Category Archives: Science

Science

Very important discovery about Adobe Acrobat Standard

I just made two very important discoveries. As much as I loathed buying Acrobat Standard, and as poorly as it ran on my machine using a case sensitive filesystem, it does have a redeeming feature.

It has a built-in OCR engine, which I knew. I hadn’t tried it. I decided to try it on an academic paper that I had in my archive. However, when I loaded the paper (which looked scanned) I was already able to select the text, though I didn’t know why. I was also able to do so in Preview, so it couldn’t have been a feature of Acrobat.

I took another paper that was clearly scanned, and tried to run OCR on it. It didn’t have the selectability that the first one did to start with. However, after OCR… it did.

So, the two important discoveries are that Acrobat will overlay your scanned documents with selectable text information transparently, and that Circulation Research appears to have already done this on their downloadable PDFs from older articles.

This explains why PDFs that I thought were scanned have been showing up in Spotlight searches that pick up their contents.

ADDENDUM: Apparently Acrobat Pro can do this in batch mode. This has major implications for me. I might even consider buying it at some point, once they come out with a universal binary.

Cardiac EP Finding of the Day

I say finding rather than fact, because sometimes a finding is later revealed to be incorrect, or subject to qualifications. Anyway, I read a lot of papers, and sometimes there are little useful nuggets of information that you might not be able to easily find if looking for them.

Here’s today’s.

According to Hearse et al 1977, the specific gravity of the left ventricular tissue of mongrel dogs is about 1.5.

I had no idea what the specific gravity of LV myocardium was. If asked to estimate, I probably would have placed it between 1 and 2, but I couldn’t have been much more specific. This could be useful when, say, someone gives concentrations in terms of wet weight of the myocardium.

Reflexively Looking for References and Trust

If you read a lot of scientific papers, or I guess academic papers really, and you care about where the information is coming from, you develop a habit.

I guess I, have developed a habit. I can’t speak for others but I think it’s fairly common.

That habit is to look for references whenever an assertion is made. There are three kinds of assertions in academic writing.

  1. Assertions with references: This is a case where the author has read something elsewhere. Ve wishes to pass that information along to the reader, perhaps to build an argument. A reference shows that the assertion comes from elsewhere, and most importantly, where to find it.
  2. Substantiated claims: In the field of science, this would be direct reference to included data (say, a table or graph), or an inference based on such data. No external reference is necessary. The reader may not trust the data, but the experiments should be repeatable by the reader to be considered valid.
  3. Unsubstantiated assertions: These generally fall into two categories: (1) Restatements of common knowledge, which one should know or can easily look up in a general reference or (2) Bullshit.

I call the last item (unsubstantiated claims that cannot easily be verified by a general reference) bullshit because without the back-up included in the other case, the reader has no grounds to believe what is written.

Try reading, say, a religious text with this frame of reference. It’s rather illuminating.

Zombies vs. Humans – A Predator-Prey Model

Molly just pointed me to a predator-prey type analysis of zombie populations and efficiency at killing and consuming humans.

I think this should become the standard for differential equations and epidemiology courses, rather than foxes and rabbits or something totally lame like that.

After students grasp that, I think you could have them move on to a more complex, pirates/ninjas/zombies/pedestrians ecosystem.