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Fornvännen's Winter Issue On-Line

With Fornvännen's summer issue on its way from the printers to subscribers, we have published the full contents of last winter's issue on-line (2011:4). This is one of the rare cases where no women have contributed papers, but it's good stuff anyway. Robin Lindblad on why axes were depicted on Bronze Age rock carvings. Michael Schneider on the landscape / societal background to Broby place names. Helmer Gustavson & J.O.H. Swantesson give three newish runic inscriptions with the early futhark the full philological treatment. Andreas Wiberg & Anders Wikström on geophys mapping of a…

Go

I used to play Go at university and after, but rather dropped out when I had children. Recently I've started playing online again, though its a somewhat inhuman way of playing. One of the themes of those times was that computers were rubbish at Go, in contrast their chess performance (one of the problems is that its pretty hard to evaluate a go position, particularly at the start, by any kind of counting. In chess (I think) you can count pieces and locations pretty quickly). So of course we Go players took that as clear proof that Go was a more interesting game :-) The Economist has a little…

I'll Take "Hobbies Less Acceptable Than Blogging" for $1000, Alex

Via Inside Higher Ed, a professor in New Jersey took the whole social media thing to the next level: A Fairleigh Dickinson University physics professor is in custody for allegedly running a prostitution website involving about 200 women and more than 1,200 johns, police said Monday. David Flory of New York City, who teaches on the FDU-Metropolitan campus in Teaneck, was arrested Sunday while sitting in a Starbucks in Albuquerque, N.M., said Lt. William Roseman of the Albuquerque police. Flory, who ran the site mostly from New York, owned a vacation home in Santa Fe, N.M., Roseman said. Flory…

Easing Swedish Metal Detector Restrictions

Restrictions on the use of metal detectors vary from country to country. In England, they are too lax. In Sweden, they are too strict. In Denmark, they are pretty much just right. As I've written before, I think everybody would stand to gain if the Swedish restrictions were eased. My idea is that we should treat metal detectors as hunting weapons: anybody who can demonstrate sufficient knowledge of rules and best practice should be licenced by the county authorities to use the instrument, and then allowed to continue doing so until they prove unfit. (Currently, all amateurs are considered…

Early Voyages of Discovery

Here's something pretty cool recommended by my amateur archaeologist and fellow honorary Chinese buddy Jerry Helliker: The Hakluyt Society. "The Hakluyt Society seeks to advance knowledge and education by the publication of scholarly editions of primary records of voyages, travels and other geographical material. Membership of the Society is strongly recommended to anybody interested in the history of exploration and travel, exploratory voyages, geographical discovery and worldwide cultural encounter." The Society's latest publication is The Guiana Travels of Robert Schomburgk 1835-1844,…

Prominent Lawyer Backs Away from Coleman Recount Team

Both Norm Coleman (R, Incumbant) and Al Franken have set up legal oversight teams for the impending recount in the Minnesota Senatorial race. However, Coleman's lawyer is regisning from the team. Acorrding to the West Central Tribune Online, Coleman's campagin ... ... announced Wednesday evening that former U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger, a Republican, would oversee the recount for Coleman. But Heffelfinger removed himself Thursday morning, saying he had to focus on guiding a city of St. Paul review of law enforcement practices during the Republican National Convention. "I have realized…

Film Festival Query

Having suggested an on-line pro-science film festival a little while ago, I should report that there are discussions underway (or at least in the works) about trying to make something happen. If it goes anywhere, it may look different than the original suggestion, but I'm kind of curious about one aspect of the original idea. If you recall, my original suggestion was that we could arrange a film festival using YouTube for the submission and distribution of entries, and basically passing the hat to get a prize pool. I still sort of like the idea of funding it via direct contributions rather…

May Berenbaum answers your questions about DDT

This week, Public Radio International is hosting a forum whereby you- the fine people of the General Public- get a chance to converse online with eminent entomologist May Berenbaum about all things DDT. The forum accompanies a piece from last week's "The World".  For background, you can read Berenbaum's recent Washington Post essay about the DDT-malaria problem here: What people aren't remembering about the history of DDT is that, in many places, it failed to eradicate malaria not because of environmentalist restrictions on its use but because it simply stopped working. Insects have a…

