Top Institutions Publishing In Nature - 2010

Below is a list of the top universities and institutions based on their publishing record in the journal ‘Nature’.  The ranking is simply based on the number of articles published in 2010 with one or more author affiliations to their institution.

1.   Harvard - 81

2.   Max Planck – 75

3.   C.N.R.S. – 57

4.   Stanford – 42

5.   N.I.H. – 40

6.   Caltech – 33

7.   Univ. Washington – 32

8.   U.C. San Francisco – 31

8.   U.C. Berkeley – 31

10. U.C.L.A. – 30

11. M.I.T. – 28

12. Cambridge – 27

13. Yale – 26

14. Oxford – 25

15. Columbia – 22

15. Univ. Tokyo – 22

18. N.Y.U. – 21

18. Washington Univ. – 21

20. Univ. Michigan – 20

20. Johns Hopkins – 20

20. Univ. Toronto – 20

20. Univ. Chicago – 20

24. Imperial Coll – 19

25. U.C. San Diego – 18

25. Maryland – 18

25. U. Penn.

29. LBL – 15

30. Univ. London – 14

31. RIKEN – 13

31. U.N.C. – 13

31. U.B.C. – 13

35. Cornell – 12

35. Duke – 12

35. Wisc – 12

35. U.C. Davis – 12

35. Northwestern – 12

Honorable Mentions:

*    Carnegie Mellon - 11

*    SCRIPPS – 11

*    U.C. Boulder – 9

*    Osaka – 8

*    Purdue – 8

*    U.C. Santa Barbara – 5

*    Gatech – 4

This report is partly in response to the Nature Publishing Index, which includes and weights equally, Nature sub-field journals.  While simply indexing the number of Nature publications already misrepresents the impact a university has on science, I feel that including the Nature sister journals exacerbates the problem.  While, Nature and Science sit at the top of the food-chain for non-field specific publications, the same cannot be said for the Nature field specific journals.  Including these smaller Nature publications in the index discourages publications in alternative, often better, field specific journals by rewarding people who have a thirst for the Nature name.  We may understand the vain desire for Nature regardless of its form, but let’s not offer any additional reward.

Value Density of US Coins

A coin machine breaks open and you have to fill your pockets with coins. There are piles of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. Which coins do you start grabbing? Well, assuming you have a good belt to keep your pants up, you want to pick the coin with the largest value density. What I mean by that is, you want the coin that has the most value for its given volume. That way you can fit the most money into your pockets. Although I suspected the dime and the quarter were great candidates, I wasn't sure which coin would win. So I ran the numbers.

The dimensions of the coins are readily available, and assuming they are cylinders, the volumes are easily calculated to be: quarter - 4.74, dime - 2.52, nickel - 3.53, and penny 2.85 (cm^3). The value densities are therefore: quarter - 5.28, dime - 3.97, nickel - 1.42 and penny - 0.35 (cents / cm^3).

So in conclusion, fill your pockets with quarters. You will be able to hold 33% more money than the guy grabbing dimes. And the guy grabbing pennies is completely out of his mind, unless the quarters are pre-1982 and he fully understands the value of copper - I still recommend quarters.

If we have the option taking half dollar or the current dollar coins, then grab those. Their volumes are: dollar - 5.51 and half dollar - 7.36 (cm^3). Their value densities are: dollar - 18.14 and 6.80 - half dollar (cents / cm^3). However since these two coins are not that common, we will consider such a hypothetical opportunity to be unrealistic.

An Inifinite Number of Primes

In 300 AD Euclid proved that there is an infinite number of primes. A prime number being an integer that is not divisible by any other numbers. The list of prime numbers starts like this: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31 ...

A guy 1700 hundred years ago could prove that this list goes on forever. A colleague, Adam Straub, challenged me to re-derive this without any resources. Adam argued: a person in the 21st century should be able to recreate this simple proof. I was able, but it took some time while driving. I challenge any readers to prove that there is an infinite number of primes before reading the solution. It is a fun challenge that requires middle school level math.

Euclid's Proof:

If we have a list of consecutive primes, starting with 2, 3, 5, .... and so on. We can always prove there is one more prime by multiplying them all together and adding one. We know this knew number is not divisible by any of the primes in our original list. So, either the new number is prime, or it is divisible by a new prime not in our original list.

Example: 2 * 3 * 5 + 1 = 31

So, if we know there is always one more prime in a consecutive list of primes there is always more primes, on to infinity.

I tried to explain this proof as simply as possible, but you can look up Euclid's proof on many other sites or even his original book, Elements (Book IX, Proposition 20) published circa 300 AD.

Living Music – A Live Experience

I have an idea for a creative new form of poetic expression - a kind of real life, walking music video montage. It is nearly impossible to recreate the three dimensional sights, sounds, smells, and touches of the world around us. Even with sight arguably being the most sensational of these physical interactions, a movie falls short. It’s being able to look all directions, focus in on a subject, or squint into the sun.

I’d like to accompany this experience with music. It would be kind of like a walking tour but with music. A real living music video, where the person walks along an author’s predefined path listening to predefined music. The goal of the author would be to recreate the feelings he experienced or wants to experience during his walk.

