The Last Word

By: | February 2, 2013

shutterstock_1633258January 28 – February 1

The most urgent question of the week falls to Richard: what’s going to become of all his books? Time for you to pitch in with some advice, dear readers.

Christie wonders how Facebook will irony-proof their new search feature.

Erik makes a fairly solid case for the idea that “tools for teaching fetuses are ridiculous“.

Cameron reveals the hidden connection between champagne powder and a “recreational mathmusician”.

Facebook or NSA? Quit your job, go back to school, and snoop on the deepest secrets inadvertently revealed by network theory. Guest poster Robin Mejia gives us the lowdown on the stats boom.

Love Story

By: | February 1, 2013

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What can you say about a fifty-seven-year-old book that has outlived its usefulness? That it was beautiful. And brilliant. And taking up valuable space in my personal library.

Our household has six 84-inch bookshelves lining two living room walls, and four more in the bedroom.  All of the living room bookshelves and two of the bedroom bookshelves hold the kinds of general reading that line the living room and bedroom walls of most households that still bother with bookshelves: novels, nonfiction, reference works. But two of the bedroom bookshelves hold volumes that are not the kind you typically find in a home, unless one of the people who live there happens to be someone who writes about science.

Continue reading →

I am not my data.

By: | January 31, 2013

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Earlier this week, Facebook unveiled its new search engine, called Graph Search. Facebook promises that it will help you find people who share your interests. “Want to start a book club or find a gym buddy? Connect with friends who like the same activities—and meet new people, too.”

Having moved around for most of my life, I can appreciate the utility of a tool that connects you with people you have something in common with. For instance, let’s say I’m on an extended business trip to Geneva, and I want to find a running partner.

So I type in “people who like running and live in Geneva, Switzerland.” More than 100 people come up. Great. But it feels stalkerish to send messages to random strangers. So I type in “My friends of friends who run and live in Geneva, Switzerland.” This brings up 14 names, but for six of them, our mutual friend is the group “trail running-switzerland.” With several of the others, I share mutual friends that are only slight acquaintances. Still, that leaves three people in Geneva who have Facebook friendships with real life friends of mine. If I was really desperate, I could ask those friends to make an introduction.

In theory, I can see how a search like this could be useful, but I can’t imagine myself really using it that way. (When this Geneva scenario actually happened to me, a colleague I was working with hooked me up with his running group after he noticed I was wearing a sports watch.) It gives me hives to imagine seeking out strangers online. Besides, it’s presumptuous to assume I can understand what someone means when they click “like” on their interests page. Does “liking” running mean you’re training for the Boston marathon? You ran a 5km once to raise money for a friend’s favorite charity? Maybe you just like Mo Farah Running Away from Things? Facebook’s search function is only as good as their data, which are fundamentally constrained by their voluntary nature.

Here’s an example. A friend of mine says he lives in Rothera, Antarctica and is from Timbuktu, Tombouctou, Mali. Neither of these facts are even remotely correct. Any human with common sense will know that these are fake data, but there’s nothing to stop Facebook from counting him if you were to search for “people who’ve been to Antarctica.” (He hasn’t.)

Graph search showed me “more than 1,000 people” who like Pabst Blue Ribbon, but what it can’t tell me is which of them drink it ironically. Continue reading →

Unborn Aspirations

By: | January 30, 2013

shutterstock_116614954To the layman, the website for BabyPlus might seem plausible. The company sells devices that supposedly make babies smarter by playing sounds to them while still in the womb. The site claims that by strapping a speaker playing loud rhythmic sounds to her belly, an expectant mother ensures her child will be more relaxed, nurse more readily, and later have “enhanced intellectual abilities” and “greater creativity,” presumably ahead of everyone else in pre-school.

The company, whose founder boasts a PhD from a British university, promises that it’s all backed up by solid science and even includes a scientific-looking paper and close associations with something called The Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health.

However, closer inspection quickly untangles the site. The founder, “Dr.” Brent Logan has a masters degree in literature. His PhD came from Somerset University, an unaccredited degree mill seemingly shut down after a federal investigation. The scientific paper legitimizing BabyPlus was a tiny Russian study, published in a journal so obscure I couldn’t find its website. And the founder of the APPPH, a minor association promoting prenatal learning, repeatedly disavowed Logan, all but calling him a fraud. Continue reading →

Flakey

By: | January 29, 2013

Unique,_snow_flakeI love snow, but we don’t get much of it here. On the rare day that the highest peaks catch a few flakes, people pile into cars and drive up into our local mountains just to see a small patch of white.

Part of the allure is the wonderful way in which snow is described —in Inuit, Yupik, Sami, and even in our own language. Sierra cement. Champagne powder. Cascade concrete. Alaskan velvet. Spring corn.

At close range, it’s more beautiful still. An avalanche forecaster once pointed to a photo of faceted snow crystals on her wall when I asked her what her favorite kind was. These weren’t her favorite, exactly—she said they’re the ones she loved to hate–but the ones that fascinated her, the kind that formed weak layers in the snow.  (Here’s a cool animation of how it forms, usually with the help of a wide range of temperatures within the snowpack.)

Maybe it’s this combination of strong and weak that gets me. Snow crystals look like delicate formations of oxygen and hydrogen. Together, they can both create winter wonderlands and decimate landscapes and lives. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Becoming a Statistician

By: | January 28, 2013

 statisticians

As you know, we are now one month into the International Year of Statistics.

What, you didn’t know that?

Yeah, statisticians aren’t really all that great at promotion.  Which is too bad, since they work on interesting problems in just about every field of science and engineering.

The first time I went to the Joint Statistics Meeting — a fairly huge annual conference organized by four statistics professional organization — I was surprised by the range of presentations. I was there for a panel on estimates of the Iraq war’s death toll, but that ran alongside talks on ways to improve clinical drug trials and the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, how to better analyze international development data, and methodological improvements in modeling the circulation of waters in Lake Michigan. And there was almost no coverage. I met one local AP business reporter, but that was it. Granted, public relations is not the primary role of a scientific society, but it’s a useful one. I’ve been to many meetings where carefully orchestrated press outreach highlighted the policy-relevant talks. Heck, even computer engineers, not exactly an incredibly pr-savvy group, have their own Barbie. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 26, 2013

DeathRaftShutterstockJanuary 21 – 25

This week, Eric showed us why no one does death quite like Mexico;

Abstruse Goose does the math to tell us where in the universe our televised electromagnetic leaks have gotten to;

Cassie examined the complex relationships between scientific breakthroughs, miracle drugs, and the government programs that allow them to save real people;

Tom considers dinosaurs in the bathtub and ponders that “a few evolutionary contingencies one way or another, and you could have had a giant ground sloth for a pet.”

And Heather described how Jyoti Singh — bestowed with the name Damini, or lightning after her violent death — is changing India forever.

 

 

A Disease, A Miracle Drug, and a Tale of Uncertain Survival

By: | January 25, 2013

phoenixPhoenix is scorching in the summer, and Pat Elliott had been standing for hours. So she wasn’t alarmed one August day in 2009 to find her feet swollen. “It must be the weather,” Elliott thought. But they also ached. The pain was horrendous. So she called her doctor, and he told her to come in. Reluctantly she went.

Several blood tests and a bone marrow biopsy later, Elliott learned she had a type of blood cancer called chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Her white cell count was sky high, her spleen was swollen, and her kidneys were failing. Continue reading →