Monthly Archives: August 2010

More Kepler Post Mortems

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Confusion Over Kepler's 'Earth-Like' Planets Explained, Science

"NASA's mini fiasco in public communication last week was a scientist's attempt at public outreach gone awry. Kepler mission co-investigator Dimitar Sasselov of Harvard University, speaking at the popular TED talks, tried to convey the excitement of hunting for Earth-size planets orbiting in the habitable zones of other stars. But his sloppy terminology and careless graphics, says Kepler Principal Investigator William Borucki, led to headlines that Kepler had just discovered hundreds of Earth-like planets. That's not true, says Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. "I'm disappointed one of our members confused people."

Rumors in Astrophysics Spread at Light Speed, NY Times

"Last week, Dr. Sasselov was busy eating his words. In a series of messages posted on the Kepler Web site Dr. Sasselov acknowledged that should have said "Earth-sized," meaning a rocky body less than three times the diameter of our own planet, rather than "Earthlike," with its connotations of oxygenated vistas of blue and green. He was speaking in geophysics jargon, he explained."

Pricing Announced For The October Release Of Office For Mac 2011 [Microsoft]

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Two versions of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac will be released some time in October, the Home and Student Edition and the Home and Office Edition. Home and Student comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Messenger, and is priced at $119 for a single-user install and $149 for a family three-pack; Home and Business also includes Outlook and is priced at $199 for a single install and $279 for a two computer multi-pack install. And if you purchase Office 2008 prior to November 30th, you can upgrade to Office 2011 at no charge. [BGR] More »


Space Weather Forecast – Aurorae Tomorrow? | Cosmic Variance

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CME

The sun kind of burped yesterday, and sent gigatons (or maybe hellatons?) of material streaming our way – to Earth that is. There is an awesome video of it over at SpaceWeather.com. The particles, mainly electrons and protons in the sub-100-eV range, are expected to reach earth tomorrow (Aug. 3) and could give vigorous auroral activity. I am not sure that northern California is northern enough to see it, but who knows? Take pictures, someone!

Once, about six or seven years ago, on an airplane flight from Chicago to California, I was on the right side of the plane and stared for hours at the shimmering curtains of green and red and purple, slowly waving as if in a breeze. It was an amazing sight!

This has been an fairly quiet solar cycle, and we are now heading to a solar max in three years which is on track to be just over half as intense as the last one in 2001, and the lowest in over 100 years. Too bad, just when I got into amateur radio…


Siemens S5 Ecoder

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Hello All,

I have a problem which seems to be very strange at least to me.

I have a CNC machine that uses two encoders for the X axis position. The active measuring system is a glass scale encoder. The problem is that when I reference the axis I get a very strange value. If I change th

NCBI ROFL: Beauty week: Blond, busty, skinny waitresses get bigger tips. | Discoblog

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4049030652_3f735fd494_oDeterminants and consequences of female attractiveness and sexiness: realistic tests with restaurant waitresses.

“Waitresses completed an on-line survey about their physical characteristics, self-perceived attractiveness and sexiness, and average tips. The waitresses’ self-rated physical attractiveness increased with their breast sizes and decreased with their ages, waist-to-hip ratios, and body sizes. Similar effects were observed on self-rated sexiness, with the exception of age, which varied with self-rated sexiness in a negative, quadratic relationship rather than a linear one. Moreover, the waitresses’ tips varied with age in a negative, quadratic relationship, increased with breast size, increased with having blond hair, and decreased with body size. These findings, which are discussed from an evolutionary perspective, make several contributions to the literature on female physical attractiveness. First, they replicate some previous findings regarding the determinants of female physical attractiveness using a larger, more diverse, and more ecologically valid set of stimuli than has been studied before. Second, they provide needed evidence that some of those determinants of female beauty affect interpersonal behaviors as well as attractiveness ratings. Finally, they indicate that some determinants of female physical attractiveness do not have the same effects on overt interpersonal behavior (such as tipping) that they have on attractiveness ratings. This latter contribution highlights the need for more ecologically valid tests of evolutionary theories about the determinants and consequences of female beauty.”

waitress

Photo: flickr/ercwttmn

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Gentlemen prefer blonde hitchhikers.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Bust size and hitchhiking: a field study.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap dancers: economic evidence for human estrus?

