(PHOTO:Ben Murray

The accepted wisdom is that exposure to the news and other media helps make people more politically educated—but a new study examining 2,400 respondents over the 2008 presidential campaign suggests that when it comes to an entrenched belief (or paranoia), this may not be the case.

Because the survey asked the same questions of the same people in October, September and November of 2008, Hollander was able to explore how people’s beliefs changed over time. The percentage of respondents who believed that Obama was Muslim stayed roughly the same over the study period, shifting from 20.2 percent in September to 19.7 percent in November.

“With most forms of political knowledge, media should theoretically make you more accurate,” Hollander said. “In this case, media exposure had no effect. Ultimately, the message here is that people believe what they want to believe.”

For more, check out the press release about the study.

(PHOTO: Philip Guo

Stanford Computer Science PhD candidate Philip Guo has a section on his website entitled Observations about People. His latest report, Geek behaviors present during conversations, chronicles “common behaviors I’ve observed from my past few years of interactions with geeks, nerds, and other highly-smart technical people.”

Here’s my favorite bit:

Preferring exact numerical responses
Geeks favor accuracy and correctness over ease-of-comprehension for their listeners. If you ask a geek a question requiring a numerical answer and he knows the exact number, then he will likely repeat it verbatim rather than rounding to present an easier-to-remember response (e.g., “that camera is 4.2 megapixels” rather than “that camera is around 4 megapixels").

Philip’s full report is here.

My limited bloggings seem to all fall under the same category: ‘nuff said. I mean really, what more do you need to know? Oh, that they made a snowflake-shaped pie to allow them to make a gigantic pie but also maintain the traditional filling:crust ratio? That I want these people to be my new best friends? That I really really really want to be invited over for dinner (where they will hopefully make a nut-free fractal pie?). Yeah. 

Anyone who hasn’t discovered the wonder and amazingness that is CBC Radio3 should sit up and take notice. They play new, interesting and alterna music and have wicked podcasts and are just generally fabulous. And only online and digital. Is just so nouveau, you know?

They also play some, er, weird stuff. Canadians, you know what I mean. For example, take this AMAZINGLY dorky song about the planet Venus from Jerry Jerry and the Sons of the Rhythm Orchestra, sent to us by Inkycircus gal, Simone. We here at the circus are, of course, big fans of science related musical offerings (nerdcore hip hop, bestest science pop songs and old school science educational songs) and this song certainly doesn’t disappoint....."it rains all day, rains all day, rains all day concentrated sulphuric acid.”

I will buy this beautiful original John James Audubon pelican from his Birds of America 1927 book. For $96,000. Of course if inflation continues in the way it’s going now, that will be $9.6 million by the time I can afford it. 

For all that we complain about gimmicky, stupid, science teaching tools (oh I haven’t, well I have in my head), I need to admit that I love what University of California, Santa Cruz statistician Herbie Lee has done with a chocolate chip cookie. By plotting the random distribution of chips throughout the cookie (which requires eating it..to see all the ones in the middle), he successfully demonstrated a Poisson distribution to his students. The PD is a distribution used to model the occurrence of events over time.

I mean do you all remember your stats class? I do. First term was Thursdays from 6-9pm. Oi. At half time break I used to get a latte so strong that my hand would sometime shake when I returned to class. I mean statistics are incredibly useful, an absolute must for those in most sciences and, I admit, I still use these skills nearly daily. But MAN OH MAN was it boring to learn. I think a cookie might have helped.

Man oh man, if only they’d had this video when I was taking Cell and Molecular Bio in 1999 - it might have injected a wee bit of life into our 3 hour Thursday evening lectures (Anne and I resorted to pen wars to keep ourselves occupied).

Anyways. Please please watch the above. It’s like a ray of nerdy sunshine to the tune of a gospel choir, provided to us by Bio-Rad, who make PCR machines (I mean SHIT man, that is the best ad for lab equipment I have ever seen and I’ve seen a lot of them).

My favorite line: “It’s amazing what heating and cooling and heating will do...” Of course the chorus is pretty amazing too: “PCR when you need to detect mutation. PCR when you need to recombine. PCR when you need to find out who the daddy is.PCR when you need to solve a crime.”

Kary Mullis would be so very, very proud.

