clock | September 9, 2006Billy the Blogging Poet opened up the Tar Heel Tavern and we all had lots of beer and it was great fun! Go and read his account of the evening.
clock | September 9, 2006George Siemens of Connectivism blog wrote:
We have designed education to promote certainty (i.e. a state of knowing)...we now need to design education to be adaptable (i.e. a process of knowing).
David Muir of EdCompBlog picks up on that an adds:
Education should not only be about what you know - how many "facts" you can recall and write on a test paper. If that's how we view education, we could end up turning schooling into a version of The Weakest Link.
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I remember, many years ago, a professor at Jordanhill saying, "Knowledge is like fish - it goes off!" A…
clock | September 9, 2006This nerd thing going on is really bugging me. I went back and re-did the test, changing only 2 or 3 answers to what I did before (not lying, just taking the other one of two possibly correct answers) and got a much higher score:
I agree with Jim that the quiz is not really measuring nerdiness so well. I'd argue that it actually measures geekiness instead. The questions are all about computers, math and Star Trek! And others have added Tolkien and slide-rules to the mix.
I can barely figure out HTML after two years of blogging. Yeah, I played Pong with another friend when I was a kid,…
clock | September 9, 2006In A Technical Tour De Force, Scientists Take A Global View Of The Epigenome:
A collaboration between researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California at Los Angeles captured the genome-wide DNA methylation pattern of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana - the "laboratory rat" of the plant world - in one big sweep.
"In a single experiment we recapitulated 20 years worth of anecdotal findings and then some," says senior author Joseph Ecker, Ph.D., a professor in the Salk Institute's Plant Biology Laboratory. "Previously, only a hand full of plant genes were…
clock | September 8, 2006Since I already posted, earlier in the week, the weirdest and most disgusting animal sex post ever, instead of writing a new one, I'll just send you to see some cute ladybug sex (scroll down to the middle of the post), which also reminded me of these pictures I dicovered a few months ago. Or another one, picked up randomly on the web:
clock | September 8, 2006This is what you see when you log in to Facebook today:
An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg:
We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I'd like to try to correct those errors now.
When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share…
clock | September 8, 2006Global Changes Alter The Timing Of Plant Growth, Scientists Say:
Different plant species mature at different times. Scientists studying plant communities in natural habitats call this phenomenon "complementarity." It allows species to co-exist because it reduces overlap in the time period when species compete for limited resources. Now, in a study posted online the week of Sept. 4 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ecologists working at Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve report evidence that climate change may al ter this delicate balance.
Mother Deer Cannot…
clock | September 8, 2006Fifth in the five-part series on clocks in bacteria, covering more politics than biology (from May 17, 2006):
In the previous posts in this series, I covered the circadian clocks in Synechococcus, potential circadian clocks in a couple of other bacteria, and the presence of clock genes (thus potentially clocks) in a number of other bacteria. But what happened to the microbiological workhorse, the Escherichia coli? Does it have a clock? Hasn't anyone checked?
Believe it or not, this question is colored by politics. But I have to give you a little background first. Latter half of the 19th…
clock | September 8, 2006
Fourth in the five-part series on clocks in bacteria (from April 30, 2006):
For decades, it was thought that prokaryotes did not have circadian clocks. Then, a clock was discovered in a unicellular cyanobacterium, Synechococcus (later also in Synechocystis [1] and Trichodesmium [2]) which quickly became an important model in the study of circadian rhythms in general. Still, it was thought, for ten years or so, that no other prokaryotes had a circadian clock. Recently, the clock genes were found in filamentous (chain-forming) cyanobacteria, as well as a whole host of other bacteria and…
clock | September 8, 2006You may remember this chart from three days ago. Now, Rob Loftis updated his chart after the inputs of a number of bloggers and commenters over the past few days, and John Dupuis has his own chart he uses in teaching about the flow of scientific information.
clock | September 8, 2006The Center for Health Design Research has issued its Report on The Impact of Light on Outcomes in Healthcare Settings. You can download the entire report as PDF:
Light impacts human health and performance by enabling performance of visual tasks, controlling the body's circadian system, affecting mood and perception, and by enabling critical chemical reactions in the body. Studies show that higher light levels are linked with better performance of complex visual tasks and light requirements increase with age.
By controlling the body's circadian system, light impacts outcomes in healthcare…
clock | September 7, 2006TNG of Neural Gourmet tagged me with this meme, so how can I resist....
Why do you blog?
It's an addiction. It's therapy. It seems a waste if I think about something and don't write it down and let others see it and comment on it. And all of that would count even if I had no audience at all, but I do, and that has opened a whole new world of online friendship and community which keeps me going every day.
How long have you been blogging?
I started on Edwards campaign blog in September 2003, then started commenting on other people's blogs a couple of months later. Finally, I started my own…
clock | September 7, 2006"Greenwashing is what corporations do when they try to make themselves look more environmentally friendly than they really are."
Will has more, much more....
clock | September 7, 2006When Ed announced that Elizabeth Edwards is coming to ConvergeSouth to lead a session about buidling online communities, a bunch of Republican commenters on his blog announced they are not going to show up because of her and found it hard (some, not all of them) to be persuaded that the conference is apolitical and that Elizabeth Edwards has more than one aspect to her - she is not just a Democrat, she is also a mother, a cancer survivor, a book author, a wife of a famous person, and an early adopter of online technology.
In the end, Elizabeth herself showed up in the comments and explained…
clock | September 7, 2006From a press release (via e-mail):
U.S. Congressional Scorecards
109th Congress:
Washington, D.C. - The Secular Coalition for America (SCA) today released its House and Senate Scorecards of the 109th Congress. The SCA, an advocacy group for atheists, humanists, freethinkers, and other nontheists, provides roll-call votes to demonstrate the members' commitment to the separation of church and state and their willingness to protect the interests of the nontheistic community.
The scorecards cover votes taken from January 2005 until August 2006. The SCA used ten key votes in both the House and…
clock | September 7, 2006
The third installment in the five-part series on clocks in bacteria (from April 19, 2006):
As you probably know, my specialty are birds, so writing this series on clocks in microorganisms was quite an eye-opener for me and I have learned a lot. The previous two posts cover the clocks in the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus, the first bacterium in which circadian rhythms were discovered and, thus, the species most studied to date.
The work in Synechococcus has uncovered a cluster of three genes - kaiA, kaiB and kaiC - that are essential for circadian rhytmicity in this species. kaiA…