Posts
March 18, 2013
+
12:59 PM | Business adaptation
Rafe Sagarin blogs at the Harvard Business Review: All of Earth’s successful organisms have thrived without analyzing past crises or trying to predict the next one. They haven’t held “planning exercises” or created “predictive frameworks.” Instead, they’ve adapted. Adaptability is the power to detect and respond to change in the world, no matter how surprising [...]The post Business adaptation appeared first on Evolving Economics.
+
11:43 AM | Data science code of conduct, Evgeny Morozov
I’m going on an 8-day long trip to Seattle with my family this morning and I’m taking the time off from mathbabe. But don’t fret! I have a crack team of smartypants skeptics who are writing for me while I’m gone. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what Leon and Becky come up with. In [...]
March 17, 2013
+
With the media awash in stories telling us how much oil is being discovered around the world, there is one word which the optimists quoted in these stories refuse to utter: Depletion.The simple fact is that depletion never sleeps. It starts as soon as an oil well begins production and goes on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Furthermore, it is not exactly news that oil is being discovered all around the world. The industry has been spending record amounts to find it.What’s critical is the
[…]
+
12:00 PM | Modeling in Plain English
I’ve been enjoying my new job at Johnson Research Labs, where I spend a majority of the time editing my book with my co-author Rachel Schutt. It’s called Doing Data Science (now available for pre-purchase at Amazon), and it’s based on these notes I took last semester at Rachel’s Columbia class. Recently I’ve been working on [...]
March 16, 2013
+
12:26 PM | Aunt Pythia’s advice – sex edition
I’m afraid the concept of “giving advice” has been taken down a notch this week, considering how many ridiculous examples we have right now of people are giving advice as a way of congratulating themselves. It’s enough to confuse an advice columnist and put her into an existential angst spiral. However, it’s not going to [...]
March 15, 2013
+
4:15 PM | 12 things to do at a work party
Not that I've done any of these...:Obtain seat closest to bar and food. Obtain table far enough away from bosses' tableMake sure you have good tablemates, i.e. ones that will not report your behavior.Check contents of hip flask. Bogart all needed butter, condiments. Obtain location of afterparty. Be sure to obtain enough food/drink to last you through after-dinner speechmaking. Discreetly pull out, distribute boss speech bingo cards. Snort loudly, just
[…]
+
3:13 PM | What was Teva doing in Mexico, MO?
Via the EPA's enforcement website, their press release on issues with a Teva Pharmaceuticals facility in Mexico, MO* (emphasis mine):In 2007, an EPA inspection found the Teva facility was discharging pollutants above permitted levels established by the City of Mexico’s Pretreatment Program, in violation of the CWA. In some cases, these pollutants were causing interference with the city’s ability to treat its domestic sewage, leading to pollutant discharges into the Salt River. A 2008
[…]
+
The other day, Morning Edition had a nice story on a retired Chicago cop who runs a barbershop in his retirement: Some older Americans are passing up retirement in favor of starting businesses of their own. In fact, more than 20 percent of new businesses are started by people between the ages of 55 and 64. And one of those businesses is a barbershop in Calumet City, just south of Chicago. It's called Rich's Den, and it's where retired police officer Richard Piña, 69, starts his day.
[…]
+
2:35 PM | Data audits and data strategies
There are lots of start-up companies out there that want to have a data team, because they heard somewhere that they should leverage big data, but they don’t know what it really means, what they can expect from such a team, or how to get started. They also don’t really know how to hire qualified [...]
+
1:32 PM | A week of links
Links this week: Razib Kahn encourages academics to get on the blogging bandwagon (and, my post on my experience). David Barash on “evolutionary existentialism”, my favourite piece this week. Paleo or not, we all get heart disease. Also on the paleo front, Peter Turchin reviews Paul and Shou-Ching Jaminet’s Perfect Health Diet; and John Hawks [...]The post A week of links appeared first on Evolving Economics.
