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A study of climatological research as it pertains to intelligence problems

I first saw this a while back: maybe 2 years ago, but CR reminded me of it recently. As far as I can tell it is genuine; the CIA offer to sell you it, though if you try to buy you get a 404. Why you'd buy it when others have it for free I don't know. I don't seem to have blogged it then; others did but just to push their own tedious ends (yes, its global cooling come again, don't all switch off at once). There are a couple of things to look at in a report like this. The most interesting is, presumably, what did the CIA think about climate change then. Slightly less interesting, but revealing…

Links for 2011-11-29

"They've traded more for cigarettes / than I've managed to express"; or, Dives, Lazarus, and Alice "Let us consider a simple economy with three individuals. Alice is a restaurateur; she has fed herself, and has just prepared a delicious turkey dinner, at some cost in materials, fuel, and her time. Dives is a wealthy conceptual artist, who has eaten and is not hungry, but would like to buy the turkey dinner so he can "feed" it to the transparent machine he has built, and film it being "digested" and eventually excreted. To achieve this, he is willing and able to spend up to $5000. ... Huddled…

Salon made me read David Brooks!

Brooks has this new book out called The Social Animal(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which has pretensions to being all sciencey, which is, I guess, why Salon asked me to review it, because so do I. Only it turned out to not be very sciencey at all, but a lumpy mélange of sciencey anecdotes tied together by a fictional story about two privileged upper middle-class twits named Harold and Erica…a badly written story, by the way, with two characters who were loathsomely tedious. How tedious? Read the excerpt in the New Yorker and find out. As the scientist went on to talk about the rush he got from…

Are MMORPGs "addictive"?

In our discussions of violence associated with video game play, we've frequently noted that there appear to be different effects depending on the type of video game. Some games are more violent than others, and some games reward violence while others discourage it. All this has an impact in terms of real-world behavior and attitudes. Some games have positive effects. One type of game -- one of the most popular types, in fact -- hasn't been studied nearly as much as the traditional arcade-style game: massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs. One of the studies of this type…

Textbooks: Jumped the Shark

Not sure if you know what Jump the shark means. I figured it was a common term. Here is the wikipedia entry. Or maybe you would like a graphic explanation. Here it is: So, why the attack on textbooks? The main reason is that I just posted a rant about forces (or abuse of the word force) and I am going for the combo attack (more points that way). Actually, this has been in my mind for quite some time. There was a post on Uncertain Principles that started me thinking about it again. I have been afraid to really speak my mind on this issue because I don't want to completely enrage the…

Friday Blog Roundup

Lisa Stiffler at Dateline Earth reports on the newest research on PBDEs (levels of this flame retardant in household dust correlate to levels in breast milk) and gives an update on Washington stateâs proposed PBDE ban. Jake Young at Pure Pedantry has an update on Eli Lilly's attempts to block the online distribution of documents that show that the company tried to play down the side effects of its schizophrenia drug Zyprexa. Mead Over at Global Health Policy commends the 22 Members of Congress who wrote to the US Trade Representative in support of Thailand's exercise of a compulsory license…

Science Blogging Conference - even if you are not coming, you can still participate

I can't believe that the Conference is only about 10 days away! Almost everything is set and ready to go and we are all very excited. If you look at the Program page, we have assembled a star-studded group of speakers and moderators who will lead sessions on a number of interesting topics. Of course, if you are registered, you will be there to participate in person. But even if you are not, you are not completely shut out - there are ways that you can participate from a long distance away. Go again to the Program page and you will notice that each session has a link to its own Discussion…

No Trust, No Science: Blogs and Best-Sellers in the Digital Age

This past weekend I attended the UBC Future in Science Journalism conference. It was a very well-organized (thanks Eric), cozy potpourri of scientists, journalists, editors, and authors (and I burned zero carbon to attend). I wanted to share a few things from BBC environmental correspondent Richard Black that might interest sciblings and their readers most. First off: the least trusted of all media sources is blogs. Have a look at this graph as well as the poll behind it: Blogs are, unsurprisingly, the least trusted media outlet. That said, ScienceBlogs was repeatedly singled out at…

What do you look like?

