Random links
- Study: Economic Recovery Kind of Sucks for Old Ladies
- ”when employment goes up, mortality increases disproportionately among the elderly and among older women in particular.”
- Many hybrid-car owners buy once -- but not again, Polk study says
- ”Only 35% of hybrid vehicle owners chose to purchase a hybrid again when they returned to the market in 2011, according to auto information company R.L. Polk & Co.
If you factor out the super-loyal Toyota Prius buyers, the repurchase rate drops to under 25%.“ Hmn... I’m wondering if they’ve been around in the market long enough to make this a reasonable comparison. 35% is a lot higher than the fraction of hybrids currently on the roads though.
- Google saves
energy money by cooling its buildings with ice
- I fixed the title for you. "Google’s new $700 million data centers in Taiwan will make ice at night, when electricity is significantly cheaper, and use it to cool the buildings during the day, reports Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge. It’s called thermal storage, and it’s basically a battery, but for air conditioning."
- In cancer science, many 'discoveries' don't hold up
- Seems to be part of the problem with the publish-or-perish model of academia. "as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 "landmark" publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. ... Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. ... Scientists at Bayer did not have much more success. Of 47 cancer projects at Bayer during 2011, less than one-quarter could reproduce previously reported findings, despite the efforts of three or four scientists working full time for up to a year. ... Bayer and Amgen found that the prestige of a journal was no guarantee a paper would be solid. ... The problem goes beyond cancer. On Tuesday, a committee of the National Academy of Sciences heard testimony that the number of scientific papers that had to be retracted increased more than tenfold over the last decade; the number of journal articles published rose only 44 percent."