Natural Selection and History

An interesting looking paper has just appeared online by John Beatty and Eric Cyr Desjardins that looks at the importance of history in determining form. The abstract reads: In “Spandrels,” Gould and Lewontin criticized what they took to be an all-too-common conviction, namely, that adaptation to current environments determines organic form. They stressed instead the importance of history. In this paper, we elaborate upon their concerns by appealing to other writings in which those issues are treated in greater detail. Gould and Lewontin’s combined emphasis on history was three-fold. First,…

At Skeptical Inquirer Online, Moving Beyond Gore's Message

Conventional wisdom pegs 2007 as the long awaited tipping point in waking the American public up to the urgency of global warming. Yet as I review in my latest "Science and the Media" column at Skeptical Inquirer Online, such optimism runs up against the reality of public opinion. Despite Gore's breakthrough success with Inconvenient Truth, American opinion today is little different from when the film premiered in May 2006. Gore has done a very good job of intensifying the beliefs of audiences who were already concerned about climate change, but a deep perceptual divide between partisans…

Possessed: Parasite Video and Powerpoint

Well, the talk at Cornell last week went very well. Thanks to everyone who came. If you want to hear me wax rhapsodic about parasite manipulations (and explain how scientists study their evolution), you're in luck. Cornell has put the video of the talk online. The image is pretty small on the screen, so I decided to post the slide show on my web site here. I suggest opening two screens and advancing the slides as the talk progresses. At first the sound is a little scratchy on the video and the light balance takes a while to get properly adjusted. But don't give up--it evens out. You may also…

Invisible Gladiators in the Petri Dish Coliseum

Over the past few months I've been working on a book on Escherichia coli (more on that later). To get a feel for how scientists work with the bug, I've been spending some time at the lab of Paul Turner at Yale. He sets up experiments to observe microbes evolve. His lab is full of freezers and incubators and flasks full of suspicious goo. One of his students gave me my first Petri dish of E. coli, which I brought home and put by my desk, where I could observe the colonies spread and then fade. In addition to his work on Escherichia coli, Turner also studies viruses called phi-six that infect…

Bloggers are people too

You may know by now what Kathy Sierra, a wonderfully smart blogger at CPU, has gone through. She has been the target of disturbing and sexually loaded comments, images with death threats. She is a writer I greatly admire. She and her team has done more with her books and her blog to raise the level of discourse in IT than anyone in the recent past. It is a loss to see her withdraw because of a few people who are psychotic, demented and cowardly to exhibit their perversion online anonymously. All social interactions have a code of conduct, explicit in some cases, implicit in many others.…

Out to Sea

I've kinda missed hurricane blogging--even though you readers seem to enjoy fights over "intelligent design" much more. In any case, here are hurricanes Gordon and Helene, drifting harmlessly out to sea (though Helene might still have a few surprises in store). In general, it's been that kind of year, folks. All the really dramatic hurricane action has been in the Pacific. At this point, it's possible that the U.S. may get an entire year-long reprieve from major hurricane threats; that Ernesto will wind up being our worst 2006 landfalling storm. That certainly would be nice. Meanwhile, I'm…

Do we need another dumb Texan for president?

This is awful: Rick Perry's Texas A&M Transcript is now available online. He was a pre-vet student in college? Unbelievable. This is a fellow wobbling between a C- and a C+ average from term to term. As an advisor, I would have taken this poor student aside in his second year and explained to him that veterinary school is really, really hard to get into — even harder than medical school — and with his grades he didn't stand a chance of getting in, and even worse, he demonstrated no aptitude at all for the field. I would have recommended that he switch majors and pursue some field that…

Robert Hooke's long lost notes published online

The Royal Society has just put Robert Hooke's folio online. The 320-year-old notebook, which had been missing for centuries, was discovered in January of last year. In it, Hooke provides details of his experiments, and of the workings of the newly-formed Royal Society, of which he was first administrator and then secretary. Hooke was a contemporary - and a rival - of Isaac Newton. He was a polymath who made major contributions to many scientific disciplines, including astronomy, palaeontology, physics, and biology. For example, he was one of the first people to examine cells under the…

