Performance poet and writer Hannah Chutzpah asked on Twitter:
What are the technical terms, in your field, for 'dunno'? In medicine there's 'ideopathic' [corrected the original, incorrect spelling] In archeology/anthropology there's 'ritual purposes' How do you professionally term 'we haven't got a clue'?
And the answers are a veritable riot!
As they say on Twitter, Thread.
And Fun.
From this story from the UK:
Survey results published by YouGov on 15 February found that only being an author or a librarian was more attractive than a life working in higher education. [So, that's Rank # 3 out of 31 professions.]
A little later in the same story:
According to the Cabinet Office’s career “happiness index”, published last year, “higher education teaching professionals” are the 61st most contented section of the UK workforce of 274 professional areas assessed.
The former ISRO chief has been banned (along with three of his colleagues) from holding any government position -- apparently as a punishment for a deal between an ISRO arm and Devas, a company headed by an ex-ISRO employee. The appearance of an incestuous relationship should have made ISRO extra-careful in pursuing that deal, but didn't.
The government's order is about administrative decisions (or, more likely, administrative lapses) by Nair and his colleagues. And, Nair himself has been fighting the order on administrative and procedural grounds -- that he has not had a chance to defend himself, as well as that he is still in the dark about what the specific allegations are! [However, this report suggests that he did get a chance to tell (at least a part of) his side of the story to two committees.]
Now, will Nair take his fight to a court of law? Will he continue his outbursts that appear to point to a serious internal power struggle within ISRO? Will he drag other bigwigs down with him? Or, will the government blink before he inflicts any more damage?
While waiting for this harrowing drama to play itself out, it's worth keeping in mind what is being questioned is the Nair's role as an administrator. If, as he claims, he is the target of a vile campaign to malign him, it's most definitely not because of what he did as a scientist!
Calling the latest government move an assault on ISRO scientists (or, more broadly, Indian scientists) is the kind of hyperbole that we can do well without.
It's interesting and all, but is it really the case that "Indians are beginning to laugh at ourselves"?
Apparently, you can buy this piece of 'music' for $0.99 at the iTunes store.
Samuel McNerney muses on the reasons why people might actually buy this stuff.
Ellen Laird in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Prime Suspect, Second Row Center. "[N]ow a suspected ax murderer was one of my students. What should I do?"
A French-Israeli academic sued a journal editor for libel and defamation when the latter published a negative review of her book. The French courts ruled against her. Now, for the first time, we have her side of the story.
A PhD thesis on snowboarding? [h/t: Chris Blattman]
This one is for LaTeX-nerds: LaTeX Coffee Stains -- the post is about a style file that adds a coffee stain to your documents. [h/t: Raghu's Buzz]
GRE revises its General Test. Again. The change takes effect this August.
The fiasco is what happened after NASA tried to hype a recent paper on bacteria that thrive on arsenic. The anatomy is the result of two excellent dissections. The first one is by Martin Robbins in The Guardian:
... [T]he science itself is the least interesting part of the affair. What's much more interesting is that the drama has given us an opportunity to see how a collection of related problems in different areas of science outreach can combine to seriously damage the credibility of a highly-respected scientific institution, and by extension science itself.
The affair .. is [essentially] ... a story of everything that's wrong about the relationship between science, peer review, the world of publishing, and the mainstream and independent branches of the media in 2010.
The second one is from Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science:
It was the big news that wasn’t. Hyperbolic claims about the possible discovery of alien life, or a second branch of life on Earth, turned out to be nothing more than bacteria that can thrive on arsenic, using it in place of phosphorus in their DNA and other molecules. But after the initial layers of hype were peeled away, even this extraordinary claim started falling under suspicious glances.
... This is a chronological roundup of the criticism against the science in the paper itself, ending with some personal reflections on my own handling of the story.
From the way the chapter in Superfreakonomics dealing with global warming is being fisked, Steven Levitt's reputation as an academic appears headed for a steep fall. Levitt has promised a detailed defence, so we'll wait to see how this one plays itself out. In the meantime, here are some links:
[Update: Extended excerpts from that chapter may be found here, while a low-quality pdf of that entire chapter is here. This post has lots more links.]
Paul Krugman: Superfreakonomics on Climate: Part 1, Weitzman in Context. From the second post:
Levitt now says that the chapter wasn’t meant to lend credibility to global warming denial — but when you open your chapter by giving major play to the false claim that scientists used to predict global cooling, you have in effect taken the denier side. The only way I can reconcile what Levitt says now with that reality is that he and Dubner didn’t do their homework — not only that they didn’t check out the global cooling stuff, the stuff about solar panels, and all the other errors people have been pointing out, but that they didn’t even look into the debate sufficiently to realize what company they were placing themselves in.
And that’s not acceptable. This is a serious issue. We’re not talking about the ethics of sumo wrestling here; we’re talking, quite possibly, about the fate of civilization. It’s not a place to play snarky, contrarian games.
Climate Progress: Error-riddled Superfreaknomics -- Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
William Connolley stops after finding the first 10 errors in the chapter.
Tim Lambert: Why everything in Superfreakonomics about global warming is wrong.
Matt Yglesias: Journalistic malpractice from Levitt and Dubner, Dubner digs the hole deeper.
Ezra Klein: The shoddy statistics of Superfreakonomics.
See also Felix Salmon who uses an example from the first book to suggest that "the Freakonomists have a history of misrepresenting environmental science."
... here's today's lesson:
Women who spray testosterone on their stomach to raise their sex drive may not see much benefit — unless they also want to grow hair on their belly.
Bonus: You really, really, cannot swallow your own tongue, even when you have a seizure.
