Posts archived in Uncategorized
“Okay. I think I’ve got a lead on the noise we’ve been troubleshooting. The noise is coming from a broadcast RF source between 2200 and 2500 MHz. Let’s check with the FCC and see what is allocated to that spectrum to get an idea of where this interference could be coming from.”
“Right.”
Here’s the full FCC allocation map– or at least a snapshot from 2011.
Beautiful integration of a laser cut enclosure, its contents, and its wiring. (link)
For small things, I pick vendors based on a few key criteria, the biggest one is how easy it is to find what I want on their web site. (The other factors are delivery time and if they’ll take a PO without needing any other information from me.)
McMaster-Carr has the best web site I’ve ever used (pictured above). It’s fast and intuitive to find what I’m looking for, and the information I need in order to select the right product is right there on the product pages (I don’t have to click through to a PDF or run a Google search to remind myself which type of aluminum is the lightest). It’s way ahead of the competition. Aesthetically, their all B&W line drawing look is pleasing, but it would be nice if I could get a color photo at some point in the search. Thier search interface works so well that sometimes I just use it to find a manufacturer item code, which I then use to find something on a different company’s web site.
Digikey recently released their Dynamic Catalog and it’s wildly underwhelming. As far as I can tell, it’s simply a reformatting of a portion of their offerings. Their basic search system (pictured below) is showing its age, but it’s decent.
Mouser’s web site is functionally similar (below).
Sparkfun’s web site is well done. They have a relatively limited catalog, so it’s easier for them to keep things nice without needing a complex search interface. What’s really nice is the discussion thread on each item’s page.
Thorlabs’ web site deserves high praise as well.
Related post: Catalogs as Textbooks (popular)
The Labrigger editorial team was a little disappointed in the consistently excellent xkcd when the recently posted list of approximations included:
Number of seconds in a year = 75^4 (accurate to 1 part in 400)
and
Number of seconds in a year = 525600 x 60 (accurate to 1 part in 1400)
In our physics classes, we always used:
Number of seconds in a year = Pi x 10^7 (accurate to 1 part in 200)
It’s still very accurate. And most importantly, the factor of Pi makes for some fascinating cancellations in calculations.
You probably already know that many grants have, in addition to the direct component that goes to the lab, an indirect component that goes to the institution.
US institutions negotiate with the NIH to set a percentage for all awards. For example, here are Harvard’s (relatively high) indirect rates. These indirect funds are used by departments and institutions to keep the lights on, pay admin staff, cover startups, and other important things.
A recent Nature article by Paula Stephan offers this insight into one aspect of how indirect rates are set:
“A US government accounting rule called A21 means that the more debt universities have from construction, the more they can add to grants for overhead costs. If a university borrows $100 million to build a new facility and pays 4% interest, it can increase its indirect rate by including the $4-million interest payment in the calculation. ”
The article concludes with, “Perhaps it is time for deans in the biomedical sciences to rent some of that excess space to their colleagues in chemistry and physics.”
Has biomedical research grown too big? Does it need to contract? Or is it only PhD programs that need to contract? On that topic, the article also suggests making graduate students more expensive to academic labs, and staffing labs with more professional scientists.
Nature has a special issue on the future of PhDs. It’s no secret that unlike the US MD program, PhD programs are not regulated and produce way more PhDs than there are jobs for PhDs.
The articles in the issue offer some suggestions. Many seem straightforward and pragmatic, such as studying the demand for PhDs in the workforce, and then changing PhD program sizes and training to match that demand, rather than the needs of academic laboratories.
I’d like to see this idea get some sort of momentum. We need a Flexner Report for PhDs. It won’t be the same, of course. For many reasons including the fact that medicine is arguably a more stereotyped practice than the varied work that PhDs do. However, the MD system is infinitely better regulated than the PhD system and there’s certainly a thing or two to be learned from it.
Perhaps these issues will be addressed on a field-by-field basis. For example, the prospects for economics PhDs are actually pretty good. They have a decent system in place. Why doesn’t this happen in other disciplines? Here’s one opinion.
The articles in the special issue of Nature offer some interesting statistics, such as the growth of PhDs granted across different countries.
BTW, here’s the annual population growth for some of those countries, for reference. They’re all right around 0-1% for the time period covered above. (source)
Springer is starting a new open access journal called “Scio Cell Biology”. It’s intended to be the first of what they hope will be a whole family of “Scio”-branded journals. They’re a gold open access/libre publisher with a new business model that allows them to offer two excellent features:
1. No author fees.
No authors pay to publish. This includes big rich labs. No color charges, no publication fees, no author fees whatsoever. No institutional fees, society dues, or subscription fees either.
2. Reviewers get paid.
This is the first time I’ve seen anything like this. The amount they’ll get paid hasn’t been announced yet, but they’re hoping that this will let the editors go back repeatedly to the best, most constructive reviewers. They also hope that it will raise the prestige of the journal. The idea is that the reviewers are financially motivated to be as constructive as possible and so authors will want to have their papers reviewed by them.
So what’s their funding model? As a hint, here are some excerpts from their upcoming inaugural issue:
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Sebastian Seung has a new book out, and to promote it he’s having a debate with Tony Movshon. The event sold out in less than two hours. So they added a simulcast in a nearby room, and are streaming it on the web at radiolab.org. It’s Monday, April 2, at 7pm New York time.
Seung’s position (as summarized on the event website): “… research would be radically accelerated by finding and deciphering ‘connectomes,’ maps of connections between neurons. […] connectomics will be as fundamental to neuroscience as genomics is to molecular biology.”
Movshon’s position (as summarized on the event website): “…maps of the brain by themselves cannot offer much insight into how this remarkable organ does its job. Just as a genome by itself is only a blueprint with little power to explain how an organism works, a connectome is at best a framework with little power to explain brain function.”
I doubt anyone would argue that mapping connections isn’t useful. But just how useful? It really comes down to funding priorities: should we spend a billion dollars on connectomics right now? Would that data be really transformative? Or would we get more bang-for-our-buck if we spread that money over several neuroscience research efforts, including connectomics, neurophysiology, genetics, molecular biology, and so on?
There’s an inherent appeal to large, simply-stated projects. And there are great success stories. The advocates of spending big money on connectomics love to draw parallels to the human genome project. The space program is another large, expensive, worthwhile project. But not all big projects are worth the price tag. For example, although it’s a clear, attractive goal to have a permanent manned outpost on the Moon, the price probably isn’t worth it right now. In a similar case of wrong price, wrong time, the Superconducting Super Collider project was abandoned in 1993 after $2 billion spent, although the science was certainly worthwhile. Perhaps spreading those research dollars to other efforts was the right decision at that time.
