Correlation between Genetic and Geographic Structure in Europe

by Lao, Oscar et al. (2008)

Full Text Available in Current Biology; See also this article in the IHT

Maybe not that weird, but definitely interesting. Biologists from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and others have constructed a genetic map of Europe. They investigated genotype data from 2,514 individuals belonging to 23 different subpopulations, widely spread over Europe. Although they found only a low level of genetic differentiation between subpopulations, the existing differences were characterized by a strong continent-wide correlation between geographic and genetic distance. This resulted in the following genetic map of Europe (click to enlarge).

The IHT explains: the genetic map of Europe bears a clear structural similarity to the geographic map. The major genetic differences are between populations of the north and south (the vertical axis of the map shows north-south differences, the horizontal axis those of east-west). The area assigned to each population reflects the amount of genetic variation in it.

The map also identifies the existence of two genetic barriers within Europe. One is between the Finns (light blue, upper right) and other Europeans. It arose because the Finnish population was at one time very small and then expanded, bearing the atypical genetics of its few founders. The other is between Italians (yellow, bottom center) and the rest. This may reflect the role of the Alps in impeding free flow of people between Italy and the rest of Europe.

But the study provides more than just an interesting picture. The authors explain that understanding the genetic structure of the European population is important, not only from a historical perspective, but also for the appropriate design and interpretation of genetic epidemiological studies.

Filed in: Europe, Science, Weird Science | Comment »

Now here is an interesting fact. I knew that the United States was becoming ever more dependent on foreign PhD students, especially in the so-called STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths). I also knew that an increasing proportion of them come from Asia, and China in particular. But this article in Science surprised me nonetheless:

A new study has found that the most likely undergraduate alma mater for those who earned a Ph.D. in 2006 from a U.S. university was … Tsinghua University. Peking University, its neighbor in the Chinese capital, ranks second. Between 2004 and 2006, those two schools overtook the University of California, Berkeley, as the most fertile training ground for U.S. Ph.D.s (see graph). South Korea’s Seoul National University occupies fourth place behind Berkeley, followed by Cornell University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOURCE: CPST ANALYSIS OF SED, 2006

HT: Nanopolitan

Filed in: Asia, Mobility, Science, USA | 1 Comment »

Social networking has gone academic. The Web 2.0 principles were already introduced in the field of science and innovation by the iBridge Network. Facebook brought social networking to the university, but it’s main goal was not exactly academic in nature. LinkedIn brought social networking to the professional sphere. Recently there have been some initiatives that bring social networking to academic life: Researchgate and Graduate Junction.

The Graduate Junction was established by Daniel Colegate and Esther Dingley, graduate  students in respectively Chemistry and Education at the University of Durham, in the United Kingdom. They set up The Graduate Junction because they were - in their own words - frustrated by a feeling of isolation in their own research projects and wanted to know who, if anyone, was doing similar research. I have had a quick look at it and it looks good and has the potential to be a valuable tool for graduate students. Much of its success obviously depends on the number of participants it will attract. If I still were a student I would definitely sign up and become member of groups like this.

Researchgate targets a larger community. It is meant as a networking tool for all academics and researchers. It is set up by three students from Germany (one of them now being at Harvard). Two of them in Medicine, one in Computer Science. The concept is backed by a world wide network of experts and advisers. Researchgate has big aspirations. Next to a networking tool, it sees itself as the start of a more profound change where researchers take more and more control over their publications and research findings.

So where will all this lead? Well…my experiences with these new tools for - often conservative - academics have not always been positive. Nevertheless I’m positive about these new tools. Graduate Junction has the advantage that it targets a younger group of people and probably more open to these kind of innovations. In addition, I think that the need of these tools might be more substantial with graduate students than with researchers in general. This is simply because the ‘normal’ channels such as journals and conferences are not so readily available to them and don’t provide that many opportunities for direct interaction.

Researchgate on the other hand has a more professional look and already is backed by a large network of academics. It also seems to provide more advanced technological opportunities like importing endnote libraries and linking with databases such as PubMed. I would love to see a further expansion to enable more interaction and maybe new opportunities for open peer reviewing.

