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Simple answers to simple questions: Professional academic publishers edition

Afarensis asks Dembski on Open Access: Is He Hypocritcal, Stupid, or Both? Both. This is the simple answer to that simple question. The broader issue of open access is not so simple. While Dembski's understanding of the issue is both hypocritical and stupid, the issue of whether commercial science publishers are hypocritical and stupid remains to be seen. Evidence for hypocrisy is fairly easy to identify. Scientists give those publishers their research, typically signing over copyright for that work to the publisher. In many cases those scientists also pay page charges to those same…

Wuzza?

Everyone seems to be talking about Nicholas Carr's recent article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (see here, here, and here) and I'm not one to buck the trend, although there is one aspect of Carr's piece that I find a bit frustrating. It is way too long! I would probably fare better with the print version but for me the online version is damn-near unreadable after a few paragraphs. Admittedly, as someone who writes super-long posts in a relatively small font (I'm working on it), I recognize the plank in my own eye, but I think there may be more involved here than Google scrambling our brains.…

What is it like to be a baby?

My latest article for the Boston Globe Ideas section is now online. This piece was inspired by my brand new beautiful nephew, Jude Lehrer - may this blog post increase your Google presence! What is it like to be a baby? For centuries, this question would have seemed absurd: behind that adorable facade was a mostly empty head. A baby, after all, is missing most of the capabilities that define the human mind, such as language and the ability to reason. Rene Descartes argued that the young child was entirely bound by sensation, hopelessly trapped in the confusing rush of the here and now. A…

Starting the "Anyway" Project - AKA Whole Life Redesign

It hasn't escaped my notice that today is November 1, and I'm supposed to be starting the Whole-Life Redesign Project. In fact, I am starting it - I'm taking the opportunity created by my kids being out of the house to move all the food storage around and clean under things and get rid of things (hmmm...should there still be baby cereal in the back of my food storage, given that the baby turned 5 on Friday...ummm....) and otherwise make a giant mess in my house in the general hope of making it better afterwards. What I haven't done is sit down and write out the parameters of how this project…

From the dentist's chair, remembering how they cried wolf

"Snazzy safety glasses," I said to the dental hygienist who was just about to ask me to open wide.   Something about the pink rims caught my eye and led me to a remark that showed my age: "I remember when dentists didn't wear gloves, or masks, or eye protection." I not only recall the bare hands of my dentist circa 1970-1980, I also remember the hullabaloo from dentists when new federal regulations were proposed in 1989 requiring them to provide such protection for their hygienists.   At the time, the term "AIDS' was less than 10 years old, and exposure to HIV in the U.S. was considered a…

The Epidemic: Typhoid at Cornell

In the United States, we tend to take our clean drinking water for granted. Even though there are periodic concerns which bubble up about pharmaceuticals or other chemicals in our water supply, we typically believe--with good reason--that we have little to fear when it comes to contamination from microbes. Our drinking water, while far from perfect, is heads and shoulders above what it once was--something many of us forget or have never realized. There have been notable breakdowns, such as the 1993 outbreak of Cryptosporidium in Milwaukee that sickened over 400,000 individuals, but these days…

How to Feed 4 On a Food Stamp Budget

From the Philadelphia Daily News (the same paper which recently brought a Pulitzer Prize to Philadelphia for amazing investigative reporting by Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman): HOW WELL can a family of four eat on just $68.88 a week? For more than 38 million Americans, it's more than a matter of conjecture...To find out how well you can eat on food stamps, we asked two chefs and a magazine food editor to plan seven days of meals for a family of four using that budget: $68.88. I like best the solutions proposed by Jose Garces, who went 66 cents over budget, and explains his solutions thus:…

When Ben Stein Says This, Things Are Getting Bad

You're probably more familiar with Ben Stein as a movie actor, but, believe it or not, he's actually a moderately conservative economist--one definitely in the neo-liberal mold. So I was shocked by his last NY Times column: he sounded like a shrill librul. First, he laments CEO salaries: When I was a lad, the chief executive of a major public company was paid about 30 or 40 times what a line worker was paid. Now the multiple is about 180. What did they do in the executive suite to become so great? Upon what meat do they feed? Why, as we are being killed by foreign competition, do we need to…

Walking and chewing gum at the same time

Nature Climate Change has wandered into political science with a study from Stanford University. Seth Werfel's examination of the "crowding-out" effect — the idea that humans have a tough time pursuing more than one strategy to solve a problem — is worth considering, even if its finding aren't exactly earth-shattering. The problem is laid out right off the top and requires no further explanation: Household actions and government policies are both necessary to mitigate the effects of climate change. However, household behaviour may crowd out public support for government action by creating the…

Drinking Age?

