Search Content

Displaying results 5351 - 5400 of 87950

The Good and Fragile Egos

Following up on my earlier post about Beyond Google and Evil, I just came across this article from the Wall Street Journal on one of Google's detractors, Consumer Watchdog. Believe it or not, Google went after their funding! ...In January, Consumer Watchdog circulated a press release alleging a "rumored" lobbying effort by Google to enable it to sell personal medical data stored on its Google Health service. Simpson said the organization merely wanted to examine whether Google was trying to avoid new regulation under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, which…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Culture Influences Brain Function, Study Shows: People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging study of its kind. Aroma Of Chocolate Chip Cookies Prompts Splurging On Expensive Sweaters: Exposure to something that whets the appetite, such as a picture of a mouthwatering dessert, can make a person more impulsive with unrelated purchases, finds a study from the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. For example, the researchers reveal in one experiment that…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Some Birds Can Communicate About Behavior Of Predators: With the aid of various alarm calls the Siberian jay bird species tells other members of its group what their main predators-¬hawks¬-are doing. The alarm calls are sufficient for Siberian jays to evince situation-specific fleeing behaviors, which enhances their chances of survival. This discovery, being published by Uppsala University researcher Michael Griesser in the journal Current Biology, shows for the first time that animals can assess and communicate about the behavior of predators. High Degree Of Antibiotic Resistance Found In…

MacDonald Resigns From USFWS

tags: MacDonald, USFWS, endangered species, politics Some of you might not yet know this, but in the highly charged atmosphere that that existed at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Julie A. MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary who oversaw the USFWS endangered species program, finally has resigned. After an egregious and ongoing abuse of power, MacDonald was finally rebuked for altering scientific documents to reduce protections for endangered species and for providing internal documents to lobbyists. MacDonald is a civil engineer with no formal training in natural sciences and who clearly…

Why Look for Life on Mars?

The Mars Polar Lander cost the average American the price of half a cheeseburger. A human lander would cost the average American more -- perhaps even ten cheeseburgers! So be it. That is no great sacrifice. -JONAH GOLDBERG, National Review Online, May 3, 2000 This week, Seed Magazine is doing a special on extraterrestrial life in the Universe. They cover a lot of ground, including whether life would necessarily look like life on Earth, where the likely places are to find it, and endeavors towards that end. And they approached me to write an article for them about Mars. An excerpt is below:…

Don't Miss one of the Most Important Interviews of the Year!

I will be interviewing Maggie Koerth-Baker this Sunda, April 1st, no fooling. Maggie Koerth-Baker is the author of the new book, "Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us". Maggie is the science editor and a regular writer at Boing Boing, and hails from the Twin Cities. She was once described as "A lighthouse of reason in a churling ocean of stupidity," which is exactly why we all need to read her book and listen to her interview Sunday, April 1st on Minnesota Atheists Talk Radio. From the publisher's review of "Before the Lights Go Out": "Hi, I'm the…

sigh, Perpetual Motion

I suppose I really ought to say something about the "demonstration" of Steorn's perpetual motion machine that's supposed to start today, but, really, I don't have much to say. I mean, if they were claiming that their device extracted free energy from extra dimensions thanks to their revolutionary new theory of quantum gravity, I might need to think about it for a few seconds before dismissing it as crap, but that's not their claim: Orbo is based upon the principle of time variant magneto-mechanical interactions. The core output from our Orbo technology is mechanical. This mechanical energy…

How to Score Well Without Really Writing

Today's New York Times has a story on the new SAT, particularly the writing test. The print version has images of the opening lines of three essays that received a perfect score, while the on-line version includes images of the full text of three perfect-score essays. The essays themselves are kind of interesting to look at. The question was one of those hideous, vague college application things: "Do memories hinder or help people in their effort to learn from the past and succeed in the present?" The three answers presented in full take different approaches. Essay #2 (there is no #1 on the…

