Every year, the James Randi Educational Foundation picks the people or organizations who have done the most to promote antireality nonsense and get the public to believe in provably untrue silliness. This dubious honor is called the Pigasus Award after Randi’s official mascot, the flying pig, as in "XXX will be true when pigs fly" — values of XXX include homeopathy, faith healing, dowsing, etc. The awards are appropriately given out every April 1.

This year’s crop has just been announced. I was not surprised to see Richard Hoover listed there for his extremely shaky announcement of life in a meteorite. Hoover published his claims in the Journal of Cosmology, and while I was pretty clear in my posts about the extremely shaky nature of this journal, the JREF simply calls them "crackpot". Heh.

I do have a quibble with the awards this year though. Our old friend Andrew Wakefield — the defrocked, debunked, and discredited founder of the modern antivax movement — was given the "Refusal to Face Reality Award" for his ongoing (and wrong) claims that vaccines cause ...

The effect of spinach on penile tumescence

“Spinach has long been praised for its many beneficial nutrients. Although not as iron-rich as originally reported (a fallacy that has become entrenched in popular culture), recent evidence suggests that the consumption of spinach may increase flow to blood-rich areas, including penile tissue. (more…)

I don’t do practical jokes much anymore — let’s just say that when I was younger, it would frequently happen that this sort of thing got escalated quickly into territory that put large swaths of the population at risk of life and limb — and I almost never do them on the blog.

Almost.

This post on Blastr yesterday reminded me of the one time I did, though. It came to me in a flash, pretty much all at once, due to the setting I was in at the time. I took the shots, set everything up, and then sprung it on my readers two years ago on this very day.

Of course, you know going in it’s a joke, but I still think it’s funny. And since I’m lazy, I’ll simply point you to the post: Spirit sees phenomenal Martian vista.

Enjoy. And, of course, April Fools!

In a week of ridiculously gorgeous astronomy pictures hitting the ‘net, I keep thinking they can’t get cooler… and then this happens: a seriously cool picture of the Sun from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory!

Yegads! [Click to solareclipsenate.]

Given that SDO orbits the Earth and sees the Sun from space, why is the bottom half of the Sun gone in this picture? It’s because we’re seeing a solar eclipse which is actually more like a lunar eclipse except the Moon is not involved.

Hmm, yeah, maybe I’d better explain.

SDO circles the Earth in an inclined orbit*. If the orbit were directly above the Earth’s equator, the Earth would block the Sun once per day, and that’s not so cool for a satellite designed to continuously observe our nearest star! So the orbit was inclined a bit, giving SDO an unobstructed view of the Sun… kinda. The orbit of SDO is inclined to maximize the viewing time for the Sun and to maintain a continuous downlink for its very large data stream (it sends about 15 megabytes of data to Earth every second!). Because of the ...

From CNN Money:

Overall unemployment has also dropped by a percentage point over the last 4 months, and is now at 8.8 %.

If this continues, “are you better off than you were 4 years ago?” could be quite the campaign slogan….for different reasons, though, than in 1980.

Some song-lovers may say that music’s in their genes. One young British boffin goes a step further by putting music in his jeans: he wears the world’s first pants-borne, playable electronic drum kit, complete with eight different drum sounds. And just so those pants aren’t lonely, another group of engineers has figured out a way to print sensors onto plastic, possibly making way for commercialized yoga mat drums (did somebody order that?) and more drums made out of things that aren’t drums.

The bloke inside the drummable jeans is Aseem Mishra, a 17-year-old British student who nabbed this year’s Young Engineer Of Great Britain award. His invention allows people to perform drum solos on their legs (video) by tapping eight paper-thin sensors sewn into the back of the fabric. The prototype must be plugged into a loudspeaker-toting backpack to make noise; Mishra says future models won’t be tied down like that.

Why would anyone create such a thing? As he told BBC News, he’s always thought that lugging his drum kit around for his band’s gigs were a hassle. “I think at the time I might have been tapping on my legs,” he explains, “and I thought, ...

