Links Roundup of the Week-1

09.26.2009 // Links Roundup, Science // abhishektiwari // 1 Comment

What McDonald’s Taught me about Running a Lab

The vision of McDonald’s and your lab maybe different. Well, maybe not, if that cure for malaria ever pans out, you too can add “Billions Served” and your office door. What is the vision of your lab? What do you want your lab to accomplish? Think about it. Be succinct.

Malcolm Gladwell, modern problems, and the analytics age

[O]ur problems today are different from those of the recent past. Our former problems were usually solved by digging up and revealing the right information. He used Watergate as an example, pointing out that key information was hidden, and the problem was solved when Washington Post journalists Woodward and Bernstein were finally able to uncover this information that had been concealed. Modern problems, on the other hand, are not the result of missing or hidden information, Gladwell argued, but the result, in a sense, of too much information and the complicated challenge of understanding it. Enron was his primary example. The information about Enron’s practices was not kept secret. In fact, it was published in several years’ worth of financial reports to the SEC, totaling millions of pages. The facts that led to Enron’s rapid implosion were there for anyone who was interested to see, freely available on the Internet, but weren’t understood until a journalist spent two months reading and struggling to make sense of Enron’s earnings, which led him to discover that they existed only as contracts to buy energy at a particular price in the future, not as actual cash in the bank. The problems that we face today, both big ones in society like the current health care debate and smaller ones like strategic business decisions, do not exist because we lack information, but because we don’t understand it. They can be solved only by developing skills and tools to make sense of information that is often complex. In other words, the major obstacle to solving modern problems isn’t the lack of information, solved by acquiring it, but the lack of understanding, solved by analytics.

Persuade xor Discover

I believe everything I wrote in the second version. Early union leaders did make heroic sacrifices. It did take courage. And present union leaders probably would rise to the occasion if necessary. People tend to; I’m skeptical about the idea of “the greatest generation.”

Open Notebook Learning

It seems an idea especially well suited to education, especially as we are coming to understanding the importance of process in the learning experience along with achievement. I mean, after all, what are scientists, but students whose teacher is that aspect of the world they are probing.

This also seems an especially fitting topic considering the emerging learning environment in Scotland County and the growing number of schools and school districts who are embrasing tools that give all their student-learners and teacher-learners ubiqutous access to networked, digital, and abundant information — and the capacity to work that information and express discoveries and outcomes compellingly to authentic audiences.

Detection of Adsorbed Water and Hydroxyl on the Moon

Data from the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) on Cassini during its fly-by of the Moon in 1999 show a broad absorption at 3µm due to adsorbed water and near 2.8µm attributed to hydroxyl in the sunlit surface on the Moon. The amounts of water indicated in the spectra depend on the type of mixing, and the grain sizes in the rocks and soils but could be 10 to 1,000 parts per million and locally higher. Water in the polar regions may be water that has migrated to the colder environments there. Trace hydroxyl is observed in the anorthositic highlands at lower latitudes.

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