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Spreadsheet Tutorial for Numerical Calculations

I really didn't want to post this, but I am going to anyway. I used ScreenToaster.com to make a screen capture movie (with audio) of a tutorial on spreadsheets. This should accompany my previous post on numerical calculations. Free online screen recorder

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: this Hobson's not so choice

Last week someone by the name of Theo Hobson expelled a hard, dry turd onto the pages of The Guardian: Richard Dawkins wants America's atheists to stand up and be counted. He wants them to form a lobby that's capable of challenging the religious culture they inhabit. He says that about 10% of the nation is atheist - if these godless millions unite, then they can begin to influence national politics. Dawkins has even tried to start the ball rolling, by launching a movement called the Out Campaign. [snip] [Quoting Dawkins] "When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has…

On Persistence and the Counting of Things

Kameron Hurley did a blog post on what it took her to become a writer, which I ran across via Harry Connolly's follow-up. These are fairly long, but well worth reading for insight into what it means to be a writer-- and they're both very good at what they do. You should buy their books, right now. As always, reading these made me feel really guilty. Maybe I ought to add "the writing life" articles to the list of topics I just don't read, with "Let's make fun of religious people!" and "The Higgs boson is the greatest thing since sliced bread!" Except unlike those two, which just irritate me,…

Science Blogging 2008: London

Conference Programme for the Science Blogging 2008: London is now online. I wish I could afford to go - it looks delicious! I hope everyone there takes and posts a lot of pictures, videos, podcasts and blog-posts so we can all vicariously participate.

Science Online London 2010

The third Science Online London 2010 will be held at the British Library on September 3rd and 4th, 2010. You can follow it as a hashtag #solo10 on Twitter and add session suggestions to the wiki here.

Tangled Bank #45

The latest edition of the Tangled Bank is online at Greythumb.blog. We are looking for volunteers to host future editions later this spring—drop a note to me if you're interested in spreading the word about science blogging.

Encephalon 50

The 50th edition of Encephalon is now online at SharpBrains. It includes entries about the path planning by hippocampal place cells, the role of calcium ion homeostasis in Alzheimer's Disease and the potential applications of transcranial magnetic stimulation.

I am a racist

(Unfortunately, this post has been linked to by a white supremacist site. Instead of providing a forum for their foulness, I'm shutting down comments on this post.) Unfortunately, I lost the link that inspired this. But I recently saw a post by a conservative about "reclaiming" the word racist. It went on to list a collection of reasons why he was a racist. The gist of it was that all of us dirty liberals were the real racists - because there's no possible reason for us to support things like affirmative action, welfare, etc., unless we really, deep down, believe that minorities -…

The Sci-Hub story so far: Main event or sideshow?

The controversy about Sci-Hub is raging in the halls of scholarship and academic publishing. What's the story, in a nutshell? Sci-Hub is a Russian website that has used donated institutional login credentials to harvest tens of millions of academic articles and has posted them on their site, free to access and read for everyone. This has not pleased the academic publishing community, to say the least. Elsevier is leading the charge to shut them down, succeeding with one iteration of the site last year until, mushroom-like, Sci-Hub has popped up again this year. My take? Mostly that it's a…

New York City Meetup - Saturday Night Fever

OK, this will be the last series of pictures of my Sciblings from the shindig of the past weekend. As you may have noticed, several others have posted their recollections and pictures on their blogs. You can also see some pictures on Flickr and Facebook and please add and tag more if you have them. I have noticed it several times before, but this is something that really came out in full force at the Meetup as we really feel like an online family - meeting people online can produce real freindships. Then, when you meet offline for the first time after years of cyberchatter, there is…

Opening Science to All at ASIS&T

Back at delightful Mocha's cafe on the corner... We just finished our session at the ASIS&T conference: Opening Science to All: Implications of Blogs and Wikis for Social and Scholarly Scientific Communication, organized by K.T. Vaughan, moderated by Phillip Edwards. Janet Stemwedel, Jean-Claude Bradley and I were the panelists. There were about 50-60 people in the audience who asked some excellent questions afterwards. I started off with defining science blogs and various uses they can be put to, in particular how they interact with other ways of scientific communication such as Open…

What lessons can we learn from teaching with a wiki?