Academic Poll: Pop Quiz, Hotshot

Tuesday is a heavy teaching day for me-- I'm in lab from 9-4, basically-- so here's something to occupy the time. Oh, no! It's a pop quiz: Pop quizzes are:(survey software) (In case the phrase is an American idiom, a "pop quiz" refers to a short test given in class with no advance warning.) This was inspired by Dermot O'Brien at Inside Higher Ed, who reports on taking his first quiz as a science student. The general topic of quizzes is one that generates a fair bit of heat, though, so I thought I'd see what my readers think of it. My quiz policy as of a year or so ago was to give many short…

On AIG and executive bonuses

It's not all that often I agree with Mike Dunford politically, but in writing about the AIG bonuses he's right. The bonuses ought to stay with the executives who were paid them. Neither congress nor the president ought to try to tax these bonuses back. Now obviously no executive at a failing bank deserves a bonus, even with the bank's money. Even more obviously it's repugnant to fund bonuses to failed executives with our tax dollars. But what's done is done, and there are three facts to be faced. 1. The executives' contracts require the bonuses, and the bailout bill specifically and…

Northern Ireland bans climate ads -- WTF?

Northern Ireland's Environment Minister, Sammy Wilson, has banned an advertising campaign promoting efficient use of electricity on the grounds that the central thesis of the campaign is "patent nonsense" and "insidious propaganda." Even if it were true, since when are either attributes grounds for censorship? What's the real problem? From the BBC's coverage of the story: Calling for his removal, the Green Party said Mr Wilson made "a laughing stock out of Northern Ireland." Sammy Wilson argued that the Scottish executive had objected and stopped the adverts being broadcast. However, the…

Guide to Torture Available Online

A torture manual created by psychologists in the 1950s entitled The Manipulation of Human Behavior is freely available online. Included are these scary sounding chapters: 1 The Physiological State of the Interrogation Subject as it Affects Brain Function 19 Lawrence E. Hinkle, Jr. 2 The Effects of Reduced Environmental Stimulation on Human Behavior: A Review 51 Philip E. Kubzansky 3 The Use of Drugs in Interrogation 96 Louis A. Gottschalk 4 Physiological Responses as a Means of Evaluating Information 142 R. C. Davis 5 The Potential Uses of Hypnosis in Interrogation 169 Martin T.…

Our Fearless Leader

Over at Shifting Baselines, Randy Olson just posted an interview with Matthew Chapman, the original guy behind the curtain of Science Debate 2008. Sheril and I have taken to calling Matthew our "fearless leader," but "fearless, selfless, deeply inspirational leader without whom this wouldn't have been possible" is better, I think. Here's a quote from the interview, in which Matthew talks about how it all began: I spoke about the debate idea to a few people who were more or less entirely cynical. I then spoke to Chris Mooney. Chris was interested, and brought his Intersection co-blogger,…

Storm World on Quirks and Quarks

One of my first interviews about the new book can now be heard online by clicking here (MPG). I recently spoke with Bob McDonald of the CBC's Quirks and Quarks about the science, politics, and policy implications of the hurricane-global warming debate, and the roughly 12 minute segment just aired today. As this is one of my earliest live interviews on the subject, critical feedback is most welcome. In fact it will be of much help to me, since there will be many more such interviews, including an appearance on the Barometer Bob Show, a popular meteorology program broadcasting out of Florida…

You are not a gadget

Virtual reality trailblazer Jaron Lanier has a somewhat curmudgeonly, critical new book out called You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. Here's an excerpt: If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of to musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than with truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless. The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea…

Hubel's Eye, Vision and Brain online

I've just discovered that the book Eye, Vision and Brain, by Nobel Prize winner David Hubel, is available online in its entirety. Hubel is a neurophysiologist who performed some classic experiments with Torsten Wiesel, beginning in the late 1950s, on the development and functional properties of the visual system. Using microelectrodes inserted into the primary visual cortex of anaesthetized cats, Hubel and Wiesel characterized the responses of cells to various visual stimuli. They found groups of cells which responded selectively to lines of a specific orientation, others which responded to…

70 million amazing rare things

One of the events organized for Bora's visit to London was a fantastic behind-the-scenes tour of the Darwin Centre, a newly built section of the Natural History Museum which houses the museum's researchers and contains a vast collection of around 70 million bottled animal specimens. The Darwin Centre's tank room is a most remarkable place. This is where the largest specimens are stored, in glass jars and metal containers whose lids are opened and closed with a system of chains and pulleys suspended from the ceiling. The tank room mostly contains fish specimens, including a…

