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agelman | March 16, 2010Jeremy Miles pointed me to this article by Leonhard Held with what might seem like an appealing brew of classical, Bayesian, and graphical statistics:
P values are the most commonly used tool to measure evidence against a hypothesis. Several attempts have been made to transform P values to minimum Bayes factors and minimum posterior probabilities of the hypothesis under consideration. . . . I [Held] propose a graphical approach which easily translates any prior probability and P value to minimum posterior probabilities. The approach allows to visually inspect the dependence of the minimum…
cortex | March 16, 2010Here's a moral scenario:
A man is sitting near the side of the road when he sees a truck speeding along. It is headed towards a group of five men, who do not hear or see it, and if nothing appears in the road, it will certainly hit and kill them. Across the road is another man sitting in front of his house. If the man who is sitting by the road calls out to the man by his house and says 'come here,' the man will walk into the road in the path of the truck, be killed, and stop it from continuing on toward the five, saving them. If the man sitting by the road says nothing, the truck will travel…
gregladen | March 16, 2010... and other matters related to dust ups on the blogosphere. At Quiche Moraine.
cortex | March 15, 2010It sounds like President Obama and his communications staff are getting to know the research of Paul Slovic:
After weeks of making his case for the legislation in broad strokes -- including two similar rallies last week in Philadelphia and St. Charles, Mo. -- Mr. Obama used Monday's appearance to pivot to the personal, as he recounted the story of the cleaning woman, Natoma Canfield -- a health care drama that could not have been better scripted for his purposes if he had written it himself.
Ms. Canfield, of nearby Medina, wrote Mr. Obama at the end of December to say that she had been…
ddobbs | March 15, 2010
The Maldive Islands played a crucial role in Darwin's long argument about coral reef genesis. It's nice to see them now play a crucial role in shark conservation by making the entire archipelago -- roughly the area of Maine, but warmer and wetter -- a shark sanctuary.
From Sharks receive Indian Ocean sanctuary in the Maldives - NatGeo News Watch
The Maldives has become the second nation to proclaim complete protection for sharks in its territorial waters.
The cabinet "decided to enforce the decision on banning shark hunting in the Maldives beginning from 1 March 2010. It was also decided…
grrlscientist | March 15, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) blog carnival was just published! The 23rd edition of Scientia Pro Publica is hosted by Bjørn at Pleiotropy. Bjørn writes about this edition;
It has been a pleasure reading all the submitted posts. It always is. I have increased both my factual knowledge about nature - and thus my horizon - in ways that I think would not be nearly as easy if it wasn't for the science bloggers. Thank you all.
This time there was a…
cwilcox | March 15, 2010Octopuses* and their cephalopod relatives are some of the smartest animals on the planet. Accordingly, many scientists want to understand how their mind works. To gain insights into the complex minds of cephalopods, researchers have been studying behavior in individual animals for years by presenting different animals with various visual stimuli. But many of the methods have downsides - for example, if you want to see how an octopus reacts to another octopus, you can add an octopus to the tank, but doing so introduces other variables. There may be variation in response based on how the…
cortex | March 15, 2010Now that the social web is maturing - the platforms have been winnowed down to a select few (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) - some interesting commonalities are emerging. The one shared feature that I'm most interested in is also a little disturbing: the tendency of the social software to quantify our social life. Facebook doesn't just let us connect with our friends: it counts our friends. Twitter doesn't just allow us to aggregate a stream of chatter: it measures our social reach. LinkedIn has too many damn hierarchies to count. Even the staid blog is all about the metrics, from page…
kcollins | March 14, 2010 Old time vinegar pie
It's Pi day or Pi(e) day...either way you look at it today is 3/14 so a good excuse to eat some pie and Scienceblogs and Serious Eats have teamed up to hold a pi(e) contest. Upon discovering this contest I enthusiastically embarked upon dreaming up something fitting for the famous number. After inspiration from some of the previous year's submissions, I came up with the idea of 'irrationally good' pie, since pi is an irrational number. I wanted something that sounded like it shouldn't be in a pie, yet it was good. My main hurdle was I couldn't think of anything that…
dblum | March 14, 2010I couldn't resist this wonderfully explosive video on YouTube showing the unfortunate end of a red gummy bear when mixed with potassium perchlorate.
I do love to watch a good hissing, sparking chemical reaction. Especially when it's not me doing the sparking (see earlier blog on the art of setting one's hair on fire in a Bunsen burner.)
Anyway, potassium perchlorate is made of potassium (no surprise there), chlorine and oxygen. Its chemical formula is KCLO4, short-hand for saying it contains one atom of potassium, one of chlorine and four of oxygen. Yes, you already figured that out, I…
grrlscientist | March 14, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is less than two weeks away and it is seeking submissions! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days.
The most recent…
gregladen | March 14, 2010"But they are sinners," I can hear the preachers and politicians say. "They are choosing a life of sin for which they must be punished." My scientist and medical friends have shared with me a reality that so many gay people have confirmed, I now know it in my heart to be true. No one chooses to be gay. Sexual orientation, like skin color, is another feature of our diversity as a human family.
Read the whole thing here
gregladen | March 14, 2010Robin Carnahan, a Democrat, has a fighting chance of beating the incumbant Republican, Roy Blunt, in the upcoming Senate race in Missouri.
According to Rasmussen:
The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely voters in the state finds Blunt leading Carnahan 47% to 41%. Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate, and eight percent (8%) are undecided. Those figures are little changed from a month ago.
source
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gregladen | March 13, 2010I'm not sure how good this is, but if you are a Star Wars Geek you are obligated to watch it and complain about it.
Hat Tip: Miss Darth Vader C.
gregladen | March 13, 2010Vaccines that contain a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal cannot cause autism on their own, a special U.S. court ruled on Friday, dealing one more blow to parents seeking to blame vaccines for their children's illness.
story
grrlscientist | March 12, 2010
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
The next edition of Scientia Pro Publica (Science for the People) is less than two weeks away and it is seeking submissions! Can you help by sending URLs for well-written science, medicine, and nature blog essays to me?
Scientia Pro Publica is a traveling blog carnival that celebrates the best science, environment, nature and medical writing targeted specifically to the public that has been published in the blogosphere within the past 60 days.
The most recent…
grrlscientist | March 12, 2010Okay, I've been hinting that I have a really cool announcement that I want to share with you but a plethora of annoying (!!) technical issues have prevented me from telling you about it. Until now. My surprise announcement is ...
... I have a blog at Nature Network! My new NN blog is called Maniraptora (Tastes Like Chicken).
As you can see, we're still working on getting the name just right (I have to email the cat herders at NN and ask them to change it for me; I don't have direct control over such things as I do here at SB).
Adding me to the Nature Network lineup has been an ongoing…