Experimenting with on-line worksheets I know some people who always teach their classes the same way, semester after semester, year after year.. Not me. I always want to experiment and try new things. This fall, I'm experimenting with using a wiki in the classroom, in addition to my blog. This wont be my first wiki experience. We've long used wikis where I work, and I've used them to collaborate with people in different locations, but this is the first time that I'll try one in a teaching situation. The wikis in my past My earlier experiences with wikis had convinced me that they would…

Presidential Science Debate: What to ask the candidates?

Science Debate is an organization that has been trying to get the presidential candidates to directly address important science policy issues. After several months of meeting and convening and conversing among top science organizations and seeking public input, Science Debate Dot Org has nailed down what questions they feel should be asked at a presidential debate. Without further ado, here is the press release from that organization just as it came to me moments ago: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—JULY 19, 2011 Organizations List Top Science & Environmental Questions Obama, Romney Should…

Don't Fix What Ain't Broke

Inside Higher Ed reports today on a new brainstrom from the ETS With criticism growing that standardized tests and grades fail to convey the full picture of applicants, the Educational Testing Service is preparing a standardized way for graduate schools to consider students' non-cognitive strengths and weaknesses. Under the "Personal Potential Index," which was developed at the request of the advisory board for the Graduate Record Exam, three or four professors or supervisors would answer a series of questions about candidates' non-cognitive skills in various areas, as well as a more general…

I guess he'd rather be in Colorado

Get me in my 1977 Chevy pickup with KBCO blasting from the radio, head up for a trail run at the Dakota Ridge Red Rocks Trail near the I-70 geologic cutout (the hypoxia makes the colors seem even more intense), then back to town to the Wynkoop Brewing Company for a few pints of Railyard Ale and fish and chips. That's where I'd be right now instead of inside the Pepsi Center or at Tent State University (although outside is always better than inside in Colorado). I'm trying to dig some science out of this week's Democratic National Convention being held in Denver this week, other than ranting…

Herbal Remedies: Just Because Its Natural Doesn't Mean Its Safe

Despite a lack of scientific evidence to back up their claims, herbal remedies are used by millions. effectiveness isn't the only issue. Could they be dangerous, too? A news story with this headline appeared in Delaware Online today, highlighting the complex relationship that Americans have with herbal remedies. I personally am quite interested in this topic for several reasons: 1) Most effective pharmaceuticals originated in plants or animals, in a more dilute form (opium, growth hormones, aspirin, etc.) 2) A paucity of peer-reviewed clinical studies back up the health benefits of a variety…

Hands of Lead and Like to Help People?

Then I have the job for you. If you are a scientist, but you want to get out of the lab, want to have a little more variety in your life, like helping people and finding information, but still want to use your science degree and be part of the scientific enterprise, then you might want to consider becoming a librarian. You know a little about what a librarian does and if not you can see my recent post. Don't worry, though, all of those functions are not typically done by the same person. You don't have to be in public service, actually, you could deal with metadata or building discovery…

Nicholson Baker on Wikipedia

Now here's a match-up: the fine-grained, highly particularized, unpredictable, and insatiably curious mind of Nicholson Baker and the many-grained field of knowledge expressed in Wikipedia. In a great reading pleasure, Baker reviews John Broughton's Wikipedia: The Missing Manual in the current issue of the New York Review of Books: Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It's fact-encirclingly huge, and it's idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it's free, and it's fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, "Diogenes of Sinope," or…

Taking Notes

Sorry for the light posting - I've been flitting about, spending way too much time in airports. (My carbon footprint is a constant source of guilt.) I've recently spent a lot of time hanging around various universities, which always reminds me of just how good undergraduates have it. They manage to live a purely intellectual life, with nothing to do but explore the world of ideas and wander around libraries so vast they'd make Borges blush. (Meanwhile, their professors are begging for grants and grading piles of papers.) The students also have schedules fit for philosopher-kings, with every…

