Hee

1) At a poster presentation today, a certain assistant professor (from a ivy league school, no less) asked the author a question, along the lines of:
Your filtering method is wrong because it smooths all out the noise. If I have a data point that is very different, you are discarding it.

-__- Hello. Isn't that the entire point of filtering, to capture the global structure? And, it is retarded to look at just 1 data point. You should be considering the curve, especially if your modality suffers from noise.

2) I am trying to make my poster to read "screw you bitch" in photos, and only in photos. Any ideas?

3) I am too cheap to exchange my drink coupon for a coke, and got a gin and tonic instead. That didn't go too well.

4) As it turns out, Benji will be staying a West Coast dog. He is not coming to be a "bang bang dawg"

3 steps of attending a conference

1. During initial version submission, confuse the Boss' first and last names
2. During final version submission, double the Boss's last name, ie John Smith Smith, instead of John Smith
3. During registration, misspell the School's name.

Science 8 June 2007:
Vol. 316. no. 5830, p. 1405
DOI: 10.1126/science.316.5830.1405

News of the Week

ACADEMIC TENURE:
MIT Colleague Quits to Protest Sherley Dismissal

The head of a biomedical innovation center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge has resigned to protest the school's treatment of an African-American colleague in the biological engineering department. Frank Douglas, who is also black, says he will leave MIT on 30 June--the termination date for his colleague, James Sherley. An MIT spokesperson says that Douglas's decision would have no impact on the institution's stance regarding Sherley, who went on a 12-day hunger strike in February after being denied tenure (Science, 16 February, p. 920).

A stem cell researcher and the winner of a 2006 Director's Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Sherley began a fast on 5 February to fight what he claims was a racist decision by MIT to reject his bid for tenure. MIT says that race played no role in the decision. When Sherley ended his strike, MIT put out a statement expressing a commitment to address his concerns about fairness and to "continue to work toward resolution of our differences with Professor Sherley." In the weeks that followed, however, MIT administrators made it clear that they would neither reopen Sherley's tenure case nor review how his grievances had been handled.

Douglas is a chemist and pharmaceutical industry veteran who was hired in 2005 to establish MIT's Center for Biomedical Innovation. He holds faculty appointments in the science, engineering, and management schools. In a 1 June letter to MIT Associate Provost Claude Canizares, Douglas expressed dismay that MIT, "after having agreed to arbitration, which led to Prof. Sherley ending his hunger strike, now, has negated that agreement and insists on his departure on June 30th, 2007. … I leave because I would neither be able to advise young Blacks about their prospects of flourishing in the current environment, nor about avenues available to effect change when agreements or promises are transgressed."

Douglas says he has no opinion on whether Sherley deserved tenure but is frustrated by MIT's "lack of desire" to resolve the issue. "Does the institution really believe that Prof. Sherley would have ended his hunger strike if he really understood that 'continue(ing) to work towards resolution of differences' meant no arbitration process and a pre-agreement that he should leave regardless of the outcome of the resolution of those differences?," he asks, saying that as a minority, he felt obligated to speak out.

In a 3 June reply to Douglas, Canizares wrote, "I can state categorically that MIT did not agree, implicitly or explicitly, to arbitration or to extend Professor Sherley's faculty appointment beyond June 30." The next day, MIT issued a statement saying that Douglas's decision was based on inaccurate information, and that it hoped he would reconsider his resignation.

Outsiders familiar with MIT's environment do not think Douglas's departure will have much impact. "The administration is inclined to take the same approach that governments take while dealing with terrorists: They won't negotiate," says Philip Phillips, an African-American solid state physicist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who was denied tenure at MIT 16 years ago. Instead, he predicts, MIT will treat Douglas as it did Sherley--"as just another irrational person."

Ouch

It must hurt to get such a comment from a reviewer

"The fact that for blah blah, one can factorize the blah blah matrix from the eigenvalue decomposition is also well known. For instance, it can be found as a homework problem in courses taught by Prof. A andB
2003: problem 3 of homework 5 at url of Prof A's course
2006: problem 4 of homework 5 at url of Prof B's course"

Heh heh

An email from the friendly school librarian:

Broad Impact: Refreshing your statistics knowledge

Five Faculty of 1000 Biology members have recently singled out an Exceptional Broad Impact paper that is of high relevance to researchers in all fields of Biology, as it provides guidance to biologists for navigating the often tricky world of data representation -- in particular the use of error bars.

"This paper should be read by anyone who is trying to present experimental data graphically." comments David Stephens (University of Bristol, UK), Faculty of 1000 Biology member for Cell Biology.

Andy Groves (House Ear Institute, USA), a Faculty of 1000 Biology member for Developmental Biology goes on to say "This wonderful article clearly explains how experimental variation is measured and displayed, and describes how different kinds of error bars can mean very different things. This paper is a must read for every scientist who thinks that triplicate plates from a single experiment counts as n=3 !!!!!"

"Personally, I have filed the pdf in a safe place, and I plan to consult it every time I send a graph for publication." concludes Etienne Joly (CNRS, France), a Faculty of 1000 Biology Member for Immunology.

Hmmm.

Free donuts at Krispy Kreme btw

Today,

1) I realize that I have two new UGs under my wing. Now I have no idea what to tell them to do.
2) Trip to dentist= Ouch. Pain. Swelling.