Yup, I've been hearing about this Amethyst Initiative about lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18 and wondered if I should blog about it from my perspective. Then I saw that Jake wrote a good post about it (and also see his older post on the topic and good comments by his readers) and decided to chime in. I grew up in a country with no drinking age laws at all. When I was very young, perhaps as young as five, one of my regular chores was to go to the corner shop to buy things like bread, milk, yoghurt or whatever else was needed. Sometimes that meant I would get some beer or wine or…

Brad's Drink: Exhilarating, Invigorating, Aids Digestion

I just had an ice cold Pepsi this afternoon. It was 35+C (ok, in the mid-nineties), I had just come back from a long hot walk through the kidfest day at the Artfest and I just had to have it. It was so refreshing, and cool, and invigorating. Why it was exhilarating. Don't know about the "Aids Digestion" bit - 'course it was Diet... not the same, eh? It will, probably, be the only pepsi I have this month. So, us physical science bloggers can be like total sluts, what with Pepsico having bought a blog on scienceblogs.com and many of the other bloggers quitting or suspending operations. Not.…

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson [Library of Babel]

Seveneves is the latest from Neal Stephenson, and true to form is a whopping huge book-- 700-something "pages" in electronic form-- and contains yet another bid for "best first paragraph ever": The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero. The rest of the book involves what follows on from that. Namely, the destruction of basically all life on Earth. I should say up front that this was, on the whole, a very enjoyable book. In a lot of ways, it's what I…

Want to boycott stuff? There's an app for that.

Vote with your wallet. Tired of the Koch Brothers ruining everything for everybody? Prefer to buy products from companies that contribute to Sandy relief? Do you just want to know which major megacorporation produced the item you are considering putting in your shopping cart? Wouldn't it be nice to have an app that allowed you to scan the product's bar codes and quickly determine which evile empire you are supporting, or avoiding supporting, with your purchasing decision. Well, there is, and it is called Buycott. Click here to see iOS version From the app developers: How Buycott works -…

June Pieces Of My Mind #1

Despite the chaos of our kitchen renovation, I have managed to build myself a little reading nest. Gotta love German. Try saying it out loud: "Die Beobachtung ferner Quasare, das holografische Prinzip und der Quantenschaum der Raumzeit". Resolutely put away my phone in order to read a book instead. Then remembered that the book is in the phone. Ever wonder what the scarf-wearing Somali girls are going to do with their lives? Judging from two of Jr's classmates in junior high, they're going to be software engineers. The question of archaeology's practical usefulness should be treated as an…

Bad Idea of the Day: Halal Pharmaceuticals

One of the more amusing aspects of 'You are only criticizing Islam because you are RACIST AGAINST MIDDLE-EASTERNERS!!!!' is the fact that most Muslims do not live in the Middle-East. They live in Asia. Case in point: Indonesia, where about >87% of the population is Muslim.  12.7% of all Muslims live in Indonesia (Iraq? 1.2%). So naturally, like Christians in the US try to pass legislation to make Christianity The Law (for everyone, whether you are Christian or not), Muslims in Indonesia try to pass legislation to make Islam The Law (for everyone, whether you are Muslim or not). And,…

Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union [Library of Babel]

There are lots of other books in the booklog queue, but this one is due back at the library today, so it gets bumped to the front of the list. Of course, it doesn't hurt that it's probably the most widely discussed of the books waiting to be logged... In case you've been hiding out in a cave that no book reviews can penetrate, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is Michael Chabon's new novel about a Jewish homeland in Alaska. In this alternate history, the founding of Israel went catastrophically wrong, and the Zionists were driven into the sea by Arab armies. Lacking a home in the Holy Land, a…

Atheists and Mormons

Believe it or not, yesterday's post started as an honest question. I phrased it provocatively because this is, after all, the Internet, but I wasn't just poking atheists with sticks. This actually started quite a while ago, during one of the previous rounds of squabbling over Dawkins and his ilk, when I started a sentence something like: "What I'd like to see is less 'Religion is Stupid' and more..." and couldn't finish it. I couldn't come up with a good example of something positive to put in place of the "..." Which was really annoying. After all, I've got a pretty solid idea of what I'd…

Atheists as other: The most disdained group in America?

