A city in 140 symbols: Prague

Prague is a charming old city with strikingly large historical center. The hilly landscape favors enjoying magnificent panoramic views.

Humans are not so far from monkeys in drinking

John Fenn and age discrimination

In European academia there is a mandatory retirement age: if a university professor becomes older than 65-68 years (depending on country), he cannot hold a position anymore. This was also the case in the US some 30 years ago, when the Age Discrimination in Employment Act still allowed for the mandatory dismissal of tenured workers.

A few days ago I was told a fascinating story of John Bennett Fenn. He was working at Yale for a quarter of a century, until he reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 1987. After a while, the law was changed to fight the age discrimination, and Fenn became officially allowed to get a job. By that time his ex-position at Yale was still vacant, and he applied for it. Believe you or not, he didn't get it.

Eventually Fenn joined Virginia Commonwealth University in 1994, where he started working on the Electrospray ionization technique, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 2002. John Fenn was 85 by that time and he still remains the oldest Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.

Yale University claimed that Fenn was working on electrospray ionization while still holding a position there. After submitting a lawsuit against Fenn, Yale was awarded over one million dollars and partial patent rights to the technique.

A city in 140 symbols: Vienna

Vienna impresses with its calm old-fashioned style. No haste, no rush, just enjoy the legendary chocolate cake and astounding coffee.

The moronometer

There is a rumor that a renowned Soviet physicist Arkady Migdal thought up a device dubbed "the moronometer". That was a spool of thread placed in a breast pocket of the jacked in such a way that the thread slightly sticks out. Then Migdal was hanging around and meeting people. During such sporadic conversations a company exclaimed "Hey, you've got a thread there!", and tried to detach it, in fact unreeling the spool. Some folks kept pulling the lengthening thread for a while.

According to Migdal, the company's silliness is proportional to the resulting length of the thread.

Reference (Russian)

A city in 140 symbols: Luxembourg

Luxembourg: the admirable capital of the last Grand Duchy in the world. Marvelous architecture is spiced by their own outstanding language.

The Journal of Chemical Physics

I'm reading a terrific review by Dudley Herschbach. In the introduction he mentions, that one of the reasons to establish the Journal of Chemical Physics in 1933 was the impossibility to publish any pure theory in the Journal of Physical Chemistry by that time. This remained the case for another two decades or so, unless plenty of acknowledged theoretical results emerged.

Nowadays pure theory is almost never published in science magazines, such as Nature or Science. We definitely need to find another one.

The Communist Thesis Competition

A PhD student of the MSU Physics Faculty, young communist V. L. Ginzburg, made a commitment to defend his thesis prior to the university's anniversary.

(source)

I don't know exactly, which anniversary is meant there: Ginzburg defended his thesis in 1940, while the MSU was founded in 1755. This might be the 185-years one.

P.S. Don't ask me what the famous theorist is doing in the lab.

Sample Cover Letter for Journal Manuscript Resubmissions

A funny thing by Roy F. Baumeister:

"...As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before doing your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see.

Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish-American War from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom Reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited.

To handle this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the review of relevant literature, a subsection entitled "Review of Irrelevant Literature" that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions in the other reviews..."

More Nobel prize predictions

Chaz Orzel organized a "Nobel Prize Betting Pool" - if you want a guest spot in his blog you may submit your guess as well.

Thomson Reuters came up with some quantitative predictions, based on the citation count.

Let's see what is going to happen next Tuesday, when the prize in Physics will be announced.

Color figures for free

It turned out that since the 1st of August the Journal of Chemical Physics publishes color figures in print for free: here is the Editor's announcement.

Not sure I ever read a printed version of any journal...

A city in 140 symbols: Budapest

Budapest: a fusion of Europe and the Soviet Union. The castle is gorgeous, but the atmosphere is quite scary: we have seen a hold-up there.

Links for 27.09.2009

1) There is no single future for scientific journals - by Michael Nilsen

2) A speech for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences - by Terry Tao

3) Buying success, Saudi style - Physicsworld.com

4) A bad time to get sick? - NHS reports that a number of hospital deaths rises on the day junior doctors join wards (they call it black Wednesday)

Politics and scientific misconduct

It turned out that a paper, published in 2009 by Iranian science minister Kamran Daneshjou has plagiarized a 2002 paper by W. Lee et al. Here is a blog post about it. Later, Nature published a long news article, where other cases of plagiarism are revealed.

This is not a very recent story, somehow: a month ago the Los Angeles Times was doubting the validity of Daneshjou's PhD degree.

This is kind of popular among politicians: a few years ago Russian president Putin was accused in plagiarizing his PhD thesis.

P.S. According to Nature's new investigation there are two Iranian ministers involved.

A city in 140 symbols: Berlin

Berlin: a large city with empty streets and not so many tourist attractions. Very multicultural, green and comfortable for living, though.

A city in 140 symbols

My wife an I very much like to travel, so it would be nice to come up with a "travel guide for twitterers". We propose it to be the following: the city should be described in 140 symbols, including the city name, with no more than two sentences. The next post will be about the city we live in, namely Berlin. If you would like to describe any cities within the format, please leave a comment.

Papers don't need paper anymore

Here is an interesting essay by Paul Graham about the future of publishing, shared on twitter by Michael Nilsen. The main idea is that "economically, the print media are in the business of marking up paper", in other words they do not sell content, but gain money solely for production. This might be a problem in the era of online publishing.