Bronze pigeons who "tweet" Tweets

An urban art installation proposal by Nick Rodrigues would install sculpted pigeons in Cambridge, MA, each equipped with a "pico projector" that would project a live Tweet stream. According to the Artsake blog, "Gossiping Birds" is a proposal by Nick Rodrigues (MCC Sculpture/Installation Fellow '07), one of ten artists chosen as finalists for a Public Art Commission in Cambridge, an initiative of the Cambridge Arts Council. The project called for site-specific public art proposals for the Cambridge Street Corridor, a one-mile stretch from Inman Square to Lechmere that spans three distinct…

The technological rapture

This month's issue of IEEE Spectrum Online magazine contains an excellent special report on the singularity, the hypothetical point in time at which technology will be sufficiently advanced so as to enable the human race to transcend their biology and take their evolution into their own hands. Some transhumanists envision a future characterized by cyborg-like beings and thinking machines with superhuman artificial intelligence, and await the singularity as eagerly as end-timers wait for the Second Coming. Some go as far as to say that we will one day be able to cheat death by uploading our…

Five Dinners with President Ahmadinejad

Dr. Jim Walsh     The imagination reels.  Five dinners with Iran's President Ahmadinejad.  What would you discuss?  What would be your top questions? MIT alumnus Dr. Jim Walsh did just that, and will report to us via an interview on Monday, June 4 via a live chat.  From the announcement: My Five Dinners with Ahmadinejad: Discussions on Iran, North Korea, and the Nuclear Age Jim Walsh PhD ’00 is an international security expert and a research associate at MIT’s Security Studies Program. He is one of a small number of Americans who has traveled to North Korea and Iran for talks with…

Have you seen Yahoo answers?

The two most annoying kinds of "hits" from an internet search are: 1) When you find a site with your question rephrased exactly as it should be, and the first few sentences of the answer you need, but to continue ... to be able to read the answer ... you must register, and possibly even pay; and 2) When all you can find is the answer on Yahoo Answers. The blockbuster success of Yahoo! Answers is all the more surprising once you spend a few days using the site. While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional…

Facial Processing and Human Cognition: New Findings

...rapid judgments of competence based solely on the facial appearance of candidates predicted the outcomes of gubernatorial elections, the most important elections in the United States next to the presidential elections. In all experiments, participants were presented with the faces of the winner and the runner-up and asked to decide who is more competent. ...Predictions were as accurate after a 100-ms exposure to the faces ...as exposure after 250 ms and unlimited time exposure .... Asking participants to deliberate and make a good judgment dramatically increased the response times and…

Paul Porter ~ Café Scientifique

Café Scientifique: Feeding Africa With Paul Porter, University of Minnesota Professor in Agronomy and Plant Genetics November 17, 2009  Doors at 6 p.m., Talk at 7 p.m.  Bryant Lake Bowl, 810 W Lake St, Minneapolis Tickets: $5 - $12 sliding scale Paul is a professor in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics at the University of Minnesota. He researches cropping systems with a focus on rye as a cover crop, canola, crop rotations, alternative crops and organic production strategies. With his cross-continental bicycle trip Paul's intent is to view agriculture, food and agro-ecosystems…

Lynn Margulis weblog tour

Here's an interesting opportunity: Lynn Margulis, the controversial scientist, is going on a 'blog tour' to promote her new imprint of science books called Sciencewriters Books. What does that mean? She's going to hang out for a little while on a few blogs and chat and answer questions. If you've wanted to have a conversation with the author of the endosymbiont theory and critic of neo-Darwinian theory, here's your chance. The tour will kick off on Monday, 12 March, at Pharyngula. She'll be sending me a short article that I'll post that morning, and we'll collect comments and questions. Later…

Is Google making us stupid?-What the Internet is doing to our brains

Nicholas Carr set out to explore how the ubiquity of text on the Internet is affecting our brains, after realizing that his increased Internet use may be affecting his ability to concentrate on reading long, detailed texts. His essay is published in the July/August issue of The Atlantic "Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain," he says. "The deep reading that use to come naturally has become a struggle." As the Internet becomes a universal conduit for most of the information that flows through our eyes and…