Need more geobloggers: ScienceOnline 2010 and The Open Lab

Geobloggers (and tweeters) are very social, but we often exist in our own world apart from the rest of the science bloggers. Here are some opportunities to remind the rest of the science-blogging world how cool we are: 1st: ScienceOnline 2010 is a conference devoted to science on Web 2.0 and to open-access science. This year's version will be held January 15-17, 2010, in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. Some of the proposed sessions include "blogging (tweeting, sharing photos, etc) from the field," "Arctic/Antarctic blogging," and "nature blogging." I figure geobloggers do more…

House Approves Mandatory Public Access to NIH Research Results

In my post earlier today, I stressed the need for the NIH to mandate open access to research publications supported by its funding: As the largest supporter of biomedical research in the US, the NIH has a special obligation to make sure that its (taxpayer funded!) research is published in the public domain. Since May 2005, the NIH has had an optional open access program that revolves around PubMed Central. Specifically, the NIH "requests and strongly encourages all investigators to make their NIH-funded peer-reviewed, author's final manuscript available to other researchers and the public…

How the Internet may save science coverage in news media

The March 2008 issue of Nature has a great editorial piece on the current (and future) state of science in news media. The article draws heavily on new information released by The Pew Research Center in a report called The State of the News Media 2008. It discusses the glaringly evident problem of waning science coverage in news media. Here are the main points: 1.Apparently, science coverage has never been very high in news media. It hovered around 4-6% (of total news coverage) from the mid-1970s until 2001 and is currently down to about 2%. 2.The problem doesn't appear to be just with…

Physicists, brace yourselves for a revolution! Faster than light travel discovered!

Those slippery rascals at Answers in Genesis have been doing research, they say, and Jason Lisle claims to have discovered something radical. I have been working for some time on solving the "distant starlight problem." This is the issue of how starlight from the most distant galaxies is able to reach earth within the biblical timescale. Although light is incredibly fast, the most distant galaxies are incredibly far away. So, under normal circumstances we would be inclined to think that it should take billions of years for their starlight to reach us. Yet, the Bible teaches that the universe…

The Neuroscience of Insight

I've got an article in the latest New Yorker (not online) on the neuroscience of insight. I begin the article with the harrowing story of Wag Dodge and the Mann Gulch fire, before describing the research of Mark Jung Beeman, John Kounios and Earl Miller: There is something inherently mysterious about moments of insight. Wag Dodge, for instance, could never explain where his idea for the escape fire came from. ("It just seemed the logical thing to do" was all he could muster.) His improbable survival has become one of those legendary stories of insight, like Archimedes shouting "Eureka!" when…

Airlines lobby to reopen European airspace closed by Eyjafjallajökull

Some very quick notes on Eyjafjallajökull: Eyjafjallajökull erupting at night on April 17/18, 2010, with impressive incandescent explosions. European airlines are taking "test flights" to see the effect of the ash on their aircraft in hopes to convince EU officials to reopen airspace. Now, officials from KLM say that everything went fine in their test flight, but I haven't seen any details about flightplans, altitude and all the sorts of info you'd want to see if you want to believe these test flights are representative. However, the president of KLM does have a bit of a point in saying…

Population structure & Singapore

Singapore is a racially diverse society, so there's a natural pool of diversity from which one can draw for study of human variation. The Han majority of Singapore derive predominantly from Fujian in southeast China. The Indians are mostly from the southern regions dominated by Tamils or Telugus, but there are large minorities from all over the subcontinent. Finally, the Malay category is really an amalgam of peoples of Southeast Asian Muslim origin, from native Singaporean Malays, to Malaysian Malays, to immigrants from Indonesia. Singapore Genome Variation Project: A haplotype map of three…

ScienceOnline2010 - Program highlights 4

Continuing with the introductions to the sessions on the Program, here is what will happen on Saturday, January 16th at 2 - 3:05pm: A. Citizen Science and Students - Sandra Porter, Tara Richerson (science_goddess), and Antony Williams Description: Students are a great resource for projects that require large numbers of volunteers. We will discuss examples of projects that combine student learning with authentic research and the power of blogs to connect students with projects. Discuss here. B. Medicine 2.0 and Science 2.0--where do they intersect? - Walter Jessen Description: Medicine 2.0…

Public Intellectuals R Us - Discuss....

