Sea turtles nesting now—only 1 out of 1000 will make it to maturity
Walking the beach yesterday on the beach by our condo on Florida’s West Coast I came across this sea turtle nest. Most likely it’s a loggerhead, but it could be a rare Kemp’s ridley according to biologists at Mote’s Sea Turtle Conservation and Research Program.
As you can see in this news report —including video of the female digging in, somewhere on this beach they recorded a nest made by this most uncommon of all sea turtles. Unfortunately, the odds of any one baby living to an age when they can reproduce, which might take up to 30 years, are only 1 out of 1000.* It does not help to be sharing their nesting ground with all the people along the coast, but, with the admonitions of biologists and concerned citizens to not disturb the eggs and keep the lights down, perhaps their chances will improve.
*One of the hazards, of particular concern for the Kemp’s ridley turtle, is toxins from Florida’s red tides based on this new research by Mote scientists.
Read this as fast as you can but be prepared for a test to follow
Once upon a time I sped through Melville’s lengthy novel “Moby Dick.” If I recall correctly, it has something to do with a fellow missing one arm who goes chasing after the devilish whale that bit it off. Nowadays my eyes tire more quickly so I appreciate the advantages of electronic readers such as Kindle that serve me up columns of enlarged text with only a few words per line. Then I needn’t work too hard looking back and forth. What really works well is keeping one’s eyes fixed and moving the text along the focus. This is called rapid sequential visual presentation, or RSVP.
Recently I got the heads-up from Scientific American*about a smart-watch from Samsung that comes equipped with an RSVP app called Spritz. They claim that their “Optimal Recognition Point” (ORP) technology increases reading-speed on-average by half-again, from 220 to 330 words-per-minute. My only question is how anyone can hold their wrist steady long enough to digest much. I’d hate to run into anyone walking down the street while absorbed in a particularly fascinating book. Texting is bad enough.
Then again it’s one thing to see a lot of words and even process them through your head, but yet another thing to comprehend fully what’s been read. That’s the point of Annie Murphy Paul of The Weekly Wonk in this blog that questions the claims of Spritz. If I read her correctly (ha ha), she suggests that subject-matter expertise is the real key to effective reading—not just doing it faster, but also with greater comprehension. Excepting pulp fiction that requires little intelligence (gotta love it!), that makes a lot of sense to me.
Nevertheless, I’m anxious to see RSVP come to Kindle so I can try reading more in the short periods of time that I can free up and/or last before becoming eye-weary. Maybe then I will re-read “Moby Dick.” I have this vague recollection of the whale being white, but that just doesn’t seem right.
Minnesota town tops nation for highest median wage after cost of living adjustment (COLA)
Take a look at this intriguing report by NPR’s Planet money on How Far Your Paycheck Goes. Being a native and resident of Minnesota, our town of Rochester caught my eye atop the right side of the graphic on incomes. My guess is that the dominant employer—the Mayo Clinic–pays a lot of money for its medicos, who then get a lot of bag for their buck being in a relatively rural region.
On the other side of these “what it feels like” income-comparisons Washington DC fares very poorly after the COLA. Based on these economic statistics it seems that the optimal strategy for a job seeker would be to get a federal-government job, for example—working on HealthCare.gov–allowing the work to be done at a distance and then take up residence in Danville, Illinois where money goes a long way in comparison.
Oh, snow–but it was ice out
Walking the dog to the park on a decent day yesterday (today being terribly cold and rainy) I came across this remnant of the mountain of snow piled up in the cul de sac. Yuk! On the other hand, many of the area’s lakes enjoyed ice-out this week. Nearby White Bear Lake was declared open on Wednesday morning (it’s a bit of a judgement call, evidently). According to records that go back 86 years this year’s ice-out fell nine days later than the median date but well ahead of the record of May 4, 1950.
I am looking forward to the dirty-snow-out coming soon. Then I feel it really will be Spring.
P.S. I noticed the postal-deliverer wearing the USPS summer-shorts uniform, so that’s a good sign. : )
Oh, oh—sociology professors say that “most of what we do for our kids at schools doesn’t matter”
Read this New York Times essay on why Parental Involvement Is Overrated and weep for all the time you spent helping your child become well-educated. It doesn’t help that
“most parents appear to be ineffective at helping their children at homework.”
