Mathematics posts
- November 18, 2010
- 05:39 AM
- 992 views
Fractals in clouds – why clouds appear ‘cloudlike’
by Croor Singh in Learning to be Terse
Clouds have distinctive shapes. Or they seem to have distinctive shapes. It turns out that is likely due to the fractal nature of clouds. The fractal nature of clouds was first shown in this paper in Science, from 1982.... Read more »
LOVEJOY, S. (1982) Area-Perimeter Relation for Rain and Cloud Areas. Science, 216(4542), 185-187. DOI: 10.1126/science.216.4542.185
- November 18, 2010
- 05:35 AM
- 766 views
Fractals in clouds
by Croor Singh in Learning to be Terse
Clouds have distinctive shapes. Or they seem to have distinctive shapes. It turns out that is likely due to the fractal nature of clouds. The fractal nature of clouds was first shown in this paper in Science, from 1982.... Read more »
LOVEJOY, S. (1982) Area-Perimeter Relation for Rain and Cloud Areas. Science, 216(4542), 185-187. DOI: 10.1126/science.216.4542.185
- November 16, 2010
- 12:00 PM
- 1,649 views
The more colourful the lie, the more people believe it, man!
by Caspar Addyman in Your Brain on Drugs
The Splintered Mind has a great guest piece by G. Randolph Mayes reflecting on John Allen Paulos’s latest piece in the New York Times, entitled “Stories vs. Statistics” , which reflects on counter intuitve work of Nobel prize winning work of Tversky and Kahneman on conjunction fallacies.... Read more »
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1983) Extensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment. Psychological Review, 90(4), 293-315. DOI: 10.1037/0033-295X.90.4.293
- November 14, 2010
- 06:31 PM
- 725 views
The limits of the immune system
by David Basanta in Cancerevo: Cancer evolution
After spending a good part of Wednesday talking with scientists at the department of immunology at Moffitt I am well aware of the importance of the immune system as an anticancer mechanism. The immune system is not perfect though...... Read more »
Martin, L., & Coon, C. (2010) Infection Protection and Natural Selection. Science, 330(6004), 602-603. DOI: 10.1126/science.1198303
- November 13, 2010
- 12:04 PM
- 802 views
Broken Taboo: A Major Journal Publishes Evidence of ESP
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
Psi is psychology's equivalent of the perpetual motion machine in physics. Claims in favor of telepathy, clairvoyance, premonitions or other extra-sensory perceptions were always considered the realm of looney-tunes who write to professors with no margins and lots of fanciful diagrams. Or worse ...Read More
... Read more »
Daryl J. Bem. (2011) Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. info:/10.1037/a0021524
- November 9, 2010
- 05:30 AM
- 767 views
The future babble of obesity prognostication
by Yoni Freedhoff in Weighty Matters
Lies, damn lies and statistics.Now to be fair I've been primed to disbelieve most future predictions by being mid-way through Dan Gardner's excellent Future Babble, but really, obesity rates to hit 42% is headline news?The headlines referred to a study published last week in PLoS Computational Biology that had some truly fancy Harvard folks hammer out a formula to predict what obesity's going to do down the road. Those fancy folks are building on a prior study of theirs that proved that obesity ........ Read more »
Hill, A., Rand, D., Nowak, M., & Christakis, N. (2010) Infectious Disease Modeling of Social Contagion in Networks. PLoS Computational Biology, 6(11). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000968
- November 5, 2010
- 09:29 AM
- 1,270 views
How many of us will be obese in 2050?
by Peter Janiszewski, Ph.D. in Obesity Panacea
Approximately 42% of the US population will be obese in 2050, according to a new study by Hill and colleagues from Harvard.
In the study, just published in PLoS Computational Biology, the authors predict the obesity epidemic will also plateau around this time. That is, 42% obesity rate is the predicted maximum level at which point an equilibrium will be reached.
The authors have this to say about their prediction:
While not great, this is a much more optimistic estimate than 100%.
That is certai........ Read more »
Hill, A., Rand, D., Nowak, M., & Christakis, N. (2010) Infectious Disease Modeling of Social Contagion in Networks. PLoS Computational Biology, 6(11). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000968
- November 1, 2010
- 09:28 AM
- 727 views
Few Women in Math-Intensive Fields
by APS Daily Observations in Daily Observations
Why are women so underrepresented in mathematics-intensive fields? This question is at the center of a storm of controversy, as some scientists suggest innate differences in ability and others blame ... Read more »
Ceci, S.J., . (2010) Sex differences in math-intensive fields. Current Directions in Psychological Science. info:/10.1177/0963721410383241
- October 27, 2010
- 04:18 PM
- 1,202 views
But did you correct your results using a dead salmon?
