Simulations Plus

Scientific research requires two kinds of effort. One is the generation and synthesis of original ideas by skilled practitioners. This is a desirable and often lauded talent that can spawn remarkable innovations in science and medical care. The second kind of effort is less visible, but equally important—the hard work required to turn an idea into reality. Executing the experiments, analyzing the data, and developing presentations of results are examples of this work. Although these latter efforts are necessary, and even enjoyable, they nonetheless can be tedious, time-consuming, and expensive.

For me, anyway, the point of opinion writing is less to try to shape events, a presumptuous and foolhardy ambition at best, than to help stimulate debate and, from my particular perspective, try to explain why things got the way they are and what they might mean and where they might lead. My own idiosyncratic bent as a writer, no doubt a legacy of my years spent in the theater, is to look for a narrative in the many competing dramas unfolding on the national stage.

Frank Rich, New York Times

During the time that I was a clinical pharmacology fellow with Lewis Sheiner and Stuart Beal in San Francisco, the Voyager mission [1] was sending back incredible images of the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.

Did you watch the Oscars? A year ago, the 3D blockbuster, Avatar, was denied the Oscar for best film, which went to a low-budget war movie called The Hurt Locker. However, Avatar did win 3 Oscars in technical categories: Cinematography, Art Direction, and Visual Effects.

We’ve had a cold winter so far in the USA, don’t you think? Snow in Alabama, a blizzard in Boston, another in Chicago, an ice storm in Dallas before the Super Bowl. . .Yep, it’s cold outside. But, take a look at this picture from 100 years ago. It’s hard to imagine how cold it had to have been to make Niagara Falls freeze over.

If you want a cheap but out-of-this-world vacation, a short tour of the universe may be just what you are looking for. This video was posted by Adam Frank last January on a National Public Radio blog called 13.7: Cosmos and Culture.

I recently had the occasion to visit the Monet exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. Several things about this exhibit blew me away.

A new graph library that provides the right graphs at the right time and with the right information has been developed by Cognigen Corporation, a leading provider of pharmacometric analysis and support services. Comprehensive graphical exploratory data analysis is essential to building pharmacometric models of drug behavior. Previously, deciding which graphs were required to describe the data and then creating a new program for each graph consumed excessive time from both scientists and programmers.

I have long been addicted to The New York Times Book Review. It is not that I am a writer groupie as much as I find it fascinating to read about how a book came about.

Few among us would think highly of a leader who directed us to innovate on demand. After all, innovation is something that comes from a mysterious creative force that strikes like lightning to the fortunate inventor, bringing with it fame and fortune. Think Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; Bill Gates; Mark Zuckerberg; or Tim Berners-Lee (huh?) [1].

Although some meteorological modelers may disagree, it seems to me that models predicting development and movement of hurricanes are getting more and more accurate.

Scientists in the field of pharmaceutical research and development face a most daunting challenge. Our understanding of the diseases we work to treat grows more complex and perplexing with each new published study. Take, for example, the gusher of information coming out on Alzheimer’s disease. How can research findings from genetics, neurology, nutrition, protein chemistry, pharmacology, and epidemiology (just to name a few) be tracked, sorted, and used?

Seems like every time we learn something new, whether it is in biology or cosmology, we learn something else that just makes us sit back and say Wow. So it is with a recent story in The Economist about new information regarding one of the universal “constants” alpha.

G.H. Hardy* said, “A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. And just as in poetry and painting, the mathematician’s patterns must be beautiful. Beauty is the first test,” he said. “There is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”

Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (seen here) is an example of a complex painting that can be grasped with a few moments of contemplation, according to Terry Teachout (links to a dead page) in the Wall Street Journal. Pollock worked during the mid 20th century, when nature was assumed to be random. However, as Robert Taylor (links to content that is no longer available) explained in a 2002 Scientific American article:

Update: For another perspective on tech employment in the United States and China, see Andy Grove’s recent article in Bloomberg Businessweek.

Take a look at BigDog and his amazing robot pals in this link to the New York Times. Or, if you love cute and cuddly, you should check out Paro.

One of the true pleasures of my job is the opportunity to travel and meet people from all over the world. Different cultures presume different business and social behaviors, of course.* But I have found that in spite of the differences, there are at least two similarities among world cultures: a passion to cheer for your national team to win the World Cup and a nearly universal reviling of the vuvuzelas.

In a recent Wall Street Journal column, Terry Teachout had a wonderful essay questioning the complexity of modern art.* He quotes from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which contains sentences like this:

If you want to understand process formalization, read Jane Austen.