it's magic

Liza, war ist und bleibt der coolste Hund

auf dem Platz, bzw. jetzt auf seinem Board. Lizarazu, one of the greatest ever:

http://goo.gl/crIoE

"They didn't want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI"

The Guardian is running a series on Germany from a British point of view. Wondering: if the UK working week is about 1.3 hours longer than the German one http://goo.gl/U47hm, would I have to work about 62 hours as a post-doc in the UK, when I am now doing about 60? Also this: http://goo.gl/CnPV7 - Germans: Cool and laid back. Really? Wow! I mean cool, yeah sure (?????????;), but laid back?

The heading of this post is taken from the book I introduced a while back ("Thinking, Fast and Slow"). Only made it to page 105 although it's more than seven weeks since I bought it in Aberfeldy (and although it's a good book well worth reading). What the author is telling us is, that "what you see is all there is" (WYSIATI) for your brain; in many day to day situations our brains system 1 (see last post on the book) is intuitively just jumping to conclusions on a limited evidential basis. While I am wondering how often this happens in science (and sometimes maybe on purpose) I'd also like to point to this video http://goo.gl/8IstC which seems important coming back to the topic of intercultural understanding. :D

 

Der Guardian bringt derzeit eine Artikelserie über Deutschland, aus britischer Sicht. Ich frage mich nun: die britische Arbeitswoche ist 1,3 Stunden länger als die deutsche http://goo.gl/U47hm, müsste
ich dann als Post-Doc auf der Insel ca 62, statt 60 Stunden die Woche arbeiten? Dazu noch schreiben sie, dass wir Deutsche seit 2006 als "cool and laid back" gesehen werden http://goo.gl/CnPV7. Krass! Cool simma ja (((????????????), aber ausgelassen (und ruhig)?

Den Titel dieses Eintrag hab ich aus dem Buch "Thinking, Fast and Slow", dass ich schon vor einer Weile vorgestellt habe - um genau zu sein bin ich in den >7 Wochen seitdem ich es in Schottland gekauft hab bis Seite 105 gekommen (obwohl es ein sehr interessantes Buch ist). Der Autor beschreibt, dass das System 1 unseres Hirns (siehe den ersten Eintrag zu dem Buch) in vielen alltäglichen Situationen dafür sorgt, dass wir intuitiv und ohne wirkliche Grundlage zu Schlussfolgerungen springen: was du siehst ist alles was da ist. Ich frage mich wie oft das wohl in der Wissenschaft passiert (und wie oft mit "Absicht"). Um auf oben zurück zu kommen dann noch dieses Video http://goo.gl/CnPV7. Ja, ja, das hilft doch beim Verständnis anderer Kulturen. Ya, ya! :D

while all of Zimbabwe is flushing at the same time

http://goo.gl/ge0HH it was a nice day in Cologne. Bit windy on the bike, but a lot of fresh air. Meanwhile I figure that Creed had quite some cool songs back then...

 

Ganz Simbabwe spühlt derzeit zur gleichen Zeit das Klo ab: http://goo.gl/ge0HH. Derweil haben wir ja ein paar schöne Herbsttage in Köln, viel Wind und frische Luft. Schön. Und ich stelle fest, dass Creed damals ein paar coole Lieder hatte. Man glaubt es kaum... 

 

 

 

my little sister got her Hat today

proud! :D

interesting, they do a open to the public defence here in Münster and everybody is allowed to ask questions.

 

Meine (kleine) Schwester hat sich gestern ihren Hut verdient. Bin schon was stolz, muss ich sagen. ;-) Gut gemacht Mari-K. Interessant in Münster ist, hier ist die Verteidigung öffentlich für die ganz Öffentlichkeit und jeder darf Fragen stellen.

will I be banned for outposting to Facebook

about this article which describes how the New Yorker was banned for showing a picture of nude people, ..., 'Adam and Eve' by Rubens?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mediamonkeyblog/2012/sep/11/facebook-new-york...

 

Meanwhile (or until I am still not banned), have a look at Andrea's and Manuel's blog:

http://wirkommendannmalwieder.blogspot.de/

 

Zen of today:Thinking is the key to understanding. Thinking is the key to misunderstanding. Let the mind roam free...

 

Qua Masseur? http://goo.gl/7jGW0

Had a great seminar yesterday by a colleague from the genetics department. He gave an intro/overview on Tajima's D (basically a statistics test to check whether a given stretch of DNA is evolving neutrally or under some non-random form, e.g. by selection). One thing he showed was Tajima's D over all human Chromosomes (which can be loaded as a track in the UCSC Genome browser) and that made me think if this is not telling us that large parts of the genome simply can't be functional in the way the ENCODE press hype implied. Okay, it's agreed now, that the 80% are purely for the press, but even if it was less. 

So is it?  Tajima's D : ENCODE media hype

                      1        :         0

Wouldn't the Tajima's D value indicate much more regions selected upon? Or is the sliding window they used to large? Or am I thinking this wrong? Very happy for discussion. Actually very happy for explanations...

 

Zen of the day: Constant turning of pebbles is needed to find the truth. Ever so often it's pebbles in your own head. Kazing!!!

