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Tangled Bank #58

The newest, niftiest, most fascinating edition of the Tangled Bank is now available online at Salto Sobrius.

Evolution for everyone

T. Ryan Gregory is getting the word out that the latest issue of Evolution is free online.

Friday Sprog Blogging: small, bigger, better, sproggier.

As captured in SprogCast #7, the Free-Ride offspring consider Mike Dunford's Earth Day resolutions meme. We discover that a kid's sense of scale is kind of different from a grown-up's. You can grab the mp3 here. The approximate transcript of the conversation follows. Dr. Free-Ride: I think I told you guys that we were going to talk again on something Earth Day-related, even though Earth Day was back on Wednesday. Elder offspring: Yeah ... Younger offspring: But we already talked about Earth Day! Dr. Free-Ride: Sure, but I said we were going to do more. First of all, do you guys know what…

Has it really been a whole year?

One year ago today, I discovered a rather amusing bit of chicanery on the part of an old "friend," namely J. B. Handley, the proprietor of and driving force behind Generation Rescue, the group that claims that all autism (not just some, not just some, but all) is a "misdiagnosis" for mercury poisoning. Given that today is one year later to the day, I thought it would be amusing to repost this. And, yes, one year later to the day, the domain oracknows.com still redirects to Generation Rescue, although, shamed, J. B. did stop having the domain autismdiva.com redirect to GR. INTERNET SQUATTER: J…

A not so new but good internet idea for pandemic response

Good idea, but is it new? When I read (hat tip easyhiker) that computer scientists at the University of Maryland were suggesting logging onto a social networking site as a useful adjunct to official information in the event of a pandemic, I thought this was not a new idea. The grandaddy/mama of sites like this, The Flu Wiki, has been up since June of 2005. It regularly logs thousands of daily visitors sharing information and tips on pandemic prepping. Other sites, in bulletin board format, have also been up for a long time. Flublogia is already well-populated. But an examination of their…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Dinosaurs May Have Been Smaller Than Previously Thought: The largest animals ever to have walked the face of the earth may not have been as big as previously thought, reveals a paper published June 21 in the Zoological Society of London's Journal of Zoology. Scientists have discovered that the original statistical model used to calculate dinosaur mass is flawed, suggesting dinosaurs have been oversized. Boy Or Girl? In Lizards, Egg Size Matters: Whether baby lizards will turn out to be male or female is a more complicated question than scientists would have ever guessed, according to a new…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Plant Communication: Sagebrush Engage In Self-recognition And Warn Of Danger: To thine own self be true" may take on a new meaning--not with people or animal behavior but with plant behavior. Plants engage in self-recognition and can communicate danger to their "clones" or genetically identical cuttings planted nearby, says professor Richard Karban of the Department of Entomology, University of California, Davis, in groundbreaking research published in the current edition of Ecology Letters. Mate Selection: Honesty In Advertising Pays Off: Throughout the animal kingdom brilliant colors or…

The NIH Public Access Policy is now permanent

From an e-mail from SPARC and The Alliance for Taxpayer Access yesterday: FIRST U.S. PUBLIC ACCESS POLICY MADE PERMANENT 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act ensures NIH public access policy will persist Washington, D.C. - March 12, 2009 - President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes' of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent. The NIH Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access requires eligible NIH-funded researchers to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the…

Links for 2010-02-16

Penultimate Links Dump (for a while) US LHC Blog » Let's draw Feynman diagams! "There are few things more iconic of particle physics than Feynman diagrams. These little figures of squiggly show up prominently on particle physicists' chalkboards alongside scribbled equations. The simplicity of these diagrams a a certain aesthetic appeal, though as one might imagine there are many layers of meaning behind them. The good news is that's it's really easy to understand the first few layers and today you will learn how to draw your own Feynman diagrams and interpret their physical meaning." (…

CJR on the Forthcoming Article: What's Next for Science Communication?

Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Curtis Brainard previews some of the major themes and proposed initiatives from a new co-authored paper I have appearing at the American Journal of Botany. The article is scheduled for the October issue as part of a special symposium on science education and communication. A pre-publication author proof is available with the final paper online later this month. If you have been following the recent blog debates over science communication but have been looking for more substantive sources, this paper is probably for you. It's also a good introduction to…

He feels unnerved. Others feel, well, like their guts were blown out of their bodies all over the lecture hall.

