Google Maps has added bicycle directions, which take into account such things as bike trails and dedicated bike lanes (take when possible), as well as steep uphill slopes and busy thoroughfares (avoid!). It’s explained in some detail on the Official Google Blog and on Google LatLong. Matt points to this post listing the cities covered (all in the U.S. so far, alas). Rob Pegoraro runs its algorithms through their paces.

Bicycle Directions on Google Maps first appeared on The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps on March 10, 2010. Copyright © 2010 Jonathan Crowe. Distributed under a Creative Commons licence.

Street View’s coverage of the U.K. is about to expand dramatically. As of Thursday, practically every road in Britain will be included — a total of 238,000 miles (380,000 kilometres). That brings it up to the level found in some other countries. See coverage in the Daily Mail and the Telegraph (via Mapperz: 1, 2). Ed Parsons comments.

In other Street View news, business listing locations can now be edited using Street View, which is handy for pinpointing (so to speak) a business’s exact location. (Lord knows virtually every business is misplaced in my little town.)

Street View Expands in Britain, Allows Location Editing first appeared on The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps on March 10, 2010. Copyright © 2010 Jonathan Crowe. Distributed under a Creative Commons licence.

Baltimore Food Desert Final

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done and dun. this is the back!

Baltimore Food Deserts Infographic:

This infographic looks at the food available in three economically different neighborhoods in Baltimore and the general healthiness of that food and how that effects the population suffering deaths from Heart Disease, one of the top causes of death in Baltimore City.

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this is the front! it gets folded into a booklet!

I've been meaning to pick up on a comment made by a reader over at writedit's epic thread on NIH paylines, scores and whatall. (If you want to swap war stories and score/IC payline grumbling, that is the hot place in town.) The guy was ticked off about a recent review he received and had a question:
I am an establishe investigator. I subnitted a competing renewal ... I got a score of 40 (37 percentile). I was very shocked and dissapointed to find out that my application had a preliminary score of 2.7 (which would have been fundable) but it seems one negative reviewer carried the day, and convinced others to pull down the score. I have not yet seen the comments, but if the comments have factual errors, especially from the negative errors, can I appeal the review and request a re-review?

Recently, as luck would have it, a loyal reader of the blog submitted the following scores, received on the review of her R01 grant proposal. Under the new scoring procedures in place since last June, these are scores which each reviewer suggests for criteria of Significance, Investigator, Innovation, Approach and Environment. I may have slightly re-ordered specific scores for concealment purposes but this is essentially the flavor.

rev#1: 2,1,1,1,1

rev#2: 2,2,3,3,1

rev#3: 3,2,5,4,2

It really is always Reviewer #3, isn't it?

Although we have more detail in the second case, let us credit the first person's description of events, leading to more-or-less equivalent scenarios. The appearance that two of three reviewers loved the proposal a whole lot and the third managed to torpedo it.

My first response to the specific scores would be "Congratulations! You must have written a pretty good proposal!" if you managed to get someone throwing down the 1 scores with a 2 tossed out so they don't look like a total homer- that's good stuff. You have an advocate like that pulling for your app and it is hard to make the case you got a raw deal. The way I'm looking at scores these days, the 2s and 3s of the next-fondest reviewer are pretty schweet too. This is my point about the strong advocate- it could be that this next-fondest person is just looking for a reason to improve the scores. After all, he/she could be sitting on an app that for random reasons he/she felt was better and was trying to spread the scores out. Absent a strong advocate, you are stuck with 2-3 range. If another reviewer is pressing for better, you might just get two pulling toward the 1-2 range. That, in my current understanding, being the entry card for a shot at a fundable score.

But...dum..da..dum..dum what's up with that third reviewer?

4th, 3rd, tomato tomahtoCalm down, calm down. Those scores aren't all that bad really. The allowable range goes up to 9 and there are only 1-2 pt gaps across the ordered reviewers. So the score disparity isn't huge. Functionally, these scores can mean all the difference in the world of course. Unless the odd reviewer finds that s/he just completely misread the app in some particular, no way s/he is going to be talked down below a 3 on those scores.

