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Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education. He is also a graduate student at the University of Kansas, completing a doctorate in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. When not modeling species distributions or battling creationists, he writes about developments in progressive politics and the sciences.
The opinions expressed here are his own, do not reflect the official position of the NCSE. Indeed, older posts may no longer reflect his own official position.
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Academia:
G. Wayne Clough, president of Georgia Tech, was tapped to run the Smithsonian Institution. As we've reported, he steps into a deeply troubled organization. His predecessor allowed infrastructure to crumble, appropriated museum artifacts for personal use in his offices, and focused more on cozying up to corporate sponsors than on the scientific and educational mission of the Smithsonian. In many ways, Clough seems well-suited to restoring faith in the Smithsonian. He comes with an academic background, which means he will understand the needs of his staff, and appreciate the balance between the public face of museum exhibits and the important...
Posted on March 17, 2008 4:20 PM • 2 Comments •
While Matt Selman's rules of book shelving are clearly insane, Ezra Klein's response is clearly not quite right either. The basic rule, from which all the others follow like a pack of hallucinating baboons, is: It is unacceptable to display any book in a public space of your home if you have not read it. Therefore, to be placed on Matt Selman's living room bookshelves, a book must have been read cover to cover, every word, by Matt Selman. If you are in the home of Matt Selman and see a book on the living room shelves, you know FOR...
Posted on February 27, 2008 2:20 PM • 10 Comments •
Help needy kids experience nature.
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Posted on October 1, 2007 12:01 PM • 0 Comments •
For reasons which I may or may not reveal some day, I'm interested in picking your collective brains about the future of online scientific publishing. My premises are as follows: I do not read printed scientific journals any more – they waste space and are hard to search through when I'm looking for a specific paper, let alone a general concept.You probably don't read print journals any more either.If you do, neither you nor anyone else will still be reading print journals in, say, 5 years.Electronic editions of journals are still not quite as useable as they ought to be...
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Posted on July 3, 2007 2:38 PM • 16 Comments •
What he said. More anon....
Posted on June 24, 2007 1:16 PM • 0 Comments •
The ScienceBlogs are abuzz with discussion of how scientists should handle the media. The concern from scientists seems to focus on the fear of being misquoted, and the journalists are responding by pointing out that misquotations are rare, and that when they occur, they rarely are substantive. The problem is that what the journalists mean by a misquotation is different from what a scientist means. Consider the case of Jack Balkin. He describes how he tried to explain to a reporter for the AP why Arnold Schwarzenegger would not be able to run for President or VP without a constitutional...
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Posted on June 21, 2007 12:12 PM • 3 Comments •
My Scibling Shelley has gotten into and out of a bit of fuss while I've been incommunicado. She posted about a paper discussing the role of alcohol in protecting antioxidants in fruit. As so many of us have done, she posted a graph and table from the original paper to illustrate her description of the study. Wiley Interscience complained, but has, thankfully, buckled to their obvious wrongness. To me and most observers, what Shelley did is an obvious instance of "fair use," as described by U.S. law: the fair use of a copyrighted work … for purposes such as criticism,...
Posted on April 26, 2007 2:42 PM • 0 Comments •
As we try to move towards paperless offices, one of the big challenges is finding the right way to file and organize PDFs of interesting papers, books, reports, proposals and what have you. ScienceSampler suggests using iTunes, and that's certainly not a bad idea. iTunes acquired the ability to handle PDFs in order to handle liner notes, and you can associate various forms of useful metadata with your PDFs. My preferred solution, imperfect though it may be, is Yep (née kip), available only for Macs. Yep lets you tag and label your PDFs in various handy ways, and is even...
Posted on April 23, 2007 1:25 PM • 2 Comments •
Afarensis asks Dembski on Open Access: Is He Hypocritcal, Stupid, or Both? Both. This is the simple answer to that simple question. The broader issue of open access is not so simple. While Dembski's understanding of the issue is both hypocritical and stupid, the issue of whether commercial science publishers are hypocritical and stupid remains to be seen. Evidence for hypocrisy is fairly easy to identify....
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Posted on January 26, 2007 1:02 PM • 0 Comments •
Great minds think alike, I guess. Like Razib and Stranger Fruit, my answer to this week's Ask a ScienceBlogger – "Who would you nominate for Scientist Laureate, if such a position existed?" – was going to be E. O. Wilson. His work on conservation alone would justify that status, if such a thing existed. His work on sociobiology is justifiably famous, and his early work on island biogeography. His work is iconic across the sciences. But …...
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Posted on November 19, 2006 9:27 AM • 9 Comments •
