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Open Source Dendrochronology

Dendrochronology is the study of tree-rings to determine when and where a tree has grown. Everybody knows that trees produce one ring every year. But the rings also vary in width according to each year's local weather conditions. If you've got enough rings in a wood sample, then their widths form a unique "bar code". Collect enough samples of various ages from buildings and bog wood, and you can join the bar codes up to a reference curve covering thousands of years. Dendrochronology has a serious organisational problem that impedes its development as a scientific discipline and tends to…

App.net and the Free Problem

Have you heard of App.net? If not, check it out. The basic premise is to create a social media platform that is aligned with users' interest. And so, gasp, it costs money! The CEO, Dalton Caldwell, has a neat video explaining the inception of the project and the philosophy of the venture. Critics have said Caldwell's proposal is misunderstood, and that users are projecting their own ideals onto the platform. They have said that there are too many men on App.net. They have said that it's just another gated community, and segmenting away users is a bad thing. I joined and still think it…

Remember the lizard men

Carl Zimmer points me an article about a former anthropologist who has some weird ideas about the origin of man: Since his resignation from the university in 1990, however, Horn has changed his tune. Once a staunch Darwinist and tenured CSU anthropology professor, Horn has devoted the last 19 years of his life to the study of alternative theories of human origin. After receiving a doctorate in anthropology from Yale University and while teaching at CSU, Horn focused his energies on the study of the evolution of non-human primates, his wife Lynette Horn said. He now advocates the theory that…

Quick! Get Karl Rove a Formspring account and a DVD of "Mean Girls"

Civility: wow, everybody's concerned about it now! Here's our president a couple of days ago: The problem is that this kind of vilification and over-the-top rhetoric closes the door to the possibility of compromise. It undermines democratic deliberation. It prevents learning -- since, after all, why should we listen to a "fascist," or a "socialist," or a "right-wing nut," or a left-wing nut"? It makes it nearly impossible for people who have legitimate but bridgeable differences to sit down at the same table and hash things out. It robs us of a rational and serious debate, the one we need…

The World Science: a virtual Science Cafe

The World is a radio show co-produced by WGBH Boston, Public Radio International and BBC. You can probably hear it on your local NPR station - if not, you can find all the shows recorded on the website. You may remember that I went to Boston a couple of months ago, as part of a team of people helping the show do something special: use the NSF grant they recently received to expand their science coverage and, in collaboration with Sigma Xi and NOVA, tie their radio science coverage to their online offerings. The result is The World: Science website, a series of weekly science podcasts with…

Uncovering Tobacco Industry Strategies - You Can Help

Over the past few years, millions of formlerly secret internal documents from the tobacco industry have been made public and helped public health advocates learn how Big Tobacco deceived lawmakers and the public about smoking's health risks. Wading through all these documents is time-consuming, so the Center for Media and Democracy has launched a TobaccoWiki that will allow people interested in the subject to share their findings online. (A Wiki is basically a tool for online collaboration; see Wikipedia's explanation to learn more about it.) Here's their explanation of the project: The…

Bloggers Bioblitzing Across the Sphere

From Ontario to Greece to Panama, what are participating bloggers finding out in the field? This thread will be constantly updated throughout the week, blog carnival style, compiling all of the bioblitzes that are being conducted. Please contact me if you have something up; I'll make sure I add it to the list. Don't forget to check out all of the participant's photos at the Flickr group (over 300 photos now). For info about the Blogger Bioblitz, follow the links: Read more about the blitz Visit the forum See submission guidelines Join the Flickr group Find a field guide online Download a…

College is Uranium: Online Learning

Do you like my title? I will make a connection in just a bit. This post is mostly about online colleges. I saw on TV that Kaplan now has online courses. So, what do I think about that? Here are some points. Some people can learn online I think this is an important starting point. Yes, there are people that can do just fine in an online course. Say there is an online course in physics (and there are). I think that students (not sure how many - could be a lot) that could perform just as well on a physics test as a student that took a traditional format course. I don't think this is a…

Parasites can change the balance of entire communities

Conspiracy theories, TV thrillers and airport novels are full of the idea that the world is secretly run by a hidden society. We have come up with many names for this shadowy cabal of puppet-masters - the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and more. But a better name would be 'parasites'. Every animal and plant is afflicted by parasites. The vast majority are simple, degenerate creatures, small in size and limited in intelligence. They affect our health and development, and even our behaviour and culture. And by pulling the strings of key species, parasites can change the face of entire habitats.In…

Brilliant!

