave my talk this morning at the Science in the 21st Century conference. Video will eventually be available at the Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive site, but if you'd like to get a sense of the talk, a few people were live-blogging it in the FriendFeed room for the meeting. You get a pretty accurate impression of the talk from the comments there.
I think it went well. People laughed in the right places, and there was some really good discussion in the question period. I look forward to seeing what it looks like on video. They have a really nice AV set-up here, with two cameras…
ddobbs | September 8, 2008
Hi Readers.
Wanted to clue you in to a couple web pleasures. One is Edge: GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS A Talk By Clay Shirky, in which Shirky talks about how society's "cognitive surplus" -- the time and brain power contained in the free time created by the Industrial Revolution and the 40-hour work week -- has moved from building cultural infrastructure (libraries, democracies, museums) in the 19th century to TV in the post-War 20th century and the Internet (at least for many people) in the 21st century.
The benefit of this last move, Shirky argues, is that the Internet can…
razib | September 7, 2008A quick rebuttal (of sorts) to my post Science is rational; scientists are not:
Peer review and the scientific community is not what distinguishes science from other areas of knowledge. After all history community decides what is good history knowledge, theology community decides what is good theological knowledge and the law community decides what is good law knowledge. Since they have similar process for publication and dissemination of knowledge, why are they not also "a superior method of extracting information about the world"?
What distinguishes science from other fields of knowledge is…
grrlscientist | September 7, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that are or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle bird pals, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will…
rallain | September 6, 2008So, I am still in Alabama because of lack of electricity in Louisiana (although we got power back last night - YAY!). My wife convinced me to go out and hear this band since we are staying at my parents and they said they would watch the kids. In general, I am way too old and crotchety to go out - but it appears I had no choice. Overall, it was not too bad except for staying out too late. (the band was actually pretty good - I think they were called [Fly By Radio](http://www.fly-byradio.com/) and they played 80s musics) The one thing I thought about while in the bar was the long line of…
pontiff | September 4, 2008Is fame and fortune what you seek (or at least fame)? Be a first mover, according to a new paper, arXiv:0809.0522
The first-mover advantage in scientific publication
Authors: M. E. J. Newman
Mathematical models of the scientific citation process predict a strong "first-mover" effect under which the first papers in a field will, essentially regardless of content, receive citations at a rate enormously higher than papers published later. Moreover papers are expected to retain this advantage in perpetuity -- they should receive more citations indefinitely, no matter how many other papers are…
pontiff | September 4, 2008I really need to create a category for blog posts for things which Google's products do which amuse me. Today in reading an email about the National Science Foundation:
Many a faculty member's got NSF, I guess, and are damn sick or writing grants to continue having NSF.
tqa | September 3, 2008
Ozymandias was a piker.
He left us his legs, most of his face, and a clear statement of what he wanted to achieve. When you get right down to it, he's not much of an enigma.
The people who built this left an enigma. Stonehenge was constructed to stand proudly forever, a monument to the greater glory of something, but we don't know what. Their engineering withstood the test of time. They - and their cultures - did not.
Stonehenge stands today, on a plane covered with the barrows of the unknown lords of long forgotten peoples. It reminds us, far more than Shelley's statue ever could,…
catdynamics | September 3, 2008There are three tropical storms in the Atlantic right now, Hanna, Ike and Josephine.
We are coming up on peak hurricane season.
Flow off Africa suggests there may be 2-3 more disturbances coming up behind those, which could develop into tropical storms.
Long range forecasts are generally poor, too many ways in which a small angular deflection of near future trajectories could change long term trajectory drastically, but current projections suggest Hanna will scoot up the east coast, probably as a weak cat 1-2 hurricane, hitting land anywhere between maybe north Florida and North Carolina,…
razib | September 3, 2008Just a small point. I do not believe scientists are particularly rational people as compared to the normal human. Because the average scientist has a higher IQ than the average artist I am willing to grant marginally higher rationality to an average scientist. Their ability to decompose and abstract any given conceptual system is greater. That being said, the contrast between the disciplines of art and science are far greater than those of individual artists and scientists. Why?
