Search Content

Displaying results 951 - 1000 of 87950

Fighting for Open Access in Serbia

Vedran Vucic is a Linux afficionado in Serbia. He and his organization have gone all around Serbia, wired up the schools, taught the teachers and students how to use Linux, taught the teachers and students how to use various online educational resources ranging from blogs to ATutor, etc. Vedran also gives technical support to about 40 Serbian bloggers whose work he also aggregates. He is now putting a lot of energy into persuading scientists, especially the young, not-yet-entrenched ones, to go online and to promote Open Access. It is an uphill battle, but he is persistent! You'll see…

Why Your Professor Would Like You To Apply To Penn State

Mars Gets Women, but he does not get the New Improved Process for Recommendation Letters for Students ...and, may I say, to the graduate program administrators around the country; the commercial on-line application services universally suck my current experience is that one of the online service providers is ok, the one used by Caltech and Harvard astro. I've also had the browser incompatibility and mystery crash issue (no, it is NOT my responsibility to get a current version of IE so that another university can subcontract their letter processing to the lowest bidder). One service asks for…

Museum Catalogues Ice Cream Stick

A bit of museum silliness with thanks to Dear Reader Kenny. As mentioned before, my dear Museum of National Antiquities has not escaped the weird influence of post-modernist museology. In its excellent on-line catalogue, which I cannot recommend highly enough, we find object number -100:559: an ice cream stick, dating from the '00s. Its context is unusually unclear in the on-line info, but it appears to have been donated during an outreach project where kids were invited to give the museum stuff and speculate about how people in the future will one day interpret it. I don't think curating,…

Physics World on the LHC

So, there's a new issue of Physics World magazine out, with a bunch of feature stories on the Large Hadron Collider. Three of these are available free online: Life at the high-energy frontier, a sort of overview of the accelerator and the people involved. Expedition to inner space, a discussion of what they hope to discover at the LHC. How the US sees the LHC, which is obvious. I'm particularly interested in one of the articles that isn't free online, though: "Beyond the Higgs" discussing what would happen if the LHC fails to find the Higgs boson. My interest stems from the fact that the…

Eugenics and the DI revisited

You may recall the event a few weeks ago at the University of Minnesota in which John West of the Discovery Institute attempted to tell us how Darwin was responsible for eugenics. Greg Laden has mentioned that we now have an account from Mark Borrello, who rebutted West in a too-brief ten minutes after the talk; he gets to stretch his legs a little more online and tears West's premises to shreds. In addition, Jim Curtsinger, who missed the talk but watched it online, gets to tell us something about the practice of teaching science: we Darwinists often talk about eugenics in our classes (I did…

Call for entries: Virtual sciart exhibition in conjunction with the AAAS Annual Meeting

FYI: Science Art-Nature and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) present the "Science Without Borders" online art exhibition in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C., February 17 - 21, 2011.This on-line art exhibition, was conceived to display and promote the best contemporary Science Art and to encourage discourse between the scientific and artistic communities. Designed as a companion to the national meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, each selected piece of…

The First Annual Blogger Bioblitz Begins Today

Over 40 bloggers will be stepping outside for National Wildlife Week, April 21 - 29, field guides, binoculars and seines in hand and pack to catalogue all the species they can find in a local area of their choosing. Early tomorrow morning, I'll be heading out to our campus' arboretum, a small, manageable riparian forest. I'll probably be tackling another area in Western Pennsylvania later in the week. The first post from me should be up be tomorrow afternoon. We have spent the past month refining the process at our forum. Use the following links to access any information you may need. Also,…

Further response to Camilla Long's ode to genetic ignorance

Earlier this month I wrote a post skewering a terrible opinion piece about personal genomics in the Sunday Times by Camilla Long. This was my conclusion: If Long wishes to stay ignorant of her own genetic risks - just as she has managed to remain ignorant of the entire field of genetics, even while writing an op-ed piece about it - that should be her choice. But her criticism of others who choose to pursue a greater understanding of their own genetic risk is entirely, horrendously misplaced. Dan Vorhaus from Genomics Law Report was equally disgusted by the piece. While we were unsuccessful…

USA Science and Engineering Festival Ranks as "50 Essential Twitter Feeds for STEM Educators" by Best Colleges Online!

