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More on Comments and Censorship

Hi Folks - I've gotten (rightly) a number of emailed complaints about the number of comments that are disappearing, and more questions about whether I am censoring comments, or moderating them. Other than a few occasions for egregious attacks on other posters or sucking up my time until I had no other choice, I don't censor comments. The reason your comments are disappearing and being marked as held for approval is because of Science Blogs - there are a number of technical problems with my blog that SB has basically not been able to fix (and some of them affect other blogs) - the idea is…

ADS functionality

The Astrophysical Data System, sponsored by NASA, is hideously useful. It is, essentially, a searchable database of all the astronomical literature, of all time, with links to current and past papers (some current papers are behind subscription walls for fixed or indefinite periods), and to the arXiv preprint archives, and to a lot of the online astronomical databases and catalogs, like searchable sky catalogs and object databases, at all wavelengths at that. Some articles are searchable, either in the abstract, or full text searching. Everything imaginable, almost, is cross-linked and…

game theory of congressional amendments

apparently the 2010 department of defense appropriations bill is moving in congress, and someone wants to amend it, there should be a vote, I think. Rep. Flake (R-Az) has offered 553 amendments to the bill #1 Would prohibit funding for Enhanced Navy Shore Readiness Integration. ... #556 Would prohibit funding for the MacDill Air Force Base Online Technology Program. or, en bloc... 553. Flake, Jeff (AZ) #595 Would prohibit funding for various earmarked projects in the bill. (yeah, I noticed the numbers don't add up, maybe some in the #300s were withdraw...) Anyway, this is a serious…

Go Look At The Moon!

This is the coolest thing online I've seen in a long time. A team of amateur astronomers took over 1000 pictures of tiny areas of the Moon. 288 of them were chosen and mosaiced together. They describe the result far better than I do: The end result is a high resolution 87.4 megapixel image of the Moon, larger even then previous images taken by some of the world's largest observatories, allowing features as small as 1km to be clearly seen. This is the world's record for the largest mosaic of the Moon ever made, and it's available for you to view in full detail (!) at their site, Lunar World…

Action items

Here are some quick, simple things you can do right now. The Florida Senate Education committee is meeting this afternoon to consider their bogus "academic freedom" bill. Florida Citizens for Science has a link to a very good analysis of the bill; it basically declares the bill pointless, vague, and self-defeating. You might try calling your Florida representative — the link has a list — and urging them to recognize the Bill Analysis and Fiscal Impact Statement of the Professional Staff of the Education Pre-K-12 Committee, and kill SB 2692. The New Humanist has an online poll (yeah, we…

I'm Praised in Romanian, I Think

My on-line buddy Vladimir over at Diogenes's Bottle has blogged extensively and almost incomprehensibly about my humble personage. Just look at the possibly wonderful (or not) things he has to say about me! La început - e drept - ideea ma amuza, caci citeam constant blogul lui Martin, un prieten suedez arheolog, care s-a mutat apoi de la Blogger catre bloggeristii profi-, adica cei platiti sa blogareasca. Martin era si este un personaj interesant. L-am cunoscut live on the web prin 2003-2004, când lucram la primul meu articol despre Basarabi si, din lipsa de materiale bune pe spatiul…

Steady Job

If by a "steady job" you mean one that is contracted to last until retirement, then I have had only one in my life so far. In 2002, Roger Blidmo gave me a steady job with his contract archaeology unit Arkeologikonsult. I left it after only a few months as my dig was done and written up, as the unit had no further digs lined up at the time, and as I had received funding to study Vendel Period metal detector finds from UppÃ¥kra. Today I have signed up with the Royal Academy of Letters for the second steady job of my life. It's actually just a change in the formal circumstances around my work as…

The Physics of Fireworks (Synopsis)

“Celebrate the independence of your nation by blowing up a small part of it.” -The Simpsons When gunpowder was first invented more than 1,000 years ago by mixing activated carbon (charcoal), sulfur and potassium nitrate together, its first major application was to the development of fireworks. By combining four simple elements – a launch, a fuse, a burst charge and ignitable stars – the most spectacular explosive shows could be produced. The anatomy of a firework. Image credit: PBS/NOVA Online, retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/fireworks/anat_nf.html. Yet the design of each stage…

Learn. Japanese. Fast?