A three year old study has resurfaced on the blogosphere with this recent mention on the daily atheist. The study (cited below) is here, and the older commentary is here. Since this is still utterly relevant, I thought I'd make it the subject of a post. I don't think there is anything in it that is not absolutely current. I guess, I have to be honest with my 14 year old daughter. No, Julia, you are never going to be president. Or even mayor. Because as far as I can tell you are an atheist. If you took up some religion and made it look like you were sincere, then maybe. Otherwise,…

Spherical Waves and the Hairy Ball Theorem

Boy howdy do we love spheres in physics. Sure we might tell you that the reason involves deep truths in topology, and symmetry, and group theory, and all that mathematical arcana, and in fact there's a lot of truth to that. But if we're completely honest, or at least if I'm completely honest, I have to admit that I love spheres because they're easy. All that lovely deep symmetry tends to produce enormous simplifications in whatever actual calculations we happen to do involving spheres. Hence, our love for pretending everything is a sphere, or at least close enough for govermnemt work. There's…

A Week in Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam: Part One

First of all, i apologize for leaving everyone high and dry with no word. I received a few emails from worry worts (which I appreciated!), but seriously all is well. I just needed a few days post-Europe to collect my thoughts and re-adjust to life in the good US of A. Anyway, here's a recap of how things went down after my last post (about the beach). For the whole trip, I secured a Eurail pass which was a FANTASTIC deal. What this pass gives you is free travel in the countries that you choose for one (lower) price. I bought one for France, Belgium, and the Netherlands---this is really what…

Book Review: Coming to Life by Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

It is truly a challenge to write both scientifically, informatively, and accessibly. However, Christiane Nusslein-Volhard is able to strike a remarkable balance in her new book on developmental biology, Coming to Life. She succinctly summarizes crucial discoveries and experiments in the field, spanning from Darwin and Mendel to very recent work in cloning and gene therapy. But, the book does not read like a laundry list of names, dates, and reagents. Rather, the book feels more like a journey through time and science, with Nusslein-Volhard as the guide, pointing out sights and sounds along…

Just who is oblivious to facts here?

Last December I examined a posting by John Ray who dismissed ozone depletion as a "Greenie scare" using facts he seemed to have just made up by himself. Now he's back, attacking gun control. This time he's not using facts that he made up---he's using facts that Lott made up. He quotes from a review of More Guns, Less Crime by Thomas Jackson: "How strange it must be to be a liberal. Driven by slogans, blinded by superstitions, dazzled by fantasies, the liberal stumbles through life oblivious to facts. There is almost nothing the liberal thinks he…

I had no idea I was stepping into a controversy

It's such a petty and trivial one, though, I can't be too concerned. I'm at Skepticon 3, and I just learned tonight that the convention has been a source of dissent…and when I read the argument, I was stunned at how stupid it was. Apparently, Skepticon has too many atheists in it, and is — wait for it — "harming the cause". I'm not joking. Jeff Wagg, formerly of the JREF, has a long lament deploring that 3 of the 15 talks are explicitly atheistic, and that JT Eberhard, the organizer, emphasizes the problem of religion too much for it to be True Skeptic™ conference. It's utterly batty. Some…

Snow, cold, influenza and colds - Temperature and Infectious Disease

A "potentially historic" blizzard is barreling down on us here in New England, and is poised to drop up to two feet of snow on Boston. All of the schools in the area preemptively closed, our public transit system is shutting down at 3:30pm, and trying to buy groceries last night was bedlam. The snow is just now beginning to fall. Winter in New England can be rough, especially for a California-raised boy like me. It's not just because of the snow and cold, it's also the influenza and common colds. Source - Flickr user "Placbo" The fact that the rate of some infections can vary by season is…

