NCBI ROFL: Amusing titles in scientific journals and article citation. | Discoblog

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“The present study examines whether the use of humor in scientific article titles is associated with the number of citations an article receives. Four judges rated the degree of amusement and pleasantness of titles of articles published over 10 years (from 1985 to 1994) in two of the most prestigious journals in psychology, Psychological Bulletin and Psychological Review. We then examined the association between the levels of amusement and pleasantness and the article’s monthly citation average.

The results show that, while the pleasantness rating was weakly associated with the number of citations, articles with highly amusing titles (2 standard deviations above average) received fewer citations. The negative association between amusing titles and subsequent citations cannot be attributed to differences in the title length and pleasantness, number of authors, year of publication, and article type (regular article vs comment). These findings are discussed in the context of the importance of titles for signalling an article’s content.”

Bonus excerpt from the full text:
“Examples of Top Amusing titles that were also in the Top Pleasant titles group include: ‘Beware of a half-tailed test’, and ‘The unicorn, the normal curve, and other improbable creatures’. An example of ...


Santorum on Limbaugh: Climate Change Is a “Scheme” for “More Government” | The Intersection

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by Jon Winsor

No surprise, but Rick Santorum appeared on Rush Limbaugh today and made an effort to scoop up Mitt’s lost support:

The argument is a familiar kind, which I’ll have more to say about in the coming days:

“To me this is an opportunity for the left to create — it’s really a beautifully concocted scheme because they know that the earth is gonna cool and warm. It’s been on a warming trend so they said, ‘Oh, let’s take advantage of that and say that we need the government to come in and regulate your life some more because it’s getting warmer.’”

“It’s just an excuse for more government control of your life…”

H/T: TPMDC


A genomic sketch of the Horn of Africa | Gene Expression

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Iman, a Somali model

Since I started up the African Ancestry Project one of the primary sources of interest has been from individuals whose family hail for Northeast Africa. More specifically, the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia. The problem seems to be that 23andMe’s “ancestry painting” algorithm uses West African Yoruba as a reference population, and East Africans are often not well modeled as derivative of West Africans. So, for example, the Nubian individual who I’ve analyzed supposedly comes up to be well over 50% “European” in ancestry painting. Then again, I”m 55-60% “European” as well according that method! So we shouldn’t take these judgments to heart too much. Obviously something was off, and thanks to Genome Bloggers like Dienekes Pontikos we know what the problem was: the populations of the Horn of Africa have almost no distinctive “Bantu” element to connect them with West Africans like the Yoruba. Additionally, a closer inspection shows that the “Eurasian” component present in these populations is very specific as well, almost totally derived from Arabian-like sources. When breaking apart the West Eurasian populations it is no surprise ...

Handwriting Analysis Can Tell Who Filled in Bubbles on Tests, Ballots | 80beats

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bubbles
The way bubbles are filled in encodes quite a bit of identifying information

What’s the News: Standardized tests aren’t as impersonal as you might think. Much as detectives analyze a note’s handwriting to pinpoint its author, scientists have developed a way to identify test-takers, voters, and so on just from the way they fill in bubbles.

How the Heck:

The researchers (from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy) used a set of 92 surveys of 20 questions each to train and test their computer program.
After setting aside eight questions from each survey, they analyzed the remaining 12 to determine the distinctive characteristics of each individual’s bubbling style. Maybe they tend to fill bubbles with a squiggle, or a series of diagonal strokes that point to the right or left, but whatever their quirks, the program learned to identify individual test takers. Its specifications are quite detailed—it draws on 804 different features concerning color and shape of the mark.
To test its abilities, the team then sicced the program on the eight questions it hadn’t seen during its training. If the bubbles had been filled in with random patterns, it would have given the correct answer only one ...


My Long Now lecture: Viral Time (slides and audio) | The Loom

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I just got back from San Francisco, where I had the privilege to speak at the remarkable Long Now Foundation. Stewart Brand, the head of the foundation, invites people to talk to the group about topics that stretch our conception of time over long scales. So I spoke about viruses and time–how they exist at scales ranging from minutes to eons. The Long Now folks have just posted the audio, which I’ve embedded below. I’ve also embedded the slides for my talk, too.

