Mathematics posts
- December 17, 2011
- 11:22 PM
- 626 views
large-scale data exploration, MIC-style
by Tal Yarkoni in citation needed
Real-world data are messy. Relationships between two variables can take on an infinite number of forms, and while one doesn’t see, say, umbrella-shaped data very often, strange things can happen. When scientists talk about correlations or associations between variables, they’re usually referring to one very specific form of relationship–namely, a linear one. The assumption is [...]... Read more »
Reshef DN, Reshef YA, Finucane HK, Grossman SR, McVean G, Turnbaugh PJ, Lander ES, Mitzenmacher M, & Sabeti PC. (2011) Detecting novel associations in large data sets. Science (New York, N.Y.), 334(6062), 1518-24. PMID: 22174245
- December 15, 2011
- 10:42 AM
- 562 views
Take that, Larry Summers!
by Cherish in Faraday's Cage Is Where You Put Schroedinger's Cat
I came across an article on the new research by Kane and Mertz which supposedly disproves the “greater male variability” hypothesis. That is, while averages for both genders are approximately the same, males have more variance in their intelligence. Thus, when intelligence tested, you’ll see more males at both the upper and lower tails of the [...]... Read more »
Jonathan M. Kane and Janet E. Mertz. (2011) Debunking Myths about Gender and Mathematics Performance. Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 10. info:/
- December 14, 2011
- 09:08 PM
- 3,388 views
Reinventing Discovery, Part II
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
This is the second part of my review of Michael Nielsen's book "Reinventing Discovery - The New Era of Networked Science" (first part is here). Last time we talked about Galaxy Zoo, the Polymath Project, and why scientists don't (usually) do Wikis. This time I'd like to focus on the book parts which talk about ArXiv. First of all, I have to say I've been using ArXiv extensively lately as part of the ACUMEN project, trying to figure out who and what can be found there. The place is a bit of a m........ Read more »
Nielsen, Michael. (2011) Reinventing Discovery. Princeton University Press. info:other/9780691148908
- December 12, 2011
- 03:51 PM
- 3,391 views
Unified Theory BS: I Debunk "The Schwarzschild Proton" by Nassim Haramein
by DJ Busby in Astronasty
The unification of forces, sought after for a long time, and the incompatibility of standard mechanics of gravity on the quantum scale has been a holy grail of sorts for physicists to resolve. Now if we look at the nature of standard black holes, not protons, we can't forget that they exist as a singularity on a quantum level. All we know of black holes then should apply to these schwarzschild protons. This new theory debunks black hole evaporation. Stephen Hawking will be angered.
Stro........ Read more »
Nassim Haramein. (2010) The Schwarzschild Proton . AIP. info:other/
- December 12, 2011
- 10:09 AM
- 3,807 views
The Beethoven connection
by Joerg Heber in All That Matters
Symphonies are some of the most complex musical pieces. They involve different instruments, each with their own unique sound, and each instruments section playing their own tunes. Yet, what are symphonies in comparison to the complexity of life? Proteins for example, they are made of a limited number of building blocks, amino acids, but take [...]... Read more »
Spivak, D., Giesa, T., Wood, E., & Buehler, M. (2011) Category Theoretic Analysis of Hierarchical Protein Materials and Social Networks. PLoS ONE, 6(9). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0023911
Giesa, T., Spivak, D., & Buehler, M. (2011) Reoccurring Patterns in Hierarchical Protein Materials and Music: The Power of Analogies. BioNanoScience, 1(4), 153-161. DOI: 10.1007/s12668-011-0022-5
- December 9, 2011
- 01:50 PM
- 661 views
Why Good Time Estimators Are Better at Math
by Elizabeth Preston in Inkfish
Since most of us were never called on in class to answer a tough time-estimation question, or quizzed on the lengths of tones in milliseconds, we don't have a good grasp of our skill in this area. It's kind of exciting. You could be a prodigy and not know it! But a cold dose of reality comes from new research saying skill in time estimation is tied to mathematical intelligence. If you're not amazing at math, your temporal abilities probably aren't A-plus either.
