Search Content

Displaying results 9851 - 9900 of 87950

Tales From the Front Lines in The Animal Research War

The Animal Research War by P. Michael Conn and James V. Parker Palgrave Macmillan: 2008, 224 pages. Buy now! (Amazon) In a dark room, buried in a nondescript building somewhere in London, an orderly array of new trainees sits silently, listening intently as a senior police official delivers a security briefing. Clicking through slide after slide of photos of activists, extremists, and terrorists, the official carefully explains who each person is, what organization(s) he or she is associated with, and what level of threat that person poses. All of this would probably look like business as…

The Power of Coal Is as Evident as Ever in Jeff Goodell's Big Coal

Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future by Jeff Goodell Houghton Mifflin: 2006. 352 pages. Buy now! (Amazon) Coal tends to inspire a few common images in our collective minds. Grizzled and hardened miners, working in deep, dark underground tunnels, piece by piece haul out the black feed needed to power the oversized, dirty, rumbling machines spewing out their noxious waste through tall smokestacks. In the process, these beasts power the rise of the world's up and coming superpower, the US. Dirty. Dangerous. Imprecise. Big.... Old school. In the Twenty-First Century…

The 1970s Ice Age Myth and Time Magazine Covers - by David Kirtley

This is a guest post by David Kirtley. David originally posted this as a Google Doc, and I'm reproducing his work here with his permission. Just the other day I was speaking to a climate change skeptic who made mention of an old Time or Newsweek (he was not sure) article that talked about fears of a coming ice age. There were in fact a number of articles back in the 1970s that discussed the whole Ice Age problem, and I'm not sure what my friend was referring to. But here, David Kirtley places a recent meme that seems to be an attempt to diffuse concern about global warming because we…

Perspectives on Biofuels

A friend and colleague of mine drives around in a cute little VW bug powered by biodiesel.  There's a peace sign on the front of it, which helps it get better mileage.  But peace sign or not, there has been an ongoing controversy about whether biofuels are worth anything. In this post, I provide a little amateur analysis of the whole topic of biofuels, and comment on the most recent study of the potential benefits. The controversy stems from the fact that it takes a lot of energy to plant, transport, harvest, and process the crops needed to produce biofuels.  Some analyses indicated that…

Cat-Blogging from Deep Time

As the proud owner of a fine cat, Tino, I'm happy to join the ritual of cat-blogging. I was inspired after reading a new study that sorts out Tino's kinship with other cats. Now I know that a cheetah is more closely related to Tino than it is to a leopard (right and left, respectively). The evolution of cats has been a tough nut to crack. While it's no great mental feat to tell the difference between Tino and a tiger, it's not so easy to figure out exactly which species are most closely related to domesticated cats and which are more distant relatives. The oldest cat-like fossils date…

The Evolution of the Modern Climate: New Evidence from Plant Remains

Things are just not like what they used to be. You know this. You know that the Age of Dinosaurs, for instance, was full of dinosaurs and stuff, and before transitional fossil forms crawled out of the sea to colonize the land, all animals were aquatic, etc. But did you know that from a purely modern perspective, the Miocene was the most important geological period? First, lets get one thing straight. We are not in the so-called "Holocene." The so-called "Holocene" is a totally bogus geological period. Saying "Hey, we're in the Holocene, not the Pleistocene ... the Pleistocene is over…

The grandmothers effect, paternal or maternal matters (?)

I've discussed menopause as an adaptation and the grandmother effect before. I was also pleased to see the responses of Larry Moran's readers when he presented his standard anti-adaptationist line of argument. I don't want to retread familiar ground here, I'm not sure if menopause is an adaptation, but let's assume so for the purposes of reviewing a new paper which has come out and offers a slight but fascinating twist on the grandmother hypothesis. Grandma plays favourites: X-chromosome relatedness and sex-specific childhood mortality: Biologists use genetic relatedness between family…

Electroacupuncture: The bait and switch of alternative medicine

At the risk of repeating myself (but, then, since when did such concerns ever stop me before?), I'll just start out by mentioning that, of all the non-herbal "alternative" medicine remedies out there, I used to give a bit of a pass to acupuncture. No, I never did buy any of that nonsense about how sticking thin needles into the skin at points along various "meridians" somehow "redirects the flow of qi," that mystical life force upon which so much woo, particularly woo based on Eastern mysticism and traditional Chinese medicine depends. However, because acupuncture involves an actual physical…

