[citation needed]

…absolutely nothing, actually, except that they’re all mentioned in this post. I’m feeling lazy very busy this week, so instead of writing a long and boring diatribe about clowns, ROIs, or personality measures, I’ll just link to a few interesting pieces elsewhere:

Razib of Gene Expression has an interesting post on the rapid secularization of America, and the relation of religious affiliation to political party identification. You wouldn’t know it from the increasing political clout of the religious right, but Americans are substantially more likely to report having no religious affiliation today than they were 20 years ago. I mean a lot more likely. In Vermont, over a third of the population now reports having no religion. Here’s an idea, Vermont: want to generate more tourism? I present your new slogan: Vermont, America’s Europe.

Sea slugs are awesome. If you doubt this, consider Exhibit A: a sea slug found off the East Coast that lives off photosynthesis:

The slugs look just like a leaf, green and about three centimetres long, and are found off the east coast of North America from Nova Scotia to Florida.

They acquire the ability to photosynthesize by eating algae and incorporating the plants’ tiny chlorophyll-containing structures, called chloroplasts, into their own cells.

You can’t make this stuff up! It’s a slug! That eats algae! And then turns into  leaf!

I’m a big fan of TED, and there’s a great interview with its curator, Chris Anderson, conducted by reddit. Reddit interviews are usually pretty good (see, e.g., Barney Frank and Christopher Hitchens); who knew the internet had the makings of a great journalist?!?

Ok, now for the turtles. According to PalMD, they cause salmonella. So much so that the CDC banned the sale of turtles under 4 inches in length in 1975. Apparently children just loved to smooch those cute little turtles. And the turtles, being evil, loved to give children a cute little case of salmonella. Result: ban small turtles and prevent 200,000 infections. Next up: frog-banning and salami-banning! Both are currently also suspected of causing salmonella outbreaks. Is there any species those bacteria can’t corrupt?

sea slug or leaf?

The good people over at OKCupid, the best dating site on Earth (their words, not mine! I’m happily married!), just released a new slew of data on their OKTrends blog. Apparently men like women with smiley, flirty profile photos, and women like dismissive, unsmiling men. It’s pretty neat stuff, and definitely worth a read. Mating rituals aside, thuough, what I really like to think about whenever I see a new OKTrends post is how many people I’d be willing to kill to get my hands on their data.

Genetic Future covers the emergence of Counsyl, a new player in the field of personal genomics. Unlike existing outfits like 23andme and deCODEme.com, Counsyl focuses on rare Mendelian disorders, with an eye to helping prospective parents evaluate their genetic liabilities. What’s really interesting about Counsyl is its business model; if you have health insurance provided by Aetna or Blue Cross, you could potentially get a free test. Of course, the catch is that Aetna or Blue Cross get access to your results. In theory, this shouldn’t matter, since health insurers can’t use genetic information as grounds for discrimination. But then, on paper, employers can’t use race, gender, or sexual orientation as grounds for discrimination either, and yet we know it’s easier to get hired if your name is John than Jamal. That said, I’d probably go ahead and take Aetna up on its generous offer, except that my wife and I have no plans for kids, and the Counsyl test looks like it stays away from the garden-variety SNPs the other services cover…

The UK has banned the export of dowsing rods. In 2010! This would be kind of funny if not for the fact that dozens if not hundreds of Iraqis have probably died horrible deaths as a result of the Iraqi police force trying to detect roadside bombs using magic. [via Why Evolution is True].

Over at Freakonomics, regular contributor Ryan Hagen interviews psychologist, magician, and author Richard Wiseman, who just published a new empirically-based self-help book (can such a thing exist?). I haven’t read the book, but the interview is pretty good. Favorite quote:

What would I want to do? I quite like the idea of the random giving of animals. There’s a study where they took two groups of people and randomly gave people in one group a dog. But I’d quite like to replicate that with a much wider range of animals — including those that should be in zoos. I like the idea of signing up for a study, and you get home and find you’ve got to look after a wolf … .

On a professional note, Professor in Training has a really great two part series (1, 2) on what new tenure-track faculty need to know before starting the job. I’ve placed both posts inside Google Reader’s golden-starred vault, and fully expect to come back to them next Fall when I’m on the job market. Which means if you’re reading this and you’re thinking of hiring me, be warned: I will demand that a life-size bobble-head doll of Hans Eysenck be installed in my office, and thanks to PiT, I do now have the awesome negotiating powers needed to make it happen.