No More Aspirin, Please

From the archives: (18 April 2006) If Massachusetts were a physician, I'd have mixed feelings about visiting him or her. Sure, Dr. Massachusetts would be incredibly persistent and would do its best to make sure I left its office feeling better than when I arrived, but on the other hand if I had any sort of serious condition, I'm skeptical about how far Dr. Mass. would go to treat the underlying causes, rather than just the immediate symptoms. Massachusetts would probably be an adept surgeon, but maybe not a great family doctor. Last week, amid great fanfare, Massachusetts governor Mitt…

Dopamine and Future Forecasting

Ed Yong has a typically excellent post on a new paper that looks at how manipulating dopamine levels in the brain can change our predictions of future pleasure: Tali Sharot from University College London found that if volunteers had more dopamine in their brains as they thought about events in their future, they would imagine those events to be more gratifying. It's the first direct evidence that dopamine influences how happy we expect ourselves to be. Sharot recruited 61 volunteers and asked them to say how happy they'd feel if they visited one of 80 holiday destinations, from Greece to…

Shout out to 'Blog around the Clock'!

Shout out to Bora over at Blog Around the Clock for his post about the USA Science and Engineering Festival. Take a read below or check out his blog. Do you have a blog of your own and want to write a post covering the USA Science and Engineering festival? Put a post up and contact us! Remember two years ago when I went to FEST in Trieste, Italy? (see pictures and coverage, e.g., this,this, this, this and more). Now nixed by Berlusconi who has other priorities than science, the FEST was one of the most exciting and famous science and technology events in the world. Sad that FEST is no more (…

Tipping point watch

More gumf from the Grauniad. Supposedly based on something in PNAS: anyone seen it? The usual suspects: the Potsdam folk and Tim Lenton and so on. Sadly (?) the online version doesn't have the appalling map that the print edition has, featuring highly implausible timescales for those bits I know anything about (Greenland and W Ant gone in 300 years). One of the dangerous tipping points was the greening of the Sahara, errrrm, because that could lead to dangerously low food prices? Shurely shom mishtake. I'm being unfair: that gets a mention (in print) as a rare beneficial example. Anyway, I…

Short Story Club: "The Jaguar House, in Shadow," by Aliette de Bodard

As mentioned a little while ago, Locus is running a Short Story Club to discuss the award-nominated stories that are available online. First up is Aliette de Bodard's "The Jaguar House, in Shadow". Like her novels and other notable short fiction, this has a Central American theme, though it's alternate-history SF rather than fantasy. This is a sort of caper story, set in a high-tech Mexica empire, where the elite order of Jaguar Knights are the only survivors of a bloody purge instigated by the new emperor, which has wiped out all the other orders. Xochitl, a young-ish female knight started a…

Economics of Writing

While I was out, John Scalzi had an interesting post about the changing economics of short story writing. Back in the day, Robert Heinlein made a living selling stories at a penny a word: As I was reading this again I was curious as to what at penny in 1939 would rate out to here in 2007, so I used the Consumer Price Index Calculator from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis to find out. Turns out that to you'd need fifteen cents in today's money, more or less, to equal the buying power of that 1939 penny. Dropping Heinlein's $70 into the calculator, you find that it was the equivalent of…

Technology News and Stuff

A robotic suit named "HAL" (will they never learn???) will become available for 2,200 monthly rental in Japan. It is actually a brain-directed mobility assistance device. The 22-pound (10-kilogram) battery-operated computer system is belted to the waist. It captures the brain signals and relays them to mechanical leg braces strapped to the thighs and knees, which then provide robotic assistance to people as they walk. Wikipedia reduces its server complexity by moving all services to one Ubuntu distro. According to computerworld: In a few months, Wikipedia will finish a major…

Think Science Now and Biotech's Communication Challenge

On TV, Neil deGrasse Tyson uses narrative to dramatize the importance of basic research. Last week in San Diego, I participated on a panel at the BIO 2008 meetings that focused on the communication challenges facing the biotech industry. Organized by Richard Gallagher, editor of The Scientist magazine, a major topic of discussion were the challenges that industry faces in communicating the value of basic research. In fact, this was also a major topic at the Cal Tech seminar that I ran on Tuesday. When the public thinks about "science," they generally think in terms of either medical advances…

Experimental Biology 2012 - Tuesday & Wednesday

I have had a lot of fun at this year's Experimental Biology conference. I always enjoy attending the symposia to listen to current research news as well as interact with fellow comparative physiologists at all levels of training. Here are the highlights from the sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday: Tuesday: J. Hicks, August Krogh Lecture: "Tales from the heart: A comparative and evolutionary perspective of the vertebrate circulatory system" Dr. Hicks gave a wonderful talk on the evolution of the heart and the physiological purpose of shunting that occurs in the crocodilian heart, which is four…

David Byrne Interviews Daniel Levitin -- or is it the other way around?

