Merry Christmas!

No regrets...

Statistics in perspective

Mathematics are funny:

1) Correlation and causality:

"It is proven that the celebration of birthdays is healthy. Statistics show that those people who celebrate the most birthdays become the oldest" (credited to S. den Hartog)

2) Power of arithmetics:

"A physicist, a biologist, and a statistician see two people enter a house, and then after some time, they see three people leave the house.

The physicist concludes, "My initial observation must have been incorrect." The biologist concludes, "Clearly, the two reproduced..." The statistician concludes, "Well, if one more person enters the house, then there will be no-one in the house!"

3) Bayesian flavour:

"A Bayesian is one who, vaguely expecting a horse, and catching a glimpse of a donkey, strongly believes he has seen a mule".

Bad news by NASA: West Antarctic Glaciers in Irreversible Decline

I will remember these research findings for a long time:

William Freeman's vision about How to Do Research

Around 1.5 years before reading my PhD I bought a book about how to write a PhD. In that book I found some discussions about something more important: which topic you want to work in and how one should try to solve problems one faces when doing research.

Prof. William Freeman's approach is a very efficient way to make oneself a clear and fast idea about the main guidelines:

1) William T. Freeman How To Do Research (Informal note written for new graduate students), March 6, 2013

In this document you will find a link (you can also click HERE) to a presentation where important people in my field have given their opinion about how to do research.

I hope will be useful!.

Gibbs & Simpson: Conditions Under Which Assessment Supports Students’ Learning

I would recommend you to read an article, which can be found HERE by Graham Gibbs and Claire Simpson which:

"... sets out and attempts to justify a set of ‘conditions under which assessment can support learning’. The evidence is rarely conclusive enough to argue that if your assessment fulfils these conditions then learning
will inevitably be more effective. They are offered as a plausible set of guidelines".

Can we make our students learn and underpin the acquired knowledge better with tools different from exams?...

Information based Model for the Classroom

I could not say it better. Made by Robert T. Balder. Link to web page HERE

FameLab Talking Science

The idea is simple:

just try to explain an idea/problem from a scientific point of view in a direct, easy and innovative way. See the following:

- Jonathan Webb FameLab UK 2013 Finalist:

Why not?. You can do it!.

Do you have a dream?. They also had it!

a) Nadra Hatchett: Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA

b) Bill Allen, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) @ NASA

c) Karin Bozak, Glenn Research Center, NASA

BICEP2 and inflation

Imagine Science becomes part of your way to look at life, and the consequences of your work are unimaginable, how would you react?. Look for one minute the video starting at 0:32.

Do schools go (somehow) against creativity?

I had never thought about whether the current hierarchical structure of subjects taught at schools is correct or not, but may be some people leave them because they do not feel integrated or motivated enough.

It might not be a matter of abilities, but a matter to find what you are good at, and be that "discovery" the reason not to "give up".

Please look at the following video. A good story at the end of it!.

Making Open Education Resources (OER) possible

This post is related to my previous OpenStax College post.

You might be interested to have a look at efforts towards making education resources widely accessible. Link is HERE

Conference at a glance (from their web page):

"Each year, the conference brings together over 200 leaders from academia, education, and industry who are seeking solutions to the rising cost of higher education and are poised to initiate change and increased access in their communities.

The 2014 Connexions Conference theme, “Making OER Work,” is an opportunity for educational leaders to focus on pragmatic solutions in open education".

Landfill harmonic

If you are in a hurry just see the video from 0:28 to 1:06...If not, see it completely

It will just cover your face as you wail and cry and scream

Some discussions I have had with people who teach young students is about the main aim they want to achieve when they TEACH.

Making their student feel happy is not what I would expect they would like to obtain, but I feel sometimes education goes in parallel, and sometimes I think this should go first.

Dead Poets Society

And Todd says: "...You push it, stretch it, it'll never be enough. You kick at it, beat it, it'll never cover any of us. From the moment we enter crying to the moment we leave dying, it will just cover your face as you wail and cry and scream."

Simply marvellous. Don't you think so?.

The universal declaration of human rights - Education

February 12th is the International day against the use of child soldiers

I would like to remind you that:

a) there is a Universal declaration of human rights

b) Points (1) and (2) of its Article 26 are:

" (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace".

Shall we dance?

This post is of a different nature...I would like to share with you a video that invites us to think about the impact that we (as parents) have on our children and how we would like them to get what we have not been able to. It is in Spanish with no subtitles, sorry! ...

Science and minorities

Did you know the size of the list of african american inventors?.

Are you really aware about women's contribution in science?.

You can start HERE

History of science in books

We can learn many things about our own history when we look at how science has evolved. From my personal background, here you have three titles of books I would recommend you to read:

1) Stephen F. Mason, "A history of the sciences"

2) Alan Chalmers, "Science and its fabrication"

3) Thomas S. Kuhn, "The structure of scientific revolutions"

Enjoy!

No. That's incidental!

We often tend to think that we need to answer correctly to the questions we have, but why don't we think about whether we are doing the right questions?.

It is more important to make GOOD questions, and of course this is more important than to correctly answer to WRONG or bad questions. Tones of knowledge hide simplicity. A long time since Socrates and Marcus Aurelius

and Occam's razor

Karl Popper and the philosophy of science

I recently found a textbook by chance about "philosophy of science", in spanish, written by J. A. Díez and C. Ulises Moulines and titled (translated into english) "Foundations of philosophy of science", and thought "what the ... is this?".

We could think of philosophy of science as the "part" of the Philosophy whose main aim is to analyse the validity of the scientific discovery from a "formal" point of view.

I got my BSc in physics in 1999. I am trying to remember if this subject was elegible during my career and does not seem so to me. Why?. I do not know, but I might make myself an idea...

I am really sorry to have lost the ideas and work of Sir Karl Popper until just recently.

OpenStax College

I promise I do not idolize Prof. Richard Baraniuk, but, all his ideas are SO GOOD! The aim of OpenStax College is:

"...OpenStax College offers students free textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for most courses. These are peer-reviewed texts written by professional content developers".

Want to study in a university at an affordable prize in terms of books?. Do it!. We should not lose anyone during their academy trip!.

Richard Feynman - The Uncertainty Of Knowledge

that moves us all...

Global remote sensing research trends during 1991–2010: a bibliometric analysis

This is the title of a paper that can be accessed here whose main aim is:

"...this study evaluated the geographical influence of authors by the new index (geographical impact factor), and revealed the auctorial, institutional, national, and spatiotemporal patterns in remote sensing research".

Two take-home messages:

a) Spain is the 12th world country in terms of remote sensing research (see Table 3). Spain is "overtaken" by the following 5 european countries: UK, France, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands.

b) There are 4 european scientists among the top 20 remote sensing researchers. They are: Lorenzo Bruzzone Jean-Pierre Wigneron Frederic Baret  and Guilles Foody.

Science and humility

May be it has to do with my own way to look at things, but I really think not all kind of personality or life perspective may match scientific spirit. I would recommend you all to read this article

"Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?"
Carl Sagan

Peer review process

I am getting older and accumulating experience. Sometimes I am happy with the peer review process and others I am not. As a mean feeling I would say I would agree with a change of this system to an "open peer review" process. I would not change everything in it, but it needs to be more transparent. It is clearly not transparent enough.

Discussions about it are more necessary than ever

I have to admit that the future of pattern recognition belongs to mathematicians...Larry Wasserman, John Lafferty, Emmanuel Candes, Robert Tibshirani, Trevor Hastie, Terence Tao, etc.