If I can win the battle against an army of deadlines this week, I’ll try to write out the entire talk as I did with “The Human Lake.” But I’ve learned not to make hard promises.

Audio:

Slides:

Viral Time: Carl Zimmer's talk at the Long Now Foundation View more presentations from cwzimmer


Rosetta’s cometary goal now in sight | Bad Astronomy

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Rosetta is an amazing probe launched by the European Space Agency. In 2014 it will go into orbit around the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and actually deploy a lander to sample the surface!

That rendezvous is still years away, but the target is now in sight: Rosetta has returned its first image of the comet.

Oh, very cool! The top image is the wide angle shot, showing a densely-populated star field toward the center of our galaxy; from Rosetta that’s the direction to the comet. The second image zooms in a bit, and you can see some distant stars and nebulosity. The bottom one has been processed to remove the stars, and the nucleus of Churyumov-Gerasimenko stands out.

Note that this image was taken when Rosetta was still 163 million kilometers (100 million miles) from the comet — that’s more than the distance from the Earth to the Sun! That’s why it took a total of 13 hours of exposure time to see the comet in these images; it’s still extremely faint from that great distance.

These pictures are important for several reasons: they test the cameras, a critical event for the upcoming encounter; they provide navigation cues, allowing ...


How to Make the “Democrat War on Science” Argument (Supposing You Want To) | The Intersection

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From globalwarming.org, a climate “skeptic” site, I find this very interesting piece entitled the “Democrat War on Science,” by William Yeatman. It attempts to us some of my own themes from The Republican War on Science and flip them so that they cut against the Obama administration–e.g., it released reports that violated peer review standards, it suppressed agency scientist dissent, it put out bad information. Based on three alleged examples, one from each category, the piece concludes:

If there’s a “Republican war on science,” then there is also a “Democrat war on science.” In fact, science is politicized and manipulated by both political parties. It’s what politicians do in order to achieve political ends. To put it another way, if you think that American elected officials give priority to the purity of science over political ideology, and not vice-versa, then I’d like to introduce you to a wealthy Nigerian friend who needs help moving millions of dollars from his homeland and who promises a hefty percentage of his fortune for assisting him.

Honestly, it’s a noble attempt. However, to really make the argument stick, you would need the following: 1) more fully documented case studies; 2) more clearly valid case studies; 3) crassness–e.g., the administration is doing this stuff blatantly and not apologizing; 4) a strong explanatory framework–e.g., what is the ideology driving this?

I think that with the Obama administration, you will certainly find mistakes and things that probably shouldn’t have happened, but I seriously doubt you will satisfy all of these criteria.

Take the three examples used by Yeatman. There’s the old business about the Interior Department wrongly claiming, in a report, that a panel of peer reviewers had supported the controversial moratorium on gulf drilling. They didn’t. Details here. My conclusion about this incident: “while a mistake was certainly made (and critics of the drilling moratorium were quick to cry foul), the mistake does not appear to have been intentional, or particularly devious in nature. What’s more, as soon as it was exposed, the responsible parties owned up and apologized profusely.”

So it’s not nothing, but it’s not a “Democrat War on Science,” either.

Yeatman’s third example–the EPA allegedly vetoing a Clean Water Act permit based on “shoddy science” is not something I know anything about, so I won’t comment. However, his second example doesn’t really work either. This is the story of Alan Carlin, a climate “skeptic” and economist who prepared a report that challenged the scientific basis for the agency’s greenhouse gas endangerment finding. New York Times story here–which shows why I am skeptical of this case:

It is true that Dr. Carlin’s supervisor refused to accept his comments on a proposed E.P.A. finding, since adopted, that greenhouse gases endangered health and the environment, and that he did so in a dismissive way.

But the newly obtained documents show that Dr. Carlin’s highly skeptical views on global warming, which have been known for more than a decade within the small unit where he works, have been repeatedly challenged by scientists inside and outside the E.P.A.; that he holds a doctorate in economics, not in atmospheric science or climatology; that he has never been assigned to work on climate change; and that his comments on the endangerment finding were a product of rushed and at times shoddy scholarship, as he acknowledged Thursday in an interview.

