clock | April 5, 2007Energy Use Study Demonstrates Remarkable Power Of Social Norms:
Most people want to be normal. So, when we are given information that underscores our deviancy, the natural impulse is to get ourselves as quickly as we can back toward the center. Marketers know about this impulse, and a lot of marketing makes use of social norms. This is especially true of campaigns targeting some kind of public good: reducing smoking or binge drinking, for example, or encouraging recycling.
This tendency may not always be used for good. This is, after all, the idea behind the Overton Window, which the Right…
clock | April 5, 2007Remember "Ask the ScienceBlogger" series? Well, it's back. And it is somewhat different now. Instead of putting the question out for everyone to respond to (or not) at their own leisure, this time one particular SB blog will be charged with answering the question, and others are free to chime in if they wish so afterwards.
The first question is out of the box now:
What's the difference between psychology and neuroscience? Is psychology still relevant as we learn more about the brain and how it works?
And Dave and Greta Munger of Cognitive Daily were charged with answering it. They did the…
clock | April 5, 20072007 TED Prize winner E.O. Wilson on TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks:
As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, to learn more about our biosphere. We know so little about nature, he says, that we're still discovering tiny organisms indispensable to life; and yet we're steadily, methodically, vigorously destroying nature. Wilson identifies five grave threats to biodiversity (a term he coined), and makes his TED wish: that we will work together on the Encyclopedia of Life, a web-based compendium of…
clock | April 5, 2007Patterns That Connect
Shape Of A Drum
Living in Japan
When Pigs Fly Returns
PLACEBO JOURNAL Blog
Reconciliation Ecology
My Best Life
Bourgeois Blues
Science Avenger
Wrong Side of Thirty
Scrutiny Hooligans (new URL since they moved)
clock | April 5, 2007I was waiting until the last installment was up to post about this. Revere on Effect Measure took a recent paper about a mathematical model of the spread of anti-viral resistance and wrote a 16-part series leading the readers through the entire paper, from the title to the List of References and everything in between. While the posts are unlikely to garner many comments, this series will remain online as a valuable resource, something one can use to learn - or teach others - how a scientific paper is to be analyzed.
As you can see, it takes a lot of time to read a paper thoroughly. It also…
clock | April 5, 2007I think I will show this in class in May when I teach the evolution lecture again.
Reed adds some caveats I am sure to point out in the classroom.
Update: Watched it again. I think I'll stop the movie a moment before the first chimp appears. Until that moment the animation, though not 100% accurate, and quite oversimplified, is GREAT for a visceral understanding of evolution. We can debate neutral selection and population sizes, but that is what we do. For a regular citizen uninterested in science, this brief movie is sufficient to "grok" evolution. This is a great example of "visual…
clock | April 5, 2007Neural Gourmet and Blue Gal are organizing a massive blogospheric Blog Against Theocracy weekend:
I'd like invite you all to Blog Against Theocracy. This is a little blog swarm being put together by everybody's favorite panties blogger Blue Gal for Easter weekend, April 6th through the 8th. The idea is simple. Just post something related to, and in support of, the separation of church and state each of those three days. Something big, something small, artistic, musical, textual or otherwise. The topic is your choosing. Whether your thing is stem cell research, intelligent design/Creationism,…
clock | April 5, 2007Scientists, as a whole, are very reluctant to write novel ideas, hypotheses or data on blogs, and are very slow to test the waters of Open, Source Publishing. Most of what one finds on science blogs is commentary on other peoples' ideas, hypotheses and data found in journals and mass media.
On the other hand, people in the humanities/literature/art/liberal arts side of campus have long ago embraced blogging as a tool to get their rough drafts out, to refine them upon receiving feedback from commenters, and subsequently publish them in peer-reviewed journals. If you follow History Carnival,…
clock | April 5, 2007
Want To Monitor Climate Change? P-p-p-pick Up A Penguin!:
We are used to hearing about the effects of climate change in terms of unusual animal behaviour, such as altering patterns of fish and bird migration. However, scientists at the University of Birmingham are trying out an alternative bio-indicator -- the king penguin -- to investigate whether they can be used to monitor the effects of climate change.
Scientists Directly Control Brain Cell Activity With Light:
Every thought, feeling and action originates from the electrical signals emitted by diverse brain cells enmeshed in a tangle of…
clock | April 4, 2007I got tagged with a meme by Greg who is trying to track the branching tree of this meme, so go check his post out (especially let him know if you do one of your own). He is also instructing us that the post is supposed to be full of links....
I love blog memes, and I have done many of them, most of which in one way or another reveal "why I blog": Academic Blog Meme, Beautiful Bird Meme, Random Quotes Meme, Silly Blog Meme, Four Meme, Hanukah meme, Zero Meme, Dirty Thirty Meme, Thinking Blogger Meme, States Meme, Obscure-But-Good-Movies Meme, Four Jobs Meme, The Blogging Blog Meme, Year in…
clock | April 4, 2007Are you, too?
Is there a good, dignified response we could invent to use in such situations?
clock | April 4, 2007...someone (guess who?) will feel persecuted:
.... One student objected that I was singling out Christianity. Another objected to what I was implying about the religion. I'm not sure I even used the word "Christian" in my description of the above examples, but I certainly wouldn't argue it. But I found it fascinating that connecting Islam with 9/11 was acceptable, but for certain students (both born-agains), the idea of connecting Christianity with bad behavior was unacceptable. I also found it interesting that despite accusations of insulting Christianity, I never made a value judgment.…
clock | April 4, 2007McCain, the Media, and Baghdad Security and A sadly necessary introduction
Unfortunately, that second one of them appeared as 'Most Popular' on Google News so the comments are filled with stupid Bushies (but hey, traffic must be great!). Perhaps an avalanche of readers not encumbered by irrational fear of terrorists, moslems, gays, women, blacks, liberals, etc. can go there and do some spring cleaning (I already did too much troll-feeding there...).
clock | April 4, 2007Sleep Quantity Affects Morning Testosterone Levels In Older Men
The testosterone levels of healthy men decline as they get older. As sleep quality and quantity typically decrease with age, objectively measured differences in the amount of sleep a healthy older man gets can affect his level of testosterone in the morning, according to a study published in the April 1st issue of the journal SLEEP.
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"The results of the study raise the possibility that older men who obtain less actual sleep during the night have lower blood testosterone levels in the morning," said Penev. "Although…
clock | April 3, 2007Time is like money, the less we have of it to spare the further we make it go.
- Josh Billings
clock | April 3, 2007Carnival of Education #113 is up on Getting Green.
Carnival of Homeschooling #66 is up on Kris' Ecclectic Homeschool.
clock | April 3, 2007Or, to tell the traditional Passover joke:
A Jewish physicist in the UK was about to get knighted by the Queen. There was a long line of recepients waiting for the ceremony and they were all instructed what to say/chant once they come to face the Queen. The physicist kept silently practicing the obligatory words, but when his time finally arrived he got so nervous he forgot what he was supposed to say. So he started singing the only song he could remember "Ma nishtanah halailah hazeh mikol haleilot..."
The Queen looked at him, then looked at her advisor and asked:
"Why is this knight…