Via EpiMonday comes an interview with epidemiologist and physican Larry Brilliant, who was tapped to be the head of Google.org ("the philanthropic arm of Google") earlier this year: If Larry Brilliant's life were a film, critics would pan the plot as implausible. Trained as a physician, he was studying in an Indian monastery in 1973 when a guru told him to join the UN smallpox vaccination effort. Brilliant helped eradicate the disease from India and eventually the planet. He returned to the US and founded a charity organization, Seva, that has saved millions of people in developing…

"This is the danger of what happens when writers have not enough to do"

PBS's News Hour with Jim Lehrer has just done a wonderful online story about how Science Debate 2008 originally came about, and how far it has come since those early days. Reporter Jenny Marder didn't miss a point that I myself have been making in talks like this one--namely that if it weren't for the Hollywood writers' strike, two of our central organizers, Matthew Chapman and Shawn Lawrence Otto, might've been a lot, er, busier, and consequently, we might have had a much tougher time getting off the ground. To that effect, Marder quotes Otto: "This is the danger of what happens when writers…

"Science in Fiction" Kavli Science Video Contest!

Now entering its third year, the Kavli Science Video contest, an international middle and high school student competition that is held as part of the USA Science & Engineering Festival, has announced "Science in Fiction" as the contest theme! The contest, sponsored by the Kavli Foundation, is designed to challenge students to investigate science through video storytelling while promoting participation in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) subjects. The new theme, "Science in Fiction" was inspired by the mission of the Science & Entertainment Exchange, a program of the…

A mysterious start to next week's Skeptics' Circle

The next Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching, and, if you haven't already done so, if you're a blogger you should be thinking about which one of your pièce de résistances of skepticism you want to submit. Guidelines are here. Next week's host, Dad of Cameron at Autism Street has decided to employ a most unusual means of soliciting entries: I know the holiday season is upon us, and for many us, including myself (aka Do'C), that can mean scarce free time. In an effort to avoid delays or mixups, I have arranged for the services of a psychic medium over the next week or so.…

Welcome to EveryONE

EveryONE? What's that? It is the new PLoS ONE community blog: Why a blog and why now? As of March 2009, PLoS ONE, the peer-reviewed open-access journal for all scientific and medical research, has published over 5,000 articles, representing the work of over 30,000 authors and co-authors, and receives over 160,000 unique visitors per month. That's a good sized online community and we thought it was about time that you had a blog to call your own. This blog is for authors who have published with us and for users who haven't and it contains something for everyone. Just launched, this blog will…

Living Abroad? Vote in the 2008 Global Presidential Primary

The Democratic Party is doing the very cool thing this year of giving Americans living abroad their own delegation to the 2008 Democratic Convention. This means that anyone currently living outside of the US can vote in the Democratic Presidential Primary for their own 11 delegates. Voting will take place online from February 5-12 and in person on some of those dates at a variety of locations. To be able to vote online, you just need to register (for free!) with Democrats Abroad by January 31st. Even better, though, to vote in person you just need to show up with your passport. You don't…

Quantum Postdocs and Beyond

Well it seems that it is that time of year again when grad students and postdocs begin to think about job applications. Last year I had the great pleasure of going through the process (yet one more time!) so yes, I feel your pain. But, at least on the postdoc side of equation for quantum computing, things don't look as bad to me as I've seen in the past. I've already posted about Microsoft Station Q postdocs and the Center for Quantum Information and Control postdocs. Here are a few more to add to the mix. First up is some loon from the University of Washington: The quantum computing…

Reveal yourselves, O Hidden Ones!

I learn from Janet, Bora, PZ, and Afarensis that this week is supposedly National Delurking Week. Lurkers, for those of you who aren't hip to the Internet lingo, are people who read blogs (or, for that matter, any form of online forum), but never (or only rarely) leave comments or posts. They are said to be "lurking." During National Delurking Week, we bloggers are supposed to ask lurkers to delurk momentarily and leave a comment. Given that Respectful Insolence averages somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 unique visits per day on most weekdays (a little more than half that number on weekends)…

Dr. Bob Sears: Stealth anti-vaccinationist?