Cologne is slowly getting cold and grey

thinking (or is it dreaming) about Vanuatu (looks like mid twenties for the rest of the month), then maybe Melbourne for the winter

Zen of the day: Only who is true to him/her-self will lead a happy life

I recommend reading the post linked below for more on the ENCODE buzz. What's the news?

http://sandwalk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/ed-yong-updates-his-post-on-encode.html

 

I turn the music up, I got my records on

I shut the world outside until the lights come one

Maybe the streets alight, maybe the tree are gone

I feel my heart start beeting to my favorite song

de-encode the jungle

what a hype around the ENCODE project today (http://genome.ucsc.edu/ENCODE/). I like it where he says that the human genome is a jungle:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3V2thsJ1Wc?wmode=transparent]

 

 

see this blog post for a well written critique of the whole project. makes some sense. who is in for reading 30 papers over the weekend?

http://sandwalk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/the-encode-data-dump-and-responsibilit...

 

how cool is this: somebody analysing scientist's weekly (over-) workload

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1208.2686v1.pdf

One could also interpret the data in a way that in some countries papers are constantly downloaded, while in other countries scientists take the time to actually read what they downloaded. Just a thought... . The thing is this, science is fun, that's why people do it (that's also why scientist don't go on strike).

 

Das ist mal was, die Analysieren die Wochenarbeitszeit und -zeiten von Wissenschaftlern. Fragt man sich, ob man die Daten auch so interpretieren kann, dass einige Leute immer weiter Paper runter laden, während Wissenschaftler in anderen Ländern die Paper auch lesen. Nur so ein Gedanke. Der Punkt ist halt, Wissenschaft macht Spass und nur darum macht man es für >60 Stunden in der Woche. Hat mal jemand von Wissenschaftlern gehört, die in den Arbeitskapf gehen? Hier noch ein Artikel aus der FAZ zu dem Paper:

http://faz-community.faz.net/blogs/planckton/archive/2012/09/01/wissenschaftl...

A paper on species numbers and why some taxa have more than others

Been reading this paper: Rabosky DL, Slater GJ, Alfaro ME (2012) Clade Age and Species Richness Are Decoupled Across the Eukaryotic Tree of Life. PLoS Biol 10: e1001381. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001381.t002.

In a way I like it because the result, basically the time a taxon is around does not say anything about the number of species in that taxon, fits into what I would have expected. However there are some general concerns with this work:

• Look at the time tree: where are the worms? Okay, that's asked from a wormy point of view, but it's a general thing. The evidence is based on a subset of taxa, where estimates about evolutionary age are at hand. Even more so in the data set four groups, Angiosperms (Flowering Plants), Mammalia, Aves (Birds, Dinosaurs?) and Coleoptera (Beetles) are featuring prominently (because they are species rich and wells studied). Out of 1,397 major clades 825 fall into these four.
• Figure 3 is weird in some way as well. The time scales in the plots seem to be wrong, why are Chondricthyes ('sharks') displayed with a bit more than 300 million years (Ma), while Actinopterygii (your 'normal fish') with more than 400 Ma? The former ones are at least 50 Ma older than the latter ones. The other thing, how is species richness measured in the past? Fossils of course, but then some organisms (like water living vertebrates) fossilise much better than e.g. land dwelling invertebrates (think of little flies).
• As mentioned by the authors themself 'we know very little about the consequences of [...] taxonomic ranking'.
• The closing sentence 'large-scale phylogenetic diversity patterns reflect constraints on species richness within clades rather than sustained diversity increases through time' is very interesting, as it raises the question: which constraints? 

 

scary: a way to track and profile all your friends on Facebook (and get your data out to even more companies)

Wolfram Alpha is apparently now offering a tool to datamine Facebook Timelines (http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2012-09/wolfram-alpha-facebook). One gets not only profiles of own 'movements' but also extensive stats about friends (like everything!). Data is of course also transferred to and kept at Wolfram servers then...

Wolfram Alpha bietet jetzt eine Software an, mit der man Facebooks Timeline durchforsten kann (http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2012-09/wolfram-alpha-facebook). Man bekommt nicht nur das eigene Profil, sondern auch alles wissenswerte über die eigenen Freunde (alles!). Die Daten werden auf Wolfram Servern gespeichert - für später mal...

a place to upload posters after meetings

Might http://figshare.com/ be a place to upload posters after meetings? They could be referenced then, which might be really nice. 

Könnte man nicht Poster nach den Meeting bei http://figshare.com/ eisntellen? Dort könnten die dann sogar als Referenz verwendet werden.

just 60 seconds and The Tudors

Wow, just learnt that the 60sec, 60min thing goes back to old Babylon. These guys calculated in a system based on the 60. Apparently also put 360 degrees into the circle. Watching ARTE while working... Oi and the fourth series of The Tudors will be on soon. Cool.

 

krass, grad gelerngt das die laten Babylonier ein 60-er Zahlensystem benutzten und darauf geht unsere Uhr zurück. Ebenso die Kreisteilung in 360 Grad, alles Babylon. ARTE, Leute schaut ARTE! Oh, und bald kommt die vierte Staffel der Tudors. Super.