clock | October 27, 2008
Here is the third interview in the series on Miss Baker's Biology class blog - William's interview with Clinton Colmenares.
Previously in this series:
ScienceOnline09 - an interview with...me!
ScienceOnline09 - an interview with Eric Roston
clock | October 27, 2008Encephalon #57 is up on Mind Hacks
Replace Michele Bachmann Blog Carnival #5 is up on Almost Diamonds
Carnival of the Green # 151 is up on DESIGN 21
clock | October 27, 2008GOODVOTE.ORG gives advice and collects media coverage of potential voter suppression:
GOODVOTE.ORG is a group of volunteers from the technology community and blogosphere who simply want the will of the voters to be reflected in the result of the 2008 election. Our only purpose is to make sure that when legitimate voters are challenged they know who to turn to for help.
clock | October 27, 2008Acupuncture Used For Animal Ailments:
Needles are often equated with pain and discomfort; however, for a horse named Gypsy the tiny sharp objects brought about much needed relief as Dr. Mark Crisman, a professor in the Department of Large Animal Clinical Sciences in the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine at Virginia Tech, administered acupuncture therapy.
How Breastfeeding Transfers Immunity To Babies:
A BYU-Harvard-Stanford research team has identified a molecule that is key to mothers' ability to pass along immunity to intestinal infections to their babies through…
clock | October 27, 2008
Most sessions (see the Program) at ScienceOnline09 are supposed to be highly interactive - in the spirit of an Unconference, based on the idea that:
The sum of the expertise of the people in the audience is greater than the sum of expertise of the people on stage.
But, there will be a few exceptions. First, there will be several quick demos on Sunday morning.
But also, four of the sessions are meant to be more in a workshop mode, where we expect that the people on stage will actually have greater expertise than people in the audience and that the reason people will choose to attend these…
clock | October 27, 2008
The next in the series of interviews by Miss Baker's high school biology class is the interview by Jordan with Eric Roston. Read the interview here.
clock | October 27, 2008Tamara Fletcher is currently studying science communication at the University of Queensland. As part of her course she is conducting a research project under the supervision of Dr Joan Leach from the School of English, Media Studies and Art History and she needs your help:
The form of the project is a short survey and analysis of scientists' perceptions of scientific blogging. As your participation in science blogging suggests you are aware, it is important to explore as blogging has the potential to act as a medium for two-way dialogue between scientists and the public, without…
clock | October 27, 2008Just five days left to go in our DonorsChoose drive! We are ending on Friday! And my chellenges are going really slow....
Seed will match some of your donations. Seed Overlords are also pitching in some cool prizes for people who donate to any of the SciBlings DonorsChoose challenges, including mine.
And don't forget that you can win one of my prizes as well. Just click here....
clock | October 26, 2008All this will not be finished in the first hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
clock | October 26, 2008Note to GOP - ACORN Was Defrauded and You Know It:
1. The GOP during the 70's, 80's and 90's employed a number of methods to register voters to insure the people they were registering were indeed Republican.
One method was to go through a neighborhood and register everyone who wasn't registered. Then they would throw out all the voter registration cards of those who had registered as "Democrats" - thereby building up Republican registration.
I am not saying that Democrats were saints. But Democrats did not have to employ this method. Democrats tended to go deep into poor and minority areas…
clock | October 26, 2008
One of the education sessions at ScienceOnline09 will be the middle/high school perspective (or: "how the Facebook generation does it"?) session that will be led by Miss Baker and eight of her high-school biology class students.
One of these students - Brandon - recently interviewed me via e-mail and the interview is now available online - you can choose the full text or you can opt for excerpts in a video form. I understand that other students interviewed other conference participants and I can't wait to see their interviews as well.
I see that Peter Suber already liked it ;-)
clock | October 26, 2008Obviously a careful anti-insurgent action, not likely an invasion of Syria.
People online think of it as a possible October Surprise. But I think that that at this point, no matter what the GOP tries to do will be only seen as a gimmick to help McCain. Any attempt at an October Surprise by them will be seen as such and will backfire. And I think they realize this.
Thus, I don't think this has anything to do with the election, but the military identified with 100% certainty a post, just inside the Syria-Iraq border, from where insurgents organized their attacks, targeted them precisely,…
clock | October 26, 2008The latest press release from ComScore - Huffington Post and Politico Lead Wave of Explosive Growth at Independent Political Blogs and News Sites this Election Season - has all sorts of interesting statistics about relative traffic, etc., of the top independent (i.e., unaffiliated with MSM) websites and blogs. One tidbit I found particularly interesting:
Looking at the demographic profiles for the top three sites, HuffingtonPost.com, Politico.com and DrudgeReport.com, one can conclude that visitors to these sites tend to be older, wealthier, and more likely to be male than the average U.S.…
clock | October 26, 2008As a follow-up to the yesterday's press release, Dr. Manzoor Bhat and Joseph Piven, M.D., researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill who use the Drosophila model system to study neurexin and its implications in the development of autism, have now released the video response - well worth watching:
clock | October 26, 2008Protein Compass Guides Amoebas Toward Their Prey:
Amoebas glide toward their prey with the help of a protein switch that controls a molecular compass, biologists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered. Their finding, recently detailed in the journal Current Biology, is important because the same molecular switch is shared by humans and other vertebrates to help immune cells locate the sites of infections.
Alternative Medicine And Heavy Metal Poisoning:
Many Ayurvedic medicines can contain dangerous quantities of heavy metals, including lead, mercury, thallium and arsenic,…