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ISSNAF News
ISSNAF News - Community Update
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Time Traveling -- Paradox Free ? |
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Monday, 26 July 2010 00:06 |
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| Image credit: Seth Lloyd, et al. |
All theories of time travel have been faced with the challenge of the “grandfather paradox:” say, a traveler going back in time could kill his grandfather and thus prevent his own existence, which would also prevent the murder taking place. In the early 1990s, David Deutsch came up with a model which allowed the time traveler remember killing his grandfather without having actually done it -- an improvement which however retains inherent inconsistencies between the past remembered and the past experienced, remarks Seth Lloyd, director of the MIT center for extreme quantum information theory (xQIT), who has been testing quantum time travel theories with a team of researchers including the Italians Vittorio Giovannetti and Lorenzo Maccone.
Lloyd's group put forth a "post selected model" of time travel, an experimental simulation which censors "paradoxical situations" by "going back and outlawing" any event that would prove paradoxical in the future. The xQIT theorists' model beat the "Grandfather Paradox" -- or, as they put it, "no matter how hard the time-traveler tries, she finds her grandfather a tough guy to kill."
Read more...
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Rigorous "Science" -- On Hold |
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Saturday, 10 July 2010 01:47 |
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Jennifer Couzin-Frankel (July 8, 2010 Science Insider) interviews Paola Sebastiani and Thomas Perls about the "furor" raised by their "provocative" paper "Genetic Signatures of Exceptional Longevity in Humans," published in Science. In a Newsweek article and in a number of blogposts in the internet, researchers criticized the paper's statistical power and technical accuracy. Though surprised by the focus of criticism -- "issues with the data," rather than the innovative idea of "looking at patterns rather than individual variants," which Sebastiani expected would "generate discussion" -- the authors are taking seriously the concerns that have been raised, and "re-checking" the paper's analysis.
It won't take months nor weeks, says Thomas Perls, but "rigorous science" takes time and people need to wait for the required "ultimate test of accuracy." Interestingly, the Longevity Study may become a case study on the self-correcting process of science; as Sebastiani pointed out, "there are errors in every paper. This is part of the scientific debate -- from errors, sometimes you can come up with very good ideas."
More later, as they say!
- Authors of Controversial Longevity Study Discuss the Furor, Science
- Genetic Signatures of Exceptional Longevity in Humans, Science
- The Little Flaw in the Longevity-Gene Study That Could Be a Big Problem, Newsweek
- Longevity paper sparks debate, Nature
- New genetic test can predict your chances of living to 100, claim scientists, Guardian
- The inside workings of science: More on the genetic study of extreme longevity,
- Genetic Finding May Provide a Test for Longevity, NYT
- Serious flaws revealed in "longevity genes" study, Scienceblog
- Calling GWAS Longevity Calls into Question, Genomeweb
- Paola Sebastiani and Thomas Perls discussed the study's findings in a live chat about the Longevity Study on Wednesday, July 7. Here
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The Climategate Affair -- "What They Did" and "What They Said" |
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Thursday, 08 July 2010 04:14 |
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| Photo: Courtesy of The Guardian |
The Muir Russell Report. The last of the three inquiries generated by the “climategate” emails affair confirms the scientific integrity of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU).
The Muir Russell’s report, though, seemingly shares with the Oxburgh report the conclusion that CRU’s researchers are "ill prepared for public attention.” But “ultimately,” as Muir Russell remarked, the inquiry “has to be about “what they did,” and not “what they said.” The findings of the CRU scientists are not the result of manipulated data.
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Italians in the Lab - Paola Sebastiani |
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Monday, 05 July 2010 23:13 |
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 Methuselah's 969 years - A Secret No More? - Genetic Markers of Exceptional Longevity
Paola Sebastiani, a professor of biostatistics at the BU School of Public Health, together with Thomas Perls * and Annibale Puca (Itb-Cnr) developed a unique genetic model which is able to predict Exceptional Longevity with 77% accuracy in an independent set of centenarians and controls. The model – resulting from a genome-wide association study of exceptional longevity (EL) – could have further interesting applications regarding age-associated diseases (e.g., dementia, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease). But as Thomas Perls put it, “Don’t expect the genetic data to lead to a Methuselah pill !”
Paola Sebastiani's research interests span, broadly put, from mathematics to experiments and applications of Bayesian statistical methods in machine learning and artificial intelligence. In the late 90s, Sebastiani co-developed, with Marco Ramoni, the first computer program – called Bayesian Knowledge Discoverer – able to generate Bayesian models from incomplete databases: BKD (Bayesian Knowledge Discoverer) is currently developed by Bayesware LLC, the startup software company which Sebastiani and Ramoni co-founded. A number of other programs followed from their stream of work exclusively based on the Bayesian approach: RoC (Robust Bayes Classifier); CAGED (Cluster Analysis of Gene Expression Dynamics), and BADGE (Bayesian Analysis of Differential Gene Expression) already used in several genomic applications.
A graduate from the University of Perugia, a master from University College, London, and a Ph.D. from the University of Rome, Paola Sebastiani was from 1990-95 a researcher at the University of Perugia. After leaving Italy, and before moving to the US, Sebastiani held faculty positions at Imperial College and the City University of London among others.
* an associate professor of medicine at the BU School of Medicine
and a geriatrician at Boston Medical Center
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The Six Legged Dog -- Back to Earth |
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Friday, 02 July 2010 07:21 |
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Having just launched the ENI-MIT Solar Frontiers Center (SFC), ENI CEO Paolo Scaroni joins the Earth Institute Corporate Circle Members and announces yet another strategic partnership for ENI: this time with Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, to promote sustainable development in Africa.
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CCSVI: Iffy Theory or Paradigm Shift ? |
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Thursday, 01 July 2010 00:05 |
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