Balancing One-Wheeled Scooter
Friday, March 28th, 2008The problem with the Segway, as I see it, is that it screams “I’m a cashed-up dork.” The following is much cooler…
Archive for March, 2008
I’m boned!
Monday, March 24th, 2008The New York Times reports on a study published in Oikos, an Ecology journal, describing a correlation between increasing beer consumption in Czech avian ecologists and decreasing publication output and number of citations.
Though the public may tend to think of scientists as exceedingly sober, scientific schmoozing is often beer-tinged, famous for producing spectacular breakthroughs and productive collaborations, countless papers having begun as scrawls on cocktail napkins.
…
“It’s rather devastating to be told we should drink less beer in order to increase our scientific performance,†Dr. Symonds said.
I’m living in a horrible nightmare world! I have a brewery in my kitchen! There’s a beer tap in my fridge! My PhD advisor wears a Victoria Bitter t-shirt to the lab!
Thankfully, the usual caveats with respect to causation vs. correlation apply, as do the less usual concerns of generalizing Czech ornithologists to the general scientific population (though Shelley does have an African Grey…). Still, I’ll be needing a beer about now.
Link to Article: Grim (2008) A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecolosgist. Oikos, 117(4), p.484.
(Stats for above figure: Shows pooled data, open circles are from 2002 survey, closed are from 2006 survey, with pooled r= -0.52, p= 0.0008.)