March 14, 2013
+
An interesting little graph from the recently (publicly) released 2012 ACS Salary Survey Report:The accompanying text is oh-so-reassuring as well:By converting salaries to constant 1984 dollars, the average salaries for chemists (or anyone else) have hardly moved in terms of what you can buy for your money as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI). In 1985 the median salary for a chemist with a bachelor’s degree was $30,075. In constant 1984 dollars, the median salary for chemists with a
[…]
+
From the New York Times, an interesting indication of what happens when you have too many lawyers and not enough jobs for them:...The result is a nonprofit law firm that Arizona State [University] is setting up this summer for some of its graduates. Over the next few years, 30 graduates will work under seasoned lawyers and be paid for a wide range of services provided at relatively low cost to the people of Phoenix. The Arizona State approach, called the Alumni Law Group, appears to be the
[…]
+
I've always been a little suspicious of the job site known as "The Ladders"; first, you have to pay to get access to the positions; also, they say that all of them make over $100k. (Also, they were the authors of a truly awful Superbowl ad that I cannot seem to find online. Sigh.) Anyway, a sharp-eyed reader notes that they're being taken to court in a class action lawsuit:"From its inception until September 2011, TheLadders scammed its customers into paying for its job board service by
[…]
+
2:15 PM | Daily Pump Trap: 3/14/13 edition
Good morning! Between March 12 and March 13, 20 new positions were posted on C&EN Jobs. Of these, 4 (20%) were academically connected.Dallas, TX: Abbott is looking for a B.S. chemist for a physical chemistry pos-- wait, they really want a Ph.D. inorganic chemist for a systems engineering position. Look, they have no idea what they want, except that it has to do with "ion-selective electrodes." I think that's your best bet.Greensboro, NC: Syngenta is showing up at ACS New Orleans with 4
[…]
+
Today’s post is basically going to consist of me wishing I’d written this Gawker piece which was actually written by Hamilton Nolan and was entitled “It Would Be Great if Millionaires Would Not Lecture Us on ‘Living With Less’”. To enjoy it as much as I did, you’d have to read this New York Times Opinion [...]
March 13, 2013
+
7:01 PM | Tiny in-line filters
A small list of useful things (links):Josh Bloom wrestles with Facebook; man, there are a lot of ignorant people. Who's the pope of organic chemistry?, Paul wonders. This DrFreddy post on CYPs is fantastic.I would love to know what's going on with this API manufacture request at In The Pipeline. Interesting post on flash chromatography of hydrophilic compounds at Practical Fragments. I loved this Ash post on the gate that led to the Manhattan Project. Andrew
[…]
+
Credit: Jones Lang LaSalleLuke Timmerman recently called out real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle's ranking of US biotech hubs, especially its ranking of San Diego over the San Francisco Bay Area. Derek Lowe chimed in and agreed that the home of the Giants and 49ers should be ranked higher than America's Finest City. For what it's worth, I certainly agree that it's a counterintuitive finding. (Don't miss Timmerman's dogging of Lindbergh Field; if only MCRD would move somewhere else...)I think
[…]
+
From the very interesting book "Organometallics in Process Chemistry" [1] comes this story of what happens when a group of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals chemists (circa 1982) were looking for a process-friendly Simmons-Smith cyclopropanation. After going from diethyl ether (!) to 1,2-dimethoxyethane to get some higher heat capacity, they faced another interesting problem -- their source of zinc and its surface area:The high cost of utilizing zinc-copper amalgam led to the develop of a cheaper process
[…]
+
In a paper in Economic Letters (ungated version here), Ying Bai and James Kung test Spolaore and Wacziarg’s hypothesis on genetic distant and economic development: Since 1949, trade and economic ties as well as the physical movement of people between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland had been banned. Given this disconnection, one would naturally expect the relative genetic [...]The post Genetic distance and income differences – evidence from China appeared first on Evolving
[…]
+
11:06 AM | I kind of hate TED talks
The good There are good things about TED talks. It’s nice to have a thoughtful articulate person saying something a little bit new and a little bit different. OK I’m done. The annoying Then there are annoying things about TED talks. People are so ridiculously polished. No idea is that perfect! Rumor has it that, [...]