Writing in PLos ONE, a group ........ Read more »
Kramer, P., Bressan, P., & Grassi, M. (2011) Time Estimation Predicts Mathematical Intelligence. PLoS ONE, 6(12). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0028621
- December 8, 2011
- 08:00 AM
- 624 views
Burn your tables
by Zen Faulkes in Better Posters
A new paper provides empirical evidence for something that many people, like Edward Tufte, have been saying for years: graphs and figures are better than tables.Cook and Teo took the results of statistical simulations, and presented them to people in the form of graphs or tables. Everyone were able to answer questions about the data more quickly using a graph. Less experienced people (i.e., undergraduates compared to postgraduates) were able to make more accurate statements about the results whe........ Read more »
Cook A, & Teo S. (2011) The communicability of graphical alternatives to tabular displays of statistical simulation studies. PLoS ONE, 6(11). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0027974
- December 7, 2011
- 06:25 PM
- 973 views
Reinventing Discovery: Book Review, Part I
by Hadas Shema in Information Culture
In Arthur C. Clarke's story "Into the Comet" he describes a spaceship with a computer malfunction that dooms all abroad to eventual death by starvation/oxygen deprivation, whichever comes first. The solution is a device older than the computer: the abacus. The entire crew run calculations on acabi, and they make their way out of the comet's nucleus successfully. That is an extreme example of citizen science (or oh-my-God-we're-all-going-to-die science) but it shows the principle, that collaborat........ Read more »
Nielsen, Michael. (2011) Reinventing Discovery. Princeton University Press. info:other/9780691148908
- December 4, 2011
- 03:37 PM
- 430 views
How Much Water Goes Into Your Mug?
by Arielle D. Ross in Salamander Hours
I didn’t always know what a first flush tea was. Although I grew up in a family of tea drinkers, I wasn’t aware of the plethora of different types of tea one can find in the local tea shop until … Continue reading →... Read more »
Chapagain, A., & Hoekstra, A. (2007) The water footprint of coffee and tea consumption in the Netherlands. Ecological Economics, 64(1), 109-118. DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2007.02.022
- December 4, 2011
- 01:39 PM
- 707 views
Circumcision, preventing fraud, and icky toilets
by Iddo Friedberg in Byte Size Biology
In no particular order or ranking, recent and not-so-recent articles from PLoS-1. The common thread (if any): I thought they were pretty cool in one way or another.... Read more »
Thomas, A., Tran, B., Cranston, M., Brown, M., Kumar, R., & Tlelai, M. (2011) Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision: A Cross-Sectional Study Comparing Circumcision Self-Report and Physical Examination Findings in Lesotho. PLoS ONE, 6(11). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0027561
Wicherts, J., Bakker, M., & Molenaar, D. (2011) Willingness to Share Research Data Is Related to the Strength of the Evidence and the Quality of Reporting of Statistical Results. PLoS ONE, 6(11). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0026828
Flores, G., Bates, S., Knights, D., Lauber, C., Stombaugh, J., Knight, R., & Fierer, N. (2011) Microbial Biogeography of Public Restroom Surfaces. PLoS ONE, 6(11). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0028132
- November 29, 2011
- 08:41 AM
- 1,167 views
Sample size, P-values, and publication bias: the positive aspects of negative thinking
If you follow the science blogging community, you may have noticed a lot of talking about sample size in the past couple of weeks. So I did my share of mulling things over and this is what I came up with.1- The study in question had a small sample size but reported a significant p-value (<0.05). Such study is NOT underpowered. An underpowered study is a study that does not have a sufficiently large sample size to allow detection of a significant result. A significant result is by definition a........ Read more »
Dirnagl, U., & Lauritzen, M. (2010) Fighting publication bias: introducing the Negative Results section. Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow , 30(7), 1263-1264. DOI: 10.1038/jcbfm.2010.51
- November 26, 2011
- 09:52 AM
- 451 views
Beware Dead Fish Statistics
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic
An editorial in the Journal of Physiology offers some important notes on statistics.But even more importantly, it refers to a certain blog in the process:The Student’s t-test merely quantifies the ‘Lack of support’ for no effect. It is left to the user of the test to decide how convincing this lack might be. A further difficulty is evident in the repeated samples we show in Figure 2: one of those samples was quite improbable because the P-value was 0.03, which suggests a substantial lack o........ Read more »
Drummond GB, & Tom BD. (2011) Statistics, probability, significance, likelihood: words mean what we define them to mean. British journal of pharmacology, 164(6), 1573-6. PMID: 22022804
- November 14, 2011
- 04:07 PM
- 366 views
Modern War-fMRI : Graphics Cards for Science
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic
