Search Content

Displaying results 8051 - 8100 of 87950

Top Science Stories of 2010: 6 Degrees of Microbial Separation

Thanks to Viktor at StrippedScience for letting me borrow his microbe New Year's cartoon! Happy New Year! I was catching up on my blog reader and came across the NatureNews top science stories of 2010. I was curious how many of these stories would have something to do with microbes... turns out quite a few do. Of the 12 science news-worthy events/discoveries selected, 3 were directly related: the claim of Arsenic-based life story, the new HIV drug Truvada (including viruses with microbes), and the synthetic genome from the Ventner institute. In the style of 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon I…

Willful ignorance is not an effective argument against personal genomics

Camilla Long's appallingly bad op-ed piece about personal genomics in the Sunday Times is a true masterpiece of unsupported criticism, and an ode to willful ignorance. I'd encourage readers to discover their own favourite errors and misconceptions (there are plenty to go around), but here are some of the more glaring flaws: Direct-to-consumer genetic testing is not illegal in the UK. Long claims: Although most of these tests seem pretty harmless and are marketed as "educational" rather than "diagnostic", in the UK such over-the-counter kits are outlawed. She's completely wrong. In fact…

Boyd Haley finally does the right thing, but is it for the wrong reasons?

As you may have heard, the strike is over. That doesn't mean the crisis is over, nor does it necessarily mean that I will be staying with ScienceBlogs, but I view management's response as a positive move that may be enough to keep me here. Now management needs to lose the Google ads for quackery, and then we have something to talk about. It seems that every time our benevolent overlords kill one set of quack ads, they disappear for a short while, only to reappear in a different guise. I think they understand that. At least I hope so. In the meantime, I will speak no further of these issues,…

A Fish That Starts With "X": Children's books about the Sea

My understanding of what makes a good children's book changed dramatically about 15 months ago, when my baby daughter Clara Lynn was born. Before that time, I thought a good children's library would be a mix of Dr. Seuss, Dick and Jane, Sesame Street, and Winnie the Pooh. These were the stories I grew up with in the Seventies. I knew to beware of hypnotic modern characters like Barney and Elmo who could steal your child's mind and win their affections. I pictured myself reading the Hobbit from a rocking chair at nighttime, while my daughter stared lovingly from under a cozy blanket. All that…

Bush's Instincts

It's one of those tired cliches: Bush makes decisions with his irrational "gut instincts," instead of relying on "careful analysis". Paul Krugman, in today's Times, end his columns by repeating this cliche: Luckily, we've got good leadership for the coming storm: the White House is occupied by a man who's ideologically flexible, listens to a wide variety of views, and understands that policy has to be based on careful analysis, not gut instincts. Oh, wait. That's what an economist would say. Classic economics assumes that everybody - even George Bush - is capable of rationally analyzing a…

Around the Web: Research Works Act & Elsevier boycott

Note: this post is superseded by: Around the Web: Research Works Act, Elsevier boycott & FRPAA. This post has superseded my previous post which focused solely on the Research Works Act. I have added some coverage of the Elsevier boycott which at least partially grew out of opposition to the RWA. I'm not attempting to be as comprehensive in coverage for the boycott as for the RWA. Some relevant resources: The Cost of Knowledge: Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier (Boycott declaration site) Notes on the Research Works Act a wiki maintained by Peter Suber, hosted by the Berkman…

We Can 'Print Prosperity': On Ersatz Fiscal Constraints and Idle Real Resources

One of the annoying claims by the so-called fiscally responsible is that we can't "print prosperity"--that is, we can't deficit spend in order to help the real economy. It's derided as unrealistic and 'ideological' (whereas fiscal austerity is implied to be 'common sense'). Peter Cooper explains how it is fiscal austerity--the worship of deficit reduction--that elevates ideology over real-world consequences (italics mine): The phrase "print prosperity" is shorthand for the common message board accusation that MMT [modern monetary theory] ignores real resources and gets bamboozled by money…

Friday Fun: To Life, Death and Beyond: The Music of Magma -- Crowdfunding the Strangest Band of All Time

Magma, the strangest rock band of all time, needs you to help finance a documentary film about their life and work. So here goes. Up until a year or so ago I'd never heard of the French prog rock band Magma, or at least their music had never penetrated my consciousness. But last year while spending the month of May in Paris, I visited a bunch or record stores (and book stores and comic stores...) and noticed records and CDs by this band Magma prominently displayed, like I should know who they are or something. It took me a while to notice enough that I forced myself to dig a bit deeper and…

