An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in an anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have no doubt already heard. After some observations and rough calculations the engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing. A few minutes later the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself happily as he now has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper. This leaves the mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he had observed right away that he was the subject of an anecdote, and deduced quite rapidly the presence of humour from similar anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny.
Academia
The Science of Death
A new podcast from the University of Bath. This time it’s Professor Allan Kellehear from the Centre for Death & Society at the University of Bath talking about the point of death and organ retention in a lecture called The science of death. From the blurb:
The research literature about ‘brain death’ is characterised by biomedical, bioethical and legal writing. This has led to overlooking wider but no less pertinent social, historical and cultural understandings about death. By ignoring the work of other social and clinical colleagues in the study of dying, the literature on the determination of death has become unnecessarily abstract and socially disconnected from parallel concerns about death and dying. These circumstances foster incomplete suggestions and narrow discussions about the nature of death as well as an ongoing misunderstanding of general public and health care staff responses to brain death criteria. I outline these problems through a review of the key literature on the determination of death.
Ingelfinger rule
The policy of considering a manuscript for publication only if its substance has not been submitted or reported elsewhere. This policy was promulgated in 1969 by Franz J. Ingelfinger, then the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. The aim of the Ingelfinger rule was to protect the Journal from publishing material that had already been published and thus had lost its originality.
I knew about the practice but not that it had a name. You learn something new every day – even on Fridays…
Photo Absolutely Nothing is Allowed Here by Vicki & Chuck Rogers (CC by-nc-sa)
How to take notes
Study Hacks is a cool blog aimed at students which has lots of study tips which are useful for everyone. Today they have a great list of tips for taking notes. This is must read stuff…
A Study Hacks Crash Course on Smart Note-Taking
Why Most Students Don’t Understand the Real Goal of Note-Taking
A classic article from the early days of Study Hacks. It lays out my core philosophy on how to take notes well. You can use its “Three Laws of Reduced Study Time Note-Taking” as a general framework for the construction of your own customized note solution.Part 2 in 60 Seconds or Less (or, The Q/E/C Note-Taking Method)
Another classic article. It summarizes the main philosophy driving Part 2 — Quizzes & Exams — of my book How to Become a Straight-A Student. What makes it relevant to this post is that it describes the famed Question/Evidence/Conclusion note-taking system that I first introduced in my book and now reference all the time here on Study Hacks.Accelerate Q/E/C Note-Taking
A technical article that describes how to use Word short-cuts to accelerate Question/Evidence/Conclusion note-taking on your laptop.Rapid Note-Taking With the Morse Code Method
A steamlined note-taking variant for long reading assignments that need to be completed in a short amount of time.The Art of Pseudo-Skimming
An even more streamlined note-taking approach for articles that only need to be reviewed, not mastered, before class.How to Read Hard Readings
This post introduces “strategic pre-processing” as a technique for conquering outrageously dense and complicated reading assignments.How to Take Notes on Power Point Slides
Technical tips for taking efficient notes on lectures that are driven by Power Point slides. Take a look at the readers’ comments, which introduce some interesting twists on my advice.
Breaking new ground
Tomorrow I will be holding a seminar at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute at Lund entitled Abusing Property Rights: Copyright as a knowledge barrier & the Open Access movement. This is a new angle on a familiar topic so I am looking forward to the discussions.
Why Nietzsche bores me…
Finally I found the reason. Here is a quote from Nietzsche’s sister:
The days of his youth — of his carefree, merry gamboling — were over. Hereafter he was all solemnity and all seriousness. ‘From these early experiences,’ says his sister, ‘there remained with him a life-long aversion to smoking, beer-drinking and the whole biergemütlichkeit …’ He maintained that people who drank beer and smoked pipes were absolutely incapable of understanding him. Such people, he thought lacked the delicacy and clearness of perception necessary to grasp profound and subtle propositions. (via Noniclolasos)
The Quite Pint by Monster (CC ATT-NC-SA)
Given the choice between being bored by Nietzsche or a beer I choose a beer anytime.
Passionate scientists
Explaining what scientists do is complex, and it doesn’t get easier if you are one of those scientists who hasn’t got a lab coat. Occasionally, when asked, I just say that I am a teacher which everyone “gets” and has an easy, positive relation to.
Peter Medawar wrote in Pluto’s Republic that:
Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.
I love this quote and use it regularly in my teaching. But there is one factor which unites many scientists across different scientific disciplines and that is passion – most scientists are passionate about what they do (some maybe a bit too much)
A nice example of the passion science inspires among its practitioners (yes we are proud to be geeky) is represented in Carl Zimmer’s Science Tattoo Emporium:
Underneath their sober lab coats and flannel shirts, scientists hide images of their scientific passions. Here they are revealed to all.
Only a truely passionate person would get tattoos such as these
This is a formula called the Y Combinator. It is a fixed-point combinator in the lambda calculus and was discovered by Haskell Curry, a rather prolific mathematician and logician whose work helped start Computer Science.
“What this formula does is calculates the fixed point of a function, which in turn allows for recursion by calling on that fixed point; recursion is perhaps the single most important concept in Computer Science. Being a computer scientist and a mathematician, this formula is very important to me and represents the innate beauty of computer science and mathematical logic.” –Mark
…and only those who share a passion (but no the subject) understand and enjoy them!
The problem with wikipedia
The wikipedia user Alunsalt is leaving wikipedia to work with a killer app version of wikipedia by Google called Knol. The fact that a wikipedian leaves is not a big deal really but her retirement letter hits on many of the important flaws with wikipedia. These issues are not new but they remain unresolved and will keep wikipedia in the “tabloid” version of knowledge dissemination – the fact that it’s useful or that many people believe what they read does not increase the truth on wikipedia.
Alunsalt writes:
As may be obvious I’ve decided Wikipedia will die shortly, and I’m not interested in clearing up the mess. When subject experts introduce themselves on their user pages saying how they tackle arguments by winning over their opponents audience, I don’t applaud their sagacity. I feel pity that the system they’re working in has dragged them down to that level. I can sympathise with feeling that you don’t want lunatics to win, but if you find yourself regularly arguing with them then maybe it’s time to get out.
It’s a shame because I genuinely believe most Wikipedians do want to create.
The Larousse goes wiki
The French encyclopedia Larousse was started for over 150 years ago is joining the Internet in a big way. They are launching their own version of Wikipedia.
Since any Wikipedia user can make changes to Wikipedia it is often criticized for having an inherent potential for unreliability. The Larousse version will have free access and enable users to contribute – but not totally freely. Anonymous contributions will not be permitted, but users who want to contribute have to sign up and their names will then appear on the article they submit. In addition to this contributions, once written, become protected.
The Larousse will also begin by putting 150,000 articles from its universal encyclopaedia online, in addition to 10,000 images.
More information at The Independent.
Sleep & Work
Finally an explanation! I knew that I was doing something wrong. The only problem is that it doesn’t say how to get off the cycle. I guess that I will just wait until after surviving the next couple of all-nighters…