Dr. Carlin remains on the job and free to talk to the news media, and since the furor his comments on the finding have been posted on the E.P.A.’s Web site. Further, his supervisor, Al McGartland, also a career employee of the agency, received a reprimand in July for the way he had handled Dr. Carlin.

I do not mean to exonerate the Obama administration of all wrongdoing. It has been inexplicably slow in generating scientific integrity guidelines and getting the government agencies to adopt them, and there are certainly cases of things that have gone wrong. See here for a Union of Concerned Scientists’ report on some of this.

Still, the whole “Obama War on Science” narrative really doesn’t fly. The president is obviously very pro-science, as is his administration–in very large part as a reaction to the last one. Moreover, I don’t really see a clear thread of ideological motive here.

If you want to know why Democrats and liberals (and environmentalists!) might sometimes distort science, the best answer is implied by Dan Kahan’s work–they will be most likely do so in cases where science conflicts with either their “egalitarian” or their “communitarian” values. I think this definitely does occur–but I don’t think it is sweeping, or mainstream in the party, for a diversity of reasons that include the fact that Democrats are generally very pro-science these days, which gives a countervailing motive.

One could generate a much larger discussion on this last point–but for now, I’ll just say to Yeatman: Nice try, but you really have your work cut out for you.


A supernova is reborn | Bad Astronomy

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A little over 24 years ago, light from the closest supernova in four centuries reached Earth. It was the first such supernova seen in 1987, so it was officially dubbed Supernova 1987A, or SN87A for short.

It was full of surprises: the star that blew up (Sanduleak -69 202) was the first blue supergiant ever seen to explode — most such supernovae progenitors are red supergiants. The intense ultraviolet flash from the explosion lit up a gigantic pre-existing hourglass-shaped shell of gas surrounding the star; over five light years long, nothing quite like it had ever been seen before. The hourglass had a thick ring around its middle, which to this day is still something of a mystery.

The expanding debris from the explosion itself has been growing for more than two decades as well. Screaming out at thousands of kilometers per second, it’s been getting less dense as it grows larger, and has been fading as well.

However, that appears to be changing now. The debris is getting brighter once again… which actually has been expected. The gas in the hourglass nebula surrounding the ...


More on the Psychology of Anti-Evolutionism: Need For Closure, Fear, and Disgust | The Intersection

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Jamie Vernon did a great post here earlier, showing some of the psychological research that supports the view that direct confrontation of anti-evolutionists, and especially criticism of their religious beliefs, probably won’t work most of the time and may even backfire.

In particular, Jamie cited a study in which supporting “intelligent design” was linked to the fear of death–thus, accepting ID may be part of a psychologically satisfying “terror management” strategy. Here is the abstract:

The present research examined the psychological motives underlying widespread support for intelligent design theory (IDT), a purportedly scientific theory that lacks any scientific evidence; and antagonism toward evolutionary theory (ET), a theory supported by a large body of scientific evidence. We tested whether these attitudes are influenced by IDT’s provision of an explanation of life’s origins that better addresses existential concerns than ET. In four studies, existential threat (induced via reminders of participants’ own mortality) increased acceptance of IDT and/or rejection of ET, regardless of participants’ religion, religiosity, educational background, or preexisting attitude toward evolution. Effects were reversed by teaching participants that naturalism can be a source of existential meaning (Study 4), and among natural-science students for whom ET may already provide existential meaning (Study 5). These reversals suggest that the effect of heightened mortality awareness on attitudes toward ET and IDT is due to a desire to find greater meaning and purpose in science when existential threats are activated.

Recently I came across another psychology study which reinforces some of this, from 2008. Kilian James Garvey of the University of New England studied anti-evolutionists, and found not only that they were more highly religious and more likely to believe in God (no shocker) but also that they had a higher “need for closure,” and reacted more strongly on affective (or emotional) measures of fear and disgust. Abstract:

Numerous polls conducted in the United States on the subject of the diversity of life on earth show an approximate 50/50 split between belief in biological evolution and belief in biblical creationism. Hypotheses generated to explain this have focused primarily on cognitive and cultural characteristics of individuals who reject Darwinian evolutionary theory. To date the consideration of affective characteristics has been lacking. In this exploratory study, the cultural measures of church attendance and belief in God, the cognitive measure of Need for Cognitive Closure and the affective measures of fear and disgust all correlate with denial of evolutionary
theories. Limits and implications of exploring the affective motivations of cognitions will be discussed.

