New system citation system allows cross-disciplinary review. Is this the next h-index?

Darkfrog submitted, created time 1 month 23 hours (www.nature.com)

Ordinarily, scientists use their h-index to determine whether their articles are up to snuff, citation-wise, and the system works well enough. Everyone accepts that it cannot be used across disciplines because overall citation rates are different. An aerospace paper that has twenty citations has made a huge impact. A developmental biology paper that has a hundred citations is skimming average.

A team out of Sapienza University in Rome has come up with a new system

1 comment | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: culture of science citations citation index citation statistics citation indices citation indexes h-index mathematics

Harvard celebrates the goofy side of science

Darkfrog submitted, created time 1 month 2 weeks (www.nature.com)

The Ig Nobel prizes were given out last Thursday. Winners included the team that showed that a stripper's ovulatory cycle affected her tips (economics) and some folks who taught slime molds to solve mazes (cognitive). The archaeology prize went to a team who documented armadillos messing up their dig site. As to whether they found a way to keep the little dudes out ...not mentioned.

The evening culminated with "Win a date with Benoît Mandelbrot."

4 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: mathematics animal behavior slime molds human behavior science and culture prizes economics archaeology cognitive science science and economics Nobel Prize

Yasushi Saka: Stirring a melting pot of math and morphogens

sea-maid submitted, created time 5 months 2 weeks (www.jcb.org)

Saka uses a combination of mathematical models, yeast, and frogs to investigate the action of morphogens.

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I, E. coli, computer

sea-maid submitted, created time 6 months 2 hours (www.sciencenews.org)

Scientists have built the first living computer and tasked it with solving an important problem: flipping pancakes. If you don't know about the flipping pancakes, this study will give you the answer.

2 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: mathematics AI artificial intelligence bacteria DNA computers

Real-world examples don't help students learn mathematics

Darkfrog submitted, created time 6 months 3 weeks (www.nytimes.com)

This study, performed once on college students and once on eleven-year-olds, suggests that students do NOT learn mathematics better if their lessons are peppered with real-life examples--the conclusion seems to be that the students remember the illustration, whether it's a train or a cup or a ski slope, instead of the underlying math. The study seems to recommend that teachers approach mathematics from principle only. This finding contests the long-held idea that familiar, colorful illustrations help students learn otherwise dull subjects

2 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: memory.learning education mathematics cognition

Why Do Whales Get the Bends?

So Cute You Could Just Eat Them Up

Eric wu submitted, created time 1 year 6 days (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

Most likely, your mother nurtured you for years and you never worried that when you came home from kindergarten, she'd gobble you up. But many animals do occasionally eat their young, including many that also are attentive parents. New research indicates that, when it comes to deciding whether to chow down on junior, Ma and Pa may be motivated by more than hunger. For example, parents may selectively eat their weaker offspring to favor the stronger ones, an evolutionary model predicts.

10 comments | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: sociology zoology bioinformatics mathematics reproduction cannibalism

Methematician turns digital detective -- has a point

Darkfrog submitted, created time 1 year 9 months (www.nature.com)

In this article, a mathematician describes his work identifying doctored pictures -- digital media that have been altered. One of his key clues is the point of light reflected in each person's eye, the angle, the color, the size. I once listened to a neuroscientist use that same clue -- the point of light -- to demonstrate that that many of our greatest visual artists, from Andy Worhol to Rembrandt, may have had casts to their eyes (eyes look out in different directions), implying that they literally don't see the world the same way. From artist to scientist to mathematician to art

Submit comment | Blog It | Email It | Keywords: neurology vision art digital media pictures photography mathematics visual defect