I am in absolutely no position to judge the technical execution of this work, but a group has posted a possible solution to the “Pioneer Anomaly” on the Physics/Astronomy ArXiV server (http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1103.5222).

For those who haven’t been following along at home, there appear to be subtle unexpected Sun-ward accelerations (i.e. higher than expected decelerations) seen in the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft while leaving the Solar System. Sean posted an earlier discussion of the anomaly and a possible reported solution that does not involve modifying gravity. However, this latest paper is by a different group, and posits that reflections within the spacecraft are enough to explain the discrepancies. There’s a nicer write-up than this one at the Technology Review Physics ArXiV blog.

FYI, it was posted a few days ago, and is not an April Fool’s posting.

Also FYI, my kids just got passports, and did you know that there’s an image of Pioneer 10 on the inside back cover? Beamjockey did some nice sleuthing a few years back and dug up the source image!

Update: After this post a researcher who is planning on publishing work on the genetic structure of Great Britain and Ireland and who has a very large N forwarded me a PCA which he gave me permission to repost. I’ve uploaded it here.

As you might infer from the post below I’ve started to get interested in African population structure. It’s not just me. Readers regularly query me about the relationship of various groups, such as the Nilotic peoples who reside amongst the Bantu in northeast Africa. Additionally, there is a consistent problem with 23andMe generating weird results for people of African ancestry, usually those with East African ancestry.

But to figure out the nature of African variation in more detail we also need to give some thought to outgroups. My initial assumption was that using Tuscans would be sufficient, but several people pointed out that many Mediterranean groups have trace African admixture. Probably not enough to matter, but why take the risk? So how about looking to Northern Europe? The Utah Whites and Orcadians jump out as plausible alternatives, but there was a third which I thought I’d try out: the Irish.

Last fall my friend Paul bought a bunch ...

Oh that’s where he is…

This astonishing find is proof, if more proof were needed, that stripey shirts and glasses did not evolve on Earth. They came from space.

(Happy April 1st. I was originally going to do a much longer version of this, but as the month drew on, it became quickly clear that nothing I would write could rival the reality.)

Yesterday Sean wrote (yet another) comprehensive insightful post, this one about what’s involved in getting tenure at a “major research university”. There is a tremendous amount of good advice in that post, and in the comments.

However.

I have to point out that the advice is very heavily weighted not towards “tenure at a major research university” but instead towards “tenure at one of the top 10 schools in the US”. As evidence, here is a plot of the latest NRC rankings (red) and US News rankings (blue) of physics departments (shamelessly lifted from here — thanks HappyQuark!). I have helpfully circled in green the departments where Sean has been on the faculty:

Now, this is not saying that much of Sean’s advice isn’t generally applicable, but one should recognize that the vast majority of people who may be seeking tenure advice are not going to be at institutions with tenure criteria as strict as the ones Sean is considering. There are scads of fantastic scientists doing interesting work at places that aren’t in the top 5 of the NRC rankings, and probabilistically speaking, you’re more likely to be working towards tenure at one of those. While MIT may have a <50% tenure rate, the odds are far better at many institutions.

Personally, I found Sean’s advice really really dispiriting, and it probably would have freaked me out to read it as a postdoc. And yet, I find myself with “tenure at a major research university” without ever having lost sleep to fears about achieving seemingly impossible standards. I worked steadily, but not insanely. I had a couple of kids. I “dabbled” in other research areas, some of which turned into major research areas down the road. And it worked out (although, it likely wouldn’t have “worked out” if I was at Chicago or Caltech).

I think if one wants to make a more general statement about “how to achieve tenure”, I think the key is to show that you’ve got “traction”. Look at recently tenured (<10 years) people in your particular department at your particular university, and evaluate what they tend to do well (say, undergraduate teaching if you’re at Swarthmore, or running giant experiments if you’re at Harvard). Then, demonstrate that you’ve got traction that is pulling you in that direction.

