"The Tsarnaev brothers offer a grisly story of American immigration and integration, and Danny offers another ..."New Yorker: ... A sedan swerved in behind him, a man banged on his window, the door opened, a pistol appeared, and soon they were off.Danny is an immigrant from China who came to Boston as a graduate student. He now works for a start-up in Kendall Square. The Tsarnaev brothers offer a grisly story of American immigration and integration, and Danny offers another: the bright young man who comes here and tries to build something. It’s...
Saturday, 27 April 2013
Friday, 26 April 2013
Jonathan Wai sends me his latest paper, which reveals (click figure below) that ~ 40% or more of US Fortune 500 CEOs, billionaires, federal judges and Senators attended elite undergraduate or graduate institutions whose median standardized test scores are above (roughly) 99th percentile for the overall US population (i.e., SAT M+CR > 1400). Over 10% of individuals in these categories attended Harvard. (In the table: elite school = top 1% undergrad...
Thursday, 25 April 2013
Part of the potential of online education is to break the "credentialing chokehold" of traditional universities. But in order for a credential to have value, one has to be sure that the holder has actually mastered the subject matter. Thus, security in testing is important. Certainly, students can cheat at traditional universities, but the problem becomes much more severe for online-only education in which the educational institution may never have...
Wednesday, 24 April 2013
Will they discover a "general factor" for dog intelligence? Anyone want to make a prediction? See also here.NYTimes: ... Dr. Hare, now an associate professor at Duke, has continued to probe the canine mind, but his research has been constrained by the number of dogs he can study. Now he hopes to expand his research geometrically — with the help of dog owners around the world. He is the chief scientific officer of a new company called Dognition, which...
Tuesday, 23 April 2013
MMA training regimens are among the most advanced in all of sports today.See also Jon Jones, phenom.Anyone who has watched Jones fight knows he is incredibly talented. His background is wrestling -- he gave up a scholarship to Iowa State when he started his pro career. I notice he hits a lot of Judo throws in his fights. Most fans think those are greco throws but they aren't -- he's using his legs, which is illegal in greco. When I investigated this, expecting to find that he had trained in Judo as many wrestlers have, I was amazed to discover...
Monday, 22 April 2013
Rather than tease my friends in economics I'll just refer you, e.g., to this blog post by Krugman and this thread on Econ Job Rumors.Ulam to Samuelson: name a single result in economics that is both true and non-trivial. (Don't give me comparative advantage. I doubt Ulam would find that non-trivial. Ulam and Samuelson were Harvard Junior Fellows together.)For more fun see, e.g., Confessions of an Economi...
I recommend this blog post (The Differentialist) by Timothy Bates of the University of Edinburgh. (I met Tim there at last year's Behavior Genetics meeting.) He discusses the implications of GCTA results showing high heritability of IQ as measured using common SNPs (see related post Eric, why so gloomy?). One unresolved issue (see comments there) is to what extent mutational load (deleterious effects due to very rare variants) can account...
Sunday, 21 April 2013
Economics Shapes Science by Paula Stephan.At a time when science is seen as an engine of economic growth, Paula Stephan brings a keen understanding of the ongoing cost-benefit calculations made by individuals and institutions as they compete for resources and reputation. She shows how universities offload risks by increasing the percentage of non–tenure-track faculty, requiring tenured faculty to pay salaries from outside grants, and staffing...
Saturday, 20 April 2013
Raghu Parasarathy, a biophysicist at U Oregon, and my correspondent in this previous post on faculty blogging, has decided to try it out. Raghu is a deep and creative thinker, so I'm sure we have some interesting contributions to look forward to!My key motivation ... hopefully recording a variety of thoughts will help them persist, and perhaps coalesce into something useful. And maybe some of the topics I expect to write about — the structure of...
