America runs on quarters

About two years ago, before leaving the United states, I've posted the following "study" friends-only on facebook. However, I feel that it might fit the format of this blog, so I'm reposting it here.

Everyone knows that the US monetary system is kind of screwed up. I you think America runs on Dunkin' Donuts – bullshit, America runs on quarters. Living in the US is a constant chase after the 25¢ coins: you need them for everything, whether it's parking, candy machines, or laundry.

The screwed up thing is that the rest of coins (1¢, 5¢, and 10¢) are absolutely useless. It's no Europe, in a store the cashier won't ever ask to look for ten cents, since she or he knows you don't have those. Instead, every American possesses a huge can at home where the coins are accumulated (you can cash them in a special machine later, to make sure that the worthless cycle continues).

And I was not an exception. This Mexican coffee tin filled up exactly by the end of my 3-year stay.

Recently, my old friend Valery Yundin was visiting and (after a couple of beers) we decided to estimate how much the coins were worth. Valery and I weighed the can (it was 3.5 kg) and looked up the mass of each coin on the Treasury Department website. Then we used two competing models to deduce the frequency with which 1¢, 5¢, and 10¢ occur:

(1) We assumed that the distribution of 1¢, 5¢, and 10¢ is uniform.

(2) We actually measured the coin distribution for a small sample of ~10 coins and assumed it is the same in the bulk.

Naively, one would expect (1) to be much less accurate than (2), since 1¢ is likely to occur 4 times more often than 5¢, for instance. However, this doesn't seem to be true: for the two cases we got very close estimates, of $57.33 and $57.48 respectively.*

Today I cashed the can and got $59.18 back.

You might be like: "Gosh, are you particle physicists or what?** Who else would get a 2.9% discrepancy and call it 'accurate' ?" Now watch my hands. Valery visited exactly 1 month ago, and I kept accumulating coins after he left. One month is 1/35th of my total stay in the US.

You know what I'm aiming at, alright. Linear extrapolation gives: $57.48 + $57.48/34 = $59.17

What do kids say these days? "Science works, bitches?" I guess that must be it.

Take care,

Misha

* Perhaps it's related to the way the prices are formed in the US – the xx.99¢ and xx.95¢ are too frequent, which biases the distribution. But I cannot prove that.

** Valery actually is.

The pressure to publish pushes down quality

An interesting read by Daniel Sarewitz in the recent Nature issue. It is a follow-up on the old discussion on the importance of the quality of the research papers as opposed to their quantity, and that the former should rather be taken into account to evaluate scientists for jobs, grants, and prizes.*

He gives an interesting example of poor quality, which is quite shocking from my naïve perspective:

"...The quality problem has been widely recognized in cancer science, in which many cell lines used for research turn out to be contaminated. For example, a breast-cancer cell line used in more than 1,000 published studies actually turned out to have been a melanoma cell line. The average biomedical research paper gets cited between 10 and 20 times in 5 years, and as many as one-third of all cell lines used in research are thought to be contaminated, so the arithmetic is easy enough to do: by one estimate, 10,000 published papers a year cite work based on contaminated cancer cell lines. Metastasis has spread to the cancer literature."

Take care,

Misha

* The main problem is, as usual, that the committee members rarely read the actual papers, and stick with the single-number estimates (such as journal impact-factors or h-index) instead.