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!


Berkeley Open Science Summit 2010 Notes

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I just returned from the Open Science Summit held at Berkeley July 29-31, 2010.

There certainly was an impressive list of presenters as well as attendees. Many of the talks were quite good, although several on the last day were more about closed collaborations than Open Science. During these presentations the assumption that patents are required to exploit discoveries in health care was repeated. This was in sharp contrast to the second day's session on gene patents, where IP protection was shown to stifle innovation and the exploitation of discoveries.
A refreshing exception to this pattern on the last day was Andrew Hessel's presentation on the Pink Army Cooperative. Andrew's strategy to cure cancer is based on the idea of customizing drugs for each individual affected by the disease. Since each drug is only applicable to one individual, the approach of expensive clinical trials doesn't apply. Since he is not interested in generating a profit from selling the drugs, IP protection also doesn't apply and allows him to make every part of the drug design process, including genetic analysis, publicly available. It wasn't clear if such an approach would be legal in the US but he did mention going to another country if necessary. Although he didn't currently have cancer, he did indicate that he might have need of this technology one day by pulling out a pack of cigarettes in the middle of his talk.
Unfortunately my panel on Open Data was canceled at the last minute due to time management problems (see FF discussion on how it happened). However, I did have a chance to generally catch up with old friends (Carmen Drahl, Joanna Scott, Cameron Neylon, Jack Park).
I also discussed some promising collaborations with several people:
1) CoLab. I spoke at length with DJ Sprouse and Casey Stark about their system for scientific collaboration. We will try to represent one solubility experiment from the ONS Challenge notebook and one organic synthesis experiment from the UsefulChem notebook to see how the information can be represented within CoLab. There may be some opportunities to visualize raw data in new ways - perhaps using non-Java tools to interact with JCAMP-DX spectra.
2) IPzero Principles. I continued a conversation with Lisa Green started with John Wilbanks and Thinh Nguyen at Creative Commons about coming up with a series of simple recommendations for ensuring that an Open Notebook can effectively prevent the patenting of inventions within an area of interest to the Open Science community.
3) Open Chemistry Reactions. I had the chance to discuss our Reaction Attempts database with Peter Murray-Rust over breakfast on Saturday. He also showed me how he is using Oscar to extract chemical reaction information from various documents. Peter suggested that we pool together our data for a demonstration in September at the London Science Online Conference. Reaction Attempts will cover the reactions done in the UsefulChem and the Todd group's Open Notebooks. Peter will extract information from both patents and Acta Crystallographica.
4) ChemTaverna. I was pleased to learn from Carole Goble that Taverna is extending its coverage to cheminformatics applications with the ChemTaverna project. I had just mentioned that we would be interested in revisiting Taverna for creating virtual libraries of organic compounds and filtering them based on predicted solubilities in various solvents. This would allow us to contribute cheminformatics workflows to MyExperiment. Carole put me in touch with the project leader Peter Li at the University of Manchester.

Where Can I Find a Red Lion CL 20 Model 200010

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I have an older car wash that uses a Red Lion CL 20, the mfg says they no longer can get them, but if I get one they can program it for me. I need to find one. where can I find one?

Red Lion CL 20 model 200010

CR4 Admin - email address removed

From the Site FAQ: Do not po

SNF Sent Sage Science to Comic-Con; Here’s Documentary Evidence | Science Not Fiction

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For the third year in a row, Discover hosted a panel on science in science fiction at this year’s Comic-Con. This year’s edition was moderated by Phil Plait and featured a great lab-meets-film panel: Jamie Paglia (creator of Eureka); Kevin Grazier (JPL planetary physicist, Science Not Fiction blogger); Zack Stentz (writer for Fringe, Thor); and Sean Carroll (Caltech theoretical physicist, Cosmic Variance blogger).

The conversation was good and lively, with a nice mix of funny and interesting bits. But don’t take my word for it:

As Sean pointed out, we weren’t allowed to include a few of the video clips in this footage, so here are the two clips he brought to show-and-tell: a forward-looking philosophy of the proper relationship between science and narrative, and an example of carefully exploring the logical consequences of an imaginary world: