Category: Items of Interest

The law of supply and demand applied to NIH funding

Demand for funding has increased, but something tells me that the supply is not going to adjust. From the AAAS this week:

NIH Blog Highlights Increases in Research Grant Applications. On her blog Rock Talk, NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research Sally Rockey posted data on NIH grant applications over the past decade-plus—specifically, competing applications for investigator-initiated research project grants (meaning they were not submitted in response to a specific request for applications). Total direct costs requested in such applications went from $4.4 billion in FY 1998 to $13 billion in FY 2011. The amount of money awarded in that pool doubled, from $1 billion to $2 billion. Put another way, in FY 1998 the demand for research dollars was 3.6 times the supply. By FY 2011, demand was 6.5 times the supply. The largest factor in this change is a rise in the number of applicants — from 19,000 to 32,000.

The solution – reduce demand by attrition, as people realize this career path is insane.

“Science writing in the Age of Denial”

I don’t know how I missed news of this April event at the University of Wisconsin, but no matter – video is online:

Science writers now work in an age where uncomfortable ideas and truths meet organized resistance. Opposing scientific consensus on such things as anthropogenic climate change, the theory of evolution, and even the astonishingly obvious benefits of vaccination has become politically de rigueur, a litmus test and a genuine threat to science. How does denial affect the craft of the science writer? How can science writers effectively explain disputed science? What’s the big picture? Are denialists ever right?

Happy Phi Day!

As you may not be aware, we have declared today, 14 August, to be Phi Day. Here at The Finch & Pea we don’t go in for the superficial assignment of such days to the date that looks like the estimated value of important numbers in your particular dating system (eg, putting Pi Day on 14 March).

Phi is also known as the Golden Ratio. While it can be expressed as the number 1.618…, Phi is an irrational number, which means that the decimal portion goes on infinitely without repeating. So, any simple numerical expression is just an estimate and does not represent the true meaning of the number.

Phi represents a particular ratio of segments. If we take the regular pentagram (composed of lines of equal length) on the right. The ratios of red:green, green:blue, and blue:pink are all equal to Phi.

If we imagine that the year is a line that is 365.25 days long, we can divide it into two segments whose ratio to each other is Phi. Dividing at Day 226 gives us the ratio 226/139.25 = 1.623*.

The 226th day of a regular calendar year is 14 August*. Happy Phi Day!

*Ideally, we’d go for Day 225.75, which is 6PM on 14 August, but then we’d have to decide on a time zone.

**In a regular year, 226/139 = 1.625. In a leap year, 14 August is Day 227, which gives us 227/139 = 1.633. 13 August is a bit better in a leap year (226/140 = 1.614); but I think there is something to be said for a consistent day on the calendar.

Fixing football at The Paltry Sapien

After a hiatus to move my family back across the Atlantic, I’ve got a new post up at The Paltry Sapien in which I lay out my proposal for fixing American football.

Prior to the NFL draft, pre-season training camp, and a player’s return after a concussion, NFL doctors will determine the medical eligibility of a player. Essentially, this has the NFL set the list of players that are available for teams to employ. The NFL has an economic incentive to declare players at risk of long-term issues from repetitive injuries (especially concussions) ineligible.

Read the rest at The Paltry Sapien.

Love art? Love science? Read The Age of Insight

Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel’s book about “The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present” will keep you busy. It’s stuffed with history of Viennese Expressionism (Klimt, Kokoschka, and my new favorite, Schiele), Freud (what he got right and what he didn’t), cognitive psychology, and a fascinating discussion about how our minds, particularly our unconscious minds, respond to art.

There are a lot of neuroscience details, but the big point of the book is that Freud was right – most of our cognitive processes are unconscious. A key aspect of creativity is to facilitate the exchange between the unconscious and the conscious, and good artists take aesthetic moves that play on the unconscious responses of beholders, and to increase our awareness of the unconscious that operates in us. Kandel gives a neuroscientific justification of James Watson’s famous claim that “it’s necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.”

Particularly fun was the discussion of why Klimt and the Expressionists pursued particular stylistic directions. Klimt was directly influences by his contact with scientists, and many of the symbols in his paintings are inspired by microscope images of cells.