The ecological fallacy

Martin Cothran has, he likes to remind people, written a book on logic, and teaches the subject at the high school level. Alas and alack, this stooge of the Disco. Inst. and Focus on (your own damn) Family cannot seem to apply it correctly in his writings. Today, he illustrates rather starkly the ecological fallacy while making the not-at-all revolutionary observation that wealthier Americans are skinnier than poorer ones: Now comes more evidence that poverty in American is characterized chiefly by eating too much. The report, from the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, has Mississippi,…

YK Counterprogramming

We wouldn't want to leave everyone with the feeling that YearlyKos was heaven made manifest on earth, so I'll just mention that Socratic Gadfly is blogging up a whirlwind of anti-Kos sentiment. I think it's a bit overdone, but there is a germ of truth to some of his complaints. I'd worry a little bit about an excess of Kos idolatry, but it was less in evidence than you might think from the name of the conference, and what you might read in dKos diaries. Firedoglake, MyDD, Glenn Greenwald, Atrios, and AmericaBlog were all big players here, and the attendees were highly egalitarian, more so…

Tripoli Six, brief update

With over 150 blog posts from around the world now registered (Declan's Connotea tally here) and the full length documentary, Injection online for free (trailer here, complete streaming video here, time to catch our breath. Declan tells us the US Center for Nursing Advocacy received over 150 letters of support because of the blog campaign, even though they were not a contact target. They send their deep appreciation to all who are helping on this campaign for justice for five nurses and a doctor. If you are a nurse or want to support nurses you can get find a guide to their letter writing…

Plant Love [bioephemera]

Tragopogon pratensis Edvard Koinberg Herbarium Amoris Through March 16, the House of Sweden in Washington, DC, is hosting a collection of luminous botanical photographs by Edvard Koinberg. The exhibition, "Herbarium Amoris," is a tribute to Swedish-born systematist Carl Linnaeus, whose innovative classification of plants - by the number and gender of their sexual organs - reportedly caused a salacious stir in eighteenth-century Europe. This collection of photos is hardly controversial (Koinberg is no Georgia O'Keefe), but it is stunning. The color is simply breathtaking. Tulipa;…

Friday Fun: OPEN ACCESS HULK SMASH PUNY TOLL ACCESS

There's this weird phenomenon on Twitter of HULK accounts, where some secret individual or cabal creates an online persona to criticize the status quo in some area of human experience, but in the lively patois of the old school Marvel Comics character, The Incredible Hulk. Feminist Hulk, Adjunct Hulk, Editor Hulk and many others. Now we can add OPEN ACCESS HULK to the party! I was a huge fan of the Hulk comic series from the 1970s all the way through to the 1990s so I'm thrilled to see this development. Who makes up the secret cabal of tweeters? Librarians? Scientists? No one really knows.…

Friday Fun: Arianna Huffington, Queen Alien Facehugger!

Ok, not quite. But I take my little title image from a post by Eric D. Snider on Arianna Huffington's "hostile takeover" of the "pay people fairly for the work they do" culture at AOL. (Yeah, scare quotes are relevant here, read the post.) Anyways, the post is called, Leaving in a Huff. And this is what inspired me to use it for a Friday Fun: Did you know that when she had her first meetings with the AOL staff, she brought them Greek cookies and regaled them with amusing personal anecdotes?? It's true! Then she taught them traditional Greek folk songs! Then they all danced a tsamiko, drank…

Friday Fun: Local artist paid with, dies from, exposure

This one's pretty funny, if only in the so-funny-it-hurts category. I'm one of those dinosaurs that tends to actually want to own a good part of the culture I consume, books and music mainly more than TV or movies. Enjoy the squirmy discomfort of this one. Local artist paid with, dies from, exposure TORONTO - In the early hours of yesterday morning, local artist Sue Jolley was found dead of exposure mere days after being paid with the same. “We’re all shocked by this, but contrary to popular belief we were paying her quite well,” said H&M Canada representative Lawrence Pike, who had hired…

Announcing: ScienceBlogs and National Geographic

Dear Readers, It is our great pleasure to bring you news of an exciting new partnership, starting today, between ScienceBlogs and National Geographic. ScienceBlogs and National Geographic have at their cores the same ultimate mission: to cultivate widespread interest in science and the natural world. Starting today, we will work together to advance this common mission through new content, applications, and initiatives. We will bring acclaimed voices from National Geographic into our rich discussion on ScienceBlogs, and National Geographic will invite their worldwide audience to join the…

"Revenge of the Nerds" meets "American Idol" -->Online voting has BEGUN!!

