Category Archives: Science - Page 3

I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses…

I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.

Johannes Kepler

#quote  

How Newegg crushed the “shopping cart” patent and saved online retail

Now this is the kind of legal officer I'd like to have on my side.

For Newegg's chief legal officer Lee Cheng, it's a huge validation of the strategy the company decided to pursue back in 2007: not to settle with patent trolls. Ever.

"We basically took a look at this situation and said, this is bullshit," said Cheng in an interview with Ars. "We saw that if we paid off this patent holder, we'd have to pay off every patent holder this same amount. This is the first case we took all the way to trial. And now, nobody has to pay Soverain jack squat for these patents."

It’s game over for a patent troll that sued nearly 50 big retailers.

Dung Beetles Navigate By The Stars

Celestial navigation has guided man around the world for several thousand years. A new study suggests it could also be guiding dung beetles.

Looks like crap to me.

Celestial navigation has guided man around the world for several thousand years. A new study suggests it could also be guiding dung beetles. Marie

About a minute in to this video taken from the lunar rover you kind of get a first person view of what…

About a minute in to this video taken from the lunar rover you kind of get a first person view of what it's like to drive around on the moon.

The weird thing to me is that because the moon is so much smaller than the earth it almost feels like you're going to drive off the edge of the moon!

H/T to Robert Krulwich for pointing this out.

10 Interesting Facts About the Placebo Effect

  1. Given a sugar pill (which has no physical effect) people with certain conditions not only report feeling better, but see actual improvements in their condition.
  2. Called the dose-response placebo effect, given two sugar pills, people report twice the benefit of one sugar pill (Demonstration to medical students of placebo responses and non-drug factors, Blackwell, 1972).  Interestingly, the Blackwell study also showed that pink placebo pills worked better as a stimulant and blue placebo pills worked better as a relaxant. There have been multiple other studies demonstrating this effect. See also Shapiro (1970) and the work by Moerman where he looked at clinical trials with ulcer treatments.
  3. If someone believes a placebo has a negative effect, they can experience that negative effect.  This is called a nocebo. (Magne Flaten, Terje Simonsen, and Harald Olsen, “Drug-Related Information Generates Placebo and Nocebo Responses That Modify the Drug Response,” Psychososomatic Medicine, 61, no. 2 (1999): 250-255)
  4. If a sugar pill is described as a muscle relaxant it will cause muscle relaxation.  If the same type of sugar pill is described as causing muscle tension, it will produce muscle tension.(Placebo-induced side effects. Shapiro, Arthur K.; Chassan, Jacob; Morris, Louis A.; Frick, Robert, Journal of Operational Psychiatry, Vol 6(1), 1974, 43-46)
  5. Placebos can produce the same side-effects that the real drug the person thinks they’re taking would also produce. (Asbjørn Hróbjartsson, and Peter C. Gøtzsche, “Is the Placebo Powerless? — An Analysis of Clinical Trials Comparing Placebo with No Treatment,” The New England Journal of Medicine, 344 (2001): 1594-1602, 10.1056/NEJM200105243442106)
  6. When conducting a study, it is an error to assume that your treatment produced the improvement and everyone seeing improvement under the placebo are “only” experiencing placebo effects.  It could very well be that everyone who experience an improvement were experiencing a placebo effect. (Asbjørn Hróbjartsson, and Peter C. Gøtzsche, “Is the Placebo Powerless? — An Analysis of Clinical Trials Comparing Placebo with No Treatment,” The New England Journal of Medicine, 344 (2001): 1594-1602, 10.1056/NEJM200105243442106)
  7. Saltwater placebos administered via syringe are more effective than sugar pills. The original study is by Traut & Passarelli (1957). There’s been follow up studies since then, including “Do medical devices have enhanced placebo effects?” by Ted J Kaptchuk, Peter Goldman, David A Stone, William B Stason
  8. Pacemakers improve heart function after they’ve been put in, but before they’ve been switched on. (Placebo effect of pacemaker implantation in obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy Cecilia Linde, Fredrik Gadler, Lukas Kappenberger, Lars Rydén. The American journal of cardiology 15 March 1999 (volume 83 issue 6 Pages 903-907))
  9. Give people a sugar pill and tell them it’s a stimulant and they get stimulated.  Give people a relaxant but tell them it’s a stimulant and they get more even more stimulated.  Give people a relaxant, tell them it’s a relaxant and they have more molecules of the relaxant in their blood plasma than the people you gave a relaxant to but told them it was a stimulant. (Magne Flaten, Terje Simonsen, and Harald Olsen, “Drug-Related Information Generates Placebo and Nocebo Responses That Modify the Drug Response,” Psychososomatic Medicine, 61, no. 2 (1999))
  10. We’re still pretty confused about the placebo effect and it’s causes.  There’s a mishmash of different things going on and we’re still picking them apart. Also, it’s really hard to design studies!

