Category: Science

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Stimulating Morning

The Computing Research Policy Blog is reporting possible good news for science funding:

Speaker Pelosi’s office just released a fact sheet on the conference agreement for the American Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act and, wow, it looks good for science agencies in the bill. Here’s the relevant bit:

Transform our Economy with Science and Technology: To secure America’s role as a world leader in a competitive global economy, we are renewing America’s investments in basic research and development, in training students for an innovation economy, and in deploying new technologies into the marketplace. This will help businesses in every community succeed in a global economy.
Investing in Scientific Research (More than $15 Billion)

  • Provides $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, for basic research in fundamental science and engineering – which spurs discovery and innovation.
  • Provides $1.6 billion for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which funds research in such areas as climate science, biofuels, high-energy physics, nuclear physics and fusion energy sciences – areas crucial to our energy future.
  • Provides $400 million for the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to support high-risk, high-payoff research into energy sources and energy efficiency in collaboration with industry
  • Provides $580 million for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, including the Technology Innovation Program and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership.
  • Provides $8.5 billion for NIH, including expanding good jobs in biomedical research to study diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer, and heart disease.
  • Provides $1 billion for NASA, including $400 million to put more scientists to work doing climate change research.
  • Provides $1.5 billion for NIH to renovate university research facilities and help them compete for biomedical research grants.

Extending Broadband Services

  • Provides $7 billion for extending broadband services to underserved communities across the country, so that rural and inner-city businesses can compete with any company in the world.
  • For every dollar invested in broadband, the economy sees a ten-fold return on that investment.
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Brains, Brains, Brains, Brains

Like many an arrogant kid before me, when I graduate from high school in my podunk hometown (no, it wasn’t marshy, and I say podunk with all the warm feelings of a idyllic childhood), I was filled with confidence that I was one of the smartest people I knew. Oh, I’d never say it, and yes I knew I was good mostly at only one small thing, mathematics, but I’m pretty certain looking back that I was a pretty confident ass. As you can well imagine, then, transitioning from my high school to Caltech, an institution filled with near-perfect-SAT-scoring students, Nobel laureate faculty members, and a wide range of just frickin’ brilliant people, resulted in a large dislocation in my perspective concerning my own capabilities. But over time, I began to realize that, while I wasn’t the sharpest cookie in the cookie jar, every once in a very rare while I could do something worthy of interest to my fellow genii in grooming (mostly jokes, mad rantings, or random acts of bizarreness, if you must know.) Thus I came to the perspective that there was no such thing as a universal genius, that possibly, just possibly, there are people who are good at differing things—little genii of their own domains. It’s often disheartening to sit in a room with a large number of brilliant people, until I remind myself of this fact. And Monday, while doing exactly this form of sitting, I began to ponder the different ways in which these people have their own styles of brilliance. Or, in short, I made a list.

Continue reading “Brains, Brains, Brains, Brains”

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Large Earth Collider

Oh noes: Scientists Warn Large Earth Collider May Destroy Earth:

BATAVIA, IL–In October, Fermilab scientists joined a growing number of physicists around the world in warning that the Very Large Earth Collider–a $117 billion electromagnetic particle accelerator built to study astronomical phenomena by colliding Earth into various heavenly bodies–could potentially destroy Earth when it sends the planet careening headlong into Mars, Jupiter, or even the sun.
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Physicists at CERN and Brookhaven National Laboratory, who underwrote the VLEC’s construction with donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, agree that there are “some troubling variables” whenever attempting to launch Earth through the vacuum of space into a massive body of solid matter. Yet, they insist, the academic benefits of a planetary collision outweigh any risk of annihilating the Earth

Damn, and I’d just drawn up plans for the Incredibly Large Sun Collider (we can get ahold of the sun, so the joke goes, by traveling there at night.)

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Krugman on Krugman

A very good essay Paul Krugman wrote on his method of doing research. Some good gems in there for researchers of all fields.

The injunction to dare to be silly is not a license to be undisciplined. In fact, doing really innovative theory requires much more intellectual discipline than working in a well-established literature. What is really hard is to stay on course: since the terrain is unfamilar, it is all too easy to find yourself going around in circles.

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Blog Posts With Scientific Content

The new father, he of uncertain principles, has analyzed whether his science posts gain viewership over time. My biggest problem with writing scientific content into posts is that when I do that it totally messes up my google searching. I mean when I do that then I end up finding my own blog post when I search for something I’m trying ton understand. On the other hand, it saves a click because I can be pretty certain that the link to my blog doesn’t lead to the answer I’m looking for (or if it does it’s time to get my memory checked out.)

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Want Fame? Be a First Mover

Is fame and fortune what you seek (or at least fame)? Be a first mover, according to a new paper, arXiv:0809.0522

The first-mover advantage in scientific publication

Authors: M. E. J. Newman

Mathematical models of the scientific citation process predict a strong “first-mover” effect under which the first papers in a field will, essentially regardless of content, receive citations at a rate enormously higher than papers published later. Moreover papers are expected to retain this advantage in perpetuity — they should receive more citations indefinitely, no matter how many other papers are published after them. We test this conjecture against data from a selection of fields and in several cases find a first-mover effect of a magnitude similar to that predicted by the theory. Were we wearing our cynical hat today, we might say that the scientist who wants to become famous is better off — by a wide margin — writing a modest paper in next year’s hottest field than an outstanding paper in this year’s. On the other hand, there are some papers, albeit only a small fraction, that buck the trend and attract significantly more citations than theory predicts despite having relatively late publication dates. We suggest that papers of this kind, though they often receive comparatively few citations overall, are probably worthy of our attention.

Guess what field was used as an example for this effect? Network theory.

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Got NSF?

I really need to create a category for blog posts for things which Google’s products do which amuse me. Today in reading an email about the National Science Foundation:
Many a faculty member’s got NSF, I guess, and are damn sick or writing grants to continue having NSF.

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Watching BioBarCamp From Afar

Over at Science in the open, the the ScienceOpener (Cameron Neylon) is attending BioBarCamp. Now, IANAB (that stands for “I am not a stamp collector” 🙂 ) but there are a ton of cool talks at BioBarCamp: many on open science / social media / science 2.0 etc (for which biologists are kicking everyone’s rear at.) Here is the schedule on google docs. Because I’m supposed to be working on a talk for an upcoming review, I need something to listen to and watch out of the corner of my eye, as I work on the review. And ScienceOpener provides: A lifefeed of the event.
Which is cool, because now I can hear awesome interesting ideas, while trying to work on my presentation (with less awesome ideas, BTW.) And I even get to see familiar faces (well…familiar people lounging while listening):
How cool is that. Science, it is a changing, my little pea sized mind thinks 🙂