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Comment Public Lab (Score 1) 105

by ananyo (#56573186) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Do Citizen Science Platforms Exist?

Public Lab is probably the best known - https://publiclab.org/. Here's how they describe themselves: Public Lab is a community where you can learn how to investigate environmental concerns. Using inexpensive DIY techniques, we seek to change how people see the world in environmental, social, and political terms.
I wrote an article about the DIY science community last year that tells you a bit more about how they and other "community science" outfits got started. (If the site asks you to subscribe just clear your cache).

Submission + - Bad science persists because poor methods are rewarded (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: In 1962 psychologist Jacob Cohen analysed 70 articles published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and calculated their statistical power (a mathematical estimate of the probability that an experiment would detect a real effect). He reckoned most of the studies he looked at would actually have detected the effects their authors were looking for only about 20% of the time—yet, in fact, nearly all reported significant results. Scientists, Cohen surmised, were not reporting their unsuccessful research. Many papers must also actually be reporting false positives.
A new paper finds that little has changed in over 50 years. The average power of papers culled from 44 reviews published between 1960 and 2011 was about 24%. The authors build an evolutionary computer model to suggest why and show that poor methods that get "results" will inevitably prosper. They also show that replication efforts cannot stop the degradation of the scientific record as long as science continues to reward the volume of a researcher's publications--rather than their quality.

Submission + - China plans particle colliders that would dwarf CERN's LHC (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: For decades, Europe and the United States have led the way when it comes to high-energy particle colliders. But a proposal by China that is quietly gathering momentum has raised the possibility that the country could soon position itself at the forefront of particle physics.
Scientists at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing, working with international collaborators, are planning to build a ‘Higgs factory’ by 2028 — a 52-kilometre underground ring that would smash together electrons and positrons. Collisions of these fundamental particles would allow the Higgs boson to be studied with greater precision than at the much smaller Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.
Physicists say that the proposed US$3-billion machine is within technological grasp and is considered conservative in scope and cost. But China hopes that it would also be a stepping stone to a next-generation collider — a super proton–proton collider — in the same tunnel.
The machine would be a big leap for China. The country’s biggest current collider is just 240 metres in circumference.

Submission + - Crowd-funded team take control of old NASA satellite (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: A crowd-funded team led by Keith Cowing, the editor of NASA Watch, has taken control of a NASA satellite launched in August 1978. But this was no act of space piracy. Mr Cowing, Dennis Wingo of Skycorp and several other experts had received permission from NASA to take control of a satellite for which the space agency has no further purpose nor funding. With the help of nearly $160,000, raised through crowdfunding, the team hopes to start a new mission and release the raw data that emerge.

Submission + - Single gene can boost IQ by six points (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: People are living longer, which is good. But old age often brings a decline in mental faculties and many researchers are looking for ways to slow or halt such decline. One group doing so is led by Dena Dubal of the University of California, San Francisco, and Lennart Mucke of the Gladstone Institutes, also in San Francisco. Dr Dubal and Dr Mucke have been studying the role in ageing of klotho, a protein encoded by a gene called KL. A particular version of this gene, KL-VS, promotes longevity. One way it does so is by reducing age-related heart disease. Dr Dubal and Dr Mucke wondered if it might have similar powers over age-related cognitive decline.
What they found was startling. KL-VS did not curb decline, but it did boost cognitive faculties regardless of a person’s age by the equivalent of about six IQ points. If this result, just published in Cell Reports, is confirmed, KL-VS will be the most important genetic agent of non-pathological variation in intelligence yet discovered.

Comment Better comments... (Score 1) 59

by ananyo (#46887499) Attached to: 13th Century Multiverse Theory Unearthed

Over at 'the other place' the guy who did some of the computer modelling for the project has chipped in with some insights that are a bit more interesting than those (dare I say it) here (there, I did).
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
eg Here's a thread from there:

T-A 18 hours ago | link

So the Economist's point is that a "research" project exploring an idea about the universe which has been known to be incorrect for centuries somehow proves the value of the humanities? Really?