Many a time my kids asked me to help them do math, which I really dreaded—not because I could not come up with the answer, but due to the constantly-changing way schools taught it. After being told many times that I got the right answer the wrong way and thus provided absolutely no help, I began bearing down on studying the latest-and-greatest math book first before working out the problem.
By the way, I made the student go through the materials with me—that made this an effective approach for parental mentoring, or so I thought. Now I wonder if I should’ve even bothered.
However, one time one of my daughters did say that my way of explaining a puzzling math problem made a lot more sense the either the teacher or the book. That’s one time out of hundred other times that my good deeds did not go unpunished, but like the single outstanding golf shot out of hundred bad ones in any-given round, I remember this fondly. 🙂
My Minnesota Twins fail on fantasy front
Supposedly hope springs eternal at the start of every baseball season, no matter how miserable the prospects for your home team. Sadly the statisticians at the Wall Street Journal burst that bubble by skewering my squad—saying yesterday that It’s Not a Fantasy, the Minnesota Twins Are Bad. Their “Roster Reality” ranking leaves the hapless Twinkies last. Fantasy team owners figured only 3 players rated a position in the first 276 drafted. That is bad.
Being a homer, when I did my draft I filled my last position with Byron Buxton—the number 1 prospect in all of Major League Baseball. Unfortunately if BB does make it up to Minnesota this year it will be after the Twins get eliminated from contention. On the bright side I expect that will again happen with plenty of games remaining to let the up-and-comers get in some good playing time.
By the way, the Twins rallied this afternoon with 2 runs in the 9th to win out over the hated White Sox and prevent them from a 3 game sweep. That’s a 1 game winning streak! Woohoo!
Experiments by Incan agronomists
Earlier this week I visited Machu Picchu in Peru, which features extensive terracing for crop-growing. Five-hundred years ago the Incans took full advantage of a uniquely temperate microclimate on sites like this along the border of the Amazon. First of all they engineered a drainage system out of rocks brought up from the river below. Then they covered it with dirt laboriously hauled from fertile plains at lower elevations. Next they evidently experimented on different crops at different levels to get the best interaction with varying temperatures each step of the way down from the peak. According to a team of agronomists and archeologists 
from U Penn who reproduced the Incan farming conditions, yields of potatoes came in at two or even four times what would be expected. All this is quite impressive—building a self-sustaining city at nearly 8000 feet on a peak with only a few, small flat areas.
Design of experiments (DOE) most important for optimizing products, processes and analytical technologies
Posted by mark in design of experiments, Uncategorized on March 1, 2014
According to this February 2014 Special Report on Enabling Technologies two-thirds of BioProcess readers say that DOE makes the most impact on their analytical work.
“The promise of effective DOE is that the route of product and process development will speed up through more cost-effective experimentation, product improvement, and process optimization. Your ‘batting average’ will increase, and you will develop a competitive advantage in the process.”
–Ronald Snee
A lot to love in new release of software–v9 is mighty fine!
Posted by mark in design of experiments on February 7, 2014
Here’s a shout-out for Valentine’s Day that there’s a lot to love in the new release of Stat-Ease software-see the major improvements here http://www.statease.com/dx9.html#description. Consultant Wayne Adams put v9 to fun use by developing equations that produced the 3D response surface renderings of the heart and number 9. Geeks rule! (No offense, Wayne, I am one.)
The rarest of birds—a reproducible result from a scientific study
Posted by mark in science, Uncategorized on February 3, 2014
In The New York Times new column Raw Data, science writer George Johnson laments experimenters
“ways of unknowingly smuggling one’s expectations into the results, like a message coaxed from a Ouija board.”
– Science Times, 1/21/14
This, of course, leads to irreproducible findings.
As a case in point, only 6 of 53 landmark papers about cancer found support in follow up studies, even with the help of the original scientists working in their own labs, according to an article in the Challenges in Irreproducible Research archive of Nature cited by Johnson.
That is discouraging but I am not surprised. I feel fairly sure that the any assertions of import get filtered very rigorously until only ones that reproduce reliably make it through.
The trick is to remain extremely skeptical of initial reports, especially those that get trumpeted and reverberate around the popular press and the internet. Evidently it is human nature to then presume that when an assertion is repeated often enough then it must be true, even though it has not yet been reproduced. Saying it’s so does not make it so.