Hallo Auch aus Frankfurt am Main

A morning view of downtown Frankfurt am Main from the window of the building where I live in Frankfurt. You can also see a large passenger plane flying over the city. It is likely following the same flight path that my plane was on when I arrived on 20 November 2009. Image: GrrlScientist, 25 November 2009. This morning, I snapped the above image of downtown Frankfurt from the top floor window of the building where I live, whilst waiting for the elevator. Our flat does not have wireless yet, and likely won't have it until sometime around the 2nd of December. Of course, this has inspired…

The Nature paper on the 1918 virus and immune reaction

We've now had a chance to take a look at a new paper in Nature (advance online publication 27 September 2006 | doi:10.1038/nature05181) on increased host immune and cell death responses in mice infected with the reconstructed 1918 virus compared to other viruses with only some of the 1918 gene segments. It is a very interesting paper. The authors (Kash et al.) infected mice intranasally (through the nose) with four viruses, one a currently circulating human H1N1 virus, A/Texas/36/91, dubbed Tx91 for short, and three others, two produced by replacing first two of the eight gene segments of…

Young Innovators Appointed to Serve on Festival's Youth Advisory Board!

You could call them child or teen prodigies – wunderkinds, who at remarkable young ages have already begun making their mark upon science and technology as innovators and visionaries. The USA Science & Engineering Festival not only applauds such young achievers, but is recruiting some of the best of them to serve on its new Youth Advisory Board. The achievements of these recently-appointed board members will not only help us further excite, inspire and reach out to more students during Festival 2014, but will also call attention to the impressive cadre of young talent that is on the…

Say 'Hi' if you see him running - Interview with Dave Munger

Dave Munger is part of the numerous North Carolinian contingent here at Scienceblogs.com. He writes the Cognitive Daily blog and runs the ResearchBlogging.org blog aggregator. At the Science Blogging Conference two weeks ago, Dave led a session on Building interactivity into your blog. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your background? What is your Real Life job? Hi, I'm Dave Munger. My background is in writing, editing, and publishing. I've written several textbooks, most notably, Researching…

How to Read Scientific Papers Without Reading Every Word

Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton is surprised that people skim over boring bits of novels. While she explicitly excludes non-fiction from her discussion, this immediately made me think of Timothy Burke's How to Read in College, which offers tips to prospective humanities and social science majors on how to most effectively skim through huge reading assignments for the information that's really important. I've mentioned this before, but I don't think I've done a science version. I've been doing more reading of journal articles lately than I have in a while, though, and it occurs to me that similar…

Reed Elsevier caught copying my content without my permission.

Update: 13 Aug. I've added a new post that I think provides a clearer explanation for the reason that this sort of behavior is such an irritant when it comes from a company like Elsevier. Like most bloggers, I have an ego. I'm not mentioning that by way of apology, but as an explanation for why I was browsing through my sitemeter statistics last Friday. Every now and then, I head over to sitemeter, call up the view that lets me see what websites referred people to my page. If I see a link that's coming from a source I don't recognize, I browse over and look to see what people are saying…

South African Unions Prevent the Delivery of Arms to Unstable Zimbabwe

Now that the Chinese ship An Yue Jiang--which was delivering arms from China to Zimbabwe--has been turned away for good, there are two significant aspects of this story upon which we should reflect. The first is that the true heroes of this tale are the unionized dockworkers, who catalyzed this turn of events by their initial refusal to unload the cargo. The second is that there are deep political ties between Zimbabwe and China, which make this picture much less black and white than it would appear to be on the surface. It was reported on April 16 that a Chinese ship slated to dock in…

Bad news continues to accumulate for "pH Miracle Living" quack Robert O. Young

Last night was one of those nights where, for whatever reason, I ran out of steam. Whether it was residual effects from the change to daylight savings time this weekend or just a day in the operating room, I don't know, but I crashed on the couch hard, at least until lighting and thunder from the storms rolling through between 2 and 3 AM woke me up for a little while. Fortunately, I do have a little tidbit to post, a very good one as well. Remember, the "pH Miracle Living" quack, Robert O. Young? He claims to be a naturopath, but even that claim, like pretty much everything he claims, seems…

