Great analysis about the usage of figures in politics: http://flowingdata.com/2011/12/12/fox-news-still-makes-awesome-charts/
What’s wrong with this figure?
See the original post for the answer.
One of the items in the grading rubric Marianne Staempfli and I developed for concept maps is the importance of cross links in the arrangement of the concept map:
“Cross links show complex relationships between two or more distinct segments of the concept map”It is one of the reasons why I am currently involved in a collaboration (among some others) on genome (or transposon) ecology by co-advising Brent Saylor with Ryan Gregory, and on anthropology in ecology by co-advising Ingrid Ng with Bob Jickling.
As I recently noticed, the majority of my posts here are unconsciously driven by the courses that I am preparing. The couple of posts on natural history and science are basically an illustration to my field course that I will be teaching next week (hopefully I will get some time to blog from the field). And in the fall, I will be teaching a grad stats course for the first time.
That is the finishing sentence from this article. The author tries to argue that theory and the scientific method is getting obsolete in this day and age, using Google as a role model:
But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. […] There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show.
I recently gave a brief project update to the gang. Here are the nuts and bolts of my undergrad thesis (I’ll try to stay brief): -Eelgrass meadows are important. They provide habitat for dozens of fish and invertebrate species, stabilize sediment, and cycle carbon and nutrients. Meadows are found in shallow coastal waters on the East and West coasts of North America. Seagrass meadows are globally threatened.
-The community dynamics of eelgrass meadows in temperate zones are largely not understood.
Intelligent persons have written wonderful books about creating good graphs. Today, I received two graphs in my Google Reader, and they make such powerful/funny statements that I had to show them, especially since they are visually so comparable.
In the funny category:
In the powerful category (click here for the original article with more powerful visuals):
It’s very unlikely that anything in my research career will produce anything that funny, or could influence the voting behaviour of a whole nation, but we can only try.
Since we seem to be on a roll on the what should come first in science, this Nature article actually presents a much better written and argued case in favour of combining the strengths of both approaches (maybe scientists should do what they are good at, science, and leave the writing to, journalists with a PhD?). Some of the costs for doing these genome studies: US$1 billion. How does that stack up to other funding, I have no idea, but this is a big number.