David Ng is Director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia - this is a just a fancier way of calling himself a science teacher.
Benjamin Cohen is an Asst. Professor of Science, Tech., and Society at the University of Virginia. He studies the place of S & T in environmental history, policy, and ethics. He also writes other stuff.
Trying to find your way around this place? Like most expositions, we offer a map: Map of The World's Fair
"The world is full of light and life, and the true crime is not to be interested in it." A.S. Byatt
For those of you at this year's Terry talks, you'll obviously be aware of our little YouTube experiment. In any event, I present to you the fruit of that labour below.
If you weren't at the conference, here is the gist: audience members were ask to participate by brainstorming, pitching, choosing, and then executing an activity amenable to recording via YouTube. This was done during the odd free 5 minutes here and there in the conference program. In total I think about 20 minutes in all was used to get the material for the video.
The genre of "environmental documentary" or "environmental film" is large enough now that it can suitably hold sub-sets. Here is a start to a filmography of agro-environmental documentaries and films. Since it is by no means exhaustive, I welcome all additions. I should say too that although many of these almost necessarily touch on GMOs and biotechnology in general, I am looking more for ones that put the lens on alternative and sustainable agriculture as their centerpiece.
Princeton's Environmental Film Festival (currently underway), is hosting some of these agro-food films, along with entries on coal, plastics, and more. It got me started on putting this list together, pushed along by my plan to use a handful of these in a course I'm teaching this Spring on science, technology, and sustainable agriculture.
New research shows links between marshmallow melting and pediatric nutrition.
Perhaps.
Yes, in homage to the Gladwellian oeuvre and generic New Yorker-ese please find "I Dream in Malcolm Gladwell" at The Morning News. We do encourage you to check it out.
Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and director of the MIT Media Laboratory, introduced the idea for the $100 laptop in 2005. The laptop would be geared towards children in "developing nations." Its intent was to help education in those countries. The project's goal, to be specific, is "To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves." The technical accomplishments of the laptop project were swift--low power requirements, a physical design that is all enclosed to prevent water or sand or dirt damage, open source software [originally, this has since changed], unique interface, and possibility for solar power and hand-crank powering, and designers were doing well to achieve their lost cost.
Two outstanding and influential thinkers and writers, Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, contributed an op-ed to the Times yesterday. More or less, here's the gist:
[W]e...need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.
This poem was sent along by W.J. Galusky, occasional guest contributor to the site. One nice thing is that it's worth reading, as below, but also worth listening to someone reading it, as at this site.
The poem is by Sarah Lindsay. It is from her book, Primate Behavior (1997).
Cheese Penguin
The world is large and full of ice;
it is hard to amaze. Its attention
may take the form of sea leopards.
That much any penguin knows
that staggers onto Cape Royds in the spring.
They bark, they bow one to another,
she swans forward, he walks on her back,
they get on with it. Later
he assumes his post, an egg between his ankles.
Each year The World's Fair bestows its top honor at the end of December, or early January. This honor has come to be renowned not just in the blogosphere (see this write-up from Time), not just on the internet (see this write-up by Susan Sontag), not just embedded within the broad swath we call middlebrow sensibility (see this column penned by Norman Mailer), but as a central element of the current cultural zeitgeist.
Please see below the fold for this year's 2008 winner, given at the end of the list of all prior winners.
Thank you to the many, many readers and subscribers to The World's Fair who, throughout this year and many prior, have continued to support us and send along nominees, well wishes, and comments. We couldn't continue the tradition without you and, we know, we owe the success of the award and its cultural cache to you.
Although I'm starting to suspect the Talk of the Town will not be noting our stunning performance, and Publisher's Weekly made not give us a starred review, I will still admit that Dave and I gave the best performance --the best performance? -- the best performance of our lives at the Cornelia St. Cafe a few weeks ago. Vince LiCata was the instigator of the whole to-do, in league with Roald Hoffmann. While Vince will no doubt soon be most known for the prize-winning choreography that has just netted him top honors by the AAAS for dancing his research, I'll also make him known here for one of the pieces he read at Entertaining Science: "When Britney Spears Comes to My Lab." It was published earlier this year here, in Nature's "futures" section (Nature 451, 106 (3 January 2008) | doi:10.1038/451106a; Published online 2 January 2008). I've pasted it, in full, below the fold.
Alright, Nicky's telling me some people had trouble accessing the Washington Post graphic I linked to in yesterday's MTR post. So here it is, reprinted below in full. This shows how a mountain--called "overburden" if you want to mow it down; called nature if you have any sense of decency--goes from geology to valley fill.
I can't believe Dave didn't cross post this. Someone once gave him a hard time for linking to and across the SCQ and here, but, come on, Dave, this should've made the journey. From The Filter, here is a rundown of Science on the Simpsons, which, true, could be next year's TV on the Radio if given proper support from Pitchfork.
