Posts

April 30, 2013

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With young people waiting until their late 30s and even 40s to have their babies, the idea of a grandparent being alive and mobile when those babies walk down the aisle is almost laughable, or would be if it didn't make me so sad about my own non-existent grandbabies.read more

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5:30 PM | The Climatic Origins of the Malaysian Nipah Virus Outbreak

One of the hardest questions to answer in an infectious disease outbreak investigation is “Why?” Why then? Why there? These questions can be almost impossible to answer – not only because of their heady metaphysical nature but also because of the difficulty of assessing the minute interactions between microbe, environment and human host. Public health officials [...]

Chua KB, Chua BH & Wang CW (2002). Anthropogenic deforestation, El Niño and the emergence of Nipah virus in Malaysia., The Malaysian journal of pathology, 24 (1) 15-21. PMID: 16329551

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1:36 PM | “Tragedy of the science-communication commons”

I’ve earlier written that science is science communication—that is, the act of communicating scientific ideas and findings to ourselves and others is itself a central part of science. My point was to push against a conventional separation between the act of science and the act of communication, the idea that science is done by scientists [...]

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10:13 AM | Projects Day is almost here! View NSC Projects and more!

#NetworkScience Each year hundreds of cadets from all academic departments participate in Projects Day by presenting a design project or thesis. Whether individually or as a team, cadets demonstrate their ability to integrate academic and military knowledge and skills, as … Continue reading →

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12:47 AM | Giving credit where due

Gregg Easterbrook may not always be on the ball, but I 100% endorse the last section of his recent column (scroll down to “Absurd Specificity Watch”). Earlier in the column, Easterbrook has a plug for Tim Tebow. I’d forgotten about Tim Tebow.

April 29, 2013

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5:53 PM | The Great Race

This post is by Phil. Last summer my wife and took a 3.5-month vacation that included a wide range of activities. When I got back, people would ask “what were the highlights or your trip?”, and I was somewhat at a loss: we had done so many things that were so different, many of which [...]

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1:03 PM | The blogroll

I encourage you to check out our linked blogs. Here’s what they’re all about: Cognitive and Behavioral Science BPS Research Digest: I haven’t been following this one recently, but it has lots of good links, I should probably check it more often. There are a couple things that bother me, though. The blog is sponsored [...]

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10:46 AM | NSC Research Team’s Visit to Kampala, Uganda

#NetworkScience Part 1: Hive CoLab Dr. Charles Thomas and I (Dan Evans) visited Kampala, Uganda in support of an ongoing Network Science Center project developing new models of entrepreneurial networks. As additional data sets are collected, and new models are … Continue reading →

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4:03 AM | When and Where Is It Okay to Cry?

A few weeks ago, an article appeared in my LinkedIn feed that asked “Is crying acceptable in the workplace?’ I’ll save you the click thru: the short answer in this piece is no. While emotion is a part of life, the article concludes it isn’t rewarded in the workplace because it suggests weakness. A quick [...]

April 28, 2013

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9:39 PM | Game Over!

Hey everyone! Tomorrow I’ll be shutting this baby down and the Body Horrors blog will solely be accessible at the Discover Magazine website. When you access any of my articles, you’ll be redirected to that article’s home on Discover. Sadly, this means that you will no longer be updated by email whenever I publish a [...]

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8:08 PM | The World Science Festival is Coming!

Heads up, readers: The World Science Festival is coming to New York City! From May 29th through June 2nd, New York City will be host to a variety of events designed to make science accessible to a larger audience. While some events do require a ticket, many are free, including a science fair done street-style [...]

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1:48 PM | The Secret Life of the Microwave Oven

An In-Progress Draft of a Thing What I’m Writing for a Science Writing Contest. [Insert snappy and pithy introduction here] Like much of our modern world, microwave ovens rely on electromagnetic waves. Every single bit of space around you has a … Continue reading →

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1:25 PM | Plain old everyday Bayesianism!

Sam Behseta writes: There is a report by Martin Tingley and Peter Huybers in Nature on the unprecedented high temperatures at northern latitudes (Russia, Greenland, etc). What is more interesting is the authors are have used a straightforward hierarchical Bayes model, and for the first time (as far as I can remember) the results are [...]

April 27, 2013

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10:24 PM | Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences

James Druckman and Jeremy Freese write: We are pleased to announce that Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) was renewed for another round of funding by NSF starting last Fall. TESS allows researchers to submit proposals for experiments to be conducted on a nationally-representative, probability-based Internet platform, and successful proposals are fielded at no [...]

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2:00 PM | Continued fractions!!

Upon reading this note by John Cook on continued fractions, I wrote: If you like continued fractions, I recommend you read the relevant parts of the classic Numerical Methods That Work. The details are probably obsolete but it’s fun reading (at least, if you think that sort of thing is fun to read). I then [...]