For example, if all the tenured faculty have research grants and students, and you don’t, then you’ll appear to be spinning your wheels. Instead, if you have a grant or two, and are showing increasing success with your proposals, the tenure committee can believe that you’re evolving into what the department expects of its tenured faculty. For most universities, you don’t always need to be completely at your destination, but you need to show that you’re actually traveling down the proper path at a decent clip. The closer you are to the destination, the better your chances, and the more competitive the tenure process, the closer you’d better be. (Sean’s point about “firing on fear” is basically saying that a tenure denial is based on their fears that you will not wind up getting to where they need/want you to be.)

The final point I’d like to make is my concern that Sean’s fairly conservative prescription eliminates the real “upside potential” of taking risks. A colleague and I have had many discussions about the fact that, because we were more than willing to leave academia, we were more willing to take risks. These risks paid off in more interesting research than the path we were headed down as young postdocs. (The one caveat is paying attention to timescale though — trying to establish a new field of research won’t be a good bet if it takes 10 years to pull off.)

In summary, while Sean’s suggestions are excellent rules for guaranteeing tenure in a physics department at any university in the US (especially that one about being a productive genius!), you can still likely achieve tenure with a less terrifying set of recommendations.

Image Credit: Mark Dingemanse

I recall years ago someone on the blog of Jonathan Edelstein, a soc.history.what-if alum as well, mentioning offhand that archaeologists had “debunked” the idea of the Bantu demographic expansion. Because, unfortunately, much of archaeology consists of ideologically contingent fashion it was certainly plausible to me that archaeologists had “debunked” the expansion of the Bantu peoples. But how to explain the clear linguistic uniformity of the Bantu dialects, from Xhosa of South Africa, up through Angola and Kenya, to Cameroon? One extreme model could be a sort of rapid cultural diffusion, perhaps mediated by a trivial demographic impact. The spread of English exhibits this hybrid dynamic. In some areas (e.g., Australia) there was a substantial, even dominant, English demographic migration coincident with the rise of Anglo culture. In other areas, such as Jamaica, by and large the crystallization of an Anglophone culture arose atop a different demographic substrate, which synthesized with the Anglo institutions (e.g., English language and Protestant religion). The United States could arguably be held up as a in-between case, with an English founding core population, around which there was an ...

Cartoon music in a candy store: a field experiment.

“An experiment on consumers’ behavior was carried out in a new field context. According to a random assignment, 60 customers from ages 12 to 14 years who entered a candy store were exposed to Top Forty music which was usually played in this store, music from cartoons (Captain Flame, Candy, Olive & Tom, etc.), or no music. Analysis showed that customers spent significantly more time in the store when cartoon music was played, but the two styles of music were not related to the amount of money spent.”

Photo: flickr/pawpaw67

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WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

What’s the News: President Obama gave a major address outlining his plan for U.S. energy security yesterday. His major goal is quite ambitious: to cut American oil imports by one-third by 2025. And towards that goal, he listed a number of initiatives that many news organizations see as a rehashing of old ideas, however good they might be. According to The Economist, “it is hard to see his recycled list of proposals as anything more than a reassurance to the environmentally minded, and to Americans fretting about rising fuel prices, that the president feels their pain.”

How the Heck: Obama cited four major tactics for decreasing oil imports:

Increase domestic production of oil
Use more natural gas and biofuels
Spur wider use of electric cars
Increase the efficiency of gasoline-powered motor vehicles

What’s the Context:

In his speech, Obama noted that “American oil production [has] reached its highest level since 2003.” As the Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler notes, domestic oil production is higher now mostly because companies are now harvesting oil from the shale of North Dakota and other states. ...

The defender of mainstream knowledge at the climate hearing today was MIT’s Emanuel, and here is his testimony. It is really good stuff.

Emanuel starts out by observing just how much scientific history there is behind our current understanding of climate–over 100 years. Much of it is so well established that it’s something young scientists learn today as part of their very basic training:

Today, students at MIT and elsewhere can do hand calculations or use simple models of radiative and convective heat transfer to explore climate physics, and they find climate sensitivities in the same range as those reported in the first National Academy of Sciences report on anthropogenic climate change in 1979.

