Mailund on the Internet

This clip is actually part of a longer interview about psycics, but it does touches upon the scientific method and is worth a look…

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Ah, I did the “rate the movie without seeing it”.  I’m guilty and I admit it!

At least I only quoted other people’s response to the paper, but I feel guilty – and dirty – nonetheless. I’ve learned my lesson and will try to do better in the past.

I read the paper now, and I’m still somewhat skeptical. I mean sure the results are what they are, but I’d like to see some explanation for why it is so. The discussion does address this, but I’d be much more comfortable with a replication study with a different dataset.

I’d also love to see a follow up study where the attractiveness of the offspring are compared to the parents to see how strong the genetics of “attractiveness” is. A strong correlation there wouldn’t surprise me much, so the evidence wouldn’t have to be particularly strong to convince me of an effect there, though.

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This just isn’t right!

How can you feel entitled to a well paying job just because you paid tuition for a degree? I mean, come on!  It baffles the mind!

You pay for tuition, so if you get taught then you get what you pay for!  If you didn’t learn anything, well, that is is a problem, but unless it is the teaching’s fault you have no one to blame but yourself.  You can sleep through the lectures and not do your homework – that is fine by me – but you cannot blame the teacher later on.

Even if that isn’t the case, and you worked really hard and actually learned a lot, how can the university be responsible for you getting a good job down the line?  Once you get the degree, you are on your own!  The job marked might be bad right now – or it might always have been (which probably isn’t the case here since we are talking IT, but it is not quite as attractive now as it was during the .com bubble) – or the competition might just be better, but how is the teaching institution responsible for this?

Yes, they might have given you the wrong impression about the studies, but cave emptor, baby, cave emptor.

I’m pretty sure the university never gave you any employment guarantees.  You have no-one to blame but yourself here.

I feel sorry for both of them, really I do.  No one should be in this situation if it can be avoided, but you just cannot blame anyone but yourself for this one…

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I’ve been trying all of last week and all of this morning to find someone to come along to Slatkin’s talk in Copenhagen this afternoon, but no luck.  Now I have to figure out for myself if I want to go.  It is six hours of transport for a one hour seminar, which really speaks against it, but on the other hand it is a talk on population genetics of Neanderthals which I am really interested in.

I’ve arranged some meetings for Wednesday before my own talk so I get some use out of the day besides just transportation, but for today it would really just be the seminar…  Besides, I’ll visit Svante Pääbo’s group in September so maybe I’ll get some info on the neanderthal project then.

I need to make up my mind within the next hour, but really it could go either way right now…

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Genetics

• Women are getting more beautiful (Times Online)
  • Are women getting better looking? (Gene Expression)
  • Women getting better looking, the paper… (Gene Expression)
  • This is just sad (Statistical modeling)
• Heritability of height vs. weight (Gene Expression)
• 93 ancestrally informative markers to categorize them all (Gene Expression)

Research life

• Maker’s schedule, manager’s schedule (Paul Graham)
  • Working your schedule around your work (John Hawks)
  • Maker’s schedule in finance (Tech guy in midtown)
• On citation practices, strategic and otherwise (Statistical modeling)
• Advice on writing research articles (Statistical modeling)
• Science 2.0: things that work and things that don’t (Byte size biology)
• Should biologists study computer science? (Ars Technica)
  • Biology, computer science and mathematics (me)

Misc science

• OMG QIP=PSPACE (The quantum pontiff)
• An entire bacterial genome discovered inside that of a fruit fly (Not exactly rocket science)
• The size of the universe: a hard question (Starts with a bang)

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