Search Content

Displaying results 1051 - 1100 of 87950

Comments?...I Don't Have to Show You Any Stinkin' Comments!

One of the more interesting "problems" in Science 2.0 is the lack of commenting on online articles. In particular some journals now allow one to post comments about papers published in the journal. As this friendfeed conversation asks: Why people do not comment online articles? What is wrong with the online commenting system[s]? I think this is one of the central issues in Science 2.0. Or as Carl Zimmer commented on comments appearing at PLOS One a few years back: What I find striking, however, is how quiet it is over at PLOS One. Check out a few for yourself. My search turned up a lot of…

Darwin's Neglected Crabs

tags: Charles Darwin, crabs, crustaceans, University of Oxford, Oxford Museum of Natural History, online database Fiddler crabs are easily recognised by their distinctive asymmetric claws. This specimen was captured in May 1835 when the Beagle arrived in Mauritius. Image: Oxford University Museum of Natural History [larger view]. The University of Oxford Museum of Natural History has electronically catalogued Charles Darwin's crabs that had been collected by the famous naturalist while he was making his voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836. These crustaceans were…

This Week in the Journal of Previously Solved Problems

Over at the Scholarly Kitchen, Kent Anderson complains about the uselessness of comments on journals: Comments in online scientific journals have been notoriously poor -- either too much material of uneven quality or too little discussion to amount to a hill of beans. All too often, commenting has to be shut down because internecine and tiresome debates break out, creating more noise than signal. The best comments are scholarly, and borrow extensively from the form of letters to the editor. After more than a decade and millions of blogs, it seems one main lesson practitioners are learning --…

The Wheels of Ethics Grind Slowly... Or Else

Inside Higher Ed has a report on a new frontier in administrative idiocy: After passing a new online test on ethics required of all state employees, [a] tenured professor in the English department at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale received a notice from his university ethics officer and from the state inspector general that he was not in compliance with state ethics regulations, a failure that state officials said could result in punishment that included dismissal. The reason? He had completed the test too quickly. Yes, that's right. Professors were asked to read a bunch of…

"Thomas Crown Affair! Thomas Crown Affair!"

What happens when about 80 people wearing blue shirts and khakis enter a Best Buy store in New York? Confusion.

Civility and/or Politeness at ScienceOnline2010

If you have been following sciency blogosphere, or my blog, or tweets about #scio10, or checked out the Program of the conference, you may have noticed that I have predicted that the "overarching theme" of the meeting will shift from last-year's focus on Power to this year's, hopefully, emphasis on Trust. Several sessions will, directly or indirectly, address the question of trust - who trusts whom, how and why: With no non-verbal clues available online (apart from an occasional smiley-face), one has to convey not just meaning, but also intent and mood, using only language. And intent and…

Debristling Psittacosaurus?

The skull of Psittacosaurus. From Osborn 1923. Despite the large amount of evidence that birds are the direct descendants of a group of theropod dinosaurs some researchers continue to protest the association, one of the most vocal opponents of the idea being Theagarten Lingham-Soliar. Working with Alan Feduccia and Xiaolin Wang (two other outspoken critics of the same topic), Lingham-Soliar published a paper last year proposing that the "protofeathers" on the fossil Sinosauropteryx were collagen fibers and not feathers at all. I didn't buy the hypothesis (see this summary for an excellent…

Water Bath Canning 101

Note: This is the first kind of canning you should try, and the most basic, and IMHO, most useful kind. It is definitely worth experimenting with when you've got an excess of produce, which many people do this time of year. If you don't have your own overproductive garden, perhaps you can offer to preserve some for a friend with a garden, in exchange for some food - and most farmers offer bulk prices if you can buy in quantity. Try shopping at the end of the day, when farmers don't really want to take the food home anyway! It is starting to be time to think about preserving food. Why…

#scio10 preparation: Things I like about having conversations online.