Today is of no doubt that paper versions of scientific journals will not last for long time. The process has already started: the American Chemical Society has basically interrupted printing anything, except for JACS and two review journals. The New Journal of Physics has no paper version from the very beginning.

An application

Today I've got an application for a PhD position by e-mail. Well, this is probably not the best idea to send those to PhD students...

The candle problem

If you are an experimentalist, please just skip it. I'll post something for you tomorrow.

Here is a famous test by Karl Duncker, he created it to study the "functional fixedness". So, you have a candle, a box of thumb-tacks and a book of matches:



The task is to attach the candle to the wall, in such a way that the wax doesn't drip onto the table (or the wall).

This is not kind of complicated, or is it? However the results of Duncker's studies were amazing - people solving the problem just to make fun were much faster than those, who were promised a reward (say, 50 dollars) for being the fastest.

Who will be the future Nobel laureates?

The Wall Street Journal listed possible winners for this year and the future. There is also one scientist from Atomic, Molecular and Optical physics community - Daniel Kleppner (MIT).

Peer-review reviewed

Most of you have probably seen the recent peer-review survey, and the post in Nature blog about it. Well, some scientists are satisfied by referees of their papers, some are not.

What looks a bit weird to me is the "how to improve peer-review" part. Usually there are two ideas:
i) to make the referee's name open, and
ii) to make the review process double-blind, with both names of authors and reviewers hidden from each other.

Well, if we take "a spherical society in a vacuum", say, an ideal one with no politics involved in research, then the first point might probably work. But I don't understand how can one hide the authors' names: people are used to cite their own work, such as an experimental machine they have built or a code they have written. So, the authors will not be obvious only when submitting their first contribution to the field.

That is surprising that 76% of researchers are favoring the double blind system.

How far can you go to get cited?

That's amazing how hard some authors work on promoting their own papers.

Here is a number of submissions to the astro-ph section of the arXive, by time of day, in 10 minute bins:

I took it from the recent investigation by Haque and Ginsparg.

The thing is that 16:00 (US eastern time) is the deadline for the daily submission to the arxive. So, the papers submitted at 16:01 will be the first for the next day and will appear on the top of the daily mailing. You are probably wondering why is that important? Recent research by Dietrich and also the preprint I cited above show that articles appearing the first are more visible and far better cited than others.

No matter how good your work is, just put it on the top of the list.

The greatest math problem ever. Part 2.

As a comment to one of my posts, Dave proposed the following puzzle:

1
11
21
1211
111221

what's the next line?

Links for 11.09.2009

1) Smoking - the blog of John D. Cook

2) Where do the best mathematicians come from - Daniel Lemire's blog

3) How do geeks propose? Male and female viewpoints.

Some metastable states live pretty long

Usually, speaking about metastable states in atoms we assume that those decay very fast, say, faster than a microsecond. But not in a Helium atom - its metastable state lives for extremely long time.

In the ground state helium has two electrons on the 1s shell, one of which can be excited to the 2s shell, using inelastic electron scattering. In such a way the metastable helium He* is obtained. The thing is that the transition 2s->1s is dipole forbidden, and the lifetime becomes huge: a recent investigation of Hodgman with colleagues shows it to be 7870 seconds, which is longer than 2 hours.

Well, that's a good opportunity to take some sleep during the experiment.

Project Eureka

Robert Benea left a comment to "The greatest math problem ever" post, with a link to the Project Eureka website, featuring a huge number of different math and logical puzzles. He also added the problem there, in the "very easy" section.

Two atoms meet in the street...

I've heard a funny anecdote in one of the recent Car Talk shows:

Two atoms meet in the street. One says:
- I feel myself so bad... It looks like I've lost an electron.
- Are you sure?
- Yes, I'm positive!

Sorry guys who already know it.

Conference proceedings vs articles in Computer Science

It came as a surprise to me that in Computer Science conference proceedings are more prestigious than peer-reviewed articles (see comments to this post). Furthermore, people never publish papers in journals, considering those to be a waste of time.

This is an opposite of what is going on in physics/chemistry/biology, so I asked Daniel Lemire on twitter whether that is true. Daniel explained to me that before the on-line era, the publication cycle was way too long for such a fast-developing field like Computer Science. Therefore journals traditionally don't have so much authority as conference proceedings, which are much faster for science communication.

Angry and calm faces

If you look at this image, the face on the left looks like an angry old man, while the one on the right looks like a calm woman.

Step back from your computer five or ten feet, and you will see that the images seem to change places!

The thing is that coarse features and fine features are distinguished differently at different distances.When both sets of features are blended into one image, the mind sees the different feature sets, depending on the distance of the viewer.

Here is the original post. There is also some real research done on this.

Thanks to Valera Yundin for the link.

Bose-Einstein condensation of calcium achieved

Scientists from Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (German national metrology institute) in Braunsweig recently obtained a Bose-Einstein condensate from about 20 000 calcium atoms. This is the first successful attempt to condense alkaline earth species.

Up to now, Bose-condensation was achieved in atomic gases of a number of alkalis (Li, Na, K, Rb, and Cs), and also of ytterbium, chromium, hydrogen, and metastable helium.