I heard this interesting story on All Things Considered on random number generation via quantum entanglement. The result was reported in Nature (the full paper is also available). I bet Scott will have something more to say about it (eventually), but it seems interesting to me, at least.
Perhaps I should go learn some quantum physics…
Here’s an interview with David Goodstein, who’s just written a book titled On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Tales from the Front Lines of Science, which looks like an interesting read.
As a postdoc at a school with a gigantic biosciences program and surrounded by other biomedical research institutes (Scripps, Burnham, etc), a lot of the professional development workshops offered here are not specifically helpful to me. For example, I went to a workshop on writing grants, but it was almost entirely focused on NIH grants; the speaker said he had never applied to the NSF for a grant. Still, I did pick up general tips and strategies about the process of writing a grant. In the same vein, I read an article in The Scientist (registration required) about improving scientific writing which offered ideas applicable to technical writing in general. One that stuck out for me was:
Write daily for 15 to 30 minutes
During your daily writing sessions, don’t think about your final manuscript. Just write journal entries, says Tara Gray, director of the teaching academy that provides training and support to New Mexico State University professors. “People think there’s two phases of a research project—doing the research and writing it up,” she says. Rather than setting aside large chunks of time for each activity, combine them to improve your writing and your research. The first time Gray encouraged a group of faculty members at New Mexico State to adhere to this schedule for three months, they wrote about twice as much as their normal output.
I think I’ll try doing this. I often complain that I live an “interrupt-driven” lifestyle, but sometimes flailing on some very involved epsilonics at the last minute to get something to work results in errors, tension, and woe.
The Large Hadron Collider has been turned on.
Did the world end yet? Guess not.
Carry on, folks, nothing to see here.
My friend Reno has a California Bankruptcy Blog.
The ISIT 2010 site seems quite definitive, no? (h/t Pulkit.)
The Times has a nice profile of Martin Gardner.
My buddy, buildingmate at UCSD, and fellow MIT thespian Stephen Larson premiered the Whole Brain Catalog at the Society for Neuroscience conference.
A fascinating article on the US-Mexico border (h/t Animikwaan.)
Kanye West is an oddly compelling trainwreck. (via MeFi).
But wait… there’s more:
Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted… Elsevier declined to provide the names of the sponsors of these titles, according to the company spokesperson… last week, Elsevier indicated that it had no plans of looking into the matter further, but that decision has apparently been reversed.
“We are currently conducting an internal review but believe this was an isolated practice from a past period in time,” Hansen continued in the Elsevier statement. “It does not reflect the way we operate today. The individuals involved in the project have long since left the company. I have affirmed our business practices as they relate to what defines a journal and the proper use of disclosure language with our employees to ensure this does not happen again.”
I guess they’re saying “mistakes were made.”
Allie sent this blog post my way about the Conyers bill, about which Lawrence Lessig has been quite critical. At the moment the NIH requires all publications from research it funds to be posted (e.g. on PubMed) so that the public can read them. This makes sense because the taxpayers paid for this research.
What Conyers wants is to do is end the requirement for free and public dissemination of research. Why? Lessig says he’s in the pocket of the publishing industry. From the standpoint of the taxpayer and a researcher, it’s hard to see a justification for this amendment. Conyers gives a procedural reason for the change, namely that “this so-called ‘open access’ policy was not subject to open hearings, open debate or open amendment.” So essentially he wants to go back to the status quo ante and then have a debate, rather than have a debate about whether we want to go back to the status quo ante.
From my perspective, spending Congressional time to do the equivalent of a Wikipedia reversion is a waste — if we want to debate whether to change the open access rules, let’s debate that now rather than changing the rules twice. I think we should expand open access to include the NSF too. It’s a bit tricky though, since most of my work is published (and publishable) within the IEEE. The professional societies could be a great ally in the open-access movement, but as Phil Davis points out, the rhetoric on both sides tends to leave them out.
Via Crooked Timber comes another story about the depths plumbed by Elsevier:
Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles–most of which presented data favorable to Merck products–that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship… Disclosure of Merck’s funding of the journal was not mentioned anywhere in the copies of issues obtained by The Scientist.
Elsevier has been involved in shady dealings before, but this is a new one for me. I recently turned down a request to review a paper for an Elsevier-published journal (citing their business practices), and this piece of news confirms my decision.
At Pharyngula there’s a great article on evolution in action among a lizard population. On the other hand, maybe some aliens went and visited the island and intelligently redesigned the lizards so they could eat vegetation better…
I went to a talk yesterday by Chris Wiggins on gene networks, signal processing, and information. I found it a bit unfortunate that he used the phrase “the mutual information between chemistry and genetics” and wrote up I(c,g) on the board. I eventually figured out what he meant, but it immediately brought to mind the famous “Information Theory, Photosynthesis, and Religion” editorial by Elias in the IT Transactions.
Although I had to duck out of the talk early, at the beginning we got to see the Inner Life Of A Cell video, which is amazing. There are versions with narration from the Harvard multimedia website. I know this has been around a while, but I hadn’t seen it yet. It’s definitely worth a look.
An Ergodic Walk 