Innotech, er… EniTech

I spent Saturday through Friday last week in Seattle at the Society of Toxicology annual meeting. Seattle is awesome and I had a lot more time to explore than my previous, three day trip. The weather was actually pretty decent — it was often rainy but not raining. In fact, it only rained the two times I didn’t take my umbrella with me.

Anyhow, I need to get back into the blogging habit, and as a big Terminator fan (apparently one of the few that prefers the original) I think that the website for Enitech is pretty entertaining.

The Big Game

While switching from granular physics to biological modeling has had many pro’s and con’s, this weekend I am relishing that for the first time since 2001, I will not be traveling to attend the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting during the Michigan-Ohio State game.

Don’t get me wrong, I regret not having new research to present and will really miss the DFD meeting, which is one of my favorites (it’s much smaller than the March Meeting but still quite diverse).  But I haven’t gotten to see the whole game in years, much to Michigan’s detriment.  As can be easily proven with sufficiently adjusted statistics, Michigan performs much better when I am watching, and this year I will get to see more than part of a quarter squeezed in at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport’s sports bar.

Though it is what I will be watching, Michigan-Ohio State is not this post’s eponymous ”Big Game.”  (Thank you, Andy.)  Instead I am referring to the Duke Super Bowl airing at  2:30 EST on NBC.  1-9 Duke takes on 1-9 Notre Dame in South Bend, and we actually have a good chance.  Don’t get me wrong, this is the same Duke football team that broke two different losing streaks of more than twenty games in my five years as a graduate student, but Notre Dame is really, really bad and demoralized this year.  Duke’s football team, on the other hand, has an opportunity to make their season, if not their college careers.  The Sagarin ratings even rank us higher.  So let’s hope that at game’s end that whatever Duke fans are on hand in South Bend will be singing the whatever it is out fight song is called and chanting “Go to Hell, Carolina, got to Hell…”

Incidentally, CNNSI.com has a cool rundown of the ten best games in the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry since 1950 (I was at #7 & #4!)

The Start of Epidemiology

At the other conference I attended last week (which I thankfully finished transcribing my notes from yesterday) we spent two days discussing the kinetics and mode of action of perfluorinated compounds (a class of chemicals used to make non-stick surfaces and flame-retardant materials that have the disturbingly long half-life of 4 years in a human). An epidemiologist from one of the two companies involved in the manufacture of the chemicals related the following anecdote which may be familiar to those more medically/biologically inclined but was new to me.

In 1854, Dr. John Snow managed to suppress an outbreak of cholera in the Soho district of London by simply marking the locations of water pumps on a map and then marking the location of cholera cases. Most of the cases clustered around a single water pump, so he removed the handle. The outbreak subsided and, to this day, the water pump handle is a major symbol for epidemiology.

Wikipedia actually had a copy of the map used by Snow:

Friendship

Also at yesterday’s meeting there was a great graph of high school friendships. It’s a directed graph, with a node for every student and an edge from each student to whomever they said were their friends. I have no idea what the colors mean (possibly cliques, but it seems like there are too few).

At any rate, the thing we discussed over lunch was the scattering of friendless students and the couple of students (e.g. the one in the upper left) who claim to be friendless but have at least one person claim them as a friend. I felt that those individuals who had friends but didn’t realize it were the saddest, though my lunch companions disagreed.

Either way, it certainly captures something about high school. I spent quite a while looking for the image (I finally found it in Mark Newman’s Galley of Network Images, of course) so enjoy.

Image From: James Moody, Race, school integration, and friendship segregation in America, American Journal of Sociology 107, 679-716 (2001).

Cool Network Image

So I was at a Network Approaches to Investigating Environmental Influences on Human Disease — i.e. systems biology — conference today and there was a really cool animation showing air travel for a given day in the United States. The coolest part is that you can see the influence of the different time zones: