Archive for August, 2017
The Etiquette of Wearing a Hat – International Business Protocol and Social Etiquette
August 13, 2017The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe
August 12, 2017Loyal Engineers Steering…#Voyager Probes Across the Universe
https://www.NYTimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engineers-steering-nasas-voyager-probes-across-the-universe.html True dedication: they’ve spent whole careers on this
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“Their fluency in archaic programming languages will become only more crucial as the years go on, because even as the probes harvest priceless information from the cosmos, they are running out of fuel. (Decaying plutonium supplies their power.) By 2030 at the latest, they will not have enough juice left to run a single experiment. And even that best case comes with a major caveat: that the flight-team members forgo retirement to squeeze the most out of every last watt.
One of the greatest obstacles to planetary science has always been the human life span: Typically, for instance, a direct flight to Neptune would take about 30 years. But in the spring of 1965, Gary Flandro, a doctoral student at Caltech, noticed that all four outer planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — would align on the same side of the sun in the 1980s. If a spacecraft were launched in the mid- to late 1970s, it could use the gravity of the first body to slingshot to the second, and so on. Such a trajectory would add enough speed to shorten the total journey by almost two-thirds. What’s more, this orbital configuration would not appear again for 175 years.” “}}
Sampling DNA from a 1,000-Year-Old Illuminated Manuscript
August 11, 2017Follow the Money: Funding Research in a Large Academic Health Center: Henry R. Bourne, Eric B. Vermillion: 9780996324212: Amazon.com: Books
August 11, 2017Follow the Money: Funding Research in a Large Academic Health Center: Henry R. Bourne, Eric B. Vermillion: 9780996324212: Amazon.com: Books
https://www.amazon.com/Follow-Money-Funding-Research-Academic/dp/0996324216
3D printers start to build factories of the future
August 11, 20173D printing transforms the economics of manufacturing
August 11, 2017Scientists Hack a Computer Using DNA – MIT Technology Review
August 11, 2017Digital Health: Tracking Physiomes and Activity Using Wearable Biosensors Reveals Useful Health-Related Information
August 8, 2017http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2001402
#mHealth: Tracking Physiomes & Activity w/ Wearable Biosensors, by @SnyderShot et al http://journals.PLoS.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2001402 >250K/day data pts on 43 people
Big names in statistics want to shake up much-maligned P value
August 8, 2017Big names in #statistics want to shake up…#Pvalue
http://www.Nature.com/news/big-names-in-statistics-want-to-shake-up-much-maligned-p-value-1.22375 Stronger significance cutoffs (.005?) but danger of FNs
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“Lowering P-value thresholds may also exacerbate the “file-drawer problem”, in which studies with negative results are left unpublished, says Tom Johnstone, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Reading, UK. But Benjamin says all research should be published, regardless of P value.
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Other scientific fields have already cracked down on P values — and in 2015, one psychology journal banned them. Particle physicists, who collect reams of data from atom-smashing experiments, have long demanded a P value below 0.0000003 (or 3 × 10−7) because of concerns that a lower threshold could lead to mistaken claims, notes Valen Johnson, a statistician at Texas A&M University in College Station and a co-lead author of the paper. More than a decade ago, geneticists took similar steps to establish a threshold of 5 × 10−8 for
genome-wide association studies, which look for differences between people with a disease and those without across hundreds of thousands of DNA-letter variants.”
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Climate change linked to more pollen, allergies, asthma
August 8, 2017#Climatechange linked to…allergies, #asthma
http://www.USAToday.com/story/news/nation/2013/05/30/climate-change-allergies-asthma/2163893/ Pollen up from a longer season; monitoring done w/o pay by volunteers
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“All of these things are likely affecting us,” says the CDC’s Akinbami, but it’s unclear which factors — chemicals, hygiene, pollen — have the most impact or what their relationship is to each other. She says the first two sensitize people and the third triggers their sensitivity.
On the pollen front alone, there are large gaps in the data, says the CDC’s Luber, noting pollen counts are not done on weekends and don’t cover every state. There’s not a single pollen-counting station in Alaska, Hawaii or 16 other U.S. states.
In fact, the 76 U.S. stations (plus one in Puerto Rico) are run by volunteers trained and certified by the National Allergy Bureau, part of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (AAAAI), a private organization that promotes research and treatment.
“There’s no federal funding,” says Linda Ford, an allergist who volunteers to do the count for the Omaha area as a way to help her patients. “There is no automated service for this,” she says, adding it can take as long as two or three hours.”
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