Jeffrey Mervis, ScienceInsider:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) today rebuffed a request from the chairman of the House of Representatives science committee to obtain reviewer comments on five social science research projects it is funding.

[…]

In a letter to Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), NSF defended the need to preserve the confidentiality of the peer-review process, according to sources with knowledge of the letter’s contents.

In case you missed it, Rep. Lamar Smith recently sent a letter (pdf) to the NSF Director requesting peer-review discussions behind several grants that were awarded because he was skeptical that they met the “intellectual merit” criteria.

That a lawyer, turned politician, might possibly veto the recommendations of experts because he is ignorant to each study’s merits is ludicrous. Let’s be honest, though. Rep. Smith isn’t ignorant - he’s a smart guy. His request is the beginning of a thinly-veiled attempt to restructure the NSF into a simple manufacturer of commercially-viable goods. This attempt is based on a short-sighted political worldview and has no business in the scientific process.

Bravo to acting NSF Director Cora Marrett for refusing Lamar Smith’s request.

Theoretical physicist, Leonard Susskind:

A number of years ago I became aware of the large number of physics enthusiasts out there who have no venue to learn modern physics and cosmology.  Fat advanced textbooks are not suitable to people who have no teacher to ask questions of, and the popular literature does not go deeply enough to satisfy these curious people.  So I started a series of courses on modern physics at Stanford University where I am a professor of physics.  The courses are specifically aimed at people who know, or once knew, a bit of algebra and calculus, but are more or less beginners.

Statistical mechanics is currently being taught.

Keith Schwarz, lecturer at Stanford, has a nifty collection of various numerical algorithms:

The Archive of Interesting Code is an (ambitious) effort on my part to research, intuit, and code up every interesting algorithm and data structure ever invented. In doing so, I hope both to learn the mathematical techniques that power these technologies and to improve my skills as a programmer.

The examples on this site are in a variety of languages. I generally prefer to use C++ for algorithms, since the STL provides a great framework for expressing algorithms that work on a variety of data types. I code up most data structures in Java, both because the Collections framework allows them to be integrated in seamlessly with other applications and because automatic garbage collection simplifies some of the resource management. Every now and then I’ll find an algorithm or data structure that is best represented in a different language like Haskell, in which case I’ll forgo my usual language conventions.

Adam Clark Estes, Motherboard, on the desire to visualize the connections that comprise the internet - and the guy who made it happen:

An anonymous researcher with a lot of time on his hands apparently shares the sentiment. In a newly published research paper, this unnamed data junkie explains how he used some stupid simple hacking techniques to build a 420,000-node botnet that helped him draw the most detailed map of the Internet known to man. Not only does it show where people are logging in, it also shows changes in traffic patterns over time with an impressive amount of precision. This is all possible, of course, because the researcher hacked into nearly half a million computers so that he could ping each one, charting the resulting paths in order to make such a complex and detailed map. Along those lines, the project has as much to do with hacking as it does with mapping.

Jessica Hume, reporting for the Toronto Sun:

The government of Canada believes there is a place for curiosity-driven, fundamental scientific research, but the National Research Council is not that place.

“Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value,” John McDougall, president of the NRC, said in announcing the shift in the NRC’s research focus away from discovery science solely to research the government deems “commercially viable”.

In my view, this mindset is absurd because the link between fundamental research and commercial viability is not always clear. For instance, as Dr. James Correia points out, it was black hole research that helped lead to Wi-Fi. Unfortunately, this short-sighted, politically-driven mentality is becoming increasingly prevalent in the United States:

[Rep. Lamar Smith] said in a statement to The Huffington Post that the NSF projects for which he has requested more information do not meet the foundation’s standards.

“The NSF has great potential to promote American innovation and expand our economy,” Smith said.

The politicalization of science is a dangerous road to travel down.

(via: Kevin Manross)

Alex Mayyasi on the case for open-access science:

Subscriptions limit access to scientific knowledge. And when careers are made and tenures earned by publishing in prestigious journals, then sharing datasets, collaborating with other scientists, and crowdsourcing difficult problems are all disincentivized. Following 17th century practices, open science advocates insist, limits the progress of science in the 21st.

The Onion details how they were “hacked”:

These emails were sent from strange, outside addresses, and they were sent to few enough employees to appear as just random noise rather than a targeted attack. At least one Onion employee fell for this phase of the phishing attack.

Once the attackers had access to one Onion employee’s account, they used that account to send the same email to more Onion staff at about 2:30 AM on Monday, May 6. Coming from a trusted address, many staff members clicked the link, but most refrained from entering their login credentials. Two staff members did enter their credentials, one of whom had access to all of our social media accounts.

As usual, they weren’t really hacked. The attackers simply relied on gullible employees.

A visual guide of housing for the price-conscious New Yorker. I’m definitely spoiled here in Oklahoma. My first apartment was around 700 square feet and only cost $400 per month. Was there baby-momma-drama and disagreements between meth heads? Sure. But, dude. $400.

Google teamed up with the USGS to animate 30 years of archived satellite data from the Landsat program. The visualizations allow us to see our impacts on Earth. Jeffrey Kluger of TIME writes about the time-lapse project:

For governments and environmental scientists, there is a lot of arcane data to extract from the maps and movies. For everyone else, there is something subtler but just as important: perspective. We tend our own tiny plots on Earth, our houses and yards often taking up less room than that infield-size pixel. It’s only when we get above ourselves — say, 438 miles above — that we can see how we’re changing our planet and begin to consider how we can be better stewards of it.

Google at its best. You can check out the videos here.

(via: Mark Laufersweiler from Derek Stratman)

xkcd on throwing:

So while there are other animals that use projectiles, we’re just about the only animal that can grab a random object and reliably nail a target. In fact, we’re so good at it that some researchers have suggested rock-throwing played a central role in the evolution of the modern human brain.

They tackle the question of how high a human could throw an object. The only logical unit for this study is a giraffe.