Online Reference Managers

(Cross posted from Christina's LIS Rant) We're just about set for a fabulous session on citation/bibliographic/reference managers at the upcoming Science Online conference. The session wiki page is here, so you can hop over there an add questions or suggestions if you'd like. John Dupuis and I are moderating and we'll have the following folks there talk about some of the most popular options: Kevin Emamy (CiteULike) Jason Hoyt (Mendeley) Trevor Owens (Zotero) Michael Habib (2Collab) John has a lot of experience with EndNote and we both have a lot of experience with RefWorks. The main point…

Wine and Whales

Every since I worked at wine merchant in Natick, MA to pay for my tiny apartment during graduate school, I have enjoyed Italian wines. My favorite? Castello Di Gabbiano.  My other favorite? Catello Banfi. Maybe they will both send me bottles for the online plug (hint, hint). My love of Italian wines is so great, and this news just bizare enough, for me to temparily loosen the 200m limit for DSN.  At the Banfi Estate a 5 my old, Plicoene, whale was discovered.  In total 16 vertebra, the size of footballs, were excavated.  At the time of the fortunate or unfortunate (depending if you are the…

Why Tracker Video Analysis dominates

I have previously compared Tracker Video Analysis and Logger Pro - check that out here. Really, the only advantage Logger Pro has over Tracker is that maybe it is easier to use for simple things and maybe students are already familiar with it from other analysis. There are other video analysis programs out there. There is VideoPoint - but this is not free and I don't think it has been updated in quite some time. Also, don't forget Video Graph. A great program for it's time, but that time was 1997. So, this post is really about Tracker and its feature of calibration point pairs. What is…

Look around you sulphur module 5

Enjoy a little on-line learning.... This sounds like a young David Attenborough [Thanks Marta!]

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Emily Fisher

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 Emily Fisher from Oceana 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)? What is your (scientific)…

Environment and Humanities & Social Science Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large versions of the Environment and Humanities & Social Science channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week! Environment. A near perfect reflection in Squaw Valley, California. From Flickr, by jurvetson Humanities & Social Science. From Flickr, by frozenchipmunk Reader comments of the week: In Primer on greenhouse gases, III, the last of a three-post series on greenhouse gases, Revere of Effect Measure explains how some gases (like CO2) absorb electromagnetic radiation returning to the atmosphere from the Earth and cause the atmosphere…

Creation Science Homeschooler Science Fair

Every year the Twin Cities Creation Science Association puts on a science fair which is sometimes called the Home Schooling Creation Science Fair. It used to be held at Har Mar mall, which was great because it is always a pleasure to stop in at Har Mar. But for the last two years, including last weekend, it was held at a local Bible College. I haven't gone every year, but most years, as does The Lorax at Angry By Choice and a variable handful of others. This year, PZ Myers also attended. (Speaking of PZ I just noticed that his book is now available as an audio edition, just so you know.)…

New Songs from Old Singers

Having done a giant weighty physics post, I feel like I should post something more frivolous, so here's something about music... I recently purchased a bunch of stuff from iTunes (yeah, yeah, Amazon has DRM-free MP3's, blah blah, blah. 1) I had a gift card, and 2) I'm not Cory Doctorow), and there was a weird sort of theme to the purchases: new releases by guys whose previous bands I like: Bill Janovitz and Crown Victoria, Fireworks on TV. The singer and guitarist from Buffalo Tom, playing with a bar band from Boston. This is the best of the lot, and sounds pretty much like a lost Buffalo…

Eight More Companies (including Wal-Mart) Dump Glenn Beck

According to a press release put out today by the organization Color of Change, the campaign to encourage companies to pull their advertising revenue from Glenn Beck's FOXNews show earned some major new signatories: Eight more Glenn Beck advertisers, including Wal-Mart - the world's largest retailer - have confirmed to ColorOfChange.org that they pulled their ads from the controversial Fox News Channel broadcaster's eponymous show. Allergan (maker of Restasis), Ally Bank (a unit of GMAC Financial Services), Best Buy, Broadview Security, CVS, Re-Bath, Travelocity and Wal-Mart join the dozen…

