Is the plane supposed to make that air rushing out sound?

Ever worry that your bags won't make it with you to their final destination even though you are paying additional fees for their existence these days?

You have good reason. The baggage compartment on a recent Qantas flight just plain opened up a giant hole.

At least everyone was OK.

HOWTO: report science in a lay publication

Say you are a journalist and you get a breathless call from a university PR office or a researcher touting a world-shattering scientific breakthrough. For instance, the discovery of a new "genetic link" to violence and delinquency. Hot damn! Well, you had better be the first to break this exciting story, lest you miss the prime opportunity of your career. The nature/nurture debate has been settled once and for all, right?

Not even close. The study I referenced above is an egregious example of what my former boss (an HHMI investigator at Yale who found the first gene and 20 subsequent others for hypertension) would call "genetics amateur hour." For one thing, the article was published in the "American Sociological Review," a SOCIOLOGY journal with a pathetic impact factor of 2.38. Anyone with even a modicum of genetics training would see that the study in question was a prime "fishing expedition" where the researchers looked at several of their favorite "candidate genes" hoping to find any relationship at all. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the study: one of their so called delinquency-causing genetic variants, "seemed to set off a young man if he did not have regular meals with his family."

It's called the Bonferroni correction, people. If you test a large number of hypotheses, it is certain that many tests will be statistically significant merely by chance. The fact that the study's authors broke down their cohort into "eats regular meals with family vs. does not eat regular meals with family" tells me that this is truly JV work. How many other tests did they try and not report?

In the spirit of giving constructive criticism, here are my guidelines for how to report science in the media:

1) If the work in question is not going to be published in a major journal, such as Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS, PLoS, or top speciality journals (e.g., "baby" Nature or Cell journals like Nature Genetics or Nature Medicine), don't bother reporting on it.

* A caveat to this point is if the work is not yet published and is being presented at a major scientific meeting, such as the American Society of Nephrology, FASEB Experimental Biology, etc.

2) Ask experts in the field. If you don't know who an expert is, find out. Call departmental chairs at other universities. Get a second, third, and fourth opinion on the work.

3) For God's sake, learn the difference between a gene, a mutation, and a phenotype. I will probably post on this again when a good example comes up.

Stuff you'd rather not know about Slippy.

Excerpted from Wikipedia:

Beltino Toad (ベルツィーノ・トード, Berutsīno Tōdo^?) is Slippy Toad's father, who works as the Research Director for the Cornerian Defense Forces. Beltino originally works for Space Dynamics Co. Ltd. as an engineer. He and Slippy invent and construct many inventions for the team, including the Blue Marine and the Land Master. Beltino is first mentioned in the Star Fox 64 Player's Guide, but does not make an in-game appearance until Star Fox: Assault, released eight years later. Beltino discovers the way to defeat the Aparoids, and eventually allows Star Fox to destroy them using a program he developed. In the Japanese version of Assault, Beltino Toad is voiced by Hirohiko Kakegawa, and his English voice actor is Scott Burns.

Amanda (アマンダ, Amanda^?) is Slippy's fiancée, who first appears in Star Fox Command. They meet two years prior to the events of Star Fox Command, and instantly fall in love. Amanda occasionally helps the team out in various missions, and pilots the Tadpole (タッドポール, Taddopōru^?), a ship armed with a multi-lock. She considers herself more of the leader in her relationship with Slippy, and always wants to be on his side during a fight. In two endings, she and Slippy settle down with children, one of whom joins Fox & Krystal's son, Marcus McCloud, as well as Lucy Hare's daughter and Falco Lombardi himself in forming a new Star Fox team. In another ending, she herself joins the Star Fox team to be close to Slippy.

Don't ask me, I was looking for stuff on Smash.

Office Pranks

For those of us bleeding to oil the infernal capitalist machine: funny stuff that's actually been instigated by people who sit disturbingly close to me.

-Spray non-drying aerosol adhesive all over someone's desk.
-Sending a company wide e-mail asking everyone to leave something inside someone's cube while they are on vacation.
-Fill someone's drawers and cabinets with peanuts, unsalted.
-Get into the company newsletter and announce that someone's been promoted to "Junior Senior Vice President."
-Moving all of the senior VP in charge of the department's stuff from his corner office to a cube in the basement.
-Send an e-mail to someone stating that they have "failed to sign the Clean Cube initiative," prompting them to drive to the office in the snow on Sunday to make the deadline.
-Write "basuras" on a box with someone's stuff in it, so the cleaning staff ends up chucking it at the end of the day.

