Wie aus 6 Stellen ich weiß gar nicht mehr wieviele werden

Die Geschichte entfaltet sich an der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn vor meinen Augen wie ein car crash in slow motion. Sie zeigt Probleme auf, die symptomatisch für den gesamten Arbeitsmarkt im deutschen Hochschulwesen sind. Die Schwierigkeiten mit befristeten Stellen, die NachwuchsforscherInnen bewältigen müssen, um am universitären Arbeitsmarkt Fuß fassen zu können, sind hinlänglich bekannt. Die bizarren Anreize der Beteiligten führen zu langsamer Auswertung der Bewerbungen und ausgeschriebene Stellen gehen vorübergehend, aber für lange Zeitdauer, verloren.

Ich will nicht mehr schweigen. Ich habe überlegt, ob ich auf Englisch oder auf Deutsch nicht mehr schweigen soll. Ich habe mich für Deutsch entschieden, damit Entscheidungsträger (auch in der Wissenschaftspolitik) die Probematik als ihre eigene annehmen werden.

Continue reading “Wie aus 6 Stellen ich weiß gar nicht mehr wieviele werden”

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Santa’s Christmas delivery route revealed

Data visualisation meets children’s curiosity. We immerse ourselves in geoinformatics to find out how postal services in the USA, in Germany and in Hungary carved their countries into mosaics of postal code areas. Visually striking maps emerge from the opaque depths of numerical data.

Whoever still sends letters by post will notice that addresses closest to you share your postal code or differ only slightly, but opposite corners of your country will have very different codes. How do postal services cover countries with postal codes?

Continue reading “Santa’s Christmas delivery route revealed”

Non-minimum-phase dynamics in an inflammation model

Inflammation is the innate immune system’s response to tissue damage caused by trauma or infection. Thinking about it as the quickly receding rash after an insect bite detracts from the major antagonistic role it plays in medicine. As Baldur Tumi Baldursson of the National University Hospital of Iceland put it, `I tell my students, your work is inflammation. Practically all of internal medicine is just fighting inflammation.’

Inflammation is a complex process involving different cell types, mediator molecules and changes in the permeability of capillaries and affected tissue. This reaction has to be ramped up quickly to defend our body, but it must also be kept under strict control to prevent immune cells causing tissue damage themselves. On occasion, things go wrong and a patient is left with chronic, abnormal inflammation: inflammatory bowel disease, coeliac disease or rheumatoid arthritis are a few debilitating examples.

A mathematical model of inflammation control

These notes extend the findings of three researchers from Britain—Joanne Dunster (Reading), Helen Byrne (Oxford) and John King (Nottingham)—using control theoretical insights, and perhaps contribute a new aspect to our understanding of the problem. Their 2014 paper1 drew attention to a shift from understanding inflammation resolution as a passive process to an active, anti-inflammatory mechanism.Continue reading “Non-minimum-phase dynamics in an inflammation model”

La La Land: a peer review

This weekend I saw the critically acclaimed new Hollywood musical, La La Land. I can warmly recommend it to my generation of nomadic, globetrotting, aspiring, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed academic scientists. It’s touching.

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SPOILER ALERT: My clumsy words will completely spoil your enjoyment whether you’re planning to watch it or have already done so.Continue reading “La La Land: a peer review”

Music cognition: probing the mind with music

What can you learn about a person from what music they like? Can you expect a difference in predisposition between those who prefer upbeat music versus those who like melancholic music? Do people with a taste for complex music have better cognitive skills, or is it a learned taste that results from devoting more time to the subject, or something else? Can a music streaming service make money through targeted advertising based solely on music preferences? Following from that, should we guard our musical taste closely? What might a future adversary infer about ourselves from our taste in music? Is it or will it be possible to scientifically predict which songs will be hits? If yes, can this capability be used during composition already?

I jumped the gun here by starting with the inverse (the inference) problem. The direct question is: do personality traits influence preferences for certain musical styles? This statistical framing assumes that there are hidden variables describing our personality and musical preferences are their functions, which can be observed. We will see that they do correlate.

Why do people differ so much in what music they like? More fundamentally, why do we like music? It seems most everyone likes music. Does this affection give us an evolutionary advantage, or is it just a neutral side effect of something that is advantageous? What percentage of us don’t like music? Are they a small minority, as social convention leads us to believe, or is there actually a silent majority for whom music is a nuisance? If they were a rarity, perhaps they are interesting subjects for psychological studies. How does rhythmic music suck many of us in and make us move with the beat? Shouldn’t we be better at controlling our bodies, at jamming such stimuli? Or is jamming more costly for some minds than moving with the rhythm?Continue reading “Music cognition: probing the mind with music”