Vote now for your favorite high school innovators! 25 top high school teams have been designing the future. Its not science fiction. Here, education meets innovation and entrepreneurship, and real science gets real. Teams have created innovative products to solve some of the grand challenges facing society. Now, they need YOU to help select the winners of the Spirit of Innovation Awards by voting online for your favorite teams. From March 29 to April 9, you can change the world, one vote at a time. Check out www.conradawards.org for more information on all of the teams, their products, and…

"Revenge of the Nerds" meets "American Idol"

Help 25 of the top high school innovators design the future! On March 29th, the Spirit of Innovation Awards challenges YOU to vote for your favorite teams and help select this year's "Pete Conrad Scholars!" Over the past 6 months, 25 finalist teams have created real products to solve some of the grand challenges facing society. From the depths of the oceans to the edges of space, these students will knock your socks off! Piezo-electric wallpaper, robotic astronaut assistants, advanced water purification systems, and Navajo Solar "Frybread" ovens; these are just a few of the amazing products…

Not an "accident": Milton Hernandez, 22 suffers fatal work-related injury in Scott, Louisiana

Milton “Tito” Rafael Barreto Hernandez, 22, suffered fatal traumatic injuries on Tuesday, October 28, while working for Scott Materials in Scott, Louisiana. KLFY provides some initial information on the worker’s death: His employer, Scott Materials, is a “concrete crushing company.” A supervisor and another employee were with Hernandez when the accident occurred. They were working to remove debris from a conveyor belt on a piece of heavy machinery. The equipment was turned back on and Hernandez was pulled into the machine. OSHA’s on-line inspection data suggests Scott Materials has not been…

Science Online London 2009

You have proven your fitness, evolutionarily speaking, not when you have babies, but when your babies have babies. So I am very excited that my babies - the three science blogging conferences here in the Triangle so far - have spawned their own offspring. Not once, but twice. The London franchise will happen again this year. And just like we changed the name from Science Blogging Conference into ScienceOnline, so did they. Science Online London 2009 will take place on Saturday August 22, 2009 at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London, co-hosted by Nature Network, Mendeley and the…

Expanding the outreach of PLoS content in the developing world

Liz Allen writes today: One snowy weekend in January 2008, I was lucky enough to attend the Science Blogging Conference (co-organized by Bora Zivkovic our Online Discussion Expert) in NC where I networked with the great and the good of the scientific communication world. PLoS distributed free T-shirts at the event and, not surprisingly, I was warmly greeted wherever I went. In one session, I listened to a young health care worker based in a remote location expressing her frustration about how difficult it was for her to access any content because of her unreliable internet connection and I…

A Quick Note to Huffington Post

If Huffington Post wants to have credibility and gain its vaunted #1 spot as the most trusted online new source, there is only one thing it needs to do - ditch the woomeisters Chopra and RFK Jr., and get in their place some people from the reality-based community. People are sick of conservative, emotion-based, gut-feeling decision-making that screwed up the country over the past 28 years. Why allowing the Left fringe equivalents into the mix? It is them that make a lot of people untrusting of Huffington Post. Will Huffington Post publish and defend this piece about the potential fraud…

Real Science for schools

When I go around proselatizing for Open Access, I always try to remember to point out that the potential users are not just scientists and physicians in the developing world, or researchers at low-tier or community colleges, but also high schools. So, I was very happy to hear about the existence of Real Science, a website that uses the latest freely available research to use in classrooms: Imagine teaching the latest science on the same day it appears in the newspapers. Imagine the kick the kids will get when they say to their parents watching the news on TV: "We did that in school today. It…

So, how was it for you?