Not an "accident": Jose Alfredo Isagirrez-Mejia, 29 suffers fatal work-related injury at construction site in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida

[Updated below (9/5/14)] Jose Alfredo Isagirrez-Mejia, 29, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Monday, July 21 while working at a construction site in Fort Lauderdale, FL. The incident occurred on a $15 million project managed by Miller Construction Company. It’s the future site of a BMW/MINI dealership and service complex. Local10.com reports the following about the incident: a ceiling roof beam “came crashing down” three workers were lowering the beam in place with a crane. “Something went wrong and it struck all three workers.” The Sun-Sentinel reports: a carpenter who was an eye-…

CSAs, Deflation and Japan Relief

Sundry stuff on a busy day - and a day when everyone is transfixed by world events. First, my colleage at Dean's Corner has offered a good guide to high tech ways to donate money to Japan relief. There are 10,000 people in Japan who haven't eaten since Friday by the best estimation, and events are adding to the horror. If you want to help, these are some simple ways. Second, the always thoughtful Kurt Cobb has a great essay everyone should read about the deflationary impact of high oil prices: The logic is so simple it's hard to understand why smart people with advanced degrees can't see it…

Food Preservation and Storage Class Syllabus

This is the the time of year for most of us when everything is ripe and abundant in our gardens and at local farms, and learning to put food up can make it possible for you to enjoy summer in winter, and continue eating locally as long as possible. It can be overwhelming when you start preserving, so if you'd like a friendly voice to walk you through it, please join us. The class is on-line and asynchronous, and you can participate at your own pace. Every week we'll have projects involving what's overflowing in our gardens and markets to get you familiar with the basics of preserving the…

Light Rail and Obesity in one NC City

As we try to figure out how to curb an unhealthy increase in obesity, one of the factors under consideration is the built environment. Those who in live in places where few destinations are within walking/biking distance, public transit is limited, and the environment is unfriendly to pedestrians and cyclists may find it harder to get the recommended amount of physical activity. Studying the built environment's effect on obesity is challenging, though. People who live in pedestrian-friendly areas with good public transit may be more likely to get enough activity and less likely to be obese…

Worker electrocuted, not trained, $29 billion firm should know better

This morning, I read MSHA's fatality report for the April 7 electrocution death of Tadd M. Bainum, 36.  Mr. Bainum was a supervisor, and was doing electrical-related work, but had NOT received appropriate training in electrical tasks.  MSHA's investigators noted: "Failure to train [him] in performing the task constituted more than ordinary negligence and is an unwarrantable failure to comply with a mandatory safety standard." Mr. Bainum's work-related death left behind his wife April and three children, Tristan, 12,  Holly, 6 and Lacy, 3.  At first glance, the dredging pits where Mr.…

In today's 'Guardian'

Web journals 'narrowing study' by Linda Nordling: Online publishing has sparked an explosion in the number of places where academics can showcase their work. Today, no field of study is too obscure to have its own dedicated title. But have platforms such as the Journal of Happiness Studies or Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy News made academic publishing more democratic? Far from it, says Alex Bentley, an anthropologist at Durham University. "We're just producing so much wordage that nobody has time to read anything. It makes academic publishing, and even science itself, a bit like trying…

Introducing: The Replacements!

Jay Rosen, on Twitter: "Hey @Boraz: Scientists (mainly, me) are close to announcing a branching off from the curmudgeons, a new species, almost. The Replacements." My response on Twitter: @jayrosen_nyu I am all ears! The Replacements! Sounds like a superhero comic strip, a movie one day! Jay, on FriendFeed: The Replacements are those who mistakenly believe that crowing for the 1,000 time that bloggers cannot replace journalists is an important and insightful act. Identifying feature: they make a show of disagreeing with the hordes of writers who think bloggers CAN replace (newspaper)…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Climate Change Does Double-whammy To Animals In Seasonal Environments: Plant-eating animals in highly seasonal environments, such as the Arctic, are struggling to locate nutritious food as a result of climate change, according to research that will be published in the 21 May 2008 online edition of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Led by Penn State Associate Professor of Biology Eric Post, the research, which focused on caribou, suggests that not only are these animals arriving at their breeding grounds too late in the season to enjoy the peak availability of food--the focus of…