All of that notwithstanding, there are many uncertainties remaining (of course)–but as Emanuel sharply points out, these could cut in either direction, and those at the hearing (like John Christy) expressing confidence that warming will be on the low end are taking quite a leap of faith:

In soliciting advice, we should be highly skeptical of any expert who claims to be certain of the outcome. I include especially those scientists who express great confidence that the outcome will be benign; the evidence before us simply does not warrant such confidence. Likewise, beware those who deride predictive science in its entirety, for they are also making a prediction: that we have nothing to worry about.

Emanuel also addresses “ClimateGate”, and pulls no punches when it comes to the ridiculous over interpretation of “hide the decline”:

I am appalled at the energetic campaign of disinformation being waged in the climate arena. I have watched good, decent, hardworking scientists savaged and whole fields of scholarship attacked without merit. Consider as an example the issues surrounding the email messages stolen from some climate scientists. I know something about this as I served on a panel appointed by the Royal Society of Great Britain, under the direction of Lord Oxburgh, to investigate allegations of scientific misconduct by the scientists working at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Neither we nor several other investigative panels found any evidence of misconduct. To be sure, we confirmed what was by then well known, that a handful of scientists had exercised poor judgment in constructing a figure for a non peer-reviewed publication. Rather than omitting the entire record of a particularly dubious tree-ring-based proxy, the authors of the figure only omitted that part of it that was provably false. If this was a conspiracy to deceive, though, it was exceedingly poorly conceived as anyone with the slightest interest in the subject could (and did) immediately find the whole proxy record in the peer-reviewed literature.

The true scandal here is the enormously successful attempt to elevate this single lapse of judgment on the part of a small number of scientists into a sweeping condemnation of a whole scholarly endeavor. When the history of this event is written, the efforts of those seeking to discredit climate science will be seen for what they are; why many cannot see it now is a mystery to me.

But probably not a mystery to your colleagues in the psychology department, Dr. Emanuel!

The thing that did not come up at the hearing, at least as far as I know: Emanuel is a Republican. If that doesn’t enhance his credibility in this area, it is hard to imagine what would.

Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (hGC), a hormone produced during pregnancy, is isolated from the urine of pregnant women and used to treat infertility. Since the 1950s, however, it’s also been used as a weight-loss aid—and still is, even though there’s no solid evidence showing it works.

But taking hCG could be worse than just ineffective: A new study shows that doses of the hormone can transmit prions, the misfolded proteins that cause mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, an invariably fatal form of dementia that riddles the brain with holes (photo).

That’s right: There’s a potential risk of contracting deadly, brain-destroying illness by injecting yourself with proteins taken from other people’s urine—and you won’t even lose weight.

The New York Times lamely wrote earlier this month that hCG as a weight-loss regimen “has fans and skeptics”—but Travis Saunders at Obesity Panacea says that spreading mad cow is just one more reason to avoid “the most thoroughly debunked weight loss gimmick in medical history.”

No prion diseases have been transmitted through urine yet, the authors of the study say, but it is theoretically possible. And even ...

Over at Harappa Simranjit has been allowing Zack to post his isopleth maps of the frequencies of ADMIXTURE components by region. He now has his own blog, The Jatt Gene. On unrelated note, does anyone know of an easy way to generate isopleth maps which is open source?

What’s the News: While the Kepler spacecraft is busy finding solar system-loads of new planets, other astronomers are expanding our idea where planets could potentially be found. One astronomer wants to look for habitable planets around white dwarfs, arguing that any water-bearing exoplanets orbiting these tiny, dim stars would be much easier to find than those around main-sequence stars like our Sun. Another team dispenses with stars altogether and speculates that dark matter explosions inside a planet could hypothetically make it warm enough to be habitable, even without a star. “This is a fascinating, and highly original idea,” MIT exoplanet expert Sara Seager told Wired, referring to the dark matter hypothesis. “Original ideas are becoming more and more rare in exoplanet theory.”

How the Heck:

Because white dwarfs are much smaller than our Sun, an Earth-sized planet that crossed in front of it would block more of its light, which should make these planets easier to spot. So astronomer Eric Agol suggests survey the 20,000 white dwarfs closest to Earth with ...

