You don’t often see the word ‘coulombs’ in the newspaper, let alone in the sports section. So when it does, people sit up and take notice.
In a National Hockey League game between the hosts the LA Kings and the visiting Columbus Blue Jackets with the score tied at 2-2, replays showed that the clock stopped [Read more…]
Scientists sometimes use god as a metaphor, Albert Einstein being one of the more notorious practitioners of this habit. This can cause religious people to think that the scientist believes in god and get all excited, since any scientist who is also religious is seen as evidence for [Read more…]
I came across a study that reports:
We surveyed an entire class of high-functioning young adults at an elite university for prospective major, familial incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders, and demographic and attitudinal questions. Students aspiring to technical majors (science/mathematics/engineering) were more likely than other students to report a sibling with an autism spectrum disorder (p=0.037). Conversely, students interested in the humanities were more likely to report a family member with major depressive disorder (p=8.8×10−4), bipolar disorder (p=0.027), or substance abuse problems (p=1.9×10−6).
Since my older daughter majored in engineering and the younger in humanities, that must mean that our family has a good chance of developing a fairly good set of neuropsychiatric disorders, no?
Observational or experimental data, if plotted on a graph, consist of a set of discrete points. There are potentially an infinite number of lines that can be drawn through those points. In some cases, the data itself suggests an overall rising or lowering trend but whether the relationship is a simple linear one or more complicated is not often easily discernible with the naked eye. We have to impose a curve based on prior expectations of [Read more…]
Look at this image and ask yourself which vertical red line would be longer if measured with a ruler on the photograph.
Phil Plait uses this image to give an explanation of the ‘moon illusion’, that refers to the phenomenon that a full moon that lies low on the horizon appears to be much larger than [Read more…]
We’ve all been in situations where the traffic is moving along smoothly and suddenly there is a backup for no apparent reason. Computer simulations suggest that this can be caused simply by one driver slightly braking, causing the driver behind to brake and [Read more…]
I have written before (here and here) about how babies, even before they speak, have an intuitive sense of justice and fairness, suggesting that [Read more…]
In the article titled Buddhism Without the Hocus-Pocus in the The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 13, 2012, page B4, unfortunately behind a subscription wall) by Owen Flanagan, a professor of philosophy at Duke University, that I wrote about yesterday, the author quotes the Dalai Lama as saying that if [Read more…]
Whales and dolphins playing together.
Suppose someone presents you with some data in the form of numbers in tables. These numbers may have been used as evidence to support some contention. Can you judge whether those numbers are authentic without actually repeating the entire study?
There have been cases in the past where people have reviewed other people’s data and found suspicious numeric patterns that would have been unlikely to occur naturally. One of the famous cases is that involving Cyril Burt’s studies of twins that purportedly showed that genetics played a far greater role in a person’s development than had been previously thought. In 1974, soon after Burt’s death in 1971, Leon Kamin analyzed Burt’s data and found that they were likely not correct because the statistical correlations he reported stayed stable up to the third decimal place, despite being obtained from different sample sizes. The odds of that happening naturally are extremely low. (Not in Our Genes by R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin (1984) p. 103.) [Read more…]