Sure, you know your face in a mirror. But what do you look like to the internet? Let's be honest - you've probably Googled yourself to see what comes up. Who hasn't? Well, now MIT has come out with an online program called "Personas" which artistically "uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity." Simply put, it shows you how the internet sees you. The developers explain exactly what it does: "Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them…

Senate to Vote on Mandatory Public Access to NIH Research Results

Via A Blog Around the Clock comes news that the Senate will be voting on mandatory public access to NIH research later this month (on September 28, apparently). Such a bill has already passed the House (in July 2007). The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is urging citizens to contact their Senators in support of this legislation. Check out the site for more information and for Senator contact information. The Alliance for Taxpayer Access offers these talking points: American taxpayers are entitled to open access on the Internet to the peer-reviewed scientific articles on research funded by…

Weird sex gone horribly wrong

Fain DB, McCormick GM. Vaginal "fisting" as a cause of death. Am J Forensic Med Pathol. 1989 Mar;10(1):73-5. It's too old to find online, so allow me to summarize the short abstract: Guy and girl are fooling around, guy sticks entire hand and part of forearm up girl's vagina, girl subsequently dies. That's all I've got. Edit: you can grab the paper here. --- Ivanovski O, Stankov O, Kuzmanoski M, Saidi S, Banev S, Filipovski V, Lekovski L, Popov Z. Penile strangulation: two case reports and review of the literature. J Sex Med. 2007 Nov;4(6):1775-80. Epub 2007 Sep 21. In essence, improper (…

Can You Pass Eighth Grade Spanish?

tags: Spanish, langauges, online quiz You Passed 8th Grade Spanish Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct! Could You Pass 8th Grade Spanish? How did you do? Did you think this online quiz was reflective of what one needs to know in eighth grade Spanish?

My mailbox is a funny place

Some days, my mailbox overflows with hilarity…like today. I got the new Roy Zimmerman CD! You should, too! It'll cheer any liberal to realize that you aren't alone, and you've got a theme song. But I also get other mail that's almost as funny, although not intentionally so. For some perverse reason, there are some of you readers out there who think you are making a statement and causing me grief by signing me up for conservative magazines and newsletters. You really shouldn't. You know what happens? It comes in the mail, I flip through it, I laugh, and I toss it in the trash. Then when the…

Neuromancer, Beedle and The Uses of Enchantment

I've been re-reading Neuromancer whilst putting my daughter to bed. Fear not, she gets stuff like The Tales of Beedle the Bard instead. Of the two, N is far and away the better book (wiki tells me that the novel appeared on Time magazine's list of 100 best English-language novels written since 1923; the authors utter ignorance of computing technology doesn't detract from it as a novel, though oddly wiki doesn't find room to mention how inaccurate his vision of cyberspace has proved). It's the ultimate look-n-feel book; you just let yourself get carried away with the flow, and ignore the…

George Stallings and Rev. Moon

John Gorenfeld was on the radio this morning in Detroit (click here to listen to the show), along with the Rev. George Stallings. For those of you not familiar with Rev. George Stallings, he is a maverick former Catholic priest who quit the priesthood and established his own quasi-Catholic church called Imani Temple. He did so after he was accused of molesting a former altar boy in 1989 and his bishop requested that he go into treatment, after which he split away from the church and started his own denomination. It was a strange mix of Afrocentric politics and Catholicism, which has now…

Now Available!

Check it out! " My new book Four Lives: A Celebration of Raymond Smullyan has just been released by Dover Publications. Don't know who Raymond Smullyan is? Well, buy the book and find out! Or you can read his Wikipedia page. Smullyan is best known for his many books of logic puzzles, but he has also written widely in mathematics and philosophy. He had a big influence on me growing up. I stumbled on to his book What Is the Name Of This Book? when I was about nine, He's currently 95, and he's still churning them out. So, for me, being asked to edit this tribute volume to him was a bit…

Patent Dispute Prevents Patients From Getting Promising Drug for Lou Gehrig's Disease

Speaking of the debate over patents interfering with medical care, there's a story in today's New York Times that mentions the drug Iplex, which has shown promise for treating Lou Gehrig's disease -- a deadly and thus far untreatable degenerative disease (also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).  From the article: Iplex ... is believed to protect the motor neurons whose death leads to paralysis in A.L.S. Some patients had persuaded their doctors to prescribe the drug when the F.D.A. approved it in late 2006 for children with growth deficiencies. "I started on Tuesday," Debbie Gattoni…

PUR water, now with added impurities!

