Technology
nisbetmc | February 11, 2009I'm back in the office after a great event last night at the American Museum of Natural History. Close to 100 attendees came out to the magnificent venue for a panel discussion on media coverage of climate change. Not surprisingly, a majority of the attendees were journalists, journalism students, bloggers, or university and NGO-types working on climate change communication.
Last night's themes will be followed up on in two panels at the annual AAAS meetings in Chicago. At CJR's The Observatory, Curtis Brainard has the details:
Two other events will take place Friday at the annual meeting of…
ksharpe | February 10, 2009Originally published by Janet Stemwedel
On February 9, 2009, at 6:25 PM
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by P.W. Singer
New York: Penguin
2009
For some reason, collectively humans seem to have a hard time seeing around corners to anticipate the shape our future will take. Of those of us who remember email as a newish thing, I suspect most of us had no idea how much of our waking lives would come to be consumed by it. And surely I am not the only one who attended a lab meeting in which a visiting scholar mentioned a speculative project to build…
tqa | February 10, 2009
Tim Sandefur and I don't agree about the proper role of government when it comes to funding scientific research. He fairly strongly believes that there are many reasons why it's wrong for the government to fund scientific research. Tim's provided a number of reasons to support his belief, and I agreed to use my blog as a platform to make my own case for the involvement of government in science.
In the abstract, many of the reasons that the government should not be involved in funding research sound fairly compelling. Unfortunately, those arguments were made on the internet. At the end of…
clock | February 9, 2009I will be on a panel, Open Science: Good For Research, Good For Researchers? next week, February 19th (3:00 to 5:00 pm EST at Columbia University, Morningside Campus, Shapiro CEPSR Building, Davis Auditorium). I am sure my hosts will organize something for us that day before and/or after the event, but Mrs.Coturnix and I will be there a couple of days longer. So, I think we should have a meetup - for Overlords, SciBlings, Nature Networkers, independent bloggers, readers and fans ;-)
Is Friday evening a good time for this? Or is Saturday better? Let me know.
You can follow the panel on…
jstemwedel | February 9, 2009
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by P.W. Singer
New York: Penguin
2009
For some reason, collectively humans seem to have a hard time seeing around corners to anticipate the shape our future will take. Of those of us who remember email as a newish thing, I suspect most of us had no idea how much of our waking lives would come to be consumed by it. And surely I am not the only one who attended a lab meeting in which a visiting scholar mentioned a speculative project to build something called the World Wide Web and wondered aloud whether anything would…
pharyngula | February 9, 2009Since I had the effrontery to critize futurism and especially Ray Kurzweil, here's a repost of something I wrote on the subject a while back…and I'll expand on it at the end.
Kevin Drum picks at Kurzweil—a very good thing, I think—and expresses bafflement at this graph (another version is here, but it's no better):
(Another try: here's a cleaner scan of the chart.)
(Click for larger image)
You see, Kurzweil is predicting that the accelerating pace of technological development is going to lead to a revolutionary event called the Singularity in our lifetimes. Drum has extended his graph (the…
purepedantry | February 6, 2009David Goldston, writing in Nature, echoes a point I have been trying to make about the science provisions of the economic stimulus package. He lists some reasons why scientists should be wary of getting our funding this way:
First, being included in the stimulus measure could turn science spending into a political football. In general, federal support for science is something pretty much everyone in both parties agrees should be maximized, even if they haven't always followed through by providing the cash. The fight over the stimulus bill could erode that consensus, creating problems for the…
mikethemadbiologist | January 30, 2009Some links for you. Science:
Don't Risk Going Unvaccinated
Cell on "a unit of scientific advance"
MRSA ST398 in US swine
Creationism: The Very Bad Idea That Just Won't Die
Other:
Busting Balls: 20 ways to improve sports
President Obama and technology
Dodd and Larson Get an Earful on Healthcare
MA regulators: Did Blue Cross/Blue Shield and Partners HealthCare collude to fix prices and raise rates 75%?
Greed and Delusion on Wall Street
What Are Chicago's Economists Thinking?
"A Dark Age of Macroeconomics"
THE POST AND THE END OF AN ERA! Colbert King's column was a disgrace. It captured a 16-…
sciencepunk | January 27, 2009Is it possible to pack a DVD with idiocy so dense that light bends around it? I don't know, but I found someone who gave it a damn good try. The Beautiful Truth is a 2008 documentary about Gerson Therapy, the supposed diet-based cure for cancer. It produced by earth NOW! a small indie label from the Cinema Libre Studio. There are numerous excerpts from the movie on YouTube, which give a fascinating insight into the nonsensical, incomprehensible world that the filmmakers live in.
(weirdly, YouTube links all of them to a video entitled 'How masturbation damages the body'. It's not clear why,…
dgmacarthur | January 26, 2009I'll be at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting next week - this will be my my first experience of this annual conference on Florida's picturesque Marco Island, but I already have high expectations based on reports from previous years. The programme is packed with cutting-edge genomics, and to be honest after a few months of Cambridge weather I'm craving even a brief glimpse of blue sky and salt water.