The second annual USA Science and Engineering Festival is fast approaching and people are starting to take notice of what a great resource the Festival organization has become. The mission of the Festival is to re-invigorate the interest of our nation's youth in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) by producing and presenting the most compelling, exciting, educational and entertaining science gatherings in the United States. We are absolutely thrilled to have ranked as one of the 50 Essential Twitter Feeds for STEM Educators by Best Colleges Online! Throughout the year, we at…

Internet Withdrawal

Having moved recently to a house wired only with telephone copper, my family and I are now into our fourth week without an internet connection. It's a really frustrating way to learn just how dependent we've become on the net. For one thing, we don't own a printed telephone directory, and our only street map of greater Stockholm is in the car. We can't do on-line banking, and we can't mail-order stuff. I can read email on my smartphone, but my wife's going nuts over being cut off. And simple information searching -- woah, I miss Wikipedia five times a day. Suddenly we have to use our printed…

ScienceOnline'09: megaprops to Sigma Xi and all who contributed

It'll be a few days before I can get together posts on this past weekend's ScienceOnline'09 conference in frigid North Carolina. The Friday Fermentable Live! was a terrific success and it already looks like there are seven posts out there (for example, Eva Amsen on her Nature Networks blog, Expression Patterns, put up an account with vasectomy-like precision). I had the honor of participating in two sessions: one on gender and allies in STEM, online and off, with the youthful Alice Pawley and Zuska and another on pseudonymity/anonymity and building online reputation with PalMD. Speaking…

Habermas on Blogs

Well, not on blogs exactly, but internet communication in general. What he says definitely applies to blogs, though. The quote is in a footnote in this speech that Habermas gave at the 2006 annual convention of the International Communication Association. Allow me in passing a remark on the Internet which counterbalances the seeming deficits that stem from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting by reintroducing deliberative elements in electronic communication. The Internet has certainly reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public of writers and readers. However,…

Tidbits, 22 January 2010

Because I scanted you on tidbits for quite some time, have a second tidbits post in a single week! A little library advocacy: Five library resources you should be using. Otherwise-closed data tend to open up in direct proportion to the perceived importance of the problem: GlaxoSmithKline opens up data on anti-malaria compounds. Now let's make this the default stance, shall we? Undergraduate science librarian Bonnie Swoger talks Science Online 2010 and data. Also on the Science Online 2010 roundup, the amazing Kevin Smith of Duke makes trenchant observations about copyright anxiety and it's…

Those deadly chemistry sets.

Months ago, I wrote about the Department of Homeland Security's concerns about chemistry sets. (You know, for kids.) Well, it seems the push to make the world child-safe (or perhaps not legally actionable?) continues. Reader Donn Young points me to this story from Wired about government crackdowns on companies catering to garage chemistry enthusiasts. Donn also shares a story of his own: Growing up, two friends and I had a chemistry 'club' centered around our chemistry sets and 'labs' in our basements. My friend's mother, who was a chemist at Battelle Memorial Institute, would give us…

Dr. Jeff Schweitzer Talks About Living a Moral Life in a Random World TONIGHT in NYC

Who: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer What: free public presentation, "Moral Life in a Random World" Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor. When: 700pm, Thursday, 9 July Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist who has written extensively on morality, religion, politics and science -- and who served as science advisor to former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. Schweitzer will talk about how we each have within us the awesome power to create our own meaning in life, our own sense of purpose, our own destiny. He will address how…

Tomorrow Night in NYC: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer on Moral Life in a Random World

Who: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer What: free public presentation, "Moral Life in a Random World" Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor. When: 700pm, Thursday, 9 July Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist who has written extensively on morality, religion, politics and science -- and who served as science advisor to former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. Schweitzer will talk about how we each have within us the awesome power to create our own meaning in life, our own sense of purpose, our own destiny. He will address how…