PUR water wasn't content with removing impurities from your water so they decided that they would put some back in...and then charge you for it! I am talking about PUR Flavor Options. No joke, after they filter your water they add artificial flavors. All over the website are testimonials about how much "water" their kids are drinking now. One even has this to say: "My son asked for flavored water more than juice.". Great. First, I'm not sure it's a good thing that kids are loading up on a non-nutritive drink over juice. Now a lot of parents over do the juice, but if it's something like OJ in…

Don't bother trying to learn anything

I'm recovering from my first full call day in the medical intensive care unit, the MICU. Call in our MICU is a morning-to-morning shift, which means being awake all night, unless you can justify sleeping. It was a relatively quiet night for us, so we got about 5 hours of sleep-a full night's worth, more or less. I made my first death pronouncement at 10:35 p.m. last night after a family withdrew care from a woman who was only 48 years old. I hadn't taken care of the patient at all; I just pronounced her as practice. In the middle of the night, I mentioned to my residents that I was going to…

Two Cultures

Scientists, as a whole, are very reluctant to write novel ideas, hypotheses or data on blogs, and are very slow to test the waters of Open, Source Publishing. Most of what one finds on science blogs is commentary on other peoples' ideas, hypotheses and data found in journals and mass media. On the other hand, people in the humanities/literature/art/liberal arts side of campus have long ago embraced blogging as a tool to get their rough drafts out, to refine them upon receiving feedback from commenters, and subsequently publish them in peer-reviewed journals. If you follow History Carnival,…

Vote For My Nephew on XFactor!!!

Not that I'm trying to influence you or anything, but you BETTER DO IT!!! LeRoy Bell is clearly the best singer of the bunch. You can vote for him using any of five different methods. ... we are giving you a handful of ways to cast your votes for your favorite 12 finalists. And they are... 1) PHONE: You can vote via calling a toll-free phone number. Each act will be assigned their own toll-free number, which will appear on screen after their performance. 2) TEXT: You can vote via Verizon SMS/text voting. Each act will be assigned their own four-digit short code, which will appear on screen…

PNAS: Carl Knutson, Online Education Developer

(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Carl Knutson, who works for a company making online learning systems. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.) 1) What is your non-academic job? am the physics content project manager for an online homework and learning environment provider, Sapling Learning, located in Austin, TX. We offer online homework and tutorials for undergraduate…

What happens when you cross the streams?

What happens when you href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/quotes">cross the streams? Or, norms in online communities, how journal commenting is different, and waving the flag on potential issues when aggregating web comments with journal articles. There have been a couple of interesting discussions on friendfeed recently about commenting on journal sites vs. commenting elsewhere and about commenting anonymously, with an established online persona, or with the name on your drivers license. (I'm intentionally not linking to them, because the threads ended up in some less than…

ScienceOnline'09 - Danielle Lee in the media

Danielle Lee was profiled in The St.Louis American the other day. Among else, the article says: Recently, she was invited to co-moderate a panel on diversity in the sciences at the third annual ScienceOnline conference in Research Triangle Park, N.C. In January, scientists, science bloggers, journalists and students from around the world will meet to explore how online and digital technologies influence science communication and education, and vice versa.

More on Historical OA

As making historical papers OA is something I am very interested in, I am watching with great interest, as Jonathan Eisen attempts to make all of his father's scientific publications freely available. I think we will learn a lot from his experience about copyright, fuzzy laws, attitudes of different publishers, etc., and can use that knowledge to help more old papers see the light of day online for everyone to see, read and use.

Radio Discussion on Intelligent Design

I will be appearing on Jim Babka's Culture Repair show on the Genesis Communications Network on Sunday afternoon between 5 and 6 pm eastern time. You can also listen online by going to this page and selecting a feed at that time. I'll be on the show alone with Jim, no other guests, and we'll be talking about intelligent design from various perspectives. Please tune in if you get the chance.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The fifty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Testimony of the Spade. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 28 January, weeks from now. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The fifty-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at The Greenbelt. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 28 January, a bit more than a month from now. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The fifty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Cognition and Culture. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 31 December, less than a month from now. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.

Well, if it's new to you, it must be new ...

Denyse O'Leary is an ID shill and journalist. Today she's touting a "new evo devo spoof site". "New" as in online since at least 2001 and I remember seeing this in the late 90's. (The original "Science Made Stupid" book was from 1986, round about the time scientific creationism was morphing into intelligent design.) This is "new" in the same way the ID is a "new science for a new century."

Verbier Music Festival

The performances are online. I am watching Anoushka Shankar and Joshua Bell's performance on Aug 2nd. Great show. [thanks Ramya] While am passing on musical links, let me plug one of my favorite podcasts from NPR which has introduced me to so much of the wonderful music that I have come to enjoy: All Songs Considered hosted by Bob. The last one on Aug 30 was DJ'd by Anoushka.