Dolphin fight.

The male dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia, are known to marine biologists for their messy social entanglements. Their relationships with each other are so unusual — they’re more like the intricate webs of the Mafia than the vertical hierarchies of chimpanzees — that, in a new paper, one team of scientists argues that the dolphins live in a social system that is “unique among mammals.” Intriguingly, the researchers also suggest that these complex, and often cooperative, relationships may stem in part from one simple, unexpected factor: the dolphins’ low cruising speed.

Interesting stuff.

However, one part of this article got me thinking about a tangential subject.  Dolphin’s rights.  Every so often I’ll hear about people calling for giving dolphins rights like humans give each other.  I guess this is because of the dolphin’s intelligence.

At first glance, dolphins seem to have a somewhat similar social system. Two or three adult males form a tight alliance and cooperate to herd a female for mating. (Female dolphins rarely form strong alliances.) Other male teams may try to spirit away the female—particularly if she is in estrus. To fight back, the first-level alliances form partnerships with other first-level alliances, thus creating a larger second-level alliance. Some of these second-level alliances have as many as 14 dolphins and can last 15 years or more. On some occasions, the second-level alliance can call in the troops from yet another group, “a third-order alliance,” as the researchers call them—leading to huge battles with more than 20 dolphins biting and bashing each other with their heads and tails over the right to keep or steal a single female.

Dolphins can be jerks.

I’m not any sort of expert about dolphins, but a surface reading of this makes this sound like a brutal sort of arrangement that wouldn’t be tolerated in civilized human society.

If we grant dolphins the same sort of rights we grant humans, are we obligated to try and police their behavior and protect those dolphins that are less fortunate than others?

Science with a capital S is better than you.

So, yesterday I shared this post on Google+:

This boulder on the moon was set a-rollin’ by whatever process. The interesting thing to me is that you can see some craters overlapping the track it created as it rolled.

From this, scientists estimate this track was created 50-100 million years ago.

Notice the impact craters overlapping the track created by the rolling boulder.

This got me to thinking about how they determined the age.  While I haven’t talked to the scientists who came up with this age figure, I imagine it went something like this:

  1. Have a model for frequency of asteroid impacts over time per unit of area of Moon surface.
  2. Determine area of tracks.
  3. Count impact craters overlapping tracks.
  4. Using impact frequency model determine how much time would have to pass before you would see the number of overlapping impact craters.

The interesting thing here is that, going by a layperson’s definition of “wrong”, the number you come up with in this scenario could be completely wrong.  I think a lot of reporting on science, and even the statements scientists make to the public, are “wrong” in the same manner.

You see, the 50-100 million year figure doesn’t make a lot of sense in isolation.  It should have probabilities assigned to it.  The real answer isn’t “50-100 million years”, it’s a, for example, (rough and dirty) graph like this:

Impact Probabilities

You see, it’s possible that the asteroid impacts all happened yesterday.  It’s unlikely, but it’s possible.

So anyway, this is usually acknowledged when actually doing Science-with-a-capital-S, it’s just that this is often lost when communicating with the public.  The thing I find interesting about this, is that, this view of things having probabilities attached to them is the way the word actually works and yet the general attitude people have doesn’t acknowledge this.

GTFO Naked Girl. I'm doing science!

Most people operate as if things either happened or not.  Of being real or not real.  Even things that you would say you’re 100% sure of…like the color of the sky…have a probability assigned to them.  You may be 100% sure, but that 100% is a measure of your over-confidence, not of reality.  For example, there’s a non-zero chance you may be living in a dream or hallucination.

What about your values, your religion, your politics?  Are your values self-consistent?  Is there a God?  Do your political leanings actually lead to the type of world you want?  There’s probabilities assigned to all of ’em, and that probability is a lot lower than the previous example about the color of the sky.

The Sun!

Click each image to enlargenate it.

sm_solarnirvana

Taken by Alan Friedman in the wavelength of hydrogen alpha light.

174735main_LEFTFullDisk

Taken by NASA’s STEREO satellites.  False color image taken in the 1 million degree C range.

174719main_LEFTREDSouthPole304

Another STEREO image.  False color in the 60,000-80,000 C range.

174606main_Image-4A-RIGHT

STEREO image.  False color in 2.5 million degree range.

174602main_FullDisk3D

STEREO image in 3D!  Need red/cyan 3d glasses to see the 3d effect.