Category: general silliness

my new favorite blog

…teaches you How To Write Badly Well. For instance, if you want to write badly well, you must Refuse to leave the present tense:

I sit at my desk and remember how, years ago, I wonder what my life will be like when I am fifty, which I am now. I’m imagining that I’m living in a big house, I remember as I sit in my one-bedroom apartment. Now I pour myself a drink and cast my mind back to a time when I’m full of hope and passion which is never to be extinguished, as it is now.

“˜What am I doing?’ I mutter to myself, taking a sip of my drink. In my memory, I’m seven years old, sitting in the highest branches of a tree which is being planted a hundred years before I am born. Now, though, the tree is long dead. I’m chopping it down at the age of twenty and thinking about when it is supporting my weight at the age of seven. I look at my watch.

“˜Late,’ I mutter to myself. It is eight; the retrospective is just starting, half an hour ago.

i’m not dropping out after all

I forgot about April Fool’s day. All week, I’ve been going on and on to my wife about how I was going to orchestrate a monumental prank on April Fool’s day–something like making a police car appear on top of the MIT dome, or making the statue of liberty disappear. But then my wife convinced me these weren’t great ideas, because they would require a lot more intelligence resources than I possess. So I settled for something more pedestrian, namely, pretending I was dropping out of academia because I’d gotten fed up with the poor hours and lack of M&Ms.

Well, while Google was busy renaming itself, and Andrew Gelman was disavowing any relationship with multilevel modeling, I dropped the ball and forgot to pull off my epic prank this morning. Turns out that may not have been such a bad thing: around noon, I found out that pretty much every other academic blogger on the planet had had exactly the same idea. Here’s Professor in Training:

After talking to my postdoc mentor last week, I’ve decided to resign from my position as assistant professor at Really Big U. Postdoc Mentor convinced me that I was a much better postdoc than I am PI and has generously offered me a place in his lab. He can’t afford to pay me as much as I was earning in his lab a couple of years ago and I won’t have my own computer or desk but I’m sure it’ll all work out for the best.

And here’s Prof-like Substance:

After all of the discussions how good postdoc life is and how teaching is sucking the life out of me I have decided to bail on this job and take a postdoc position in another country that I’ve always wanted to live in. My department and Dean are understandably upset and it took some time to make sure that all of my trainees can find PIs to work with so that they can finish their degrees, but sometimes you just have to do what’s right for yourself.

What the hell, people. Do we all share a brain? Are you all listening in on my conversations with my wife? Or is it just that all academics secretly harbor fantasies of dropping out in favor of a less stressful life featuring sunny beaches, cocktails, and afternoon sessions of Jai Alai?

Anyway, long story short, there won’t be an April Fool’s joke this year. I’ve decided to stay in academia. Just to be different.

elsewhere on the net

I’ve been swamped with work lately, so blogging has taken a backseat. I keep a text file on my desktop of interesting things I’d like to blog about; normally, about three-quarters of the links I paste into it go unblogged, but in the last couple of weeks it’s more like 98%. So here are some things I’ve found interesting recently, in no particular order:

It’s World Water Day 2010! Or at least it was a week ago, which is when I should have linked to these really moving photos.

Carl Zimmer has a typically brilliant (and beautifully illustrated) article in the New York Times about “Unseen Beasts, Then and Now“:

Somewhere in England, about 600 years ago, an artist sat down and tried to paint an elephant. There was just one problem: he had never seen one.

John Horgan writes a surprisingly bad guest blog post for Scientific American in which he basically accuses neuroscientists (not a neuroscientist or some neuroscientists, but all of us, collectively) of selling out by working with the US military. I’m guessing that the number of working neuroscientists who’ve ever received any sort of military funding is somewhere south of 10%, and is probably much smaller than the corresponding proportion in any number of other scientific disciplines, but why let data get in the way of a good anecdote or two. [via Peter Reiner]

Mark Liberman follows up his first critique of Louann Brizendine’s new “book” The Male Brain with second one, now that he’s actually got his hands on a copy. Verdict: the book is still terrible. Mark was also kind enough to answer my question about what the mysterious “sexual pursuit area” is. Apparently it’s the medial preoptic area. And the claim that this area governs sexual behavior in humans and is 2.5 times larger in males is, once again, based entirely on work in the rat.

