HFO-1234yf, a climate-friendly alternative refrigerant for car air conditioning systems touted by environmental activists, may instead be a greater problem than the products they insisted was causing pollution.
It used to be that broader understanding of zoology meant intuitively that new species would be harder to find and so it followed that there would be fewer of them when found - that is the nature of rarity.Now, because newer species are so rare, it is fashionable to label them nearly extinct even though they have just been discovered and so may not have been prolific any time in recent memory, or at all. It can be a little numbing to the general audience. - when everything is rare, nothing is (see special snowflake).
Most researchers regard their work as vital to society, even if that value is only higher order and the chain to societal benefit is tenuous to outsiders. That's no different than any other job - people at the Department of Motor Vehicles feel like the entire state would halt without them and, in an elaborate food chain, they are right, and the same holds true for environmentalists who worry that some obscure critter going extinct will have a butterfly effect on worldwide ecology. In a domino world, they are also correct.But researchers are different than those other examples because they can't just do their jobs, they have to not only show they are doing their jobs, they have to prove they should continue doing them, and then raise the money to do it.
The federal government rarely succeeds in its attempts to legislate what I would call positive things - this is because the government has no power beyond restricting money and every effort to exceed that is met with resistance by constitutional scholars and states.A progressive culture like the US wants more government whereas a liberal culture like the US wants freedom, and I would argue the best way to implement both goals is that, rather than attempting positive change (and failing - see American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and Affordable Health Care for America Act) , government stick to punitive actions.
US scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, according to a bold statement published in a BMJ press release. The press release is about a paper called 'Retractions in the scientific literature: do authors deliberately commit research fraud?' in the Journal of Medical Ethics. How did he arrive at that conclusion? Language and apparently poor understanding of statistics.
Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, had a life-changing event occur almost one year ago. On November 19th, 2009, a thousand e-mail messages and documents, many his correspondence, were released to the public.Many stressed that those messages were stolen(1), as if the process vindicated the content (would it do so if damning emails had been from Exxon or BP?) but that was small solace because climate science was already suffering backlash and climate science detractors had a field day alleging the entire process was tainted.
Hurricane forecasts were way off again last year so if you're still wondering if a trained chimp 'can predict hurricanes better than NOAA'(1) a Nature Geoscience article has good news for you; forecasts can still be wrong 75% of the time but now can be wrong for years in advance too.
University of California president Mark G. Yudof has issued an 'open letter' to California to talk about the budget problems the system is facing and how they want to deal with the issues facing the state- "I am writing today to let Californians know about the fiscal realities that confront the university, and also about some recommendations I intend to bring next week to our governing Board of Regents. First, though, I'd like to provide a bit of background."So I will list what he writes and then translate that into economic reality, as seen by people who actually live here but are not employed by the state.
2010 is the biggest year for life on Mars since 1898. Or 1955 or whenever the last 'life on other planets' craze hit the public. But unlike those other times, there is good reason. This year, over 20 different papers have invoked the chance there may once have been life on Mars in their work. There is now all kinds of data discussing water on Mars, minerals on Mars and even that the soil might support life. The Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets alone has 64 papers on Mars so far this year.
1,400,000 70-dimension histogram vectors about gamer behavior. What can you do with that?Me? Nothing, the math is too much but, if you can make sense of it, a lot of data is there in the ongoing online gaming phenomenon known as World of Warcraft(WoW). Keeping track of all that data would seem to be solely the purview of computer programmers but sociologists are starting to take notice. Some people are just goofing off and writing a book about their experiences but others see gold in 'game mining' - the insights of anthropology we can get by seeing what 10 million people do in a virtual, controlled setting over a period of years.
After "Five Million Miles to Earth" and "Dead of Night" we get to something a little more modern in our 5 Days of Halloween Movies.
After watching "Five Million Years To Earth", a terrific mix of science, horror and anthropology, it's no crime to associate British horror cinema with Hammer Films, even though that was not one of the bloody Dracula films which earned them their fame.
It's playoff time in baseball and the Giants have home field advantage over the Texas Rangers starting tomorrow, October 27th.Baseball, more so than any other sport, lends itself to numerical analysis because virtually everything except defense is rigorously quantifiable. There are some details, such as an umpire who might call a wider strike zone than another, but at least from a rules perspective the strike zone is what it is.
