Does Which College Matter?

Another essay by Paul Graham packed with great thoughts – this one on hiring, colleges, measuring the performance of people, etc..

Practically everyone thinks that someone who went to MIT or Harvard or Stanford must be smart. Even people who hate you for it believe it. But when you think about what it means to have gone to an elite college, how could this be true? We’re talking about a decision made by admissions officers—basically, HR people—based on a cursory examination of a huge pile of depressingly similar applications submitted by seventeen year olds.
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At most colleges you can find at least a handful of other smart students, and most people have only a handful of close friends in college anyway. The odds of finding smart professors are even better. The curve for faculty is a lot flatter than for students, especially in math and the hard sciences; you have to go pretty far down the list of colleges before you stop finding smart professors in the math department.
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What matters is what you make of yourself. I think that’s what we should tell kids. Their job isn’t to get good grades so they can get into a good college, but to learn and do.

Great article. I believe that setting up an educational environment can create a situation where people have much greater odds of flourishing: engineering schools and silicon valley – Innovative Science and Engineering Higher Education. So those responsible for creating those environments should continue their work. And student everywhere should know they can learn a great deal by making the most of their opportunities.

Science Summary: Photosynthesis

Seed’s latest cribsheet, a one page summary of Photosynthesis:

Through the process of photosynthesis, plants, algae, and bacteria use sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into the oxygen and food that sustain much of life on Earth. This Cribsheet covers the basics of photosynthesis: where it happens, how light is used in the process, and why we think photosynthesis may have triggered the rise of complex life. In addition, we tell you why plants are green and how photosynthesis could temper climate change—if rainforests and oceanic ecosystems aren’t destroyed.

Antibacterial Soaps are Bad

Consumer Antibacterial Soaps: Effective or Just Risky? by Allison E. Aiello, Elaine L. Larson, and Stuart B. Levy

Methods. The PubMed database was searched for English-language articles, using relevant keyword combinations for articles published between 1980 and 2006. Twenty-seven studies were eventually identified as being relevant to the review.

Results. Soaps containing triclosan within the range of concentrations commonly used in the community setting (0.1%ndash0.45% wt/vol) were no more effective than plain soap at preventing infectious illness symptoms and reducing bacterial levels on the hands. Several laboratory studies demonstrated evidence of triclosan-adapted cross-resistance to antibiotics among different species of bacteria.

Conclusions. The lack of an additional health benefit associated with the use of triclosan-containing consumer soaps over regular soap, coupled with laboratory data demonstrating a potential risk of selecting for drug resistance, warrants further evaluation by governmental regulators regarding antibacterial product claims and advertising. Further studies of this issue are encouraged.

The article is not open access unfortunately but this summary was actually pretty good. Via Antibacterial soap: Just Risky

Buckminster Fuller $100,000 Challenge

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge seeks submissions of design science solutions within a broad range of human endeavor that exemplify the trimtab principle. Trimtabs demonstrate how small amounts of energy and resources precisely applied at the right time and place can produce maximum advantageous change.

Solutions should be:

* Comprehensive — a clear demonstration of holistic systems thinking.
* Anticipatory — projectively tracking critical trends and needs; identifying and assessing long term consequences of proposed solutions.
* Ecologically responsible — reflective and supportive of nature’s underlying processes, patterns and principles.
* Verifiable — able to withstand rigorous empirical testing.
* Replicable — capable of being readily undertaken by others.
* Achievable — likely to be implemented successfully and broadly adopted.

How to enter

I Support the Public Library of Science

I support PLoS graphic

I am a fan of the Public Library of Science, as I have mentioned previous. Yesterday I donated some money to support their great efforts. From the PLoS site:

During this time of transition from traditional to open access publishing, we must develop creative ways to support the launch of new journals, the investment in new publishing technologies, and efforts to increase awareness of, and commitment to, open access.

The Future of Scholarly Publication, 2005
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False by John P. A. Ioannidis, PLoS published, 2005
Inhibition of Mutation and Combating the Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance, PLoS published, 2006
Who Needs Sex (or Males) Anyway? by Liza Gross, PLoS published, 2007
Science Journal Publishers Stay Stupid, 2007
YouTube+ for Science from PLoS, 2007

Nanotechnology Breakthroughs for Computer Chips

Nano On Off Switch

Photo: Actual scanning tunneling microscopy images of the naphthalocyanine molecule in the “on” and the “off” state. More images

IBM Unveils Two Major Nanotechnology Breakthroughs as Building Blocks for Atomic Structures and Devices

IBM scientists have made major progress in probing a property called magnetic anisotropy in individual atoms. This fundamental measurement has important technological consequences because it determines an atom’s ability to store information. Previously, nobody had been able to measure the magnetic anisotropy of a single atom.

With further work it may be possible to build structures consisting of small clusters of atoms, or even individual atoms, that could reliably store magnetic information. Such a storage capability would enable nearly 30,000 feature length movies or the entire contents of YouTube – millions of videos estimated to be more than 1,000 trillion bits of data – to fit in a device the size of an iPod. Perhaps more importantly, the breakthrough could lead to new kinds of structures and devices that are so small they could be applied to entire new fields and disciplines beyond traditional computing.

In the second report, IBM researchers unveiled the first single-molecule switch that can operate flawlessly without disrupting the molecule’s outer frame — a significant step toward building computing elements at the molecular scale that are vastly smaller, faster and use less energy than today’s computer chips and memory devices.