So, as previously mentioned in this space, Kate and I will be spending a few weeks in Japan in August/ September. Out of a combination of politeness and self-interest, it would be good if we knew at least a smattering of Japanese before going there. Back in '98, I did the book-and-tape thing, and learned at least phrasebook Japanese ("Eigo ga hanashimasu ka?"), but I remember very little of that, and Kate doesn't know any. We've heard good things about the Rosetta Stone software packages, but those are really expensive. The goal here isn't to be able to watch anime without subtitles, it's…

links for 2007-11-16

Environment plays key role in children's readiness for school "Genetic factors played a significant role in the children's core abilities underlying the four components of school readiness, but the environment shared by twins of the same family remained the most important factor overall." (tags: education science news) White children more positive toward blacks after learning about racism, study shows It's amazing how many education research results seem to come from the "Journal of Well, Duh!" (tags: education science news) phishhook.com :: View topic - Charts and graphs of rap song…

Day 1 - So far

SICB (pronounced 'sick-bee') is certainly a smorgasbord of science and it is somewhat difficult to decide which sessions and/or talks to attend. I had originally intended spending the day with the Linking Genes with Morphology in Vertebrates symposium, but a combination of factors had me instead hopping from talk to talk. For those interested, PZ has summarized the morning portion of the symposium. (I did manage to attend the first afternoon talk of the symposium - by Cohn on the evolution of cartilage and un-paired fins in vertebrates ... good stuff). I spent the day so far with topics as…

How we look for stuff online and what we do when we find it

Nicholas Carr has an insightful post that points to a fascinating study of online user behavior while they are looking for information and researching some subject, done by British Library (the research study, 35 pages PDF, well organized and well worth your time). ...In one sense, the process of information retrieval seems to have become more important than the information retrieved. We store lots of information, but like distracted squirrels we rarely go back to examine it in depth. We want more acorns. The authors note that this kind of behavior is not restricted to the young. It…

Curse of the Janjaweed

As soon as she saw the two darkly clad men riding towards her on camels, their heads and faces swathed in scarves, Nafisa Mohamed knew what she must do. "I told my son and my daughter to run as fast as they could." The men were the Janjaweed, nomadic Arab bandits who have been slaughtering Darfuri men and raping women, in a military offensive engineered by the Sudanese government. Jinn is Arabic for demon and jawad means horse. Darfuri people will tell you that the Janjaweed are indeed devils on horseback. Nafisa had been living for a year in Kalma camp, which houses about 120,000 Darfuri…

Another day, another creationist

My conversation with Perry Marshall about "evolution 2.0" is now online on the radio show Unbelievable. Marshall is sales and marketing guy who has written a book titled Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design, in which he claims to have worked out a reconciliation between science and religion based on arguments he had with his missionary/theologian brother, that hints at the quality of the science you'll find in it. He has a superficial view of a few biological processes, like DNA error repair and transposition, and has shoehorned them into his religious belief that…

Are creationists rational?

My Synthese essay has finally been published [paywall], in which I argue that on the basis of the more realistic notion of rationality devised by Herbert Simon, called "bounded rationality", certain heuristics are liable to lead people to rationally choose to believe in creationism under the right conditions. It's a conceptual developmentalist perspective. Here's the abstract: Creationism is usually regarded as an irrational set of beliefs. In this paper I propose that the best way to understand why individual learners settle on any mature set of beliefs is to see that as the developmental…

It was all our fault…or was it?

You knew the religious folk were going to look at the disaster in Japan and start pointing fingers. This time, though, it wasn't the fault of gays and lesbians, nor was it the sight of jiggling breasts…no, this time, it was the atheists' fault. Senior pastor Cho Yong-gi of Yoido Full Gospel Church, the largest Christian church in the world, has faced vicious public condemnation as he called the catastrophic Japanese quakes and tsunamis "God's warnings." "I fear that this disaster may be warnings from God against the Japanese people's atheism and materialism," an online Christian press…

New entry on Mach in Stanford Encyclopedia

Ernst Mach is one of the more interesting of the nineteenth century polymaths. A physicist, he also kicked off positivism, and (I did not previously know) was an evolutionary epistemologist: Mach is part of the empiricist tradition, but he also believed in an a priori. But it is a biologized a priori: what is a priori to an individual organism was a posteriori to its ancestors; not only does the a priori pre-form experience, but the a priori is itself formed from experience. It was simultaneously the contradiction and confirmation of Kantian epistemology. In as much as Kant used the a…

From Our Friends at the Discovery Institute

Man, I just arrived in Seattle and had scarcely gotten a nap in when I woke up to find this: SEATTLE -- In his book The Republican War on Science, Chris Mooney declares war on intelligent design, calling it a "reactionary crusade" promoted by "[s]cience abusers." Discovery Institute now responds to Mooney's war on intelligent design (ID) by publishing a detailed report, "Whose War Is It, Anyway? Exposing Chris Mooney's Attack on Intelligent Design," documenting 14 major errors Mooney makes when writing about ID in his book. The report will be available online on Friday, Sept. 15. "Why do so…

MicroRNAs Can Activate Translation!