Links

The Washington Post zings Lott for throwing stones at the New York Times from his glass house. Matt Welch also comments, while Greg Beato thinks that the New York Times has hit rock bottom when even John Lott is denigrating its integrity. Andrew Chamberlain invites readers to join in an online debate about Lott and scholarly integrity. Tom Spencer comments on the errors that Lott made on his blog.

Free Virtual Conference

A bunch of grad students at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) are organizing an online symposium in the Life Sciences. They've got a list of speakers and you can upload your own presentation. The conference runs from December 4-8, but I'm not sure how exactly this virtual conference works. If you're interested, check out their website and read what other people have to say. (Via Public Rambling.)

Blogging From Sea Round Two

From the 17th-27th I will b out to sea aboard the Western Flyer, technology and time permitting I will try to get post a couple entries here at DSN. You can read all about the cruise, check the updated logbook about daily activities, view pictures of the seafloor, and meet the people onboard online at MBARI's website. You can check the location of the ship in real time as well.

Calling it like it is

Two examples of why blogs are better than mainstream news coverage, when it comes to confronting reality and doing something about it, one from the climate wars, one from the front lines of women's health. First, Andy Revkin, a former New York Times journalist who still blogs there. He calls out a coal-industry-backed attempt to silence one of the world's leading climatologists as the "Shameful Attack on Free Speech" that it is. By launching a Facebook campaign to convince Pennsylvania State University to cancel a scheduled talk by Michael Mann, the coal interests have indeed shamed…

End World Hunger Vocabulary Quiz

tags: vocabulary, United Nations, free rice, online quiz This linked online vocabulary game has an interesting premise; for every correct answer you provide, ten grains of rice will be donated to the United Nations to end world hunger. How many grains of rice did you donate?

On the Novell-Microsoft Deal

I've been holding back on this one, but it is time to speak out.  On November 2, 2006, href="http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyid=2006-11-02T230517Z_01_WEN9025_RTRIDST_0_TECH-MICROSOFT-NOVELL-BALLMER-DC.XML">Microsoft and Novell announced a deal.  The deal involves Microsoft paying Novell, and the two companies working together to ensure a certain level of interoperability between Novell's Suse (a Linux distro), and Microsoft's Windows.  In return, Novell would get protection against intellectual-property litigation. By way of background…

Reading Diary: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy by Gabriella Coleman and This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things by Whitney Phillips

Gabriella Coleman's Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous is largely a laudatory history of the Anonymous hacker activist movement with some anthropological and political analysis. Whitney Phillips' This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture on the other hand, is much more geared towards an analytical and philosophical analysis of past and present (and even future) of how online trolling relates to contemporary culture. Neither book is perfect, and both tend to falter where it comes to how closely…

paradigm shift: fact-checking (journalism) vs debugging (programming)

If you've been following the Jared Diamond/New Yorker controversy, or my ongoing posts on journalism vs. blogging (here, here, here, here, here), you might be intrigued by this conversation about the culture of fact-checking in journalism, between journalism professor Jay Rosen and programmer Dave Winer, in their podcast series Rebooting the News. Consider this riddle: how is fact-checking in journalism like (or unlike) debugging a computer program? Here's Rosen's take on it: One of the features of a rebooted news system would actually be borrowed from the tech world. And it's the notion of…

Proposed changes in the NIH grant process

Effect Measure has a good post about the NIH granting process. I'm not going to rehash what revere said, as far as the description of what happens once a grant application arrives at the NIH and how it winds its way through the Initial Review Group to one of many study sections through programmatic review. In any case, I agree that it's a crappy system--except for all the others. Certainly it has much to recommend it. Junior scientists compete for funds with more senior scientists on a more equal footing than perhaps any other nation in the world, and almost anyone can get a grant if they…

About Being Poor and the Cost of Money...

...well, it still sucks. And JPMorgan Chase isn't helping: The Washington State Department of Social and Health Services says it wants to know why JPMorgan Chase is charging welfare recipients 85 cents each time they withdraw money from one of its bank machines, according to Rebecca Henrie, a spokesperson with DSHS's Community Services Division. In the first four months of 2011, Chase, one of the nation's largest banks, took in a total of $465,000 in ATM fees from some of the state's poorest people: single mothers on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, a program that DSHS administers.…

