What do Americans and Finns know about Ammonia?

Via Jon Eisen on twitter, Hal Levin at MicroBEnet has gotten himself into trouble with this post (now deleted as not reflecting the views of MicroBEnet). The part that annoyed readers (including me, after seeing the tweet calling it out). On May 8th, CNN reported on “Top 20 most polluted cities in the world.” An esteemed colleague […]

Instacast

I’ve been frustrated by Apple’s Podcasts app on my iPhone, so I decided to try InstaCast on the recommendation of a friend on twitter.  Initial impressions: The first thing I noticed was that when you launch it for the first time, it doesn’t ask if you want to import Podcast subscriptions from iTunes or the Podcasts […]

RoomScan Pro

Today we went to a seminar about remodeling with Stearns design-build to get some ideas about some remodeling plans. In talking about things, I decided that we really need a better diagram of our house layout. It doesn’t have to be super precise, but I want a starting point to sketch from. I thought there might […]

Who gets NIH grants and is it a problem?

Drugmonkey posts a graph from Grantome.org showing distribution of grants by institution. A series of follow-up posts at Grantome includes one that looks beyond the top 50 institutions and concludes: The NIH website reports that more than 80% of its budget goes to over 2,500 universities and research institutions. Yet for the R01 – which is arguably […]

Do architects get what we do in the lab?

This post is what I wrote in February of 2009 on the old blog. I was prompted to dig this post up by Virginia Postrel tweeting about this article in Slate. I pulled the text from a database dump of the old blog. The images are old too, but were not in the original post (found them in my […]

Adventures with the iPhone music app

My wife and I like to joke that stores do their market research by figuring out what we like a lot and then discontinuing those items. That’s how I feel about Apple’s decision a couple of iOS upgrades ago to decouple Podcasts and iTunes U from Music. I like to listen to podcasts. I listen to […]

Human subjects and education research

At Retraction Watch, there’s a story of a paper about ethics training retracted due to IRB human subjects protocol problems. We tend to think of human subjects research as involving things like drug trials, but a lot of it is things like this: This was an IRB-approved paper-pencil study investigating how certain features of ethics […]