Social Sciences
terrasig | April 17, 2010I've often remarked that the beauty of this blog is that more people read here every day than I would reach in even the largest class I teach. Moreover, far more people read this blog than will ever read my peer-reviewed scientific publications. And that's even considering that we have very modest traffic numbers here for ScienceBlogs.com. Of course, Terra Sig readers are very discriminating - and good-looking, erudite, and probably even smell good, too.
This morning, my Twitter feed brought me a post from the blog, University of Venus, as referred to me by HASTAC Director of New Media…
drorzel | April 17, 2010
The Secret of L.A.'s 10-Year-Old Fake Freeway Sign - Traffic - Jalopnik
"An artist named Richard Ankrom had the same experience, and so he did what any fed-up Los Angeles driver would do: He created a simple directional tool to help drivers prepare for the 5's poorly marked hairpin exit. He designed and sewed a Caltrans uniform, cut the shield-like "5" shape as well as a "NORTH" from sheet metal, and affixed reflectors to match the existing system. He even gave the signage a nice dusting of L.A. smog sheen so it wouldn't look glaringly new. On August 5, 2001, in broad daylight, he hoisted a…
eklemetti | April 16, 2010
The ash plume from the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption.
To say that the Eyjafjallajökull eruption has become the most significant volcano-related news story of the year would be an understatement. There has been wall-to-wall coverage on every major media outlet, dissecting everything from the effect of ash on jets, to the effect of ash on people, to wildly premature commentary on the climatic effect of the eruption to the potential place in history of this event. The eruption is affecting a wide swath through society: the European economy may take a hit of billions of dollars due to…
jdupuis | April 15, 2010A month or so ago I posted on Scholarly Societies: Why Bother?, basically on the challenges that scholarly societies face in the digital age. I got a few good comments, getting a nice discussion going.
I also posed a few questions directly to scholarly societies but unfortunately didn't get any comments from any of the various societies themselves. I did find that a bit disappointing in that the public conversation seemed to be happening without them. Never a good thing in the digital age.
Today, however, Kevin Marvel of the American Astronomical Society added a comment to my original…
jstemwedel | April 15, 2010Making good ethical choices in the real world is hard, in large part because it requires us to find the best balance in responding to interested parties whose legitimate interests pull in different directions. The situation is further complicated by the fact that as we are trying to make the best ethical decision we can, or evaluating the ethical decision-making of others, we can't help but notice that there is not universal agreement about who counts as a party with legitimate interests that ought to be taken into account, let alone about how to weight the competing interests in the ethical…
clock | April 12, 2010Whenever I read a paper from Karl-Arne Stokkan's lab, and I have read every one of them, no matter how dense the scientese language I always start imagining them running around the cold, dark Arctic, wielding enormous butterfly nets, looking for and catching reindeer (or ptarmigans, whichever animal the paper is about) to do their research.
If I was not so averse to cold, I'd think this would be the best career in science ever!
It is no surprise that their latest paper - A Circadian Clock Is Not Required in an Arctic Mammal (press release) - was widely covered by the media, both…
clock | April 9, 2010Next American Scientist Pizza Lunch:
It's not often that we get to dive a little deeper into a topic encountered at a recent pizza lunch talk. But we will this month. In March, Geoff Ginsburg from Duke briefed us well on the current science regarding genomic (or personalized) medicine and its promising applications. At noon on Tuesday, April 20, Jim Evans from UNC-Chapel Hill will discuss the complexity of implementing this new medicine with a talk entitled: Personalized Medicine: Too Much Information / Too Little Information. Like Dr. Ginsburg, Dr. Evans is a doctor-scientist. He is also…
nisbetmc | April 8, 2010
At Science today, contributing journalist Yudhijit Bhattacharjee reports on the decision by the National Science Board to drop discussion of survey questions about evolution from their 2010 Science Indicators report. As a reviewer of several previous versions of the report and as an expert who provided input and feedback on the design of the 2006 survey instrument, I have several thoughts on what I think Bhattacharjee in the article unfairly portrays as a "controversy."
The NSB is correct to be concerned about how these questions are interpreted by the public and by the scientific community…
sastyk | April 8, 2010When Eric and I first wrote a letter to Eric's grandparents, asking them to consider living with us, the response was very mixed. Grandma and Grandpa's generation of friends and family were mostly very pleased and thrilled - given the bad lot of options available to many of them, finding a compatible home with their grandchildren looked pretty good. Most of them had cared for their parents, and so somewhere inside them, this seemed like a normal relationship. Some of my friends were frankly jealous - they'd lost their own grandparents, and wished for something like what we were going to…
cevans | April 6, 2010
I don't have the attention span to write this article.
In the course of penning this introductory paragraph, I've taken umpteen email breaks, gotten distracted by several Wikipedia wormholes, and taken an hour's time out to watch Frontline documentary clips on YouTube. It has taken me, in toto, seven days to write a five-paragraph article about my generation's decreasing attention span. At least the irony isn't lost on me.