Commuting sucks. Jonah Lehrer discusses evidence from happiness studies (by way of David Brooks) suggesting that most people would be much happier living in a smaller house close to work than a larger house that requires a lengthy commute:

According to the calculations of Frey and Stutzer, a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office.

I’ve taken these findings to heart, and whenever my wife and I move now, we prioritize location over space. We’re currently paying through the nose to live in a 750 square foot apartment near downtown Boulder. It’s about half the size of our old place in St. Louis, but it’s close to everything, including our work, and we love living here.

The modern human brain is much bigger than it used to be, but we didn’t get that way overnight. John Hawks disputes Colin Blakemore’s claim that “the human brain got bigger by accident and not through evolution“.

Sanjay Srivastava leans (or maybe used to lean) toward the permissive side; Andrew Gelman is skeptical. Attitudes toward causal modeling of correlational (and even some experimental) data differ widely. There’s been a flurry of recent work suggesting that causal modeling techniques like mediation analysis and SEM suffer from a number of serious and underappreciated problems, and after reading this paper by Bullock, Green and Ha, I guess I incline to agree.

A landmark ruling by a New York judge yesterday has the potential to invalidate existing patents on genes, which currently cover about 20% of the human genome in some form. Daniel MacArthur has an excellent summary.

green chile muffins and brains in a truck: weekend in albuquerque

I spent the better part of last week in Albuquerque for the Mind Research Network fMRI course. It’s a really well-organized 3-day course, and while it’s geared toward people without much background in fMRI, I found a lot of the lectures really helpful. It’s hard impossible to get everything right when you run an fMRI study; the magnet is very fickle and doesn’t like to do what you ask it to–and that assumes you’re asking it to do the right thing, which is also not so common. So I find I learn something interesting from almost every fMRI talk I attend, even when it’s stuff I thought I already knew.

Of course, since I know very little, there’s also almost always stuff that’s completely new to me. In this case, it was a series of lectures on independent components analysis (ICA) of fMRI data, focusing on Vince Calhoun‘s group’s implementation of ICA in the GIFT toolbox. It’s a beautifully implemented set of tools that offer a really powerful alternative to standard univariate analysis, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be using it regularly from now on. So the ICA lectures alone were worth the price of admission. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that my post-doc mentor, Tor Wager, is one of the organizers of the MRN course, and I wasn’t paying the $700 tab out of pocket. But I’m not getting any kickbacks to say nice things about the course, I promise.)

Between the lectures and the green chile corn muffins, I didn’t get to see much of Albuquerque (except from the air, where the urban sprawl makes the city seem much larger than its actual population of 800k people would suggest), so I’ll reserve judgment for another time. But the MRN itself is a pretty spectacular facility. Aside from a 3T Siemens Trio magnet, they also have a 1.5T mobile scanner built into a truck. It’s mostly used to scan inmates in the New Mexico prison system (you’ll probably be surprised to learn that they don’t let hardened criminals out of jail to participate in scientific experiments–so the scanner has to go to jail instead). We got a brief tour of the mobile scanner and it was pretty awesome. Which is to say, it beats the pants off my Honda.

There are also some parts of the course I don’t remember so well. Here’s a (blurry) summary of those parts, courtesy of Alex Shackman:

Scott, Tor, and me in Albuquerque
BlurryScott, BlurryTor, and BlurryTal: The Boulder branch of the lab, Albuquerque 2010 edition

what do personality psychology and social psychology actually have in common?

Is there a valid (i.e., non-historical) reason why personality psychology and social psychology are so often lumped together as one branch of psychology? There are PSP journals, PSP conferences, PSP brownbags… the list goes on. It all seems kind of odd considering that, in some ways, personality psychologists and social psychologists have completely opposite focuses (foci?). Personality psychologists are all about the consistencies in people’s behavior, and classify situational variables under “measurement error”; social psychologists care not one whit for traits, and are all about how behavior is influenced by the situation. Also, aside from the conceptual tension, I’ve often gotten the sense that personality psychologists and social psychologists often just don’t like each other very much. Which I guess would make sense if you think these are two relatively distinct branches of psychology that, for whatever reason, have been lumped together inextricably for several decades. It’s kind of like being randomly assigned a roommate in college, except that you have to live with that roommate for the rest of your life.