by Iddo Friedberg in Byte Size Biology
fMRI tests are very popular. Why should they not be? Take someone, stick them in an MRI, show them a picture of their mother-in-law, see which bits of their brain light up (get more blood, hence are more active) and voila! You’re in the New York Times science supplement under the title “Scientists discover brain region responsible for unmitigated rage.” (Any resemblance to any actual mother-in-law, living or dead, is purely coincidental.) fMRI is a great tool for mapping cogni........ Read more »
Craig M. Bennett, Abigail A. Baird, Michael B. Miller, & George L. Wolford. (2010) Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Proper Multiple Comparisons Correction. JSUR, 1(1), 1-5. info:other/http://jsur.org/v1n1p1
- October 27, 2010
- 01:41 AM
- 801 views
The Piffle Paradox - or how pure mathematicians have fun
by westius in Mr Science Show
Ever wondered how pure mathematicians have fun? The following is from the 1967 paper Modern Research in Mathematics by A. K. Austin, from the Department of Pure Mathematics at the University of Sheffield. It's a send-up, by the way...
A note on piffles by A. B. Smith
A. C. Jones in his paper "A Note on the Theory of Boffles," Proceedings of the National Society, 13, first defined a Biffle to be a non-definite Boffle and asked if every Biffle was reducible.
C. D. Brown in "On a paper by A. ........ Read more »
Austin, A. (1967) 3183. Modern Research in Mathematics. The Mathematical Gazette, 51(376), 149. DOI: 10.2307/3614400
Farlow, S. (1980) Three Mathematical Satires A rebuke of A. B. Smith's paper, 'A Note on Piffles'. International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology, 11(2), 285-304. DOI: 10.1080/0020739800110222
- October 25, 2010
- 07:38 PM
- 617 views
Finding Parameters for Cancer Progression and other Complex Biological Models
by Michael Long in Phased
Diego Fernandez Slezak (Buenos Aires University, Argentina), Gustavo Stolovitzky (IBM), and coworkers show that a mathematical "best fit" to a complex biological model may be biologically implausible.... Read more »
Fernández Slezak, D., Suárez, C., Cecchi, G. A., Marshall, G., & Stolovitzky, G. (2010) When the Optimal Is Not the Best: Parameter Estimation in Complex Biological Models. PLoS ONE, 5(10). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0013283
- October 25, 2010
- 01:16 AM
- 624 views
Parametric Bootstrap Power Analysis of GISS Temp Data
by apeescape in mind of a Markov chain
Previosly, I calculated a bunch of ad-hoc power curves from GISTEMP data. Power is essentially a reframing of the p-value, to see the significance of the trend lines in the global temps. However, power calculations are inherently very noisy, hence, my ad-hoc way of aggregating the data. Another method is to bootstrap through the responses [...]... Read more »
Gerard, P., Smith, D., & Weerakkody, G. (1998) Limits of Retrospective Power Analysis. The Journal of Wildlife Management, 62(2), 801. DOI: 10.2307/3802357
- October 22, 2010
- 05:54 PM
- 740 views
Yes, diversity matters
by David Basanta in Cancerevo: Cancer evolution
Diversity matters and I am not talking about the workplace. It does in cancer (I am writing this from an NCI organised meeting in the context of the ICBP, where one one the main themes is the role of...... Read more »
Palmer TM, Doak DF, Stanton ML, Bronstein JL, Kiers ET, Young TP, Goheen JR, & Pringle RM. (2010) Synergy of multiple partners, including freeloaders, increases host fitness in a multispecies mutualism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(40), 17234-9. PMID: 20855614
- October 1, 2010
- 10:49 AM
- 701 views
Harmful algal blooms highlight risks from cascading ecological collapse
A plankton bloom in the Baltic sea. Credit: ESA Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are scary things. The occur when populations of algae explode in coastal environments. The algae suck up the oxygen and release neurotoxins into the water, and even the local air. Fisheries and beaches have to be shut down. People have been killed. HABs aren't predictable, but its clear that they more damaging and more common than they were in the past due to nutrient pollution ........ Read more »
HEISLER, J., GLIBERT, P., BURKHOLDER, J., ANDERSON, D., COCHLAN, W., DENNISON, W., DORTCH, Q., GOBLER, C., HEIL, C., & HUMPHRIES, E. (2008) Eutrophication and harmful algal blooms: A scientific consensus. Harmful Algae, 8(1), 3-13. DOI: 10.1016/j.hal.2008.08.006
Miller, M., Kudela, R., Mekebri, A., Crane, D., Oates, S., Tinker, M., Staedler, M., Miller, W., Toy-Choutka, S., Dominik, C.... (2010) Evidence for a Novel Marine Harmful Algal Bloom: Cyanotoxin (Microcystin) Transfer from Land to Sea Otters. PLoS ONE, 5(9). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0012576
Bauman, A., Burt, J., Feary, D., Marquis, E., & Usseglio, P. (2010) Tropical harmful algal blooms: An emerging threat to coral reef communities?. Marine Pollution Bulletin. DOI: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2010.08.015
Brock, W., & Carpenter, S. (2010) Interacting regime shifts in ecosystems: implication for early warnings. Ecological Monographs, 80(3), 353-367. DOI: 10.1890/09-1824.1
- October 1, 2010
- 06:29 AM
- 789 views
Am I wasting my time?