14113 15 hours ago | link

Yes. It provides a lot of information about the history of science. Most importantly, Grosseteste was one of the first to use what we now think of as the scientific method, and (I believe) the first to suggest a 'big bang like' start to the universe.

He's essential in the history of science for introducing aristotalean traditions and ideas, to the scientific discourse at the time, as well as being one of the early founders of science. For that reason at least he's well worth studying, and especially his ideas, which are very close to what we have now. What the science researchers are doing is helping the historians formalise his ideas in todays language and notations so that their similarities can be seen with todays ideas.

Source: I worked on this project over last summer as a computer science student visualising his explanation for the start of the universe.

Submission + - 13th century multiverse unearthed (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Robert Grosseteste, an English scholar who lived from about 1175 to 1253, was the first thinker in northern Europe to try to develop unified physical laws to explain the origin and form of the geocentric medieval universe of heavens and Earth.
Tom McLeish, professor of physics and pro-vice-chancellor for research at Britain’s Durham University, and a multinational team of researchers found that Grosseteste’s physical laws were so rigorously defined that they could be re-expressed using modern mathematical and computing techniques—as the medieval scholar might have done if he had been able to use such methods. The thinking went that the translated equations could then be solved and the solutions explored.
The 'Ordered Universe Project' started six years ago and has now reported some of its findings. Only a small set of Grosseteste's parameters resulted in the “ordered” medieval universe he sought to explain, the researchers found; most resulted either in no spheres being created or a “disordered” cosmos of numerous spheres. Grosseteste, then, had created a medieval “multiverse”. De Luce suggests that the scholar realized his theories could result in universes with all manner of spheres, although he did not appear to realize the significance of this. A century later, philosophers Albert of Saxony and Nicole Oresme both considered the idea of multiple worlds and how they might exist simultaneously or in sequence.

Submission + - China will become the world's largest economy by the end of the year (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Until 1890 China was the world’s largest economy, before America surpassed it. By the end of 2014 China is on track to reclaim its crown. Comparing economic output is tricky: exchange rates get in the way. Simply converting GDP from renminbi to dollars at market rates may not reflect the true cost of living. Bread and beer may be cheaper in one country than another, for example. To account for these differences, economists make adjustments based on a comparable basket of goods and services across the globe, so-called purchasing-power parity (PPP). New data released on April 30th from the International Comparison Programme, a part of the UN, calculated the cost of living in 199 countries in 2011. On this basis, China’s PPP exchange rate is now higher than economists had previously estimated using data from the previous survey in 2005: a whopping 20% higher. So China, which had been forecast to overtake America in 2019 by the IMF, will be crowned the world's pre-eminent country by the end of this year. The American Century ends, and the Pacific Century begins.

Submission + - Rich now work longer hours than the poor (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Overall working hours have fallen over the past century. But the rich have begun to work longer hours than the poor. In 1965 men with a college degree, who tend to be richer, had a bit more leisure time than men who had only completed high school. But by 2005 the college-educated had eight hours less of it a week than the high-school grads. Figures from the American Time Use Survey, released last year, show that Americans with a bachelor’s degree or above work two hours more each day than those without a high-school diploma. Other research shows that the share of college-educated American men regularly working more than 50 hours a week rose from 24% in 1979 to 28% in 2006, but fell for high-school dropouts. The rich, it seems, are no longer the class of leisure.
The reasons are complex but include rising income inequality but also the availability of more intellectually stimulating, well-remunerated work.

Submission + - Astronomers unveil the most Earth-like exoplanet yet (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: In a paper just published in Science, Elisa Quintada, an astronomer at NASA, and her colleagues, describe the detection of a particularly special exoplanet. Kepler 186f appears to be the closest relative to Earth yet discovered. Located about 500 light-years away, in the direction of the constellation Cygnus, Kepler-186f has a radius between 0.97 and 1.25 that of Earth. And it orbits its parent star firmly inside the "habitable zone", in which temperatures are just right for liquid water.

