Three C’s in Science: Correlation, Confound, and Causation

If you want to irritate a scientist, start a loud conversation about how two things are connected and therefore, you know that one causes the other. 

Two ice cream friends!

Fight Night: Tenure vs. Adjunct Professors

Normal Job: you are offered a contract with a salary and benefits. Usually, you can get fired at almost any time, but you have some legal protections to prevent you being treated terribly.

In academia, things are not so normal. The two extremes are tenure and adjunct. This post is a short explanation of the two types along with links.

First place-Physics!

For the average high school student, the science requirements consist of one of the following sequences:

9^th grade- Biology; 10^th grade- Chemistry; 11^th grade-Physics

or

9^th grade-Earth Science; 10^th grade- Biology; 11^th grade- Chemistry; 12^th grade- Physics

The original order was developed because educators thought it was the easiest way to teach science. Each course requires successively more difficult mathematics. Students could learn Biology more easily than Chemistry or Physics.

Jury of Your Peers

If you ever read a popular science article that references papers, you’ll often see the phrase “peer-reviewed” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review) Scientists typically only trust peer-reviewed papers, but sometimes the public will accept papers that haven’t been peer-reviewed. With the internet, any yahoo can post an article online. So what does this phrase mean?

Peer Review is the process by which scientific papers get accepted and how the scientific community works in general. Basically, your work isn't accepted until your peers agree with you.

Scribbling on paper

Quote from a reader: “I've learned that if you ask a physicist a hypothetical question, they will most likely try to give you a real answer. As a result, never ask a physicist a hypothetical unless you're ready for a real explanation and potentially hand-drawn diagrams on napkins. I love you guys.”

A back of the envelope calculation is a rough estimate performed on a random scrap of paper (like the back of an envelope). They are synonymous with physicists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-of-the-envelope_calculation

Let's go through an example of one of these calculations:
Estimate the number of pizzas consumed by all the students at the Northwestern University during one quarter. (Adapted from University of Maryland)

Significant Other

What’s significant in your life?

Regular person: my partner, my job, my friends, etc.

Scientist: hopefully my data

In everyday use, significance means that something is important and meaningful.

For scientists, significance has a very specific definition, which is referred to as statistical significance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance).

Basically, if I have a result, what are the odds my result occurred from some specific factor versus the odds that my result just occurred by chance. If I'm confident my result came from some effect, then the result is considered significant.

I like free stuff!

Imagine your favorite ice cream shoppe gives away all of their ice cream for free!

They even include the ice cream recipes and their favorite sundae recipes.

But wait, there’s more!

Anyone can add in their favorite sundae recipes or make their own ice cream.

Sound awesome? Yes.

Well guess what, the free  ice cream sundae of software is open source software (tasty analogy, eh?).