Technology
mikethemadbiologist | November 5, 2010Deep thought: Tom Brady changed his hair to look like Justin Bieber because he's going bald. Anyway, these links can't be any worse than that lead in. Science:
Evolution: The Curious Case of DogsHerding Firesheep in New York City
Other:
Parents' effort key to child's educational performancePaint it BlackerOn Wall Street: All Reward, No RiskYear-round school gains ground around U.S.The Big Lie About Social SecurityAmerica's war on teachersInsidious Force Threatens Military Morale
jdupuis | November 4, 2010More for your reading and collection development pleasure.
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu (ISBN-13: 978-0307269935)
As Wu's sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth century--radio, telephone, television, and film--was born free and open. Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information: Adolph Zukor, who took a technology once used as commonly as YouTube is today and made it the exclusive…
kcollins | November 1, 2010The USA Science and Engineering Festival challenged students across the nation to make a video that tells us "Why Science is Cool". The video contest received over 100 entries, and the awards ceremony was hosted Oct. 24 in Washington, D.C., by Bill Nye the Science Guy, as part of the festival's Expo on the National Mall. Top prizes include an HD camcorder (first prize), in addition to cash donations assigned to the students' school science or technology programs, WOLFRAM Mathematica visualization software, and Adobe PREMIERE editing software.
The contest was sponsored by the Kavli…
drorzel | October 28, 2010
Take better photos of friends and family: Turn off your flash. - By Steven I. Weiss - Slate Magazine
"The flash didn't go off" has been shorthand for photographic failure for more than 100 years, but the conventional wisdom on lighting is now being challenged by advances in camera technology. The quickest, simplest, cheapest way to take more professional-looking pictures of your friends and family is to stop using your digital camera's built-in flash.
(tags: pictures technology gadgets slate education optics)
The hard edge of empire - Charlie's Diary
"We know about the real world of the…
jdupuis | October 26, 2010Slice and Scan
After Launching Search and Discovery, Who Is Mission Control?
The smart scholar's publication-venue heuristics; or, how to use open access to advance your career
Piracy trumps obscurity again
Open to All: Preserving Library Values in a Digital World
Proposing a Taxonomy of Social Reading
How Should Peer Review Evolve?
Why Peer Review Matters
Mutations of citations: Just like genetic information, citations can accumulate heritable mutations
Bookstores: dead or alive?
Over It Yet? Privacy, That Is
An Amazon Digital Book Rental Plan?
In a Digital Age, Students Still Cling to…
oracknows | October 21, 2010Remember Hollie Quinn?
She's the woman who parlayed her "breast cancer cure testimonial" into a book deal, even though she underwent conventional surgical therapy of her cancer. When criticized for this, she came up with an incredibly lame defense of her book. Well, she's at it again. This time around, she's touting thermography:
As we describe in our book, Hollie uses thermography for ongoing monitoring of her health, and not just for her breasts but for her entire body. She hasn't had a mammogram in eight years, since her original diagnosis. Thermography isn't perfect, but it meets our…
kcollins | October 20, 2010APA Exhibit at USA Science Expo
The American Psychological Association will have an exhibit at the USA Science & Engineering Festival Expo on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on Saturday, October 23, and Sunday, October 24. Titled Let's Use Our Heads to Save the Environment, the exhibit will highlight the role of psychological science in reducing energy use, pollution, and climate change.
ANS to Participate in USA Science & Engineering Festival
The American Nuclear Society (ANS) will be participating on Saturday and Sunday, October 23-24, at the grand finale Expo of the USA…
kcollins | October 20, 2010This looks interesting! From post
The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will enable astronomers to explore the universe in unprecedented clarity when it achieves "first light" later this decade. The public, however, will get an exciting preview of what TMT will observe as part of the two-day expo for the USA Science and Engineering Festival, October 23 and 24 in Washington, D.C.
Staff and volunteers from TMT will use a high-definition projection system and innovative portable planetarium dome provided by Ansible Technologies to take visitors on a virtual tour of the cosmos from objects within our…
kcollins | October 19, 2010Monday, The White House held the First Ever Science Fair that Kicked off the Final Week of the USA Science and Engineering Festival. Here is an article from TIME Magazine about the Science Fair and the Festival.
Find the Full Article in TIME Magazine here
The White House Office of the Press Secretary MONDAY, OCTOBER 18 President Obama to Host White House Science Fair
President will Celebrate Winners of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Competitions and Announce New Steps to Inspire All Students to Excel WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, President Obama will host the White House…
jdupuis | October 18, 2010It's Open Access Week this week and as part of the celebrations I thought I highlight a recent declaration by the Open Bibliographic Working Group on the Principles for Open Bibliographic Data. It's an incredible idea, one that I support completely -- the aim is to make bibliographic data open, reusable and remixable. Creating a bibliographic data commons would lead to many opportunities to create search and discovery tools that would be of great benefit to scholarship, education, research and development.