In the comments on my last post, a number of people made the suggestion that something about the nature of online interactions may encourage people to say things they would never say to someone's face, or to be more impulsive in their responses, or surf on waves of free-floating anger, or what have you. While this may sometimes be the case -- for some people, in some circumstances -- my initial reaction is that there are a lot of features of online conversations (on blogs or the comment threads following them, in online fora, etc.) that I find can make for better conversations than many that…

In Search of Online Excellence

In yet another sign of the growing respectability of the online world for communicating science, this year the National Academies have set up a new "online/Internet" category for their annual communication prize. Here's what they want: Entries original to the Web which published in English online in 2007 will be considered. Entries should include up to six online articles, hypertextual documents, podcasts, commentaries, etc., or any combination thereof, that constitute a formal series or that may have appeared individually on a topic or common theme. So if you haven't applied yet, now's your…

The world is ending, again

I'm sorry to have to mention this again, but there's a chance the world will end on Wednesday. The same guy with the website that was designed to make you vomit from your eye sockets, who has been predicting the imminent end of the world over and over again, is predicting the apocalypse again. Ho hum. Anyway, I think he's been stung by his repeated failures, and this time he's imbedded his prediction in a conditional. Smart move. Expect further sliding deadlines for the apocalypse, all coupled to improbable pre-conditions. For instance, if a yeti starts nesting in my armpit hair, you should…

Friday Fun: Mobile phone technology set to revolutionise things we already do quite easily

After a week like this, I think we all need something a little on the lighter side. Mobile phone technology set to revolutionise things we already do quite easily One of the biggest launches at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is the I-open; an app which allows you to open your front door by just twisting your phone as if it was a door handle. ‘This is breakthrough technology’, said marketing manager Chris Davies, ‘the phone’s action even works with a gloved hand which is a big advantage when compared to the friction deficit presented by traditional door handles if used with…

Oil on troubled waters

There's a lot of concern about the environmental effects of drilling for oil off the US coast, but I don't buy it. Yes, I know it won't produce any meaningful amount of oil, ever, and no oil at all for years. But that's a technicality. Politically it's a compelling idea and even though it won't do any good, what's the harm? Drilling for oil in coastal marine environments is perfectly safe. Experts from the oil and gas industry have said this is true and who would know better? In fact, who has more experience with oil on the high seas? These guys have been shipping oil on the world's oceans…

Are we Press?

Hsien reports that the CEO of b5media (organization that hosts her blog) left a comment on Panda's Thumb (why not on her blog which is, after all, a b5media blog?) in which he states that: All it takes for us to issue bloggers accreditation is that we - are you ready for this? - issue them press badges and register those badges with one of the two dozen journalist associations in north america. That's not how it sounds from what the AAAS person said, but OK, we'll see how it all develops. So, if I want to get a paper that is under the embargo in order to have sufficient time to read it and…

Download Dawkins' God Delusion In Arabic For Free

Bassam Al-Baghdady (@Al_Baghdady on Twitter) is a Swedish film writer. He's translated Richard Dawkins' 2006 best-seller The God Delusion into Arabic. Bassam tells me the file may be disseminated freely, so go ahead and download Dawkins' God Delusion in Arabic for free! وهم الاله بقلم ريتشارد دوكنز. Two disclaimers, though. 1. Despite numerous contact efforts over many weeks, I haven't received any response from Richard Dawkins or his staff when I've asked for permission to put the book up for download. The reason that I am going ahead anyway is that there is no official Arabic translation of…

A Message from the Chair

The message is: "I have a chair!" SteelyKid's new chair is a kid-sized black fake-leather armchair from Target. We originally set out looking for a kid-sized table and chair set that she could use to draw on, but the only ones on offer at Babysaurus were chintzy particle board things with Disney characters all over them, and we're trying to limit our consumption of both of those. The armchair is kind of silly, but she was too cute climbing in and out of it for me not to buy it. She's talking more and more these days, and has started to pick up adult hand gestures. Here she is explaining to…

Vertical Agitation

As part of an ideas series for 2010 at The Tyee, I wrote a piece on vertical agitation -- the idea that to make a real difference, you need to go straight to the top. Here are the first two paragraphs: People who buy green products can apparently more easily justify subsequent greed, lying and stealing. A study, released earlier this year by researchers from the University of Toronto, showed that participants who were exposed to green products in a computer-simulated grocery store acted more generously in experiments that followed, but that participants who actually purchased green products…

Where on (Google) Earth? #152

The Where on Google Earth? competition has been going on for almost two years now, wandering the geoblogosphere from winner to winner. During that time, we've covered all 7 continents and a whole buncha islands, but we've revealed one great big bias. We're landlubbers. I've managed to find one again - for the first time since I moved to ScienceBlogs! - and I think it's time to start correcting this historical inequity. For new players, here's the game: Open up Google Earth and try to find the patch of Earth pictured here. Be the first to post its coordinates, and describe the geology as…

Where have all the science shows gone?