I hope both initiatives will succeed. It’s about time for the academic community to start using the technological opportunities available. Both might turn out to be great new opportunities for inter-organisational, interdisciplinary and international cooperation.

Filed in: Higher Education, Internet, Science, Technology, World | 2 Comments »

The Editorial Board of Beerkens’ Blog decided it’s time for a new regular item. Under this new item, I’ll now and then report on a peculiar, remarkable, eccentric, extraordinary, unconventional, atypical, strange, funny, odd or bizarre study. In other words: a case of Weird Science. Here’s the first one.

Optimal boarding method for airline passengers

by Jason H. Steffen 

Full Text Available in Arxiv / Physics & Society [PDF]

The problem

Several passenger boarding schemes are used by the airline industry in effort to quickly load passengers and their luggage onto the airplane. Since the passenger boarding time often takes longer than refueling and restocking the airplane its reduction could constitute a significant savings to a particular carrier, especially for airplanes which make several trips in a day.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that boarding from the front to the back is the worst case but that boarding from the back to the front is optimal or nearly so. Indeed, this is the strategy that is often employed, boarding passengers in blocks from the rear of the plane to the front. In this case, conventional wisdom only provides an answer that is half right. The worst  boarding method is, indeed, to board the plane from front to back. As this study shows, however, boarding the airplane from the back to the front is very likely the second worst method.

The Findings

By boarding passengers in a manner that allows several passengers to load their luggage simultaneously the boarding time can be dramatically reduced. This result contradicts conventional wisdom and practice that loads passengers from the back of the airplane to the front. Indeed, it shows that loading from the back to the front is little different from the worst case of loading from the front to the back. The goal of an optimized boarding strategy should focus on spreading the passengers throughout the length of the airplane instead of concentrating them in a particular portion of the cabin.

By boarding in groups where passengers whose seats are separated by a particular number of rows, by boarding from the windows to the aisle, or by allowing passengers to board in random order one can reduce the time to board by better than half of the worst case and by a significant amount over conventional back-to-front blocks—which, while better than the worst case performed worse than all other block loading schemes. The primary drawbacks for any of these methods is likely to be psychological instead of practical. Groups of passengers who wish to board together would be an issue to investigate from both a customer satisfaction point of view and as a component in a more detailed model.

If a workable method to have passengers line up in an assigned order could be found—and it likely may be employed already, then there is the potential for a substantial savings in time. Such a savings would most likely benefit flights between nearby cities where a particular airplane would make several trips in a given day since it might allow one or two additional flights. Or, it might allow an airline to reduce the number of gates that it requires to meet its obligations since each gate would be cleared more rapidly.

Filed in: Science, Travel, Weird Science | 1 Comment »

After 9/11 the number of international students in the US dropped considerably due stricter visa requirements and security regulations. Just now that the US is relaxing the regulations, the Netherlands seems to become more restrictive towards international students, at least those from specific countries.

My former university - the University of Twente - this week announced that they had rejected a number of Iranian students and that they will not be able to process new applications from Iranian students. Is the University of Twente (UT) getting paranoid? No! They are acting according to a United Nations resolution and a following decision by the Dutch Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They had requested universities to give a formal guarantee that the Iranian visa applicants do not have access to certain specific scientific knowledge (read: nuclear knowledge). UT’s president explained:

Students have the right to attend all courses and they should be able to develop freely. We don’t want to exclude students from education and therefore we cannot give the guarantee that the Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs demand from us. (…) As a university we cannot exclude the possibility that Iranians will be exposed to nuclear knowledge. We can’t control that.

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Filed in: Higher Education, Internationalisation, Netherlands, Politics, Science | 2 Comments »

In a Nature commentary Barbara Sahakian & Sharon Morein-Zamir (University of Cambridge) discuss the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs in order to boost brainpower. And of course, these ‘Professor’s little helpers’ are also penetrating those places where the brains are (or should be) most heavily used: academia.

