A document by The Winnower. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Henry Rzepa. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Henry Rzepa. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Sven Kochmann. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Anthony Salvagno. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Anthony Salvagno. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Ross Mounce. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Michael Oman-Reagan. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Michael Oman-Reagan. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Henry Rzepa. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Henry Rzepa. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Jacob Jolij. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Henry Rzepa. Click on the document to view its contents.

Creating rankings might seem like a vain exercise in belly-button gazing, even more so for people so unlike that kind of things as programmers.  However, in this paper we will try to prove how creating city (or province) based on rankings in Spain has led to all kinds of interesting effects, including increased productivity and community building.

Factor analysis of allele frequencies was used to identify signals of polygenic selection on human intelligence. Four SNPs which reached genome-wide significance in previous meta-analyses were used. Allele frequencies for 26 population were obtained from 1000 Genomes. The resulting factor scores were highly correlated to average national IQ (r=0.92). A regression of IQ differences between subcontinental groups on the 4 SNPs g factor and an index of genome-wide genetic distances showed the former was an independent and significant predictor (Beta= 1.14), whereas genome-wide distances lost all predictive power. This finding suggests that the relationship between the 4 SNPs g factor and IQ is due to natural selection on a specific phenotype and not the result of a spurious correlation arising from genome-wide evolutionary processes such as random drift or migrations. A regression of IQs on genetic factor scores of developed countries was used to estimate the predicted genotypic IQs of developing countries. The residuals (difference between predicted and actual scores) were negatively correlated to per capita GDP and Human Development Index, implying that countries with low socioeconomic conditions have not yet reached their full intellectual potential.

An experiment in Post-Proposal Peer Review (PPrPR) The grant proposal which follows was submitted to the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) on January 06 2015. We are making the proposal publicly available, as an experiment in online peer review of a grant proposal (rather than a research paper), via The Winnower and PubPeer as both sites have a fundamental commitment to open debate and discussion of academic research and ideas. The PI (PM) will blog about the progress (and ultimate fate) of the proposal at the Institute of Physics’ physicsfocus blog. Details of the format of EPSRC proposals are available here. The proposal is structured according to these guidelines (although we have forgone the requirements re. font size/type so as to produce a document in line with The Winnower’s ‘style file’). We have not provided detailed information on costings but an edited version of the “Justification of Resources” section of the proposal is included. The sections below are taken from what is known as the Joint-Electronic Submission (Je-S) form associated with the grant, the detailed Case for Support, followed by the Pathways to Impact statement, and the Justification of Resources section.

Twitter is a useful medium for the exchange of ideas, but it is not well suited to a thorough exposition of complex topics. In one recent exchange, I engaged author and journalist Peter Hitchens (@clarkemicah) on the relative harms of alcohol and cannabis, a discussion he later dissected in his blog (http://dailym.ai/13Dc1Rv). Having repeatedly attempted without success to post a reply on his blog, I have elected to do so here.

Medical students and residents often seek advice on a variety of topics from more senior physicians. Herein, I share the collected wisdom of 40 practicing physicians on topics of general interest to undergraduate and graduate medical trainees. Much of this advice is applicable to physicians already in practice.

Relativization: The act of constructing a physical model which obeys the Einstein equivalence principle. This paper corrects and extends the initial results regarding black hole thermodynamics revealed in the preceding paper. In the process of correcting and extending those initial upper bounds on the intensity of Hawking radiation from a micro black hole, I will Quantitative find much more. It will be demonstrated that a Schrodinger like equation derived in the previous papers once solved in position basis with the proper boundary conditions will give a model which works on any imaginable length scale. This will be worked out analytically with accuracy precision by the aid of

A recent conversation on Twitter led to the suggestion that someone compile a list of physiological effects of concern for BOLD. That is, a list of potentially confounding physiological changes that could arise sympathetically in an fMRI experiment, such as altered heart rate due to the stress of a task, or that could exist as a systematic difference between groups. What follows is the result of a PubMed literature search (mostly just the abstracts) where I have tried to identify either recent review articles or original research that can be used as starting points for learning more about candidate effects. Hopefully you can then determine whether a particular factor might be of concern for your experiment.   This is definitely not a comprehensive list of all literature pertaining to all potential physiological confounds in fMRI, and I apologize if your very important contribution didn’t make it into the post. Also, please note that I am not a physiologist so if I go seriously off piste in interpreting the literature, please forgive me and then correct my course. I would like to hear from you (comments below, or via Twitter) if I have omitted critical references or effects from the list, or if I have misinterpreted something. As far as possible I’ve tried to restrict the review to work in humans unless there was nothing appropriate, in which case I’ve included some animal studies if I think they are directly relevant.   A final caution before we begin. It occurs to me that some people will take this list as (further) proof that all fMRI experiments are hopelessly flawed and will use it as ammunition. At the other extreme there will be people who see this list as baseless scare mongering. How you use the list is entirely up to you, but my intent is to provide cautious fMRI scientists with a mechanism to (re)consider potential physiologic confounds in their experiments, and perhaps stimulate the collection of parallel data that might add power to those experiments.   (This article first appeared as a blog post on practicalfmri.blogspot.com.)

Part 2 from a 2-part series reflecting on lessons learned from OpenCon 2014.

How we can align open communication seen on blogs with career-advancement garnered from publications.  Three key aspects of scholarly communication need to be made available for bloggers: 1) DOIs, 2) Review, and 3) Archival.

Organizing this symposium was a tremendous learning process for all of us. Here, we record the process we used, and the guidelines we’d follow (or not!) if we were to do it all over again. We hope they’re helpful to junior scientists looking to organize meetings of any kind, but especially those dealing with systemic issues affecting the research enterprise.   The organizing tips are presented below in topical “chunks” arranged in the chronological order we found they first required attention. However, most chunks have tasks that need to be executed over a long time scale. To facilitate the management of this, we assigned individual people to coordinate many of them.   If you’d like to organize your own symposium on these topics, please feel free to use whatever assets we have that may be useful to you. We would be delighted to offer additional advice; please feel free to contact us at info@futureofresearch.org. We’d love to help spread the word about your meeting!

A document by Lorraine Chuen. Click on the document to view its contents.