Daniel Drezner: Public Intellectual 2.0: ".....The pessimism about public intellectuals is reflected in attitudes about how the rise of the Internet in general, and blogs in particular, affects intellectual output. Alan Wolfe claims that "the way we argue now has been shaped by cable news and Weblogs; it's all 'gotcha' commentary and attributions of bad faith. No emotion can be too angry and no exaggeration too incredible." David Frum complains that "the blogosphere takes on the scale and reality of an alternative world whose controversies and feuds are ... absorbing." David Brooks laments, "…

Geologists get to suffer with the idiots, too

My most memorable encounter with the anti-animal research cadres was several years ago, when I was a graduate student, and the Animal Liberation Front snuck into our building one night and vandalized one of my colleague's labs; they destroyed data, stole some irreplaceable mutant lines, and walked away with most of the research animals, things like white mice and quail and other small furry lab-bred animals. In their noble humanitarianism, they later released them all just off of I-5, where all the baffled, frightened little beasties made the local red-tailed hawks very, very happy. It's the…

Blogging Is Not Mandatory

I mentioned on Twitter that I was thinking of proposing a Science Online program item about the professionalization of blogging, throwing in a link to post from a couple months ago. That included a link to this SlideShare: Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters and How Social Media Can Help from Chad Orzel And that was re-tweeted by Chris Chabris, kicking off a gigantic conversation about the whole idea of scientists communicating directly with the public (most of which took place after I went to bed last night, so I only saw it in my Twitter…

Mill on Kinds and Types

A while back I excerpted some Whewell on classification by types. Here is John Stuart Mill disagreeing with him, and, I think, starting off the modern literature on natural kinds. Kinds are Classes between which there is an impassable barrier; and what we have to seek is, marks whereby we may determine on which side of the barrier an object takes its place. The characters which will best do this should be chosen: if they are also important in themselves, so much the better. When we have selected the characters, we parcel out the objects according to those characters, and not, I conceive,…

Funny Looking Rock found on Mars!

When last we heard from Rhawn Joseph, he was playing with photoshop and trying to sell off his online journal, the Journal of Cosmology. The Journal of Cosmology has been plugging away, claiming to have found bacteria in meteorites and then diatoms in meteorites — give them a blurry, vague photo of some shapeless blob, and they'll claim it looks just like something biological on Earth. Either that, or they'll photoshop my head on to it. Rhawn Joseph's latest struggle: he's suing NASA for suppressing evidence of life on Mars. His evidence is this pair of photos taken by the Mars Opportunity…

Help jailed AIDS researchers in Iran.

You know what makes an already scary world a lot scarier? When a government decides it's a crime for disease researchers to do their job. From Declan Butler: Iran has summarily tried two of the nation's HIV researchers with communicating with an "enemy government," in a half-day trial that started and ended on 31 December in Tehran's Revolutionary Court. There will be no further court hearings, and a verdict is expected within days. The brothers, Arash and Kamiar Alaei, who have achieved international acclaim for their progressive HIV-prevention programme, have been held in Tehran's…

Birds in the News 107

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Swainson's Hawk, Buteo swainsoni, in flight. Image: Justawriter [wallpaper size]. People Hurting Birds An extremely rare lesser spotted eagle, shot earlier this year by dumbass human hunters on the island of Malta, has been saved from death but may never be able to return to the wild. The bird, nicknamed Sigmar after Germany's environmental minister, underwent three operations to repair damage it suffered after being shot, but it may not be enough for the bird to live in the wild again. The bird can feed itself and…

The Blues in Russian

The story of research on linguistic relativity can be summarized thusly: early cognitive scientists, inspired by the work of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, were all-too eager to find that thought is influenced, if not determined, by language (either by its grammatical categories, ala Whorf, or by the words we use). Their enthusiasm caused them to get greedy, and instead of starting simple, they went straight to perceptual properties that are sorted out very early in visual perception. If the perception of such properties could be shown to have top-down influences (like linguistic influences…