Hello Maastricht

I like to travel light. My luggage for a five-day conference stay in the Netherlands barely fills a small back pack. Apart from what I wear and carry in my pockets, I've got: Netbook computer + charger Smartphone charger Camera + charger + transfer cable. The travel camera is pretty small, but its memory card is an old clunky format that won't fit into the netbook's flash reader. GPS navigator + batteries (gotta get some Maastricht geocaches) Two paperback sf books + one work-related book, the new Valsgärde volume Spare undies + socks, wash as needed Spare t-shirts. This time I decided not…

New Place

I'm typing this on my smartphone while digesting an evening meal of ramen noodles, egg and Chinese Sauerkraut from the tin. I'm in our new house. It's a mess, boxes everywhere. My wife is having a foot bath. Juniorette is playing with legos in her room. Both are singing in Mandarin. Yesterday a crew of about fifteen friends & family moved our stuff here -- many thanks guys! I am very proud to have so many good people in my life whom I can rely on. Today my wife and I skipped work and spent the day getting things into order. I've done some washing and assembled two book cases and a high…

Lisa Simpson Needs You

You're seeing other ScienceBlogs readers donate, now join the love train*. A rare serious post from Steve explains The Real Mozart Effect and why we should support music education with DonorsChoose. Playing an instrument has cognitive and developmental benefits. That reason formed an episode of The Simpsons, too: Lisa's Sax. Homer wants to buy an air conditioner but Lisa needs help to nurture her brain with more than Springfield Elementary has to offer. Unsure what to do, he walks out of Moe's toward It Blows, with $200 in his pocket. He sees a music store and says, "Musical instrument?…

BibliOdyssey: Must-have blog book

This brain map comes from The Book of Life: The Spiritual and Physical Constitution of Man (1912), by the obscure mystical philosopher Alesha Sivartha, who is sometimes referred to as a "grandfather of the new-age movement". The map is of particular interest, as it approaches modern neurology but still retains a few elements of phrenology, and is therefore a transition between the two. (Click on the image for a larger version.) It is based on the experiments of the pioneering Scottish neurologist David Ferrier, who functionally mapped the sensory and motor cortices by lesion studies and…

RPG Rules Sell Better Than Adventure Modules

Role-playing games of the Dungeons & Dragons variety come in the form of books that are functionally analogous to computer software. You get your operating system (core rule book) and then you can buy update packages (rule expansions), programming libraries (campaign settings) and application programs (adventure modules) for it. In this analogy, the computer that runs the software is you and your gaming buddies. A difference between RPGs and computer software is that once you have a secure installed base for your operating system -- that is, with RPGs, once you've sold enough core rule…

Cruel, cruel tease

If you're like me, you are eagerly awaiting the release of Dawkins' next book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and you've probably already put in your preorder at Amazon. It's kind of like the anticipatory excitement for the Harry Potter books, only for hardcore geeks. To whet your appetite, there is a short extract from chapter one available online. And alas, you have to wait until 22 September for the whole thing. We'll have it read by the 23rd, right? Want more? Here's an excerpt from chapter two.

Home, home on the range, where the deer and the catteleo play

It's true. Chimeras are out and walking among us. These aren't quite the chimeras that RPM is obsessed with, but they're certainly bothersome to some. From Genome Technology Online, we have a report that James Derr, at Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine, wants to sequence the genome from a real buffalo, but those buffalo are hard to find. To quote Genome Technology: Problem is, that legacy has been mingled with domestic cattle in efforts to "make a better beef animal." Meatier, more docile hybrids are known as cattelo, if you were wondering. Where do real buffalo roam? Maybe not…

Sweet, sweet memories

A few days back, I noted that January 5th 2006 marked my first post on Scienceblogs. And indeed it did. But I forgot that it was actually a back-dated post from my old blog. It was today - January 11th - one year ago that Sb launched with fifteen intrepid bloggers - Janet, Tara , Afarensis, Dave & Greta, Tim, Ed, RPM, Razib, Chris, GrrlScientist, Kevin, PZ, Chad, and myself - boldly going where no bloggers went before. For those of you who wish to feel nostalgic, the Wayback Machine has the front page from January 12th 2006 online. Oh, how far we have come!

Elvis is still dead. Oh, and evolution is a fact.

Some press releases get the right money quote: "The bottom line is that the world is round, humans evolved from an extinct species and Elvis is dead," Weissmann said. "This survey is a wake-up call for anyone who supports teaching information based on evidence rather than speculation or hope; people want to hear the truth, and they want to hear it from scientists." By asking the questions in a non-loaded manner, FASEB managed to ascertain that 61% of Americans actually do accept evolution as a fact. Oh, and the NAS has published the book online for free if you don't want a physical…