On October 26, 2010, Dr. Moran Cerf was a UCLA neuroscience researcher whose project, on the connections between single nerve cells and specific thoughts, had just been written up in the journal Nature. Affirmation. Life was good. For a few hours. Then he made a verbal slip in an interview with the BBC and, before long a "dream recording machine," not of Dr. Cerf's making but bearing his name, had come humming to life and was careening across continents by way of Internet news sites and blogs. Moran Cerf tells the story of what it's like to try and subdue a science fiction monster as it threatens to devour years of serious research.

If dsge performs better than the competitors, does that mean that it performs still?

Prediction as a game against nature. Weird science.

"FigShare allows you to share all of your data, negative results and unpublished figures. In doing this, other researchers will not duplicate the work, but instead may publish with your previously wasted figures, or offer collaboration opportunities and feedback on preprint figures."

science.I/O is an open science community. Comment on, recommend and submit papers. Get up-to-date on a research topic. Follow a journal or an author. science.I/O is in beta and is currently focused on Computer Science.

entertaining hijinks in the lands of economic models of science

what does it mean to have genes as a variable? how are they entwined with culture? what does this mean for our researches?

Toolchain science workflow tools

interesting little wiki of complexity and emergence for the student-type.

he National Science Foundation sent out a Dear Colleague letter requesting white papers on grand challenges in the social and behavioral sciences. The Directorate for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences of the National Science Foundation (NSF/SBE) will use these white papers "to frame innovative research for the year 2020 and beyond that enhances fundamental knowledge and benefits society in many ways. This request is part of a process that will help NSF/SBE make plans to support future research."

personalities and methods clash in the nasty climate business. An amusing demolition of one of the sillier bits of nonsense

MCMC, Monte Carlo methods, and the Metropolis -Hastings sampling doohickey for fun and profit. Well, profit.

alternatives to the current peer-review system on the rise?

"As Narayan has eloquently argued many times, it no longer makes sense for most institutions to run their own HPC, if you take into account the true costs of power, AC, and hardware. The only reason it looks like HPCs work well is because of the way institutions play games with funny money (a.k.a. "overhead charges"), channeling it to HPC behind the scenes - often with much politicking involved. If, as a scientist, your compute is "free" or even heavily subsidized, you tend not to think much about it. But now that we have to scale those clusters 10s or 100s or 1000s of X, to deal with data 100s or 1e6s of times as big, institutions will no longer be able to afford to build their own clusters with funny money. And they'll have to charge scientists for the true computational cost of their work -- or scientists will have to use the cloud."

Handy app for developing simultey/machine-learningey apps. tags and manages the output from every invocation of your script and automagically associates it with the code revision, time, dat and some other metadata.

"On the off chance that we do choose to provide the source code, it will be in a file named 'source.tar.gz' that unpacks in to the current directory. There will be no explanation of contents, instructions on how to run it, or any enabling information -- it was hard to write, and it should be hard to run! Old, patched, or otherwise impossible-to-obtain versions of Redhat Linux, Perl 5, and associated CPAN libraries will be required before the code runs, even if it doesn't actually use any of them. No source code documentation will be present, of course -- we don't need it ourselves, after all! Automated tests will also not be present (we don't have any of those, either). New versions of the code will be published under the identical file name, with no indication of what changes were made. (We'll be sure to use mixed DOS and Unix EOL editors for our files, so 'diff' won't work to figure out what has changed.)"

it's the page of that trendy work-out-your-laws-for-you package

vintage @thelastpsych sarcasm: "humanicons with no visible external genitalia such as tattoos or Nautica T-shirts"

learning in the game-theoretic statistical framework of vovk and shafer

aweome tag team demoilition of friedman's weird "asiif" stance.

common pitfalls in handwavey evolutionary argument

web2.0 hype for the sciences for the win.

The question that they are answering isn't "does environment matter more than genetics?" It's a more subtle, sneaky, social-policy answer: "since we now know that genetics isn't as deterministic as we hoped, is there something else that we can focus on which is equally out of our control?

free intro to modelling-for-complexity book

O'reilly gives an overview of large dataset tools, including some nice machine learning ones

the propensity of people to favour explanations that include mentions of neurons even if said mentions adds no explanatory value

Axelrod and Tesfatsion's guide to ABM methodlogy is free and online. there ya go.

...with bonus nods to Gladwell.

the importance and risks of minority voices in science - cigarette smoke and climate change denialists

the explanatory gap of gene expression studies

wicked algorithmic game theory overview

beautiful side-by-side presentation fo the contentious graphs and evidence regarding climate change.
"I researched this subject in a very particular way. I deliberately chose not speak directly to any climate experts or leading scientists in the field. I used only publicly available web sources.

Why? Because I wanted to simulate what it’s like for people trying to learn about climate change online."

VisTrails is an open-source scientific workflow and provenance management system ...that provides support for data exploration and visualization. Whereas workflows have been traditionally used to automate repetitive tasks, for applications that are exploratory in nature, such as simulations, data analysis and visualization, very little is repeated---change is the norm. As an engineer or scientist generates and evaluates hypotheses about data under study, a series of different, albeit related, workflows are created while a workflow is adjusted in an interactive process. VisTrails was designed to manage these rapidly-evolving workflows.
...VisTrails maintains provenance of data products, of the workflows that derive these products and their executions... it allows users to navigate workflow versions in an intuitive way, to undo changes but not lose any results, to visually compare different workflows and their results, and to examine the actions that led to a result....

subjectivity in methodology

"Dr. Judy Carman, senior scientist working in the field of epidemiology in Australia and awarded a government grant to study the safety of GM feed, has been subjected to a sustained campaign of vilification by individuals associated withthe biotech industry, with the clear intention of preventingher from carrying out the research. Political pressure is nowbeing brought to bear on her research by the current Agriculture and Food Minister of Western Australia.

Dr. Carman is not an isolated case. A long string of scientists beginning with Arpad Puszati, Susan Bardocz, Shiv Chopra, Ignacio Chapela, Irina Ermakova, and more has suffered the same attackswhen their research or laboratory findings are deemed unfavourable to thebiotech industry; they have also lost their grants or their jobs as a result."

Wow. reproducability and software development fail.

"In the Daily Telegraph James Delingpole is already preparing to sue his employer for not respecting his belief in Delingpolism, which states that “anyone who proselytises on behalf of AGW, carbon capture, Cap & Trade or wind farms without being able to demonstrate with at least 95% certainty that their cause has any scientific foundation whatsoever, must be exiled immediately to the Arctic Circle”.

"The minimal publishable unit of science — the paper — is too big, too monolithic. The useful unit: a blog post."

The lack of falsifiability in complex modelling see as a big bloody issue.

They stick around, getting cited. Also apparently blind peer review in big Pharma is a not so great either.

the open access ideal seems to be taking off among journals which see their content as immediately relevant to the world.

fascinating account of learning via some brief diversions into the methodology of social science

interesting mortal-comprehensible bunch of measurement biases for global temperature measurement that I hadn't thought of - IR emissions versus heat, missing ocean temperatures, boundaries of heat budget system and so on. Still remaining puzzle: which other area of theoretically-heavy research gives so much airtime to amateurs tracing graphs? [TODO: formulate my own economic theories based on tracing data points on graph paper. profit.]