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Things that are effective but dangerous (in our quest for science literacy)

So, as mentioned previously, I got the chance to hang out with Chris Mooney this past week, and gracious as he is, he also took time to meet and greet a few of the local gang of science scouts. Anyway, his visit was great as a number of interesting topics were broached both in casual conservation as well as the public panels that he was involved in. A big theme that seemed to be reoccuring was the issue of public relations, branding, and the role of overall aesthetics in getting folks to notice things - um big things like the issue of global warming or general scientific literacy for…

You Probably Shouldn't Buy This Laser

The laser pointer, much beloved of PowerPoint lecturers, cat owners, amateur scientists, and middle school boys at movie theaters, is actually a pretty amazing device. There's quite a bit you can do with a relatively cheap laser, and they're just plain fun. They're also relatively safe. The red pointers are usually Class 2 and the green ones are usualy class 3R. Class 2 lasers are very difficult to hurt yourself with, and while Class 3R lasers can cause eye injury, in general brief exposures are unlikely to cause permanant damage. There's two higher classifications for lasers: 3B and 4. Class…

Mortality in Eating Disorders NOS

This post is about a journal article that describes mortality rates in populations of persons with eating disorders.  It is sort of about that.  The article is in the APA green journal, which is not openly accessible.  Only the abstract is free.  Usually I don't write about closed-access articles.  But this is different, because I am not going to do a traditional post about a peer-reviewed article.  You don't need to have access to the whole article to get the point. href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/166/12/1342">Increased Mortality in Bulimia Nervosa and Other…

Rime of the Ancient Parasite

Biologists these days can paint many different portraits of the same organism. They can follow the tried and true style of Aristotle and paint with a broad brush, describing what they can see with the naked eye--number of legs, color of hair, live young or eggs. Or they can paint a creature at the cellular level--the twist and turns of collagen fibers in a horse hoof or the poison-producing organelles of a rattlesnake. In the past few years a new kind of portrait has been hung in the biological museum: a portrait of the genome. In the thousands or millions of DNA base pairs, genomes can…

Technology and Genealogy

What makes you a member of family, or a citizen of a nation? Over at Sciencewoman, Alice reports on a session she attended at this year's NWSA conference: In a session on the technologies of citizenship, Banu Submramaniam of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst talked about the developing practice of doing DNA maps to understand your heritage, and then linked into a discussion about how caste is argued by some activists as analogous to race, and then DNA scientists go in to study caste with no sociological or historical theorization of what it means. It's all very interesting to me,…

DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2008: fund classroom proposals, help kids.

It's October, which means ScienceBlogs bloggers are, once again, participating in the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge. The idea behind the drive is simple: we're appealing to you, our readers, to help public school teachers across the U.S. fund proposals for classroom supplies, activities, and field trips. As I wrote at the start of our very first drive in 2006: Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth understanding. If you're reading the blogs here, chances are you feel the same way. A lot of us fell in love with science because of early…

Patents Patently Absurd: The End of Innovation in Education Will Come at the Hands of The Corporate Business Model

I've been avoiding discussion of the patent issue. This is partly because I don't know enough about it, and partly because I am terribly annoyed by it. Yes, yes, I blog about stuff that annoys me all the time, but these are topics that I'm professionally engaged in, so the annoyance is not personally as troubling. The basic idea is this: The US patent office has apparently gone nuts, or is being well paid off, and is accepting or approving patents on things that really should not be patented. The result is that a corporation with lots of money can patent something, and the next day sue…

Why should Catholicism be a prerequisite for speaking science?

I just received my copy of the latest Seed, and although I feel a bit reluctant to say it because it may be interpreted as sucking up to the corporate masters who provide my bandwidth, it really is a very good science magazine—I'd be subscribing even if they weren't sending it to me for free. Take a browse through it sometime, there's a lot of the content available online. Anyway, of course the first thing I turn to in the magazine is Chris Mooney's article on Learning to speak science. It's good and has some productive suggestions, and I agree with Mooney on 90% of what he says in it, but… (…

Eight Things to Hate about Me

I'm fucking sick of blog memes. Not only do I find online surveys totally lame, I also never get tagged. Boohoo, nobody likes me. Now, John Logsdon orders me to tell you eight things about me. I'm only doing this 'cause we had dinner together last week. Here are the rules: We have to post these rules before we give you the facts. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don't forget…

