purepedantry
Posts by this author
May 7, 2007
The Economist has an interesting article about reforming academia in Europe to make it more transparent and competitive. Resistance is to be expected. Money quote:
Unleashing universities' "full potential", and "mobilising the brainpower of Europe" are at the heart of the commission's plans to…
May 3, 2007
Oops:
Children here got more than they bargained for when they tuned in to "Handy Manny" on the Disney Channel this week -- hard-core pornography.
Cable giant Comcast is investigating how the porn was broadcast during the popular cartoon, which is about a bilingual handyman, Manny Garcia, and his…
May 3, 2007
Just to show that I have way too much time on my hands, I went last night and collected the best science themed music videos that I could find on YouTube. Feel free to suggest more if I missed some.
1) Weird Science by Oingo Boingo...classic...so classic...
I don't think I had ever seen this…
May 2, 2007
The Freakonomics guys have a simply hysterical article in the New York Times magazine about monkey economics. The article discusses how monkeys possess the mental apparatus for economic valuation including the use of money. They train the monkeys to use silver tokens as currency to trade for food…
May 2, 2007
The Great Global Warming Swindle was a documentary that aired in March on UK TV organized by Martin Durkin of Wag TV. The documentary purports to debunk several of the claims made by climate scientists on global warming. (Just to be clear I have not seen this documentary.)
Anyway, Roger Pielke…
May 1, 2007
I live in Manhattan, and it has always been a source of fascination how prices got so exorbidant. While I am somewhat protected from market forces -- I live in school-subsidized housing -- even with the help I have a room only slightly wider than my mattress and a shower just about big enough to…
May 1, 2007
Earlier this week in the post Neurological "Personhood," I made a comment about individuals with autism. My comment was as follows:
1) Some individuals do not show normal development in the system of identifying personhood described. For example, individuals with autism sometimes show deficits in…
April 30, 2007
Want to know when to use Standard Deviation (SD) as opposed to Standard Error (SE) or a Confidence Interval (CI)? Then you should read this really useful paper in JCB about error bars in scientific papers. Here is just a sampling of their useful rules:
Rule 3: error bars and statistics should…
April 30, 2007
If this works, this guy is going to make a bagillion dollars:
By giving ordinary adult mice a drug - a synthetic designed to mimic fat - Salk Institute scientist Dr. Ronald M. Evans is now able to chemically switch on PPAR-d, the master regulator that controls the ability of cells to burn fat. Even…
April 30, 2007
They didn't need to go out and make artificial snot. It's allergy season...I got plenty for them right here:
Researchers at The University of Warwick and Leicester University have used an artificial snot (nasal mucus) to significantly enhance the performance of electronic noses.
The researchers…
April 27, 2007
I had the great pleasure of working in labs as an undergrad. Most of my classmates now did as well. Part of the good experience was the ability to really narrow down what type of science I was most interested in; part of it was the more mercenary goal of getting the experience that was necessary…
April 27, 2007
Ronald Bailey at Reason reviews an interesting article in the American Journal of Bioethics by Martha Farah and Andrea Heberlein and the responses to it. Farah and Heberlein argue that while an innate system for the detection of personhood exists in the human brain, it is so prone to being fooled…
April 26, 2007
I don't know if you caught this story, but one of our fellow bloggers here at ScienceBlogs, Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle, was threatened with legal action when she reproduced a figure from a published paper in one of her blog posts. The original post is here (now with the figure removed).
She…
April 26, 2007
The Economist has a great article summarizing all the ways in which the debate between evolution and religion has gone global. It also does a good job of analyzing the different strains within the American debate, depicting it as much less monolithic:
Even in the United States, defenders of…
April 25, 2007
I don't know if you have been following this story, but there have been massive honey bee die-offs recently in the United States. Considering that honey bees are the primary pollinators for many of the crops grown here, this is a problem that greatly exceeds just the bees.
