Talk about climate change, and be sure that your analyses are rock solid, because you will get some serious backlash. What interests me most is the danger of “if the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, everything will look like a nail” thinking.
http://www.statisticsblog.com/2012/12/the-surprisingly-weak-case-for-global-warming/ is a blog post written by a graduate statistics student, with this summary:
“TL;DR (scientific version): Based solely on year-over-year changes in surface temperatures, the net increase since 1881 is fully explainable as a non-independent random walk with no trend.
Some time ago, I received this email from a grad student:“Do you know the blog zombies ideas in ecology?? I think this is the kind of ideas that could interest you. After reading all these chase papers I just find myself completely lost in the meaning and use of words such as stochastic, random and neutral…. This text kind of help me (it’s a critic of the use of these terms in community ecology) http://oikosjournal.
Thiago successfully defended his PhD in Brazil! Congratulations! You will be able to read all the innovative research he has done the last couple of years as they will become part of the vetted ecological literature, no doubt about that. But I think he learned more than “ecology” during these last years. Here is an excerpt from his acknowledgments:
“Tive muita sorte de conhecer o meu co-orientador Karl Cottenie. Para minha surpresa, um quadro branco e uma caneta preta - e não um programa de estatística - me mostraram como rabiscos podem gerar ideias e muito conhecimento.
Most of you readers probably followed the US elections with varying degrees of interest and passion, but as scientists are also aware of the “role” of Nate Silver and his blog FiveThirtyEight.com. Lots has been written about his success, which is “just” a nice example of the strengths of the scientific process, and thus not that surprising. What does surprise me, is the reluctance of journalists to come to terms with what he does.
“Seems to me that there’s not really a contradiction between System1 (intuition) and System 2 (rational) modes of knowing. Instead, one’s just faster than the other. Both are useful, both are necessary. But the great achievement of science has been to tell us that intuition always has to be checked. In essence, science is the overturning of intuition by slow, painful, careful System 2 reasoning.”from http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2011/11/intuition-and-counterintuition.html
It’s been a long time since I focused on this, but I found some nice illustrations for some of them. The illustrations in this post by Maria Popova reminded my of the 10 Commandments. I looked through the other posters on the original website Advice to Sink in Slowly, and actually found an illustration for every commandment:
1. reveal curiosity/passion
Andy J Miller2. tell a story
Mathew Isherwood
3. great dreamLee Basford
Since I started reading a lot of long-form articles on the internet, I have been exposed to a lot of great ideas, and great writing. The latest is an article by Steven Shapin in the London Review of Books, The Darwin Show. He synthesized 14 (fourteen!) books that appeared around the celebration of his 200th birthday in 2009. In it, he explores a lot of interesting themes, and one of the main ones revolves around why this is such a big deal.
Robin Sloan wrote abeautiful short story (The truth about the east wind), with a very interesting format. It looks at the tension between religion and science, from a Greek tragedy perspective (you should really read it).
“Zeus formed it into a girl and set her free to walk the earth. This was Athena. Pure curiosity. The spark made flesh. From the day she was formed, Athena was an omnivorous observer, a kind of super Galileo/Darwin long before either was born.
Ingrid and I had a discussion the other day about whether quantitative or qualitative data make a more lasting impression. As you might have guessed, I am more on the quantitative side, and Ingrid more on the qualitative side ;-) And me being me, I created a visual scenario about a result from Ingrid’s thesis (the importance of deep community in successful conservation) that was applied in 100 new conservation efforts (or replicate experiments, without controls, though).
It’s been a long time since I posted something about the “Cottenie Commandments”. Steve McCurry regular posts a series of his portraits, centered around a theme. One of these themes is “Lost in Thought” and pictures people hard at work by doing nothing.
CanadaOften, by juxtapositioning the caption with the picture, he also tells a very intriguing story, with only one word. Very powerful.