All ideas

New Ph.D. students in the empirical sciences should be recruited into ongoing scientific studies right from the start

All too often we come across Ph.D. students who after 2-3 years of effort still struggle with their first (co-)authorship. In many cases, this may be considered a waste of financial resources and human... continue reading

Pre-registration of a test for statistical significance of a GALFA-HI -- WMAP ILC correlation

In 2007 Gerrit Verschuur proposed that HI structures as seen in the Leiden-Argentina-Bonn 36' HI survey of the sky are correlated with structures in the WMAP sky, which are typically ascribed to the CMB.

He... continue reading

The End of the Party: A New Approach to Parliamentary Democracy

Today’s party democracy suffers from two issues. First, members of parliament (MPs) should represent voters’ opinions. Yet their free mandate often suffers from obligations to vote in accordance with party interests and is therefore overridden by... continue reading

A first law of humanities computing

In the course of the last decade, I formulated what I consider to be something of a law concerning the use of computing in Humanities research:

The novel and... continue reading

Hybridization of the Position Sensitive Tunable Laser Diode Microspectroscopy and Laser Ionization Mass Spectrometry on the Scanning Microscopic Stage for Multiparametric Colocalization Imaging

To date there are known methods for mass-spectrometric control of the surgical samples, including MALDI imaging which applies a laser beam. But in most cases these methods provide nonselective measurements of the samples, which were previously... continue reading

Create standalone simulation tools to facilitate collaboration between HEP and machine learning community

Discussions at recent workshops have made it clear that one of the key barriers to collaboration between high energy physics and the machine learning community is access to training data. Recent successes in data sharing through the... continue reading

Spore coat of liverworts: potential candidate for future space suits

Future space suits require greater mobility as mars exploration is proposed by NASA and other space agencies. Currently space suits are designed for zero gravity and low gravity situations. Such space suits will be unviable when used at Mars and... continue reading

On Domestication and Feralization: re-rethinking invasive species from a genetic perspective

The new wild is an attractive concept recently synthesized by Fred Pearce, which in essence states that we have vilified invasives and have spent tremendous effort in eradicating them, often with limited success. But we were the ones to bring them... continue reading

Supervised and unsupervised machine learning approach to the CMS data quality monitoring

The CMS experiment at the LHC is one of the biggest and most complex general purpose detectors ever built. The constant monitoring of the data quality is vital to guarantee a proper and efficient operation of the detector and reliable physics... continue reading

Using kittens to unlock photo-sharing website datasets

Mining photo-sharing websites is a promising approach to complement in situ and satellite observations of the environment, however a challenge is to deal with the large degree of noise inherent to online social datasets. Using the Flickr... continue reading