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Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Numbers > Pundits
What’s FiveThirtyEight Good For?: The Inevitable Nate Silver Backlash
Uncertain Principles November 8, 2012
Now that we’ve apparently elected Nate Silver the President of Science, this is some predictable grumbling about whether he’s been overhyped. If you’ve somehow missed the whole thing, Jennifer Ouellette offers an excellent summary of the FiveThirtyEight saga, with lots of links, but the Inigo Montoya summing up is that Silver runs a blog predicting…
Whatever Nate Silver Does, Isn’t Science
Built on Facts November 7, 2012
If you’re one of the probably four people who haven’t heard about Nate Silver, you’ve missed out. He’s a statistics guy who runs the always interesting 538 Blog at the New York Times. He made his name in baseball statistics, Moneyball style, and moved into politics where he made state-by-state statistical forecasts of the last…
Hating on Nate Silver
EvolutionBlog October 31, 2012
I recently heard a pollster remark, “When you give conservatives bad polling data, they want to kill you. When you give liberals bad polling data, they want to kill themselves.” That attitude has been well on display recently in the right-wing freak out over Nate Silver’s website. Silver currently gives Obama a 72.9 percent chance…
Channel Surfing
Life Science
Check out this picture of a captive cockatoo (Cacatua goffiniana) in the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna using a tool: Figaro (shown above) was observed by a student using a piece of bamboo to try to retrieve a dropped pebble. This was the first documented evidence of a Goffin’s cockatoo attempting…
Probably because he’s already at Skepticon, and I’m not. (via Arthropoda)
Physical Science
Blows against supersymmetry and facebook. Matthew Bailes continues ruminations at the Conversation – the general riff is on crowd sourcing and distributed computing, with a bit of bragging on The Beast they got down under. Ok, I’m, just jealous. I had not heard of Diaspora – be interesting to see if it can crowd out…
“When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it’s a sure sign you’re getting old.” -Mark Twain Welcome to yet another installment of Messier Monday, where each week, I’ll pick one of the 110 Messier Objects — deep-sky objects catalogued to avoid confusion for comet hunters — to highlight for you. So far,…
“There is no such thing as magic, supernatural, miracle; only something that’s still beyond logic of the observer.” -Toba Beta It might be hard to believe, but science tells us truths about the Universe that we might never have intuited or philosophized about if the Universe itself didn’t reveal them to us through investigation. Bap Kennedy…
Environment
There’s a nice paper out by Holland and Kwok, attributing much of the somewhat-hard-to-understand change in Antarctic sea ice to changes in wind forcing. The growth in Antarctic sea ice, although much smaller than the decrease in the Arctic, is still a bit embarassing; it would be much tidier if it were decreasing. The abstract…
Let Them Eat Shrimp: The Tragic Disappearance of the Rainforests of the Sea by Kennedy Warne has been out for about a year, but if you’ve not seen it you may want to have a look at it. Warne, editor of New Zealand Geographic magazine, is a naturalist who writes about the embattled mangrove swamps,…
Wrong. October was, nationally in the US, kinda cold. Not record cold, but colder than average. However, as Jeff Masters at Weather Underground has calculated, we would have to have some kind of Snowball Earth scenario kick in for December in order for 2012 to not be the warmest year on record in the US.…
Humanities
In recent years, we’ve seen the federal government increase recognition of, and resources for, the mental health conditions that many veterans suffer from — but it hasn’t been enough.
The science and technology blogs were alight with adulation last week with the news that with no assistance, illiterate Ethiopian children had learned to use and even “hack” computers given to them. Speaking at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference, the founder of the One Laptop Per Child initiative revealed an experiment in which Motorola Xoom tablets…
I want to talk about the book Across Atlantic Ice: The Origin of America’s Clovis Culture. It was written by Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley, both highly respected archaeologists. The point they make in the book is very simple: An important archaeological culture known as the “Clovis” is actually a European culture that traveled east…
Education
The USA Science & Engineering Festival Facebook page has grown at an incredible rate! Today we have reached over 30,000 Likes on our page! Facebook has been instrumental in helping us to achieve our mission to invigorate the interest of STEM. Festival Executive Director Marc Schulman states, “We recognize the importance of social media to…
USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog
Women Who Changed the World Through Science & Engineering: Irène Joliot-Curie
PLEASE SHARE IF YOU ARE INSPIRED Irène Joliot-Curie — Chemist and physicist Shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with her husband Frédéric Joliot for discovering that radioactivity could be artificially produced. You’ve heard of the achievements of Nobel Prize-winning scientists Marie and Pierre Curie. Now discover their brilliant scientist-daughter Irène Joliot-Curie who would also later…
This article was co-authored with Felice Vazquez, Esq., Special Counsel to the President, Kean University. What, really, do our children learn in school? While standardized tests and teacher accountability are the buzzwords of the day, our schools may be missing one of the most important lessons our children must master in order to reach their…
Politics
There’s been a lot of talk lately about what the Republican party and its members were up to this election year. Racial slurs and lynching chairs, being mean to recent immigrants, and voter suppression directed at minorities could hot have helped to get the non-white vote in line for last Tuesday’s elections. A ramped up…
Over at Slate, John Dickerson has a piece expressing amazement that “numbers guy” Mitt Romney was so badly misinformed about the election. While I’ll admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude about the general bafflement of the Romney campaign and the Republicans generally, this particular slant (which Dickerson isn’t the only one to take, just…
This article was co-authored with Felice Vazquez, Esq., Special Counsel to the President, Kean University. What, really, do our children learn in school? While standardized tests and teacher accountability are the buzzwords of the day, our schools may be missing one of the most important lessons our children must master in order to reach their…
Medicine
… from you, as a friend or relative? Or, more exactly, what kinds of often well meaning things do you say or do for someone with chronic illness that are actually hurting and not helping? I have a good friend who, like many other friends actually, has a chronic illness that is sometimes painful, sometimes…
As our great Lord Draconis Zeneca promises, besides the fantasies of filthy lucre in the minds of our opponents, there are other rewards to being one of his shills and minions besides getting to blog to my heart’s content about the pseudoscience and quackery that is “alternative” medicine. One of them is that sometimes I…
It took six years of going from doctor to doctor to doctor for Penney Cowan to finally receive a diagnosis for her chronic pain: fibromyalgia. Doctors had told her she’d just have to learn to live with the pain — a condition that some days made it hard to lift a cup of coffee. So when she decided to join the pain program at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic, she didn’t have high hopes. She says she expected the effort to fail.
