LHC goes live on 10 September...

... so if you think the world might end when they turn it on for real, best get your world-ending duds ready, and perhaps mix a few cocktails.

Here's the official LHC page. Here's an earlier post on this blag. And here, below, is the awesome LHC rap, which there's a good chance you've seen, but just in case not...



(And isn't that Stephen Hawking one incredible ventriloquist? I saw him on telly blathering on about galaxies for hours and I never saw his lips move once. Genius. [Thanks to the Viz letters page.])

BPSDB has moved...

So BPSDB has moved, and somewhat transmogrified. It used to be an aggregator of blog articles attacking pseudo-science, called, in full, 'Blogging Pseudo-Scientific Douche Bags'. The old site had gone quiet, and nobody could get hold of the administrator, and so it's been shifted over to Lay Science. The rescue job is welcome - although the old BPSDB is still 'there' the new version is actively managed. But along the way it became the rather more respectable and well-mannered 'Blogging on Pseudo-Science Database'. Sigh.

(I remember when the old 'Digital Research' software company dropped what I'd thought of as the coolest bit of their original name. Who's both old and geeky enough to remember what it was? That, BTW, doesn't mean who's young and/or non-geeky but knows how to use a search engine.)

Encephalon #51

Sandy G hosts the latest Encephalon, over at The Mouse Trap. It's cool. Among the fine things there is an article at Mind Hacks about how just calling a deck of cards special fools even accomplished tricksters into entertaining crazy hypotheses about the tricks done with it, reminding us of something Dennett has said about the non-existence of a genuine 'hard problem' of consciousness. There's also a piece at Mind, Body, Soul on Asperger's syndrome patients and their deficits at reading others. That latter piece is fruitfully read alongside one at Neurocritic on differences between autistics and Williams' sydrome subjects found with eye tracking. My own piece from a little while ago on encoding of the concept 'nest' in the mouse hippocampus also made the cut. There's more - check it out.

An analysis of the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces

I'll be honest, I'm mostly blagging this piece from Applied Ergonomics (Volume 33, Number 6, November 2002) because it has such a terrific title. It's the title that got the paper an Ig Nobel (see this story in WIRED) a while ago, suggesting that the Ig Nobel processes at least sometimes don't get beyond the title.

The motivation for the study was related to occupational health. Sheep shearing involves some dragging work, and the shearers are prone to back injuries plausibly related to the dragging. Here's the abstract:

Some occupational health and safety hazards associated with sheep shearing
are related to shearing shed design. One aspect is the floor of the catching
pen, from which sheep are caught and dragged to the shearing workstation.
Floors can be constructed from various materials, and may be level or gently
sloping. An experiment was conducted using eight experienced shearers as
participants to measure the force exerted by a shearer when dragging a
sheep. Results showed that significant changes in mean dragging force
occurred with changes in both surface texture and slope. The mean dragging
forces for different floor textures and slopes ranged from 359 N (36.6 kg)
to 423N (43.2 kg), and were close to the maximum acceptable limits for
pulling forces for the most capable of males. The best floor tested was a
floor sloped at 1:10 constructed of timber battens oriented parallel to the
path of the drag, which resulted in a mean dragging force 63.6N (15%) lower
than the worst combination.

The rest of the paper is hardly exciting - they got some shearers and some sheep, and interchangeable panel to experiment with different surfaces, a force plate, did some biophysical modeling, and came to the conclusion at the end of the abstract. The 'change' that came with changes in slope was the anticipated 'finding' that its easier to drag a sheep down hill. As with
much applied work, doing the sums meant including some simplifying assumptions, my favourite being:

The best available estimate of the force being applied by the hands of the shearer is predicated on the assumption that the sheep were inelastic and moving at constant velocity.

This simplification leads to a caveat at the end, since, given that it takes more oomph to get the sheep moving in the first place, and those sudden bursts of effort is likely a key culprit in wear and tear on the back:

Another issue is that the initial force required to begin motion exceeds the steady-state dragging force. Calculation of this initial force from force plate measurements was infeasible because estimates of acceleration and elasticity of the sheep would be required.

Acceleration seems like the sort of thing that you could measure easily enough, maybe even from video footage, but I'd guess that rigorous assessment of the elasticity of sheep would demand a study in its own right.

Harvey, J. (2002). An analysis of the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces. Applied Ergonomics, 33(6), 523-531. DOI: 10.1016/S0003-6870(02)00071-6

Praxis: New carnival

Lay Science has launched what should be a cool new blog carnival, called Praxis. Here's what it says on the box:

Topics:
The carnival is intended to cover all aspects of life as an academic, whether it's the lifestyle, career progress, doing a Ph.D., getting funding, climbing the slippery pole, academic life as a minority, working with colleagues and students, dealing with the peer-review process, publishing, grants, science 2.0, amusing anecdotes, conference experiences, philosophical musings, public engagement, or even historical articles about what life was like in the good (or bad) old days.

I'll link to this when it comes out, and maybe even contribute from time to time.

Doctor Who? Deception by chiropractors

David Colquhoun's always splendid DC Science blog has a terrific piece on Chiropractic, and the mis-use of the title 'doctor' by pseudo-science whackos. I'm linking it here mostly as an opportunity to tip my hat at a fine blog, one of the ones that helped get me into the blogging enterprise.

Effortless Incitement readership

So this here blag has been running for nearly two months. According to Google Analytics, it has had a bit over 400 visits, a bit over 600 page views, and a bit over 300 unique visitors. (Yes, you are all individuals.) The most viewed individual article so far is The Coghill Challenge - Part 2, mostly on the back of it being featured in the most recent Skeptic's Circle blog carnival. The daily maximum readership has been 54 so far, and 18 subscribe via feedburner.

The visitors mostly come from the USA, UK and South Africa, but 39 countries in total have sent traffic so far, including most of Europe and Asia, but only one other African country, and nowhere South of the USA in either the Americas or Caribbean. Maybe I should write something en Espanol. Most of the traffic is direct or via referral (from blogger, and the blog carnivals I've participated in, as well as research blogging in the case of articles on peer-reviewed research). Only a small fraction so far is from search results, with 'effortless incitement' being the most common way of getting here by searching.

I can also report the following:

63.4% of visitors are using Firefox.
83.8% of visitors are using Windows.
83.8% of visitors are using 32 bit colour, and 96% have Java support.

Technorati seems to have been wobbly for a while, and the page for this blog there has persistently been a few days or more out of date for a while. Still, since Effortless Incitement got listed, its Technorati rank has climbed from 1,287,256 to 787,635, and its 'authority' from zero to 8. It's one person's favourite there (thanks, Michael).

So it's early days yet. I'll get good and liquored up when daily readership passes 100, and when unique visitors passes 1000.