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Permalink Reply by doone on Jun. 1, 2012
In a fjord in Canada scientists have found a landscape similar to one of Jupiter’s icy moons: Europa. It consists of a frozen and sulphurous environment, where sulphur associated with Arctic bacteria offer clues for the upcoming missions in the search for traces of life on Europa.
Permalink Reply by doone on Cozma Shalizi in American Scientist:
D. R. Cox published his first major book, Planning of Experiments, in 1958; he has been making major contributions to the theory and practice of statistics for as long as most current statisticians have been alive. He is now in a reflective phase of his career, and this book, coauthored with the distinguished biostatistician Christl A. Donnelly, is a valuable distillation of his experience of applied work. It stands as a summary of an entire tradition of using statistics to address scientific problems.
Statistics is a branch of applied mathematics that studies how to draw reliable inferences from partial or noisy data. The field as we know it arose from several strands of scholarship. The word “statistics,” coined in the 1770s, originally referred to the study of the human populations of states and the resources those populations offered: how many men, in what physical condition, with what life expectancies, what wealth and so on. Practitioners soon learned that there was always variation within populations, that there were stable patterns to this variation and that there were relations between these variables. (For instance, richer men tended to be taller and live longer.) Another component strand was formed when scientists began to systematically analyze or “reduce” scientific data from multiple observers or observations (especially astronomical data). It became obvious from this research that there was always variation from one observation to the next, even in controlled experiments, but again, there were patterns to the variation. In both cases, probability theory provided very useful models of the variation. Statistics was born from the weaving together of these three strands: population variability, experimental noise and probability models. The field’s mathematical problems are about how, within a probability model, one might soundly infer something about a given process from the data the model generates, and at the same time quantify how uncertain that inference is.
Applied statistics, in the sense that Cox and Donnelly profess, is about turning vexed scientific (or engineering) questions into statistical problems, and then turning those problems’ solutions into answers to the original questions. The sometimes conflicting aims are to make sure that the statistical problem is well posed enough that it can be solved, and that its solution still helps resolve the original, substantive dilemma—which is, after all, the point.
Rather than spoiling any of Cox and Donnelly’s examples, I will sketch one that recently came up in my department.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 10:30 AM | Permalink
Permalink Reply by doone on Jun. 1, 2012
The news everyone has been anticipating…that’s right, the tomato genome has been sequenced! Plant geneticists from 14 countries spent the last 9 years working on the tomatoes’ behemoth genome, which contains over 31,000 genes…that’s more than us humans.
-Gen’Anne’tics
Permalink Reply by doone on In 1920, the brothers Lutz and Heinz Heck, directors of the Berlin and Munich zoos, respectively, began a two-decade breeding experiment. Working with domestic cattle sought out for their “primitive” characteristics, they attempted to recreate “in appearance and behavior” the living likeness of the animals’ extinct wild ancestor: the aurochs. “Once found everywhere in Germany,” according to Lutz Heck, by the end of the Middle Ages the aurochs had largely succumbed to climate change, overhunting, and competition from domestic breeds.1 The last aurochs herds died out in the Polish-Lithuanian Union, where a documented population persisted under royal protection in Mazovia until the middle of the seventeenth century. Historical descriptions of these animals identified the aurochs as similar to domestic oxen, but entirely black, with a whitish stripe running down the back.2 More distant accounts emphasized their ferocity and imposing size. Julius Caesar described the aurochs of Germania as an elephantine creature prone to unprovoked attack.
more from Michael Wang at Cabinet here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 06:29 AM | Permalink
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