Category Archives: science-y observation

The Limits of Crowdsourcing

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aka “no amount of hot air balloons can save a bad idea”

A few days ago on the forum, after a newly-registered poster inquired how to get ahold of TEPCO so he could give them his idea for fixing the leak, I suggested that it was a bit naive to think that a layperson is going to suggest a viable solution that had not already occurred to the people working the problem. I got some static for that position. No matter — here’s someone who agrees.

Guardian readers ‘fix’ the Fukushima power plant

[T]here’s this odd, growing trend in the world today, fed by endless news vox-pops and the general ‘X-Factorization’ of television, that somehow everyone’s opinions are valuable and worth listening to.

Bollocks.

Crowdsourcing can work, but you have to have expertise from which to draw. That’s the idea behind a discussion forum: you have enough people together and odds are good that someone (if not several people) will know the answer to a question. But it all rests on a subset of the crowd having a level of expertise. You aren’t asking a random person for the answer, you’re asking (ideally, anyway) someone who knows what they are talking about. In other words, it’s not guesswork.

Doctor Obvious Goes to a Frat Party

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Uncertain Principles: One in Three College Students Is Coasting. This Is News?

So, for all the splashy headlines, I really don’t see a lot here to be distressed about. A third of our students are coasting, but a third of our students have always been coasting, and will always be coasting. And if you think about it, around a third of all the people we interact with are probably coasting. That’s the way the world works, and academia is not exempt.

The Brain Stork

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Steven Johnson: ‘Eureka moments are very, very rare’

Good ideas happen in networks; in one rather brain-bending sense, you could even say that “good ideas are networks”. Or as Johnson also puts it: “Chance favours the connected mind.”

Another surprising truth about big ideas: even when they seem to be individual flashes of genius, they don’t happen in a flash – though the people who have them often subsequently claim that they did. Charles Darwin always said that the theory of natural selection occurred to him on 28 September 1838 while he was reading Thomas Malthus’s essay on population; suddenly, the mechanism of evolution seemed blindingly straightforward. (“How incredibly stupid not to think of that,” Darwin’s great supporter Thomas Huxley was supposed to have said on first hearing the news.) Yet Darwin’s own notebooks reveal that the theory was forming clearly in his mind more than a year beforehand: it wasn’t a flash of insight, but what Johnson calls a “slow hunch”. And on the morning after his alleged eureka moment, was Darwin feverishly contemplating the implications of his breakthrough? Nope: he busied himself with some largely unconnected ruminations on the sexual curiosity of primates.

I’m not sure if he’s drawing the distinction between “thinking about a problem” and “coming up with the solution;” I’ve certainly had this happen on the much smaller scale of problems on which I work. You can be thinking about something, and making efforts to come up with a solution, and have a flash of insight which comprises the bulk of the answer. But the point about networks is, I think, well taken — it is invaluable to be able to bounce ideas off of someone and get feedback. It saves time to hear the fatal flaw that you have not yet discovered.

The broader thesis of needing certain other ideas, techniques or technology to be present before a solution is possible is something I thought was fairly obvious. “Conventional wisdom” has a way of setting in and restricting thought processes, and sometimes the best thing one can do is to find a person who doesn’t know a problem can’t be solved, and let them have at it. Experimentally you need certain technologies to exist before a phenomena can be investigated. Or, put another way, scientists tends to work on the cutting edge, but that cutting edge is defined by what is already known.

Show and Tell

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Experiment vs. Theory: The Eternal Debate

Bottom line: we have lasers, with or without the sharks.

That’s something you can show off on a tour of the department and it’s guaranteed to make an impression on prospective students and parents.

From my perspective, it’s also something you can show off to admirals and generals and civilian upper-level cogs. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

The Greens of Summer

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flickr: Locals and Tourists

Using geotagging to determine what tourists photograph vs what the locals photograph.

Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).

Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).

Yellow points are pictures where it can’t be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven’t taken pictures anywhere for over a month). They are probably tourists but might just not post many pictures at all.

What's Love Got to Do With It?

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Mathematical model explains marital breakups

Rey developed an equation based on the “second thermodynamic law for sentimental interaction,” which states a relationship will disintegrate unless “energy” (effort) is fed into it.

Hmmm. I guess emotional baggage is now relationship entropy. I don’t think has changed the age-old problem that investigating the three-body problem tends to create a lot of relationship entropy.

The mathematical model also implies that when no effort is put in the relationship can easily deteriorate.

Ah, yes. This is based on the work of Dr. Obvious, no doubt.

Games People Play

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I don’t play, so I don’t know if the first rule about Farmville is Don’t Talk About Farmville!

Cultivated Play: Farmville

As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks. In other words, the more you play Farmville the less you have to play Farmville. For such a popular game, this seems suspicious.