Category Archives: Joke
Living on my own
Lights on please, any questions? Prototyping a new discussion culture
It is a ritual that I have seen for may years. All lights are switched on after a talk and the race starts for the microphones.
These are not always the best questions that are being asked after a talk. And as there is a time limit, not all questions will be asked. And why are these only oral questions while the lecture was multimedia?
Apart from the fact that asking a question is a mini-presentation of people who are not suffering from low self esteem, I think we may indeed develop new tools of communication.
Here is my current experimental setup. I open a local hotspot before the lecture where up to 250 mobile devices (phone, tablet, laptop) can connect. Each of these clients in the audience gets a comment / upload screen when following instructions given on the first slide.
All audience response is being written to a database, while attached diagrams or screenshots are being saved to a cache directory.
The talk itself is not displayed from Powerpoint but from Chrome in presentation mode. Basically this is just one single presentation page built dynamically with one divs per slide. Next slide just means scrolling to the next div and can be controlled from any tablet or phone.
Periodically the presentation page is being appended with further divs containing new question slides from the audience.
After the end of the talk, we can go to the admin page, where we may jump to single questions and display them just like the slides from my own talk.
But what is so much different now to the current practice?
- Questions are asked in time.
- Everybody can see the questions – no need for any microphone.
- There is nothing is lost as we can review the questions even weeks later.
If you interested in testing, I would be happy to share further details. The only thing you need is a local WLAN router and access to the command line where a local web server is being started.
Better figures
A recent paper identifies 10 rules for better pictures. As I have also given several lectures on that topic, I was excited what the authors think…
1. Know your audience. This is trivial as you never know your audience.
2. Identify your message. True and not true at the same time. True as it makes your findings more evident – not true if you are allowing a reader to find his own message.
3. Adapt the figure to the support medium. Trivial. May be very time consuming.
4. Captions are not optional. Absolutely true, I also suppport good captions – mini stories for those who can’t read the whole text.
5. Do not trust the defaults. Trivial. No one does.
6. Use color efficiently. Not really, avoid colors for those of us who are colorblind and to avoid expensive page charges.
7. Do not mislead the reader. Why should I?
8. Avoid Chartjunk. Absolutely. Most frequent problem.
9. Message trumps beauty. Sure, form follows function.
10. Get the right tool. Maybe correct while the further recommendations look like a poor man’s effort to make his first graphic at zero cost: Gimp, Imagemagick, R…
Journal Hijacking
It’s not easy to monitor science output. This may be particular true when it comes to Journal Hijacking. In brief
The Spanish journal Afinidad has been hijacked. Someone has set up a fake website for the journal and is soliciting submissions and payments from the authors in accordance with the gold open-access model.
With the recent quality of some scholarly journals I feel they may have been highjacked too: typing errors, omission of references, major misunderstandings, logical errors, you name it.
Academics – the most status-conscious people in the world?
Edge sends me an email today
The strange thing about academics, which always fascinates me, is that they believe they’re completely immune to status considerations and consider themselves to be more or less monks. In reality, of course, academics are the most status-conscious people in the world. Take away a parking space from an academic and see how long he stays. I always find this very strange when you occasionally get in the realm of happiness research, you get fairly considerable assaults on consumerism as if it’s just mindless status seeking. Now, the point of the matter is, is that academics are just as guilty of the original crime, they just pursue status in a different way.
True? True!
How our personal data are being traded
Tom Brewster had an interesting idea: selling hsi own data. Why should anyone else make money with it?
When I decided to sell the secret details of my personal life, I had high hopes I’d get a willing buyer. It didn’t go well.
I had been curious to see if I could make money from my online information – something that data brokers across the world are doing every day; collecting it, combining it with others’ information and flogging it to marketing firms or anyone willing to pay. So I put myself on eBay.
The article is really interesting to read, yea, yea.
Ignore everybody?
When sorting out old boookmarks to numerous internet articles and papers that I wanted to read over the past years, but never did, I came across “Ignore everybody”. The website is still up after all the years and has some interesting proposals
Related posts: Don’t become a scientist?|
Cycling is good for you (and vitamin D is an activity marker)
Vitamin D level is an activity or lifestyle marker, although this has been largely neglected in the medical literature, maybe except Gannage 2000, Hyppönen 2007, Sohl 2013 and Choi 213. A new paper by de Rui in PLoS now shows that
serum 25OHD levels were significantly higher in individuals who engaged in outdoor pastimes … compared to those who did not. In particular, subjects regularly practicing gardening or cycling had higher serum 25OHD levels than those who did not, whereas 25OHD levels differed little between subjects who did or did not undertake indoor activities.
While these are good news for older cyclists Continue reading Cycling is good for you (and vitamin D is an activity marker)
Science delusion
It is a bit annoying. If you google for science delusion, you are only referred to Sheldrake. But this is not what I wanted, I was more interested in mad scientists. Not Frankenstein, not Moreau not Dr. Faustus not any literary character, some more real life figures. Also not Venter. But here comes something interesting
In 1951, entomologist Jay Traver published in the Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington [Traver, J. (1951). Unusual scalp dermatitis in humans caused by the mite, dermatophagoides (Acarina, epidermoptidae). Proceedings of the Entomological Society of Washington, 53(1), 1-25.] her personal experiences with a mite infestation of her scalp that resisted all treatment and was undetectable to anyone other than herself. Traver is recognized as having suffered from Delusory Parasitosis: her paper shows her to be a textbook case of the condition. The Traver paper is unique in the scientific literature in that its conclusions may be based on data that was unconsciously fabricated by the author’s mind.
The author ( Matan Shelomi, Mad Scientist: The Unique Case of a Published Delusion Matan Shelomi, Sci Eng Ethics (2013) 19:381-388) believes that a possible retraction of the 1951 paper raises the issue of discrimination against the mentally ill – others may consider this as delusionary correctness.
Der Ramstetter Faktor 10,0613083
Jahrelang mussten sich das die ADAC Motorwelt Leser antun, jeden Monat neu, 15 Jahre lang, den einseitigen Autolobbyismus des Michael Ramstetter. Und jetzt ist sie auch quasi amtlich
die Zahl, mit der der mittlerweile ausgeschiedene ADAC-Pressechef Ramstetter die tatsächlich abgegebenen Stimmen bei der ADAC-Wahl zum “Gelben Engel” aufgepimpt hat
Der Spiegel hat wohl etwas gerundet in seinem Artikel, Continue reading Der Ramstetter Faktor 10,0613083
What I would like to test
There are so many other inventions in disciplines that I know from hear-say only. When being asked what I would like test, I would point to the ZeHus Bike+ unit, a self contained rear wheel with regeneration during braking and constant movement and electric assistance during acceleration. Continue reading What I would like to test
Bikes vs Cars (first unsolicted advertisement at Science Surf)
Thinking out of the box
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.