For many, it seems that the immediate and tangible benefits of taking these drugs are more persuasive than concerns about legal status and adverse effects. There are clear trends suggesting that the use of stimulants such as methylphenidate on college campuses is on the rise, and is becoming more commonplace in ever younger students. Universities may have to decide whether to ban drug use altogether, or to tolerate it in some situations (whether to enable all-night study sessions or to boost alertness during lectures).

But it’s not just the students. Pills also provide brain boost for academics, according to an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement earlier this year:

Feeling under intense pressure to improve your performance at work? Fatigued by the growing demands of a 24/7 society? These are occupational hazards affecting many of today’s academics.

But the suggestion that an individual’s performance can be improved, and tiredness overcome, simply by popping a pill can shock even those academics who have studied the effects of so-called smart drugs.

According to the THES, no major studies have yet been conducted in the UK to discover the extent to which smart drugs are being used by academics or students. The Times Higher made a journey around British academia to poll the opinions and attitudes about the use of cognitive-enhancing drugs in academia. Here are a few quotes:

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Filed in: Higher Education, Science, World | 1 Comment »

A remarkable letter in today’s correspondence section of Nature. For some odd reason, a group of scientists from Oxford and the National University of Singapore thought it would be a good idea to investigate the level of research activity of scientists during the holidays.

In order to find out how many submissions were made to academic journals on Christmas Day between 1996 and 2006, Richard Ladle, Ana Malhado and Peter Todd searched Google Scholar for articles received on 25 December. Even taking into account the overall increase in the volume of submissions, there were about 600% more manuscripts received by journals on 25 December in 2006 than in 1996.

Proportion of published papers submitted on 25 December relative to mean number submitted on the 25th of the month (excluding weekends) for all other months in that calendar year. R² = 0.69.

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Filed in: Humor, Science, World | Comment »

I ran into some interesting papers and essays on the issue of English as the lingua franca of contemporary higher education and science. They raise serious questions about the preservation of ’scientific languages’, the ability to learn and teach in a non-native language, the homogenising tendencies of a lingua franca and even about flexible interpretation of plagiarism…

Some time ago, biophysicist Stefan Klein wrote an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine about languages and science (Dümmer auf Englisch; English translation here: Dumber in English). Klein wants to ensure the future of German as a language of science and presents some good arguments for it. Roughly, his argument is that the move towards English as a lingua franca makes science elitist and (non native English speaking) scientists dumber. For the first issue Klein refers to a seminar he attended:

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Filed in: Culture, Higher Education, Science, World | Comment »

The Nobel Prizes for the sciences have been awarded in the past few days. Since I have nothing smart to say about the use of embryonic stem cells, giant magnetoresistance or chemical processes on solid surfaces, I had a look at the careers of the Nobel Prize winners.

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Filed in: Higher Education, Science, World | 1 Comment »

Yesterday was the single most (ok, second most) important annual event for science: the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. The Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded since 1991 for those scientific achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. They ‘celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology’.

In Harvard University, great scientists gathered to hear who would follow in the footsteps of eminent illustrious intellectuals like:

Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University, for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it’s all too easy to overlook anything else — even a woman in a gorilla suit. (Winners Ig Nobel Prize for Psychology, 2004)

Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden’s National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting (Winners Ig Nobel Prize for Biology, 2004).

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Filed in: Humor, Science, World | Comment »

More than 25 years after the Bayh-Dole Act came into force, Members of the Subcommittee on Technology & Innovation met to discuss the future of the law. The law allows universities to patent inventions that result from government funded R&D. Inside HigherEd reports that most members agreed that circumstances have changed the last 25 years. Competition is coming from China and India, instead of Germany and Japan. Technology is now more complex, with technological innovations being based on a bundle of patents instead of a few. And…universities have become competitors not just collaborators. This last point was observed by Susan Butts, the senior director of external science and technology programs at Dow Chemical.

She agreed with other members that there was a potential for more collaboration between universities and industry, especially since private funding for research and development has increased over the years. But, she said, a primary obstacle to more partnerships is the potential for disputes over intellectual property.