Submission + - Paper microscope magnifies objects 2100 times and costs less than $1 (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: If ever a technology were ripe for disruption, it is the microscope. Microscopes are expensive and need to be serviced and maintained. Unfortunately, one important use of them is in poor-world laboratories and clinics, for identifying pathogens, and such places often have small budgets and lack suitably trained technicians.
Now Manu Prakash, a bioengineer at Stanford University, has designed a microscope made almost entirely of paper, which is so cheap that the question of servicing it goes out of the window. Individual Foldscopes are printed on A4 sheets of paper (ideally polymer-coated for durability). A pattern of perforations on the sheet marks out the ’scope’s components, which are colour-coded in a way intended to assist the user in the task of assembly.
The Foldscope’s non-paper components, a poppy-seed-sized spherical lens made of borosilicate or corundum, a light-emitting diode (LED), a watch battery, a switch and some copper tape to complete the electrical circuit, are pressed into or bonded onto the paper. (The lenses are actually bits of abrasive grit intended to roll around in tumblers that smooth-off metal parts.) A high-resolution version of this costs less than a dollar, and offers a magnification of up to 2,100 times and a resolving power of less than a micron. A lower-spec version (up to 400x magnification) costs less than 60 cents.

Submission + - UN report reveals odds of being murdered country-by-country (economist.com) 4

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: A new UN report (link to data) details comprehensive country-by-country murder rates. Safest is Singapore, with just one killing per 480,000 people in 2012. In the world’s most violent country, Honduras, a man has a 1 in 9 chance of being murdered during his lifetime. The Economist includes an intriguing 'print only interactive' (see the PDF) and has some tongue-in-cheek tips on how to avoid being slain:
>First, don’t live in the Americas or Africa, where murder rates (one in 6,100 and one in 8,000 respectively) are more than four times as high as the rest of the world.
Next, be a woman. Your chance of being murdered will be barely a quarter what it would be were you a man. In fact, steer clear of men altogether: nearly half of all female murder-victims are killed by their partner or another (usually male) family member. But note that the gender imbalance is less pronounced in the rich world, probably because there is less banditry, a mainly male pursuit. In Japan and South Korea slightly over half of all murder victims are female.
Then, sit back and grow older. From the age of 30 onwards, murder rates fall steadily in most places.

Submission + - Organ regenerated inside a living animal for the first time (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Scientists at Edinburgh University have successfully persuaded an organ to regenerate inside an animal. As they report in the journal Development, they have treated, in mice, an organ called the thymus, which is a part of the immune system that runs down in old age. Instead of adding stem cells they have stimulated their animals’ thymuses to make more of a protein called FOXN1. This is a transcription factor (a molecular switch that activates genes).
The scientists knew from earlier experiments that FOXN1 is important for the embryonic development of the thymus, and speculated that it might also rejuvenate the organ in older animals. They bred a special strain of mice whose FOXN1 production could be stimulated specifically in the thymus by tamoxifen, a drug more familiar as a treatment for breast cancer.
In one-year-olds, stimulating FOXN1 production in the thymus caused it to become 2.7 times bigger within a month. In two-year-olds the increase was 2.6 times. Moreover, when the researchers studied the enlarged thymuses microscopically, and compared them with those from untreated control animals of the same ages, they found that the organs’ internal structures had reverted to their youthful nature.

Submission + - 1930s immigrants to US who Americanized their names got income boost (economist.com) 1

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Economists—most famously the Freakonomics duo, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner—have long worried that having the “wrong” name could set you back in the labour market. A number of studies show that having an “ethnic-sounding” name tends to disadvantage job applicants (though others suggest that names matter little).
Waves of migrants to America did not need economists to tell them that their name could be a disadvantage. Many changed their names to fit in. Almost a third of naturalising immigrants abandoned their first names by 1930 and acquired popular American names such as William, John or Charles. What was the impact? The authors draw on a sample of 3,400 male migrants who naturalised in New York in 1930.
The authors found that changing from a purely foreign name to a very common American name was associated with a 14% hike in earnings.

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