Scientists have been…
April 24, 2007
Here is your philosophical conversation to ponder over for the day. (I am cleaning out links, and this is the sort of stuff you get when I am cleaning out links.)
I recently read an interesting interchange on about Weber's idea that a state is defined by a monolopy on the legitimate use of force…
April 24, 2007
If you read the statistics, it isn't difficult to question the effectiveness of abstinence-only education in schools. It is about as effective as telling a three-year-old to not eat that big cookie on the table and then leaving the room to see what happens. However, I was under the distinct…
April 23, 2007
For those of you who don't have time to shower and have a cup of coffee (or who have failed miserably to do those things simultaneously), why not consider caffeinated soap:
Tired of waking up and having to wait for your morning java to brew? Are you one of those groggy early morning types that just…
April 23, 2007
Managers of Russia's new media have informed their journalists that from now on 50% of the news must be positive:
At their first meeting with journalists since taking over Russia's largest independent radio news network, the managers had startling news of their own: from now on, they said, at least…
April 23, 2007
Excellent analysis from an article in Science on the recent funding woes (sadly behind a subscription wall). Money quote:
Meanwhile, research institutions everywhere were breaking ground on new facilities and expanding their faculty. In a 2002 survey, AAMC found that new construction at medical…
April 20, 2007
A controversial portrait -- possibly of the writer Jane Austen -- was put up for auction at Christie's yesterday. (Actually it failed to sell.) The controversy is over whether the picture is actually of her. (A photo of the portrait is to the right.)
All of that is very interesting, but not…
April 20, 2007
As I indicated in my previous post (also related to Lindsay Lohan), being a redhead derives from a recessive allele in the Melanocortin Receptor 1 -- a receptor from Melanocyte Stimulating Hormone.
MC1R mutations also result in the phenotype of
A) Being super hot
and
B) A higher risk for skin…
April 19, 2007
Hat-tip: Shelley.
This site is awesome!!!
They did all these experiments with Peeps like what it takes to dissolve a peep or what happens to a peep in a vacuum. I am so going to do some of this stuff when I get home.
My favorite: the peep fear response (from being put in a test chamber...read:…
April 19, 2007
The murders at Virginia Tech are horrible and tragic, but they have also spawned a lot of hysterical claims. I think that is why I haven't talked about them. I have no desire to get swept up in that hysteria.
Last night on NPR, they interviewed Dr. Russ Federman, director of counseling at the…
April 19, 2007
Outcast chimp prefers humans to other chimps:
We all know not to feed the animals when visiting the zoo. Now the Antwerp Zoo has urged visitors to, please, stop staring at the chimpanzees.
New rules have been posted outside the chimp enclosure at the city zoo urging visitors not to form a bond with…
April 18, 2007
It is going to be a big day of other people's work because I don't have time to post anything of my own. However, that doesn't mean the day is news-free. The Supreme Court issued a decision today upholding the Federal Partial Abortion ban:
A closely divided U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld…
April 18, 2007
Reason magazine has a great interview with Jackson Publick, the co-creator of one of my favorite shows The Venture Brothers. For those of you who haven't seen it, it is sort of a parody of all the cartoons from the 60s like Jonny Quest where supergenius kids fought crime and had archnemeses. (The…
April 17, 2007
I have talked about funding a couple of times (here and here), and I get the impression from the comments about those posts that my views are at the minimum somewhat iconoclastic. Basically, while I would prefer the government to give more to research, at the moment I don't think that the primary…
April 16, 2007
Now that is unfortunate:
Japan's leading toilet maker Toto Ltd. is offering free repairs for 180,000 bidet toilets after wiring problems caused several to catch fire, the company said Monday.
The electric bidet accessory of Toto's Z series caught fire in three separate incidents between March 2006…
April 16, 2007
Thank you, Germany:
Passively listening to Mozart -- or indeed any other music you enjoy -- does not make you smarter. But more studies should be done to find out whether music lessons could raise your child's IQ in the long term, concludes a report analysing all the scientific literature on music…