- Science Not as Self-Correcting As It Thinks (Economist) — REALLY good discussion of the shortcomings in statistical practice by scientists, peer-review failures, and the complexities of experimental procedure and fuzziness of what reproducibility might actually mean.
- Reproducibility Initiative Receives Grant to Validate Landmark Cancer Studies — The key experimental findings from each cancer study will be replicated by experts from the Science Exchange network according to best practices for replication established by the Center for Open Science through the Center’s Open Science Framework, and the impact of the replications will be tracked on Mendeley’s research analytics platform. All of the ultimate publications and data will be freely available online, providing the first publicly available complete dataset of replicated biomedical research and representing a major advancement in the study of reproducibility of research.
- $20 SDR Police Scanner — using software-defined radio to listen to the police band.
- Reimagine the Chemistry Set — $50k prize in contest to design a “chemistry set” type kit that will engage kids as young as 8 and inspire people who are 88. We’re looking for ideas that encourage kids to explore, create, build and question. We’re looking for ideas that honor kids’ curiosity about how things work. Backed by the Moore Foundation and Society for Science and the Public.
"science" entries
Four short links: 18 October 2013
Publishing Bad Research, Reproducing Research, DIY Police Scanner, and Inventing the Future
Four short links: 16 October 2013
New Math, Business Math, Summarising Text, Clipping Images
- Scientific Data Has Become So Complex, We Have to Invent New Math to Deal With It (Jennifer Ouellette) — Yale University mathematician Ronald Coifman says that what is really needed is the big data equivalent of a Newtonian revolution, on par with the 17th century invention of calculus, which he believes is already underway.
- Is Google Jumping the Shark? (Seth Godin) — Public companies almost inevitably seek to grow profits faster than expected, which means beyond the organic growth that comes from doing what made them great in the first place. In order to gain that profit, it’s typical to hire people and reward them for measuring and increasing profits, even at the expense of what the company originally set out to do. Eloquent redux.
- textteaser — open source text summarisation algorithm.
- Clipping Magic — Instantly create masks, cutouts, and clipping paths online.
Four short links: 11 October 2013
DNA Coding, Quartz2D Shell, Hardware Sadness, and Manycore OS
- Programming Synthetic DNA (Science Daily) — eventually enabling the reification of bugs.
- Schwartz — a shell for Quartz 2D with Python.
- The Slow Winter — best writing about the failure of Moore’s Law and the misery of being in hardware. Ever.
- Akaros — an open source, GPL-licensed operating system for manycore architectures. Our goal is to provide support for parallel and high-performance applications and to scale to a large number of cores.
Four short links: 4 October 2013
Neuromancer Game, Ray Ozzie, Sentiment Analysis, and Open Science Prizes
- Case and Molly, a Game Inspired by Neuromancer (Greg Borenstein) — On reading Neuromancer today, this dynamic feels all too familiar. We constantly navigate the tension between the physical and the digital in a state of continuous partial attention. We try to walk down the street while sending text messages or looking up GPS directions. We mix focused work with a stream of instant message and social media conversations. We dive into the sudden and remote intimacy of seeing a family member’s face appear on FaceTime or Google Hangout. “Case and Molly” uses the mechanics and aesthetics of Neuromancer’s account of cyberspace/meatspace coordination to explore this dynamic.
- Rethinking Ray Ozzie — an inescapable conclusion: Ray Ozzie was right. And Microsoft’s senior leadership did not listen, certainly not at the time, and perhaps not until it was too late. Hear, hear!
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Recursive Deep Models for Semantic Compositionality
Over a Sentiment Treebank (PDF) — apparently it nails sentiment analysis, and will be “open sourced”. At least, according to this GigaOm piece, which also explains how it works. - PLoS ASAP Award Finalists Announced — with pointers to interviews with the finalists, doing open access good work like disambiguating species names and doing open source drug discovery.
Four short links: 23 September 2013
Web Collaboration, Science Perversion, Decompiling Tamagotchi, and Science Fabrication
- Together.js — Mozilla-produced library for in-page collaboration.
- This Complex and Tragic Event Supports My Own View (Vaughan Bell) — pretty much every tactic he describes, you will see deployed daily.