Push vs. Pull strategies in science communication

Danielle Lee, who just defended her PhD last week (her defense was livestreamed and livetweeted and liveblogged - Congratulations!!!!!!!!!) wrote a very thought-provoking post this morning - Understanding push-pull market forces and promoting science to under-served audiences. Go read it now. If general public will not actively seek science content ('pull') than perhaps we can have the content come to them wherever they are ('push'). But people are scattered over gazillions of media places! How do we get to them everywhere? One answer is to try to get many people to contribute science-y…

KITP: Exoplanets RIsing

Well, I'm back at the Kavli Institute attending the Exoplanets Rising workshop. We have a full schedule of talks over the week, and I'll be intermittently blogging the events as we amble along. Bunch of interesting sounding talk on the schedule, and hopefully some interesting news and discoveries that we will hear about. We kick-off this morning with Mayor and Marcy, and the Fischer and Charbonneau after the break, looking forward to it. Not seen planets around M dwarfs with mass less than 0.3 solar masses, but that is likely a bias - lower mass dwarfs are fainter, duh. Talks will be online…

Digital DNA Could Reveal Identity of Harry Potter Leaker

tags: Harry Potter, leaker identity As you all know by now, the last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was leaked recently to the internet. The leaker meticulously photographed every page in the book and posted those images to the internet where most of them are clearly readable. However, according to experts at Canon, an imaging company, the identity of the person who leaked the book could be revealed by tracing the digital camera that was used. Basically, the vital information contained in each photo, known as Exchangeable Image File Format (Exif) data, revealed that…

Citizen Reporting: Bill Clinton's Value to Hillary's Presidential Bid

tags: citizen reporting, politics, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, US Presidential bid, WNYC, Brian Lehrer Show, Ethan Hova, Huffington Post This morning, I was listening to WNYC, the local NPR affiliate and my favorite radio station in the world. On the Brian Lehrer Show, he was interviewing Ethan Hova, a reporter at the liberal online newspaper, the Huffington Post. Hova is organizing a "citizen reporter" story where a group of us get together and determine the value to Hillary Clinton of having a former President of the United States as a spouse. To do this research project, Hova has…

Weekend Diversion: 8-bit glory for a rainy day

"A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long." -e. e. cummings While the rest of the United States gets swept over by a heat wave, the weekend here in Portland, OR gives us an all-too-familiar sight. But I have found the diversion (for myself, at least) for the rainy weekend. I'm listening to The Detroit Cobras' version (they're a cover band) of the soul classic, It's Raining.And what is it I've found for entertainment? My favorite old nintendo games, available (at last!) to play online in…

Merovingian Motorway at Grez-Doiceau

[More blog entries about archaeology, Belgium, Merovingian, burial; arkeologi, Belgien, folkvandringstiden, vendeltiden, gravar.] Belgian Dear Reader Bruno is one of the astronomy buffs behind Blog Wega (in Dutch). A piece about Bruno's nearest archaeological site wouldn't fit that blog, but I'm happy to have it as a guest entry. Rich 1st Millennium graves, what more can you ask for? This is the sixth entry I receive for the Your Nearest Site carnival. Gimme three more NOW, people, and I'll put it on-line! Merovingian Motorway at Grez-Doiceau By Bruno Van de Casteele Yes, this is my…

ADHD Resource

I got an email that I almost deleted without reading, thinking for a moment that it would be spam. It turned out not to be. Since the author appears to be well-intentioned, I'll go ahead and post it here. He mentions some on-line resources regarding the diagnosis and treatment of adult ADHD. Based upon the title of the email, I thought it was going to be one of those pitches for Internet drug sales. It is not. Instead, it promotes a site put up by an independent ADHD coach. Presumably, the main purpose is to promote his business. I have no particujlar objection to that. I have no…

Diversity in Science: Lewis Latimer

DLee has started a new carnival to highlight the contributions of awesome scientists and engineers, with the first one being focused on the contributions of African-American scientists and engineers (it being Black History Month and all). (By the way, does anyone else think it is supercool to have a Black History Month when we finally have an African American president? I think so. Way cool. We're watching history being made!) So. I want to profile someone I just learned about this very week, and who I have already talked about with my first-year students. So. Have you ever heard of…

What are your favorite iPhone apps?