We all have those moments. Our ears silenced to the outside world by the music playing into our heads. Observing the outside world can almost seem surreal as the music inspires self reflecting thought. This is especially true when the music matches our mood and surroundings. Although it’s hard to predict the mental state of the listener, the goal of the author should be to coerce the listener into a particular mood using sight and sound. Of course, this sounds precisely like a movie or music video, but I think by using the real world it can be much more.

In the end, like most of my ideas, I would like to see others pursue this thought more so than myself. Though I will try. The idea will go in the large scrambled queue that resides in my brain, notebook, and this blog.

Million Monkeys Project

The Million Monkeys Project

A finite but extremely large number of monkey's with typewriters act as my muse during my creation of large amounts of creative works. Copyrights last for a cumbersome duration and so it is a goal of this project to place everything I make in the public domain.

Here you will find an exhaustive list of creative works that are in a fixed and tangible form. For example, my first project is an enormous list of two word poems which I have independently created. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a two word poem which I have not written (unless you include proper nouns).

For this day on, each of my creative works will forever be free (as in beer and speech) for anyone to copy. By placing my works in the public domain, I encourage anyone to use each work in anyway they wish without any attribution. That being said, I do retain the copyrights to the compilation of works, so do not redistribute my lists.

After writing poetry till my hands bled, I decided I should look to see what has already been written. Having only assumed that two word poetry might exist, it turns out I was correct. Below is some of the two word poetry others have written. Almost all of them can be found in the poetry lists I wrote independently wrote.

Muhammad Ali at Harvard College recited a now famous poem:

Me, we.

A great video behind this poem explains its origins. I also independently wrote this famous poem without any prior knowledge of its existence. It can be found in both the One Million List and One Billion Plus List.

Clark Hall Radio

I successfully turned my advanced physics lab into a radio station. Cornell's only on-campus radio station broadcasted Modest Mouse at 103.9 FM for over two hours. The range was at least a half mile and the station was running at a fraction of its full capabilities. So, let be known that Clark Hall on Cornell's campus has a hidden radio station on the third floor, disguising its self as Lab station C-9.

[[Here is my lab report]]

A New Equals Sign - Dot Equals

I think that mathematics could use a new commonly used character to describe certain types of equalities. Typically, the equals sign, = , is used to denote the equality of two quantities. A simple example of this would be



A lot of times, algebraic manipulations of expressions are made and the equals sign is also used. An example of this would be:



In this latter example, I think a unique equality character should be used to distinguish equalities made solely from mathematical manipulation.

So I propose the following a dot equals to denote equalities made solely from mathematical manipulation or evaluation. A simple example being:



Or




Although this symbol is available in unicode and Latex, if the character does not exist an equal with a period ( .= ) could be used. I must note that I have seen this to denote "in the limit of". I do not think this is a common use, and as an alternative a dot underneath the equals sign could be used or anything else similar to an equals sign. This symbol and many others exist in Unicode or Latex. For inspiration, check out all of the unicode symbols here.

Memorizing the Alphabet

The English language uses a Latin alphabet consisting of 26 letters. This number is comparable to many other phonetic alphabet systems. Twenty six is not an incredibly large number, yet it has given me much difficulty throughout my life. As a child too much time was spent alphabetizing words for the tedious homework tasks given to me by my elementary teachers. As an adult, I embarrassingly still mumble the alphabet song to myself when looking up words in an appendix or dictionary. There seems to be no apparent organization of letters in the accepted sequencing of the alphabet. Shouldn't Q join X and Z at the end? Or maybe the vowels should be grouped together. Since it is the 21st century, we could even use a sequence modeled from Dvorak's Simplified Keyboard. Dvorak studied letter frequencies and the physiology of people's hands and created a layout to adhere to these principles in order to improve typing proficiency over the now accepted QWERTY standard. And just like the QWERTY keyboard, it looks like the organization of the alphabet is not going to change.

So, I have realized it may be worth my time to take matters into my own hand. I will unnaturally acquire the intuitive feel for letter sequencing that others have obtained through their life. I propose doing this through assigning numerical values to each letter. Numbers, have arguably the most intuitive organization imaginable. If one obtains immediate knowledge of the numerical placement of each letter in the alphabet, alphabetizing becomes trivial.

I started this process briefly in the car. Some letters seemed easier to me than others. Obviously A, B, C, and Z are easy. Some other ones to note: H = 8 - they look similar, I = 9 and L = 12 - they sound similar. Counter intuitively, M, which is symmetric, is 13 an odd value not divisible by 2 while N, an antisymmetric letter, is 14 and perfectly divisible by 2. Also, G would never have struck me as being the luckiest letter in the alphabet, but I'm not surprised about M being unlucky.

I could go on about the feeling letters give me and the associations I make from them, but it would detract from the point of this article and also take away from its credibility. I have posted the letters and their corresponding values for others to think about. In the future, I would like to create an interactive website for memorizing alphabetic values.

A = 1
B = 2
C = 3
D = 4
E = 5
F = 6
G = 7
H = 8
I = 9
J = 10
K = 11
L = 12
M = 13
N = 14
O = 15
P = 16
Q = 17
R = 18
S = 19
T = 20
U = 21
V = 22
W = 23
X = 24
Y = 25
Z = 26