My question is about the moral equivalence of the scientist.
I'm currently reading Steven Shapin's The Scientific Life which is, briefly put, a kind of biography of the modern scientist. (Here's the subtitle: "A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation.") Shapin is a professor of history at Harvard, well known historian and sociologist of science, author of several influential texts in the history of science, the sociology of science, and STS. One common thread in most of his work is the role of virtue and character in the history of science. In The Scientific Life, the first few chapters deal with the changing character of "the scientist." From the gentlemanly men of science who saw their work as a calling, to the twentieth century's professional paid scientist, who see scientific work as a job, a way to earn their daily bread, the identity of the scientist has changed as the content, meaning, and social position of science itself has shifted. These are heady, contemporary, cultural issues. They are all loaded with a good deal of subtext. Shapin's great skill is to historicize them.
The Bush Administration put Mountain Top Removal (MTR) on its list of "midnight rules" - a parting shot at the end of this administration in favor of an environmentally destructive industry, a final gut punch undermining of ecosystems in Appalachia. The Times wrote about this a few weeks ago and Friend of the Fair Jody Roberts wrote about it last week over at The Center. Roberts points out that the new ruling "makes it easier for coal-mining companies to deposit the "waste" they create (otherwise known as "mountain") into adjacent valleys."
Anyway, for those of you who have an annual tradition of putting together a gingerbread house, why not do it this year with a sustainability twist?
That's right! Bake for a Change is a contest where you, as the submission details say, apply sustainable building design practices to a gingerbread house.
Anyway, those details in full are presented here, and you can see last year's entries by checking through this Flickr group. If you do check the flickr page out (and this highly recommended since it's really cool), then you'll note that we're happy to see all sorts of entries, from the fun to the fancy. Seriously, winning really isn't the point - it's more about creative (and in this case, edible) ways to think about sustainable practices.
I'm curious to see if there are any New Yorkers keen on a Science Scout get together (maybe even use this as a potential start to another local group similar to the one in Vancouver?). All in the name of science communication of course, although usually, it's also just an excuse to have a drink or two.
If so, I game for a drink or two on the evening of Dec 6th. I've created a Facebook event page here. to see if there is any interest even with this short notice. If so, the event page will confirm a possible gathering (and place by tomorrow - Dec 5th - evening latest).
It is no grand observation to see that food studies, food politics, food culture (and even food landscapes, it would appear) feed a growing body of literature in the academy and at your local big box bookstore. (Who will be the first to call me out on that pun?) Here are some of them, the ones that are mostly singularly named. They are all summarized in a review essay at the Chronicle of Higher Education, from a few months back. Although not explicit in their titles or summaries, the histories of science and technology are implicated in all of these food histories.
From the Telegraph (as found through Arts and Letters Daily), comes a unique series by London-based photographer Carl Warner. It says there he "makes foodscapes: landscapes made of food." The images below are borrowed from the Telegraph's slideshow, who borrowed it from Warner's homepage. To keep them under the same umbrella as the prior landscape and modernity images (trees; the West; the pasture; the A-bomb), I'll note this: we have here food items from actual physical landscapes (not represented landscapes), re-moved, re-ordered, re-shaped, and re-placed into imaginative scenes that evoke variations of the physical landscapes usually photographed or painted without such a multi-phased staging. Put differently, we have images of landscapes that are made of food; food which was grown in agricultural landscapes that are *not* depicted here; food that now has been carved and configured to appear as if it was a natural landscape. Sort of.
This lovely piece has been circulating of late, but Sonke has been kind enough to allow the SCQ to present his "Advice for Potential Graduate Students" as a handy dandy pin-up, suitable for pinning up in some visible area of your lab.
Anyway, worth a read - as a previous grad student, and now supervisor type - the advice is pretty sound.
Go here to read the full piece in its entirety (or to download the pin-up). And/or check out Sonke's lab here.
It's the next in a monthly cabaret-like series run by Roald Hoffmann. He's a Nobel Prize winner, you know. Chemistry, '81. And he writes plays. Like Oxygen. We are not Nobel Prize Winners, as it were. Although I (Ben) did once win a baseball signed by the World Series-contending Baltimore Orioles in 1980 (after their '79 defeat) at their winter traveling caravan. That was huge. And it predates Hoffmann's Nobel Prize, you might notice.
Or with him, at least. My oh my I don't know why I liked this so much. But here we are, "The Plan," by Jack Handey. Copied in full beneath the fold for your holiday enjoyment.
This past Saturday we held our Terry talks student conference, where we had 9 student speakers "give the talk of their lives." It was fun all around, with a few kinks to work on for next year, but I think we've got a good thing going. In any event, because we had been in discussions with folks at TED during the planning process, we also put a few TED videos on the conference program. One of them was this great one by John Hodgman - here, take a gander...