Dr. Bob Sears is the bane of science- and evidence-based pediatricians everywhere. As pediatrician Dr. John Snyder relates, whenever he hears a parent say "I was reading Dr. Sears" or sees a patient in his office holding a copy of Dr. Sears' The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Choice for Your Child, he knows what's coming next: Resistance to vaccination. It would be one thing if this resistance were based on evidence or science-based concerns about the safety of vaccination, but it's not. As Dr. Snyder explains, while playing the "open-minded" "tell both sides" gambit, Dr. Sears credulously…

The usefulness of commenting on scientific papers

Here is a great example by Cameron Neylon: It's a little embarrassing... ...but being straightforward is always the best approach. Since we published our paper in PLoS ONE a few months back I haven't been as happy as I was about the activity of our Sortase. What this means is that we are now using a higher concentration of the enzyme to do our ligation reactions. They seem to be working well and with high yields, but we need to put in more enzyme. If you don't understand that don't worry - just imagine you posted a carefully thought out recipe and then discovered you couldn't get that same…

Shout-out to Cruze, Lonnie, and Scholar 3000 at The REC Radio Show on G-Town Radio

I just want to say thank you to Len Webb aka 'Cruze' and his posse for having me on their weekly, two-hour online radio show, The REC, this past Wednesday night at G-Town Radio in Philadelphia. It was nice to open my e-mailbox Wednesday morning with his note. I've read your blog on the case of Henrietta Lacks and the episode of Law and Order. The episode inspired us to spend some time tonight June 9th on the program discussing the issue. I planned to reference your blog and your thoughts on the show but I was hoping you might be available to talk to via phone and share your thoughts live on…

The Graduate Junction

Graduate Junction is a new social networking site designed for graduate students and postdocs. I looked around a bit and found it clean, easy-to-use and potentially useful. This is how they explain it - give it a try and let me know what you think: The Graduate Junction is a brand new website designed to help early career researchers make contact with others with similar research interests, regardless of which department, institution or country they work in. Designed by two graduate researchers at the University of Durham, The Graduate Junction has proved very popular with research students…

Fall Gardening Class Starting Up!

Just to let you know, I'm starting another class this week - this one helping people get started with fall gardening and season extension. If you are like most folks, you probably start out enthusiastic about your garden, but around the middle of the summer, you get focused on harvesting, or overwhelmed by the heat and the weeds and let the cool season garden peter out. That's a mistake, because with very simple and cheap methods of season extension and a little attention right about now (for those as northerly as me, a bit later for folks south of me in this hemisphere), you can be…

From tropical forests to peer mentoring, Erika Marin-Spiotta is an emerging force in Earth Science

After tropical forests are cleared for agriculture and then abandoned, secondary forests regrow on the site. But how do plant species composition, biomass and soil organic matter differ through this succession of primary forest, pasture, and secondary forest? Employing tools of biogeochemistry, ecosystem ecology, and land-use/land-cover change to examine those and related questions, Erika Marin-Spiotta earned a Ph.D. in environmental science, policy, and management from the University of California at Berkeley, a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and…

From the Archives: Sharing, Privacy and Trust in a Networked World by OCLC

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of Sharing, Privacy and Trust in a Networked World, is from November 19, 2011. ======= OCLC's newest state of the library world/environmental scan report was published a few months ago: Sharing, Privacy and Trust in a…

New in Science Publishing, etc.

From Pierre, we hear about a new system for calculating individuals' research impact - Publish Or Perish, based on Google Scholar. Deepak, Pedro, Mark and Deepak again take a first look at Clinical Trials Hub and like what they see. Jeff published a paper, but his Mom was more worried (in the comments) about the way he looks, with Congrats relegated to the afterthought. SXSW Podcast on Open Knowledge vs. Controlled Knowledge has now been posted online. Worth a listen. There is an article in Wired on science video sites, including JoVE, LabAction and SciVee and Attila provides deeper…