The Benefits of Seawater

Hope over at Benefits of Seawater suggests my original debunking of Original Quinton Marine Plasma was not "logical". First, who is 'Hope'? She is a freelance writer who is paid by Quinton to generate an internet buzz. Just started up two blogs for a new client on the benefits of seawater. They're meant to promote the client's product by spreading internet awareness as it were. If you want to check up on the blogs and see how they are doing. You can visit the Benefits of Seawater and All About Seawater Therapy. If this works out it will also be a regular gig, Yay!, which can…

Tradeoffs

I'd like to tell you a story about a routine of modern life that is really bad for your brain. Everybody performs this activity - sometimes multiple times a day! - and yet we rarely realize the consequences. In 2008, scientists at the University of Michigan did a very clever study illuminating how this activity led to dramatic decreases in working memory, self-control, visual attention and positive affect. Other studies have demonstrated that people who are less exposed to this activity show enhanced brain function. They are better able to focus and even recover more quickly in hospitals.…

Borges Was A Neuroscientist

The neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga has written a lovely appreciation of Jorge Luis Borges in the latest Nature (not online). Quiroga focuses on Borges interest in neuroscience, which led him to write his classic short story Funes the Memorious, about a man who cannot forget: In the story of Funes, Borges described very precisely the problems of distorted memory capacities well before neuroscience caught up...In a study using electrodes to probe the hippocampus in epileptic patients for clinical reasons, we identified a type of neuron that fires in response to particular abstract…

Quoth Mark Blaxill: "Science is funny" when it comes to mercury in vaccines and autism

I must admit that, after having taken it easy over the last few days, when the time came to sit down and get back into the swing of things, I had a bit of a hard time. No, it's not just blogging. That's actually a rather minor component of the whole malaise that descended upon me like a shroud. Rather, it's the simple fact that the Labor Day weekend in the U.S. represents the unofficial end of the summer season. After that, it's all back to school, back to work, back to the grind. Back to real life after summer. This reluctance, not surprisingly, seeped out of real life and started to permeat…

Reinventing the Informal Economy

As I gear up to finish my Adapting-in-Place book, I've been thinking a lot about the role of the informal economy in supporting a culture that can't keep growing and consuming resources at the same rate. As those of you who have been following my work for a while know, the informal economy represents the larger portion of the world economy (3/4 of all economic activity) and includes a wide range of important activities. When the formal economy fails, the informal economy is needed - and yet we have stripped the informal economy over the last decades. How to rebuild is a huge question - and…

True "individualization" of cancer therapy

One major point I've tried to make over the last few years is that the so-called "individualization" or "personalization" of treatments claimed by practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) is not "individualization" at all, but rather a sham that appears superficially like individualization but in reality is not. I say that because the "individualization" promoted by CAM practitioners is not based on science and clinical trials. Another point I've been trying to make is that the true "individualization" of treatments will require science, and it will not be easy. In fact…

Immediate reconstruction after breast cancer: A most disturbing study

I realize that being in academic medicine at a tertiary care center often produces the "ivory tower" syndrome, but occasionally it is brought home to me that the way we practice surgery here often differs considerably from how surgery is practiced "in the trenches." This time around, it was a study about how often surgeons referred women whose breast cancers are large enough to require a mastectomy to treat to plastic surgeons for a discussion of reconstruction options prior to the mastectomy. The answer was: Not nearly often enough. See for yourself: ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Forty-four percent of…

Worldview Weekend's Bad 14th Amendment Scholarship

I've mentioned before being on the Worldview Weekend mailing list. This is basically a group of religious right types who meet, appropriately, in Branson fairly regularly. They send me a list of articles on their website every week and it's typically a source of much amusement. No group that features the deep thoughts of Kirk Cameron can possibly fail to entertain. My favorite of the new batch is this essay by Steven Voight on the 14th amendment, wherein he promises to reveal "startling" research that will overturn "decades of legal assumptions" about the doctrine of incorporation. If only…

