In the Nursery

At Blesford Ride, what most schools would have called the Sanatorium was called the Nursery. It was presided over by a stout Sister in not quite clean starched white, who wore a cap like a winged helmet, a row of scissors and pens across the swell of her breast, and a vigorous greying moustache. Her prescription for most upsets was darkness and starvation, which she called giving the brain and stomach a little rest. Most boys, after an hour or two of privation, more or less miraculously recovered and asked for release. Marcus was often in, with asthma and headaches. He did not ask to be let out [144].

Byatt, A.S. The Virgin in the Garden. Vintage International, 1978, 1992. ISBN 0679738290.

The Fly People

The fly lab was as distinctive a domestic ecology for its human inhabitants, the fly people, as for its dipteran denizens. There drosophilas were reconstructed as "standard" flies, and there, too, students and visitors were transformed into drosophilists and assimilated into a working community with its peculiar customs, ways of life, and moral economy. The fly group's rules of communal behavior constituted the design of an intricate piece of social technology, much as linkage maps constituted the design of a laboratory instrument. Drosophila and the drosophilists evolved symbiotically, and the customs of the fly people were adapted to the special qualities of their breeder reactor. Drosophila was designed to take advantage of its potential for abundant, fast-paced production, and so, too, was the fly group. The fly group's rules of ownership, access, and credit were shaped by the peculiarities of the creature they had adopted -- or that had adopted them. Fly and fly people became dependent on each other for their identities and livelihoods, bound together in doing experiments [91].

Kohler, Robert E. Lords of the Fly : Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life. University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN 0226450627.

Why the fly

The chief advantage of Drosophila was one that historians have overlooked: it was an excellent organism for student projects. Drosophila kept an academic schedule. They were most plentiful in the autumn, when gardens and orchards were filled with rotting fruits and vegetables, and as they were accustomed to wintering over in human habitations, they happily bred year-round in the warmth of college labs. They were easily replaced and inexpensive to keep, thriving on anything that would support a growth of yeast (bananas quickly emerged as the ideal: not too juicy, cheap, and available year-round). If colonies were killed off by inexperienced or careless students, only a modest investment was lost. When cultures died out in the summer vacation, it was easy to start new cultures when student laborers returned in the fall. The craft skills of Drosophila were easily learned, and a fly colony could be easily maintained in the interstices of a busy undergraduate schedule. Animal colonies and greenhouse collections were far more exacting of time and skill and were too valuable to entrust to succeeding generations of green apprentices [34].

Kohler, Robert E. Lords of the Fly : Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life. University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN 0226450627.

The frontier, c.1906

The four day event took more than 3,000 lives, burned through 28,188 buildings, flattened 522 blocks, destroyed tens of churches, 9 libraries, 37 national banks, the Pacific Stock Exchange, 3 major newspaper buildings..., 2 opera houses, and the largest, most richly appointed imperial hotel in the era of turn-of-the-last-century opulence. More than 200,000 people were burned out of their homes -- men, women, and children who found themselves wandering smoke-filled streets with no claim to a future except that they were alive and that they owned the clothes on their backs [3].

San Francisco, a city of enduring culture and taste, has been known throughout the world as the Paris of the Pacific. But its many contradictions have occasionaly led to its being known as the Baghdad by the Bay -- a city of historic wickedness and ferocity, with more than a few vestiges of the frontier in its character. In 1906, it had the highest per capita murder rate in America and was the only city in the country where a killing in a boxing ring had no legal repercussion. While it had a church for every 2,500 citizens, it also had a saloon for every 250 of them [3-4].

Smith, Dennis. San Francisco is Burning : The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires. Viking, 2005. ISBN 0670034428.

Theories of rain

"What is it that interests you?" Mr. Wells said. Which no one ever asks me.

"What you would expect," I replied, and told him what I would tell you, if you were here. "How a cloud floats, when water is much heavier than air. How cloud particles form from vapor; and how raindrops grow from those particles. Whether the winds drive the particles together, coalescing them."

He looked puzzled, yet also, I thought, interested. "There are rains of manna and quails in the Bible," he said. "And in Pliny the Elder, rains of milk and blood and birds and wool."

What I wanted to say was this: It was raining the day they took us from each other.

Q. What kind of rain?
A. A light rain, a drizzling rain.

Q. You remember that?
A. It is almost all I remember. On the muddy ground our household burns without flame, the smoke rising up through the fine rain falling down. You have no face. Your figure, clad in damp homespun, disappears into a cloud.