This Week in NYC: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer Speaks About Living a Moral Life in a Random World

Who: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer What: free public presentation, "Moral Life in a Random World" Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor. When: 700pm, Thursday, 9 July Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist who has written extensively on morality, religion, politics and science -- and who served as science advisor to former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. Schweitzer will talk about how we each have within us the awesome power to create our own meaning in life, our own sense of purpose, our own destiny. He will address how…

Dr. Jeff Schweitzer Talks About Moral Life in a Random World

Who: Dr. Jeff Schweitzer What: free public presentation, "Moral Life in a Random World" Where: SLC Conference Center, 352 7th avenue (between 29th and 30th streets), 16th floor. When: 700pm, Thursday, 9 July Dr. Jeff Schweitzer is a scientist who has written extensively on morality, religion, politics and science -- and who served as science advisor to former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore. Schweitzer will talk about how we each have within us the awesome power to create our own meaning in life, our own sense of purpose, our own destiny. He will address how…

Virtual Autopsy at House of Sweden

Doesn't that title sound weird - like an experimental film? It may help to know that House of Sweden is Sweden's embassy in Washington, DC - a lovely glass building on the Potomac. If you're in the DC area, you should get on their mailing list, because they host interesting science-related panel discussions and receptions. Yesterday, they opened a new exhibit - the Virtual Autopsy Table. It's a touch-screen tabletop that lets you slice into, rotate, and magnify an MRI-based 3D representation of the human body, all with a brush of a hand: The Virtual Autopsy Table from Norrkö…

PIG MONKEY!!!

Oh good God. We are reprinting this article in its entirety from the Orange News because it is just too good. Check it! Curious locals flocked to the home of owner Feng Changlin after news of the piglet spread in Fengzhang village, Xiping township. "It's hideous. No one will be willing to buy it, and it scares the family to even look at it!" Feng told Oriental Today. He says the piglet looks just like a monkey, with two thin lips, a small nose and two big eyes. Its rear legs are also much longer than its forelegs, causing it to jump instead of walk. Feng's wife said the monkey-faced piglet…

Talk Origins wants to buy Expelled. Can you help them?

Apparently, when you make a movie, there's this box of stuff left over that someone has to own. It can include things like the original unedited film/video, from which the director and editors selected/cherry picked what they wanted to include, as well as various correspondences and documents and stuff. The company that produced that horrid piece of drek known as "Expelled! No Intelligence Allowed" has gone out of business (a little Darwinian process at work, may we assume?) and the box of stuff that resulted from that film is now on the auction block. The auctioneer's gavel will strike this…

Royal Mail celebrates 350 years of the Royal Society

A set of special commemorative stamps is being launched today to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society. The stamps feature ten of the most prominent historical fellows, as chosen by leading figures in the society today. How many can you name? Answers below the fold! Each scientist is displayed with an image representing their contribution to the world. The fellows, and the field of their acheivement, are as follows: Robert Boyle - Chemistry Sir Isaac Newton - Optics Benjamin Franklin - Electricity Edward Jenner - Vaccination Charles Babbage - Computing Alfred Russell…

Thanks

Some of you might already be aware of this, but whenever you click on one of the books I have in the "currently reading" section of this blog, my ridiculously-massive wishlist, or any other link to amazon.com and then buy something, I receive between 4% to 6% of the price of that sale. It doesn't cost you anything (so don't worry), but as a result I've been able to accumulate a fair amount of credit with amazon.com to further add to my bookshelves. In fact, I was able to acquire Carnivorous Nights, Schaller's classic The Serengeti Lion, and (a true bargain) a 1st edition copy of Francis…

Squid brain ties

these are pretty freaking cool. Someone should buy me one!

Leave John Alone!

