I doubt we’re going to go through the same Sturm und Drang as we did with the iphone and “antennagate,” but I see that HTC’s newest phone has an antenna issue when you hold it a certain way.
HTC was one of the choir who had chastised Apple, saying that “The reception problems are certainly not common among smartphones,” and essentially saying Apple screwed up.
Bwahahahahaha!
Some ideas on communicating risks to the general public
Relative risk statements speak of risk increasing or decreasing by a percentage, for instance, that mammography in women over 40 reduces the risk of breast cancer by 25%. But all percentages erase the frequencies from which they were derived. We cannot tell from the relative risk reduction what is the absolute risk reduction: by how much does the risk of breast cancer actually decrease between those who get mammographies and those who do not: the answer is .1%
Relative risk information does not give information on how many people need to undergo a treatment before a certain benefit is obtained. In particular, based on the relative risk information, can one say how many women must be screened before a single life is saved? If your intuition tells you 4, you are again far off, as 1000 women must be screened to save the one life. In this way, relative risk information can cause people to misjudge the effectiveness of treatments
Best Space Pictures of 2010: Odd Aurora, Ring of Fire, More
Bonus: photos from the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2010 contest
Exclusive: TSA frisks groom children to cooperate with sex predators, abuse expert says
An expert in the fight against child sexual abuse is raising the alarm about a technique the TSA is reportedly using to get children to co-operate with airport pat-downs: calling it a “game”.
Oh … my … God
The Youcut Citizen Review of Government
We are launching an experiment – the first YouCut Citizen Review of a government agency. Together, we will identify wasteful spending that should be cut and begin to hold agencies accountable for how they are spending your money.
A really horrible idea: have lay people suggest research to cut by looking for “questionable” grants. Based on what? The scientific illiteracy possessed and cherished by a large fraction of the populace? Given the kind of ridicule that politicians themselves display toward science (in particular, anything remotely related to evolution or genetics), I would expect a parade of suggestions based solely on ideology, cutting anything related not only to evolution, but also global warming and any behavioral studies that want to look at conduct that doesn’t mirror that of the Cunninghams from Happy Days.
The site uses as an example “$750,000 to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players.” Of course, it turns out that it’s more than that. There is no reference to the grant (or grants), but someone has already tracked this down. The project was an effort to objectively measure individuals’ performance, and soccer was used in the preliminary work, but an application was for workers in a business setting. As far as I can tell, the soccer model was only part of the work funded by the grant. You can’t build a complex model from scratch, so you work your way up using a system that’s more easily investigated. This isn’t really all that subtle a notion, in the scheme of things scientific, but it’s lost here.
If these politicians can’t grasp that, there isn’t much hope that they would grasp the concept of funding a lot of basic research, because most of it ends up not panning out. It’s research. It means investigating the unknown, where there can be no guarantee of success. But as our representatives in government, it really is their job to know this. Pandering like this is just an example of abandoning their responsibilities. It’s sickening.
Butane from a lighting wand, dipped into bubble solution, making butane bubbles. When I drop a match in, they burn. In wonderful slo-mo. Note: dipping a lighting wand into soapy water tends to impede the flint’s ability to light the butane.
Why a piece of pizza is so tempting after a stressful day
A new animal study has found that exposure to stress post dieting can increase chances of binge eating.
Physics and Cake: The ‘observer with a hammer’ effect
[T]his robotic arm is so ridiculously precise that it can measure the diameter of eggs more accurately than any pair or vernier calipers, any laser-interferometer array or any other cool way of measuring eggs that has ever existed. The National Standards laboratories are intrigued.
However, there is a slight problem. Every time the robot tries to measure an egg, it breaks the darn thing. There is no way to get around this. The scientific breakthrough relating to the accuracy of the new machine comes from the fact that the robot squeezes the egg slightly. Try and change the way that the measurement is performed, and you just can’t get good results anymore. It seems that we just cannot avoid breaking the eggs. The interaction of the robot with the egg is ruining our experiment.
(This analogy is in the context of superposition, not the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle)