Need for closure is particularly interesting–this is about craving certain and fixed answers and being uncomfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, no matter the issue. It is no big leap to see how anti-evolutionist religious beliefs provide certainty. Anti-evolutionists who have achieved “closure” are thus probably very fixed in their views and highly dismissive of threats to them.

It is hard not to speculate about what is lying at the roots of all this. We have highlighted published psychology research suggesting that anti-evolutionists are more likely to be religious and high on need for closure, as well as sensitive to fear and “existential threat.” It all seems related…


Genetics existed before -omics | Gene Expression

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In the post below, Moderate marginal value to genomics, I left some things implicit. It turns out that this was an ill-considered decision. In reality my comments were simply more cryptic and opaque than implicit. This is pretty obvious because even those readers who are biologists didn’t seem to catch what I had assumed would be obvious in the thrust of my argument.

The point in the broadest sense is that DNA and genomics are not magical. Genetics existed before either of them. Understanding the physical basis of genetics has certainly been incredibly fruitful, and genomics has altered the playing field in many ways. But there was a broad understanding of genetics before DNA and genomics, both in a Mendelian sense and in the area of biometrics and quantitative genetics. In the earlier post I indicated that the tools for predictions of adult traits due to the effect of genes have been around for a long time: our family history. By this, I mean that a lot of traits of interest are substantially heritable. A great deal of the variation within the population can be explained by variation of genes in the population, as inferred by patterns of correlation ...

Rush Says to Romney on Climate: “Bye Bye Nomination” | The Intersection

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By Jon Winsor

Last week, we reported on Mitt Romney taking a “round-Earth position on climate change.” Not surprisingly, for certain people, Romney had done the unthinkable:

(Of course, Rush has opposed nominees who’ve won the nomination before–for instance, John McCain last year.)

Later, Romney’s questioner actually called in to Limbaugh’s show, and did an admirable job:

CALLER: …First of all, I wanted to specify the difference between policy and science… And I specifically quoted from a 2010 National Academy of Sciences report, and two quotes here. The first is, they concluded — and, by the way, the National Academy of Sciences, as you know, is considered the Supreme Court of science in this country. It was founded in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln, and it’s charged with giving the Congress unbiased scientific information. Now, their conclusion was, quote, “A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”

RUSH: Then they’ve lost all credibility. It’s a bogus claim.

CALLER: Let me go on. They then went on to say, “Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found wrong is vanishingly small. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities. And then I asked my question, so that’s the context of the question. Your response was that there was evidence even in the last year that established this whole premise of manmade global warming is a hoax.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: I don’t know where you’re getting the hoax from, sir. I mean I’m looking at –

RUSH: It’s called the University of East Anglia in England and the Hadley Climate Center where they basically made it all up, pure and simple. It’s a hoax. There’s nothing true about it.

END TRANSCRIPT

That shouldn’t have been the end of the conversation. Every official inquiry that has been made into “Climategate” has exonerated the participants. But it’s Limbaugh’s mike, right? He can go to a commercial and end the conversation whenever he likes.

After the 2008 election, pollster Nate Silver reflected on a heated on-air conversation he had with a radio talk show host over what should have been a simple matter:

Almost uniquely to radio, most of the audience is not even paying attention to you, because most people listen to radio when they’re in the process of doing something else. (If they weren’t doing something else, they’d be watching TV). They are driving, mowing the lawn, washing the dishes — and you have to work really hard to sustain their attention. Hence what [David Foster] Wallace refers to as the importance of “stimulating” the listener, an art that Ziegler has mastered. Invariably, the times when Ziegler became really, really angry with me during the interview was when I was not permitting him to be stimulating, but instead asking him specific, banal questions that required specific, banal answers. Those questions would have made for terrible radio! And Ziegler had no idea how to answer them.

Rush Limbaugh is what he says he is, an entertainer. But he’s an entertainer that a lot of people listen to, especially people who go to Republican presidential primaries and vote—-for or against people like Mitt Romney. So the question becomes, basically, should people vote based on what Rush tells them as he tries to fill the airwaves with exciting content? Or, as the caller points out, should things be based on what dozens of worldwide scientific organizations have concluded, with no dissenters?