Videogames and neuroscience have a rocky relationship.On the one hand you have Susan Greenfield and her games-hurt-the-brain theory. But she's not representative of neuroscientists as a whole: games have also helped neuroscience, for example, in this study of the neural correlates of "flow" experiences. Now neuroscientists have another reason to be thankful for games, according to a new paper. It turns out that modern 3D graphics cards - which mostly exist in order to render videogame visuals - ........ Read more »
Eklund A, Andersson M, & Knutsson H. (2011) Fast random permutation tests enable objective evaluation of methods for single-subject FMRI analysis. International journal of biomedical imaging, 627947. PMID: 22046176
- November 13, 2011
- 07:01 PM
- 996 views
Something you should know about: Quantifier Elimination (Part I)
by Aaron Sterling in CSTheory StackExchange Community Blog
by Arnab Bhattacharyya About a month ago, Ankur Moitra dropped by my office. We started chatting about what each of us was up to. He told me a story about a machine learning problem that he was working on with Sanjeev Arora, Rong Ge, and Ravi Kannan. On its face, it was not even [...]... Read more »
Alfred Tarski. (1951) A Decision Method for Elementary Algebra and Geometry. Rand Corporation. info:/
- November 13, 2011
- 10:54 AM
- 551 views
To bomb or not to bomb
by United Academics in United Academics
It's a question that has been on social scientist' minds for ages: why don't we just always attack the people we fear, instead of trying to keep the peace?... Read more »
Nash, J. (1950) Equilibrium points in n-person games. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 36(1), 48-49. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.36.1.48
- November 10, 2011
- 01:41 PM
- 858 views
Fantastic free new academic search tool for tracking down -ve findings
by Neurobonkers in Neurobonkers
Does what it says on the tin.... Read more »
Agarwal S, Yu H, & Kohane I. (2011) BioNOT: A searchable database of biomedical negated sentences. BMC bioinformatics, 12(1), 420. PMID: 22032181
- November 8, 2011
- 05:10 AM
- 566 views
The seventh starling (Murmuration)
by GrrlScientist in Maniraptora
SUMMARY: What do particle physics, statistics and poetry have in common? (includes videos)... Read more »
Cavagna, A., & Giardina, I. (2008) The seventh starling. Significance, 5(2), 62-66. DOI: 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2008.00288.x
Cavagna, A., Cimarelli, A., Giardina, I., Parisi, G., Santagati, R., Stefanini, F., & Viale, M. (2010) Scale-free correlations in starling flocks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(26), 11865-11870. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1005766107
Hemelrijk, C., & Hildenbrandt, H. (2011) Some Causes of the Variable Shape of Flocks of Birds. PLoS ONE, 6(8). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0022479
- November 8, 2011
- 03:00 AM
- 36,742 views
The seventh starling (Murmuration) [video] | @GrrlScientist
by GrrlScientist in GrrlScientist
What do particle physics, statistics and poetry have in common? (includes videos)... Read more »
Cavagna, A., & Giardina, I. (2008) The seventh starling. Significance, 5(2), 62-66. DOI: 10.1111/j.1740-9713.2008.00288.x
Cavagna, A., Cimarelli, A., Giardina, I., Parisi, G., Santagati, R., Stefanini, F., & Viale, M. (2010) Scale-free correlations in starling flocks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(26), 11865-11870. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1005766107
Hemelrijk, C., & Hildenbrandt, H. (2011) Some Causes of the Variable Shape of Flocks of Birds. PLoS ONE, 6(8). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0022479
- November 7, 2011
- 05:28 AM
- 632 views
A Millenium Problem issue
by Marco Frasca in The Gauge Connection
As my readers know, a recurring question in this blog is the solution to the Millenium Problem on Yang-Mills theory. So far, we have heard no fuzz about this matter and the page at the Clay Institute is no more updated since 2004. But in these years, activity on this problem has been significant and [...]... Read more »
Alexander Dynin. (2009) Energy-mass spectrum of Yang-Mills bosons is infinite and discrete. arXiv. arXiv: 0903.4727v4
Marco Frasca. (2007) Infrared Gluon and Ghost Propagators. Phys.Lett.B670:73-77,2008. arXiv: 0709.2042v6
I. L. Bogolubsky, E. -M. Ilgenfritz, M. Müller-Preussker, & A. Sternbeck. (2009) Lattice gluodynamics computation of Landau-gauge Green's functions in the deep infrared. Phys.Lett.B676:69-73,2009. arXiv: 0901.0736v3
Ph. Boucaud, J. P. Leroy, A. Le Yaouanc, J. Micheli, O. Péne, & J. Rodríguez-Quintero. (2011) The Infrared Behaviour of the Pure Yang-Mills Green Functions. arXiv. arXiv: 1109.1936v1
- October 31, 2011
- 12:06 PM
- 671 views
Apocalypse not
by United Academics in United Academics
Apocalypse not
By Bendert Katier Monday October 31, 2011
Apocalypse not
This month’s magazine is themed Apocalypse Now. Or, what seems to be more appropriate, Apocalypse Not. Because although Judgement Day has been predicted many, many times, it is still not upon us. Wonder if, when, and how it will happen? Check out this issue.... Read more »
Bartlett, A. (1994) Reflections on sustainability, population growth, and the environment. Population and Environment, 16(1), 5-35. DOI: 10.1007/BF02208001
Nash, J. (1950) Equilibrium points in n-person games. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 36(1), 48-49. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.36.1.48
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