A patient you won't hear about from Stanislaw Burzynski or his apologists

It's been a while since I mentioned Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski, the Houston doctor who has somehow managed over the last thirty-plus years to treat cancer patients with something he calls "antineoplastons" without ever actually producing strong evidence that they actually cure patients, increase the chances of long-term survival, or even improve disease-free progression. Although there was a tiny bit of prior plausibility behind the concept--albeit only very tiny--back in the 1980s, the relentless drip, drip, drip of negative evidence, coupled with Burzynski's failure to advance his therapy…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: The Color of Woo, revisited

Ah, yes, Washington, DC. That's where I am right now, deep in the belly of the government beast, attending the meeting of The Society of Surgical Oncology. It's usually a great meeting, except for the distressing tendency of surgeons here to act, well, too much like surgeons. For example, consider when the very first session today, which happened to be about my area of interest breast cancer, started. Was it 8 AM? No. 7 AM? No. It was 6 AM. I kid you not. 6 AM in the freakin' morning! The week after the switchover to Daylight Savings Time, yet! There was a time when I used to actually get up…

How Not to Freeze: Living Without Heat

Note: This is a revised version of an article I wrote for ye olde blogge about how to keep warm if you need to. Despite the fact that I believe people should use a lot less energy, I am not proposing here that people in cold climates go cold turkey on supplemental heating ;-). This post is, instead, about *how to survive* if you find yourself without heating fuel in a cold climate. Why do you need to know this? Because it happens, and more often than you think. How could it happen? Well, you could live in a place that requires minimal supplemental heat, and have a sudden, unusual cold…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - the submissions so far

Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 240 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You can buy the 2006, 2007 and 2008 editions at Lulu.com. Please use the submission form to add more of your and other people's posts (remember that we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics, as well as essays): Here are the submissions for OpenLab 2009 to date. As we have surpassed 240 entries, all of them, as well as the "submit" buttons and codes and the bookmarklet, are under the fold. You…

Made for Each Other: Evolution of Monogamy in Poison Frogs

tags: evolution, evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, animal behavior, molecular ecology, parental care, mating systems, monogamy, sexual selection, frogs, poison dart frogs, Dendrobatidae, Ranitomeya, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper, journal club Peruvian mimic poison frog, Ranitomeya imitator. Image: Jason Brown [larger view] To know the breeding system is to know the genetic architecture of a species. To know the evolution of a breeding system is to know how evolution works .. ~ Lewis & Crowe, Evolution (1955) Genetic tests have revealed the…

A paper about spread of bird flu. I think.

Let me apologize in advance. This is a bit of a rant about scientific writing. It didn't start out that way, but as I hit the keyboard, Satan took control. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, or "penis" in the trade) is said to be reporting that bird flu comes from southern China (Wallace et al., "A statistical phylogeogrpahy of influenza A H5N1," PNAS, March 13, 2007, 104:4473-4478). We already knew that. So what's new? That's a bit harder to say. Here's the lede (i.e., the opening lines of a news story) from the Agence France Presse news agency: US…

KITP: Imaging and Microlensing

Next we review microlensing surveys for planets and then direct imaging surveys. Scott Gaudi up first on microlensing. Interesting statistics on preponderance of solar like planetary systems. Hints of free floating planets seen. Paul Kalas on direct detections. Also Graham and Kadsin. Plus bonus "structure of giant planets" review at the end. Microlensing: Rapid fire overview and list of surveys. If you want a summary of what it is and who is doing it, read the opening slides. Get statistics of planets in otherwise inaccessible mass-orbit parameter space, but no or limited followup for most…

2007: The Year in Ants

This week the blogosphere is busy recapping 2007 with lists of top stories in politics, news, and celebrity haircuts. In all the hoopla surrounding year's end, somehow everyone seems to have forgotten the ants, even though the, um, fast-paced world of Myrmecology has made plenty of discoveries this year. In no particular order, here is my list of the most significant advances in Ant Science from 2007. Argentine ants and Fire ants- two of the world's worst invasive species- keep each other in check in their common native range. The perennial mystery of invasive ants is why they are so…

