Trouble at the lab

A 2013 oct 19 ECONOMIST article reviews problems with scientific research - i've summarized and reordered them:

1.    most scientists are not statisticians
2.    statistical mistakes are common
3.    pressure to publish incomplete results is strong
4.    a lot of research is poorly designed and executed
5.    many models are ‘overfitted’
6.    bias to publish positive results leads to bias in overall knowledge
7.    peer review is unreliable
8.    amounts of data are often overwhelming
9.    intellectual property rights restrict the use of code or methods
10.  replication is often difficult and unrewarding
11.  fraud is more common than realized

fear

by their dependence on lawyers and doctors Americans regularly prove their fear of real and imagined threats; no wonder they also lean on spooks...

trees, dead and killed

yesterday i witnessed the killing and disposal of a live tree by 4 machines powered by dead trees: chain saw, chipper, blower, and truck. is this what technology wants?

what's next?

two institutions seem to have facilitated human progress but now constrain it: the nation-state, and the corporation.

bird songs

are a variation of 2 themes: 'i'm ready for love' and 'if you can hear this, you're too close!'

NGC 3190

do you suppose there are any computers there that use the Milky Way as wallpaper?

Missing partners

Several of my favorite travel books have mystery partners:
Graham Greene JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS
John Steinbeck LOG OF THE SEA OF CORTEZ
Claude Levy-Strauss TRISTES TROPIQUES
Richard Mattiessen CLOUD FOREST (Miss X)

Braxston at Kennedy

a nearly full house heard Anthony Braxston at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater on 2012 Dec 7 - and not that many people walked out.

he looked like a school janitor: rumpled white shirt, dull black shoes, droopy cardigan sweater.

i thought i heard a few wrong notes?

the show began with his turning over an hourglass, which he said to the giggles 'really helps us,' tho to do what he didn't say. when the sand ran out i was ready for the end, but they kept playing for a few minutes more - perhaps this was an encore?

he made obscure hand gestures: did 3 fingers vertical mean 3 solos and 3 horizontal mean 3 sharps (and held to the right 3 flats)?

he played the largest saxophone i've ever seen; taller than he is, but it didn't sound much lower than the next largest.

nevertheless, listening to the quintet for an hour does clean the mind of the musty tonalities of conventional music (jazz included).

sloppy language

phrases that set my logical teeth on edge:

'there you go...' (what does this mean, if anything?)
'i have no idea' (the speaker almost always has some idea!)
'there's a first time for everything' (oh, like 1 + 1 = 3?)
'There you go'

a geophysical bucket list

things to see before i die (X = done)
  total solar eclipse
X equator
  aurora
  antipodes of my birthplace (62 E, 34 S, SE of Madagascar)
  poles
  Arctic Circle
X transit of Venus
X Mercury
X Venus
X Mars
X Jupiter 
X Saturn

making and enjoying

if a members of a group are too old or too sick or too uneducated or even just too lazy to be sufficiently productive, then how can they afford the good life their leaders are telling them they deserve?

bubblewrap

the anthropocene is a stage in Earth's development in which the dominant species has covered the planet with secure, air-conditioned cells (offices, homes, cars), losing a sense of comfort with the natural surface.

drowned in the roar

the environmental movement can be heard about as well as a string quartet playing on the median strip of a superhighway.

one fit punishment

i don't believe in capital punishment, but here's an idea for mass murderers: a strong circular wire cage about 3 meters in diameter in the center of a room into which all the relatives and friends of victims may enter 16 hours a day.

what you can do

a few years ago i gave a talk on climate change at Georgetown U. and a young student asked me what she could do for the environment. I replied:

1. it doesn't much matter what you do, individual efforts make almost no difference,
2. but probably the most impact you can have would be to kill yourself and yourself so deep that your rotting body won't emit greenhouse gasses,
3. finally, i can only tell you what i did today: biked to the bus stop, took the bus to the Metro then the subway downtown, walked a mile to the campus. that's an existential answer.

needless to say, in light of answer #2, i wasn't invited back to this Jesuit university again...

My Review of R in a Nutshell

Originally submitted at O'Reilly

R is rapidly becoming the standard for developing statistical software, and R in a Nutshell provides a quick and practical way to learn this increasingly popular open source language and environment. You'll not only learn how to program in R, but also how to find the right user-contributed R...

R in a Nutshell

a good place to start

By Lee De Cola from Reston, VA USA on 7/1/2012

 

4out of 5

Pros: Well-written, Easy to understand, Helpful examples, Accurate, Concise

Best Uses: Refreshing your skills, Novice, Learning new tricks, Teaching yourself R, Intermediate

Describe Yourself: University teacher

i'm using the book to refresh my R skills, tho i've used the program for about a decade now. i've also recommended it to my Virginia Tech students.

the examples are well structured from simple to complicated.

but sometimes the author likes to show off: introducing custom packages on p. 43 is way ahead of most readers.

QUESTION: is the code available anywhere?

(legalese)

lying brevity

what's with 500-page books that call themselves 'handbooks' and '... in a Nutshell'?

contra Apple

• all those icons trying to look like plastic blisters
• a snyc alarm that sounds like a sparrow being squashed by a cafe chair
• the icloud contacts page modeled after an old address book and a calendar with shreds of paper...

this is the design leader of the 21st century?

like LBJ's villages

environmental scientists need to fly a lot for their research and meetings; they may have to destroy the planet in order to save it.

i'm good

the new 'no thank you'