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mspringer | December 4, 2009I'm a relatively light sleeper. The ear-piercing klaxons that are most alarm clock buzzers are way more than necessary to get me out of bed, and even most music stations are more than I want to deal with abruptly when I'm trying to work up the will to leave warm comfort to go to a day's work. So it's usually the dulcet tones of NPR that start when the clock alarm reaches the specified time.
This morning the programming included a short "Everyday Science" piece about how parachutes work. Their explanation went more or less like this: when you open the parachute, the chute pushes the air…
sastyk | December 3, 2009I may be a happily married woman, but I'm not immune to seduction - who is? So when a lovely woman named Erin came around offering to fulfill my wildest fantasies, I was intrigued, if a little nervous. She promised me the moon, deep stimulation, plenty of aroused excitement, the full range of delights. It was intoxicating. And so I allowed my self to be swept away by the titillation of more and bigger and deeper. She was even open (shocking!) to getting my honey involved (more on this below). And thus, I find myself here at Science Blogs, ripe and panting to begin. The lure of more…
jwilbanks | December 3, 2009My last posts on why I don't like the open source metaphor for science have generated a lot of good comments, here and in my email, twitter, and in person.
They've forced me to think about what exactly it is about the meme that makes me so uncomfortable, and raised some good objections and points. I'm going to try to chew through a few of them in this post and then ditch the topic for a while, as I've got a lot of complaining to do about publishing and data and those topics have had to take a back seat for a few weeks while I worked this through my system.
On a side note, I actually kinda…
cortex | December 3, 2009Jon Stewart on the stolen Climategate emails:
I have two responses to the release of these admittedly unflattering emails. Firstly, they shed virtually no light on the actual climate science. Tyler Cowen says it best:
I see science, including climate science, as very much a decentralized process, based on the collective efforts of thousands of researchers. The evidence for our current understanding of climate change also comes from a wide variety of disciplines, including chemistry, meteorology, oceanography, geography, tree ring studies, ice sheet studies, and a good body of theory, which…
cortex | December 3, 2009The WSJ reports that the Fed is considering getting serious about popping financial bubbles:
Not so long ago, Federal Reserve officials were confident they knew what to do when they saw bubbles building in prices of stocks, houses or other assets: Nothing.
Now, as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke faces a confirmation hearing Thursday on a second four-year term, he and others at the central bank are rethinking the hands-off approach they've followed over the past decade. On the heels of a burst housing-and-credit bubble, Mr. Bernanke now calls financial booms "perhaps the most difficult problem for…
gregladen | December 2, 2009Welcome to the 45th installment of the Circus of the Spineless Blog Carnival.
The previous installment of this panoply of boneless metazoans was at Marmorkrebs, and the next edition will be at Life Photo Meme. Please check with the carnival's home for information on how to submit your spineless blog posts.
Trees, Plants and More: Scale Insect Infestation
The scale insect, which has struck all over the city seems to have found its way here as well. It secretes honeydew that attracts ants. Indeed, i saw many big black ones right next to the scale insects.
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National Park Service: Native…
gregladen | December 2, 2009Chosen by a selected, secret jury, this entry comes from Saint Paul, Minnesota. Just when you think you've seen all the viral videos, another one comes along ....
Alternate source:
agelman | December 1, 2009Steven Levitt writes:
My view is that the emails [extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia] aren't that damaging. Is it surprising that scientists would try to keep work that disagrees with their findings out of journals? When I told my father that I was sending my work saying car seats are not that effective to medical journals, he laughed and said they would never publish it because of the result, no matter how well done the analysis was. (As is so often the case, he was right, and I eventually published it in an economics journal.)
Within the…
cortex | December 1, 2009A new paper by Paola Giuliano, an economist at UCLA, and Antonio Spilimbergo, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, looks at how severe recessions, depressions and other "macroeconomic shocks" influence the political beliefs of young adults. Here's the abstract:
Do generations growing up during recessions have different socio-economic beliefs than generations growing up in good times? We study the relationship between recessions and beliefs by matching macroeconomic shocks during early adulthood with self-reported answers from the General Social Survey. Using time and regional…
gregladen | December 1, 2009And I say "Crap" because this is, for once, going to be a science talk and that would be really interesting, BUT Stephanie Zvan, Mike Haubrich and I will be busy making a TV show at the same time. (Our new sitcom!) But YOU can go to the talk. Here are the details:
The talk is hosted by the Minnesota C.A.S.H.
Thursday, December 3rd, at 7:30
Molecular Cell Biology Building 3-120
420 Washington Avenue SE
East Bank Campus of the University of Minnesota.
PZ Myers, biologist, renowned science blogger, and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris, will be giving us a talk on…
gregladen | December 1, 2009This is not about "Man against fire" but rather "Man and fire working together."
Obama To Enter Diplomatic Talks With Raging Wildfire
gregladen | December 1, 2009According to The Scientist
This year's most exciting innovation, announced in April, circumvents the complications that come with the most common technique for reprogramming cells to an embryonic-like state. For the first time, Sheng Ding of Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and his colleagues induced pluripotency in mouse embryonic fibroblast cells using only proteins, avoiding genetic modification altogether.
The others are listed here.
gregladen | December 1, 2009You tell me. Vote for your favorite internet video in the comments section below.
gregladen | December 1, 2009Rhett Allain is an Associate Professor of Physics at Southeastern Louisiana University. He enjoys teaching and talking about physics. Sometimes he takes things apart and can't put them back together....
And now he blogs HERE! Welcome Rhett.
agelman | December 1, 2009Commenter RogerH pointed me to this article by Welton, Ades, Carlin, Altman, and Sterne on models for potentially biased evidence in meta-analysis using empirically based priors. The "Carlin" in the author list is my longtime collaborator John, so I really shouldn't have had to hear about this through a blog comment. Anyway, they write:
We present models for the combined analysis of evidence from randomized controlled trials categorized as being at either low or high risk of bias due to a flaw in their conduct. We formulate a bias model that incorporates between-study and between-meta-…
gregladen | November 30, 2009Drug monkey put up this funny video. But it is not so funny as it is like real life some times.
I (and a couple of others) once found out that we were no longer authors on a manuscript (that we had written) when the "authors" gathered in a lobby to get on an elevator to go up to a suite (at a conference) to put on finishing touches. We were asked to not get on the elevator.
We had questioned a very dubious conclusion that one of the primaries had come to in an unrelated research project. We were right of course.
The real sad news is this: Back in the old days, any academic worth a…
cortex | November 30, 2009There was no sentence in How We Decide that I regretted more than this one, which was first written in the fall of 2007, when Vince Young was the starting quarterback for the Tennessee Titans:
Vince Young ended up excelling in the pros.
I was discussing the statistical disconnect between a QB's score on the Wonderlic intelligence test - an abbreviated version of the IQ test - and their performance in the pros. The league requires that every player in the draft take the Wonderlic. The test is twelve minutes long and consists of 50 questions, which get progressively harder as the test goes…