100 really is more than 1

Study: Sometimes 100 cents feels like it’s worth more than a dollar:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

We all know that $1 is equal to 100 cents. But a new study suggests that, in some situations, people may behave as if 100 cents actually has more value.

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This is fascinating. The results indicate that what is important to people is the 100 and the 1, not the dollars and cents. So people see 300 cents as more important than $5 because 300 is greater than 5. I wonder if 100 meters seems farther than 0.1 kilometers?

Technorati Tags: Science

Small is better

The right (or wrong) size for a committee: less than 20 but not equal to 8:
[Via Effect Measure]

New Scientist reporter Mark Buchanan has a fascinating article this week on “the curse of work.” The title might be the least satisfactory thing about this examination of a new mathematical article that attempts to explain the inexplicable:

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There has been a lot of empirical data indicating that the best group have less than 20 members. One not mentioned here are sports teams. Most competitive sports are made up of groups that are 9-15 members in size. This fits with the ability to reach agreement, to follow a single focus.

When the goal consists of winning, having small groups makes sense. Now we have some modeling data to suggest why this is.

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Still costs a lot

How far are we from the $1000 genome?:
[Via Genetic Future]

Still quite a way, based on this survey of second-generation sequencing users (subscription only, I think) conducted by the industry publication In Sequence.

Along with a range of other questions, the survey asked users about the cost to generate one billion base pairs (one gigabase, or Gb) on their platform at the end of 2008, which is about as current as we’re likely to get. I’ve estimated below the total cost to sequence a complete* human genome, assuming an overall depth of coverage** of 30x, for the three most widely-used second-generation platforms:

The fine print

Note that the number of respondents is pretty small for each platform, although it’s probably enough to get a fairly good idea of the cost situation at the current time (although I’d appreciate any comments from users out there who think the costs are inflated).

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There will probably always be a tradeoff between real accuracy and cost. One can have a really well characterized sequence, with 30 times coverage of the entire genome and all those repetitive regions done for a lot of money.

Or one can use a faster approach but with increasing chances of errors and unsequenced regions. This could be a real problem is medical decisions are made from data that could have some errors in them, both false positives and false negatives.

People think the DNA sequence is hard data but in one viewpoint, it is still soft with some level of inaccuracies present. How much to pay to reduce the inaccuracies?

Technorati Tags: Health, Science