You will note at this point that I am assuming that the preliminary overall scores are somewhat related to the individual scores. There is not supposed to be any specific relationship, which is a topic of rant-inducing proportion for another day. Suffice it to say that to a first approximation I am comfortable making the leap. So the initial preliminary overall score identified by these reviewers were probably 1 or 2 (2 unlikely), 2 or 3 (about equi-likely) and a 3 or 4. (Here I am making the further assumption that the scores were not substantially edited after the meeting.) What are the possible post-discussion scenarios and voting outcomes?

Well, it could have stayed similar to initial. Perhaps the advocate talked the middle one down so you ended up with 1, 2, 4 or even 1, 1, 4. Maybe the middle or bad one talked the advocate up. So it was 2,3,4 or worse. And then we have to make assumptions about which reviewer was most convincing to the mean of the panel itself. Some 20 more reviewers would be voting, typically within the post-discussion range. Did they lean to the good side, minimizing the contribution of the detested Reviewer #3? Or did they lean towards spiking the app? Were they split?

Getting back to the comment waaaay up at the top of the post, it is generally ridiculous to claim that one reviewer ruined your chances of funding in a way that is unfair or shows that the system is broken. After all, I don't ever (and I mean ever) hear anyone claiming the system is broken or screaming about appeal because of receiving an outlying score in the favorable direction.

Since you've been so patient, the reader was kind enough to relate the app ended up with a 26 priority score (i.e., the vote averaged 2.6). So looks like the panel voted smack dab in the middle of the range identified in the reviewer's original critiques. But so what? If it had ended up toward a 3.5 or so, we would only conclude that the "bad" reviewer was convincing to a whole panel of people. That is no flaw in the system. And if it had trended more toward a 2.1 or so? Everyone would be jumping around high-fiving each other. Except that one outlying reviewer perhaps. But s/he shouldn't be grousing about the system either.

Final thought on reading the tea leaves. There will be additional clues in the "resume" section of the summary statement if your SRO is any good. Best case scenario is that a single issue, maybe two, identifies the core problem. Worst case, there are several things mentioned without a lot of clarity. But this probably means that the panel did not coalesce into a single viewpoint. Sometimes this difference can help you decide what to spend the most time on during your revision process.

After a long confinement in a cramped metal tube, the guards stewardesses have finally released me in Melbourne. I'm going to have to figure out what I'm doing next — I think the University of Melbourne Secular Society is going to wrangle me out to a wildlife sanctuary, but I haven't connected up with them just yet. I'm just sort of savoring the sense of freedom right now, and making fiendish plans.

But the important news is that I've survived, mostly. You might want to stay upwind of me, but otherwise I'm feeling pretty good right now.

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Google has introduced Google Reader Play, a product intended to "make Google Reader more accessible for everyone."

Read More: Google

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Facebook and Google are being sued by Winksite in a case of alleged mobile social networking patent infringement.

Read More: Winksite, Mashable, USPTO

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Two Azerbaijani bloggers will remain in jail after using a donkey to represent their government in a satirical YouTube video. Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli lost an appeal Wednesday asking for them to be released from their respective 2 and and 2.5 year sentences. Their lawyer vowed to continue appealing all the way up to the Azerbaijan's Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.

Hajizade and Milli had posted the video on YouTube in 2009, which made fun of Azerbaijan's government and what they portrayed to be the country's softball press. Featured was an actor dressed up as a donkey holding a press conference—the donkey, of course, representing the government. As noted by the AFP, the two were charged with hooliganism immediately after the video appeared online and have been in jail ever since.

The bloggers' lawyer Isakhan Ashurov told the AFP that they had appealed the ruling because they have not committed any crimes in Azerbaijan, though authorities claim that their arrest mysteriously has nothing to do with the satirical video. Ashurov plans to press on with the appeal. "The European Court of Human Rights has already accepted two complaints from us regarding infringements of the bloggers' rights during detention," he said. "If the Supreme Court also upholds the decision we will send a third complaint."

Like many former USSR countries, Azerbaijan is often criticized for its heavy hand in silencing criticism and free speech. Reporters Without Borders in particular has hammered on the government for treating these two bloggers (and jailed journalists/critics in general) as dangerous criminals and for dancing around the true reasons for their arrest. If the government continues to reject Hajizade and Milli's appeals, though, their jail sentences might come to an end before the legal system gets around to dealing with them.

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Well, you could be dead, I suppose. But the American Family Association says that you can X-out your gayosity by starting a relationship with Jesus Christ. They don't specify the nature of the new relationship you'd be having.