ScienceOnline'09 - introducing the participants 3

Let's highlight some more of the participants of this year's ScienceOnline09 conference: Kevin Emamy is coming to do a demo of his CiteULike reference management platform. Kay Endriss teaches statistics in Career Center High School in Winston-Salem (see the Wikipedia page). Martin Fenner is the Clinical Fellow in Oncology at Hannover Medical School in Germany. He blogs on Gobbledygook and will lead a session on Providing public health and medical information to all. Matt Ford is a writer for Nobel Intent and will co-moderate a session Science blogging without the blog? Suzanne Franks is my…

ScienceOnline2010 update

Just a few updates on the progress in the organization of ScienceOnline2010 to those of you who do not follow me (or scio10) on Twitter. The main event - the actual sessions of the conference - will be held, like last two years, in the beuatiful building of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society (and publisher of American Scientist). The main conference program will occur on Saturday, January 16th and half of Sunday, January 17th, 2010. Breakfast, lunch, tea and coffee will be catered there on both days. As we did every year, we will have an Early Bird Dinner on Thursday night. This is…

Birds of a Feather? The Problem with Niche Search Engines

This week's On the Media spotlights Rushmore Drive, the new search engine marketed to African Americans (audio above). As the program describes, the search engine uses a unique algorithm to find those sites that are most heavily trafficked by blacks and to return them at the top of the search results. From host Bob Garfield's interview with CEO Johnny Taylor: JOHNNY TAYLOR: The algorithm, it's one of the few places where the black community becomes the majority for purposes of producing results. In all of the mainstream search engines, the majority's behavior is what detects how the results…

Colonialism Meets International Athletics

This post isn't about science, but it is about something close to my heart. For a long time, I've been outraged over the eternally-unresolved status of U.S. territorial possessions like Puerto Rico and Guam, and over the disenfranchisement of Americans right here in Washington, D.C., who aren't allowed to have voting representation in Congress. Now, a cool website is using the Olympics to publicize D.C.'s status plight. The argument is that if DC isn't granted statehood, then like the other U.S. territories (read "colonies"), it ought to be allowed to have its own Olympic team. In essence,…

Do musical tastes help you get to know someone?

If my twentieth high school reunion last year was any indication, we seem to hang on to the music we listened to as adolescents longer than any other time period. Everyone was dancing to "Purple Rain" and "Rock Lobster" like the music written in 1984 was the best ever written. A 1996 study confirmed this notion, finding that young adults express stronger preference ratings for music than older adults. Take a look at a random sampling of accounts on MySpace, and you'll see that nearly every member has a song associated with his or her account. It's as if music somehow forms part of a person's…

Teaching evaluations

Yesterday in class my students filled out one of those stereo-typical bubble sheet evaluations that supposed to tell me (and the administration) something meaningful about my teaching abilities. I won't see those results until after grades are turned in, but that's OK with me because I didn't find the questions asked on the standard form particularly useful. Plus, I gave my own evaluation a few weeks ago and those results are already in. So how's my teaching going? 31% of students said that my general performance was excellent, 47% of students said it was good, 19% said it was acceptable,…

One More Thing Harvard Postdocs Can't Have

OK I live 30min away from the Longwood Medical Center by foot. Most days I walk to and from work but on rainy/blizzard days I take the M2 Shuttle, a free service provided by Harvard to ship people between the Medical Campus here at Longwood and the Main Campus in Cambridge. It's dependable and well used. Now to save a couple of bucks, they're going to charge postdocs 2$ a ride. That's more than the cost of a T fare (T=subway in Boston)! Why? Doesn't Harvard want to help us get to work and be efficient? No way. After all, it's OK to crap on postdocs. And to make matters worse it's not all…

Best Science Books 2011: Booklist Online

Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Booklist Online Biography, Environment, Business. Galileo by John Heilbron American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park; What Our Gardens Tell Us about Who We Are by Wade Graham Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig,…