I'll be giving a talk myself on some fairly preliminary data emerging from work I've been doing with the Sequencing R&D team at my new home, the Wellcome Trust Sanger…
sb admin | January 23, 2009I want to add one caveat to the stem cell debate. There is so much potential for the stem cell research that could potentially change people lives forever. I however throw caution to the wind by citing the sayings of those who build and/or advanced the technology for the nuclear bomb. these people justified their actions as advancement of science and that they were not responsible for how their findings were used. The people that developed this technology now know that that was a cop-out and they regret advancing the science that killed hundres of thousands of people. here is how i draw the…
edyong | January 22, 2009The area collectively known as Austronesia covers half the globe. It stretches from South-East Asia and Taiwan, across New Guinea and New Zealand, to the hundreds of small islands dotted around the Pacific. Today, it is home to about 400 million people.
They are the descendants of early humans who spread throughout the Pacific in prehistoric times. These forebears are long dead but they left several unexpectedly important legacies that are evident in their modern descendants. The languages they used evolved and splintered into over 1,200 tongues spoken by modern Austronesians. The bacteria…
edyong | January 21, 2009The blood that flows into our heads is obviously important for it provides nutrients and oxygen to that most energetically demanding of organs - the brain. But for neuroscientists, blood flow in the brain has a special significance; many have used it to measure brain activity using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.
This scanning technology has become a common feature of modern neuroscience studies, where it's used to follow firing neurons and to identify parts of the brain that are active during common mental tasks. Its use rests on the assumption that the…
oracknows | January 15, 2009My dear readers, I beg your indulgence for the moment.
I had been planning on doing something a bit more serious than what I've been up to lately. Believe it or not, NaturalNews.com pointed me to a study that's actually pretty interesting. It even challenges to some extend existing results. Of course, Mike Adams' minion's interpretation of the study was so wrong as to be not even wrong, as they say (so what else is new?). But therein lies the entertainment value with the educational value.
Sometimes, however, something happens, and a followup to something I've written before is demanded. It…
nisbetmc | January 15, 2009
I am in Venice, Italy this week to participate in an expert workshop on research in science communication held at the historic Venice Institute of Science & the Arts (above). Already there have been some terrific presentations and I will have more to report later. But for now, in advance of my visit, I was invited to contribute an op-ed to the Science section of La Stampa, one of Italy's national newspapers. Go here to read a PDF of the op-ed in Italian. The draft English version that was then translated is below.
Science Communication: From Transmission to Conversation
Over the past…
ksharpe | January 12, 2009Review by Jessica Palmer, on Bioephemera
Originally posted on: January 12, 2009 8:20 PM
I went to a party the other day wearing the shirt above. I'd seen it online, expressed covetousness, and the staffer actually tracked it down and bought it for me (thus scoring major points for A) an early Christmas present, B) listening to my incessant stream-of-consciousness babble, and C) appreciating his girlfriend's geeky streak.)
Anyway, at the party, most of my friends couldn't decipher anything past "OMG, WTF." I was surrounded by "digital immigrants." In fact, I'm a digital immigrant myself: I…
bioephemera | January 12, 2009
I went to a party the other day wearing the shirt above. I'd seen it online, expressed covetousness, and the staffer actually tracked it down and bought it for me (thus scoring major points for A) an early Christmas present, B) listening to my incessant stream-of-consciousness babble, and C) appreciating his girlfriend's geeky streak.)
Anyway, at the party, most of my friends couldn't decipher anything past "OMG, WTF." I was surrounded by "digital immigrants." In fact, I'm a digital immigrant myself: I didn't get my first email account until college, and I never IM'd until a year or two ago…
sporte | January 9, 2009The HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology is a non-profit organization that opened it's doors in April, 2008. One of the great things about this institute is it's commitment to sharing biotech knowledge with the surrounding community.
For the general public, HudsonAlpha has a ongoing written series on biology topics called Biotech 101. Teachers will probably find this useful too. There's a great description of Copy Number Variation written by Dr. Neil Lamb, their director of educational outreach. Some of the other pieces discuss Microarrays, Epigenetics, and RNAi.
School programs…
sb admin | January 7, 2009Word is out that Obama will probably nominate Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and television correspondent, for the post of U.S. Surgeon General. Reactions in my office yesterday werenât very positive, but several bloggers have pointed out that Guptaâs high profile and credibility with the general public can help him advance the administrationâs health priorities.
First, Revere helpfully reminds us what the Surgeon General actually does:
The SG is the head of the uniformed services of the United States Public Health Service, wears a Navy uniform and holds a rank equivalent to a Vice Admiral. If…
rallain | January 5, 2009I finally saw the movie WALL-E. Good flick, I liked it. There was, however, one part I must comment on. You know I can't help myself. I feel like the shark Bruce in Finding Nemo. I try not to attack, but there is a tiny drop of blood in the water. Here is the scene that I want to talk about:
I guess I should give a spoiler alert. Although, I will not talk about the plot of the movie.
In this scene, WALL-E is hitching a ride on this space craft. The space craft is entering a hanger deck of a space station. While the hanger door is still open, WALL-E is clearly hanging on so that he…