I won't try and explain the details of the declaration since it's released under a CC…
kcollins | October 12, 2010Great info on EE Times Group, one of our Sponsors', Grants for Student Reporters. These students will come to the Festival. Read more here.
Washington, DC-area Middle School Students to Serve as Technology Journalists for EE Times' Innovation Generation Website at the Festival
Download image
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- EE Times Group, a UBM company and the daily source of essential business and technical information for the electronics industry's decision makers, today announced the two middle schools who are the recipients of its "Student Reporter" Transportation Grants to attend…
kcollins | October 9, 2010Shout out to EE Times Group for getting the word out about the Festival.
SOURCE EE Times Group
To Offer Teardowns of Popular Consumer Electronics and the Opportunity to Serve as Technology Journalists
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- EE Times Group, a UBM company and the daily source of essential business and technical information for the electronics industry's decision makers, today announced its plans for the USA Science & Engineering Festival, a two-week celebration of science in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, which begins on October 10, 2010. The festival will offer…
cevans | October 8, 2010
In case you didn't know, reality is science fiction.
If you doubt me, read the news. Read, for example, this recent article in the New York Times about Carnegie Mellon's "Read the Web" program, in which a computer system called NELL (Never Ending Language Learner) is systematically reading the internet and analyzing sentences for semantic categories and facts, essentially teaching itself idiomatic English as well as educating itself in human affairs. Paging Vernor Vinge, right?
NELL reads the Web 24 hours a day, seven days a week, learning language like a human would -- cumulatively, over…
gregladen | October 7, 2010The command line is a great place to get weather information. Here, I discuss one cli-app for current conditions and forecasts, in the larger context of why you would ever want to use the command line anyway.
There are several ways to use your computer to check the weather. One is to use the Nakob Weather Rock method. Suspend the computer using a rope from a tripod of sticks. If the computer is swaying, that means it is windy. If the computer is wet, that means it is raining. And so on. Like this:
That is a very amusing way to tell the weather, but it is not convenient because your…
tfk | October 5, 2010The opening of Sam Harris's End of Faith, like several essays he wrote at HuffPo, focus on suicide bombing. He argues that suicide bombing is absurd, and only exists because of religion. A footnote to EoF acknowledges that suicide bombing was first deployed on a large scale by the Tamil Tigers, who were not fighting a religious war, but rather were part of an ethnic and nationalistic conflict. He waves this objection away at HuffPo by writing: "it is misleading to describe the Tamil Tigers as 'secular' ⦠While the motivations of the Tigers are not explicitly religious, they are Hindus who…
kcollins | October 1, 2010BIG shoutout to the The Epoch Times! They have a lot of great pictures from our recent press conference and a great article about the USA Science and Engineering Festival. Below is an introduction to the article or you can read it all here. Thanks Epoch Times for being a Sponsor of the USA Science and Engineering Festival and publishing such a piece about the Festival.
Written By Du Won Kang
Epoch Times Staff
(pictures from Epoch Times article)
WASHINGTON--"We are going to put on the largest science and engineering party that the United States has ever seen," said Larry Bock, Executive…
krandall | September 28, 2010By Dr. Paul EstradaPlanetary physicist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs
If planets are a dime a dozen, moons are less than a penny each. There are at least 139 moons just within our own solar system. Most of these are the property of the gas giant planets beyond Mars. More than just a nice accompaniment to planets, moons may have habitats in which liquid water could ebb and flow - and possibly be a suitable home for life. Planetary physicist Dr. Paul Estrada investigates how moons around gas giants are formed -- an important…
sastyk | September 23, 2010There are a lot of inherent contradictions in my life - and for the most part, I stand with Emerson and his claim that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Periodically someone throws at my claims that we're going to have to radically reduce our fossil fuel usage "but you are writing this on a computer" as though the fact that there's an underlying hypocrisy to this that undermines my claims. And there is a kind of hypocrisy, in the adolescent sense of the term - but the reality is that it is impossible to live in this world and the one that is coming without being a…
kcollins | September 20, 2010Check out this interview with Brian Pollock, Chief Scientific Officer of Life Technologies one of our sponsor organizations on the USA Science and Engineering Festival. This interview was posted on Earth Sky another one of our partner organizations.Brian Pollok, Ph.D., is Life Technologies' chief scientific officer and Head of Global Research and Development. He oversees the allocation of more than $350 million in R&D funds annually, which has yielded innovative new products in the areas of DNA sequencing, cell analysis, and molecular biology. Dr. Pollok has been with Life Technologies…
oracknows | September 20, 2010A critical aspect of both evidence-based medicine (EBM) and science-based medicine (SBM) is the randomized clinical trial. Ideally, particularly for conditions with a large subjective component in symptomatology, the trial should be randomized, double-blind, and placebo-controlled. As Kimball Atwood pointed out just last week (me too), in EBM, scientific prior probability tends to be discounted while in SBM it is not, particularly for therapies that are wildly improbable strictly on the basis of basic science, but for both the randomized clinical trial remains, in essence, where the "rubber…