Fairness, finally!

The International Ice Hockey Federation just announced that Canada has won the bronze medal in the 1964 world championships! (story) As The National reported a couple of nights ago, the Canadian team thought they had won the bronze medal and showed up at the medal ceremony at the Olympics (at the time the world championship was decided at the Olympics) only to find that the tiebreak rules had been changed after their final game, thereby giving the bronze to Czechoslovakia and dropping Canada to fourth place.

Progressive public health policy

Finally schools are getting serious about addressing public health issues: Now in Québec, school nurses can distribute birth control pills (story). So much for la revanche des berceaux....

Automatic CS Papers

Has everyone seen this? It's a program that automatically generates CS papers; all you have to do is specify the author names and it generates a silly paper for you, complete with figures! :)

New York Times editorial on the 50th anniversary of Einstein's death

For those of us that bemoan the lack of scientifically accurate commentary and reporting for lay people, there is an excellent discussion of quantum physics and relativity in today's New York Times Op-Ed page. I'm not sure why a 50th anniversary prespective on Einstein's life and work belongs on the Op-Ed page, but the content itself is excellent.

A $2 bill can land you in jail

From a diary at Daily Kos: a man was arrested for trying to spend $2 bills. Quoth a police spokesman: "It's a sign that we're all a little nervous in the post-9/11 world." Thanks for ruining our currency, Osama!

I'm NOT dead...

Right well this is just a weird story about how computers have taken over...
For those of you who don't know, I broke my left thumb. It was a fluke accident during Taekwondo practice.
This morning, I had my 1 week follow up appointment to get another xray and to check to make sure the cast was ok. But when I went to check in, I got more than the usual set of identifying questions (Name, Birthday, Address... followed by "are you sure you're Delphine?"). Then, I was nicely informed that I was deceased! But of course, it was possible that the computer was wrong since I'm standing right there (actually the funny part was that the computer would warn the receptionist that I was deceased but then let her make appointments for me anyway... I wonder how many deceased people need to see the orthopaedist...)
So I got it straightened out after a while (it was a computer "glitch" apparently) but it's just weird to be informed that I'm perhaps not as alive as I think I am...

Avast!

Testing out bloggarrr...
☠

Statisticsbusters

I'm quite a fan of the show Mythbusters on the Discovery channel. It's fun to watch them light things on fire, drop things from heights, and blow things up in the name of science. And it's refreshing to see science being used in order to debunk some obviously false myths.

I was less than impressed with their conclusions from tonight's experiment to see whether yawning is contagious, though. The setup: get 50 volunteers, dividing them into two groups. One-third are placed individually in isolation as a control; the other two-thirds receive the same treatment, but the greeter first yawns at them. 25% (I think) of the control group yawned in the allotted time, compared to 29% of the experimental group. The average yawn time was 9.6 minutes in the control group versus 9 minutes in the experimental group. From this the mythbusters concluded that the hypothesis is confirmed. I argue that the test is inconclusive, since the result is not even 1-sigma.

Of course, the mythbusters often have to work in suboptimal conditions with an insufficient sample size to test their myths, and in many cases one can legitimately argue with their methods. Since it's all for entertainment purposes (and statistics is hardly entertaining), all of this is excusable. Still, it's unfortunate that a show that advances the scientific method would so cavalierly brush aside statistical considerations.

The Tech's web presence

So, is it just me, or is The Tech's web site updated a lot less than it used to be. I like to do a quick browse through the MIT news every few weeks, but the current home page is still showing the March 11th issue. I seem to remember the site being updated twice a week when we were there... is the paper having problems?