I love this, because it reminds me a little bit of a Kurt Vonnegut, with its meandering premise coming fully home at the end. Anyway, worth 20 minutes of your time I say.
The Morning News has another stunning series of landscape photographs on display and another chance to reflect on the intersection of landscapes, nature, and technology. It's possible that each of those words should be in quotes--one point brought up by previous commenters in this Landscape and Modernity Series (the West; the pasture; the A-bomb) --to suggest better the implications of defining them. Perhaps so.
Myoung Ho Lee: Tree # 3, Archival Ink-jet print on paper, 100x80cm, 2006
These images are by Myoung Ho Lee, whose work you can find and purchase at Lens Culture. Mike Smith, who interviewed the artist at TMN, introduced it like this:
In this series, "TREE," the "photography-act" is more than a click. The canvas that frames each tree is there by human design, turning the object into a subject, pulling it out of the landscape.
Except to say that I'm most taken by the way the set-up for the pictures skews depth, flattening the canvas of the tree by use of an actual canvas behind it, and that doing so convolutes all manner of assumptions about the ways we use technologies to mediate our perceptions of non-human nature, I'll leave the reposted pics below without undue annotation.
Recently, we had an opportunity to host a variety of great talks for science teachers. One of the talks was by Dr. Hadi Dowlatabadi, with an entertaining take on the value of integrating disciplines, or rather simply getting away from being so discipline focused. Anyway, here is the link that will lead you to a 25 minute talk he gave (apologies for the buzzy sound feed).
It's a great talk, with some choice quotes, in particular a reference to a certain Nobel Laureate as a grandstanding asshole.
That's what Local Foodie big shots did over at Grist. Sustainable food and ag folks (I'm not sure why this was a separate category) pitched in here.
They did so because food policy and agricultural policy (perhaps the same thing, as Michael Pollan has argued) are at once issues of health, energy, and climate change. To wit, Pollan would tell Obama to appoint "a Food Policy Czar in the White House. Why? Because, as I've written recently, progress on the all-important issues of energy independence, climate change, and health care costs depends on reform of the food system--and, crucially, an ability to connect all those dots when making policy."
If you take a gander at our "Terrytalks" speaker promo video, you'll note that one of the sillier requests we had for our student speakers was to pick a song that would work if Terry talks were to have a soundtrack. If you remember, Terry talks has a fairly straight up mandate to connect students to each other over things related to social reponsibility, interdisciplinary collaborations, and/or environmental stewardship.
Anyway, what was great was that the suggested songs were so very diverse in genres. In fact, you can have a listen by clicking the tape below.
There was actually one song we can't seem to find anywhere (Skeffa Chimoto's Nabola Moyo - a Malawi hit song), but here is the mixed tape contents for your reading pleasure.
1. Ben Lee - Were All in This Together
2. Lalo Schifrin - Soundtrack Sel - Mission: Impossible
3. Pink Floyd - Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)
4. Saul Williams - List of Demands(Reparations)
5. Phoenix - Lost and Found Itunes Amazon
6. The New Pornographers - My Rights Versus Yours
7. Dolly Parton - I Will Always Love You
8. Europe - The Final Countdown
Anyway, we're also looking for other suggestions - thought this might make a nice tradition down the road. Suggest away!
Not sure if you remember a previous mention on this, but I'm one of the folks involved in a new student conference initiative at UBC. Christianed "Terrytalks", this is basically a clone of the TED talks, where we'll offer the chance for students to share their globally relevant passions and desires to a large audience (about 400 this time around) of their peers, students, faculty and staff.
Anyway, I just made this quick promo video to highlight our student speakers. Would be great to get some feedback on the video in general (I'm generally new to video editing stuff). Would be even better if anyone can help figure out what song Idette is referring to (this will make more sense if you watch the video).
O.K. o.k. so I've been ultra delinquent with keeping on top of the PF3 puzzle, and for that I heartily apologize.
But here we go - the proverbial home stretch. As it stands what did happen was that somewhere in the conversation, in the comments, in the hypothesizing, the answer was indeed found.
However, in a manner that some might say happens also in the scientific process, the answer when proclaimed was done so in a way that didn't really reflect a full on "aha!" moment. Truth is, it seemed like maybe it was a lucky guess - I don't know - maybe it wasn't, but I'm of the opinion that based on the clues provided, if you know it, you would know you know it.
So... to keep things progressing, I'm going to go one step further than just saying "the answer" happened to have been uttered previously. I'm actually going to narrow it down to three of these guesses.
One of these is the real mccoy. Can you figure it out?
If it helps, click here to see a full on montage of every clue presented so far. Regardless of what happens, I'll give out the answer on Christmas day. Good luck!