This man supplied some of the weaponry used in two major college mass murders. He is eager to continue supplying these weapons in the hopes that someday a good guy will shoot a bad guy. Eric Thompson, owner of Topglock.com, is the goto guy if you need guns, especially the widely loved Glock handgun. The gentleman who killed a half-dozen people at NIU got some of his supplies at Topglock. The guy who killed all those kids at Virginia Tech last year also got some of his armaments at Topglock.com. Topglock: Your specialist in tragedy. We're having a motto contest for Topglock.com. Here'…

More carnival barking: 50th Skeptics' Circle

Set up as a tribute to the late Carl Sagan, the latest Skeptics' Circle is up at Humbug Online.

Songs of the Season

King's College Choir I miss the live version. Good singing that. King's College Choir - get the live CDs online.

Encephalon 34

The 34th edition of the neuroscience and psychology blogging carnival Encephalon is now online at Distributed Neuron.

Arrival Thoughts

People have been raving about the new movie Arrival, which is an adaptation of Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," which I did a guest lecture on for a colleague's class on science fiction some year ago. It's unusual enough to see a science fiction movie hailed for being smart that Kate and I actually arranged a babysitter for the night, and caught it in the theater. It's a surprisingly credible effort at adapting a story I would've guessed was unfilmable. I wasn't as blown away as a lot of the folks in my social media feed, though. I think that's largely because I'm too familiar with the…

Books I'd like to read

For your reading and collection development pleasure! Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by Kathleen Fitzpatrick Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them. Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy's future and…

Leaving the cult of antivaccinationism and alt-med

The other day, I got to thinking about cults. The reason is that it's been clear to me for some time that the antivaccine movement is a quack cult. In fact, a lot of quack groups are very cultish, the example that reminded me of this having been an excellent report published by a young mother named Megan Sandlin, who used to be antivaccine but is no longer. Her post, Leaving the Antivaccine Movement, reminded me very much of the genre of "deconversion" stories, in which atheists who were once fundamentalist Christians describe the process of their losing their religion or cult members…

Elsevier buys SSRN: Another sideshow or the main event?

Main event. Definitely. Elsevier's acquisition of the open access journal article and working papers repository and online community Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is definitely a case of Elsevier tipping their hand and giving us all a peek at their real long term strategy. Much more so than their whack-a-mole antics with Sci-Hub and other "pirate" services. One of the big hints is how they've tied it's acquisition so closes with their last important, strategic acquisition -- Mendeley. Another hint is that they also tie it in to one of their cornerstone products, Scopus. From the…

The View from the AIP Class: Week 2

M.'s latest update (see the first post for her bio) on what it is like to take the class.  It is funny - I always worry I'm not providing enough reading material for people.   Apparently that may not be a critical issue ;-).   This class is very different from any other I've taken. There are a lot of suggested readings, let's just say many of them have been posts from Sharon's blog and we know how long those can be! But there's also the class discussion, which is online. That alone is new to me, I've never taken an online class before.  Something I'm noticing every time I read through the…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Rare Microorganism That Produces Hydrogen May Be Key To Tomorrow's Hydrogen Economy: An ancient organism from the pit of a collapsed volcano may hold the key to tomorrow's hydrogen economy. Scientists from across the world have formed a team to unlock the process refined by a billions-year old archaea. The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute will expedite the research by sequencing the hydrogen-producing organism for comparative genomics. Are Hands-free Cellphones Really Safer?: Since April 1 when Nova Scotia outlawed the use of hand-held cellphones while driving, sales of hands…

Reed Elsevier's Experiment With Online Free Access

Today's New York Times notes this weekend's launch of Elsevier's OncologySTAT website: But now Reed Elsevier, which publishes more than 400 medical and scientific journals, is trying an experiment that stands this model on its head. Over the weekend it introduced a Web portal, www.OncologySTAT.com, that gives doctors free access to the latest articles from 100 of its own pricey medical journals and that plans to sell advertisements against the content. The new site asks oncologists to register their personal information. In exchange, it gives them immediate access to the latest cancer-related…

The War on Forestry

So after coming up with the term "The War on Epidemiology" which has been adopted by one other person (thanks Tara), I've been encouraged by that overwhelming success to devise another phrase: The War on Forestry. By way of DailyKos, I came across this LA Times article about a graduate student at the University of Oregon's Forestry School who has come under severe pressure due to a paper accepted and published online at Science. Members of the faculty even tried to prevent the paper from being published in Science by writing a letter to the editors claiming it was lousy science. Way to…

California madness!

