[Edit, Sept. 25, 2016: In retrospect, this is a confusing post. The overall point is fine, but my contrived illustration is not a good one.] At an otherwise excellent talk some time ago, the speaker put up a graph like this (look below — not the cheetah)… …and said that the two sets of data points, … Continue reading You may not be interested in noise, but noise is interested in you
A few evenings ago I gave a “science pub” talk — part of a long-running series of public presentations that the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry runs at several sites in the state. (This was at a local pizza place, so thankfully I could just bike to it.) I called the talk “Glimpses of … Continue reading Science Pub 2016
As I briefly mentioned in my end-of-year book recap, one of the best books I read in 2015, and one of the best popular science books I’ve read ever, is Oliver Morton’s The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World. Geoengineering refers to the intentional manipulation of climate, usually in the context of combatting … Continue reading How I learned to stop worrying and love geoengineering
As I noted a few months ago, I co-taught this past term a graduate workshop on scientific ethics. It was an experiment — this is the first time we’ve offered a course like this in Physics at Oregon — and overall I think it was fairly successful. We had a series of lively discussions, consistent … Continue reading Course recap: Scientific Ethics (Spring 2016)
Synopsis: (1) We’re posting preprints, for the reasons that you’re probably already familiar with. (2) I can entertain myself by making graphs and models, this time about article metrics. Preprints A few months ago we posted our first, and a few weeks ago our second, papers on bioRxiv, the fairly new preprint server for life … Continue reading We’re Hip, We’re Trendy, We’re Pre-printers
[Note: a long post of interest only to people who care about data analysis and bad statistics, and maybe about the distant stars influencing your life.] By now, we should all be able to list the many reasons that p-values (or null-hypothesis-significance-testing, NHST) are awful: that “statistical significance” has nothing to do with effect size … Continue reading How do I hate p-values? Let me count the ways…
I’ll guess that most people reading this don’t believe in homeopathy, astrology, or the existence of lizardlike extraterrestrials that walk among us. This is probably not because any of us ourselves have researched these topics, but rather because we are unconvinced by their proponents, and also perhaps because these ideas have not managed to break … Continue reading Scientific publishing for non-scientists
In Part I, I wrote about how I started exploring the topic of machine learning, and we looked briefly described one of its main aims: automating the task of classifying objects based on their properties. Here, I’ll give an example of this in action, and also describe some general lessons I’ve drawn from this experience. … Continue reading Learning about (machine) learning — part II
Machine learning is everywhere these days, as we train computers to drive cars, play video games, and fold laundry. This intersects my lab’s research as well, which involves lots of computational image analysis (e.g.). Nearly everything my students and I write involves writing or applying particular algorithms to extract information from data. In the past … Continue reading Learning about (machine) learning — Part I
I spent much of my undergraduate life in UC Berkeley’s Astronomy department. I was an astrophysics and physics double major for quite a while, and I spent countless hours working with our undergraduate-built rooftop radio telescope (shown), both helping build it and serving as a teaching assistant in the laboratory course we designed around it. … Continue reading Berkeley astronomy news (rotten eggs part 2?)
The Eighteenth Elephant 