The 2010 Wellcome Book Prize nominees: new medical fiction/nonfiction

The Wellcome Trust book prize honors books that "bring together the worlds of medicine and literature." This year's recipient was none other than Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - a well-deserved win for a nuanced exploration of the tensions between pure research, medical ethics, and social injustice (with a meta-message about the role of the science journalist in telling these kinds of stories). Some of the other books on the Wellcome shortlist were new to me, so I wanted to highlight them in case you're interested in some holiday reading. But I'll be honest, this…

Fuel for Thought

My recent posting on deepwater oil drilling raised questions about alternative energy sources. The news of more and more permits allowing deepwater oil drilling is discouraging given available alternative fuels, but understandable. Here's why. A recent Science publication by Richard Kerr provides an historical perspective of energy production and consumption since the 18th century. It is no surprise that fossil fuels are so popular, because: A coal mine or oil field, for instance, yields five to 50 times more power per square meter than a solar facility, 10 to 100 times more than a wind…

Did Someone Help Bear Stearns Tank?

If there was a crucial tile in the Jenga Pile o'Shit (also known as the recent financial meltdown), it was the cratering of Bear Stearns stock. I can't have been the only one who thought, "Damn if I had only shorted Bear Stearns...." Turns out some anonymous investors did just that under some...unusual circumstances: As the story lacked prurient interest, it was left to Bloomberg.com to unearth persuasive information that the Wall Street firm was seemingly brought down by a conspiracy that netted its participants a profit of upwards of $250 million on an investment of $1.7 million in a week…

Science Blogging Conference Update

The conference is only 19 [13] days from today! It's getting really exciting! The program is shaping really well: On Thursday (January 18th) we will have a teach-in session. About 20 people have signed up so far (update: 30, thus the session is now full). We'll use Wordpress to help them start their own blogs, so I'll have to make one of my own in advance and play around to figure out the platform before I teach others. On Friday (January 19th), we'll have dinner and all the bloggers present will read their posts. We have not decided on the place yet, but perhaps a site that has wifi, or…

Brendan Koerner in Wired how, why, and if Alcoholics Anonymous works

The last two days (here and here), you lovely commenters and I have been bantering about legacy media's reluctance to use the original literature citation in print or online coverage of science, medicine, and health stories. The discussion has drawn input from working writers as well as scientists and bloggers and I also draw your attention to the comments at the impetus for these posts over at The White Coat Underground with PalMD. But remember, my dear ink- and pixel-stained friends, I am also a graduate advisory board member and instructor in a science and medical journalism program at a…

Kill the post-embargo publication window

I can't find the paper you've written about and your link doesn't work. What's going on?  I keep having to answer this question and it's getting tiresome (although, as we'll see, this no fault of the people who ask it). This post is borne of that frustration. At the bottom of every piece I write about peer-reviewed research (which is most of them), I include a citation for the paper in question and a link. This is good practice. Every journalist should, in theory, do it. The link is almost always to a DOI number rather than to the journal page. And often, those links don't work.…

What a difference a year makes: tweeting from Cold Spring Harbor

I've been quiet for the last two weeks, largely due to some feverish last-minute analysis in the lead-up to this year's Biology of Genomes meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where I spoke in (and co-chaired) the Genetics of Complex Traits session. Long-term readers may recall that I sparked off a minor controversy at last year's meeting by writing several blog posts summarising presented work. While I deliberately steered clear of discussing unpublished or contentious work, basically focusing on the "big picture" messages emerging from the sessions rather than the technical details, I…

"Can any business seem more fitted to heighten [pallid hopelessness] than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames?"

Shorter Disco. 'tute's David Klinghoffer: Paul McBride, Darwinist Hero of the Hour: Why don't real scientists take our book seeking to throw out all of paleoanthropology – self-published by a lawyer, an insect geneticist, and a bacterium geneticist – seriously? That paleoanthropologist who tore it to shreds doesn't count: he hasn't got good enough credentials. Honestly, here's David Klinghoffer's actual opening: The debate about evolution is conducted in large part on blogs… Defending Darwinism from critics and advocates of alternative scientific theories like intelligent design should be a…