Travel season begins again for me. I've already mentioned that I'm off to Winnipeg this weekend; the weekend after that is the Science Online conference. And then the whirlwind begins: I'm invading California, singlehandedly. Here's my schedule: W, 1/20: UC Santa Barbara Th, 1/21: UC Davis F, 1/22: Berkeley Sa, 1/23: UC Santa Cruz Su, 1/24: De Anza College (Cupertino) M: 1/25: CSU Chico T: 1/26 Sacramento City College W: 1/27: Stanford Th: 1/28: Sierra College That's insane. I may regret this when I stagger away from that grueling series. At least I'm giving the same talk at all of them, on…

Links for 2010-01-29

Physics Games - online physics-based games Just in case you were planning to get something done today. (tags: games physics science education internet computing) J.D. Salinger Dead « Whatever "Somewhere Holden Caulfield is pretending he doesn't care." (tags: books literature news blogs) Best Science Books 2009: The top books of the year! : Confessions of a Science Librarian "For the last little while I've been compiling lists from various media sources giving their choices for the best books of 2009. Some of the lists have been from general media sources, in which case I've just…

Great Moments in Vanity Searching -or- The Hotness of Physics

I was Googling for "How to Teach Physics to Your Dog" last night, to check whether a review of said book that I know is coming has been posted yet (side question: Does anybody know a good way to exclude the umpty-zillion versions of Amazon and other sellers from this sort of search? Most of the results are just product pages at one online retailer or another.). The review I was looking for isn't up yet, but I did find a goodreads page, a nice entry at the Cincinnati public library calling it "abstract science delivered painlessly," and this pre-publication alert from Library Journal. "Wait a…

Coming home and leaving again

So I got back Sunday night from a workshop at Arizona State University on Engineering and Science Ethics Education. The goal of the workshop was to explore the possibilities for blending microethics and macroethics in graduate engineering and science education; we spent 2 days talking about the history of such efforts, what micro and macro ethics might mean in the context of scientific and engineering education and practice, and how we might operationalize these ideas into 4 formats: a 3-credit course, a 9-credit course, a lab-situated set of discussions, and some online formats. The…

The upside of the Hollywood writers' strike?

An editorial in the current edition of the journal Nature suggests we science types take advantage of the writers' strike. It does this under the headline "A quantum of solace," stolen from the next Bond flick. The headline's a stretch, and so is the editorial itself, but hey... Here's the essential bit: Scientists often complain that they can never change the way that science is portrayed in films, which seems as if the screenplays are written on a planet with different laws of physics. But, to quote an earlier Bond film, never say never. Indeed, today is a propitious time for such…

Young on Pundit Payola

Cathy Young disagrees with the Iain Murray/Tom Giovenetti line on cash for comment: Sadly, some conservatives are now defending the practice of opinion writers serving as hired guns (hired quills?) for business and lobbying interests. Among others, Iain Murray in The American Spectator and Giovanetti in National Review Online (which, to its credit, has published strong critiques of payola in punditry) claim that a witch-hunt against conservative writers is afoot. Liberal pundits, they whine, are subsidized by the media, major foundations, and the publishing industry, while conservatives…

Redoubt Eruption Update for 4/7/2009

Image courtesy of AVO/USGS taken by Kristi Wallace showing the eruption plume on March 31, 2009. Today's update will be relatively brief: AVO has returned Redoubt to Orange/Watch status after this weekend's eruptions. The new dome continues to grow and this is accompanied by the usual volcanic seismicity associated with dome construction. We should expect to see the status fluctuate from Orange to Red as the eruption waxes and wanes - and likely get little to no warning of the next big explosive event. The eruptions of Redoubt has forced Chevron to halt activity for all its Cook Inlet oil…

A simple solution to poverty requires rethinking charitable giving

I linked last week to Matthew Yglesias's Slate piece "The Best and Simplest Way to Fight Global Poverty," which reports on a study that gave unconditional cash grants to poor young adults in Uganda and found that four years later, recipients of the grants had more business capital and higher earnings than those in a control group. I thought about the study again over the weekend as I listened to a Planet Money podcast about a charitable school-building project in Haiti that exemplifies how hard -- and potentially less effective -- it can be to give poor communities assets like schools rather…

What printer should you get?

