Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

Testing, testing

OK, this is a test to see if my €7 was well spent….

Do we get an equation here?

As you can see, it’s a mean equation.

EDIT: Grrr…. OK. Let’s see what happens with a picture:

OK, now let’s try some graphics

Hmmm, no Turner prize for me, eh?

EDIT: OK, there should be an equation there now. Which means I have a workaround. I’ll explain more later, once I’ve got some feedback from the guys who took my €7 from me…

"It’s the wrong scanner, Bruce!"

Ouch.
BBC NEWS | UK | England | Norfolk | Hospital’s scanner goes walkabout

Someone at Philips sent the wrong scanner to the wrong Queen Elizabeth Hospital (I guess it’s easy to mix up Kings Lynn and Adelaide). But anyway, the BBC report includes this:

“There’s probably a shipping clerk sitting in an office very miserable,” QEH spokesman Richard Humphries said.

Yes, but which Queen Elizabeth Hospital does he speak for?

Powered by ScribeFire.

Rechtschreibung ist schwierig

I just read this in a discussion on Pharyngula

Go easy on him; spelling is hard.

Even Einstein, the smartest man in the world managed to get “i” before “e”, except after “c” wrong twice in his own name.

Posted by: John McKay | September 24, 2007 12:33 AM

Sheer class, and one I’ll have to remember to steal.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Why I’ve not been blogging much

There’s a monster guarding my laptop

I managed to drive it off for long enough to post this. But it’ll be back.

Oh yes, it’ll be back.

Turf War!

The latest from the Beeb:
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Chernobyl ‘not a wildlife haven’

The back-story is that in 1986 a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl blew up, throwing radioactivity over a wide area. The Soviet authorities decided that the area wasn’t safe, so they evacuated everyone from around it, and basically built a big fence and put up signs with “Keep Out” written on them (in Russian or Ukranian, presumably). This sort of site is irresistible to ecologists: except for the radioactive bits, the habitat should revert back to a natural state.

So, the conclusion of one group of ecologists is that everything is rosy around Chernobyl, with lots of rare species hiding from mankind under a protective mushroom cloud. In contrast, the BBC report another paper by Anders Pape Møller and Tim Mousseau, Species richness and abundance of forest birds in relation to radiation at Chernobyl. This is the abstract:

The effects of low-level radiation on the abundance of animals are poorly known, as are the effects on ecosystems and their functioning. Recent conclusions from the UN Chernobyl forum and reports in the popular media concerning the effects of radiation from Chernobyl on animals have left the impression that the Chernobyl exclusion zone is a thriving ecosystem, filled with an increasing number of rare species. Surprisingly, there are no standardized censuses of common animals in relation to radiation, leaving the question about the ecological effects of radiation unresolved. We conducted standardized point counts of breeding birds at forest sites around Chernobyl differing in level of background radiation by over three orders of magnitude. Species richness, abundance and population density of breeding birds decreased with increasing level of radiation, even after controlling statistically for the effects of potentially confounding factors such as soil type, habitat and height of the vegetation. This effect was differential for birds eating soil invertebrates living in the most contaminated top soil layer. These results imply that the ecological effects of Chernobyl on animals are considerably greater than previously assumed. (emphasis added)

Going on this (unfortunately I can’t get access to the full paper), what the authors found is that individuals and populations suffer more in areas of higher radiation. Makes sense. But look at the bit I bolded. In a scientific paper, this is really sniffy and aggressive: it’s tantamount to accusing someone of distorting reality.

But, if we look at the science of both groups, there doesn’t seem to be any conflict in what they report. The people who are saying that things are going well are comparing the exclusion zone to what it would have been like without the accident. As one of them writes:

However, it cannot be said that radiation is good for wildlife. Instead, the elimination of human activities such as farming, ranching, hunting and logging are the greatest benefit, and it can be said that the world’s worst nuclear power plant disaster is not as destructive to wildlife populations as are normal human activities.

In other words, the accident caused the creation of a thriving conservation area. It wasn’t planned, but it still happened. Isn’t that great?

