I’ve had some very bad news, and its hard to cope. I appreciate all the support & emails & friends I’ve made through this blog. I will try & post from time to time, but it’s not going to be every day.
hard times & a brief break
3
From RockTalk – Learn More About the Principles of Peer Review
Learn More About the Principles of Peer Review
I have to say when NIH says “this report is for you”, my eyes roll back in my head, my tongue sticks out and I fall foaming at mouth onto the ground. Who the hell are you kidding? NIH reports are useful (as Drug Monkey has demonstrated over and over), but mining them for information is not for the faint of heart, nor have I found one that is useful for young/new/ESI investigators. However…
The pdf is actually not that bad. They had someone who can write do the writing. They have pictures of a diverse group (although, as is true of everything in this world today, the folks are MUCH younger than I have ever noticed in reality). There are some good links at the end (with minimal info on why you might want to go to these links):
And some videos that don’t work well from the pdf:
NIH Peer Review Revealed Provides a front-row seat to a review peer review meeting.
I’ll put others up later on.
Amazing return of walkabout software disk
My disks for Adobe Illustrator went walkabout 4 months ago. I sent emails to everyone, no accusations, just “I have a new computer, need the disks”. Nothing happened. Someone left the lab a month later. Another set of emails, and some frantic searching (yes it is possible that it was filled with the umpteen CD’s that have raw data from a machine that won’t write to an external hard disk – fuck Toshiba).
Then , lo… a miracle occurred, and the disks reappeared on a general lab table. No note. No nothing. I’m glad to have ‘em back.
Sidney Harris is a fucking genius.
the Dalai Lama on education
Too long for twitter
We need to understand the inadequacy of an educational system so slanted towards material values. The solution is not to give an occasional lecture, but to integrate ethics into the educational curriculum. To do this effectively requires a secular ethics, free of religious influence, based on common sense, a realistic view and scientific findings.
Type 1 and Type 2 errors – p-values
Type 1 and type 2 are lousy names. They convey no information about what they are. Once, I asked an office mate who was finding new species and naming them to name if sie would be willing to name one after me (I was younger and brasher). Sie said “hell, no, that name will convey nothing about the species” as in H. longifolia or H. bigantleria
Anyway type 1 error is the type you are always seeing associated with p=.05. It is the probability of being wrong if you reject the null hypothesis. That is, if you say that red fish are bigger than blue fish, based on your samples of each, you could see this much difference in size between them just by chance. You roll a single die several times and get the following distributions – these are the number of times you rolled each number.
Die 1:
This is about what you would expect for 100 roles – about equal numbers of each. Now, here is what your labmate (the one who is stealing your data, you think) got, with hir own die:
This is NOT what you expect. All those 6′s? nearly 50% 6′s? Now, of course it is possible that someone would roll a die 100 times and get a 6 47 times. But how likely??? That is the question that p-values answer.
In the olden days, when I was young, you had to calculate this crap by hand, or look it up in a table that never ever made sense. But now, with the advent of modern society, decafe coffee, no smoking in restaurants, it is possible to have it computed for you. That is the p-value. What is the probability of seeing this by chance? p=0.05 tells you how much chance. Or 1 in 20 times you would see this much difference by chance.
And yes, sie is stealing your data (p = 0.00000012 in the above case).
There is good news and then there is the frustrating news about the research landscape
My MD/PhD student turned her thesis in today. She finished and defended and published in time to rejoin her 3rd year clinics on time. Others have done this by virtue of doing what I would call a master’s thesis – basically 1-2 first authored published papers. Many have just taken another 6 months, and eased themselves in over the next 3 months, essentially taking more time. Her thesis included five first authored publications, and several co-auths with others in the lab. She’s the one who got her own NIH funding –posted at Isis, can’t find link 
She’s a good person, on top of it.
This is more than a brag post. It is a post of concern and of frustration. I have lots of trouble with Teh Pizicians. De EM-DEEs. The ones who thing a degree means that they can do research. A PhD doesn’t mean you can do research, let alone good research either. Its supposed to be a marker of that, but we all know people who slip through.
My problem is that MD’s get a large dollop of arrogance mixed in with their morning vitamins. It is obviously an idiosyncratic combination of brains, heart, endurance, training and personality to what makes a good researcher. I know that I had to learn to be researcher. I just don’t think that many clinicians learn. They it came in that morning vitamin mix.
More to say on this… but I gotta go write an exam.