Anthony Watts Starts Up Cloud Based Anti-Science Organization

The Open Atmospheric Society Climate science pseudo-skeptic Anthony Watts recently bought and registered the domain "theoas.org" and has just announced the formation at that Internet address of a new society explicitly designed to organize people in meteorology and related areas intent on opposing the scientific consensus on climate change. And yes, there is a scientific consensus on climate change. Dr. Roy Spencer once said to me that trying to organize climate skeptics would be like “trying to herd cats”. While this Society is not trying to “herd” anyone, nor is it specifically focused on…

The 34th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle: Critical Thinking Crystallized

This time around, the latest meeting of the Skeptics' Circle comes to us from down under. EoR, who, despite being "rather sad and boggy," always perks up when it's time to debunk the claims of pseudoscience or New Age woo, brings us the 34th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle via the Wonderful World of Crystals: Eor surveys the Wonderful World of Crystals, and receives some interesting etheric vibrations as a result. By applying the higher vibrational properties of these gems to his chakras he received contact with various arcane and occult information previously only held in the Akashic…

Who will clean the litter box after you've been raptured?

This has got to be a spoof site, but then I would have had to think Rapture Ready was a joke, too. Anyway, when the Rapture comes and you are ascended into heaven, you need to make sure your beloved pets are cared for, so the JesusPets service is recruiting non-Christians to take care of pets during the Tribulation or whatever. It's a bit bizarre. One thing they have to make sure of is that the godless atheist isn't signing up just so he can get his hands on Mr Tinkles to rape and eat, so we have to sign a promise that we aren't just scheming to ravish everyone's abandoned pets. Make hard CA$…

The ultimate "Zionist" conspiracy

If you've hung out in forums where Holocaust deniers, 9/11 Truthers, and other conspiracy theorists hang out, as I have done, one thing you'll notice is that these particular purveyors of dubious conspiracy-mongering seem to have a particular love of demonizing Jews (or, as the smarter ones tend to call them in order to try to skirt obvious charges of anti-Semitism, "Zionists"). If you believe such nuts, Jews are responsible for exaggerating the Holocaust, for destroying the World Trade Center, or even for for the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia or even Hurricane Katrina. Indeed,…

Atheist Blog Carnival Proliferation

Atheist bloggers have long had the Carnival of the Godless to publicise their work. Then came MoJoey's Atheist Blogroll. And now there's the Humanist Symposium carnival, whose first instalment came on-line the day before yesterday. If God hadn't wanted you to have contact with other atheists, then he clearly wouldn't have made all these blogging venues. Although an atheist, I rarely feel moved to blog about my unfaith. You see, in Sweden, atheism is no big deal. Expressions of religious faith are the exception here, not the other way around. I believe in no gods, but nor do I believe in…

Why do we get fevers?

The answer is that it increases lymphocyte motility, helping to fight the infection: Nobody likes coming down with a fever, but feeling hot may do a body good. Researchers report online 5 November in Nature Immunology that a fever in mice revs up the immune response by helping white blood cells enter lymph nodes, where they join the battle against microbial invaders. All mammals can develop fever when they're sick enough, and even cold-blooded animals with infections, such as fish and lizards, will seek warmth to raise their body temperatures. This suggests that fever somehow helps the body…

Science blogging event in London

If you're in London, you might be interested in this event, which has been organised by the Royal Institution in collaboration with Nature Network: Blogging science Dr Ben Goldacre, Dr Jennifer Rohn, Ed Yong Thursday 28 February 2008 7.00pm-8.30pm What is it like to work in a lab? What's the latest science news? How can you tell good science from quackery? The answers to all these questions can be found in blogs, and in this event you'll meet the people who are writing them. There are literally tens of millions of blogs online. Some read like personal diaries, while others are built round…

The Online News Association meeting - vote for my panel

The Online News Association organizes a meeting every year (and gives Online Journalism Awards there). The next one will be in October 28-30, 2010 in Washington, D.C. The program is formed by the online news community submitting proposals, then everyone else voting the proposals up or down. I guess that the organizers also have some say in it (especially if the voting produces a horrible gender imbalance - easy to happen with so many proposals put forward by men). The proposals are now all up online and ready for your votes - you need to register (they have to avoid spammers, robots,…

Why I'm boycotting Hasbro and their Scrapulous app

This morning, Hasbro finally intimidated Facebook and Scrabulous into suspending the popular word game app. I love Scrabulous, and I'm mad as heck - not least because in my current game, I'd scored a whopping three Bingos (words in which you use all 7 letters) and was routing the usually dominant competition (my staffer). Scrabulous is an online pseudo-Scrabble - a godsend for those of us who can't meet to play real games in meatspace, but can squeeze in a word here and there over the course of the week. But Hasbro, the company which has the rights to most of your typical-American-childhood…

Politics Tuesday: Join Ocean Champions Reception in D.C.