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Filed in: Higher Education, Innovation, Science, USA | Comment »

What did the internets bring me today? A lot of truths and lies:

• World news today - healthcare in the US and who is telling the truth? Michael Moore on CNN, demanding an apology.
• Education & Science news today - Dr. Carmona and the administration who had instructed him to put political considerations over scientific ones: truth vs. lies, a.k.a. science versus politics.
• Blog post today: science versus politics was the theme of yesterday’s ‘great global warming swindle’ event. John Quiggin blogs on this hilarious evening and shows how the delusionists were demolished. And Auxedit shows why it was hilarious.

Filed in: Politics, Science, W - E - B Links | Comment »

A nice little snippet from last week’s issue of Nature about a good initiative in open access to research:

“The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a leading private sponsor of biomedical research in the United States, will require its 300-plus investigators to make their research publicly accessible within six months of publication.

Articles that do not meet this requirement will not be considered when the investigators apply for contract renewals. The policy, announced on 26 June, will come into effect at the start of 2008 and will apply only to papers on which an HHMI investigator is the first, last or corresponding author.”

The researchers are still able to publish in many journals (including Nature) because the Institute will cover the costs that some publishers charge for making papers publicly available after a certain period of time.

Filed in: Innovation, Science, USA | Comment »

One of my first posts in this blog was on the iBridge Network, a platform for searching and sharing innovations in universities. Universities can use the platform to license and distribute a variety of items, including software, research tools, databases, teaching materials, surveys, and reference materials.

“Universities are tremendous wellsprings of knowledge. By encouraging widespread access to information and linking researchers with interested parties, we are hoping to more fully realize the innovation potential that research offers.”

Filed in: Innovation, Internet, Science, Technology, USA | Comment »

A study team led by Peter Tindemans (former Chair of the OECD Megascience Forum) and Luc Soete, Director of UNU-MERIT, a joint research and training centre of United Nations University and Maastricht University in the Netherlands) has proposed yet another structure for the European Institute of technology.

Originally proposed by Commission President José Manuel Barroso as part of the relaunched Lisbon Agenda, the aim of the EIT is to strengthen the European ‘knowledge-triangle’ of research, education and technology. The European Commission first expressed a preference for the EIT as a single institution. After a consultation of a wide range of stakeholders it proposed (pdf) a decentralised network structure in October 2006.

This EIT is organised around six Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs). These KIC’s should be seen as joint-ventures of partner organisations representing universities, research organisations and businesses which are intended to form an integrated partnership in response to calls for proposals from the EIT.

Tindemans and Soete find that the decentralized EIT that has been proposed by the Commission is found to be not feasible. It is too dispersed; it would not increase significantly the research output in a field; it cannot match a top tier university in providing an environment for training graduates; and a dispersed institute cannot adequately organize technology transfer. Instead of the decentralised model, they propose a clustered model. One of the major implications seems to be that there will be multiple EITs and that they will be more geared towards the regional context.

While they acknowledge that the underlying rationale for setting up the EIT is critical, they caution against making blanket assumptions about Europe’s inability to convert knowledge into commerce, to organize critical mass, or to reward entrepreneurship and excellence in research and education. The study team cites evidence from the latest European Commission Innovation Scoreboard, which found that several of the smaller European countries and Germany perform significantly better than, or as well as the US and Japan (see below). Not all EU countries, regions and institutions have problems with converting knowledge into commerce and critical mass, rewarding entrepreneurship and excellence in research and education. The authors warn that ignoring this fact might result in assuming too easily that a European level institutional solution is necessary in cases where national or regional approaches might be more appropriate.

(click to enlarge)

“Nobody in the US would think of establishing an AIT (American Institute of Technology) so if we think of creating a European Institute of Technology it should recognize the present strongholds in research, in graduate training and in innovation. Otherwise, it will represent little more than what the French call ‘un saupoudrage’ of undoubtedly substantial additional research monies but which spread over such a wide number of research centres will barely make an impact.”

Filed in: Europe, Innovation, Politics, Science, Technology | Comment »