It’s that time of the month again – time to select ten blog posts for my Science Writer Tip-Jar initiative. For those new to this, here’s the low-down:

Throughout the blogosphere, people produce fantastic writing for free. That’s great, but I believe that good writers should get paid for good work, or at least that people should be willing to pay for good writing. I am.
Every month, I choose ten pieces that I really enjoyed and donate £3 to the author. There are no formal criteria other than I found them unusually interesting, enjoyable and/or important. Pieces where writers were paid for their work are excluded.
There are buttons on the sidebar for you to contribute too if you wish. The “Support Science Writers” button goes to the writers. At the end of April, the chosen ten will get equal shares of the pot. The “Support NERS” button goes to me; I’ll match a third of the donations and send that to the chosen writers too.

So without further ado, here are the picks:

Evelyn Mervine for her continuing series of illuminating interviews with her dad – a nuclear engineer – about the Fukushima ...

I have a new article up on Blastr, the SyFy channel’s web site for news and info and scifi-y stuff.

The article is about asteroid impacts, and the lack of Hollywood accuracy thereof. I take a typical movie synopsis and destroy it plot device by plot device. It’s like taking all my movie reviews and condensing them down into one run-on snark.

And yes, I know that the illustration for the article (seen here) is scientifically inaccurate. I know what you’re thinking; it’s so obvious: no asteroid is actually flying saucer shaped! At least, that’s what they want you to think*.

So go over there, read the article, and leave your own complaints in the comments. I promise I will read them all and take them into consideration†.

* Dear readers with an impaired sense of humor: I know that’s not really how the picture is scientifically inaccurate. Of course, the actual mistake is that you should see thousands of stars in the background.

† No I won’t.

Related posts:

- Blastr: Other than that, Spock, how was the movie?

In order to tackle conservation, energy, funding, and many more critical issues we discuss, economics will be a large part of the solutions. Yet when we hear economists in the media, I often wonder why women aren’t generally quoted and interviewed. Further, where are the women who blog about it? Answer: They simply don’t exist. UCLA economist Matthew Kahn notes:

There are 52 women who rank in the top 1000 [members of the economics profession] and 0 of them blog. Contrast that with the men. Consider the top 100 men. In this elite subset; at least 8 of them blog. Consider the men ranked between 101 and 200. At least, six of them blog. So, this isn’t very scientific but we see a 7% participation rate for excellent male economists and a 0% participation rate for excellent women. This differential looks statistically significant to me.

Kahn is curious about the reasons why and suggests that men may have more leisure time and “nerdy guys spend more time reading and writing blog posts.” Perhaps that’s part of it, but in recent years, the number of women science bloggers has exploded, despite family, teaching, and other obligations. We may not be as well represented when you account for all science blogs (or recognized as often), but our numbers are growing. Women tend to use these forums as tools to share ideas, collaborate, and facilitate discussions beyond the academic bubble where many of us reside. In fact, at ScienceOnline annual meetings, we outnumber our male colleagues. In other words, there must be more to the gender disparity in economics than time and nerdiness. (Although I am, admittedly, a nerd).

Another blogger theorized that women stay away from economics blogs because of their combative style, yet science blogs are not always a particularly friendly place either. (Any regular reader of The Intersection understands what I mean). The pissing contests that emerge do not seem to keep women from blogging. Further, even though comment threads tend to be male dominated, I receive many emails from women and kids, so it’s clear that they’re reading too.

What’s really going on? Here’s my suspicion: Rather than gender differences in attitudes, female economists are simply still not part of the economics blogging culture… yet. It’s not an activity that they consider because there are no predecessors already engaged. In other words, encouraging women to participate is more about changing social mores and cultural norms of what’s acceptable and rewarded within the economics profession. That can’t happen until women are better represented online. A bit of a chicken and egg problem, but I’m confident economics will catch up to science in this regard.

Why does this matter? Because pioneering women will bring new ideas and perspectives to the table. And Kahn is correct that it will also create more opportunities for them to get recognized in their profession. I applaud Kahn for highlighting the gender divide and challenge him and his colleagues to encourage more women to get engaged. If they have reservations, tell them to email me.