Posted by Traci Reid, traci@oceanchampions.org Wouldn't it be great if we could just get together people who know and care about the oceans with the people who make the political decisions concerning ocean protection? Not in any sort of pretentious or overly formal way, - no committees, hearings, "have my people contact your people", or - ahem, suggestive bathroom stall behavior. Just the right combination of really smart people with a shared vision of ocean protection. Sitting down over a beer. Exchanging ideas. Wouldn't that be a good thing? Oh wait, we ARE doing that very thing, next…

Adapting-In-Place Class Starts Thursday

Just a reminder that Aaron Newton (my co-author on A Nation of Farmers) and I will be running our Adapting in Place Class online for six weeks, starting Thursday. The class is asynchronous - you don't have to be online at any particular time, just participate when you like. The goal of the class is to help people develop a coherent plan for how to create a good and viable low energy life with what you have. Previous participants have told us that the class was "life-changing." This class attempts to deals as clearly as possible in such a murky subject with the question of "how should I…

Science in the Media: Rude or Ailing Health?

If anyone's in London or thereabouts on the 31st of March, come and see me and a few other science journalists discuss the state of science in the media at City University. The discussion follows a recent government report, entitled Science in the Media: Securing the Future. The report declared that science coverage (in the UK, at least) was in "rude health", while is somewhat different to the picture that others have painted. I'll be discussing the report as well as, presumably, other matters about science journalism along with a panel of veteran UK journalists. I assume that I have been…

Science 2.0 (repost)

I think I have a profile on Friendster - I don't know, I haven't checked since 2003. I have bare-bones profiles on MySpace, LinkedIn and Change.Org and I will get an e-mail if you "friend" me (and will friend you back), but I do not have time to spend on there. I refuse to even look at all the other social networking sites like Twitter - there are only so many hours in the day. But I am interested in possible ways of making science communication more interactive and more Webby 2.0, beyond just blogs. Pedro, Carl and Phillip have recently written thoughtful posts about this topic as well.…

Science 2.0

I think I have a profile on Friendster - I don't know, I haven't checked since 2003. I have bare-bones profiles on MySpace, LinkedIn and Change.Org and I will get an e-mail if you "friend" me (and will friend you back), but I do not have time to spend on there. I refuse to even look at all the other social networking sites like Twitter - there are only so many hours in the day. But I am interested in possible ways of making science communication more interactive and more Webby 2.0, beyond just blogs. Pedro, Carl and Phillip have recently written thoughtful posts about this topic as well.…

UNC Nobel Laureate on the importance of information access to scientific research

This is today: A Conversation with Dr. Oliver Smithies Excellence Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine 2007 Nobel Laureate Moderated by Dr. Tony Waldrop, Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development Monday, March 30, 2009 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm Room 527 Health Sciences Library Light refreshments to follow Join us for a chat with Dr. Oliver Smithies about the importance of information access to scientific research, especially his own. Audience participation will be encouraged. Don't miss this opportunity to have your questions answered by Dr. Smithies. You may also submit…

Correlations

Wayne J. Warf said: I just wonder if this was a little fishing expedition by Tim. You know, take a bunch of stats and run pairwise correlations on them and see if any pop out significant at p<.05. Of course, doing this without adjusting your significance levels skews the results tremendously, but one wonders just the same. Was there an a priori hypothesis being tested against the null or was it just "shotgun statistics". <sarcasm> Yes, I sat up late at night trying to correlate things with gun ownership. I tried the number of letters in the country's name, the number of medals won…

PLoS - on Twitter and FriendFeed

Despite online debates - which one is better: Twitter or FriendFeed, sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek - the fact is that these are two different animals altogether. Asking one to make a choice between the two is like asking one to make a choice between e-mail and YouTube - those are two different services that do different things. Thus, they are to be used differently. Twitter is a communications tool (or a 'human application'). You can broadcast (one-to-many), you can eavesdrop (many-to-one) or you can converse (one-to-one, either in public or through Direct Messages). But most…

'My work has been plagiarized. Now what?'