Because at the end of the day science does not rely on the rationality of a scientist. It relies on the…
illconsidered | September 3, 2008There has been lots of discussion of this year's arctic sea ice extent. Last year was a shocking 23% lower record breaker. That's 23% lower than the previous record, for which one had to go all the way back to....2005! That's not 23% below the 1979-2001 average, but 23% below the lowest previous measurement! 2005, aside from being the previous record, was also remarkable for being the fourth consecutive year that fell below the trend line. (With a steady decline in noisy data one would expect equal probablities of data points falling above the trend line as below.)
Here is a graph made…
sb admin | September 2, 2008No, this isn't some post-modernist rant on the inherent non-objectivity of science. On the contrary---this is a much simpler, grittier point, that science actually is the most accurate way of describing reality, and because of this, politics (the job of manipulating and controlling group's social reality) and science will always be roommates.
This comes up because we get complaints---regular complaints about science blogging failing to stick to "science". I gotta say that this complaint always seems to come from those who find reality to be a bit too liberal, but maybe that's just my bias…
oracknows | September 2, 2008ResearchBlogging.org, that aggregator for blogging about peer-reviewed scientific research, has been given a makeover and a major overhaul. New features include:
There will be much, much more on our official launch date of September 2, but here is a partial list of new features:
Multiple language support (and 30 new German-language bloggers!)
Topic-specific RSS feeds
Post-by-post tagging with topics and subtopics
"Recover password" feature
Email alerts when there is a problem with posts
Users can flag posts that don't meet our guidelines
Customized user home pages with bios and blog…
rallain | September 2, 2008Here I am, at my parents house. There is no power at my house and Louisiana in September with no power is really a whole bunch of no-fun. But maybe I can use this time to talk about science.
**The Nature of Science**
Here is a review. What is science all about? (I am pretty sure I talked about this before) Science is about making observations and from those observations creating models. If the model predicts other things that are confirmed, then that is good. If not, the model must be changed. Really, it's that simple.
**Hurricane Models**
It is somewhat interesting that forecasting…
drorzel | September 2, 2008This was the last of the experiments that I did for my thesis (it's not the last xenon paper I'm an author on, but the work for that one was done while I was writing up), so my memories of it are bound up with the thesis-writing process.
My favorite story about this stuff was when I gave a talk about this work at NIST-- I don't recall if it was before or after my defense-- and somebody asked the obvious question about how the quantum statistical rules are enforced. That is, how is it that you never get two identical fermions colliding in an s-wave state? Since an s-wave collision is just a…
drorzel | September 2, 2008 This is the last of the five papers that were part of my Ph.D. thesis, and at ten journal pages in length, it's the longest thing I wrote. It was also the longest-running experiment of any of the things I did, with the data being taken over a period of about three years, between and around other experiments. As usual for this series of posts, I can sum up the key result in one graph:
(No spiffy color figure this time, as the experiment never made it onto the old web page, and my original figures are three or four computers ago.)
What we found was that when we prepared samples of metastable…
grrlscientist | September 1, 2008tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that are or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle bird pals, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is published here for your enjoyment. Here's this week's issue of the Birdbooker Report by which lists ecology, environment, natural history and bird books that are (or will…
drorzel | September 1, 2008One week from today, barring anything catastrophic, I will be speaking at the Science in the 21st Century workshop at the Perimeter Institute. Sabine Hossenfelder has a nice run-down of the program at Backreaction, and it sounds really interesting.
I have my talk more or less ready-- I started making slides a week or two ago, because I wasn't sure how long it would take, doing talk prep in between diaper changes and baby feedings. I had hoped to get a couple of colleagues to listen to it, but that's probably not going to happen, so I'll be working without much of a net (Kate's heard me run…