This month's issue of Seed magazine features an interview, or really more of a discussion between music researcher Daniel Levitin and David Byrne. Even better, you can read the whole article online! Byrne has been one of my musical heroes for decades now, and Levitin is a phenomenal researcher who really knows how to write. I'm about two-thirds of the way through his book This Is Your Brain on Music now, and I'm very much enjoying the read. So how does the interview go? It reads a little awkwardly -- you get the sense that Byrne and Levitin just sat down for a somewhat choreographed chat, and…

Resurrecting One of the World's 1st Video Games

This guest post is written by Peter Takacs, a physicist in Brookhaven Lab's Instrumentation Division. Takacs, who earned his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, joined Brookhaven in 1979. Peter Takacs More than a half-century ago, Brookhaven Lab nuclear physicist Willy Higinbotham sought to "liven up the place" with an experiment in entertainment. At BNL's annual open day in 1958, Higinbotham created what is often credited as the world's first video game. Hundreds waited in line for a chance to play "Tennis for Two," an interactive game made from an analog computer, two chunky…

Tid Bits

It has been a while. Here goes: 'Do you want to catch up on your Darwin? Here's a link to the Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. Want something to listen to while you are stuck in traffic? How about the audio version of The Origin of Species. Also there is a great podcast from the Whitehead - I've been wanting to write about this for a while - go check it out. And there is the Science Saturdays at Bloggerheads.tv that I've mentioned previously. What else is there ... Via Hsien at Eye on DNA I stumbled onto this clip produced by Genome British Columbia's Learning Centre: ... uhm ... I…

Wall Street Journal on Lancet study

I missed this when it first came out, but Carl Bialik has written excellent summary of the issues in the Wall Street Journal. Researchers concluded that about 100,000 more Iraqis had died outside Fallujah since the invasion than would have died had the prewar death rate continued. Yet the study, published in the British medical journal Lancet, was roundly criticized for discarding the Fallujah data from calculations. Others questioned the study for extrapolating from only 89 death reports outside Fallujah, including reports of 21 violent deaths. The biggest concern with the Lancet study…

News Tid Bits

Summers and the Allston expansion. Latest stats on gender and higher education. And free books! Ladies and Gentlemen start your hard drives. (all quotes+links below the fold) From today's Boston Globe: As Harvard University searches for a new leader, questions loom over its last president's most ambitious project: turning America's oldest university into the nation's hub for life sciences. During his 5-year tenure as the university's president, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers worked to put Harvard at the forefront of research on how the human cell works, a question the school'…

LA LA LA LA LA - NY Times and the physics of football

People say I am picky. Ok, sometimes I am. But somebody has to stand up for what is right and just. Maybe I am that person. Please stop using the word force if you don't know what it is. There. I said it. You can attack me now. It wasn't just one thing that got me fired up. It was two things. First, I read this article on physics and football (Physics of 'The Hit' from the NY Times). If it was just this article, I would have let it go and moved on. But no. One of my kids just happened to be watching MythBusters (We all love MythBusters) and there was a discussion that used the term…

Industrialized Science

Wired has now put more photos from my article on the Allen Brain Atlas online. They're grotesquely gorgeous: While the Allen Atlas of gene expression has already proven itself to be a valuable research tool, I think the project's most profound long-term impact will come from its methodological innovations. For the most part, modern science remains a field of artisans, of technicians and grad students doing experiments by hand. However, because the Allen Institute needed to generate such vast amounts of data, they realized that a different approach was required. And so they pioneered a high-…