What I said was, "Rains of fish." [106-107]

Barrett, Andrea. "Theories of Rain." In Servants of the Map : Stories. W.W. Norton, 2002. ISBN 0393043487.

The dreams of the dead

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream [98].

Delillo, Don. White Noise. Penguin, 1986. ISBN 0140077022.

Modern angst

Heinrich's hairline is beginning to recede. I wonder about this. Did his mother consume some kind of gene-piercing substance when she was pregnant? Am I at fault somehow? Have I raised him, unwittingly, in the vicinity of a chemical dump site, in the path of air currents that carry industrial wastes capable of producing scalp degeneration, glorious sunsets? (People say the sunsets around here were not nearly so stunning thirty or forty years ago.) Man's guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death [22].

Delillo, Don. White Noise. Penguin, 1986. ISBN 0140077022.

Public flocking behavior

In Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold emphasizes the potential of mobile communications to create a social revolution by enabling new forms of cooperation. He describes the emergent behavior exhibited by thumb tribes of connected teenagers: "the term 'swarming' was frequently used by the people I met in Helsinki to describe the cybernegotiated public flocking behavior of texting adolescents."* [67].

*Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Perseus Books, 2002. ISBN 0738208612.

Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability. O'Reilly, 2005. ISBN 0596007655.

Like father, like son

"But you've got it backward," said Louisa. "I'm not talking about details. I'm talking about the big picture, the historical context of discovery, the nature of creativity, the changing cultural patterns of the way human beings see..."

So she'd get her master's degree in the history of science, Sandy mused. She'd finish up her little project and apply for medical school the year after. Robert Hooke was fine; he was eccentric; eccentricity was all the rage in med school applications. English majors, musicians, writers. Sandy had served his time on the committees. Harvard loved that kind of thing. She would be a doctor in the end. He knew it. Lousia was no soft-spoken library researcher. No math-fearing patsy. She was his son [67].

Goodman, Allegra. Intuition. Dial Press, 2006. ISBN 0385336128.

'O miserable abundance, O beggardly riches!'

Truth be told, until now he hadn't heard of John Donne. He hadn't learned much about seventeenth-century poets during his years of chemistry and biology and graduate school. It occurred to him now that he'd spent his whole adult life in a prison workshop. Years and years of manual labor went by. New results filtered through only on the rarest occasions, and always to other people. Miracles didn't happen, but Cliff and his friends kept on working. Like scientific sharecroppers, they slaved all day. They were too highly trained to stop. Overeducated for other work, they kept repeating their experiments. They kept trying to live on their seventeen-thousand-dollar salaries. There was not much poetry in that, or if there was, Cliff had certainly not been privileged to see it [20].

Goodman, Allegra. Intuition. Dial Press, 2006. ISBN 0385336128.

Darwin's sinewy elegance

What will follow from this singular occurrence [the ability of organisms to self-replicate], anywhere in the universe, is Darwinian selection and hence the baroque extravaganza that, on this planet, we call life. Never were so many facts explained by so few assumptions. Not only does the Darwinian theory command superabundant power to explain. Its economy in doing so has a sinewy elegance, a poetic beauty that outclasses even the most haunting of the world's origin myths. One of my purposes in writing this book has been to accord due recognition to the inspirational quality of our modern understanding of Darwinian life. There is more poetry in Mitochondrial Eve than in her mythological namesake [xi-xii].

Dawkins, Richard. River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. Basic Books, 1995. ISBN 0465069908.

posted for Amy

Wealth and poverty

Half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress. That's how much new information we create in a year -- 92% of it stored on magnetic media.* It's time we shifted our focus from creating a wealth of information to addressing the ensuing poverty of attention [44-45].

*Lyman, Peter & Varian, Hal R. (2003). How Much information?

Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability. O'Reilly, 2005. ISBN 0596007655.

Magic, judicious control of

Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards -- not "not doing any magic" because they couldn't do magic, but not doing magic when they could do and didn't. Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you knew how easy it was. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn't been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again [154].