A social researcher tracking my movements across the web might discover that, in the words of University College of London professor and director of CIBER (the Centre…
sastyk | April 5, 2010During the period of my life when I was a professional smart-ass (ie, my adolescence), I used to complain to my mother that even the day after she went grocery shopping, there was never any food in the house, only the component ingredients of food. As I teenager I wanted to eat like my peers who seemed to have an endless supply of chips and soda around. To have to come home from school and actually scramble eggs or make a sandwich seemed horribly unfair. My mother and step-mother expressed little sympathy.
It was only later that I realized how central this "buying the ingredients of food…
pharyngula | April 5, 2010I'd known for a long time that the term "scientist" had been coined in the early 19th century, but I just ran across a first-hand account of the event by the fellow who came up with it, William Whewell. The context is this: many in the science establishment of the day had been chafing at the premier British institution, the Royal Society, which had grown stodgy and was infested with politicians, bishops, and other such hangers-on, and they formed a new institution, the British Association for the Advancement of Science. As part of the process of establishing their identity, they struggled…
laelaps | April 1, 2010
The partial faces of Anoiapithecus (left), Pierolapithecus (center), and Dryopithecus (right). (Images not to scale)
Our species is just one branch of a withering part of the evolutionary tree, the great apes. Along with the handful of species of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, we are all that is left of the hominids, and considering the threats our close relatives face we could very soon be the only great apes left. It has not always been this way. During the swath of prehistory ~23-5 million years ago known as the Miocene a variety of ape species inhabited forests through much of…
tetrapodzoology | March 31, 2010
If anything should be clear from the range of creatures that I write about at Tet Zoo - think caecilians, borhyaenoids, imaginary giant owls and rhynchosaurs - it's that there's an almost infinite amount of technical information on obscure creatures 'locked away' in the technical literature. Among the most remarkable of mammals are, without doubt, the winged cats or pantheropterygines, yet for all their fame and notoriety, most of the information on these creatures has remained widely scattered in the literature and a good synthesis is absent.
Winged cats were first brought to scientific…
nisbetmc | March 31, 2010
This year the School of Communication at American University has hired leading junior faculty in the areas of science journalism and risk communication. The two new faculty, scheduled to move to Washington, DC in August, will contribute significantly to SOC's research capacity, professional initiatives, and teaching portfolio. Below with their permission, I have posted brief bios.
DECLAN FAHY
Declan Fahy joins the journalism faculty as a tenure-track assistant professor. He has reported extensively on science, health, and environmental issues, as well as many other topics, for the Irish…
aardvarchaeology | March 31, 2010When I was in school I read a great story about a man who took opium, felt that he had a great philosophical insight, wrote it down, and then found, after sobering up, that what he had written was "I perceive a distinct smell of kerosene", Jag känner en distinkt doft av fotogen.
Mucking around on the blessed web, I now find that the man was Oliver Wendell Holmes, an American 19th century physician and author. But it was ether, not opium, and turpentine, not kerosene. Here's what OWH writes in his essay "Mechanism in thought and morals : an address delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society…
tfk | March 29, 2010In a monumental step towards bringing sanity to biotech patents, a court ruled that a patent granted for the sequence of a gene associated with breast cancer was invalid. Basically, Myriad Genetics held a patent on the use of the sequence of BRCA1 and BRCA2, genes with alleles associated with high risk of breast cancer. Thanks to its patent, Myriad was the only company able to make tests for these alleles, and medical societies like the Association for Molecular Pathology, the American College of Medical Genetics, the American Society for Clinical Pathology, and the College of American…
sastyk | March 29, 2010Passover is a holiday deeply concerned with inclusion - at one point during each seder night, we open our doors and leave them open wide, and call out "let all who are hungry come and eat." One year, teaching Hebrew School to 10 year olds, I asked them what would happen if they called out and a stranger came in and sat down. My students, largely from affluent and middle families in a leafy suburb where most strangers are likely to be much like them, were to a one deeply uncomfortable with the notion. They expressed fear at the thought of the stranger coming to their table, even surrounded…
pharyngula | March 28, 2010I've been following the news lately, and have at last unearthed the most horrible, awful, evil thing you can do to a religion, the one simple thing that will get the faithful to melt down.
Tattling.
Oh, no, don't you tell on the church! It ought to be the first commandment. Church leaders can engage in the most ghastly, demeaning, terrible crimes, like raping children, and the concern isn't for the young people who've been hurt — instead, it's a worry that the revelation of human imperfection among priests might diminish people's dedication to the faith, so it must be covered up. The guilty…
pharyngula | March 27, 2010Speaking of the ABC, I revisited their Global Atheist Convention blog, which I can say without hesitation was absolutely the worst effort any of the media put out. I think I prefer the blatant stupidity of a Gary Ablett to the mawkish blitherings of a gang of pious apologists — at least it's honest. And that's all they've got — the blog is still limping along with a series of tepid guest posts by people making weak excuses for their faith. It was supposedly a blog about the convention, but it never quite rose to the standard of even meeting their own aims — instead, it's an exercise in breast…