I’m not saying there aren’t ways in which the two disciplines overlap. There are plenty of similarities; for example, they both tend to heavily feature self-report, and both often involve the study of social behavior. But that’s not really a good enough reason to lump them together. You can take almost any two branches of psychology and find a healthy intersection. For example, the interface between social psychology and cognitive psychology is one of the hottest areas of research in psychology at the moment. There’s a journal called Social Cognition–which, not coincidentally, is published by the International Social Cognition Network. Lots of people are interested in applying cognitive psychology models to social psychological issues. But you’d probably be taking bullets from both sides of the hallway if you ever suggested that your department should combine their social psychology and cognitive psychology brown bag series. Sure, there’s an overlap, but there’s also far more content that’s unique to each discipline.

The same is true for personality psychology and social psychology, I’d argue. Many (most?) personality psychologists aren’t intrinsically interested in social aspects of personality (at least, no more so than in other, non-social aspects), and many social psychologists couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the individual differences that make each of us a unique and special flower. And yet there we sit, week after week, all together in the same seminar room, as one half of the audience experiences rapture at the speaker’s words, and the other half wishes they could be slicing blades of grass off their lawn with dental floss. What gives?

elsewhere on the internets…

Some stuff I’ve found interesting in the last week or two:

Nicholas Felton released his annual report of… himself. It’s a personal annual report on Felton, as seen through the eyes of a bunch of friends, family, and strangers:

Each day in 2009, I asked every person with whom I had a meaningful encounter to submit a record of this meeting through an online survey. These reports form the heart of the 2009 Annual Report. From parents to old friends, to people I met for the first time, to my dentist“¦ any time I felt that someone had discerned enough of my personality and activities, they were given a card with a URL and unique number to record their experience.

You probably don’t much care about Nicholas Felton’s relationships, moods, or diet, but it’s a neat idea that’s really well executed. And it looks great [via Flowing Data].

Hackademe is a serialized novel about a man, with an axe, who dislikes professors enough to take them out behind the wood shed and… alright, no, it’s actually “a website devoted to sharing clever uses of technology, software, or modified items to solve problems related to information overload, time management, organization, productivity, and other challenges faced by academics on a daily basis.” Which is pretty cool, except that I have trouble seeing the word “hackademic” in a positive light…

The UK’s General Medical Council finally laid the smack down on the ethically-challenged Andrew Wakefield–he of “vaccines cause autism, and here’s a terrible and possibly fraudulent study to prove it” fame. There’s a very long but very good write-up of the whole debacle here. Unfortunately, the reprimand is really just symbolic at this point, because Wakefield now lives in the US, and isn’t (officially) practicing medicine any more. Instead, he spends his days pumping autistic children full of laxatives. I wish I were joking.

The Neuroskeptic has had a string of great posts in the last couple of weeks. I particularly enjoyed this one, wherein he exposes reveals himself to be an expert on all matters sexual, dopaminergic, and British.

According to a study in Nature, running barefoot may be better for our feet than running in shoes. Turns out that barefoot runners strike the ground with the middle or ball of the foot, greatly reducing the force of impact. This may explain why so many (shod) runners get injured every year, and is supposed to make sense to you if you’re one of those evolutionist folks who think humans evolved to run long distances over the course of millions of years. But since you and I both know god created shoes around the same time he was borrowing Adam’s ribs, we can dispense with that sort of silliness.

The Census Bureau has some ‘splaining to do. Over at Freakonomics, Justin Wolfers discusses a new paper that uncovers massive (and inadvertent) problems with large chunks of census data. The fact that the census bureau screwed up isn’t terribly surprising (though it does call a number of published findings into question); everyone who works with data makes mistakes now and then, and the Census Bureau works with most data than most people. What is surprising is that Census has apparently refused to correct the problem, which is going to leave a lot of people hanging.