Video Analysis Tutorial and a cat

Cats can be entertaining - especially when they are someone else's cat and that someone made a video. Really, this post is about analyzing video with Logger Pro (in a tutorial type fashion). I just happens that I chose this cat video to analyze. Here is the video: I am going to look at the part where the cat gets on the fan. I will try to step through the analysis so you can do your own. Get the video Actually, the first step is to find a video. YouTube has tons of stuff. Also, you could make your own video with a camera. A couple of things to make your life easier: A non-zoom video…

A tragic afternoon in Tucson

President Josiah Bartlet: The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight. They're our students and our teachers and our parents and our friends. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels, but every time we think we have measured our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and we're reminded that that capacity may well be limitless. This is a time for American heroes. We will do what is hard. We will achieve what is great. This is a time for American heroes and we reach for the stars. Today, Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head while meeting constituents…

Brains at risk

The Lancet has just published (NOvember 8, 2006, online publication) a major review of the scientific evidence suggesting developmental disorders in children traceable to chemicals in the environment is significant and largely overlooked. Authored by two internationally recognized scientists, Philippe Grandjean (Harvard School of Public Health and University of Southern Denmark) and Philip Landrigan (Mt. Sinai School of Medicine), the paper identifies 201 industrial chemicals with the capacity to cause a neurodevelopmental defect (NDD) such as autism, attention deficit disorder and mental…

Are colleges and universities making the grade in flu planning?

Sometimes my flu obsessed readers think no one is paying attention but it isn't true. Beneath the surface of a spasmodically and superficially interested mainstream media, various institutions are worrying and grappling with the enormity of the consequences of a pandemic. Colleges and universities have the special problem of large and dense communities of mobile and active young adults, the ones in the cross-hairs of the current pandemic candidate, influenza A/H5N1. Many, probably most, colleges and universities have not done much. But a significant number have. The University of Minnesota is…

Sixteen years ago today

March 9, 1991 was the first, and the most violent day, of the five-day protest in Belgrade (then Yugoslavia, now Serbia). This was the first anti-Milosevic protest in Serbia, just a couple of months after the first multi-party elections that he stole. About 100,000 people gathered in the center of Belgrade. Soon, the police moved in and the fight started and spread around town to several different venues, especially in front of the state TV. One teenage boy and one policeman were killed (the former was shot by a moving cordon of police, the latter was thrown over the fence onto the street…

Student guest post: Cancer isn’t contagious…or is it??

Student guest post by McKenzie Steger Off the southeastern coast of Australia lies a small island that in the 1700 and 1800’s was inhabited by the very worst of Europe’s criminals and is now the only natural home in the world to a species named after the devil himself. Decades later beginning in 1996 Tasmanian devils were going about their nocturnal lifestyle in normal devilish fashion feasting on small mammals and birds, finding mates and reproducing, occasionally fighting with one another and so on. (1) Just as criminals divvied up their booty hundreds of years before, the devils were…

The things women do for beauty--or, beware the bikini wax

Women do some rather insane things to achieve modern standards of beauty. We wear shoes that do terrible things to our feet. We don bras that dig into our chest and push our breasts into strange conformations. We slide on pantyhose to firm our stomachs, makeup to hide our imperfections, and hair dye to diminish our grays. And we have this strange habit* of yanking other body hair out from the root, be it our eyebrows, underarms, legs, or pubic hair. Yes, I do have a point here (besides making men squirm). The August issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases has a forthcoming article…

Does Evolution Support Any Particular Political View?