The cruise-ship piece ["A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"] ran in [Harper's in] January 1996, a month before [Infinite Jest] was published. People photocopied it, faxed it to each other, read it over the phone. When people tell you they're fans of David Foster Wallace, what they're often telling you is that they've read the cruise-ship piece...
It's heartbreaking, this lengthy article in Rolling Stone about David Foster Wallace. Reading the tributes and memories of DFW over at McSweeney's, you can't get away from the impression that he was just a regular guy who, oh, happened to be a genius and literary phenom of the sort that won't come along for some time again, if ever. Let's say ever. Reading the Rolling Stone article by David Lipsky leaves you with the same understanding. All people are normal, or, here, this is better, all people are the same distance from normal as anyone else since there is no such thing. I was just a reader, so how was I to know he actually seriously suffered from depression, legitimately, fatally. His distance from normal was in the wrong direction, I think the point is.
Though, to convolute my claim, I didn't realize how normal I was. Just last year I photocopied the cruise-ship piece and sent it to a friend who wanted to know why I liked Wallace. That essay was my own entry into the world of purposeful reading, if you really want to know.
Thanks to Beej, of the Purdue Beej's, for sending me the link.
Recently, we had an opportunity to host a variety of great talks for science teachers. One of the talks was by Dr. William Rees. It was a nice little introduction into the conundrum of our reliance on "progress" to fix things. In any event, here is the link that will lead you to a 25 minute talk he gave.
If you do watch it, I'd be interested to see what you think. In many ways it suggests that human behaviour is currently not well suited to dealing with an issue of this magnitude.
Interestingly, one of the questions that came up after the talk, (that I thought really nailed the going feeling in the room) was "Do you think it's important to teach students to hope?"
The data presented below were first published after Halloween in 2006, here at The World's Fair. After further (non-anonymous) peer review, we pushed into the second phase of the research in 2007, as published here. We are proud to acknowledge that these earlier efforts--pilot studies, both--led to further funding. We've now been able to pursue the third phase of the work. Difficult work, yes. Labor-intensive, to be sure. Gut-wrenching, perhaps. But huge breakthroughs were in the offing. The hierarchy below includes the results of our continuing work.
I lectured today on technology and progress in my big-lecture class (the main thrust being: in what way is technology progress, and who says so, and why). Just before I'd watched a documentary, Our Daily Bread (and here), about the modern industrial agriculture process. It pairs very well with another documentary, Manufactured Landscapes, and in that way ties into the recent thread of "landcsape" images at the site (the West, fences, and bombs). In discussing technology and progress, the lecture was built with commentary on mechanization and the values of technical rationality. That got me to thinking of the "disassembly" line as the antecedent to the assembly line. Which leads me here to offer two images, one from 1869 that I got from Mechanization Takes Command by Siegfried Giedion, the other from Our Daily Bread.
So, this is one of the things that has been keeping me busy the last couple of weeks.
Essentially, the lab hosted a largish conference for high school science teachers (about 95 registrants) - as well, we took the tact of blogging the conference so that almost all of the content is already up (by my calculation, all content will be up by week's end).
Friend of the Fair Oronte Churm has a note on engineers over at The Education of Oronte Churm, "The Engineers Think On It." Eating at a diner with a book of poetry in hand, he posits the engineer's quest for utility--and for order and rationality, it seems--over poetry and spirit (or so my own poetic license has it, from reading his post). I'd say his interpretation is not of any engineers I know, though they do exist in lore and in lonely corners at Virginia Tech.
They had a job to do, but they weren't going to rush it. There was pleasure in the food, companionship, and the pause, but they intended to get back to it. The work they described took neither nature nor the human into account. You were either with them or against them, and they'd be astonished if you were against them.
These offer another set of landscape images (here were some others: one; two), these punctuated by the contrast of nuclear sky, horizon, and military maneuver. I saw them at this site, though that site was reposting images from the book How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb, by Peter Kuran. The Cal Lit Review site says this by way of couching the images:
Between 1945 and 1962, the United States conducted over 300 atmospheric nuclear tests above the ground, in the ocean or in outer space.
On August 5, 1963, the United States and the former Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, effectively banning the testing of all nuclear weapons except those tested underground. Atmospheric nuclear test blast photography came to an end.
The first one, below, is from the Bikini Atoll, July 24, 1946.
I think the poem below, by Edward Hirsch, is in league with the one by Vijay Seshadri, "Memoir," posted a few months ago. Hirsch's was apparently inspired by the poem "Account," by Czeslaw Milosz.
The Telegraph's website has an "Atlas of the Real World." There are 18 different versions of the world map, where software depicts "the nations of the world, not by their physical size, but by their demographic importance on a range of subjects." Here is the Nuclear map:
Trying to find your way around this place? Like most expositions, we offer a map: 
