What do mice chasing crickets, particle accelerators, solid sponges for natural gas storage, and toddlers with cameras mounted on their heads have in common? All were the subjects of short talks at yesterday afternoon’s “Informal Symposium” on Machine Learning in the Sciences at the University of Oregon, that Teddy Hay, Gabriel Barello, and I co-organized. … Continue reading Machine Learning Mixer
Nothing about science today, and not even a drawing or painting — just a photo I took while biking home yesterday that reminded me that I have one of the best commutes on the planet. It rained yesterday, perhaps marking the start of the wet season in Eugene and the end of the typically dry, … Continue reading Yesterday’s traffic report
NOTE: This will only be of interest to a subset of the very small number of people who calculate things related to two dimensional viscosity. For the rest of you, here’s a link to the previous post, on witchcraft! SYNOPSIS: I describe and provide MATLAB code (here) to calculate the hydrodynamic drag and diffusion coefficients … Continue reading Membrane Diffusion Software
A few months ago, I read parts of “Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande” (E.E. Evans-Pritchard, 1937). I like cultural anthropology, and I much prefer descriptions of the creative ways that humans have constructed societies to the more “scientific” anthropology that now seems more prevalent, and so it’s not surprising that I found Evans-Pritchard’s … Continue reading Witchcraft, Guts, and Statistics
Yesterday I spent over 3 hours reviewing a paper for a journal, capping off a jam-packed day of semi-improvised discussions with high school students, grant proposal writing, a very tiny bit of lab work, and more. A friend of mine, coincidentally, also spent several hours yesterday reviewing a paper. This morning, I read a blog … Continue reading Peer Review, and Lying Injured on the Sidewalk
The bio-science journal eLife is trying out an remarkable new approach to peer review: letting authors decide how, or even whether, to revise their manuscripts in response to reviewers. The well-written announcements are here and here. I’m glad to see experimentation with new scientific publishing methods, though I’m skeptical about this one. Fundamentally, the new … Continue reading eLife’s Peer Review Experiment
Synopsis: A blurb about a recent paper from my lab [1], on our discovery that the bacterium that causes cholera can manipulate the mechanical environment of an animal gut to expel resident bacteria. Introduction: cholera’s tools, and ours Cholera killed more people in the 19th century than any other epidemic disease, and it continues to … Continue reading New Tricks from an Old Bacterium
When borrowing an elephant femur a few weeks ago I was reminded of the nascent Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, which we’re constructing at the University of Oregon as a center for translational or applied life-science research. The femur was for my Physics of Life class, as I’ve written about before [link]. In brief, … Continue reading On Elephants, Oregon, Science, and Art
Our visitation days for prospective Physics graduate students at the University of Oregon — people who have been admitted and are deciding whether or not to come — will occur this Friday and Saturday. There’s a poster session, and it occurred to me that we don’t have any posters from my lab that provide a … Continue reading A lab overview poster
All departments at the University of Oregon are being called upon to create metrics for evaluating our “scholarship quality.” We’re not unique; there’s a trend at universities to create quantitative metrics. I think this is neither necessary nor good — in brief, quality is better assessed by informed, narrative assessments of activity and accomplishments, and … Continue reading Cite this post! (On publication metrics)
The Eighteenth Elephant 