Last Thursday the American Enterprise Institute sponsored a debate on the subject of Darwinism and Conservatism. A video of the debate is available online, but I haven't had a chance to view it yet. In the meantime, I'll have to make do with this article from The New York Times. Over the years evolution has been used in the service of a great many political viewpoints. In Darwin's time, what we might call the “pro-Darwinian right” argued for Social Darwinism. You can still find strains of this thinking in the political right today. Nowadays, however, the pro-Darwinian-right, as…

Campaign for a Reality-Based Reality

"You are entitled to your own opinions. You are not entitled to your own facts." -Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up to provide a way for leading scientists to sit down together, evaluate all of the available data on climate change, and present the public and policymakers with the best possible overview of the current state of the science. It exists to assess and present the facts. We need to know the facts. We need to know what has happened, what is happening, and what is likely to happen in the future. Without that knowledge,…

Out of town for three weeks: A request for our readers

I'm about to head out of town for three weeks. You may have noticed posting getting lighter the last couple weeks as I attempted to tie up loose ends before the trip. Posting will be getting even lighter for the next three weeks as I head west to visit family. Then, a week from now, Nora and I will be heading out into the true wilderness, miles out of range of any cell phone tower, and certainly out of reach of the internet. Here's a description of part of our route: One of Washington's granddaddy trails, Boundary Trail runs across the entirety of America's largest wilderness, the Pasayten.…

But do chimps look forward to sex?

Our closest extant relatives have received a fair bit of attention in the past few days, with the publication of two new studies which have been picked up by numerous news outlets. First came the study by Fraser et al, which shows that chimps, like humans, console each other with physical contact following bouts of aggression. This was found to occur more often when a fight between two chimps was not followed by reconciliation, and was more likely to take place between individuals that share a close relationship. This study was quickly followed by that of Townsend et al, who show that…

Lemur Week: Numerical Cognition and Hidden Grapes

Behold! The second installment of the Science Online Lemur Cognition series. If you missed the first installment, you should check out the cyborg lemurs of the Duke Lemur Center. There's some pretty good evidence that numerical cognition emerged fairly early in the primate lineage, at least, if not significantly earlier in evolution. Most of the work on numerical cognition in non-human primates, however, has focused on a handful of monkey and ape species. The prosimian suborder of primates, however, which includes lemurs, diverged from the main primate lineage some 47-54 million years ago. If…

Good Wi-Fi, Bad Wi-Fi

It's rare for me to be gone so much in such a short period of time. Two meetings in two weeks, one in San Diego and one in Washington, DC, and I'm bushed. One thing that continually irks me on the two or three occasions each year when I go to meetings is how blatantly hotels rip customers off for high speed Internet access. Most of the hotels that I end up staying at for these meetings are pretty nice hotels. Some of them are even very nice. You'd think that they'd throw in high speed Internet access and/or wi-fi as part of the package. After all, even a budget hotel chain like the Baymont…

Egypt

A year ago, I was at a conference in Alexandria, Egypt, and then spent a few days in Cairo. I got to experience the Egyptian culture, to see antiquities, and to meet some amazing people. It was my first trip outside the bubble of Western developed democracies, and was an eye-opening experience. Cab drivers and others I talked with all remembered President Obama's speech in Cairo and seemed to think highly of him and of the US. Despite my fairly Jewish looks and inescapably American affect, I never detected any animosity. Even the panhandlers and minor scam artists on the streets were…

How To Kill a Plant

After all, we've already figured out how to kill a human being. All you need are trillions of dollars, the willingness to sacrifice the lives of countless civilians and military personnel, and a total disregard for natural resource consumption, and hey, after a decade or so, you can kill a guy. Am I sorry he's dead? No, of course not. Does this resolve much of anything? Not that I can see. So let's talk about how to kill plants, which is way easier, especially when you don't intend to. I offer this information up for several reasons. First, I'm an expert. You might think this wouldn't…

Are you a real skeptic? I doubt it.

I mean, you might be, but I'm certainly not going to take your word for it.... I have an email from a blogeague (that's a colleague in the blogosphere) asking for clarification on the use of the word Skeptic in relation to climate change. This is a person very much involved in ocean conservation who had understood the word "skeptic" to mean a person who "does not believe in" anthropogenic global warming, but I had used the term in a blog post to describe a person who is not an AGW denialist. We have a commenter on this site who seems to have been pretending to have just woken up one recent…

WSJ: Incompetent Ranting

At first, I was going to title this post WSJ: Incompetent Ranting. Then I decided that was too strong.  Then I read the article again, and went back to the original title.  Mind you, this is not intended to be an ad hominem attack.  The author, href="http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/history/faculty/facultyprofiles/shorter.html">Edward Shorter, has been the Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine since 1991, and in 1996 was cross-appointed as Professor of Psychiatry (at the University of Toronto).  He has written some good books, including A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the…