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10:56 AM | CMU’s Summer Institute for Network Analysis

#NetworkScience LTC Mike Lanham (inbound D/EECS) will be teaching at Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) CASOS Summer Institute 2013 from Jun 9-16. The Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems (CASOS) hosts an annual summer institute for government, academia, … Continue reading →

April 26, 2013

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1:09 PM | “A Vast Graveyard of Undead Theories: Publication Bias and Psychological Science’s Aversion to the Null”

Erin Jonaitis points us to this article by Christopher Ferguson and Moritz Heene, who write: Publication bias remains a controversial issue in psychological science. . . . that the field often constructs arguments to block the publication and interpretation of null results and that null results may be further extinguished through questionable researcher practices. Given [...]

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10:50 AM | Newsblast Volume 3 Issue 5

#NetworkScience In this Newsblast Dan Evans writes about his Entrepreneur Network project. The project seeks to create a network model that accurately measures the entrepreneurial environment in a particular location, define a “goal network” for that location, and determine driver nodes … Continue reading →

April 25, 2013

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2:03 PM | Call Me Maybe: Social Media & the Spread of STDs

April! We’ve passed the vernal equinox and spring is springing, flowers are blooming, we’re shedding our sweaters and jackets and all will be warm once again. We can put our winter blues to rest and bask in the knowledge that summer will soon be upon us. To my delight, I recently discovered that this month, [...]

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1:29 PM | Fascinating graphs from facebook data

Yair points us to this page full of wonderful graphs from the Stephen Wolfram blog. Here are a few: And some words: People talk less about video games as they get older, and more about politics and the weather. Men typically talk more about sports and technology than women—and, somewhat surprisingly to me, they also [...]

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1:22 PM | It’s binless! A program for computing normalizing functions

Zhiqiang Tan writes: I have created an R package to implement the full likelihood method in Kong et al. (2003). The method can be seen as a binless extension of so-called Weighted Histogram Analysis Method (UWHAM) widely used in physics and chemistry. The method has also been introduced to the physics literature and called the [...]

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12:30 PM | Overemphasis on Theory Development Is Damaging Organizational Psychology

In a recent article appearing in Organizational Psychology Review, Pillutla and Thau[1] make some very strongly worded arguments about the role of theory development in psychological science. I’ll start exploring their paper with a quote in their own words: The state of [industrial/organizational psychology] and its obsession with novel theoretical contributions is antithetical to the goals of [...] Related articles from NeoAcademic: Recent Cheating Scandal at U of Flordia Highlights […]

Pillutla, M. & Thau, S. (2013). Organizational sciences' obsession with "that's interesting!": Consequences and an alternative, Organizational Psychology Review, 3 (2) 187-194. DOI: 10.1177/2041386613479963

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April 24, 2013

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8:12 PM | Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop pharmaceutical statistician stops mugger

Brett Keller points us to this feel-good story of the day: A Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop helped a neighbor woman escape a Tuesday morning attack by a man who had been stalking her. Kent Hendrix woke up Tuesday to his teenage son pounding on his bedroom door and telling him somebody was being mugged in [...]

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7:29 PM | Another comment on BMC Cancer, WDDTY and homeopathy

Well, I don’t know what bugs are at play in the BMC Cancer system. Almost three weeks since submitting the latest re-worked version of my comment (which I append below so it may be read by somebody), not only has it not appeared under the paper in question, but the continued lack of response (excepting one message informing me that – again – my query has been forwarded to the Editorial team) to my interim e-mails to the relevant provided... Read more

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6:16 PM | My talk midtown this Friday noon

At the City University of New York Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue (between 34th and 35th street), room 6002. The topic: causality and statistical learning. Announcement is here (scroll down). It says that if you would like to attend any event, please respond by emailing datamining@gc.cuny.edu

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4:06 PM | 28 Geeks Later: Lessons Learned from Zombies at the Cambridge Science Festival

So I recently worked at the Cambridge Science Festival. More specifically, I worked in the ‘social media’ part of the Cambridge Science Festival. Even more specifically, I ran around Cambridge Science Festival with a swanky piece of kit to record … Continue reading →

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1:15 PM | The Tweets-Votes Curve

Fabio Rojas points me to this excellently-titled working paper by Joseph DiGrazia, Karissa McKelvey, Johan Bollen, and himself: Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? We answer this ques- tion using a random sample of 537,231,508 tweets from August 1 to November 1, 2010 and data from 406 competitive U.S. congressional elections provided [...]

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1:01 PM | Parenting a Twentysomething

I was desperate in my twenties for my parents to think of me as a co-adult, especially during one night that's seared in my memory. I was 22 years old, two and a half years out of college, and had just started working as a reporter for a small magazine for which I was traveling on my first-ever business trip. read more

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10:36 AM | How to Identify Key Players in Terrorist Networks

#NetworkScience Submitted by Dr. Luke Gerdes On April 15, Dr. Luke M. Gerdes spoke to the Social Network Analysis Club (SNAC) about the impact that data transformation has on node-level centrality. He demonstrated that efforts to find “highly central” individuals … Continue reading →

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4:26 AM | Come see PsySociety at its new home!

As many of you have likely realized by now…we’ve moved! PsySociety has officially transitioned over to the new Scientific American MIND blog network. Launched just last month, the MIND network now features all of the brain- and psych-related blogs from … Continue reading →