Anyway, Joe My God suggests that you Freep this poll.

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Really: Since they are hard to conceal, the study says, noses would work well for identification in covert surveillance. The researchers say noses have been overlooked in the growing field of biometrics, studies into ways of identifying distinguishing traits in people. "Noses are prominent facial features and yet their use as a biometric has been largely unexplored," said the University...

The new series from David Simon and Ed Burns, creators of The Wire and Generation Kill, premieres next month on HBO. I guess the gist is that it will look at the music scene in post-Katrina New Orleans. Can’t wait. Here’s the first (rather cryptic) teaser.

Identity theft prevention service LifeLock is not as pristine as its reputation claims after all. The company agreed to pay out $12 million to settle charges with the Federal Trade Commission and 35 states, which had said that LifeLock's identity-theft-prevention claims were false and that the company actually made its own customer data available and unsecured from theft. As it turns out, there is no way to fully guarantee that identity theft won't happen, no matter what someone puts on the side of a truck.

LifeLock has made a name for itself as the go-to service if you never want to have any part of your identity stolen, ever. The company claims to proactively protect your information against fraud, alert you to any kind of shady activity, and reduce credit card offers for $10-15 per month. Those who have seen LifeLock's trucks driving around their cities know that the company used to slap its CEO Todd Davis' social security number on the side of the vehicle along with a number of claims guaranteeing that its customers won't fall victim. (As an aside, Davis' identity allegedly ended up getting stolen in 2007.)

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As part of the grand hoopla-fest building up to the release of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan this month, the agency hosted a Digital Inclusion Summit at Washington, DC's Newseum on Tuesday. Co-sponsored with the Knight Foundation, during the course of the event the FCC disclosed more components of The Plan. These include recommending the creation of a Digital Literacy Corps "to conduct skills training and outreach in communities with low rates of adoption," and tapping into the agency's Universal Service Fund to subsidize broadband for low income people.

But what really got our attention was this: the NBP will ask the government to "consider use of spectrum for a free or very low cost wireless broadband service.''

That's odd, we thought, since the FCC and Congress have been considering such an idea for years.

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Charlemagne’s prediction 1 that the Greek crisis would have no substantial effects for EU integration is looking decidedly wobbly.

Radical plans for a European version of the International Monetary Fund to bail out crisis-hit countries would need a new treaty and the agreement of all European Union member states, Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, has warned. Throwing her weight behind the proposals from Wolfgang Schäuble, her finance minister, Ms Merkel admitted that the European Union had lacked the tools to deal with the Greek debt crisis: “The sanctions we have were not good enough.” But she added that a full-scale negotiation of the EU’s 27 member states would be needed to set up a European Monetary Fund, which would be able to bail out eurozone members subject to strict budgetary conditions. “Without treaty change we cannot found such a fund,” Ms Merkel told foreign correspondents in Berlin yesterday.

Charlemagne attempts to shore up his position in a new post, suggesting that perhaps Germany is just blowing smoke to conceal its unwillingness to help Greece, but I suspect that his heart isn’t really in it. After all, the distinguishing feature of cheap rhetoric is that it is cheap. And, as was obvious at the outset, Germany’s trial balloon is quite politically expensive.

As Charlemagne himself notes (he seems to think this supports his position: I’m not sure why), the German proposal is resulting in howls of outrage from the president of the Bundesbank and Germany’s representative at the ECB. Both of them seem to be doing their very best impressions of 19th century gold-standard ‘suffering is good’ ultras – but anti-inflation fanaticism plays well with the German public, and Merkel is likely to pay a domestic political price.

The international price is likely to be higher still. Germany has sought for decades to resist French calls for EU-level ‘economic government,’ fearing that any such initiative would have substantial intra-state fiscal transfers and lax inflation policy trailing from its hindquarters. Now, not only are the camel’s hairy nostrils snuffling eagerly around the tent’s interior, but the front legs and the forward hump have found their way in too. What is surprising is that it is Germany, rather than France, which pulled the tent-flap open

This is not to say that we are likely to see an European Monetary Fund emerging (if by that, one means some Europeanized form of the IMF). A more plausible theory of Germany’s proposal is that it combines an effective recognition that some form of stronger economic governance is needed for the eurozone with an opening bid that is as harsh, punitive and limited in scope as possible, so as to minimize the distress of German taxpayers. But Germany’s proposal is simply not credible. Member states are not going to sign up to an arrangement whereby states in default could have their voting rights in the Council suspended, or be kicked out of the eurozone. It’s politically impossible – and Germany knows this.

