Lap dogs are so yesterday...

Bailey the shoulder dog.

NoiseTrade Widget

I thought this would go to my blog, According to Sara, but no, here it is. This is a great album. Justin's lyrics are always thought provoking...You should download these songs.

Happy Christmas to me

Not a bad load of loot for one day.
Thanks Tobi!
Thanks Julian!

"Great For Display"

Does anybody remember these things?
I remember thinking that encarta was going to make all print encyclopedias extinct. Who could have predicted that something like wikipedia would ever exist, let alone become anything that might resemble an authority for research. Crazy interwebs... anyway, at least books are still good for "display." Although, I think if I ever saw this on someone's shelf at home, I would probably just snicker.

Natural Selection Economics: A Skeptic's Perspective

I find economics fascinating. I should point out right away that I tend to swing heavily pro-market on most issues. With that said, I recently read an article that highlights the opinions of several academic scientists and economists regarding the current economic crisis. Two names caught my attention, Stuart Kauffman (a leading name in systems biology and computer science, and the author of At Home in the Universe, one of the few books that changed my life) and Michael Shermer (publisher of Skeptic Magazine). Here's a quote from Shermer's take on governmental and "top down" market intervention:

Life is intricate, complex, and looks intelligently designed, so our folk biology leads us to infer that there must be an intelligent designer. Analogously, economies are intricate, complex, and look intelligently designed, so our folk economics is to infer that we need an economic designer. This is why instinctually we look to top-down artificial solutions to problems that naturally arose from this bottom-up complex adaptive system... Life and economies, like language, writing, the law, civilizations, and cultures, arise spontaneously as self-organized emergent properties from within systems themselves and without the aid of a blueprint design by a clever engineer. Neither God nor Government are needed to explain such phenomena. In their stead, natural selection and the invisible hand explain precisely how individual organisms and people, pursuing their own self-interest in their struggle to survive and make a living, generate the emergent property of complex ecologies and economies. Both are Complex Adaptive Systems in which individual particles, parts, or agents interact, process information, learn, and adapt their behavior to changing conditions.

Fascinating. The theory of natural selection emerged from the economic laws of supply and demand. In fact, the term, "survival of the fittest" was originally used to describe free market systems. There's a certain beauty in the parallels between economics and ecology. So, if these parallels hold true, it's more than a little disturbing that we've been attempting to "play God" in the market place for the past 60+ years. I tend to agree with Shermer here. The best solution to a failing economy is not pretty, but limited intervention is probably the best long term solution. But, since we've already dumped a few trillion into the market in form of so-called "bailouts"... I hope I'm wrong.

Night Vision Goggles!

Where the hell were these when I was a kid? Are you kidding me? Night vision goggles? I would have killed for these when I was 10 through 22 years old... Now I'm just to cheep and old to fork over a mere $50 for night fricking vision goggles.

Oh man, kids today have all the cool stuff.

Scientist or Misogynist?

I was once told by an academic adviser that every good scientist will find him/herself at odds with his/her contemporaries, and the great scientists are just really loud about it. He went on to add, "and even the best scientists aren't always right, they're just louder than everyone else." Well, hear me shout. The recent issue of Science Magazine contains an article that, in my not-so humble opinion, is a great example of bad science. Granted, it's a sociology paper, and I'm no sociologist, so I'm well outside of my area of expertise... but, that shouldn't stop a good scientist from making a scene, right?

The first figure (pictured here... please don't sue me, Science Magazine) of the article says it all. For the past decade, the rate of female graduate students and faculty members at all levels appears to be rising at the same rate. And, it takes roughly 10 years for the increase in graduate students to affect the numbers of junior faculty members at the corresponding rate. This makes sense because it takes about 10 years to get from graduate student to Jr faculty.

We've all heard stories of females in the work place who are discriminated against, given unfair treatment, talked down to, or who have not been promoted while their male counterparts fly through the ranks with higher pay. I have no doubts that this has and may still happen. But, the numbers just don't reflect it. The authors go on to investigate the success rates of faculty members who apply for federal grants (R01) and distinguish between new and senior faculty members. The authors concede that, while there are far more men in high scientific positions, there is no significant difference between the acceptance rates of grants submitted by males and females. So, why not highlight the disparity between the gross numbers of men and women in faculty positions? Figure 3 of the paper (shown below) shows that there are twice the number of R01 grants awarded to men with PhDs compared to women with PhDs, but they fail to remind us that there are also twice as many male applications submitted. To make matters worse, they paste the success rate for females above each category, which looks really low (<30% and in the teens in some cases) what did they forget?... the corresponding success rate for males in each category, which is THE SAME!

Ok, so why are there so few senior scientist women submitting grants? And, I agree with the authors here. This is an outstanding problem in the field, but what could be the cause? Are women denied tenure? Is it harder for a woman to land a faculty job? Is the sexism so bad that women drop out of science just to avoid the misogynists? We certainly won't know from this study, because they didn't look at any of that data. The authors just conclude that for some unknown reason, women are dropping out of science before they become faculty members. But, are there any other possible explanations? Well, senior scientists were in graduate school over 30 years ago. What do you think the % women in science was in the 70s and 80s? Remember that graph in figure 1? It takes about 10 years for them to climb that ladder. Could there be a significant cohort effect of graduate enrollment in the 70s and 80s? The authors didn't think so. In fact, they just shrugged it off. I blame the reviewers.

Having just graduated from graduate school, I can say that there are a LOT of brilliant women in science today. I work with many of them now. Give them a little time. Science has no room for misogynists, and any capable man, woman, gay or straight, from any creed or sect will excel in their field. Stacking the data to advance an idea or an agenda does the field and the people no good. It just promotes bad ideas and tempts the moguls to institute bad policy. The numbers indicate that we're headed in the right direction. I'd even argue that the problem is fixed. We just need these junior scientists to grow into some bigger shoes.

The Calacanis 120% Solution

I haven't been this inspired in months. I'm really hoping this will be the mantra that carries me through 2009. I came across this on Jason Calacanis' blog:
http://calacanis.com/2008/12/04/the-120-solution/

I was turned on to Jason's blog after hearing him on my favorite podcast, This Week In Tech. In a discussion about the current depressing state of economic affairs and the painful lack of capital available to entrepreneurs, Calacanis made the statement that a smart business person will take the opportunity in a down market to invest in themselves. That means, if you've been thinking about a degree, this might be a good time to go back to school. Or, if you've been wanting to learn a programming language, then get a book and start hacking away. If you've just been thinking about blogging and not actually blogging (pointing my finger squarely at myself :/ ) then get to writing. When the investors freeze up the funds needed to start your business, invest in yourself.

Here's to working harder, getting smarter, and self-improving... oh and having fun doing it!