That’s no monkey…

My kids have a puzzle of “jungle creatures”.

I hate it1. I do not hate it because there is no jungle in the world in which these animals all live together2. Continue reading “That’s no monkey…”

KFPR 1865AM – The Finch & Pea Radio

The only problem with Marie-Claire‘s Song of the Week pick is that it is only once a week. One song a week? Isn’t this the 21st Century? Yes it is. But, the University of Alberta, insists that Marie-Claire spend large chunks of her time working for them.

So, we did the next best thing. We made a Pandora station, KFPR 1865AM – The Finch & Pea Radio, around the artists who created the music featured in our Song of the Week.

*If you live outside the United States, you may not be able to listen to the station. This is not our fault. We suspect that Cory Doctorow will be perfectly happy to tell you whose fault it is.

Not being an experimentalist is no excuse for not understanding experiments

Why are so many non-reproducible experiments so highly cited? Part of the problem may be a growing cultural change in biology: not everyone does experiments now. More and more, biologists are divided into experimentalists and computational biologists. (I hesitate to say theorists, because computational biologists don’t theorize about biology any more than experimental biologists.) The reason for this division is because, thanks to the growing availability of big data sets, it is possible to learn something new by analyzing already available data.

This is a positive development, but the risk is that we create a class of biologists who don’t understand the subtleties of the experiments that produced the data they work with. Continue reading “Not being an experimentalist is no excuse for not understanding experiments”

Cinde-Really 5: If the slipper fits…

We all know how Disney’s Cinderella ends. The Grand Duke visits every house in the kingdom looking for the girl the lost glass slipper fits. Cinderella is locked in the tower to prevent her from trying on the glass slipper1. Cinderella escapes the locked tower. Wicked Step Mother breaks the glass slipper to prevent her from trying on the glass slipper. Cinderella produces the other glass slipper. Slipper fits. Cinderella marries the prince.

Cinderella never actually tries on the glass slipper. She tries on a glass slipper, but she does not try on the glass slipper that was left at the ball.  Continue reading “Cinde-Really 5: If the slipper fits…”

Certifiably reproducible science… meh

A movement is afoot to create formal structures to reproduce experiments (Ars Technica):

Almost nobody goes back and repeats something that’s already been published, though.

But maybe they should. At least that’s the thinking behind a new effort called the Reproducibility Initiative, a project hosted by the Science Exchange and supported by Nature, PLoS, and the Rockefeller University Press.

John Timmer goes on to write about reasons why some people think this is a waste of time. I agree with all of these reasons. Continue reading “Certifiably reproducible science… meh”