So no EMF - but instead, protracted bargaining between Germany and France (which is playing it cautious), with the UK protesting from the sidelines, over what a revised set of institutional arrangements will look like. The IMF usually has maximal bargaining power at a country’s moment of crisis – it typically cares far less about whether the country makes it through than the country itself does, and hence can extract harsh conditions in return for aid.2 But – as we have seen with the Greek crisis – EU member states are far less able to simulate indifference when one of their own is in real trouble, both because member states are clubby, involved in iterated bargains etc, and because any real crisis is likely to be highly contagious (especially within the eurozone). In other words, the bargaining power of other EU member states (and of any purported EMF) is quite limited. If Greece really starts going down the tubes, Germany faces the unpalatable choice of either helping out or abandoning the system that it, more than any other member state, created. In short – any EMF, unlike the IMF, needs (a) to concentrate on preventing countries getting into trouble rather than dealing with them when they are already in trouble, and (b) deal with the fact that any country in trouble likely has significant clout in the architecture overseeing it.

From my sense of the EU integration process, and of the rough bargaining strengths of the actors involved, I imagine that any final bargain will emphasize forward-looking measures, which are intended to forestall problems before they arise. Unhappily for Bundesbank disciplinarians, these are likely to rely more on carrots than sticks – it is clear from previous experience with the Growth and Stability Pact that threats of harsh punishment are not sufficient to produce virtue if these threats are not credible. We can expect moderate levels of fiscal transfers (likely ratcheting up over time), aimed at helping ease the pain of adjustment, together with admonishments (and withdrawal of goodies) for those who fail to live up to their promises. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if these measures went hand-in-hand with some kind of revised Lisbon process aimed at bolstering domestic competitiveness etc. These measures will be accompanied by ex-ante vague and minatory arrangements intended for situations of real crisis – but in practice, the two will likely start to blur into each other. If you have mechanisms for real fiscal transfers (nb however that the fights over increasing the remarkably skimpy EU budget are likely to be bitter and protracted), then these will become one of the obvious policy tools that governments will resort to (by increasing fiscal flows temporarily) when crisis hits. So yes – the Greek crisis is plausibly a very significant step indeed in EU integration (whether for good or bad, I am not going to speculate, since even if I am right, it would depend heavily on the detail).

1 For the sake of fairness I should note that Charlemagne has written a genuinely excellent piece on the domestic political economy of the Greek crisis in the interim.