In addition to switching within a single molecule, the researchers also demonstrated that atoms inside one molecule can be used to switch atoms in an adjacent molecule, representing a rudimentary logic element. This is made possible partly because the molecular framework is not disturbed.

Richard Palmer on Engineering and Innovation

Q and A: Richard Palmer interview

Palmer: d3o is a soft, flexible material that combines properties associated with liquids and enables them in solids. Normally the study of mechanics of materials in solids is entirely different to the study of fluids and what I have done is combine the two. The fluid properties that are incorporated in d3o allow it to be stretchable, soft, to flow and to feel comfortable. But in an impact, that fluid turns into an elastomer and everything locks together to dissipate, spread and absorb the impact.

CNN: Can you go into the applications of that?
Palmer: You can use d3o in sportswear where you want freedom of movement and dexterity but also want some impact absorption. It’s in footwear, headwear, gloves, clothing and boots.

It means people can get on with their sport without being confounded by pieces of bulky, rigid plastic and cumbersome, stiff foams. It’s the difference between Robocop and Spiderman. Robocop is built with protection around him like a shield; d3o is more like Spiderman, where the protection and the athlete are integrated together. It’s a discrete, small and totally unrestricted layer of protection in the areas where you need it that wouldn’t previously have been possible.

CNN: What advice would you give someone who wanted to become an innovator?
Palmer: Open your eyes to both creative and analytical thinking. Scientists aren’t just boffins; creatives aren’t just mad lunatics. There’s a huge opportunity to dovetail the two. And follow something you believe in.

Five Scientists Who Made the Modern World

Interesting post by John Hawks: Five scientists who made the modern world

If you were to make a list of the top five scientists who ever lived, who would you choose? People are asking the question (also, here, here). So far, it hasn’t been all that interesting. All the lists have two or three names in common, and throw in two or three unexpected names for balance…
But once your list includes Newton, Einstein, and Maxwell, and then you throw in Galileo, well there’s not much room for anything else. None at all if you take Darwin as a given.
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So I decided to do something a little different: What five scientists have had the greatest impact on human life?
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1. R. A. Fisher. His work in population genetics laid the foundations for the vast productivity increases of twentieth-century agriculture. He was far from alone in this, but he stood apart from his contemporaries by inventing many of the statistical methods that would come to define scientific hypothesis testing. Without Fisher’s innovations in statistics, large-scale medical research studies would be meaningless. All this after he established the basis for Mendelian inheritance of continuous characters.
2. Louis Pasteur…
3. Leo SzilÃ¡rd…
4. John von Neumann…
5. This one is for you. Who else belongs on this list?

How about Norman Borlaug? Related: 20 Scientists Who Have Helped Shape Our World. I must admit I am biased – I am a big fan of Sir R.A. Fisher (this link has a number of resources with more information on his work). Partially because he did great stuff but also because I am somewhat connected to him. George Box was R.A. Fisher’s student and married Joan Box. My father was George Box’s student and then colleague. So seeing R.A. Fisher ranked #1 feels nice (even if actual ranking makes little sense… but it can be interesting).

YouTube+ for Science from PLoS

SciVee is a new site by the great people at PLoS, with support from NSF and San Diego Supercomputer Center. It is very early in the launch of this effort but it looks very promising.

SciVee allows scientists to communicate their work as a multimedia presentation incorporated with the content of their published article. Other scientists can freely view uploaded presentations and engage in virtual discussions with the author and other viewers. SciVee also facilitates the creation of communities around specific articles and keywords. Use this medium to meet peers and future collaborators that share your particular research interests.

Of course plenty of great videos are already online but this looks like another great effort at helping improve communication of scientific ideas by the Public Library of Science. And there are advantages to a community lead by scientists that not only posts videos but encourages scientific discussion on the related matters. I am hopeful (and confident) this will become a great resource.

Related: Science and Engineering Webcast Directory – Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Public Lectures – Google Engineering and Technology Webcasts
Originally I posted this to my employers blog: Engineering and…. It turns out it was made public prematurely – SciVee update.

One Species’ Genome Discovered Inside Another’s

Video describing genome inside genome Watch video of Professor Werren describing the genome-in-a-genome at the University of Rochester.

More incredible gene research. Scientists at the University of Rochester and the J. Craig Venter Institute have discovered a copy of the genome of a bacterial parasite residing inside the genome of its host species. The research, reported in today’s Science, also shows that lateral gene transfer—the movement of genes between unrelated species—may happen much more frequently between bacteria and multicellular organisms than scientists previously believed, posing dramatic implications for evolution.

Such large-scale heritable gene transfers may allow species to acquire new genes and functions extremely quickly, says Jack Werren, a principle investigator of the study. If such genes provide new abilities in species that cause or transmit disease, they could provide new targets for fighting these diseases.

The results also have serious repercussions for genome-sequencing projects. Bacterial DNA is routinely discarded when scientists are assembling invertebrate genomes, yet these genes may very well be part of the organism’s genome, and might even be responsible for functioning traits.

“This study establishes the widespread occurrence and high frequency of a process that we would have dismissed as science fiction until just a few years ago,” says W. Ford Doolittle, Canada Research Chair in Comparative Microbial Genomics at Dalhousie University, who is not connected to the study. “This is stunning evidence for increased frequency of gene transfer.”

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