Pratchett, Terry. Going Postal. HarperCollins, 2004. ISBN 0060502932

Identifying contextual clues

PROBING WHY PHISHING REMAINS SUCCESSFUL
A new paper published by three academics tries to explain why, after all the press about phishing scams, so many computer users continue to fall for them. "Why Phishing Works," written by Rachna Dhamija of Harvard University and Marti Hearst and J. D. Tygar of the University of California at Berkeley [for CHI 2006], points out that despite a general awareness of phishing rackets, most users are unable to discern the difference between a legitimate Web site and one spoofed to look like the site of a bank or other financial institution. In one exercise, the researchers created a fake bank site that fooled 91 percent of subjects participating in the experiment. Similarly, 77 percent misidentified a legitimate E*Trade e-mail as fraudulent. Experts attribute some of the problem to ignorance and some to users' not taking simple precautions, such as looking closely at the address bar of Web pages. Bernhard Otupal, a crime intelligence officer for high-tech crime at Interpol, noted that in one recent phishing scam, a number of users went to a site pretending to be that of a prominent bank and entered personal information even though they were not even customers of that bank.
ZDNet, 3 April 2006

from Edupage, April 05, 2006
"Edupage is a service of EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology."

Research priorities

Even with the Detroit funding renewed, however, Little and his staff were now facing massive budget cuts, and it was this practical realization that forced them to rethink Jackson Lab's institutional priorities. At the time of Cloudman's departure [in 1932], Little approached the remaining staff scientists and requested their feedback on the latest budget-cutting woes. Minutes of this meeting note that the group unanimously agreed to use the small amount of cash on hand to secure the future of the inbred mice: they bought enough food for existing animals to ensure their continuation [...] for a year. In providing for themselves they were much less generous: the researchers voted to cut their own salaries back to $100 a month -- a reduction of more than half their original level. To further reduce living expenses, and thus create some spare funds for research, they also decided to combine households whenever possible and to grow a large community garden [114].

Rader, Karen A. Making Mice : Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900-1955. Princeton University Press, 2004. ISBN 0691016364.

The Thinking Tyrant, Lament of

Being an absolute ruler today was not as easy as people thought. At least, it was not simple if your ambitions included being an absolute ruler tomorrow. There were subtleties. Oh, you could order men to smash down doors and drag people off to dungeons without trial, but too much of that sort of thing was bad for business, habit-forming, style-lacking, and very, very dangerous for your health. A thinking tyrant, it seemed to Vetinari, had a much harder job than a ruler raised to power by some idiot vote-yourself-rich system like democracy. At least he could tell the people he was their fault [69].

Pratchett, Terry. Going Postal. HarperCollins, 2004. ISBN 0060502932

Quantifying Reliability and Measurement Errors

One important goal of a measurement study is to quantify the reliability of a measurement process. We have seen that quantification can be accomplished by two general methods. Using a representative sample of objects we can employ a measurement process using multiple co-occuring observations to estimate internal consistency reliability; or we can repeat a measurement process on separate occasions, which enables estimation of test-retest reliability. A key aspect of reliability, from a measurement perspective, is that any measurement process consisting of multiple observations can reveal the magnitude of its own reliability. This contrasts with estimation of validity, that, as we will see later, requires collection of additional data [120].

Friedman, Charles P. & Wyatt, Jeremy C. Evaluation Methods in Biomedical Informatics, 2nd ed. Springer, 2006 (Health Informatics Series). ISBN 0387258892.

The premise

JAX mice, then, functioned less as static research tools guaranteeing the dominance of a particular line of work than as ever-present totems of the genetic approach in American experimental biology. Because they were standardized at the locus of the gene, considerations of how their hereditary constitutions shaped results became a material part of all work in which they were used. [...] My claim, then, is that the emergence of standard research organisms reflects changing social and disciplinary ecologies of knowledge. Genetically standardized mice were the standard-bearers for a genetic approach to biomedicine; their production represented, to paraphrase Karl Marx on technology, the power of genetic knowledge objectified [18].

Rader, Karen A. Making Mice : Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900-1955. Princeton University Press, 2004. ISBN 0691016364.

Mind and matter

It's tempting to think of evolution as a hereditary life jacket, something we receive, not rework. Because each generation stirs the pot, changing its physical, social, and psychological environments, we've been tinkering with human evolution all the time. [...] Our brain is simply one experiment life is running. There are many others, equally unlikely. We don't know the outcome of these trials, we don't even know all the ingredients. Meanwhile, we try to keep an eye on the whole shebang, from prairie vole and ozone layer to skunk cabbage and humans, astonished by the long shot of it all [234].

Because mind is matter, we matter and we mind. We use words like small hand axes. We televise alternate worlds. We scout the invisible. We practice the art of science. As songsters and sages have always said, we dream several dreams, only one of them during the night. For better or for worse, we've become nature's way of thinking about itself, a brain for all seasons [258].

--Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain. Scribner, 2005. ISBN 0743246748.