Cpt. J.S. McCain III has come under a lot of unwarranted criticism recently. May I say, first of all, that I respect and honour McCain's service to the USA, its air force, and the Douglas Aircraft Company. Two of McCain's recent responses to questions have come under extensive criticism, particularly on the intertoobs: 1) that he was unable to remember, precisely, how many houses he and his wife happened to own at that precise moment, and; 2) that to be considered "rich", rather than middle class, required an income of order $5 million per year. These responses are much misunderstood, and I'…

Soft Equals Death

As noted many times, FutureBaby is due in July, which means we're at the point in the process where we need to start acquiring, or at least registering for, Stuff. Of which there is a frightening amount. Kate's big on consumer research, so we picked up the Baby Bargains book that several people recommended (this being 2008, they also have a blog), and Kate has been going through it carefully. I'm more happy-go-lucky than she is, so I've been a little more casual about it, just reading the chapter-opening lists of essential information, and not the reviews of specific products. I have to say,…

Ravlunda Cemetery Rebuttal

In 2009, geologist Nils Axel Mörner and Bob G. Lind (and a distinguished third author who was not consulted about having his name on the publication) had a paper published in Geografiska Annaler about the Ravlunda 169 cemetery. This was an outcome of the pair's unauthorised digging at the site in 2007. The paper is a mess and shouldn't have been accepted. Tellingly, the topic is archaeology and quaternary geology, while none of the authors is an archaeologist and the journal is about geography. Now Alun Salt and I have replied to Mörner & Lind's paper, also in Geografiska Annaler. At…

NASA Astrobiology Roadmap 5: Planetary Conditions for Life

The final session in the online discussion of the NASA Astrobiology Roadmap is today from 4-5 pm eastern. Go to Astrobiology Future to sign in to the live web chat. Questions and comments will be taken both from call-ins and from written questions. The online discussion will be moderated by Dr Francis McCubbin from UNM, Dr Sean Raymond from Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux, and yours truly... The live session will, as with the other Roadmap sessions, be followed by a week long opportunity to input questions, ideas and topics for discussion at The Astrobiology Future Forum. The four…

More Aussie astroturf

The Australian Environmental Foundation is a brand new environmental organization. Unfortunately they have chosen a very similar name to the long established Australian Conservation Foundation, so similar that the ACF has sued for trademark infringement. Probably the best way to keep them apart is to remember that the Australian Conservation Foundation is a grass roots organization with a goal of preserving forests, while the Australian Environmental Foundation is an astroturf organization with a goal of preserving logging companies. The AEF's spokesperson is Kersten Gentle, Victorian State…

Shelley in Newsweek

Newsweek has a story online today about a passage, in a book published by Wiley, that was recently discovered to have been plagiarized (D'oh!) from Wikipedia. Fellow ScienceBlogger Shelley of Retrospectacle gets a mention, though, for her run-in with Wiley earlier this year over her inclusion of a few figures from a Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture article in a blog post... a post that just so happened to be slightly critical of the article's press release. From Newsweek: In an ironic wrinkle, this isn't Wiley's first embarrassing encounter with new media. In April, Shelley…

Remembrances of books past

Our university library is having a book sale today, one of those unfortunate but necessary events where they purge old or duplicate items from the collections to make room for new books, and I had to make a quick browse. What did I discover but an old children's book that startled me with fearful and powerful remembrances — this is a book that I checked out from the Kent Public Library when I was ten years old. That's the Golden Guide to Mammals by Herbert S. Zim and Donald F. Hoffmeister, copyright 1955. It features "218 ANIMALS IN FULL COLOR", with maps of their distribution and short…

Medicine 2.0 Carnival: Web 2.0 technologies and the practice of medicine

This month's edition of Medicine 2.0 focuses on connections. You'll learn how new technologies are empowering patients by connecting them with their own health records, connecting patients and paramedics with doctors, and connecting doctors with each other. Nothing connects like Web 2.0. Let's hit the Midway! Many submissions to this carnival certainly captured the carnival spirit. I had just become resigned to the notion of scouring the internet myself, looking for posts that would fit today's collection, when a couple of days ago, I was inundated with email submissions. Great! I thought,…

