Science: July 2007 Archive Page

Until the eigth school in the list, they've only included schools with a few students which means that any large percentage drops or gains are not strange at all, but expected. To put them on the "Biggest Metro Math Losers" (what kind of name for a table is that anyway?!) is simply poor reporting.

I'm sure the editors would think a reporter insane for doing the same thing for the baseball box scores: "Mauer was 2 for 4 on Tuesday, but only 1 for 5 on Wednesday. That's a 30% drop!" --IB --Newspaper Reporting (Three Standard Deviations to the Left)

The big problem here, as IB notes, is that the article in question deals with a very small pool of students, so that normal fluctuations in the numbers look like huge drops and gains. (Thanks for the suggestion, Josh.)

Sometimes called the reptilian brain because its basic structure dates back to our reptile ancestors, the brain stem is largely devoted to our most primal instincts, far removed from the complex, higher-brain skills that allow us to understand humor. And yet somehow, in this primitive region, we find the urge to laugh. --Steven Johnson --What's So Friggin' Funny? (Discover)

Brian May is completing his doctorate in astrophysics, more than 30 years after he abandoned his studies to form the rock group Queen. --Queen guitarist to complete doctorate (AP | Yahoo! (will expire))

This brightened my day.

And as far as I know, no other news outlet in the world got this point wrong except the BBC -- not even the tabloids.

People often accuse the BBC of agenda-driven falsification of stories. Perhaps that's sometimes true, I don't know. But in the cases of science mis-reporting that I'm familiar with -- and there are many of them -- the problem seems to be that the reporters and editors concerned are arrogant, lazy, and not very smart.

[...]

Perhaps the BBC News stories in question are turned out by low-level employees who are given only a few minutes to re-write each press release, and are strictly prohibited from doing any independent research, even as much as might be accomplished in a half an hour of web research, or a brief interview with an expert. If so, then all the blame belongs to the managers who have thus condemned their writers to produce drivel. --Mark Liberman --They Just Don't Care (Language Log)

Your job is very simple! All you need to do is look out for the features that mark out sprial and elliptical galaxies. In fact, as you're a human and not a computer, most galaxies should be easy to classify since they're obviously spirals or obviously ellipticals. On this page, you will practice classifying galaxies. On the next page, you will take a short trial to test your skills. If you don't pass the trial, you can try again. Once you pass the trial, you can start contributing to Galaxy Zoo science!
--Galaxy Zoo

I got a 13 out of 15 score on the qualifying test.

I gather that astronomers have developed software that chops telescope images up into chunks centered on bright objects, and that people are better at identifying the bright spots as clockwise spiral galaxies, counter-clockwise spirals, oval galaxies, or something else (like a star or a satellite). Or, to be more precise, the effort it would take to create a computer program that surpasses human skill is not worth investing, when it is possible instead to get an army of volunteer humans to do the work. (This is called "Flintstoning," which refers to the usefulness of certain low-tech solutions, such as Fred using his feet underneath the car.)

For a long time, I have daydreamed about making a computer program that asks students to evaluate short writing samples, such as thesis statements or news leads. The idea is that I would first train students with samples that I have already graded. Then those students who have demonstrated that they are good at evaluating the writing samples (that is, those whose answers closely match mine) start being asked to evaluate samples written by their peers. I imagine that a particular student sample would get evaluated by at least two peers; if the peers disagree, then the system would flag that sample, and I would break the tie.

I wouldn't use such a system to mark assignments for a grade -- my thought that it would be useful for the kind of assignment where students get credit for simply doing the work, and the added value would be that students would get some kind of structured peer feedback. I would make sure to read and comment on at least a handful of exercises in each set, and this system would help me identify which students are not only doing a poor job writing their own exercises, but are also unable to recognize when a sample exercise meets the criteria.

I used to think that things like rocks and buildings and my own skeleton were fairly solid. But they're made up of atoms, and atoms, as you can see here, contain so little actual material that they can barely be said to exist.

We are all phantoms. --Hydrogen Atom Scale Model (Phrenopolis)

'One approach to seeing the future is through scenarios -- carefully crafted "what if?" stories that let us imagine several different outcomes', the book says. It suggests holding a 'scenario party' (seriously) where you can 'pool the imaginations and experiences of your friends'. In short: we have no idea what the future will look like, but let's knock about some shocking 'what if?' scenarios over a glass of wine to make ourselves feel simultaneously terrified/terrifically important. It's the closest you'll get to a naked admission from the climate change lobby that its warnings of floods and pestilence and swarms of locusts are based on its members' own fevered, teenage imaginings rather than a scientifically revealed forecast of what is to come. --Brendan O'Neill --The planet's burning. Let's party!  (Spiked Online)

A snarky, class-focused review of The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook.

They were surprised when a magazine article asserted that women use an average of 20,000 words per day compared with 7,000 for men. If there had been that big a difference, he thought, they should have noticed it.

They found that the 20,000-7,000 figures have been used in popular books and magazines for years. But they couldn't find any research supporting them.

"Although many people believe the stereotypes of females as talkative and males as reticent, there is no large-scale study that systematically has recorded the natural conversations of large groups of people for extended periods of time," Pennebaker said.

Indeed, Mehl said, one study they found, done in workplaces, showed men talking more.

Still, the idea that women use nearly three times as many words a day as men has taken on the status of an "urban legend," he said. --Randolphe E. Schmid --Study: Women don't talk more than guys (Yahoo! | AP (will expire))

The armada of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs broke free from a cargo ship 15 years ago.

Since then they have travelled 17,000 miles, floating over the site where the Titanic sank, landing in Hawaii and even spending years frozen in an Arctic ice pack. --Ben Clerkin --Thousands of rubber ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journey (Daily Mail)

Behavioural experts have found that infants begin to lie from as young as six months. Simple fibs help to train them for more complex deceptions in later life.

Infants quickly learnt that using tactics such as fake crying and pretend laughing could win them attention. By eight months, more difficult deceptions became apparent, such as concealing forbidden activities or trying to distract parents' attention. --Richard Gray -- Babies not as innocent as they pretend (Telegraph)

Is "fake crying" really the same thing as "lying"? It's a form of communication that serves a social purpose, like saying "thank you" when you don't really feel grateful.

It seems like the real news here is not that researchers discovered new details about cognitive development, but rather the application of a new shading for the concept of deception.

I guess it's a little late for a link to the Will Farrell baby landlord skit, but finally it seems appropriate.