Brain & Behavior
This week, we’re looking at the science of sexual orientation, where debates over nature vs. nurture have influenced law, policy and equal rights. We’re joined by neuroscientist and writer Simon LeVay, to talk about his research on the topic, and his book Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation. And on…
Check out this picture of a captive cockatoo (Cacatua goffiniana) in the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna using a tool: Figaro (shown above) was observed by a student using a piece of bamboo to try to retrieve a dropped pebble. This was the first documented evidence of a Goffin’s cockatoo attempting…
Via Thngsbreak, we have the charming Lord Monckton back at it with all out Birtherism: The diligent, unpaid heroes who have been investigating the dodgy document for more than a year on behalf of the people of Maricopa County, Ariz., have found a long list of irregularities in Mr. Obama’s identification documents. I have used…
Technology
Greg Laden's Blog
So, does this also mean that when I lose my phone, my suitcase can find it for me?
Aaron Kaplan is rather in awe of being invited to the Falling Walls conference for what he calls his “hobby project”. But not all of us can boast a hobby that connects hundreds of thousands of people to the internet in a democratic, decentralised fashion. He is the founder of Funk Feuer, a peer-to-peer mesh…
Perhaps having anticipated some bleary eyes in the audience following last night’s reception cocktails, Google’s chief economist Hal Varian starts his Falling Walls lecture with a question: what day of the week are the most Google searches for “hangover”? The answer is, unsurprisingly, Sunday, a fact revealed by Google’s Trends platform,…
Information Science
Confessions of a Science Librarian
Recent Presentations: Getting Your Science Online and Evaluating Information
As I mentioned way back on October 22nd, I was kindly invited to give a talk at the Brock University Physics Department as part of their seminar series. The talk was on Getting Your Science Online, a topic that I’m somewhat familiar with! Since it was coincidentally Open Access Week, I did kind of an…
If you’re one of the probably four people who haven’t heard about Nate Silver, you’ve missed out. He’s a statistics guy who runs the always interesting 538 Blog at the New York Times. He made his name in baseball statistics, Moneyball style, and moved into politics where he made state-by-state statistical forecasts of the last…
Confessions of a Science Librarian
Around the Web: Profs with tattoos, Supporting an open definition of Digital Humanities and more
The Inked Academic Body Why I Support an Open Definition of DH Bring It On! Why the Crisis in Academic Librarianship is the Best Thing Ever and What We Should Do About It. Administration as Academic Alternative In praise of the big old mess Ignore the Doomsayers: The Book Industry Is Actually Adapting Well Head…
Jobs
New faculty positions in multiple science and engineering disciplines, including astronomy, emphasizing computational analysis and data mining. Penn State is embarking on a transformative cluster hiring initiative in cyberscience – computation- and data-enabled science and engineering – to lead through cyber-enabled innovation in interdisciplinary research. This cross-college endeavor will coordinate multiple faculty appointments to develop…
At Palm Beach Groves in Lantana, Fla., a small, seasonal business that ships fresh citrus nationwide, employees have regularly voted between getting a raise or keeping their employer-based health insurance. Health coverage always wins, as many employees’ ages and pre-existing conditions would have made it nearly impossible to get coverage on their own. But a new report finds the Affordable Care Act is on target to help prevent this scenario.
Postdoctoral Scholar, Stellar and Exoplanetary Astrophysics and SETI “Applications are invited for a postdoctoral research associate position to work with Prof. Jason Wright and collaborators. The ideal applicant will have some combination of: • experience working with large photometric datasets, especially in the near and mid-IR • strong coding skills, in languages including IDL •…