Paralysis from chiropractic session

My blog posts seem to run in themes - sort of like when after you buy a car, you see other people driving that model all over the place. Yesterday we posted about homicide charges being leveled against an unlicensed California chiropractor operating a clinic out of his garage. That post garnered a large number of hits from a related story in the Canadian National Post, where our blog was linked under "More from the Web." An Alberta woman has launched a $529-million class-action lawsuit against provincial chiropractors after a neck adjustment allegedly left her paralyzed. Sandra Gay Nette, of…

DIY for mad scientists

19th century anatomical study cabinet #1 Alex cf, 2008 The undisputed modern master of the horrifying cryptozoological specimen is Alex cf, bane of vampires and cthulhu spawn. Unfortunately, there's an immense demand for his work, and he isn't very prolific. So how's a girl to fill her curiosity cabinet - especially with Halloween right around the corner? Luckily, Repository For Bottled Monsters turned up a great DIY project: how to bottle your own mad-scientist monstrosities. Check out these jars, created using inexpensive plastic toys from the dollar store: from imakeprojects.com These…

Waltzing Matilda - why were the three Australian dinosaurs published in PLoS ONE?

As I was traveling, I only briefly mentioned the brand new and exciting paleontology paper in PLoS ONE - New Mid-Cretaceous (Latest Albian) Dinosaurs from Winton, Queensland, Australia that was published on Thursday. Bex has written an introduction and will post a Media/Blog coverage (of which there was a lot!) summary probably tomorrow. The fossils were discovered, cleaned and analyzed by the Australian Age Of Dinosaurs non-profit organization, with a help of thousands of volunteers - the 'citizen scientists'. You can learn more from their press release. The importance of the publication of…

#scio10 aftermath: my tweets from "Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Session: Engaging underrepresented groups in online science media".

Session description: The conference timing may keep some attendees away in their hometowns participating in local MLK activities. Therefore, we are introducing a session to promote the principles of Dr King in the context of online science communication: promoting social justice and eliminating racism in areas ranging from healthcare to scientific career paths. We plan to take a different angle from the blogging about gender/race session: how do we cultivate emerging science writers from underrepresented groups to promote science, for example, in areas of health disparities (i.e., diabetes,…

Food Prices Are a Result of Speculation, Not Shortages

Unless a shortage is defined by a 0.1% decrease. Paul Krugman, with whom I often agree, has been crying hither and yon that rising food prices are a result of food shortages and not market speculation. This hasn't made much sense to me. First of all, we saw similar spikes in agriculture futures prices in 2006 that were clearly the result of financial speculation. First of all, as Alice Cook notes, we're producing historical high levels of wheat: Curse those stupid fucking natural history facts! But there is a predicted decrease in supply of about five percent. Cook argues that this…

The Fisherman and the MBA

Via my father I came across this anonymously authored modern day parable, which I think is a good analogue for the economic growth vs sustainability argument: An American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied "only a little while". The American then asked why didn't he stay out longer and catch more fish. The Mexican said he had…

Critical thinking in video games

Another fluff post. Again, I apologize, but I think I whupted todays test, so I dont feel bad :P During tests weeks like this, I love to take study breaks by playing video games. Not 'WoW' games that end up distracting you more than relaxing you-- Im one of those 'alternative' gamers that has benefited from the third revolution in gaming. I luv brain games. Ive always loved the 'Zelda' series, but now there is a whole new group of 'brain games'-- 'Brain Age', 'Big Brain Academy', and the like. Theyre nice because they are a 'break', but Im not shutting my brain off entirely or…

Friday Grey Matters: Mexico Disregards Illegal Parrot Trade

Mexico has a lot of problems on its hands: pollution, emigration, drugs, poverty, pollution, to name a few. But Mexico also plays host to many endangered species and habitats, providing a very dangerous home to the animals lucky enough to live there. And these endangered animals, including rare parrots, have price tags: what they can fetch at market. At the Sonora Market, a bustling bazaar, traders illegally sell animals alongside exotic herbs and folk cures in the heart of Mexico City's often lawless center. Inside its labyrinthine corridors, conservationist Juan Carlos Cantu shudders as a…