My picks from ScienceDaily

'Regressive Evolution' In Cavefish: Natural Selection Or Genetic Drift: "Regressive evolution," or the reduction of traits over time, is the result of either natural selection or genetic drift, according to a study on cavefish by researchers at New York University's Department of Biology, the University of California at Berkeley's Department of Integrative Biology, and the Harvard Medical School. Previously, scientists could not determine which forces contributed to regressive evolution in cave-adapted species, and many doubt the role of natural selection in this process. Darwin himself, who…

My Job in 10 Years: Social Media and the 21st Century Classroom

On Thursday, February 4th, I attended the Social Media and the Modern Day Classroom session that's part of Social Media Week Toronto. It was hosted here at York and most of the presenters were local faculty or staff. It was a very interesting session in which all the speakers brought something different and valuable to the table. Neel Joshi moderated and gave an overall shape to the session, asking provocative questions and mostly focusing on Twitter as a learning and community building tool. Laura D'amelio is the Manager of Print & E-Media Content here and she talked about how York…

Voting Ends TODAY for the Kavli Video Contest! Get your vote in now!

Which is the coolest science video? You tell us! Cast your vote now for the Kavli Video Contest People's Choice Award! TODAY is the last day to vote. Let us know what video you think is best and best expresses why Science is COOL! Just check out all the great science videos online, and then you rate them! And be sure to give your favorite a 5 stars rating. Voting for the People's Choice Award is fast and easy !!! First, you need to register and log into the SciVee site http://www.scivee.tv Then view all of the Kavli science videos here Click the star rating you prefer under each video that…

ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants

As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what. Mary Ann Spiro is a Biotechnology graduate student and science writer/media director in the Institute for NanoBioTechnology at Johns Hopkins University. She writes for Baltimore Science News Examiner and tweets. At the conference, Mary will lead a workshop on Storyboarding your science video and posting it online and do an Ignite-style presentation "The Story of…

ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants: SciBlings

As you know you can see everyone who's registered for the conference, but I highlight 4-6 participants every day as this may be an easier way for you to digest the list. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what. Dorothea Salo is an academic librarian in Wisconsin who blogs on The Book of Trogool. She tweets as well. At the conference, Dorothea will co-moderate the session "Scientists! What can your librarian do for you?" and teach a workshop "Repositories for Fun and Profit". Peter Lipson is a physician in Michigan. He blogs on White Coat Underground and Science-Based…

The Psychology of Cyberspace

The Psychology of Cyberspace is a course taught by John Suler in the Department of Psychology at the Science and Technology Center at Rider University. The website is a collection of a large number of thought-provoking essays on various aspects of human behavior online: This hypertext book explores the psychological aspects of environments created by computers and online networks. It presents an evolving conceptual framework for understanding how people react to and behave within cyberspace: what I call "the psychology of cyberspace" - or simply "cyberpsychology." Continually being revised…

Science Blogging Conference - who is coming? (The Media)

There are 91 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. There are already 95 registered participants and if you do not register soon, it may be too late once you decide to do so (we'll cap at about 230). Between now and the conference, I am highlighting some of the people who will be there, for you to meet in person if you register in time. Helen Chickering is a longtime television health reporter, now working with the NBC News Channel Dan Barkin is the deputy managing…

Challenging Harry Potter Quiz

Do you remember how, at some point in the recent past, I wished that the Harry Potter online quizzes were more challenging? Well, someone heard me. Because this Harry Potter quiz relies on questions written by readers, it nicely confirms my working hypothesis that the most difficult quiz/exam that could ever be written is the one composed by the students themselves. [flash required] Since I spent most of last night watching Harry Potter DVDs, I thought this quiz would be easy. Oh, how wrong I was. Besides the fact that the questions are written by a bunch of 12 year old HP fanatics, these…

History of Science and American Science Policy

Tim @ Deltoid beat me to posting about the new (online at least) Naomi Oreskes talk in which she discusses the tactics of the Western Fuels Association (go here), so instead I'd like to take the opportunity to highlight a paper she and Zuoyue Wang contributed to the Isis Focus section on the value of history of science. The abstract reads: Historians of science have participated actively in debates over American science policy in the post-World War II period in a variety of ways, but their impact has been more to elucidate general concepts than to effect specific policy changes. Personal…