March 12, 2013
+
It's time for another portion of the Reddit Chemistry Jobs FAQ. Here's part 1 and part 2. Today's questions:czechychicky: How important is a PhD supervisor vs. university at which the degree was obtained? chemistress: How much does the graduate school you attend matter? Will I seriously be hurting my future job prospects if I receive my PhD from a (much) lower-ranked school?The old adage is that your terminal degree/experience should be the best one possible. There's a lot of caveats
[…]
+
Let's say that you had a unique skill set, one that gets you paid $50,000/year. If you decided to leave your field but be willing to take occasional consultant gigs, how should you charge for it?If it were me, I would take my hourly rate, say, $25/hr, and use that as a benchmark and then move that number up and down as I felt like it. It seems to me that it would be okay to bump it up a little bit, say $40-50/hr just to make it worth your time (if, for instance, you had decided to take a job in
[…]
+
3:02 PM | Daily Pump Trap: 3/12/13 edition
Good morning! Between March 7 and March 11, there have been 25 new positions posted to the C&EN Jobs website. Of these, 9 (36%) are academically connected.Anchorage, AK: SGS North America is seeking a lot of positions; here's one for a project manager in an analytical laboratory in Anchorage. (Fun!) Odd how that Anchorage project manager position doesn't show up on their website, but this lab tech position does.Greenville, SC: Our old friend IRIX is posting for a senior analytical
[…]
+
2:46 PM | Ivory Filter Flask: 3/12/2013 edition
Good morning! Between March 5 and March 11, there are 16 academic positions posted on C&EN Jobs. The numbers:Total number of ads: 16- Postdocs: 1- Tenure-track faculty: 6- Temporary faculty: 3- Lecturer positions: 2- Staff positions: 4- US/non-US: 15/1Solomons, MD: The University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science seeks a M.S./Ph.D. chemist to run their analytical group, which consists of 6 analysts.Moorhead, MN: The University of Minnesota - Moorhead seeks
[…]
+
11:37 AM | Black Scholes and the normal distribution
There have been lots of comments and confusion, especially in this post, over what people in finance do or do not assume about how the markets work. I wanted to dispel some myths (at the risk of creating more). First, there’s a big difference between quantitative trading and quantitative risk. And there may be a [...]
March 11, 2013
+
From the pages of Bloomberg, a reminder of what actual shortage in an employment field looks like:Wages in energy and mining have grown at nine times the rate of all industries since 2008, and starting salaries for petroleum engineering graduates are about $98,000, up 9.7 percent since 2008, according to PayScale Inc. The need is acute at the newest chemical, refining and export complexes that serve a shale-drilling renaissance that has given U.S. companies the competitive advantage of low
[…]
+
From this week's C&EN, more from ACS President Marinda Wu on ACS New Orleans:As part of my initiative to promote jobs, ACS will launch a program in New Orleans that is intended to expand job opportunities for ACS members. The International Employment Initiative (IEI) will bring international recruiters to meet job seekers at Sci-Mix on April 8 and the ACS Virtual Career Fair on April 8–9. Connecting job seekers with global opportunities increases potential options for members looking for
[…]
+
1:08 PM | Why I blog
Over the last year I have seen several blog posts and articles discussing the merits of being an academic blogger, most recently this piece by Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson (HT: John Hawks). Having been blogging on my research interest – the intersection of economics and evolutionary biology – for around two years now, I thought [...]The post Why I blog appeared first on Evolving Economics.
+
I wanted to give you the low-down on a data hackathon I participated in this weekend, which was sponsored by the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge on the topic of climate change and social information. We were assigned teams and given a very broad mandate. We had only 24 hours to do the work, so [...]
March 10, 2013
+
It is a slick piece of public relations to convince people to disregard what is right in front of them and believe the opposite. And yet, that is what the oil industry has achieved with an oh-so obviously coordinated campaign to tell the public and policymakers that there is no need to be concerned about future oil supplies.Many people remember the price spike of 2008 which shot prices to an all-time high of $147 a barrel. Oil subsequently crashed all the way down to about $35 at the end of
[…]
