What if assumptions of bias factored into test results to overcome social or cultural bias that prevents some people from achieving high test scores turned out to be flawed?

That's a messy sentence, right?   Confusing sentences like that are what happens when 40 years of accepted practice in using  tools to check tests of "general mental ability" for bias are themselves flawed. If it holds up, this finding from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business challenges basically throws out reliance on those exams to make objective decisions for employment or academic admissions.

A new corticosteroid hormone in the sea lamprey, an eel-like fish and one of the earliest vertebrates dating back 500 million years, may shed light on the evolution of steroid hormones.

Principal investigator and lead author David Close of the University of British Columbia's Department of Zoology andcolleagues at Michigan State University identified a corticosteroid hormone called 11-deoxycortisol in the sea lamprey that plays dual roles in balancing ions and regulating stresses, similar to aldosterone and cortisol in humans. 

Aww. I cannot bring myself to enter the contest to win a month living in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

The website beckons: "Be the experiment. Eat. Sleep. Science." 

But I am not proficient at editing or making videos, a prerequisite. The winner will emerge $10,000 wealthier for interacting with the public, doing experiments and documenting the Month at the Museum experience, October 20 to November 18, 2010. 

What a dream gig!  

My last post got me thinking a bit more about uncertainty and decision making. It reminded me of a podcast I had listened to a while back, on uncertainty, storytelling and hedge fund managers.

It is based on the work of David Tuckett at University College London.

This is the line that I remembered. In the interview Tuckett said, “Fund managers have too much information but never enough; therefore [they] have to gain conviction for their actions by telling themselves stories.”

Tuckett is an economist turned psychoanalyst who has been studying the emotional underpinning of financial markets.

I have been working with scientists and engineers on explaining their research and other work to the general public for almost a decade. I've explained the science of many things and how they connect to the real lives of real people. But it occurred to me this morning that if you asked me to come up with a sentence or two on what an engineer's job is, I would struggle with it.

What exactly does an engineer do? How is he or she different from a scientist? What is their role in our world?

Did I mention that I am dating an engineer who works for a big local utility company, and I don't understand what he does either.

Skegness is SO bracing

In a classic experiment known as the Ultimatum Game, person A is given 10 coins to split between himself and person B. If person B accepts the distribution, they both keep the coins; if not, no one gets paid.

According to Game Theory, the optimal solution is for person A to give himself nine coins and person B one coin——both will end the game richer than when they started. However, played in the wild, the most common distribution is 6-to-4, a ratio seen as fair by both parties.

But why? What's the origin of the human idea of fairness?

I've recently had two similar, yet very different, experiences in my day job as a science writer. A few months ago I was assigned to write a piece for symmetry Magazine (look for it in August!) about an artist in residence at Paul Alivisatos' nanotechnology research lab at the University of California, Berkeley.

Imagine a bullet-proof vest made from a relatively simple protein processed from water - fashionable for those high-risk warzones yet still environmentally terrific.

Ancient people knew about this material 5,000 years ago and even made armor from it but  modern science can't replicate it in a laboratory - though we are getting closer.

The mystery material is silk fiber.   Silk spun by spiders and silk worms combines high strength and extensibility and fundamental discoveries in how silk fibers are made have shown that chemistry, molecular biology and biophysics all play a role in the process. These discoveries have provided the basis for a new generation of applications for silk materials, from medical devices and drug delivery to electronics.

A new study says that mild H1N1 infection may go undetected using standard diagnostic criteria and concludes that coughing or other respiratory symptoms are more accurate in determining influenza infection than presence of a fever. 

A team led by Sang Won Park, MD, professor at the Seoul National University, investigated confirmed cases of H1N1 who were hospitalized and quarantined during the early stages of the pandemic in 2009. The study's results showed only 45.5 percent of the case subjects had fever. Individuals with mild infection and no fever have the potential to evade detection at airports or medical triage units, thus continuing the chain of infection.