Mike Dunford is a graduate student in the Department of Zoology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, where he studies evolution. He's also a contributer to The Pandas Thumb. As is the case with everyone else here, his opinions are his own, and do not necessarily represent those of any organization he is affiliated with.
June 29, 2006
Religion's been on my mind a lot lately. It's come up in a number of blog posts and articles I've read recently, and there have been some acrimonious debates on the topic at Panda's Thumb and elsewhere. All this thinking...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 5:03 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 28, 2006
The rise of factory farming over the last half-century has resulted in a crisis for family farms. Factory farming benefits from the economy of scale, producing much, much more of whatever their product is - milk, beef, pork, whatever -...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 8:49 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 27, 2006
It's taken me a while to take a swing at this particular Ask A ScienceBlogger question, mostly because I just don't know the answer. It's definitely true that some science teachers are better than others. The best teacher I had...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 10:51 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've been rather lax in promoting my Donors Choose challenge, and it's time to change that. The initial three challenges I picked have all been funded, mostly by people not involved in my challenge. That meant that I hadn't come...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 7:25 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here's a nice bit of breaking news from the conservation biology front: The birth of two Whooping Crane chicks in Wisconsin. (Scroll down this page at Operation Migration's site to the June 23rd entry for pictures of the birds.) This...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:18 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 26, 2006
Remember Ward Churchill? He's the apparenty-soon-to-be-former University of Colorado academic who stirred up controversy when he referred to 9-11 victims as "little Eichmanns" in a 2001 essay. Today, the UC Boulder Interim Chancellor announced that the university, following a very...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 11:25 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars, I find this Washington Post article about the effect of the Daily Show on attitudes towards politics and politicians. The article reports on the results of a published study that found that people who...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 3:38 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In the first post in the Hawaiian Evolution series, I wrote a bit about why evolution is so readily apparent on Islands. Today, I'm going to shift away from the biological a little bit, and talk about a different type...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 8:37 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 23, 2006
In the latest news from the planet the Republicans wish we lived on, weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. This news comes to us courtesy of a couple of Congresscritters - Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 8:12 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 22, 2006
Today's episode in the ongoing tragicomic farce that is the American Congress involves the renewal of several provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Over the years, the VRA has gained a wide base of bipartisan support, and renewal of the...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 5:12 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 21, 2006
There are a number of places on this planet where the signal of evolution is readily apparent to anyone who cares to look. Most of those places are islands. It's no coincidence that Darwin made the Galapagos famous, or that...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:29 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 19, 2006
One of the things I've been thinking about doing in this new version of the blog is a series of posts on the biology of the Hawaiian Islands. The designation of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands as a National Monument earlier...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 9:13 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 18, 2006
Japan managed to buy enought votes at the recent meeting of the International Whaling Commission to pass a resolution declaring that the moratorium on whaling was meant to be temporary and is no longer needed. The resolution is not all...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 10:57 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 17, 2006
I'll be more or less out of the loop this weekend, due to some family things in another state. (That's one of the downsides to living in Hawaii. Any out-of-state travel requires a minimum of 10 hours in the air...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 12:05 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 15, 2006
This weeks' Ask A Scienceblogger is a relatively simple one, which would explain why I'm getting to it so quickly. We're asked to take on the following question:How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 10:21 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Today, President Bush invoked the Antiquities Act to create the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Monument. In so doing, he has created the single largest marine protected area in the world - at 360,000 square kilometers, the new national monument is...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 6:27 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Education
Pick a Scienceblogger - any Scienceblogger - and you'll find someone who loves science, and thinks that everyone should be exposed to it. That's one of the reasons that we spend time hammering out these posts. We also, as...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 9:12 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The latest issue of Seed Magazine - the print product brought to you by the same folks who bring you us - has an article about Dr. Joan Roughgarden's work. The main topic of the article is Roughgarden's opinions on...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 5:05 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 13, 2006
With Tropical Storm Alberto nearing landfall, this seems like as good a time as any to talk about hurricanes and global climate change. With legions of reporters standing by to cover the storm, and scrambling for things to talk about...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 5:38 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 12, 2006
This weeks question:Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why? Tough question. I've got lots of ideas about what I'd do with limitless...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 10:51 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Janet tagged all of us new SBers with a mathematically themed meme. I put off answering this long mostly because I have a massive aversion to math - that's why I went into evolutionary genetics. I'm also not a big...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:20 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 11, 2006
Dr. John Marburger, the current Presidential Science Advisor, has a little question-and-answer piece over at Newsweek. Nick Anthis has some comments on the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of the article over at The Scientific Activist. On the...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 7:18 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 9, 2006
This is the first time I've been associated with a website that sells advertising space, and what with them paying the bills and all, I figured that clicking on the ad was the least I could do in return. I...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 1:43 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
As I mentioned the other day, some of the kids in the neighborhood and I decided to conduct some experiments into the Mentos + Coke = geyser phenomenon. I thought I'd have pictures and/or video to show you, but due...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 10:32 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
If all goes according to plan, this post should appear right about the time that this blog "goes live." (And if all doesn't go to plan, the delete feature works just fine, so no worries there.) That being the case,...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 6:15 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Razib has two interesting posts up at Gene Expression (1,2) that touch on something related to my own research: the question of whether or not "species" are really "real" biological entities, or just artificial groupings that humans use to make...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 4:05 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 8, 2006
By now most of you will have heard about 1LT Ehren Watada, the army officer who is refusing to obey an order to deploy to Iraq. This is an issue that's getting a fairly large amount of play on the...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 8:34 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 7, 2006
It's amazing how often doing good science walks hand in hand with looking like a bloody fool. It's entirely possible that doing something that looks absolutely insane is a necessary step in the development of a decent scientist (if so,...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 5:20 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 5, 2006
Last week, back at the old joint, I wrote a post about an issue that had come to my attention after reading an article at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. This particular issue involved an assault on religious freedom that...
Posted by Mike Dunford at 11:01 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