If you have not done it yet, please fill a brief questionnaire about your experience at the Science Blogging Conference. We will meet in a couple of weeks to analyze how it went and to start brainstorming the ways we can make the next conference even better. So far, we received 46 responses through that form and have been reading them carefully. One of the responders was not even there - he fully participated in the proceedings online, watching the streaming videos and participating in chatrooms in real time, then blogging about it. I wish there was a way to send locopops - the high point…

Video Games and Aggression

My son is working on a paper for school and he picked the topic of video games and how they affect behavior. He primed himself by playing Assassin's Creed for a couple of days, so he could aggressively look for sources and he found these: Most Middle-school Boys And Many Girls Play Violent Video Games Children's Personality Features Unchanged By Short-Term Video Play Study Examines Video Game Play Among Adolescents Surgeons With Video Game Skill Appear To Perform Better In Simulated Surgery Skills Course Online Multiplayer Video Games Create Greater Negative Consequences, Elicit Greater…

My picks from ScienceDaily

World's Hottest Chile Pepper Discovered: Researchers at New Mexico State University recently discovered the world's hottest chile pepper. Bhut Jolokia, a variety of chile pepper originating in Assam, India, has earned Guiness World Records' recognition as the world's hottest chile pepper by blasting past the previous champion Red Savina. Decoding Effects Of Toxins On Embryo Development Apparent: Changes in gene expression patterns in zebrafish embryos resulting from exposure to environmental toxins can identify the individual toxins at work, according to research published in the online open…

Discover Your Summer Resource Guide

Latest from Project Exploration Project Exploration has just released Discover Your Summer 2008, a summer science resource guide. The guide includes more than 160 programs for middle and high school students throughout the Midwest, along with tips on how to apply for programs successfully. Thanks to a special partnership with the Self Reliance Foundation, students can also access information about programs in Discover Your Summer in Spanish. SPECIAL LIMITED OFFER - We have print copies available on a first-come, first-served basis. We can give you up to 100 copies of the guide. If you can…

Tamiflu Connected to Teen Suicide

Tamiflu (Oseltamivir), the world's first line of defense against avian influenza, is correlated with teen suicides. This expensive and difficult-to-find drug has been linked to 64 cases of psychological disorders and two teenage suicides in Japan, according to media reports there. In February 2004, according to an online edition of Japan Times, a 17-year-old high school boy under treatment with Tamiflu died after he jumped in front of a truck. A year later, a 14-year-old junior high student, also taking the drug for influenza, jumped to his death from the ninth floor of his condominium. In…

Medieval Monastic Graffitti

One of the most recent additions to the on-line catalogue of the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm is deliciously enigmatic. It's a little sandstone tablet (SHM 18011:100) measuring 73 by 60 mm, covered on both sides with vaguely script-like and architectonic graffitti. The edges are neatly notched, prompting a museum curator to suggest in the inventory notes that the tablet may have been intended as a yarn spool, nystvända. But no-one really knows. The tablet was found by Sigurd Curman's team in 1919 during excavations among the ruins of the nunnery of Vreta in Östergötland. The…

Rawr!

I retain just enough of my childhood fascination with dinosaurs to be interested in a headline like "A Meat Eater Bigger Than T. Rex Is Unearthed". Of course, most of the information you would really want is right there in the headline: New dinosaur species, really big, carnivorous, next story please. Subsequent years of scientific training have given me a second reaction to this sort of story, after "Whoa, cool." Namely, "Boy, the graphics with this story are useless." I mean, the little shadow-dinosaur jpeg at left is a standard thing, but the almost completely featureless map of Argentina…

Local Green Construction

We live just a few blocks away from the local high school, which has had some sort of massive construction project going on for a few months now. I've been wondering what created the giant pile of dirt to one side of the grounds, but haven't been bothered enough to actually, you know, look it up to find out. We got a newsletter thing this week that gets sent out to all the homes in the district, though, and the lead story (which I can't find online) is all about the construction project, which includes for the high school: Replace the building's inefficient and ineffective heating system with…