The other day, author pal and PharmFamily friend Rebecca Skloot sent out a Twitter request for iPhone app suggestions for her new gadget, particularly those that might be of greatest use on her upcoming, self-supported book tour for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Let me first congratulate Ms. Skloot on ditching that CrapBerry and adopting a technology that is as superior as her book. Rebecca got me looking at my iPhone and made me realize that, well, it sort of has that not-so-fresh feeling. I've got a few tried-and-true apps that I've shared with our Twitter followers but I even feel…

Haeckel on film

Proteus is a film about the 19th century biologist and artist Ernest Haeckel. It's almost a few years old now, and has already worked its way through the blogosphere. But, given Dave's interest in Haeckel and the recent uptick in Haeckel-talk at the blogs, let me bring it up again. Haeckel and his assistant, 1866 (no, not a still from the making of Deadwood) Slate had a beautiful slideshow of Haeckel's images a while back. The Panda's Thumb made note of it. Haeckel's famous for his amazing artistic abilities, and the unbelievable wealth of imagery he left us (well, and being tagged…

Sadventists, badventists

This afternoon, a couple of smiling, glassy-eyed young ladies stopped by my house to talk about Jesus. I was delighted, but I made the mistake of telling them up front that I was an atheist, and didn't believe in their religion…and they backed away slowly, said "goodbye!", and scurried away. It's so hard to bait the trap when you insist on using honesty. Anyway, I did get a little online satisfaction reading this great ferocious rant about Seventh Day Adventists. The Seventh-day Adventist cult's "prophet" and founder, the alcoholic, masturbation-obsessed habitual plagiarist Ellen G. White,…

JOURNAL WATCH: New Study Finds That As of 2003, The Most Consistent Predictor of Citizen Activism in the Stem Cell Debate Was Church Mobilization

A pre-publication release of a study I did with Kirby Goidel of LSU is now available at the website of the journal POLITICAL BEHAVIOR. Analyzing national survey data collected in 2003, the study finds that the most consistent predictor of citizen activism in the stem cell debate (measured as donating money, contacting officials, writing letters to the editor etc) is church-based mobilization, including the distribution of materials at church, and requests to participate from church leaders. Below is the abstract and article information. Readers at universities should be able to download…

Staging, Self-Shaping, Starting Small: Not Important?

An early classic in computational neuroscience was a 1993 paper by Elman called "The Importance of Starting Small." The paper describes how initial limitations in a network's memory capacity could actually be beneficial to its learning of complex sentences, relative to networks that were "adult-like" from the start. This still seems like a beautiful idea - the cognitive limitations of children may somehow be adaptive for the learning they have yet to do. And Elman is not alone in proposing it; a number of other researchers have proposed that a lack of cognitive control or working memory…

Should You Eat or Drink Your Fruits and Veggies? An Experiment

From the Obesity Panacea Archives: The following post first appeared on January 11, 2010. In the past year or so I've seen lots of online discussion about the nutritional value of juice, and the role that it may play in obesity and weight management.  Although there are a lot of good nutritional arguments against juice consumption, they are all a bit abstract (for a quick review of the main arguments, click here).  We can tell people again and again that orange juice is the nutritional equivalent of Coke, but when they look at at a glass of orange juice, it still looks like a glass of…

White Americans and Resistance to Affirmative Action

From the Chronicle of Higher Education daily update yesterday: The strongest source of white opposition to affirmative action today is neither racism nor a sincere conviction that any favoritism, even if compensatory, is wrong, but rather a "desire to protect fellow whites," three scholars argue in a paper released last week by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. That finding, the authors contend, offers a new window into white opposition to affirmative-action programs. The Chronicle article needs a subscription but the paper it refers to, Why White Americans Oppose Affirmative Action…

Ethics under climate change - competition

This announcement of an essay competition at Inter-Research, a German-located research group, may be of interest to students: Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics Ethics of Climate Change CALL FOR ESSAYS Major consequences of climate change are now predictable to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty. Many of these consequences will be experienced within the next 100 years - on time scales relevant to emergency preparedness, medical responses, infrastructure alteration, financial investments, treaty negotiations, etc. These changes will impact the globe, geographically,…

On censorship

The internet filtering debacle raises some more general issues I have with my nation's governments' tendency to censor ideas it doesn't like. Sure, there's the "Won't somebody think of the children" justification, which is a Good Intention (suitable for paving roads), but surely the best bet is to go for the producers of child pornography through legal sanctions and encourage parents to take responsibility for their children's internet habits by using family clean feeds and monitoring their behaviour rather than penalise everybody to suit a few religious interests. In a democracy, under…