Wow! One of the biggest findings of the year! I'll have to read the article more carefully before I comment on it - previously, I wrote a post on the paper that led to this new discovery that was just published online in Science. Switching from Repression to Activation: MicroRNAs Can Up-Regulate Translation. Vasudevan S, Tong Y, Steitz JA. AU-rich elements (AREs) and microRNA target sites are conserved sequences in mRNA 3'-untranslated regions (3'UTRs) that post-transcriptionally control gene expression. Upon cell-cycle arrest, the ARE in tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNFalpha) mRNA is…

Proks have dynamin like molecules!

When I was a grad student, eukaryotes had all the neatest toys ... actin, microtubules, kinesins, dynein, myosin, dynamin, SNAREs ... OK that's not totally true - bacteria had their version of tubulin (the constituent of microtubules), and it's called FtsZ. Then others found that bacteria had a version of actin, the most known is called MreB. The latest is that prokaryotes have dynamin. (Click here for previous dynamin entries.) From the paper: Given the presence of large GTPases with predicted dynamin-like domain organization in many members of the Eubacteria such as E. coli and Bacillus…

Lost years for sea turtles revealed

Researchers used stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen on old and new parts of the shells of 44 Bahaman green turtles (Chelonia mydas) to examine changes in sea turtle diets between their juvenile and elder stages. The results indicate green sea turtles spent their "lost years' in the deep ocean as carnivores feeding on jellyfish, before moving closer to shore and switching to a vegetarian diet of seagrasses. The new research was published in the online journal Biology Letters. Karen Bjorndal led the study. She is a zoologist and director of the University of Florida's Archie Carr Center…

#scio10 preparation: A very brief proto-thought about civility.

Sometimes I think the whole question of civility and incivility (online or offline) boils down to the question of am I welcome in this space? Do you think I belong here just as much as you do? Do you think I don't really belong here? Are you going to exert the effort to run me off, or are you just going to wait until I give up and go away on my own? Do you welcome me enough that you'll tell me when I've messed up -- not because you were waiting for me to slip up, but because you respect me enough that you think I'd want to know that I'd messed up so I could fix it? Do you trust me enough to…

La Presse on the eco-sceptics' web war

Montreal's La Presse has published an article on the global warming skeptics' on-line war on science. (Google translation here.) I get mentioned: Certains vont jusqu'à accuser les éco-sceptiques d'utiliser de fausses identités dans les blogues afin de donner des voix multiples à leur opinion, en s'approuvant eux-mêmes. Le blogueur australien Tim Lambert dit ainsi avoir découvert sur son site deux commentateurs qui n'étaient qu'une seule et même personne, le blogueur torontois Stephen McIntyre, cadre de l'industrie minière à la retraite. Les responsables du site environnementaliste…

What is next-generation sequencing?

Most of the posts I've written recently have involved next-generation DNA sequencing in one way or another, which may have left some readers scratching their heads - keeping track of the different technologies, how they work, and their strengths and weaknesses is a challenge even for those immersed in this fast-moving field. Fortunately, help is at hand for readers who don't know their SOLiD from their 454. Luke Jostins (who wrote a guest post here on Genetic Future a while back) has a great new post up on his blog Genetic Inference providing some background on second-generation sequencing.…

Fake Videos Presentation

I put together this short presentation on fake videos for a class. What the heck, I will also put it online so that maybe some other people can use it. So, here it is. I have it in many forms. First, a video of me going through the talk. Then I have the keynote and PowerPoint files with the movies. Feel free to use it as you see fit. You might want to modify some of the files, I have no problem with that. How to spot a fake video from Rhett Allain on Vimeo. And the other versions: Keynote (fakevideos.key - 46.1 MB) - this has the movies embedded PowerPoint (fakevideos.ppt - 2.6 MB) -…

