It is a fact that the best climbs are performed by famous mountaineers before they became famous (Doug Scott in “Mountain” according to an inscription at Firmian/Messner Mountain Museum). Continue reading The best climbs
Category Archives: Joke
Reading this blog will improve your academic skills
Aren’t hat good news being published by Science this week?
Process-specific training can improve performance on untrained tasks, but the magnitude of gain is variable and often there is no transfer at all. We demonstrate transfer to a 3-back test of working memory after 5 weeks of training in updating. The transfer effect was based on a joint training-related activity increase for the criterion (letter memory) and transfer tasks in a striatal region that also was recruited pretraining.
Continue reading Reading this blog will improve your academic skills
Hierarchical bounding boxes
Feed this paper at this site to get the following result
An anthology of thinkers
There are already several anthologies of thinkers. Miyaki finds the following 10 groups Continue reading An anthology of thinkers
Enough for today, some more relevant now
German Science blogging
The German blogosphere is now being mapped but with a few exceptions German science blogging doesn’ play a major role (in contrast to knitting that shows a large cluster Continue reading German Science blogging
Placebo for placebo
or “Do placebo responders exist?” is a remarkable new review by researcher from the Harvard Medical School. I always wondered about the sheer size of the placebo effect (and its perception as nuisance parameter). The authors simply ask the question
… this paper also examines the evidence for the existence of a consistent placebo responder, i.e. a person who responds to placebo in one situation will respond in another condition or using a different type of placebo ritual….
Suggestibility is a human trait, yea, yea.
DNA for DNA
It might be fun to read here on a genetics board about DNA (Direct Note Access) which is a technology implemented in Melodyne that can extract notes from polyphonic music.
So far, it does not use a library of musical instruments according Peter Neubäcker, head of development, in an interview published in c’t 8/2008, p 34. It separates “musical content” defined by periodicity, similar overtones and meaningful musical distance like halftones. Although that’s something bioinformatics is trying for some while for DNA (desoxyribonucleic acid), I wonder if the decomposition concept in DNA would works also for DNA, yea, yea.
Ivan Hajek – there is no better accordion player
This morning when leaving the Munich underground, I could hear Ivan – the best accordion player in the world. There are numerous videos at YouTube, so listen if you like Continue reading Ivan Hajek – there is no better accordion player
Our lives are unrepeatable experiments lacking a control
a prosaic quotation from the recent Nature correspondence section that highlights why genetics has been leading us into nowhere.
Our lives are unrepeatble experiments lacking a control. Myriad external factors interact with genetic and epigenetic factors and with chance to determine whether we are well or ill, smart or dull, successes or failures.
Yea, yea.
Fail!
The non-scientific world doesn’t have any problem to show failure. Have a look at
failblog.wordpress.com
www.doingitwrong.com
www.shipmentoffail.com
Why is failure of science Continue reading Fail!
If pigs could fly
is a book that I am currently reading. There is also a brief German/English account how this sentence came into life. What did you expect when reading the title??
Something like “winners don’t punish”? A smart letter in this week’s Nature with the 3 options of Cooperation(C) – Defection (D) and Punishment (P)?
"nice people" player 1: C C C C player 2: C C C C top payoff! "punish and perish" player 1: C P P P P player 2: C D D D D extremely bad! "turning the other cheek" player 1: C C C C C player 2: D D C C C payoff still positive!
we should have known this earlier…
Addendum
link to an earlier post here on “tit for tat”
link to “vengeance is ours” at Edge
link to “sermon on the mount”
link to “Prisoner’s dilemma“
Central limit theorem
The central limit theorem states that a sum of independent identically distributed random variables (lets say allele counts in genomewide association scans) of finite variance will be approximately normally distributed. Unfortunately the maximum of the distribution will not reflect the true value … or did I get it wrong?
I am number eight
The trouble with coauthors, a wonder poem
I am not sure exactly
how I came to be where I am,
number eight among eleven authors…
The full text is at the link above, yea, yea.
Why blog writing is something different from writing a paper
This may be obvious, at least if you have read Daniel Gilbert
In 2002, Jane Ebert and I discovered that people are generally happier with decisions when they can’t undo them. When subjects in our experiments were able to undo their decisions they tended to consider both the positive and negative features of the decisions they had made, but when they couldn’t undo their decisions they tended to concentrate on the good features and ignore the bad.
When reading my own writings a second time, I always discover typing errors, crude sentences, and other poor habits – blogs as snapshots of less happier minds?