When I was younger, there always seemed to be some show about science on television. Outside of the documentaries on PBS, the Discovery Channel, or even A&E, there was a whole slew of science shows for kids that generally have become extinct without replacement (although some still live on in reruns). Here are the intros to the shows I can remember watching on Saturday mornings and after school; [I couldn't find the intro for Beakman's World, so here's a clip about elephants instead.] There may be one or two that I left out, but even if I did there was obviously a…

Lies and the lying liars

Bounce Boyda thinks Bancy broke this promise: Nancy Boyda stood in front of a camera, taped a commercial, and ran it on the air. On the commercial she said, "I'm not going to raise your taxes." Bounce Boyda, like the RNC and the Kansas GOP, are using a definition of "raising taxes" very different from what you or I might mean by the term. All that this budget vote did was to leave taxes unchanged. All the supposed tax increases were approved by the Republicans as part of the Bush tax plans. As a ploy to make the damage to the budget less obvious, they didn't make permanent changes to tax…

Making it real: People and Books and Web and Science at ScienceOnline2010

People You cannot see the feedback that many participants at ScienceOnline2010 have already provided to Anton and me (keep them coming - we take the responses very seriously), but the recurring theme for the "highlight of the conference" question was "Meeting the People"; and the main request for the future is "provide more time for informal conversations". You will see even more of that kind of sentiment if you peruse the growing list of blog coverage. Or glean it from photographs posted on Flickr and Picasa here, here, here, here and here. Or on YouTube videos here and here. While Early…

Making it real: People and Books and Web and Science at ScienceOnline2010

People You cannot see the feedback that many participants at ScienceOnline2010 have already provided to Anton and me (keep them coming - we take the responses very seriously), but the recurring theme for the "highlight of the conference" question was "Meeting the People"; and the main request for the future is "provide more time for informal conversations". You will see even more of that kind of sentiment if you peruse the growing list of blog coverage. Or glean it from photographs posted on Flickr and Picasa here, here, here, here and here. Or on YouTube videos here and here.... While…

The 'submit to Open Laboratory 2010' buttons are here!

Thanks, this year again, to Zen Faulkes for putting together the submission buttons that you can embed wherever you want on your sites and thus have easy way to submit an entry for Open Laboratory 2010 whenever you read a cool science post. You should read the long-winded instructions about what is and isn't appropriate to submit, deadline, and other pertinent information. And you should certainly buy (or tell your friends, colleagues, family and neighbors to buy) the 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 editions. Especially if you buy in April - we have entered the anthology into the April contest at…

Fake journals, the internet, and public health

You've probably already heard that Merck and Elsevier are being called on the carpet for producing a medical "journal" - Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine - that appeared to be peer-reviewed, but was actually a marketing ploy to encourage doctors to prescribe Merck drugs. Ouch. Elsevier told The Scientist, "Elsevier acknowledges the concern that the journals in question didn't have the appropriate disclosures," the statement continued. "It is worth noting that project in question was produced 6 years ago and disclosure protocols have evolved since 2003. Elsevier's current…

A poignant obituary

Geoffrey Midgley's obit is in the Independent today. A comment online is, I suspect, from one of his sons.

Is Linux Grandma Ready?

Linux is more than grandma-ready. Linux is by far the preferred operating system for most grandmas. The other day graduates of my UMN degree program presentations of their work. One of the students had borrowed a laptop from the UMN unit she worked for to give an on screen presentation. She had borrowed a Windows XP computer the week before for the practice session, and everything went fine. But this time, with the same computer, same software, same presentation, etc. she could not get it working. At the last second, I whipped out my laptop, booted it up, we threw her presentation on…

But You Can Bury All the Hummers

Jeffrey Leonard, an environmentally friendly businessman (no, really, he is), makes an interesting case for jumpstarting the economy and Detroit by offering massive government-based rebates for their cars, including the gas guzzlers (italics mine): Skeptics will have two major objections. The first is economic, and the second is environmental. Those who object on economic grounds would argue that Detroit has gotten into trouble because it produces poor cars at high cost, and that handing billions to the industry to help it sell more cars would simply reward a failed business model. Those who…

Accelerating Universe Talk in Second Life Today

Just a reminder: I'm giving a talk / Q&A session about the discovery of the accelerating Universe today in Second Life. The talk is at 10:00 AM PDT / 12:00 Noon CDT / 1:00 PM EDT / 17:00 UT. Find it by going to this location: Spaceport Bravo (120,65,278). Also, for those of you who don't know: a basic Second Life account is completely free! Go to the site and register for an account, and download the client to run on your computer. After you get in-world, you'll go through an "orientation island" that teaches you how to move about and look about. The Basic Account lets you get in…