Slime mold has evolved the capacity to plan metropolitan transit systems! So claims a study in last week’s issue of Science. Ok, that’s not exactly what the article shows. What Tero et al. do show is that slime mold naturally forms networks that have a structure with comparable efficiency to the Tokyo rail system. Which, if you think about it, kind of does mean that slime mold has the capacity to plan metropolitan transit systems.

Projection Point is a neat website that measures something its creators term your “Risk Intelligence Quotient”. What’s interesting is that the site measures meta-cognitive judgments about risk rather than risk attitudes. In other words, it measures how much you know about how much you know, rather than how much you know. If that sounds confusing, spend 5 minutes answering 50 questions, and all will be made clear.

Pete Warden wants to divide up the US into 7 distinct chunks. Or at least, he wants to tell you how FaceBook thinks the US should be divided up, based on social connections between people in different geographic locations. There’s Stayathomia, Mormonia, and Socialistan. (Names have been deliberately altered to protect the guilty states.)

Each day in 2009, I asked every person with whom I had a meaningful encounter to submit a record of this meeting through an online survey. These reports form the heart of the 2009 Annual Report. From parents to old friends, to people I met for the first time, to my dentist“¦ any time I felt that someone had discerned enough of my personality and activities, they were given a card with a URL and unique number to record their experience.

the fifty percent sleeper

That’s the title of a short fiction piece I have up at lablit.com today; it’s about brain scanning and beef jerky, among other things. It starts like this:

Day 1, 6 a.m.

Ok, I’m locked into this place now. I’ve got ten pounds of beef jerky, fifty dollars for the vending machine, and a flash drive full of experiments to run. If I can get eighteen usable subjects’ worth of data in five days, Yezerski mows my lawn, does my dishes for a week, and walks my dog three times a week for two months. If I don’t get eighteen subjects done, I mow his lawn, do his dishes, and drive his disabled grandmother to physiotherapy once a week for six months. Also: if I don’t get any subjects scanned, I have to tattoo Yezerski’s grandmother’s name on my back in 50-point font. We both know it’s not going to come to that, but Yezerski insisted we make it a part of the bet anyway.

And then goes on in a similar vein. You might enjoy it if you like MRI machines and cerebellums. If you don’t care for brains, you’ll probably just find it silly.

what do turtles, sea slugs, religion, and TED all have in common?

…absolutely nothing, actually, except that they’re all mentioned in this post. I’m feeling lazy very busy this week, so instead of writing a long and boring diatribe about clowns, ROIs, or personality measures, I’ll just link to a few interesting pieces elsewhere:

Razib of Gene Expression has an interesting post on the rapid secularization of America, and the relation of religious affiliation to political party identification. You wouldn’t know it from the increasing political clout of the religious right, but Americans are substantially more likely to report having no religious affiliation today than they were 20 years ago. I mean a lot more likely. In Vermont, over a third of the population now reports having no religion. Here’s an idea, Vermont: want to generate more tourism? I present your new slogan: Vermont, America’s Europe.

Sea slugs are awesome. If you doubt this, consider Exhibit A: a sea slug found off the East Coast that lives off photosynthesis:

The slugs look just like a leaf, green and about three centimetres long, and are found off the east coast of North America from Nova Scotia to Florida.

They acquire the ability to photosynthesize by eating algae and incorporating the plants’ tiny chlorophyll-containing structures, called chloroplasts, into their own cells.

You can’t make this stuff up! It’s a slug! That eats algae! And then turns into  leaf!

I’m a big fan of TED, and there’s a great interview with its curator, Chris Anderson, conducted by reddit. Reddit interviews are usually pretty good (see, e.g., Barney Frank and Christopher Hitchens); who knew the internet had the makings of a great journalist?!?

Ok, now for the turtles. According to PalMD, they cause salmonella. So much so that the CDC banned the sale of turtles under 4 inches in length in 1975. Apparently children just loved to smooch those cute little turtles. And the turtles, being evil, loved to give children a cute little case of salmonella. Result: ban small turtles and prevent 200,000 infections. Next up: frog-banning and salami-banning! Both are currently also suspected of causing salmonella outbreaks. Is there any species those bacteria can’t corrupt?

sea slug or leaf?