Large Ideas in Small Words

This picture of the Up Goer Five gave me the idea to try to explain some of my work using one hundred or fewer of the ten hundred most often used words. You can use this checker to help you explain your own work in the same way if you wish. Have fun!

The idea behind my work:
There are four-lettered lines in our cells that tell the cells how to work. Usually these lines are found in pairs, but we know enough about the lines to force them to make many different forms. Can we take what we know about the tiny lines and make foot-long lines with two types of hard letters that stick to each other so they take on the same forms as the tiny lines? It seems so! We can build things without touching the pieces themselves by letting forces do the work for us.

Follow Up on Cherry Picking

In my post regarding cherry picking I wrote that purposefully excluding data from a data set is misleading and unethical, but I forgot to mention there are some exceptions.  It can be necessary to exclude a data point or points that was/were gathered outside of controlled conditions.  Imagine measuring the average growth rate of bacteria at 37 C over many trials across many days.  Several days in a row, the bacteria are plated at a known concentration in a Petri dish, incubated at 37 C overnight, and the amount of growth is measured in the morning via optical density or whatever your favorite method is (don't pretend you don't have one).  If the power goes out one night and the 37 C incubation room drops to -15 C, the data from that trial become invalid to use when calculating your average.  Incorporating the data would skew the results unfairly, as the conditions under which the data were gathered are not in line with what you are testing.  If you end up not using certain data points in your analysis, you need to explicitly state why you are excluding them.

Throwing out half your data from a long term study after you realize you're not going to get the results you want is still cherry picking though, regardless of your North Carolina residency status.