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sschoenbaum | July 2, 2010Steve Schoenbaum writes: In his blog this week, Mark Pendergrast challenges someone/anyone to take on explaining the differences between case-control studies vs. cohort studies. As an EIS officer, back in late May/early June 1968, I did a case-control study as part of the investigation of a common source outbreak of hepatitis in Ogemaw County, Michigan, so I will try to pick up the challenge. I believe it was only the second time case-control methods were used in a CDC epidemic investigation. In using this method I learned about the power of comparison, not just that numerators need…
gregladen | July 2, 2010
A dam at a game preserve in the Waterberg. I believe that one crocodile lives here. Gets bigger every year. (It probably has friends in the nearby river.)
gregladen | July 2, 2010I had never felt airsick before, or since. But now I was a nauseated rag doll flopping around in the middle row of a six seater prop plane and I was ready to hurl at any moment.
Saturday is Reposted Essay Day!
BBC depiction of the path of Flight 447. I find it astonishing that the most important weather related feature on the planet is a "place where there are a lot of thunderstorms" or often not even identified at all. This is equivalent to a plane crashing into the Cascades and the news reporting that the aircraft went down in a "place with some hills" or not even noting the existence…
gregladen | July 2, 2010A handful of posts that made people mad at me, or each other:
Slaughter a Cow Every 28 Days: How the Bible Ruined Western Society
Mail Order Brides and Hypergyny
Mail Order Russian Brides, Woovending, Shell Oil and Silence
The Natural Basis for Inequality of the Sexes
gregladen | July 1, 2010The Plant Blogging Carnival Berry Go Round is up and running at Agricultural BiodiversityWeblog.
The Carnival of Evolutoin # 25 is at Culturing Science.
jgoldman | July 1, 2010Upon waking up this morning, my sciblings and I discovered that many of us had become zombies.
What else could I do but capitalize on an internet meme, in between snacking on brains and flesh?
Surprisingly, some of my sciblings' BOOKS were even afflicted:
gregladen | July 1, 2010Unlikely to come to a theater near you, this obscure foreign film would make you laugh, cry, and wonder about what is really possible:
Hat tip: Java Joe
cortex | July 1, 2010Brendan Koerner has a really fantastic article in the latest Wired on Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). It's a fascinating exploration of the organization, from its hallucinogen inspired birth (Bill Wilson was tripping on belladonna when he found God in a hospital room) to the difficulty of accurately measuring the effectiveness of AA:
The group's "cure rate" has been estimated at anywhere from 75 percent to 5 percent, extremes that seem far-fetched. Even the most widely cited (and carefully conducted) studies are often marred by obvious flaws. A 1999 meta-analysis of 21 existing studies, for…
gregladen | July 1, 2010The Blog Pick of the Month is a monthly award given for the best (well, they don't actually say best, but I'll assume) blog post covering a story from PLoS ONE and aggregated in ResearchBlogging.org. (There are several such posts each month.)
This is considered one of the most prestigious awards on the entire Internet. (If you area blogger, please remember, YOU can get one of these awards!)
Anyway, the June Award goes to ... (drum roll) ...
....
Moii!
For This Post, which was about this PLoS ONE paper.
sb admin | July 1, 2010I've been told that it's zombie day, so I thought I'd link to this research article by Gelman and Romero:
The zombie menace has so far been studied only qualitatively or through the use of mathematical models without empirical content. We propose to use a new tool in survey research to allow zombies to be studied indirectly without risk to the interviewers.
It's on Arxiv, so you know it's real.
agelman | July 1, 2010I've been told that it's zombie day, so I thought I'd link to this research article by Gelman and Romero:
The zombie menace has so far been studied only qualitatively or through the use of mathematical models without empirical content. We propose to use a new tool in survey research to allow zombies to be studied indirectly without risk to the interviewers.
It's on Arxiv, so you know it's real.
cwilcox | June 30, 2010Zombie-me, c/o Joseph Hewitt, who happens to havea cool RPG game open source thing, if you're curious.
You may have noticed that ScienceBlogs has gotten a little... strange today. That's because it's ZOMBIE DAY! There are a ton of posts around the site about the various biological, philosophical, physical, chemical and overall nature of zombies. What I've decided to talk about, though, might be the eeriest and creepiest of it all. That's because I'm going to talk about real zombies.
No, seriously. Real zombies. Things that walk around aimlessly, living dead, that kind of thing. In the real…
gregladen | June 30, 2010The Wetterling Abduction (1989) is a relatively well known case of an unsolved child abduction. Patty Wetterling went from bereaved mother of abductee Jacob Wetterling (11 years old) to child saety advocate to Congressional canddiate. Had Patty Wetterling won her race for Congress, she'd be there instead of ... yes, you guessed it, Wacko Michele Bachamann.
Anyway, right now, something seems to be happening in the abduction case, as I write this:
Investigators Wednesday swarmed around a St. Joseph property near the spot where 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling was abducted in 1989.
The Stearns…
pharyngula | June 30, 2010Unless they're imprecatory, and from the other side. Christopher Hitchens has made an announcement.
I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice.
Medical treatment is the best course of action in these sorts of events.
krandall | June 30, 2010In a recent conversation with SETI Institute Trustee, Dr. Frank Drake, we discussed the last 50 years of SETI research. Watch as Frank, for the very first time, describes his experience when he believed he discovered a sign of intelligent life in the universe!
gregladen | June 30, 2010If you've been following along, you'll want to visit this comment on The Buddha Is Not Serious blog.
My response: Thank you William, I appreciate what you've said, accept it at face value, and encourage you to reconsider your statement that you will never blog again.
Hey, Quiche Moraine is always looking for guest blogging. If you want to put the occasional post there while you get back on your blogging feet, you are more than welcome.
mspringer | June 30, 2010The laser pointer, much beloved of PowerPoint lecturers, cat owners, amateur scientists, and middle school boys at movie theaters, is actually a pretty amazing device. There's quite a bit you can do with a relatively cheap laser, and they're just plain fun. They're also relatively safe. The red pointers are usually Class 2 and the green ones are usualy class 3R. Class 2 lasers are very difficult to hurt yourself with, and while Class 3R lasers can cause eye injury, in general brief exposures are unlikely to cause permanant damage.
There's two higher classifications for lasers: 3B and 4. Class…
sb admin | June 30, 2010Karen Starko writes: When the "financial crisis" started and the news media started throwing around numbers in the trillions and projected fixes in the billions, I realized I just didn't get it. So I got a little yellow post-it, labeled it "understanding trillions," and started a list of examples. And when I learned that the US GDP in 2006 was 13T and the derivative market, estimated in June 2007, was valued at 500T, I quickly got a sense of the potential drain of the derivative market (in which money is spent on items without real value...my definition, please correct me if I am wrong). I…