Test essay 5: Design a system to find potential collaboration partners for scientists

This is the 5th of the test essays in preparation for comps.  This question was posed by my advisor.  I opened it and went, "wow." It's sort of like the perfect storm of question.  When I first finished it, I thought I did really well, but now it seems less than completely satisfying.  So here's the essay written in 2 hours, timer started prior to opening the question. Question (IR 1) Informal interpersonal communication is very important among scientists. Describe a retrieval system to identify collaborators. Include the following in your answer: a. Knowledge representation to enhance…

Conceptual Metaphor Comment by Dr. Gibbs

In the previous entry, I made some disparaging remarks about conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), and George Lakoff specifically. I also noted that, in my experience,, the psycholinguist Raymond Gibbs, Jr. is the only one in the cognitive linguistics who seriously addresses the evidence and theoretical arguments against CMT from outside cognitive linguistics. As he's done before, Dr. Gibbs dropped by and left a lengthy response in the comments, which I'm reposting here in its entirety (edited to remove some HTML problems, but not for content). At the end there is a long list of citations. I…

Plant biologists in Sweden speak out about the importance of plant genetics. ”Populistisk miljörörelse demoniserar gentekniken” - DN.SE

It seems that plant biologists just cant take the misinformation about genetics any longer. First we had the moving and informative video from the Rothamsted Research Group  and now an elqouent article from two professors from Swedish agricultural university. You can read their story here: ”Populistisk miljörörelse demoniserar gentekniken” - DN.SE. Is the tide turning in Europe? Are consumers now able to more easily access knowledge-based information on genetically engineered crops? Can we finally move on from from talking about how the seed was made and instead focus on what really matters?…

"Alcohol was the weapon of choice for these men": Peer groups may be key to stopping campus rape

On NPR's Morning Edition earlier today, Laura Starecheski reported on efforts to use peer groups to prevent young men from becoming rapists. She set the stage by talking with psychologist David Lisack about a study he (and colleague Paul M. Miller of Brown University School of Medicine) conducted among male University of Massachusetts Boston students and published in Violence and Victims in 2002. Knowing that the majority of rapes are never reported to authorities, and wanting to know whether serial rapists were responsible for many of them, Lisack and Brown took a direct approach: They asked…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Patty Gainer

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

On science blogging and mainstream science writing...

In which, having largely stayed out of it, I wade into the ongoing rivalry between bloggers and more mainstream forms of science writing... The latest round in this seemingly endless debate was a review by New Scientist of Open Lab 2008, an anthology of the best science blogging from the last year. Others, including Brian Switek and SciCurious, have touched on the specific criticisms levied by the review, but I wanted to pick up on the more general issue it raised - namely the relative merits and pitfalls of science blogs compared to mainstream science writing. I am increasingly uneasy with…

On The Lesser-Spotted ID Paper

In April 2005, I posted a piece (reproduced below the cut) that discussed Evolutionary Monographs as the putative outlet for Paul Nelson's 1998 Ph.D. thesis, a thesis that argues against common descent. In comments over at the Panda's Thumb, Nelson noted that: Bill Dembski and I have been working on a shorter article, with some of the monograph's main points, which we plan to submit to the best peer-reviewed biology journal we can find. (Comment of May 2nd 2005) We're still waiting, and considering Dembski's proclivity for posting papers online to get comments from detractors, this is all…

Science Fair Data Analysis - a proposal

Previously, I talked about science fairs. One of the problems is that students don't really have a good understanding of data analysis. For me, statistical analysis is just something to do with data. It isn't absolutely true. So, it doesn't really matter that students use sophisticated tests on their data. The important point is they use some type of test to compare data. I just made up some arbitrary data analysis rules. Maybe if students and judges accept something like this, it could really improve science fair projects and judging. To explain my analysis, I decided to have my own…

ScienceOnline'09 - Interview with Henry Gee

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Henry Gee, the senior editor at Nature and blogger at I, Editor and The End Of The Pier Show , to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Thank you. It's nice to be here. Nice decor. Hessian up the walls. Very 1970s. I like the lava lamp. This sofa needs re-uphostering, though. The smell. I think…

