Balancing Signal and Noise

How frequently to post is a perennial question for anyone with a footprint in social media. Too frequent and no one pays attention to all the noise. Too seldom and no one bothers to look. In either case, you also risk the possibility that Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook will deprioritize your post when serving it to your followers or friends. Of course, it all depends on how valuable a given post is. It can have value simply because you are popular in whatever sense, and the reader cares only about the fact that you are the one saying it. It can have value in some intrinsic sense because of the concept that is conveyed. Or it can have value somewhere in between. Regardless, readers are being bombarded by so many screaming pieces of content (that is, noise) that it's hard for any piece of truly valuable content (that is, signal) to be noticed.

Interestingly, this question also pertains to data. Is the signal from the device detectable and reproducible from the noise? It is also relevant to the articles that we publish in science. Is the advance incremental and hence within reach of a good guess from past work?! Or is it truly a new signal that advances our understanding? Ultimately, we scientists must find signals well above the noise, and be careful in reporting it so that it doesn't get lost in the noise. There is also the question of what is the noise and what is the signal. Consider the accompanying image with this post. Is the pretty red region the signal that is tainted by the noise of a few bright spots? Or are the bright spots the signals that shine over the noise of the red background?

If you are interested in questions of observation, you may also want to check out some of my old posts on the role of perception and implicit bias: Part I and Part II. (It's relatively timely again because Amy Herman appeared on an NPR broadcast just this week.)

Juggling Communication Into My Calendar

It’s about time that I wrote my next Blog Post. As you may recall from one of my old posts on Hallows or Horcruxes, as a researcher, my daily question is whether to spend time on grants or papers. What I neglected to mention is that as a Professor, I also have a long list of other items that I must address in order to keep up my research (and teaching) enterprise moving forward. The fact that I enjoy many of these tasks doesn’t detract from the fact that they take time. Alas my blogging has suffered.

So where's the "chemistry" in the fact that I have been a slacker in not writing on my everywherechemistry blog? Sadly, it partially lies in the fact that all of my chemistry colleagues are equally overburdened. E-mail has become a daily chore with hundreds of messages that must be deleted, responded to immediately, or which require significant deliverables that require even more time. I know that this is no different than what other professionals experience. It is a sign of the times. Electronic communication has increased our ability to share our chemistry with each other, but it has also increased our volume of work. The ease in travel also tempts us to move our bodies, not just electrons, to distant places. It allows me to interact with chemists (and other scientists) directly, and mentor students whom I would not meet otherwise. That human touch provides more substance to the methods and approaches that we are developing and teaching each other.

Thus communication in all its forms is critical to learning and advancing chemistry. This is a fact that may have been lost on you as you learned how to balance chemical reactions, how to name molecules or how to calculate the wave functions associated with chemical bonds. Nevertheless, it's a critical part of doing chemistry... And I'm happy to be back on my blog! Please stay tuned.

The Analytics of FaceBook and what it says about you (and others)

There’s no way that I could possibly go into all that FaceBook (and Google) knows about me from the amalgamation of all the sites I have visited and the content that I have produced, not to mention what they gather from the data of all of my friends and acquaintances about me through their own links and hits to my material. But I do want to hit on one crazy connection that intrigues and scares me at the same time.

FaceBook presumably tracks the degree to which each of my posts has been clicked in any way by my friends, whether they simply read it, clicked on the forwarding link, liked it, commented on it, shared it, etc. (Note that while I may not know who lurked it, FaceBook does!) That means that there is a way for FaceBook to tell me what aspect of my on-line personality is of interest to each of my friends. Presumably each of these faces is different and is somehow a reflection not just of myself but also that of my fB friend. There’s clearly some statistical error and noise among these faces because each is contingent on the overall activity of a given fB friend and their strategy for digesting fB content. Nevertheless, it seems nearly unfathomable that fB has a way to access the degree of my multiple personalities by way of running statistics on these faces. In turn, such data would presumably be possible for me to obtain a better understanding of what I really have in common with a given friend. Chances are that knowing this would make the relationship weaker rather than stronger as I might be tempted to zero in on only the known overlaps rather than the discovery of new commonalities. But how will I or you actually respond to this type of information when fB eventually gives us this (new) feature (whether free or charged)?

Blog Post #100 - Looking Back & Looking Forward

This is my 100th post. The first 99 posts have already received over 31,000 page views. The rather eclectic mix of my posts is visible in the top 5 viewed posts:

* 924 views:   Keep your outline to yourself! (A random walk through... (Jan 27, 2014)
* 634 views:   6. The blurring of physical chemistry and chemical... (Aug 14, 2013)
* 419 views:   Chemistry is Everywhere (My first post on Apr 27, 2013!)
* 412 views:   Advancing Science Through Diversity #OXIDE #Telluride... (Jun 24, 2013
* 356 views:   Soft materials made up of tricked-up hard particles... (Jun 18, 2014)

As traditional publishers have long known, how-to books and articles do well, and my post giving tips for delivering better scientific presentations is at the top. On the other hand, a historical view of physical chemistry and chemical physics also found an audience. A post reporting on our recent theoretical and computational research work has done well. Our discussion of diversity also found an audience. There is no telling how well such page views correlate with each other. For example, are readers of the diversity-related articles interested in my science publications or in my off-beat observations about the underlying science of a rock?