Science Sites for Kids

Is there hope for our children’s education? Last week, I questioned the direction our public schools were heading, expressing quite a bit of frustration. Yet, while I’ve been frustrated, along with many others (judging by the response to that post) we might be missing a possible solution, sitting right under our noses: The computer. Depending on who you talk to, the computer may represent the best or the worst of our futures. In a child’s hand, the computer can be a distraction or a frustration... or it can be a source of fun and knowledge. It is up to us, as parents and teachers, to show our…

Hindawi: Another Dodgy OA Publisher

Hot on the heels of the hapless Science Publishing Group, I have received solicitation spam from another dodgy OA publisher, Hindawi Publishing in Cairo, with another odd on-line archaeology journal. The Journal of Archaeology has 71 academics on its editorial board. And a strangely generic name. What it doesn't have is any published papers yet, after months on-line, or an editor-in-chief. So I wrote to some board members at European universities, and they replied that they thought the journal was probably legit, though they weren't exactly sure. "The lack of published papers and low…

Hear hear: Why the Huffington Post Can't Replace The New York Times

Steven Waldman: Why the Huffington Post Can't Replace The New York Times The idea that the Huffington Post, or the explosion of interesting internet news or blogging sites, can replace journalistic institutions like the New York times or other newspapers or dinosaurs of the mainstream media truly misunderstands the web, newspapers, journalism and the serious threat posed to democracy if the news gathering institutions fail. I think Waldman has this right.  Michael Hirschorn's Atlantic piece pondering the death of the Times is plenty interesting, and good food for thought. But -- even…

Does an artificial intelligence require a body?

Apropos of the Chess/AI discussion that's going on on the front page of ScienceBlogs today (and here at CogDaily), I noticed this little gem in a book I'm currently reading for a review (Sandra and Michael Blakeslee's The Body Has a Mind of Its Own): Meaning is rooted in agency (the ability to act and choose), and agency depends on embodiment. In fact, this is a hard-won lesson that the artificial intelligence community has finally begun to grasp after decades of frustration: Nothing truly intelligent is going to develop in a bodiless mainframe. In real life there is no such thing as…

NIH "Medicine in the Media" Course

NIH has just announced the acceptance of applications for their 7th annual conference, Medicine in the Media: The Challenge of Reporting on Medical Research, 5-7 May, 2008. The National Institutes of Health's Office of Medical Applications of Research (OMAR) presents a free annual training opportunity to help develop journalists' ability to evaluate and report on medical research. Now in its seventh year, the course curriculum builds on the best of prior years' offerings to create an intensive learning experience with hands-on application. This year's course will be held on the campus of…

Pat Robertson: World's Strongest Man

Via Radley Balko, here's an amusing tidbit about Pat Robertson, God's own personal carnival barker, from his own CBN webpage: Did you know that Pat Robertson can leg-press 2000 pounds! How does he do it? Where does Pat find the time and energy to host a daily, national TV show, head a world-wide ministry, develop visionary scholars, while traveling the globe as a statesman? One of Pat's secrets to keeping his energy high and his vitality soaring is his age-defying protein shake. Pat developed a delicious, refreshing shake, filled with energy-producing nutrients. And if you believe that, I've…

Orange juice a better source for potassium than Gatorade®

Who knew? As I am stuttering through recovery from LungMutiny2010, I am paying more attention to my diet. So, as I try to go out for my 10 min walk everyday, I still drink some sports drink - usually Gatorade made from the massive vat of powder you can buy here at Costco. We tend to get plenty of sodium in our diet - far too much in the US, actually - but I always worry about potassium when I am sweating (Disclaimer: I am not an exercise physiologist or a cardiovascular or nephrology physician.). I always thought that the widely-sold sports drinks were the best sources of potassium outside of…

Fixing our "impatience with irresolution": why math teachers should "be less helpful"

Via Jennifer Ouellette, a wonderful TED talk by Dan Meyer, high school math teacher, which is about so much more than math or education. It's about how we think about problems in the real world, how we handle ambiguity, and the problem with impatient problem-solving: "what we're doing here is taking a compelling question, a compelling answer, but paving a smooth, straight path from one to another, and congratulating our students for how they step over the cracks along the way". In his words, Meyer "sells a product to a market that doesn't want it, but is forced by law to buy it." So he's…

"The largest thing we have ever built, made from the smallest things we know how to make"