Strawberry Genes and Budding Math Geniuses

This week, two press releases from the Institute: The first was on the sequencing of the woodland strawberry genome (unfortunately, in the same week the cacao genome was sequenced). The Institute scientists who participated in the project contributed in the computational analysis of genes encoding flavor- and aroma-related proteins. This wild cousin of the cultivated strawberry is a member of the rose family, along with fruit trees including apples, peaches, cherries and almonds. In other words, this small annual plant is sure to become a useful experimental model for plant and agricultural…

Dixonian future animals of Brussels

I've just spent a few days at the Institut royal des Sciences naturelles de Belgique in Brussels, for theropod-related reasons. A great museum, with tons of excellent material on display. I just want to briefly report one interesting discovery here: I was surprised and delighted to find that the recently opened Gallery of Evolution includes a small selection of hypothetical future animals, apparently the inhabitants of the Dixonian epoch. Here's my favourite beast... It's the giant penguin Neopygoscelis dentatus, though I didn't know this when I was looking at it: I wondered whether it might…

Medieval Zombies: the Grateful Dead

Reading Anund & Qviberg's new guide book on Medieval Uppland, I came across a great religious legend: "The Grateful Dead". (The band got its name from a dictionary entry on this family of stories.) The earliest version of the legend is found in the German Cistercian prior Caesarius of Heisterbach's 13th century book of miracle stories, the Dialogus miraculorum. This book was hugely popular for centuries, and though Caesarius is largely forgotten today, we do remember his chilling line about how to tell a Cathar from a Catholic, attributed by Caesarius to one of the Albigensian Crusade's…

SchadenFriday: James Dobson

Maybe we should call this one SchadenThankFuckingChrist. It appears that Dobson's influence has been steadily falling off. The ministry apparently has been "flat" for some time. For example, in 1994 Dobson's monthly newsletter had a circulation of 2.4 million copies. Today, that circulation is about 1.1 million. Also, in the 1990s, Dobson was drawing audiences of 15,000 or more to his speeches; but in the lead-up to the 2006 mid-term election, only about 1,000 people heard his anti-abortion speech at the 2,500-seat Mt. Rushmore National Monument amphitheatre. Daly explains that the event was…

Lott calls me "extremely dishonest"

In an email to a poster at The High Road forum Lott writes "The actual data has been available on one of my websites at www.johnlott.org since February 2003. The Appendix of my book, The Bias Against Guns, goes through and discusses the data in depth. I talk about how the survey was done, the questions used in the survey, who did the survey, how it was weighted, etc. there. The www.johnlott.org website also has some downloads discussing the survey debate in general. On this last point, Lambert has been extremely dishonest. For example, he has a long list of surveys but he lists the date…

On the Checking of Boxes

One of the many ancillary tasks associated with my job that I wish I was better at is the advising of students. More specifically, the advising of students who aren't like I was at that age. What I mean by that is that when I was a student, I didn't need to be convinced of the utility of liberal arts education. I had specifically chosen to go to williams in part because of the small size (having grown up in a small town, I found it more congenial), but also because I was never only interested in science. I always enjoyed reading books and discussing history and politics, so I didn't need a…

The Basics of Starting Seeds

In keeping with the reminder I got that I should back up a little bit, and present my ideas more coherently for those who haven't encountered them before, I thought I would add a post about why someone might want to start seeds, and how to do it, to supplement the posts on winter sowing and the sowing of perennials from seeds. New gardeners generally start out by buying their seedling, and depending on where you are getting them, this can be a problem. The destructive wave of Late Blight that hit the tomato crop across the eastern half of the US was derived from seedlings purchased at big-…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with John Timmer

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked John Timmer from Ars Technica to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? Geographically, I…

Open Access Rants: Hanging together on the goddam wagon

Twitter is a great place to rant and rave sometimes. You can feel free to let loose and say what you're thinking without necessarily feeling that you need to have completely well-formed ideas. The enforced brevity can sometimes also be a plus, as it forces you to distill what you want to say to the bare minimum. It it possible to string together longer thoughts across multiple tweets but it becomes a bit awkward to read. I let loose a couple of Open Access related rants over the last few days and I thought I'd share them here, slightly cleaned up to make them more readable. Both are fairly…