sci

The Ig Nobel Price winners have been announced. Although they are obscure this years nominees I didn’t find them as funny as in the previous years.

Nice to see that the chemistry one went to Wicker et.al. (ref) We did similar measurements (though not in the cinema). So it’s fun to see our field also got a nod.

Just recently I found an interesting answer to the question “Why can we smell copper?” on the chemistry stackexchange.

There is an interesting paper on Mosquitoes from Raji et. al. (“Aedes aegypti Mosquitoes Detect Acidic Volatiles Found in Human Odor Using the IR8a Pathway”, doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.02.045). It deals with how mosquitoes track their human targets. They identify three ranges - at furthest they track by CO2, in mid-range by IR and at closest they zoom in on particular VOCs.

I’m working on project KIRAS now for some time, and we essentially also need to track humans. It seems our machine learning algorithm has a similar approach (although we do not use IR). But CO2 is more dominant in large containers, while in smaller other compounds play greater role.

Nice the ERJ has accepted our correspondence about the future of respiratory medicine. Hope I will have the link soon. Unfortunately I had extremely limited room to address the statistical issues. Anyway writing this correspondence was a pleasant experience. Really hope we will have more to say soon.

Having spent three months on and off a problem I finally managed to sufficiently solve Problem 110. Strange how problems change once you work on huge numbers. But now I can again proudly present my score <img src=“https://projecteuler.net/profile/cager.png", alt=“Project Euler Score”/>. Nicely this puts me in the statistics of active ones on place 19 in Austria.

Just got Imputing defensible values for left-censored ‘below level of quantitation’ (LoQ) biomarker measurements forwarded. It starts as interesting read stating the problem but IMHO ultimatively fails to address the problem. I am especially disappointed that neither the IUPAC definition and guidelines are mentioned, nor the current ISO 11843. Especially the works of Lloyd A. Currie offer great insight in this topic. The whole idea of censoring values below LOQ was already debunked by Currie. While I find the whole censored data method is promising I expect it useful for cases where the measurement device reaches its limits - not cases of manual censorship.

Alles wieder vorbei. Für mich interessant waren von den Japanern ein Experiment bei dem CO während einem Ergometerexperiment gemessen wurden und ein chinesisches Experiment bei dem die Luft in einem Airliner beobachtet wurde. Interessanterweise haben die Chinesen auch ein Paper über automatische GC/MS Auswertung gebracht. Beides Steckenpferde von mir.