Colors can tell us a lot about how we recognize shapes

The Beck effect is difficult to replicate online, because it involves testing reaction times. However, I think I've figured out a way to approximate the effect. This movie (Quicktime required) will show you how it works. Just follow the directions on the opening screen: Now, which letter did you see first? Let's make this a poll: If we manage to replicate the effect, there should be a bias in the results, which I'll explain below so everyone has a chance to try it out before learning the "answer." In the 1960s, Jacob Beck found that when searching arrays of letters like this, viewers were…

Deep Rifts among the wingnuts

Quite the little hissyfit is brewing on the far right. One one side is Joseph Farah, lunatic publisher of the online teabagging journal, World Net Daily, better known as Wing Nut Daily to rational people. Farah organizes something called the "Taking America Back National Conference", in which the not-very-bright half of America gets together to piously discuss how they can complete the total trashing of the country. On the other side is crazy flaming psycho goon Ann Coulter, who would have been a headliner at the WND conference — she's exactly the kind of nut WND loves. Unfortunately, Coulter…

Colors can tell us a lot about how we recognize shapes

[This entry was originally posted in April 2007] The Beck effect is difficult to replicate online, because it involves testing reaction times. However, I think I've figured out a way to approximate the effect. This movie (Quicktime required) will show you how it works. Just follow the directions on the opening screen: Now, which letter did you see first? Let's make this a poll: If we manage to replicate the effect, there should be a bias in the results, which I'll explain below so everyone has a chance to try it out before learning the "answer." In the 1960s, Jacob Beck found that when…

What will academia (need to) look like when gas is $20/gallon?

Gas prices keep going up, and don't kid yourself that they're going to go down again anytime soon either (enjoy those profits, ExxonMobil shareholders...). Some places in the US are looking down the road at $5/gallon, and of course Europeans have been paying vastly more than that for years. The news is rife with stories of police departments worrying about going broke because gas is too expensive, and schools that can't afford the food they cook to give kids lunch at school because food costs are going up too much (which of course hits the poor kids more than the rich kids - yeah, that…

Making a clean getaway

I'm taking a vacation next week. For real. Miles from anywhere. We're headed to the isolated Isle Royale National Park, which is the island in Lake Superior that is the eye of the wolf, as it were. We take a boat there Monday, and come back on the next boat, which runs on Friday. Guess what else? There will be no Internets. I wanted to write a similar post to ScienceWoman on my reflections on my first year, but I feel I need a little space to be able to do this first. My head is so full of static - what to read next, should I really read that next, shouldn't I work on the revisions for…

Depression Induces Bone Loss: My thoughts

Jonah Lehrer, at href="http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2006/10/depression_induces_bone_loss_1.php">The Frontal Cortex, points out a recent PNAS article (published online ahead of print) that indicates an unexpected finding.  Using a mouse model or depression, they find that the risk of osteoporosis is increased.  Furthermore, they find that treatment with an antidepressant reduces the risk. href="http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0604234103v1">Depression induces bone loss through stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system Raz Yirmiya, Inbal Goshen, Alon Bajayo, Tirzah…

The impact of blogging on me (a meme).

Dave Munger tagged me with a meme about (among other things) the effect blogging has had on my life. The questions seem worthy of relection, so I'm game: What have you learned so far from visitors to your blog? I've learned that there are a lot of people who aren't paid to "think for a living" who think for fun and do it quite well. I've learned that people with strong opposing opinions can still have rational discussions with each other. And, of course, I've learned that what my kids say is more reliably fascinating than what I say. If somebody offered to pay for a course (or more) for…

Chicago Magazine on Lott vs Levitt

Via Eli Rabett I find a long article by James L. Meriner in Chicago magazine on the Lott-Levitt lawsuit. There's some new information on the history of Lott and Levitt such as this: Just when and how the Lott-Levitt feud started is not clear -- neither man would directly comment on the lawsuit for this article. Levitt's friend Austan Goolsbee, also an economics professor at the U. of C., remembers when Levitt, then a junior fellow at Harvard, visited Chicago in 1994 to present a paper. Lott had just been named a visiting professor. "Even before Steve was on the [academic] job market, John…

What is it about Winona, MN and antivaccinationists?