A few suggestions for the Weblog Awards

Go vote! These are my choices, and you all should follow your own consciences. Best individual blogger: I vote for Lindsay. Best blog: I vote for Raw Story (yeesh, but this category is stocked with some really awful right wing crap). Best comic strip: I vote for xkcd, of course. Best online community: LGF must be destroyed, so I vote for Daily Kos. Best liberal blog: These are all good, so this time I vote for Hullabaloo, but I'll probably rotate my daily vote among all the others. Best LGBT blog: I'm torn between it and Pam's House Blend, but I vote for Susie Bright. Best…

Texas Education Agency May Get its Comer-Uppance

Christina Comer is suing the Texas Education agency. Here is a copy of the law suit. From the Dallas News: AUSTIN - A former state science curriculum director filed suit against the Texas Education Agency and Education Commissioner Robert Scott on Wednesday, alleging she was illegally fired for forwarding an e-mail about a lecture that was critical of the teaching of intelligent design in science classes. Also Online Christina Comer, who lost her job at the TEA last year, said in a suit filed in federal court in Austin that she was terminated for contravening an unconstitutional policy…

Links for 2009-09-10

NASA Unveils Images From Repaired Hubble Telescope - NYTimes.com "Dr. Weiler noted that the telescope was now in the best shape of its 19-year life in orbit, far surpassing the ambitions of its founders, and that it could last for at least another five years. "Hubble gets better and better and better," he said." (tags: science astronomy space news overbye) Clip-Clopping Across the Bridge « Easily Distracted "A lot of folks back then disagreed with my point, saying that there was no surer way to check the influence of the fringes than to expose and mock their craziness. Can I just ask:…

Quantum to Cosmos

I'm clearing out browser tabs before the weekend, which has reminded me that I've been terribly remiss in not passing along information about the Quantum to Cosmos festival being held next month at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. For 10 exciting days this October, Perimeter Institute's Quantum to Cosmos: Ideas for the Future (Q2C) will take a global audience from the strange world of subatomic particles to the outer frontiers of the universe. All events will occur on-site in Waterloo, Ontario and online at q2cfestival.com Q2C's extensive program features more than 50 events --…

links for 2009-05-19

Solar charging an electric motorcycle - how long? | Dot Physics "Questions to be answered: How much energy would the bike need to go 50 miles? How much power (average) could you expect to get from the solar panels? Andâ¦how long would it take to charge this sucker. I am sure you can store enough energy in a battery to go 50 miles and even a tiny solar cell could charge this - but would it be practical?" (tags: science physics energy environment blogs dot-physics) New system for detection of single atoms | Eureka! Science News "Scientists have devised a new technique for real-time…

Ant Research Roundup (5.ii.08)

A trail of Atta leafcutting ants in Gamboa, Panama. From the recent literature: The Journal of Experimental Biology has a lab study by Dussutour et al documenting how leafcutter ants avoid traffic jams under crowded trail conditions.  Apparently, unladen ants increase a narrow trail's efficiency by following the leaf-carrying ants instead of trying to pass their slower sisters. See also commentary by JEB and Wired. source: Dussutour, A., Beshers, S., Deneubourg, J. L., Fourcassie, V. 2009. Priority rules govern the organization of traffic on foraging trails under crowding conditions in the…

Plazi.org launched

http://plazi.org/ Donat Agosti's group has launched Plazi, a set of tools that translates flat paper taxonomy into dynamic web content. This technology is significant: it means the content of old literature can be extracted automatically into databases. Taxonomic names are tracked and linked to external information, and collecting locations are linked to maps. This will be a valuable time-saver for taxonomic research. As an example, my doctoral thesis was a fairly traditional piece of work: a book length taxonomic revision, all done in flat text on a word processor. Plazi has turned it…

Newsweek covers evolution; Begley online today

The new issue of Newsweek (19 Mar 2007) carried a surprise for me: former Wall Street Journal health reporter, Sharon Begley, has moved back to the magazine. In fact, Begley wrote this week's excellent discussion and cover story on the massive amount of science in support of evolution. "The debate over human origins has been one of the most significant and controversial conversations in American society over the last 150 years. Whether they believe in Darwin's theory of evolution as it was proposed in his "Origin of Species", adhere to a literal interpretation of the Bible or inhabit some…