Thursday, 18 April 2013
Stephen Smale gave a lecture today in the MSU math department, on protein binding and folding. He mainly presented the mathematical aspects and it was a bit like magic. If (as claimed) his methods, which could be described as coming from machine learning, actually give the best results to date on these problems it really is magic.Title: Mathematics of Protein FoldingAbstract: Learning methods are used to create a geometry on spaces of amino...
Tuesday, 16 April 2013
Sounds nutty, but what the heck! Don't blame me if I lose my temper or become violent -- my digit ratio made me do it! ;-)Finger Length Predicts Health and Behavior (Discover): ... In boys, “during fetal development there’s a surge in testosterone in the middle of the second trimester” that seems to influence future health and behavior, says Pete Hurd, a neuroscientist at the University of Alberta. One easy-to-spot result of this flood of testosterone:...
Sunday, 14 April 2013
A colleague responds to my earlier post Blogging professors, on how universities might encourage more faculty blogging.What I had in mind was a university-wide platform that would aggregate the output of participating faculty. This kind of branded expert channel might have a place amid the economic collapse in journalism we are currently experiencing. If Huffington Post is worth $315 million (OK, not really, just another dumb move by AOL), what might a platform showcasing 100 clever faculty from a major research university be worth? 100 bloggers...
I recall reading this quote (or something similar) when Bezos was Time magazine's Man of the Year in 1999. Jeff Bezos: Yeah. So, I went to Princeton primarily because I wanted to study physics, and it's such a fantastic place to study physics. Things went fairly well until I got to quantum mechanics and there were about 30 people in the class by that point and it was so hard for me. I just remember there was a point in this where I realized I'm never...
Saturday, 13 April 2013
When I first started blogging in 2004, I thought it would be only a matter of a few years before a significant fraction -- say 10-30% -- of all professors would have their own blogs. Surely, I thought, many brilliant professors would have no shortage of (and no shortage of interest in expressing) fabulous ideas and opinions worthy of wider attention and discussion.But I was wrong. My rough estimate is that, currently, typical research universities (with, say, 1000 or so professors!) have no more than a handful of active faculty bloggers (for some...
Tuesday, 9 April 2013
Sunday, 7 April 2013
As a punishment, Sisyphus was made to roll a huge boulder up a steep hill. Before he could reach the top, however, the massive stone would always roll back down, forcing him to begin again.I recommend this well written refutation of Cosma Shalizi's much loved (in certain quarters) g, a Statistical Myth, an attack on the general factor of intelligence. Over the years I have not encountered a single endorser of Shalizi's article who actually understands the relevant subject matter. His article is loved for its reassuring conclusions, not the strength...
Saturday, 6 April 2013
Some time ago I posted on a striking claim of genetic prediction for autism risk that appeared in Nature Molecular Psychiatry:Predicting the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder using gene pathway analysis (Nature Molecular Psychiatry)AbstractAutism spectrum disorder (ASD) depends on a clinical interview with no biomarkers to aid diagnosis. The current investigation interrogated single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of individuals with ASD from the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange (AGRE) database. SNPs were mapped to Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes...
Friday, 5 April 2013
Recently I looked at some national-level data for university researchers in physics, chemistry, EE, molecular biology and zoology. The data confirm my "moneyball" suspicion: the research funding and citations of the top 20% of faculty typically exceed the bottom 60-80% combined!In other words, one excellent researcher is worth several mediocre ones. The average annual funding for top quintile researchers in the fields listed above is in the neighborhood of $1 million, with the exception of zoology which is smaller by a half or so. Citation numbers...
Special issue of Science. If genomic methods (e.g., genotyping of tumor cells to identify most promising treatment) fulfill their promise in cancer therapy, the number of human genomes available for other research will skyrocket.INTRODUCTION—With the completion of the human genome in 2001, many researchers immediately set their sights on using this information to better understand the genetics and, more recently, epigenetic effects identified during...
Thursday, 4 April 2013
So far I'm enjoying it very much. Amazing that he is 87 years old. Amazon reviews here.“Forgive him anything, he writes like an angel.”Salter: To write? Because all this is going to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth."There comes a time,"...
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