"It is the largest thing we have ever built," says Whitesides, "and we have assembled it from transistors--the smallest things we know how to make. It is a chrysalis we are forming around the planet...a table where we sit to gossip, a suq where we buy and sell; a shadowy corner for planning mischief; a library holding the entire world's information; a friend, a game, a matchmaker, a psychiatrist, an erotic dream, a babysitter, a teacher, a spy....The best and worst and most ordinary of us reflected--and perhaps distorted--in a silvery fog of bits." --George Whitesides describing the Internet…

Russians who raised the dead: book review and excerpt

Those still sitting on the fence over whether to buy this month's best pop science debut about zombies can read a review by the kind folks at Arc magazine here, and read an extract from the book in Salon magazine, entitled: Russians Who Raised the Dead: Bryukhonenko had heard about Kuliabko’s experiments with humans and he was ready to try his own hand at them. He enlisted the help of the experimental surgeon Sergeo I. Spasokukotey, who had helped to engineer the network of blood banks across the Soviet Union. In 1934, showing a similar level of disregard for a person’s self-determination as…

Friday Cephalopod: In the blue

Nautilus pompilius (from Nature 453, 826 (12 June 2008) — doi:10.1038/453826a; Published online 11 June 2008)

Tangled Bank #93

The newest latest bestest spiffiest edition of the Tangled Bank is now online at From Archaea to Zeaxanthol.

Fame

My first paid gig is up at Seed online. It's a retread of a post from a month or so ago.

Clock Quotes

America is the country where you buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for one dollar, and use it up in two weeks. - John Barrymore

Hotel Mauna Kea

"what's this dip over here? Will the referee buy it?" So this is what prolonged oxygen deprivation does to you? Brilliant. h/t Kayhan

First sign of summer

Last night we had the first ice-cream van of the summer around our streets. But we didn't stop it and buy one.

Fair trade? No, free trade.

The Economist has a thought-provoking article out on the implications of "green" food. The newspaper takes on the recent trendiness of organic, fair trade, and locally-produced food, arguing that these practices may perpetuate or even worsen the global status quo they set out to remedy. On organics (via shortage): Following the "green revolution" of the 1960s greater use of chemical fertiliser has tripled grain yields with very little increase in the area of land under cultivation. Organic methods, which rely on crop rotation, manure and compost in place of fertiliser, are far less intensive…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Mark MacAllister

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 Mark MacAllister, Coordinator of On-Line Learning Projects at the North Carolina Zoological Society 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…

Misleading bird flu press release (aka, Gideon's strumpet)

I am frankly baffled by a news release from Gideon Informatics, a company that describes its mission as developing and marketing "point-of-care medical-decision support applications that help reduce diagnostic errors." It claims to be "managed by an expert executive team and medical advisory board." Apparently they forgot to give this press release to their advisory board before releasing it: Despite the recent fatal case of avian flu in Beijing, overall avian flu cases in humans worldwide have decreased 55%, from 88 to 40, from 2007 to 2008, according to GIDEON Online (www.gideononline.com…

STUDY: What Can Climate Communicators Learn from Gladwell's Tipping Point and Gore's WE Campaign?

Over the past decade, best-selling books such as Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point have told compelling stories of how marketers and political consultants use "influentials," "mavens," "connectors," and "navigators" to sell products and win elections. In similar fashion, following the 2008 election, news articles proclaimed Barack Obama the first "online networking president" and speculated as to how Obama might be able to translate his millions of online campaign activists into a powerful governing force. On climate change, with the 2006 release of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore…

Alice's gender and science session: How can we be allies?

Gender and science session - Alice, Zuska, and Abel Non-chronological note-taking from a great session. What is an ally? How do you become an ally? You can be an ally for any oppressed group. (http://partnersinchange.umich.edu/page1_2.html) Be an ally all the time, not just in front of the person to whom you are allied. (Zuska) There is point of no return. A crystallizing experience, that crosses a threshold, where they can't go back to not caring. But you can't tell (from looking or listening) who has crossed the threshold and whether you can count on them all the time. (Janet) Being an…

Game Review: Discipline the Simian

Played a fun card game with a somewhat off-colour name today: Spank the Monkey from 2003. The object of the game is literally to catch a monkey and whack its little hairy behind. Why? Because all the players are employees at a junk yard, and the monkey's being a nuisance. It's built itself a tower of junk and sits atop it, making ugly gestures, screeching and probably flinging poo at the customers. To catch it, you need to build a junk tower of your own while keeping the other players from building faster than you and catching the monkey. Much of the fun stems from the absurd combinations of…