I had a good printer experience, and I thought I should pass it on to you. Printers are, of course, the spawn of Satan. Especially the ink jet kind. For a long time, I had a cheap black and white laser, which worked OK for non color stuff, and an inkjet all in one, which was handy but cost a lot to keep in ink. When Huxley, at about age 5, figure out how to use the all in one as a photo copy machine or to print photos off an SD card (both functions I had not explored, but he figured out on his own), he incorporated the all-in-one into his artistic work flow, which involved making computer…

24 Hours of Reality: The Dirty Weather Report

Al Gore announces an online event taking place on November 14: 24 Hours of Reality: The Dirty Weather Report:

The Bible in Translation

Watch Humanist Views: Humanism and the Bible in Activism & Non-Profit  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Drop in preterm births followed Colorado’s rise in long-acting contraception use (rerun)

The Pump Handle is on a holiday break. The following, which was originally published on Feb. 29, is one of our favorite posts from 2016. by Liz Borkowski, MPH I've written before about the Colorado Family Planning Initiative, which in 2009 started providing free IUDs and contraceptive implants (the two forms of long-acting reversible contraception, or LARC) to low-income women at family planning clinics in 37 Colorado counties. Between 2008 and 2014, the state's teen birth and abortion rates both dropped by 48% (see this webinar for details). While teen birth rates have been declining…

The WorldNutDaily on Morality

Whenever you find something on Worldnutdaily labeled an "exclusive commentary", you can usually be assured that it's exclusive because it's so badly written and poorly reasoned that no one else would publish it. Such is the case with today's commentary by Mychal Massie entitled Morality Doesn't Evolve. It's badly written because it's written in that pseudo-highbrow style that uses words because they sound impressive, not because the resulting sentence is either eloquent or persuasive. To wit: Minority rule is now the consensus notwithstanding the majority, and heretofore the laws hold…

...There Are Children Starving in India

The subject of food waste is not sexy. Anyone faced with the statistic that we waste 40% of our food in America is almost certainly appalled - for a second or two. But they also probably stop thinking about it just a tiny second later, probably after a moment of thinking "not us, though." And yet, it almost certainly is us. A recent study is very clear about the costs of wasted food - food waste has risen by 50% in my lifetime, and the average American now wastes 1400 kilocalories a day of food. That adds up to 1/4 of all freshwater use, 300 million barrels of oil spent in agriculture (…

The Vicious Cycle of Physics PR

In which I talk about why it is that particle physics and cosmology are so over-represented in popular physics, and why my own books contribute to that. [The too-short excerpts on the new front page are beyond my ability to change, so I'll be doing Victorian-style "In which..." summaries at the start of posts as a work-around, so a casual visitor has some idea what a psot is about before clicking through.] One of the maddening things about the recent upgrade of the ScienceBlogs back end has been that a lot of things have been posted during that time that I wanted to respond to. Near the top…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Cockroaches Are Morons In The Morning, Geniuses In The Evening: In its ability to learn, the cockroach is a moron in the morning and a genius in the evening. Dramatic daily variations in the cockroach's learning ability were discovered by a new study performed by Vanderbilt University biologists and published online recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. DNA Extracted From Woolly Mammoth Hair: Stephan C. Schuster and Webb Miller of Penn State, working with Thomas Gilbert from Copenhagen and a large international consortium, discovered that hair shafts provide an…

Tangled bank #45

...is up over at GreyThumb blog. Check out some of the best online science writing in a variety of fields.

Tell the Sb Overlords What You Think

The Sb Overloards have a poll up to learn what y'all think about the upcoming Sb on-line forum reform.

Story Time

This post was prompted by the combination of three events: a visit with the founder of PubGet, an invitation to keynote at a conference on publishing, and an interview with Bora about the Science Online 2009 conference last January in RTP. The past year has seen an explosion of talk about the future of the scientific article. It's wonderful to see, even if the results are either depressingly complicated to achieve or depressingly incremental innovation. Both of those results are better than when I got into this - I remember at a conference in Sweden in 2006 hearing a grand high priest of the…

Myriad Oral Argument Recordings

The oral arguments in Monday's Myriad appeal are online here. (Scroll down and look for Association for Molecular [Pathology] v. PTO).