InnoCentive

Have you heard about InnoCentive? It's my new favorite website. The premise of the site is simple: "seekers" post their scientific problems and "solvers" try to solve them. If the problem is successfully solved, then the "solver" gets a specified monetary reward. (The money is the incentive part of InnoCentive.) The questions on the site are astonishingly varied, and include everything from a food company looking for a "Reduced Fat Chocolate-Flavored Compound Coating" (Reward: $40,000) to a research foundation looking for a "Biomarker for measuring disease progression in Amyotrophic Lateral…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Travis Saunders

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 Travis Saunders (Twitter), my SciBling from the Obesity Panacea blog 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…

Biology is Power

I got a lot of interesting responses to my post about DIYbio and how modeling innovation in biotech on computer hacker culture may lead to a science that is less "democratized" than what is being proposed. My friend Adam pointed me to Jaron Lanier's work criticizing the "open" and "free" culture movements online as both unfair and leading to cultural stagnation. While I don't agree with all of Lanier's arguments about the prospects of an open digital culture, he makes a lot of really important points that resonate with my feelings about the future of science based on the open online model, in…

Egyptian 2011 Revolution: Euphoria, Then Reality

This article was co-authored with Dr. Morad Abou-Sabe', President of the Arab American League of Voters of New Jersey. CNN's Ivan Watson talks to John King from Cairo about his exclusive interview with Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim. {February 9, 2011} The Egyptian revolution of January 25th, 2011 created widespread euphoria of the kind only wide-eyed optimists enjoy. It was a moment in Egypt's history that should never be forgotten. It evolved naturally after six decades of oppressive military rule of Egyptians who had - almost - given up hope of any chance for change. Increasing…

A cancer quackfest

Oh, goody. I think I see future blog fodder for the second half of September. (When you've been in the blogging biz as along as I have, you think that far in advance when the opportunity presents itself.) Well, maybe it's blog fodder. The problem is that I would actually have to wade through the blog fodder. You see, I'm referring to something that one of my least favorite cancer quacks, Robert O. Young, turned me on to yesterday. The same way that antivaccinationists have their yearly antivaccine quackfest known as Autism One, cancer quacks apparently like to have their quackfests, too. Only…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Primates Expect Others To Act Rationally: When trying to understand someone's intentions, non-human primates expect others to act rationally by performing the most appropriate action allowed by the environment, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard University. The work was led by Justin Wood, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, with David Glynn, a research assistant, and Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard, along with Brenda Phillips of Boston University. Brain's Timing Linked With Timescales Of The…

Congratulations to Timothy Sandefur

Despite the fact that the first thing he did upon returning from his weekend getaway was bust my chops for my take on the Dan Rather fake memo story (LOL), I'd like to congratulate Timothy Sandefur both on his award from the Clarement Institute and on the recent publication of his article about the Declaration of Independence in Constitutional interpretation in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He was kind enough to send me a copy of that article, and I give it a big thumbs up. I hope it will be available online at some point so that you can all benefit from his insights into a…

The Friday Fermentable: Open Source Blog Beer

I can't believe I missed this earlier in the year: Colorado's Flying Dog Brewery created a beer based upon a basic recipe together with reader suggestions in what was called The Open Source Beer Project: You are holding what we believe is the first Open Source Beer to hit the market in the United States. We started with a basic Doppelbock recipe and solicited suggestions from homebrewers on our blog. We took your comments and crafted this Doppelbock, aptly named Collaborator. The blog, the recipe, and the label are online at opensourcebeerproject.com, if you'd like to brew some yourself.…

50,000 physicists can't be wrong! (Who said they were?)

The Internet makes it waaaay to easy to be stupid. Over at my other blog, a collective effort assembled by the Weather Channel, I write exclusively about climate issues. Each of my posts and just about all my colleague's posts dealing with the subject assume that climate change is real and that humans are largely responsible. It's easier that way to keep things short. It also happens to be a reflection of what climatologists think. But almost every post attracts comments from those who beg to differ and last week was no different. Except that some of the comments were more inane than usual.…

The question is...

Has anybody reading this post used twitter in the classroom? Not in the sense of: "Students, write something witty in less than 140 characters" But rather: "Students, we don't mind you using twitter during class, but keep the tweets class specific. Oh yeah, and use this hashtag #subject101" In other words, use the online tool in much the same way as a conference, but specifically for a class in, say, university. I've had a chance to look at a number of articles here and there by searching "using twitter in classroom." This one, in particular, was interesting: Professor Encourages…