All of these analytics are catnip for scientists who crave hard data to support the impact and importance of our work. The h-index (named after Jorge Hirsch), for example, attempts to quantify the impact of a scientist’s oeuvre through a cumulative but tempered accounting of the citations that their work has received. It’s of practical use because it’s very hard to compare different scientists. On the other hand, the h-index is wrought with confounding factors… The larger the field, the more citations every paper within it receives; membership in groups of prolific scientists who happily follow each other’s work gives a happy boost to all; advances in “hot” areas will necessarily receive more attention; the Matthew effect; the longer the scientist's career, the higher the h-index; and the list goes on. Such factors, though seemingly giving some scientists advantages over others, are not necessarily positively uncorrelated with their impact. And the h-index has become a metric that nearly every scientist detracts, but simultaneously follows with equal interest.

So looking at the analytics of my posts, I am simultaneously humbled and dismayed. I never expected that there would be, on average, more than 300 page views per post. This number is likely more than what my scientific articles receive. The latter have been peer-reviewed and have advanced science, but have they directly touched nearly as many lives as my posts? On the other hand, 300 page views pales in comparison with some of the more established science bloggers, and is far surpassed by anything that LeBron James or Taylor Swift tweets by a factor of, like, infinity. So I’ll keep posting, if only because thankfully you, dear reader, are still reading, and hopefully I’m providing you with some outside-the-box perspectives not available elsewhere.

post ACS recovery... @AmerChemSociety @ACSNatlMtg #ACSIndy

Yogi Berra apparently said, “Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." He wasn't speaking of ACS meetings, but rather of a St. Louis haunt, Ruggieri's restaurant. There's no doubt, though, that ACS meetings are big. Indeed the American Chemical Society (ACS) holds two national meetings a year, and each includes on the order of 15,000 people. There are many technical sessions running in parallel, governance meetings, outreach events, receptions, and the list goes on. Thanks to pre-registration and the postal mail, at least we can avoid the infamous long lines of days of old at the front end of the meeting. Sadly, many chemists choose not to attend simply because they follow Yogi's advice. So why do I keep going, and more importantly why should you attend an ACS meeting? I suppose that I like the menu! It's huge, and I invariably stumble over unexpected chemistry or old friends. And you can too.

The only down side is that, like me, you may find yourself so busy that you never to stop for a break. While I managed to blog some posts during the recent meeting in Indianapolis, the needed recovery led to my not-so-brief lapse in posting during the past week or so. I had papers to write and submit, papers to review, students to advise, classes to teach, assignments to grade, deliverables to submit, e-mails to write, and many other items on my to-do list. And that's ignoring all the other items on the other side of the work-life balance sheet. I'm sure you're no different. Nevertheless, I find our National meetings as useful to my work, if not more so, than some smaller specialized meetings. I could do a lot worse than needing some recovery time after being supersaturated with chemistry for a week…

49 posts and counting!

This is actually my 53rd post. It's been an interesting jump into the blogging waters, and I'm still treating it as an experiment. The accompanying picture shows a grid of roughly 49 (7 squared) blog pictures that I have used so far. The rough part is that I added a few extra to stand in for the first six entries that I posted without pictures. In that time, I've had about 5,500 page views. That's over 100 views/post which pales by comparison with the long time bloggers out there, but is a lot more than I expected at this point.

So far, I have attempted to (or learned to) follow a formula for my posts so as to make it a manageable task. The formula is a constraint in the same sense as a haiku or a twitter post are bound by the rules of their media. My constraints are:

1. Keep it to two paragraphs.
2. If the writing must be longer than two paragraphs, span it over more than one post.
3. Each post should be (mostly) self-contained.
4. Include a photo with every post. In my case, they are always square.
5. Legos make great actors for quick photo shoots.
6. Write one day, edit on a second sitting, and post on a third.

I probably have others... (My students joke about the fact that I always toss certain phrases into my writing as a matter of course, and I'm sure that I have done the same in my posts.)

As to the look of the blog itself, I have modified it slowly over time. I figure that I need to have enough content to make it useful to navigate. With over 49 posts, I might finally be hitting such a tipping point. I like simple, clean and modern styles. I chose white on black because it's easier for *me* to read, and it emphasizes signal to background. So it was natural for me to use the current style from the blogger defaults.

Entering the fourth paragraph, you can see that I habitually violate my own rules...  And this leads me to my request: Please send suggestions for additional (or different) constraints on blog writing that you think are interesting or fun. Please also suggest how I should better style this blog.

And thank you for reading! My wife still doesn't read my blog.

Hello Blogging...

Does the world really need another blog? Probably not. And yet, here I am starting one. To what end? I am not exactly sure. I'll post on what I find interesting or amusing in the world of chemistry. My posts will tend to have a theoretical/computational slant. They will tend to focus on diversity of all kinds. They will also focus, from time to time, on my activities through the various chemistry-related organizations that I am involved in. As much as anything else, I am looking to see if there are any responses to the posts, and hope to shape my views based upon them.