Powers on the Genome

Richard Powers, one of my favorite novelists, just got his entire genome sequenced and wrote about the results for GQ: I come from a long line of folks, on my mother's side, with congenital difficulty making choices. My father's family, on the other hand, are born snap deciders. This time the paternal genes won out, and half an hour after reading the invitation, I was on board. So I went shopping. A day online gave me my first taste of the bewildering range of consumer genetic products. There was Family Tree DNA, specializing in tracing genetic genealogies. There was DNA Direct, whose Web…

Diagnosing TB in developing countries

SciDev.Net's TV Padma reports that tuberculosis experts are looking to India to develop affordable TB-testing kits. An estimated four million cases of the disease go undetected, and two million TB patients die every year. India has increased its efforts at finding and treating cases of the disease, but diagnostics still present a challenge, Padma explains: TB tests come in a range. Latent infections can show up as a reaction when the protein, tuberculin, is injected under the skin. Blood tests may reveal immune molecules (gamma interferon) produced by the body to protect against the bacterium…

Holiday microscope shopping

Since Phil has suggestions for holiday telescope shopping, I have to offer some suggestions for microscope shopping. If you really want to get a kid interested in biology, a microscope is a great gift, but I'll give you the price tag right up front: $150 is probably the minimum to get a decent, low-end student scope. First, a few don'ts. Don't buy a microscope at a toy store, unless you want cheesy, cheap plastic junk. And probably the most important advice: don't judge a microscope by the highest magnification. You'll see lots of ads that shout "1500x!!!", but trust me: you can't get a good…

New FireFox plugin for 23andMe customers [Genetic Future]

Software company 5AM Solutions has just launched a neat little FireFox plug-in for customers of consumer genomics company 23andMe.  The idea is very simple: Download your raw data from 23andMe (or use one of the files from me or my colleagues at Genomes Unzipped); Install the plug-in from here and point it to your 23andMe data; Browse to a website discussing one of the genetic variants included on the 23andMe chip, and you'll see highlights around the rsID of any variant on the page (rsIDs are unique codes assigned by dbSNP to most of the common variants targeted by personal genomics…

New FireFox plugin for 23andMe customers

Software company 5AM Solutions has just launched a neat little FireFox plug-in for customers of consumer genomics company 23andMe.  The idea is very simple: Download your raw data from 23andMe (or use one of the files from me or my colleagues at Genomes Unzipped); Install the plug-in from here and point it to your 23andMe data; Browse to a website discussing one of the genetic variants included on the 23andMe chip, and you'll see highlights around the rsID of any variant on the page (rsIDs are unique codes assigned by dbSNP to most of the common variants targeted by personal genomics…

Billy Bragg podcast #3 is up

Yay! Fabulous Friday. The third Billy Bragg podcast is online now Includes the tale of the Famous Curry Incident. Hm... I wonder if that'd work on Nature Editors?

Whew...some content arrives!

Hey, you want some science? My latest Seed column on battling beetle balls is online. (And I've just arrived in Ann Arbor after a long travel day!)

Anthro Blog Carnival

The seventeenth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Hominin Dental Anthropology. I love that blog's name. Check it out! Archaeology anna anthropology anna boom shakalaka.

OMG! ROBERT HOOKE!

Squeeeee! I like totally love Robert Hooke, and now you can read Hooke's notebooks online. The broadband version is phenomenal — it's like leafing through the 17th century.

Links

JoVE: Journal of Visualized Experiments, an online video-publication for biological research. schlolarZ.blog, a new blog by a group of young scientists at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany.

The new Palaeontologia Electronica is here!

After a long wait, the new Palaeontologia Electronica is now online! It even includes a review of Jane Davidson's A History of Paleontology Illustration by yours truly. Check it out!

Nature Network, Tonight in Central Square

I just read in Corie's blog that Nature's new online local community (NatureNetwork Boston) is having a pub night. I'll try to be there. Click here for details.