Birds in the News 153

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Whimbrel, Numenius phaeopus at Bolivar Flats, Texas. Image: Joseph Kennedy, 2 July 2008 [larger view]. Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/2000s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400. Christmas Bird Count News The Annual Christmas Bird Counts are rapidly approaching, so I am publishing links to all of the counts here; who to contact, and where and when they are being held, so if you have a link to a Christmas Bird Count for your state, please let me know so I can include it in the list: Alabama (Thanks…

Shortly After Hell Freezes Over: Interview with Elisabeth Montegna

Elisabeth Montegna is quite a prolific blogger, with SECular Thoughts being just one of her virtual spaces. We finally got to meet at the second Science Blogging Conference in January and took a tour of the Museum of Natural Science in Raleigh together. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real World job? I'm a senior graduate student at the University of Chicago. Since I get a stipend, I consider that my real world job. I graduated college from Boston…

Tagged to "fix" the NIH

It looks as though I've been tagged by Drug Monkey, who apparently thinks that I might have something worth saying about the state of the NIH and its peer review system, about which the NIH is presently soliciting comments, as pointed out to me by Medical Writing, Editing, & Grantsmanship. Why Drugmonkey might think this to be the case, I have no idea, but presumably it has something to do with some previous posts that I've made about the NIH, how biomedical research is funded in this country, and the disconnect between vision and reality at the highest level of the NIH. Although I used…

A "teachable moment": Guggie Daly goes full Orwellian to promote antivaccine beliefs

As hard as it is to believe, I've been writing about the antivaccine movement for over 12 years now, and dealing with it online for close to 17 years. If there's one thing that all that exposure to the pseudoscience, logical fallacies, misinformation, and outright hatred spewed forth by antivaccine activists on a daily basis, it's that language matters. Antivaxers know this and are constantly trying to twist language to their ends. For instance, other than hard core antivaxers who are refreshingly honest, most antivaxers really, really hate being called "antivaccine." I like to think it's…

Books: "Coming To Life" by Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

Several ScienceBloggers are reviewing Coming To Life today (see reviews by Janet, Shelley, RPM, Nick and PZ Edit: Razib has also posted his take), each one of us from a different perspective and looking from a different angle, so go read them to get the full scoop. PZ Myers reviewed the book a few weeks ago. Someting that struck me was that PZ said that the book : "....assumes nothing more than that the reader is intelligent and curious. Seriously, you don't need a biology degree to read it!" ...while a reviewer, Edward F. Strasser (a math PhD whose hobby is reviewing books from this angle…

The Kasich/Ham/Krauss Instatranscript

Tonight's edition of The O'Reilly Factor featured a discussion of the brand new creation museum outside Cincinnati. Guest host John Kasich was sitting in for Bill O'Reilly. Representing darkness and ignorance was creationist impresario Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis. On the side of sunshine and puppies was Case Western physics professor Lawrence Krauss. Here's how it went down: KASICH: In the back of the book segment tonight, the twenty-seven million dollar creation museum opens today in Kentucky. The museum is designed to convince visitors that the Biblical story of life on…

Teaching Ambiguity and the Scientific Method

As a sort of follow-on from yesterday's post, thinking about the issues involved reminded me of a couple of browser tabs that I've had open for a while, namely this story about an education session at the AAAS meeting, and this Inside Higher Ed article on "Teaching Ambiguity". From the IHE piece: Tidy may be comforting, but it is also banal, boring, conventional and unrealistic. That's why I have been asking faculty to infuse their classes with the element of surprise. By surprise I do not mean mysteriously taking a rabbit out of a hat, but rather incorporating experimental, untidy open-ended…

Is Tenure Worth It? (updated)

Steven Levitt from the Freakonomics blog has started a discussion about whether the tenure system is worth it. His argument is that the tenure system supports the mediocre and should be scrapped: If there was ever a time when it made sense for economics professors to be given tenure, that time has surely passed. The same is likely true of other university disciplines, and probably even more true for high-school and elementary school teachers. What does tenure do? It distorts people's effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career (and presumably work very hard early on as…