What's scary is that the "someone" in all of these instances is the other Yale guy who I'm effectively replacing.

David Brooks, get over yourself

You know Obama's Berlin speech was solid when this is all the NY Times' resident sourpuss, David Brooks, has to say about it.

"[Obama said America] must 'lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good.' In Berlin on Thursday, it was more of the same."

Really, Mr. Brooks? Are you seriously going to criticize the senator for sticking with his positive and effective campaign theme?

"But now it is more than half a year on, and the post-partisanship of Iowa has given way to the post-nationalism of Berlin, and it turns out that the vague overture is the entire symphony. The golden rhetoric impresses less, the evasion of hard choices strikes one more."

So now we're going to judge Obama's effectiveness as president a mere six months after he won his first primary? Yeah, that makes sense.

"When John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan went to Berlin, their rhetoric soared, but their optimism was grounded in the reality of politics, conflict and hard choices. ... Kennedy didn’t dream of the universal brotherhood of man. ... Reagan didn’t call for a kumbaya moment."

I guess John McCain isn't the only one who needs a history lesson from time to time. Kennedy and Reagan were already president when they gave their Berlin speeches. Are we to judge Obama by the same standards? Sure, he's being a bit presumptuous, but that's not an invitation to criticize him as if he were already the man in charge. The job of a presidential candidate is to stake out policy positions and defend them with "soaring rhetoric." Obama has defined his positions well (FISA bill excepted) and his oratory is second to none. But he wasn't in Berlin to give a policy speech. He was there to start the process of getting America back into Europe's good graces, and to lay out his goal of generally bringing people together. The mere fact that 200,000 people turned out in a foreign capital to hear the message is proof that he can do it.

"The odd thing is that Obama doesn’t really think this way. When he gets down to specific cases, he can be hard-headed."

Duh. Of course he can do what he is pledging to do. His skills at working the system and getting what he wants are unsurpassed. The beauty of his candidacy is that he's great both at whipping crowds into a frenzy over the wholesome, all-American ideals that we've been missing for a long time and at getting down to business.

So, Mr. Brooks, if you're going to criticize him, save it for some legitimate policy debate (there are plenty to be had), and don't insult us with this tripe.

O XKCD, how cruel thou art

The comic is not a very big fan of people who devote their lives to furthering the understanding of literature and culture. I take a small amount of comfort in assuming that my major, classical literature, would be more difficult than generic literary criticism to fake one's way through, simply given the number of languages one must know just to become a grad student. Hmph. Scientists aren't the only legit academics—it's just a few fields that give the rest of us a bad name.

Nas on Wednesday's Colbert Report

I should probably start watching these things earlier than 24 hours after they air, but in case you missed it, Colbert had Nas stop by to talk (and rap) about his crusade against Fox News. ("Nothing says 'thug life' more than a clearly worded argument submitted in writing and supported by the signatures of concerned citizens.") I'm looking forward to the great Nas-O'Reilly debate of '08.

Things People Do

Pencil carvings.

News Jay doesn't want to hear

Windows 7 is looking at a release in 2010. Microsoft is also going back on the offensive with Vista with its latest marketing campaign, where hostile users were blind tested with an existing copy of Vista, and a new OS offering codenamed "Mojave." Users reportedly described the new offering as pleasant; MS then proceeded to shatter their innocence by revealing that Mojave was none other than Vista repainted with a different theme. Moar here.

DNS Cache Poisoning Exploit Made Public

If there ever was a h@x0r equivalent of a WMD, this is it. Means of exploiting a weakness that is present in every standard implementation of DNS was discovered a while back, and now they have been made public. More details on the specifics behind the vulnerability here. This thing's got all the white hats scrambling. I haven't seen this sort of seriousness coming from security researchers in, well, ever. If you haven't heard about this yet, well here it is; better get patching before all your passwords get jacked and google redirects to equestrian imagery of an explicit nature.

Edit: Shit. This was like two days ago. Better late than, never, I suppose.