by Bob O'Hara in Deep Thoughts and Silliness
Physicists have it easy. When they're not talking about stuffing their hands into their equipment, they're measuring their fundamental constants to 38 significant figures. Chemists too have a simple time - they get to make stinks and bangs with expensive...... Read more »
Knape, J., & de Valpine, P. (2010) Effects of weather and climate on the dynamics of animal population time series. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.1333
Mutshinda, C., O’Hara, R., & Woiwod, I. (2010) A multispecies perspective on ecological impacts of climatic forcing. Journal of Animal Ecology. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2656.2010.01743.x
- September 26, 2010
- 07:28 AM
- 543 views
Big Pharma Explain How To Pick Cherries
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic
Here at Neuroskeptic, we see a lot of bad science. Maybe, over the years (all 2 of them) that I've been writing this blog, I've become a bit jaded. Maybe I'm less distressed by it than I used to be. Cynical, even.But this one really takes the biscuit. And then it takes the tin. And relieves itself in it: A New Population-Enrichment Strategy to Improve Efficiency of Placebo-Controlled Clinical Trials of Antidepressant Drugs.Don't worry - it's from a big pharmaceutical company (GlaxoSmithKline), s........ Read more »
Merlo-Pich E, Alexander RC, Fava M, & Gomeni R. (2010) A New Population-Enrichment Strategy to Improve Efficiency of Placebo-Controlled Clinical Trials of Antidepressant Drugs. Clinical pharmacology and therapeutics. PMID: 20861834
- September 15, 2010
- 03:31 PM
- 969 views
Through a (Brain) Scanner, Darkly
by Lindsay in Autist's Corner
Explains Ecker et al. (2010)'s statistical analysis of the geometry of MRI-derived computer models of 20 autistic men's brains, compared with normal and abnormal (ADHD) controls... Read more »
Ecker C, Marquand A, Mourão-Miranda J, Johnston P, Daly EM, Brammer MJ, Maltezos S, Murphy CM, Robertson D, Williams SC.... (2010) Describing the brain in autism in five dimensions--magnetic resonance imaging-assisted diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder using a multiparameter classification approach. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 30(32), 10612-23. PMID: 20702694
- September 13, 2010
- 08:57 PM
- 816 views
When Will the First Earth-like Planet Be Discovered?
by Samuel Arbesman in arbesman.net
With news of new extrasolar planets being released nearly weekly, there is a general feeling that we are in the midst of a singular moment in cosmic discovery. And the news a few weeks ago of a planet that is about the same size as Earth has provided the sense that the discovery of a [...]... Read more »
Samuel Arbesman, & Gregory Laughlin. (2010) A Scientometric Prediction of the Discovery of the First Potentially Habitable Planet with a Mass Similar to Earth. PLoS ONE (in press). arXiv: 1009.2212v1
- September 13, 2010
- 07:13 PM
- 821 views
Finding Truth in a Messy World
by jebyrnes in I'm a chordata, urochordata!
*-note, this was derived from a combination of emails between myself and my former phd advisor. See if you can pick out who is arguing what and where. It’s fun – well, for some of you, anyway. How do we know the world? This is a seemingly simple and vast question – one with no [...]... Read more »
Paine, R. (2010) Macroecology: Does It Ignore or Can It Encourage Further Ecological Syntheses Based on Spatially Local Experimental Manipulations?. The American Naturalist, 176(4), 385-393. DOI: 10.1086/656273
Ellison, A., & Dennis, B. (2010) Paths to statistical fluency for ecologists. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 8(7), 362-370. DOI: 10.1890/080209
- September 13, 2010
- 04:04 PM
- 1,360 views
Scientific hubris, or: Everything you thought you knew about straight line fits is wrong
by sarah in One Small Step
Think you’ve got your least squares down to a tee? Think again. In a paper posted to the Arxiv in late August, David Hogg of NYU and his collaborators take us to task on our sloppy data fitting habits. And he’s not in the mood to mince his words. It is conventional to begin any [...]... Read more »
David W. Hogg, Jo Bovy, & Dustin Lang. (2010) Data analysis recipes: Fitting a model to data. Arxiv . arXiv: 1008.4686v1
topics
join us!
Do you write about peer-reviewed research in your blog? Use ResearchBlogging.org to make it easy for your readers — and others from around the world — to find your serious posts about academic research.
If you don't have a blog, you can still use our site to learn about fascinating developments in cutting-edge research from around the world.