2 The exception being where the collapse of a country’s economy would have genuine systemic consequences.

Craig Bennett (of Prefrontal.org) and Michael Miller, of dead fish brain scan fame, have a new paper out: How reliable are the results from functional magnetic resonance imaging?Tal over at the [citation needed] blog has an excellent in-depth discussion of the paper, and Mind Hacks has a good summary, but here's my take on what it all means in practical terms.Suppose you scan someone's brain while they're looking at a picture of a cat. You find that certain parts of their brain are activated to a certain degree by looking at the cat, compared to when they're just lying there with no picture. You happily publish your results as showing The Neural Correlates of Cat Perception.If you then scanned that person again while they were looking at the same cat, you'd presumably hope that exact same parts of the brain would light up to the same degree as they did the first time. After all, you claim to have found The Neural Correlates of Cat Perception, not just any old random junk.If you did find a perfect overlap in the area and the degree of activation that would be an example of 100% test-retest reliability. In their paper, Bennett and Miller review the evidence on the test-retest reliability of fMRI studies. They found 63 of them. On average, they found that the reliability of fMRI falls quite far short of perfection: the areas activated (clusters) had a mean Dice overlap of 0.476, while the strength of activation was correlated with a mean ICC of 0.50.But those numbers, taken out of context, do not mean very much. Indeed, what is a Dice overlap? You'll have to read the whole paper to find out, but even when you do, they still don't mean that much. I suspect this is why Bennett and Miller don't mention them in the Abstract of the paper, and in fact they don't spend more than a few lines discussing them at all.A Dice overlap of 0.476 and an ICC of 0.50 are what you get if average over all of the studies that anyone's done looking at the test-retest reliability of any particular fMRI experiment. But different fMRI experiments have different reliabilities. Saying that the average reliability of fMRI is 0.5 is rather like saying that the mean velocity of a human being is 0.3 km per hour. That's probably about right, averaging over everyone in the world, including those who are asleep in bed and those who are flying on airplanes - but it's not very useful. Some people are moving faster than others, and some scans are more reliable than others.Most of this paper is not concerned with "how reliable fMRI is", but rather, with how to make any given scanning experiment more reliable. And this is an important thing to write about, because even the most optimistic cognitive neuroscientist would agree that many fMRI results are not especially reliable, and as Bennett and Miller say, reliability matters for lots of reasons:Scientific truth. While it is a simple statement that can be taken straight out of anundergraduate research methods course, an important point must be made about reliability in research studies: it is the foundation on which scientific knowledge is based. Without reliable, reproducible results no study can effectively contribute to scientific knowledge.... if a researcher obtains a different set of results today than they did yesterday, what has really been discovered?Clinical and Diagnostic Applications. The longitudinal assessment of changes in regional brain activity is becoming increasingly important for the diagnosis and treatment of clinical disorders...Evidentiary Applications. The results from functional imaging are increasingly being submitted as evidence into the United States legal system...Scientific Collaboration. A final pragmatic dimension of fMRI reliability is the ability to share data between researchers...So what determines the reliability of any given fMRI study? Lots of things. Some of them are inherent to the nature of the brain, and are not really things we can change: activation in response to basic perceptual and motor tasks is probably always going to be more reliable than activation related to "higher" functions like emotions.But there are lots of things we can change. Although it's rarely obvious from the final results, researchers make dozens of choices when designing and analyzing an fMRI experiment, many of which can at least potentially have a big impact on the reliability of their findings. Bennett and Miller cover lots of them:voxel size... repetition time (TR), echo time (TE), bandwidth, slice gap, and k-space trajectory... spatial realignment of the EPI data can have a dramatic effect on lowering movement-related variance ... Recent algorithms can also help remove remaining signal variability due to magnetic susceptibility induced by movement... simply increasing the number of fMRI runs improved the reliability of their results from ICC = 0.26 to ICC = 0.58. That is quite a large jump for an additional ten or fifteen minutes of scanning...The details get extremely technical, but then, fMRI is a technology, so that's only to be expected. When you do an fMRI scan you're using a superconducting magnet to image human neural activity by measuring the quantum spin properties of protons. It doesn't get much more technical.Perhaps the central problem with modern neuroimaging research is that it's all too easy for researchers to write off the important experimental design issues as "merely" technicalities, and just put some people in a scanner using the default scan sequence and see what happens. This is something few fMRI users are entirely innocent of, and I'm certainly not, but it is a serious problem. As Bennett and Miller point out, the devil is in the technical details.The generation of highly reliable results requires that sources of error be minimized across a wide array of factors. An issue within any single factor can significantly reduce reliability. Problems with the scanner, a poorly designed task, or an improper analysis method could each be extremely detrimental. Conversely, elimination of all such issues is necessary for high reliability. A well maintained scanner, well designed tasks, and effective analysis techniques are all prerequisites for reliable results.Bennett CM, Miller MB. (2010). How reliable are the results from functional magnetic resonance imaging? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences...

Bennett CM, Miller MB. (2010) How reliable are the results from functional magnetic resonance imaging?. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. info:/

In my intro class yesterday, we began a discussion of presidency and I noted that presidents face the challenge of leadership: they confront high expectations even as the Constitution affords them little formal power. (How they have accumulated power... John Sides

• USA Today tracks the remarkable recent progress toward the legalization of marijuana.
• The Catholic church can’t bring itself to defrock priests who diddle little boys, but it’s perfectly willing to expel a little girl from private school because her parents are lesbians. (Standard libertarian disclaimer: The church is free to make its own policies about its schools. And I’m free to criticize it for those policies.)
• Sean Penn not only continues to defend tyrant Hugo Chavez, but suggests imprisoning American journalists who criticize Chavez.
• D.C. councilman who pushed smoking ban now asks for exemptions for his favorite events.
• This is just a damned nice story. Conan is great.
• Panel recommends D.C. cop who brought gun to a snowball fight get a 10-day suspension.