The News Mis-Shaping and Distorting My World

"Graduating from an Ivy League university doesn't necessarily mean you're smart." Lakehead University in northern Ontario set up www.yaleshmale.com in a bid to attract potential new students. It shows a picture of Yale graduate Mr Bush with the caption: "Graduating from an Ivy League university doesn't necessarily mean you're smart." "It was literally a tongue-in-cheek way of getting attention," university president and vice-chancellor Frederick Gilbert told Reuters news agency. The website had received more than 7,000 hits, he said on Monday, and online comments had been 95% positive.…

The Future of Cell Biology - Part I - Organellar Shape

OK this is an attempt to revive the blog. This entry is inspired by a talk given about a month ago by my mentor, Tom Rapoport. I hope that it will be the first of a series of posts where I ramble on about what we don't know. In each post I'll discuss a topic that remains mysterious. I'll try to point out what we don't fully comprehend and add my two cents. Today's topic will be organelle shape. Look inside any eukaryotic cell and you'll lots of little membranous organelles whizzing around. These membranous structures play crucial roles in various cellular activities. Very often their shape…

#scio10 aftermath: collecting my tweets from the conference sessions.

Last night I arrived home safely from ScienceOnline2010. As expected, the conference was tremendously engaging and useful, as well as being a rollicking good time -- so much so that the only blog post I managed to post while there was the Friday Sprog Blog. (Major props to the elder Free-Ride offspring for taking notes from our conversation and letting me bring them with me.) However, as some others have noted (for example, drdrA), I did manage to maintain an online presence by "Tweeting" my real-time notes from the conference sessions I attended. And, as a step toward blogging something…

In which Joe Jackson's wisdom about cancer is apparently not validated

Everything Everything gives you cancer Everything Everything gives you cancer There’s no cure, there’s no answer Everything gives you cancer - Joe Jackson I don't write about nutrition as much as other topics because I'm not as knowledgeable about it as I am about, say, cancer, vaccines, and what constitutes good medical evidence. (I am, however, trying to become more knowledgeable.) Even so, I was thinking. After my post a week ago in which über-quack Joe Mercola unexpectedly gave a glowing introduction to a paean of praise for bacon and my post yesterday in which a credulous fellow by the…

How hard is it to clean up the scientific literature?

Science is supposed to be a project centered on building a body of reliable knowledge about the universe and how various pieces of it work. This means that the researchers contributing to this body of knowledge -- for example, by submitting manuscripts to peer reviewed scientific journals -- are supposed to be honest and accurate in what they report. They are not supposed to make up their data, or adjust it to fit the conclusion they were hoping the data would support. Without this commitment, science turns into creative writing with more graphs and less character development. Because the…

Syria, Water, Climate Change, and Violent Conflict

There is a long history of conflicts over water – the Pacific Institute maintains an online, searchable chronology of such conflicts going back 5,000 years. There were dozens of new examples in 2012, in countries from Latin America to Africa to Asia.  (A full update for 2012 has been posted.) Access to water and the control of water systems have been causes of conflict, weapons have been used during conflicts, and water systems have been the targets of conflict. One especially disturbing example of a major conflict, with complicated but direct connections to water, has developed over the past…

Fighting HIV---the boring version

The fight against HIV occurs on several different levels: prevention of transmission and acquisition, treatment of the infection, and prevention and treatment of opportunistic illnesses. Prevention has been addressed extensively (and perhaps will be again later), and opportunistic illnesses is a huge topic, so first I'll delve a bit into the origins and biology of the treatment of HIV infection (and of course the usual caveat; this is grossly oversimplified, and Abbie has a whole lot of good, ungrammatical science over at her place). For better or worse, this requires another short biology…

New Judge Jones Interview

There is a new interview with Judge Jones in the July/August edition of the Pennsylvania Lawyer. The article is not available online, but I wanted to share some of the more interesting bits. As he did at the close of the trial and many times since, he offered a great deal of praise to the attorneys, particularly from the plaintiffs team: In this case, however, it wasn't simply a matter of everyone just doing their jobs. In Jones' view, the lawyers performed exceedingly well. "I think that some of the cross-examination was absolutely fabulous," said Jones. "It will endure, and I think it will…