(Thanks Tom)

After all of Anne’s posts on cleaning your computer and spilling coffee on your computer, you might think that we are a bunch of clumsy destroyers. Indeed, we are. Anne loves to spill things on herself and anything in her vicinity****. I like to wash people’s electronic goods. Yes, that is right. I washed my boyfriend’s iPod, which was snuggled inside the front pocket of his red hoodie. Nice. I think this is payback for when he washed AND DRIED my favorite black silk sweater. Anyways.

The pod emerged from the Bosch completely dead. Boyfriend attempted to dry it slowly underneath some infrared heat lamps above our stove shelfs. Nothing. He set a timer to check on the sucker every couple of minutes. Nothing. Indeed it had been more than 4 hours since the incident, and we were on our way to buy a new one at an UNofficial Apple Store (we are to get an OFFICIAL Apple store soon - they are hiring on the Apple Jobs site for a Pacific Center-based store), when the boyfriend checked it and it was alive. A little steamy under the screen, but in perfect working order. Not to mention very very clean.

But it seems that his is not a miraculous story. According to this 2005 post from the UK tech site, The Register, iPod Nanos are pretty good at surviving the spin cycle. This is likely owing to their hardy flash memory (as opposed to the hard drive used in previous iPod Minis) and a really tight seal around the battery.

Indeed if you look up “washed iPod” on Google, you’ll get a ton of similar survival stories. It seems that waiting patiently until it is fully dried is the real key here and not trying to plug it in wet to your computer or power source. In any case, it’s alll kind of ironic given the flack that Apple gets for building such disposable small goods.

***Did I mention that Anne once dropped her Nokia phone in a vat of boiling curry at the Notting Hill Carnival in London? It survived for quite a few months afterwards and only smelled a little funny.

THEIR SONGS SAVED LIVES… NO REALLY!

We all knew science and song go together like a horse and carriage (Related: ”Math, for children. And adults who want to laugh at James Blunt making fun of himself” October 19, 2007 and ”Some great science ear candy” August 01, 2007. Not to mention Kate Fink’s fabulous list of the Top Ten Science Songs for petri dish slaves)

But this story takes that relationship to a whole new level of awesomeness.

EMI is the parent company of The Beatles’ two record labels, Capitol Records and Apple Records. And it had its fingers in several pies at the time (they gave the BBC its first television transmitter), one of which included R&D in medical imaging technology. So they took the heaps and heaps of money they made off of the sales of some 200 million Beatles singles and used it to fund Sir Godfrey Hounsfield’s work on his CT scanner prototype at EMI Central Research Laboratories in Hayes, England. As a result he spent four years tinkering on it. Lo and behold the first EMI-Scanner was installed in a hospital in Wimbledon, England in 1972.

EMI initially estimated that the global demand for their machine, which used series of x-rays to generate a 3D image of the soft tissues inside one’s body, would peak at 25. Since then the technology has burgeoned and CT scans are a staple tool for medical practitioners.

Which begs the question. What are the best Beatles’ lyrics to hijack and tell this tale? Anna’s vote is for “Help!”:

Help, I need somebody,
Help, not just anybody,
Help, you know I need someone, help.

When I was younger, so much younger than today,
I never needed anybody’s help in any way.
But now these days are gone, I’m not so self assured,
Now I find I’ve *imaged* my mind and opened up the doors.

Me? I think “Please Mister Postman” works well:

Doctor Godfrey look and see
If you got time in your scanner for me
I been waiting such a long time
Since I heard of that tumor of mine

You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute - so still
You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute - soooo stilllll
You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute - soooo still
You gotta check it and see, one more time for me…

Some very talented peeps over at the Coastal Ocean Observing Center at the University of New Hampshire have put together a remarkably thorough and clever spoof of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” all about trolling for plankton and other fun things oceanographers do. It’s called ”Cruise Cruise Baby.”

All the footage and inspiration comes from a series of 12 hour monthly research cruises conducted around the Gulf of Maine over the past several years.

It makes for GREAT Friday afternoon doldrum watching. Here are some of research associate Chris Manning‘s inspired lyrics:

“To the extreme the damn boat is rolling
Put it in gear let’s go plankton trolling…
....

Motion sickness problems?
Yo we’ll solve them.
Throw up your snacks
Let the ocean dissolve them

cruise cruise baby - doo dodododooodododo
cruise cruise baby - doo dodododooodododo”

Here are the full lyrics.

And here’s me signing off wishing everyone a great weekend with a quote from my new favorite mid-nineties science rap spoof: “Word to your photons.”

(Thanks Judy and Isla!)