- Natalie Silvanovich — a security engineer who has extracted and decompiled the code (running on a 6502!) in the heart of a Tamagotchi, and documenting it. Formidable!
- Science Fiction to Science Fabrication — MIT course: This class ties science fiction with speculative/critical design as a means to encourage the ethical and thoughtful design of new technologies. (via Beta Knowledge)
Four short links: 9 September 2013
Google Play Services, Self-Signed Kernels, Visualising Scientific Papers, and New Microcontroller
- How Google’s Defragging Android (Ars Technica) — Android’s becoming a pudgy microkernel for the Google Play Services layer that’s in userland, closed source, and a way to bypass carriers’ lag for upgrades.
- Booting a Self-Signed Linux Kernel (Greg Kroah-Hartman) — procedures for how to boot a self-signed Linux kernel on a platform so that you do not have to rely on any external signing authority.
- Paperscape — A map of scientific papers from the arXiv.
- Trinket — Adafruit’s latest microcontroller board. Small but perfectly formed.
Four short links: 8 August 2013
Distrusting CA Certs, Brain Talk, Ineffective Interventions, and Visual A/B Tools
- Reducing the Roots of Some Evil (Etsy) — Based on our first two months of data we have removed a number of unused CA certificates from some pilot systems to test the effects, and will run CAWatch for a full six months to build up a more comprehensive view of what CAs are in active use. Sign of how broken the CA system for SSL is. (via Alex Dong)
- Mind the Brain — PLOS podcast interviews Sci Foo alum and delicious neuroscience brain of awesome, Vaughan Bell. (via Fabiana Kubke)
- How Often are Ineffective Interventions Still Used in Practice? (PLOSone) — tl;dr: 8% of the time. Imagine the number if you asked how often ineffective software development practices are still used.
- Announcing Evan’s Awesome A/B Tools — I am calling these tools awesome because they are intuitive, visual, and easy-to-use. Unlike other online statistical calculators you’ve probably seen, they’ll help you understand what’s going on “under the hood” of common statistical tests, and by providing ample visual context, they make it easy for you to explain p-values and confidence intervals to your boss. (And they’re free!)
Four short links: 25 July 2013
Git Secrets, Ab Initio Keyboard, Continuous Deployment, and 3D Atomic Models
- More Git and GitHub Secrets (Zach Holman) — wizards tricks. (via Rowan Crawford)
- Building a Keyboard from Scratch (Jesse Vincent) — for the connoisseur.
- Practicing Deployment (Laura Thomson) — you should build the capability for continuous deployment, even if you never intend to continuously deploy.
- 3D Printed Atoms (Thingiverse) — customize and 3d-print a Bohr model of any atom.
Four short links: 10 July 2013
Technical Bitcoin, Tracking News Flow, Science Advice, and Gov Web Sites
- 6 Technical Things I Learned About Bitcoin (Rusty Russell) — Anonymity is hard, but I was surprised to see blockchain.info’s page about my donation to Unfilter correctly geolocated to my home town! Perhaps it’s a fluke, but I was taken aback by how clear it was. Interesting collection of technical observations about the workings of Bitcoin.
- NIFTY: News Information Flow Tracking, Yay! — watch how news stories mutate and change over time. (via Stijn Debrouwere
- EO Wilson’s Advice for Future Scientists (NPR) — the ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper. (via Courtney Johnston)
- Healthcare.gov New Web Model for Government (The Atlantic) — The new site has been built in public for months, iteratively created on Github using cutting edge open-source technologies. Healthcare.gov is the rarest of birds: a next-generation website that also happens to be a .gov.
Podcast: what makes a scientist?
How scientists become scientists, whether science is still advancing at Newton's pace, and the future of neuroscience and bioengineering.
At Sci Foo Camp last weekend, we enjoyed sitting down with several thoughtful scientists and thinkers-about-science to record a few podcast episodes. Here we speak with Tom Daniel, a professor of biology, computer science, and neurobiology at the University of Washington, and Ben Lillie, co-founder of The Story Collider and a Stanford-trained physicist. First topic: what brings people to science, and how we compare to our icons. Along the way, we mention Hans Bethe, Isaac Newton’s epitaph, and John McPhee’s trip across Interstate 80.
We’ll post the rest of the series over the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can find more episodes of our podcast and subscribe on iTunes or SoundCloud.