Science, statistics and society January 21, 2010
Posted by sarah in: science . 3comments
What are the odds?
On Tuesday I attended Science Cafe in Leiden, a monthly discussion evening on all matters scientific and their role in society. The theme was the way chance, likelihood and statistics are (mis-)used and represented by the media, politicans and the law. Leading the discussion was Arnout Jaspers, columnist for Dutch science magazine Natuurwetenschap & Techniek, with special guest Richard Gill, Professor in Mathematical Statistics at Leiden University. Gill and Jaspers illustrated the potentially far-reaching consequences of bad statistics with two recent stories to hit the headlines: the reopening of the Lucia de Berk case, and the drug suspension of Germany’s most successful winter Olympian, Claudia Pechstein.
First steps in direct exoplanet spectroscopy January 16, 2010
Posted by sarah in: new astronomy . 2comments
Top: Image of star HR8799 and its exoplanet HR8799c (ESO/M.Janson). Bottom: The spectrum as recorded by the NACO detector, prior to extraction ; the vertical direction is spatial, horizontal is spectral (M. Janson et al, 2010)
Astronomers collaborating from both sides of the Atlantic have obtained the first direct spectrum of an exoplanet. The news here is mainly that they managed to record the spectrum and separate it reliably from that of the host star. Their short letter in ApJ, posted to astro-ph yesterday, doesn’t delve deeply into the implications of what they found but focuses more on the way they obtained, processed and analysed their data to separate the planet’s signature from that of the star.
The Lay Scientist: Of women and stilettos January 12, 2010
Posted by sarah in: science, women . Add a comment
AA Gill wears his with pride
Go read the post I wrote last night over at the Lay Scientist, in which I get worked up about a pair of shoes sent to me by the Dutch science funding council NWO.
Seriously though, don’t let this feminist faux-pas on NWO’s part put you off applying for this fellowship scheme. It’s a good programme and I wish they’d advertise more widely. The next deadline is on 11 February, for the mid-career Vidi scheme. Read more here.
A pretty picture of me January 7, 2010
Posted by sarah in: me . 1 comment so far
Ha! No, I’m not giving you an actual pretty picture of me – I may have a blog but I’m not that much of a narcissist. Two of my favourite online toys right now are Wordle and social bookmarking site Delicious, which I started using a couple of months ago as a way of keeping track of links and bookmarks. So far it works well for me and it integrates nicely with other applications I use, like Twitter and FriendFeed. I created a Wordle of my Delicious tags and despite having only used the site for a short while, the tags sum my science-related interests up pretty well (and it looks so attractive!). Click to see a bigger version.
Now apparently I just need to settle on how I want to spell “visualis/zation”!
#STFC in tweets January 3, 2010
Posted by sarah in: astro 2.0, politics, science . 1 comment so far
My twitter feed in the last weeks of the decade was often dominated by reactions to and discussions of the funding cuts to physics and astronomy research in the UK announced on 16 December. On the day of this announcement I created a permanent archive for all tweets hashtagged #stfc to keep a record of all that was said on the issue – as regular twitter searches only go back around 10 days. On the last day of the year I exported all the tweets going back to 10 December and I’ve been playing around with visualising them. Here are a few samples.
Here’s a plot of the number of tweets in the 12 days from 15 December to 16 December, binned per hour. The red lines indicate the approximate time of the announcements of the funding cuts on 16 December, and of the postdoctoral fellowships cancellation on 21 December. Click on the chart for a closer look and get the data here. At the height of the buzz, there were almost 120 tweets in one hour, and on the 16th around 500 tweets were tagged #stfc. And while the traffic has quieted somewhat now, the STFC crisis is still an active topic of discussion.
If you thought it was only a small group of people making a lot of noise, think again. Over 330 people tweeted about STFC in the whole 3-week period, and even the busiest tweeters contributed no more than 4% of the total. Click on each pie segment to see the usernames and numbers.
The archive is accessible to anyone and continues to aggregate #stfc tweets at the same location. I’ve placed the data file with the tweets I used to generate these images in a public location, as well as the idl script I wrote to process the data and generate the timeline (the script uses a few functions from the idl astronomy library). The pie chart was created using the Google Pie Chart gadget in Google docs. The word cloud was generated by Wordle, removing common English words plus “rt” and “stfc”.