Craig Bennett, of prefrontal.org and dead salmon fame, links to a really great Science News article on the promises and pitfalls of fMRI. As Bennett points out, the real gem of the article is the “quote of the week” from Nikos Logethetis (which I won’t spoil for you here; you’ll have to do just a little more work to get to it). But the article is full of many other insightful quotes from fMRI researchers, and manages to succinctly and accurately describe a number of recent controversies in the fMRI literature without sacrificing too much detail. Usually when I come across a mainstream article on fMRI, I pre-emptively slap the screen a few times before I start reading, because I know I’m about to get angry. Well, I did that this time too, so my hand hurts per usual, but at least this time I feel pretty good about it. Kudos to Laura Sanders for writing one of the best non-technical accounts I’ve seen of the current state of fMRI research (and that, unlike a number of other articles in this vein, actually ends on a balanced and optimistic note).

This week’s issue of Science has a news article about National Lab Day, a White House-supported initiative to pair up teachers and scientists in an effort to improve STEM education nation-wide. As the article notes, National Lab Day is a bit of a misnomer, seeing as the goal is to encourage a range of educational activities over the next year or so. That’s a sentiment I can appreciate; why pick just one national lab day when you can have ALL OF THEM.

In any case, if you’re a scientist, you can sign up simply by giving away all of your deepest secrets and best research ideas providing your contact information and describing your academic background. I’m not really sure what happens after that, but in theory, at some point you’re supposed to wind up in a K-12 classroom demonstrating what you do and why it’s cool, which I guess could involve activities like pulling french fries out of burning oil with your bare hands, or applying TMS to 3rd graders’ foreheads, or other things of that nature. Of course, you can’t really bring an fMRI scanner into a classroom (though I suppose you could bring a classroom to an fMRI scanner), so I’m not really sure what I’ll do if anyone actually contacts me and asks me to come visit their classroom. I guess there’s always videos of lesion patients and the Muller-Lyer illusion, right?

Peer reviewers get worse as they age, not better. That’s the conclusion drawn by a study discussed in the latest issue of Nature. The study isn’t published yet, and it’s based on analysis of 1,400 reviews in just one biomedical journal (The Annals of Emergency Medicine), but there’s no obvious reason why these findings shouldn’t generalize to other areas of research.From the article:

The most surprising result, however, was how individual reviewers’ scores changed over time: 93% of them went down, which was balanced by fresh young reviewers coming on board and keeping the average score up. The average decline was 0.04 points per year.

That 0.04/year is, I presume, on a scale of 5,  and the quality of reviews was rated by the editors of the journal. This turns the dogma of experience on its head, in that it suggests editors are better off asking more junior academics for reviews (though whether this data actually affects editorial policy remains to be seen). Of course, the key question–and one that unfortunately isn’t answered in the study–is why more senior academics give worse reviews. It’s unlikely that experience makes you a poorer scientist, so the most likely explanation is that that “older reviewers tend to cut corners,” as the article puts it. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed this myself in the dozen or so reviews I’ve completed; my reviews often tend to be relatively long compared to those of the other reviewers, most of whom are presumably more senior. I imagine length of review is (very) loosely used as a proxy for quality of review by editors, since a longer review will generally be more comprehensive. But this probably says more about constraints on reviewers’ time than anything else. I don’t have grants to write and committees to sit on; my job consists largely of writing papers, collecting data, and playing the occasional video game keeping up with the literature.

Aside from time constraints, senior researchers probably also have less riding on a review than junior researchers do. A superficial review from an established researcher is unlikely to affect one’s standing in the field, but as someone with no reputation to speak of, I usually feel a modicum of pressure to do at least a passable job reviewing a paper. Not that reviews make a big difference (they are, after all, anonymous to all but the editors, and occasionally, the authors), but at this point in my career they seem like something of an opportunity, whereas I’m sure twenty or thirty years from now they’ll feel much more like an obligation.

Anyway, that’s all idle speculation. The real highlight of the Nature article is actually this gem:

Others are not so convinced that older reviewers aren’t wiser. “This is a quantitative review, which is fine, but maybe a qualitative study would show something different,” says Paul Hébert, editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal in Ottawa. A thorough review might score highly on the Annals scale, whereas a less thorough but more insightful review might not, he says. “When you’re young you spend more time on it and write better reports. But I don’t want a young person on a panel when making a multi-million-dollar decision.”

I think the second quote is on the verge of being reasonable (though DrugMonkey disagrees), but the first is, frankly, silly. Qualitative studies can show almost anything you want them to show; I thought that was precisely why we do quantitative studies…

[h/t: DrugMonkey]