Around ScienceBlogs

Poor, poor Ida, Or: "Overselling an Adapid" Physics in Star Trek Online social networking isn't for everyone Decoding the brain's response to vocal emotions Philosophy and evolution

Even the food is dangerous in Iraq

Not even dinner is safe in Iraq. Reports seem to agree on is that there was a mass food poisoning of Iraqi policemen on Sunday, although whether 11 died and hundreds fell ill or 7 died and hundreds fell ill or no one died but over a thousand became ill is still unclear. Authorities are saying it could have been from "spoiled food," but this is highly unlikely. The victims reportedly became ill immediately upon finishing their meals: Some collapsed as soon as they stood up from the meal, others fell "one after the other" as they headed out to the yard in the base to line up in formation, Mr al…

Nature Biotech: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugy of Blogs

I am back from an excellent science journalism conference in Denmark and will have more to say on the meeting which highlighted several issues that speak directly to challenges faced here in the US. But for now, I wanted to return to our Commentary article "Science Communication Re-Considered" published last week at Nature Biotechnology. Of particular interest to readers, we discuss the rise of science blogging as just one small part of the complex puzzle which is public engagement. There is a lot to like about blogs but there is also a lot to be cautious about. Importantly, despite great…

Greetings From the People of Earth

Greetings from the People of Earth from World Science Festival on Vimeo. I made the above video, Greetings from the People of Earth, to open the World Science Festival 2010 panel "The Search for Life in the Universe," which featured personal hero Jill Tarter, David Charbonneau, and Steven Squyres. In 1977, taking advantage of a fortuitous alignment of planets, NASA dispatched two spacecraft named Voyager into space. These probes, now the farthest human-made objects from Earth, carry with them a unique recording, the Voyager Golden Record. Compiled by a team under Dr. Carl Sagan, the Golden…

ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Peter Lipson

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked one of my SciBlings and friends, Peter Lipson, aka Pal MD of the White Coat Underground, to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific/medical) background? I'm a husband, dad, and internist. An…

Congratulations to danah boyd!

danah boyd was hired by Microsoft, where she will have freedom to continue her research on online social networks at Microsoft Research New England in Boston. Congrats, danah!

My car is worth more than I am!

$5175.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth Mingle2 - Online Dating Do you think I might appreciate in value as I get older? (via brokenhut)

Encephalon Haiku edition

The 51st edition of Encephalon is online now at The Mouse Trap. This time, host Sandeep has interspersed the entries with haikus about the mind and brain.

Silly Rabbit, Commodities Tricks Are For Kids

This is a little off the beaten path, but it's a silly little diversion with some classic "the press lacks numeracy skills" complaints as a bonus. Thomas Frank writing in the Wall Street Journal has written a rather wild piece - One Cross of Gold, Coming Up: How the government could get even with right-wing cranks. It's mainly in a Modest Proposal sort of vein; I don't expect he's even a little serious. Still, fun to take a look at. His proposal runs more or less as follows: 1. All those right wing cranks are hoarding stashes of gold. 2. The federal government has lots of gold in Fort…

Stock Versus Water

Michael Ruhlman says to not waste money on store bought stock: I cannot say this strongly or loudly enough: DO NOT use canned stock/broth. Use WATER instead. I repeat. You DO NOT NEED to buy that crappy can of Swanson's low sodium chicken broth! It will HURT your food. Use water instead. When that recipe says 1 cup of fresh chicken stock (or good quality canned broth), please know that your food, 90 percent of the time, will taste better if you use tap water instead of that "good quality" canned broth. Water is a miracle. Last time I was doing a recipe for a book with one of the most…

Fast from Fast Food: ‘Values of justice are faith values — they’re one in the same’

In Boston, you’re never too far away from a Dunkin’ Donuts. In fact, the Massachusetts-based company inspires a fiery sense of loyalty in many Bostonians. It’s kind of hard to give up the city's ubiquitous fast food staple, but Paul Drake is committed. “As somebody who’s pretty poor at fasting, it’s been hard,” said Drake, executive director and lead organizer at Massachusetts Interfaith Worker Justice. “Here in Boston, there’s a Dunkin’ Donuts on every corner…it’s easy to see the convenience that is fast food. But it’s actually been a really good teaching moment for me — I do this work every…

Extra, Extra

Another week, another new blog network. Go say hello to the bloggers at Wired Science. Five of the six should look familiar, if you've been around Scienceblogs for a while: Brian Switek, David Dobbs, Daniel Macarthur, Maryn McKenna, Rhett Allain and Brian Romans, joined Jonah Lehrer, who had already been there a few weeks. Science Melody Dye and I discussed psychology on the Bloggingheads Science Saturday program yesterday. The second edition of the Carnal Carnival is up at Carin Bondar's place, and the theme is vomit! Christie Wilcox tells us that, apparently, the most highly cited academic…

NC Blogging plans for the year

Foodblogging, Storyblogging, Healthblogging, Bowlging...this is turning into one busy year in North Carolina online. But Anton can't do it alone. Please participate and make the local blogosphere matter!