I received an email from reader Doug Blank (who gave me permission to share it here and to identify him by name) about a perplexing situation: Janet, I thought I'd solicit your advice. Recently, I found an instance of parts of my thesis appearing in a journal article, and of the paper being presented at a conference. In fact, further exploration revealed that it had won a best paper prize! Why don't I feel proud... I've sent the following letter to the one and only email address that I found on the journal's website, almost three weeks ago, but haven't heard anything. I tried contacting the…

One more chance to support the NIH

Sadly, unlike my post a couple of hours ago, this is not an April Fools jest. Evolgen previously reported on the success of the Specter-Harkin Amendment in the Senate to change a completely flat National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget containing actual real cuts to the budget of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to one with a modest increase in fiscal year 2007. Both the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) and Genetics Society of America both weighed in when the budget was sent to the House in order to garner support in committee for adding an amendment similar to the Specter…

Not the Eye of Argon!

No, it can't possibly be true! Jim Theis's masterwork, The Eye of Argon(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), has actually been published? As a book? With pages and a cover and all of that? I've known of this legendary monstrosity for years, and have read it online and as a tattered and stapled faded photocopy, but to actually have a publisher commit resources and money to it … truly, we are in the End Times. You too can read it, but don't buy it: get it for free, and even then you are paying too much for it. This is what you get when you give a teenager a thesaurus, insist that every noun must have an…

We Can Solve It? Forthcoming Paper on Opinion-Leaders and Climate Change

Opinion-leaders are a commonly overlooked resource by science organizations and advocates. Public communication initiatives too often ignore the special individuals across communities and social groups that can serve as vital go-betweens and information brokers, passing on messages about an issue such as climate change that can speak directly to their otherwise inattentive peers, co-workers, and friends. In a forthcoming article at the journal Science Communication, we synthesize past research from politics, marketing, and public health, presenting a toolbox of concepts, measures, and…

Antarctica: Others Think I'd do a Helluva Job, Too

Video created by The Sneer Review. Since I have recently developed quite a history of visiting cold and snowy places, often during the winter (remember Morris, Minnesota in January? Or how about Helsinki, Finland in November, then again in February?), I wish to preserve that tradition. I am competing for the opportunity to go to Antarctica in February 2010 -- a dream adventure that I've always wanted to pursue (and almost did pursue when I was an undergraduate researching Fin Whales and Crabeater Seals at the University of Washington). To enter, all candidates must publish a picture of…

Modeling antiviral resistance, XV: a few words about model assumptions

[A series of posts explaining a paper on the mathematical modeling of the spread of antiviral resistance. Links to other posts in the series by clicking tags, "Math model series" or "Antiviral model series" under Categories, left sidebar. Preliminary post here. Table of contents at end of this post.] We have now gone through the entire paper on modeling the impact of antiviral resistance in an influenza control program, by Lipsitch et al., published in PLoS Medicine. Since a number of assumptions were made, we take some time to consider what effects they have on the model's results. In the…

The Woo Boat, part 3: Andrew Wakefield goes full Mike Adams antivax

Hard as it is to believe, it’s been seven months since the Conspira-Sea Cruise, or, as I called it when I discovered it before it set sail, The Woo Boat. After it set sail and I started reading reports about it from two reporters who took the cruise in order to report on it, Anna Merlan, Bronwen Dickey, and Colin McRoberts. Reports by Merlan and McRoberts were published in due course (and, of course, blogged about by me). The cruise was about as you’d expect, of course. Particularly hilarious (to me, at least) was how far Andrew Wakefield had fallen to be reduced to being one of many cranks…

Very cool - American Physical Society offers free access to public libraries

This APS rocks! Here's the press release from PAMnet: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE APS ONLINE JOURNALS AVAILABLE FREE IN U.S. PUBLIC LIBRARIES Ridge, NY, 28 July 2010: The American Physical Society (APS) announces a new public access initiative that will give readers and researchers in public libraries in the United States full use of all online APS journals, from the most recent articles back to the first issue in 1893, a collection including over 400,000 scientific research papers. APS will provide this access at no cost to participating public libraries, as a contribution to public engagement…