How Good is Your Theory? Open Thread I

He was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher... or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. -Douglas Adams When I started writing about science online in January of 2008, I put the word out that I would accept questions from my readers. After all, I knew that there was a lot of misinformation out there, as well as the more insidious "technically correct but misleading" information about science. In particular, I want to get the actual information that we know out there. As far as what I can contribute, I'm confident that I can add an expert voice for my specialties (physics, astronomy…

DonorsChoose Payoff: Homework vs. Google

An anonymous donor cashes in a $30 donation to ask: Homework solutions from intro physics through grad school physics are available online, and while working through Jackson and Goldstein problems can be miserable without some guidance, the temptation is there to plagiarize. When you teach, do you use book-problems or write your own? Do you trust that those who are really interested in the subject will do the right thing and slog through homework like thousands before them? An excellent question. Homework is really a vexing issue. There's no way to really learn physics without doing…

MacDonald on Haught

As I noted in yesterday's post, John Haught has relented and has allowed the video of his appearance with Jerry Coyne to be posted online. I am pleased that he ultimately decided to do the right thing. Having now had a chance to watch the two presentations, let me say that I stand by my speculation, from yesterday's post, regarding what happened: I picture Jerry making his points calmly but forcefully, and I picture Haught not really saying much of anything. I had intended to go through Haught's talk carefully and explain, point by point, why I think his argument does not hold up at all…

Bremner Emory UPDATE: Academic institutional policies on online and social media communications

Addendum published 14 July 2009 - I began this post in the spirit of revisiting the recent case of Emory University professor of psychiatry and radiology, Dr Douglas Bremner, who write the blog (and authored the book) Before You Take That Pill. Inside Higher Ed has the story behind the request by university administration for Bremner to remove from the blog his academic affiliation after publishing a satirical but serious post on the need for a bipolar patient to continue smoking in his residence. One may also care to note that Dr Bremner is critical of the pharmaceutical industry and Emory…

The Mathematics of Reddit Rankings, or, How Upvotes Are Time Travel

Ok, so this isn't really physics as such, but it's pretty fascinating. There's a very large online community called Reddit in which users submit links which interest them. These links come with two little arrows beside them, and the users can vote the link up or down. Here's a screenshot of how the website looks to me at the time of this writing: As I visit on different days or on different times on the same day, the links and their order changes. This keeps the site fresh and news-y, at least if you like your news full of cat memes. It's pretty clear that the ordering of these links is both…

EPA Official Fired Over Dow Chemical Dispute

Last year we posted a notice of the highest measurement of dioxin ever recorded by the EPA. The reading was from the Tittabawassee River in Michigan, downstream from Dow Chemical's headquarters in Midland and on its way to Lake Huron (see map below). Michigan state safe levels are set at 90 ppt. The EPA standard is 1000 ppt. A hot spot reading on the river clocked in at 1.6 million ppt. Last week, the Bush Administration forced out a senior EPA official who was pushing Dow to clean it up. I'd noticed the story last year of the EPA measurements in a news link on-line. It spurred this…

Gullible Gunners, part 3

Back in March I wrote about the way pro-gun bloggers leapt to the conclusion that self-defence in the UK was illegal, based on story about a man who defended himself against some robbers with a sword, killed one and ended up being jailed for eight years. Unfortunately, the story left out the fact that the killing was not in self-defence since the killer had stabbed the robber in the back after he fled from the killer's home. In the comments to that post and this follow-up post, Kevin Baker argued that restrictions on weapons in the UK made it essentially impossible to defend yourself. Now…

Intelligence, Cancer, and Eyjafjallajökull

This seems to have become unofficial volcano week, here at ScienceBlogs. If you haven't been following the coverage of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption at Erik Klemetti's Eruptions blog, you should consider doing so. Also, Dr. Isis has a post on how the eruption has fouled up all nuclear imaging plans at her place of research, and Ethan explains how volcanic lightening works. Our benevolent overlords have further commented: "Eyjafjallajökull's ill temper has been an unexpected object lesson in the complexity and interconnectedness of our environment, technology, and social networks." To that I…