On the subject of entertainers as policymakers, David Frum put things in a thought-provoking way in an interview last year (he was talking about Fox, but I think what he was saying still applies here):

Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox. And this balance here has been completely reversed. The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines a strong Republican party.


NCBI ROFL: The science of melting ice cream. | Discoblog

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Ice cream structural elements that affect melting rate and hardness.

“Statistical models were developed to reveal which structural elements of ice cream affect melting rate and hardness. Ice creams were frozen in a batch freezer with three types of sweetener, three levels of the emulsifier polysorbate 80, and two different draw temperatures to produce ice creams with a range of microstructures. Ice cream mixes were analyzed for viscosity, and finished ice creams were analyzed for air cell and ice crystal size, overrun, and fat destabilization. The ice phase volume of each ice cream were calculated based on the freezing point of the mix. Melting rate and hardness of each hardened ice cream was measured and correlated with the structural attributes by using analysis of variance and multiple linear regression. Fat destabilization, ice crystal size, and the consistency coefficient of the mix were found to affect the melting rate of ice cream, whereas hardness was influenced by ice phase volume, ice crystal size, overrun, fat destabilization, and the rheological properties of the mix.”

Photo: flickr/miss karen

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Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: I ...


Bodily Invasion During Duckling-hood Makes Adult Ducks More Adventurous | 80beats

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ducks

What’s the News: Infections that change an organism’s personality are a strange little corner of biology, with toxoplasmosis, which brainwashes mice and rats to have no fear of cats, topping the list. But scientists think that more pedestrian infections could play a role in shaping personality, especially when they happen early in life. Ducklings provide the latest data that this theory may have something to it.

How the Heck:

Ducks assess an object’s color when deciding whether it’s safe, showing a noted preference for green and a dislike of orange, which researchers think might indicate that insects of that color can be toxic.
To see whether they could get ducks to branch out, as well as be more active in unfamiliar environments, they first simulated a parasite infection by injecting ducklings at various stages of development with sheep red blood cells, which challenge the immune system in a similar way. (They didn’t infect them with real parasites because they wanted the same level of immune reaction in each duck, and it would require a much larger sample size to average out the varying effects that pathogens have on different individuals.)
Once those ducklings and their uninjected counterparts grew up, ...


Through the lens of a glass house | Gene Expression

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Nature has a very interesting piece up right now, Don’t judge species on their origins, which addresses the periodic bouts of hysteria which are triggered by ‘invasive species.’ I’ve addressed before the issue of biological terminology of convenience being transformed into fundamental and principled Truths. The separation between ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ selection, or more archaically the division between ‘humankind’ and the ‘natural world.’ There are important reasons why these terms emerged the way they did, but we shouldn’t confuse the terminology for the truth. This seems definitely a problem when we humans talk about ‘invasive’ and ‘non-native’ species, as well as whether population X is worth being protected because it is a ‘species’ according to a genetic definition, or whether it is too ‘genetically polluted.’ We are after all an invasive species ourself!

Since the piece is behind a paywall I’ll extract the most relevant paragraphs:

Today’s management approaches must recognize that the natural systems of the past are changing forever thanks to drivers such as climate change, nitrogen eutrophication, increased urbanization and other land-use changes. It is time for scientists, land managers and policy-makers to ditch this preoccupation with the native–alien dichotomy and embrace more dynamic and pragmatic approaches ...

Aquarius/SAC-D Launched

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Aquarius/SAC-D Launched

"With a burst of light, the United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket carrying the Aquarius/SAC-D spacecraft lifted off June 10, 2011 at 7:20 a.m. PDT (10:20 a.m. EDT) from NASA's Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California."

NASA Launches Space-Based Saline Solution, OSTP

"Aquarius is the product of an international collaborative effort between NASA and the Argentine space agency, with contributions by Canada, France, Brazil, and Italy. This new capability will enhance and complement the European Space Agency's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity satellite designed primarily to measure soil moisture."

Keith's note: There is a memorial banner on the launch tower that reads "In memory of our colleague and friend Hal Chase - the ULA Team". Hal Chase was a ULA employee at VAFB and passed away recently.