Neandertals in Siberia & Central Asia

I don't know if we should believe Svante Pääbo anymore, but his lab has some new findings re: Neandertal mtDNA: Neanderthals in central Asia and Siberia Nature advance online publication 30 September 2007. doi:10.1038/nature06193 Authors: Johannes Krause, Ludovic Orlando, David Serre, Bence Viola, Kay Prüfer, Michael P. Richards, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Catherine Hänni, Anatoly P. Derevianko & Svante Pääbo Morphological traits typical of Neanderthals began to appear in European hominids at least 400,000 years ago and about 150,000 years ago in western Asia. After their initial…

Techno losers

Gmail's "chat" app is now integrated via AJAX with the email application. In other words, if you've sent someone an email from gmail to gmail you will show up in their user list for chat automatically. I was explaining this to a coworker and I proceeded to demonstrate it. One woman that I always saw as "green" (online) on my chat list had emailed me only once, she had thanked me for some help in data collection that went into a presentation she was giving for the lab. I didn't know her well, though she sure was a talker. In any case, I was like, "Check it, people never notice when you chat…

Friday Fun: Furious Facebook investors pacified by amusing picture of kitten

It's unseemly to revel in the misfortunes of others. Words to live by, ones I usually take very seriously. Of course, all bets are off for my Friday Fun posts, so let's revel a bit in the misfortunes of Facebook and the man seated at the throne in King's Landing. As its share value continued to plummet towards zero in its first week of trading, social media giant Facebook has seen off a major revolt by thousands of furious shareholders by issuing a series of heartwarming and whimsical posts featuring kittens and other adorable internet memes. *snip* A number of disgruntled investors used…

Saturday roundup

Again, I never get to discuss all the topics I find interesting. So to keep you busy over the weekend, check out a few that I didn't have time to emphasize this week: Neurotopia on the zombies among us. Orac's series on medicine and evolution: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 4a New studies suggesting that mercury fillings aren't harmful. Can you name that virus over at Buridan's ass? Professional societies spurning women editors? (More here from Evolgen). Ewen on the science behind the recent monoclonal antibody drug trial gone bad. The National Science Foundation website is up for a…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Formula Discovered For Longer Plant Life: Molecular biologists from Tuebingen, Germany, have discovered how the growth of leaves and the aging process of plants are coordinated. Human Or Animal Faces Associated With At Least 90 Percent Of Cars By One-third Of Population: Do people attribute certain personality traits or emotions to car fronts? If so, could this have implications for driving and pedestrian behavior? Truls Thorstensen (EFS Consulting Vienna), Karl Grammer (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Urban Ethology) and other researchers at the University of Vienna joined economic interest…

Science Blogging Manifesto

Daniel Brown has written quite a nice post about science blogging, what it is, what it is for, and why one should read (and write) science blogs: Science Blogging: The Future of Science Communication & Why You Should be a Part of it: Over the past few years, a new development has arisen in the world of science amongst those who wish to purvey the wonders of reality to the general public. I'm speaking of course about the ascension of the Science Blog. Many articles have been written on the burgeoning importance of science blogs for the processing and dissemination of scientific knowledge (…

Another role for Open Science

When I teach BIO101 I usually give at least one assignment that entails finding a biology-related article, writing a short summary of it and explaining the gist of it to the rest of the class. We did that this Monday and the students picked, as usual, some interesting topics (including some that take us way outside of the scope of the course, e.g., game theory and Evolutionarily Stable Strategies). The sources, as usual, are popular science magazines like American Scientist (the last one that is still of high quality, I'm afraid to say), Scientific American, Discover, Natural History, etc.…

Fornvännen's Winter Issue On-Line

Fornvännen's winter issue (2009:4) is now on-line and available to anyone who wants to read it. Check it out! Anna-Sara Noge looks at burnt mounds, Bronze Age heaps of fire-cracked stone, with bones in them, just like I once did for my first academic paper. But unlike me she has actual osteological data showing that there are human bones there! Ny Björn Gustafsson looks at Viking Period bellows shields, pottery or stone barriers that kept a metalworker's bellows from catching fire from the heat of the furnace. Mathias Bäck presents new evidence for Viking Period settlement outside Birka'…