Monday Links

I haven't done this in a while: Below the fold you'll find links to an interview with Alan Parker editor of Nature Genetics, Boltzmann and entropy, Big Biology, Tanzanian society (as seen through a medstudent from the west) and a note on affirmative action. Hsien Hsien Lei of Genetics and Health interviews Alan Parker, editor of Nature Genetics. Here's an excerpt (re:open access): As for Nature, my guess is that it will remain a 'reader pays' journal for the foreseeable future. The primary reason is that it costs a great deal of money to produce. One thing that may not be apparent from the…

My Super Tuesday predictions

Originally written last night, but I forgot to post it. Honest: On the Republican side, I'd like to see Romney do well, but he won't. McCain will win a bunch of big states, and because Republican primaries tend to be winner-take-all, he'll sew up the nomination. On the Democratic side, no one will clinch anything. The Democratic primaries and caucuses tend to allocate delegates at small geographical units, so the split will be close to 50-50. Brian Schaffner breaks down the delegates according to results from recent polls, and bears that prediction out, with Obama just 80 delegates behind…

Plagiarism is bad.

My students know that plagiarism is bad. You'd think a major wire service would know it, too. But it would seem that maybe the Associated Press doesn't know that failing to properly cite sources is plagiarism. Or perhaps the AP does know, but doesn't care. When your business is built on the premise that you are a reliable source of information, it seems to me that this is a very bad strategy. Over at Huffington Post, Larissa Alexandrovna relates the details. She did painstaking legwork to put together a story about changes to the U.S. guidelines about who gets access to classified…

Jared Loughner comes into focus, still fuzzy

Eve Conant and Claire Martin dig into Jared Loughner's background, trying to explain his mass murder. I think the first half the piece is weak, alas, but the second half is dynamite. The first builds on interviews with his neighbors, who say that the 22 year-old liked to walk the streets in a hoodie with his earbuds in, and didn't respond to greetings. That could be a sign of mental illness, I suppose, or it could mean he's a disaffected 22 year-old guy who lives with his parents and isn't happy about it. If we rounded up all the guys or gals who wear hoodies and listen to iPods, we'd…

The Asymmetric Advantage of Bullsh-t

Julian Sanchez, writing about global warming, makes an excellent point about how denialists are able to be so successful (italics original; boldtype mine): Come to think of it, there's a certain class of rhetoric I'm going to call the "one way hash" argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. A one-way hash is a kind of "fingerprint" for messages based on the same mathematical idea: It's really…

College and university presidents tweeting

...Or not? Not surprisingly, one of my professional interests is the use of Twitter and other social networks/media in higher education. And not just for educational/classroom purposes but also for outreach. In other words, people who work at a college or university using Twitter in an official capacity to reach out to other people outside their organization. Of course, this applies to using Twitter to recruit students, to reach out to parents, to connect to similar external departments or organizations. It also applies to outreach within an organization. For example, we use twitter at my…

Friday Fun: Celebrating Buffy the Vampire Slayer at 20

OK, I admit, Friday Fun a few days late... In any case, last Friday marked the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yes, March 10, 1997 marked the very first episode of one of the greatest TV shows of all time, and certainly my personal favourite. Although I didn't start watching until the mid-2000s (I had two young kids in 1997 and was not watching much TV. We heard a lot about how great it was, but weren't in any space to be adding new shows to what little we were watching), once I did start with the DVDs, I was hooked. I've watched the whole thing through twice and…

Put Your Musical Talent To The Test! Enter The Festival Songwriting Contest!

We're challenging musicians around the world to create a song for the 2nd USA Science & Engineering Festival and all entries are due by November 30, 2011. We are looking for a song that captures the spirit of curiosity, innovation and discovery that the Festival is all about, gets people excited about science and is so memorable that people can't stop singing it! Over 100 individuals entered the inaugural USA Science and Engineering Festival jingle competition and the winner was Ryan Miyakawa and his song "Come and Play at the USA Science & Engineering Festival." Click here to hear…

Miracle at OSHA

When we started Effect Measure almost four and half years ago, there were few public health oriented blogs. One notable exception -- and an exceptional exception it was -- was blogger Jordan Barab's Confined Space. It wasn't just a health and safety blog. It was the health and safety blog. It was almost the only way most health and safety professionals could keep track of what was happening in their field politically. When we started this blog Jordan had been blogging daily for about 18 months, and we met for coffee. Neither of us expected my blog would outlast his, but a couple of years ago…