Donors Choose: kids need us, with or without cheap theatrics

Update: you guys finished funding one of the projects below, which is incredibly generous.  I'm a big fan of micro-donations, so feel free to kick a buck or two into another project! --PalMD OK, you guys have been great. We've funded eight projects in needy Michigan schools, reaching 630 kids---and many of the projects are multi-year so even more kids will be reached. But from a strictly selfish viewpoint, I want more. One of my favorite bloggy friends, Dr. Isis, has brought out the big guns. She is offering to much public self-humiliation to encourage extra giving. I've got nothing on…

Product Warranties

Don't ever buy them. Ever. Each year, millions of people gladly pay an additional 10 to 50 percent of a product's original price to extend a warranty. These snap purchases help fuel a booming, $15 billion-a-year business and feed a lucrative profit stream for retailers that sell the warranties and companies that underwrite them. Many consumers do so because they say the plans provide them with peace of mind. The decision to buy an extended warranty defies the recommendations of economists, consumer advocates and product quality experts, who all warn that the plans rarely benefit consumers…

Wolverine vs Donald Duck

I'd totally pay good money to see that. Disney to buy Marvel

Deep thought

The UAW should buy GM and turn it into a worker-owned cooperative.

One last reminder...

...that I and a bunch of other ScienceBloggers will be at the following location from 2-4 PM today: Details: 2pm-4pm on Saturday, August 9 Social 795 8th Ave (close to 49th St.) New York, NY 10019 A couple of warnings: Point one: I'm a lot more boring and unassuming in person than I am on the blog. Really. Just ask my family and friends. As PZ would say, I don't breath fire or eviscerate alt-med mavens. If you're expecting the same level of scintillating (or not-so-scintillating) wit seen here, you're likely to be disappointed. Fortunately, my fellow ScienceBloggers will more than take up the…

The Endowment Effect

Here's a post from last summer*: I went jean shopping this weekend. Actually, I went to the mall to return a t-shirt but ended buying a pair of expensive denim pants. What happened? I made the mistake of entering the fitting room. And then the endowment effect hijacked my brain. Let me explain. The endowment effect is a well studied by-product of loss aversion, which is the fact that losing something hurts a disproportionate amount. (In other words, a loss hurts more than a gain feels good.) First diagnosed by Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman, the endowment effect stipulates that once…

People collect the weirdest things....

From paper airplanes to IBM Typewriters, from cold war calculators to cereal boxes, from condoms to condiments, and many, many more strange collections, all found at the Museum of Online Museums, thanks to Anne-Marie.

What Survives from 2013's Blogging?

Continuing the weekend theme of meta-blogging, one of the questions I've occasionally wondered about in doing top-posts lists for a given year is the problem of a bias against recency-- that is, that posts put up toward the end of the year are inherently at a disadvantage because they've had less time to integrate up the slow trickle of traffic that every page on the Internet gets. Obviously, this isn't a question that can be answered by data from 2014, but I have access to traffic stats back to mid-2012, so I can look at data for 2013. So, these are the top posts I put up in 2013 in terms of…

If newspapers die, investigative reporting will die as well. Really?

Timothy Burke: Journalism, Civil Society and 21st Century Reportage: As the failure of many newspapers looms and public radio cuts its journalistic offerings, the complaint against new media by established journalists gets sharper and sharper. The key rallying cry is that new media can't provide investigative reporting, that it can only piggyback on the work of the mainstream print and radio media, and that when the newspapers go, there goes investigative work and all the civic value it provided. As a starting point in a conversation about the future, this complaint is much more promising…

The Right Room for a Dialogue: New Policy on Anonymous Comments

I've long questioned the value of anonymous blogging or commenting. Much of the incivility online can be attributed to anonymity. And with a rare few exceptions, if you can't participate in a dialogue about issues without using your full name and true identity, then what you have to say is probably not that valuable. These long standing thoughts were called to mind again after reading a post by Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth. Quoting as the subject to his post a line from Monty Python "is this the right room for an argument?," Revkin writes: Michael Palin asked that question nearly 40 years…