What Møller and Mousseau show is that, within the exclusion zone, the biodiversity is lower in areas with higher radiation. But they make no mention of comparisons with areas outside the exclusion zone. As far as I can see, there is no conflict between the results of the two groups (but if I see the paper, I might revise that opinion!): the biodiversity could still be higher than outside the zone.

Why the fuss? I don’t know any of the people involved, but it looks like a typical academic spat. One side’s pronouncements have almost certainly bruised the others’ large egos, and this is the response. Because of the way science is supposed to work, we can’t write in our papers that such and such is a tosser (checks: there are 201 papers in Web of Science with Tosser as an author. 172 are by A. Tosser. Hmmmm), so we are reduced to using hints, insinuations and politeness. Once you are familiar with the literature it’s clear what’s going on (and the example here is really not subtle). But those involvedm can still get your name on the BBC website by claiming that there is a real controversy.

This sort of thing happens quite regularly, and the best thing to do is either to step in to calm things down, or sit back with some popcorn to watch. Get a front-row seat in the right conference, and the blood will be lovely…

Powered by ScribeFire.

Rove Move

BBC NEWS | Americas | Top White House aide Rove resigns
Just two thoughts:

• Let’s see how many “rat leaves sinking ship” comments this story gets.
• I don’t think anyone predicted him leaving before Gonzales.

Rejoice! Rejoice!

Powered by ScribeFire.

Oh, the irony

So, the big British political news this morning was the defection of a Tory MP to Labour.  As part of his resignation letter, Quentin Davis wrote

Under your leadership the Conservative party appears to me to have ceased collectively to believe in anything, or to stand for anything.

It has no bedrock. It exists on shifting sands. A sense of mission has been replaced by a PR agenda.

and

Although you have many positive qualities you have three, superficiality, unreliability and an apparent lack of any clear convictions, which in my view ought to exclude you from the position of
national leadership to which you aspire…

Is it just me, or is this, particularly the last part ironic on the day that Tony Blair resigned?  We were hearing exactly the same things about him 10 years ago.

When did Peter Mandelson defect in the other direction?

The Big Harry Potter prediction

I was (re-)writing a lecture for a course I’m giving next week in Asturias, and included an example of prediction.  I thought it was sufficiently interesting to preview here.  Feel free to disagree.

The background: even if you haven’t heard now, you’ll soon be sick of hearing that HP7, Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows is released next month.  There are lots of unknowns, which give us plenty of scope to predict what will happen, and then hope nobody remembers when they’re wrong.

So, I decided to make my own predictions – after all, that is what the lecture is about.  So, I’ve tried to predict how many pages the book will have.  As the course is in statistics, we need data.  For that I use the number of pages in the previous books, and the dates they were published:

Odd, it looks like Ursa Major.  It must be a clue!  Perhaps it’s pointing north, so Harry will have to go to the frozen northlands, be helped by a polar bear in his quest, and in the final climax end up betraying a friend in order to save everything, and break through to a new universe.

*ahem*

Anyway, now we do a linear regression.  Because the course is about Bayesian analysis, I did a Bayesian prediction.  This meant firing up BUGS, fitting a straight line, and predicting the number of pages for a Harry Potter book published in 2007.  I also made a prediction based on the least squares estimate of the line.  This is what I got:

The thick bars are +/-one standard error, the thin bars are the 95% confidence/credible intervals.  Next week I will blather on about why the Bayesian intervals are wider, but for the moment, I want to point out that I’m predicting that HP7 will be about 860 pages long, but with a wide margin of error: there’s a 95% probability that it will be between 500 and 1200 pages long.

And I get paid to do this stuff.

Hello World!

Hello?

*tap tap*

Is this thing on?  

Hmmm, I wonder what this button does.

Ah.

I won’t try that again for a bit.

Err, hello. After wandering the blogosphere for some time, and mugging posts with silly comments and games of Mornington Crescent, I finally decided to create my own blog, so I could pontificate on the world.

For anyone who doesn’t know me, I’m an Englishman who has drifted to Finland, and now work at the University of Helsinki as a researcher, in statistics, ecology, evolutionary biology and such things.  I have mainly been hanging round the science blogs, so I’ll probably post on these matters, but there will also be other things that take my fancy as well (like possible uses for cat hair). 

OK, now I have to think of something to write about.