A couple of weeks ago, I linked to an amazingly ignorant antivaccination screed published in the Winona Daily News. In the comments, I was made aware of another antivaccination screed in the form of a letter to the editor to the Winona Post. (Unfortunately, I am unable to locate it online.) Now, today, I find that there are people in Winona who are trying to outdo Jim and Laurie Jenkinson (the authors of the first article) in serious stupidity in the form of a letter to the editor published in the Winona Daily News entitled It Is Important to Learn More About Vaccinations. I'd normally agree…

Israel

Recent weeks have brought a steady stream of interesting reports about Israel's internal politics and how those politics relate to the rest of the world. To whit: Israel Roiled After Chomsky Barred From West Bank: Front-page coverage and heated morning radio discussions asked how Mr. Chomsky, an 81-year-old professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, could pose a risk to Israel and how a country that frequently asserts its status as a robust democracy could keep out people whose views it found offensive. ⦠The decision to bar him from entering the West Bank to speak…

Birds in the News 126

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter "Thy Fearful Symmetry" Male greater Prairie-chicken, Tympanuchus cupido. Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU. [larger view]. More of Dave's Greater Prairie-chicken images. Birds in Science Seven feathers that either belonged to a non-avian dinosaur or an early bird have been discovered encased in amber in a remarkably vivid state of preservation, according to a recent Proceedings of the Royal Society B study. The 100-million-year-old amber, excavated from a Charente-Maritime quarry in western France, was found near the…

Anonymity, openness, safety, and responsibility.

This week, the National Review Online's media blogger revealed the secret identity of dKos blogger Armando, who says that this unwanted decloaking probably means he will no longer blog. While I'm not heavy into the political end of the blogosphere (until someone can provide me with more than 24 hours per day), Armando's story resonates with me because one of my favorite science bloggers, BotanicalGirl, had to stop blogging when members of her department became aware of her blog. So I've been thinking a lot about blogging anonymously versus blogging under one's own name, not just in terms of…

fukushima questions of nippon

there are a number of questions that need answer regarding the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, aka Fuk-D. As a starting point, here is an amateur online feed of radiation in Tokyo (Park18). It is a geiger-counter, the normal count rate is 10-20 cpm, around noon on march 15th the count rate peaked at about 120 cpm, the counts then dropped before there was another broad rise on march 16th to about 40 cpm. The first question is: why am I having to link to an amateur with a geiger counter? The Japanese Atomic Energy Authority has four online environmental radiation monitors.…

I knew it!

This one seems to be making the rounds among blogs that I frequent. Given that it's Saturday, when I usually don't post anything that requires serious writing, it's a perfect day to let the sheep in me have free reign and follow the flock, taking this test: Your Score : Robot You are 100% Rational, 0% Extroverted, 42% Brutal, and 28% Arrogant. You are the Robot! You are characterized by your rationality. In fact, this is really ALL you are characterized by. Like a cold, heartless machine, you are so logical and unemotional that you scarcely seem human. For instance, you are very…

Teachers Gone Wild

My wife, a biology teacher, gets crazy in the biology classroom. She is famous for her interpretive dance renditions of numerous cellular processes. The students in the first class of the day reportedly stare in disbelief and roll their eyes, but the students in the other classes throughout the day seem to love it. Several of her students have taken to filming her pedagogical paroxysms, and you know that some day, Amanda will be a YouTube Star. ~ a repost ~ But this brings up the interesting and difficult mixture of students, personal technology in the classrooms, teachers, schools,…

Teaching Biology Lab - Week 1

I am teaching the Intro Bio lab right now and thought it would be appropriate to schedule this post to appear at the same time. I wrote it last time I taught this, but today's lab will be pretty much the same. Being second summer session, the class will probably be really small, which will make the lab go even faster and easier. Yesterday I had my first class of the semster of the BIO Lab at the community college. This is the first time with a new syllabus, containing some new excercises. At the beginning, we took a look at some cartoons, as examples of Inductive and Abductive Arguments,…

Knitting for the Apocalypse

This is a repeat, but it is at least three years old, and I haven't done a fiber arts piece in a while, so I thought I'd get us chatting. The cooler weather certainly makes me want to knit! The title here is somewhat tongue in cheek, of course, but I do think that we knitters and crocheters, spinners and weavers have something useful to contribute to a lower-impact future - warm fingers and toes, homemade reusable cloth bags, beautiful clothing - all made from local or recycled or otherwise sustainable materials. So I thought a discussion of how to knit (and all the other useful fiber arts)…