But let your communication be Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil
Monday, June 3rd, 2013

In der Tat ist es so, dass nur wenige Photographen ihr Medium beherrschen

Das Zitat ist 60 Jahre alt. Die meisten Bilder werden nicht mehr geprintet, und dennoch ist die Aussage von Weston unvermindert aktuell, vielleicht sogar noch mehr als vor 60 Jahren.

In der Tat ist es so, dass nur wenige Photographen ihr Medium beherrschen. Sie erlauben dem Medium stattdessen, sie zu beherrschen, und veranstalten eine sinnlose Jagd auf neue Objektive und neue Papiere, auf neue Entwickler und neue Zubehörteile – und widmen doch keinem davon genügend Aufmerksamkeit, um all seine Eigenschaften zu erkennen. So verlaufen sie sich schliesslich in einem Irrgarten technischer Informationen, die ihnen wenig oder gar nichts nützen, da sie sich nicht im Klaren darüber sind, was sie mit ihnen eigentlich anfangen wollen ( Edward Weston, 1943 ).

Friday, April 12th, 2013

Thinking out of the box

Friday, April 12th, 2013

Bad news are good news

e! Science News reports a new study in EPJ Data Science by Marcel Salathé showing that anti-vaccination sentiments spread more easily than pro-vaccination sentiments.

We find that the effects of neighborhood size and exposure intensity are qualitatively very different depending on the type of sentiment. Generally, we find that larger numbers of opinionated neighbors inhibit the expression of sentiments. We also find that exposure to negative sentiment is contagious

Read the full paper for the tricky design – at least the results fully underpin daily life experience. It’s certainly much easier to do Twitter than Facebook studies on the other hand these rather short messages are certainly not the main channel of many great “opinionated” people.

Saturday, April 6th, 2013

What a data scientist does except drinking coffee

LIMIT TO 5! What about a maximum of 5 papers per year per scientist?

Undoubtly, there is an avalanche of poor research – as the Chronicle wrote last June, “we must stop the avalanche of low-quality research” the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent [...]

Science success sucks (sometimes)

Leo at zenhabits has a great new piece: Why I don’t care about success. ‘Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.’ (Albert Einstein) A lot of people in my field write about how to be successful, but I try to avoid it. It’s just not [...]

A longe fuse

Mutation accumulation in the human genome is a largely neglected research field. Most mutations have a very small effect (if any) and may be compensated by environmental improvements. I have already argued in that way in the 2003 Triple T paper and will reiterate it soon in PLOS medicine (just found that James Crow 1997 [...]

Is religion a natural phenomenon?

I do not want to discuss here the rather polemic view of Daniel Dennetts “Breaking the spell” and other books as the new secularism is “suddenly hip” as the Guardian digital edition writes on 29th Oct 2006 Secularism is suddenly hip, at least in the publishing world. A glut of popular science books making a [...]