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For international ScienceOnline2010 travelers arriving at RDU: "Nobody was griping"

In the light of the Northwest Airlines "pantsbomber" episode and America's penchant for quick but poorly-thought out theatrical responses to such incidents, some international colleagues planning to attend ScienceOnline2010 have expressed some concern about the hassles they might encounter flying into our beloved burg in two weeks. Preliminary accounts from the RDU International Airport suggest, however, that our local TSA and customs officials have maintained reason and restraint while also keeping travelers as safe as possible: Paul Beach, an Air Force communications officer who flew into…

The case of the disappearing New Scientist essay on creationist code words

A couple of weeks ago, New Scientist published an insightful but hardly controversial little essay on the challenges a science book editor faces when she has to deal with creationist literature. Amanda Geftner's piece, "How to spot a hidden religious agenda" disappeared from the magazine's website last week (Of course, it's still available elsewhere, like here.) As of this morning, if you try to find it at the New Scientist site, you get a message from the editors: New Scientist has received a legal complaint about the contents of this story. At the advice of our lawyer it has temporarily…

Round-up: Dinos on display, soldiers at play, stereotypes at work, pharma ghosts, Iraqi snakes

Much much much ado on the web this week, on the too-many fronts I try to visit. From my list of notables: Carl Zimmer, who clearly doesn't sleep, writes up a nice post about a Nature paper announcing Limusaurus, a newly discovered fossil that is, Zimmer notes, is "not -- I repeat NOT -- the missing link between anything"-- but nevertheless sheds some light on how dinos may have turned into birds (more or less). Bonus: Great pictures of Carl holding up three fingers. Ed Yong, who seems to be drinking the same strength coffee as Carl Zimmer lately, looks at an interesting correlation: Hidden…

Four Days to Go....Enter The 1st Annual CRASH THE INTERSECTION Contest

We have now gotten some good entries, but we still need more to make a completely, er, informed decision...and we're afraid some real Picassos out there are still holding back. So with just days left, Sheril and I want to remind everyone one last time about the The 1st Annual CRASH THE INTERSECTION Contest! Design an "Intersection" banner and have your art displayed atop our blog for at least one year where the world can be dazzled by your creativity and wit! That's thousands of views a day all credited to you! We like to mix things up so there are no guidelines as long as it's not rated NC…

New York Times Reviews Storm World, Wants More "Thingamabobbercane"

The infamous "Thingamabobbercane" off the coast of Oregon last November. I'm excited to say that my book is reviewed today in the Sunday Times Book Review, available online here. I think it would be fair to call the review itself lukewarm (not quite warm enough for storm formation, let's say). The reviewer, Lisa Margonelli of the New America Foundation, seemed to want a repeat of The Republican War on Science. Most of the Times review attempts to recap the book, but because we don't blanch from it at the Intersection, here is the paragraph of criticism: Mooney has written a well-researched…

Tool-use in wild crows filmed for the first time

New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) have remarkable tool-using abilities that are at least as sophisticated as those of chimpanzees, if not more so. To date, however, such behaviours have only been observed in contrived experimental conditions. Using newly-developed miniuatrized animal-borne video cameras, researchers have now filmed wild crows using tools. The footage they have obtained is the first to show the use of tools by crows in their natural habitat. Used in combination with conventional radio telemetry, the tail-mounted cameras provided the researchers with detailed…

Biosphere in decay

BldgBlog has a great post featuring Noah Sheldon's photographs of the decaying, abandoned Biosphere 2. From BldgBlog: "The structure was billed as the first large habitat for humans that would live and breathe on its own, as cut off from the earth as a spaceship," the New York Times wrote back in 1992, but the project was a near-instant failure. Scientists ridiculed it. Members of the support team resigned, charging publicly that the enterprise was awash in deception. And even some crew members living under the glass domes, gaunt after considerable loss of weight, tempers flaring, this…

New Sciblings, Book Club, and More

Lots of new things to tell you about. First, SB has reinvigorated the ScienceBlogs Book Club. The first book being discussed is "Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service" by Mark Pendergrast, who is participating in the book club himself, and already has a post up. Second, exciting news from SB headquarters: We here at ScienceBlogs are pleased to announce that beginning today, we will be helping to spark the next generation of research communications by introducing new blogs to our network from the world's top scientific institutions. The…

A Fungus Among Your Follicles

I think this is a great teachable moment: Scientists complete genome sequence of fungus responsible for dandruff, skin disorders from PhysOrg.com Scientists from P&G Beauty announced that they successfully sequenced the complete genome for Malassezia globosa (M. globosa), a naturally occurring fungus responsible for the onset of dandruff and other skin conditions in humans. Results of the genome sequencing are published in today's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [...] I mean, think about it. Kids in biology class have a hard time relating to size and…

Fame! (Article in Seed about Texas edition)

My article for Seed about what the new Texas standards mean for science education nationwide is now online! Check it out. Here's a taste: Given these stakes, my colleagues and I worked hard to influence the Texas School Board over the months of hearings, providing them with a statement signed by 54 scientific and educational societies opposing “any effort to undermine the teaching of biological evolution and related topics.” We worked with local activists to organize constituents and political honchos who educated board members about the importance of evolution to science education. But the…

HGDP Selection Browser

You know what the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) is implicitly, they're the list of populations you've seen in many human genetics papers already. Now the Pritchard lab has put up a nice browser to query the data in a manner analogous to Haplotter. One of the major improvements, aside from the fact that you're looking at 52 populations instead of 3, is that it uses GET to pass parameters instead of POST. That means I can link to the queries for KITLG and SLC24A5. Try it, it works! Under instructions it is laconically stated that: Search using a sequence name, gene name, locus, or…

Taboo, Sustainable Eating and Who We Are Not

Pha Lo has a wonderful piece at Salon on the ways that his family's history of locavorism was a source of shame and conflict for them, because it fit so badly into the American diet. He echoes a story I hear over and over again, both from immigrants and from Americans from traditional agricultural communities - we were embarassed about our diet, made ashamed or even punished for eating real food, told what we were eating was gross. He writes about his local, organic, sustainable diet: I remember watching grown-ups lose their identities and self-worth, slip into depression and cycles of…

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. Victoria Stodden is a Postdoctoral Associate in Law and Kauffman Fellow in Law and Innovation at Yale Law School, a fellow with the Internet and Democracy Project at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School and a Fellow at Science Commons. She blogs and tweets. At the Conference, Victoria will lead the session on Legal Aspects of publishing, sharing and blogging…

Denialists' Deck of Cards: State and Federal Issues

Okay industry lobbyists in training, you've started just making up arguments to confuse everyone. That's a method of confusing issues. Now you should start confusing individuals' roles in the policy process. It's time to start playing government officials off each other. If you don't like what the federal government is doing, say that it is a state issue. Of course, if the states are active on the issue, you should argue that it is a federal issue, and that state action will create a "patchwork" of conflicting requirements. The "patchwork" argument is also an effective tool to…

Discover Your Summer in the Midwest

You know that I have a soft spot for Project Exploration (just see this for starters), so when Gabrielle Lyon asks me to spread the word about their activities, I am more than happy to oblige. Here is the announcement of their latest action - and you may be interested or know someone to forward this to who can find it useful: Are you running a science program for middle or high school students this summer in the Midwest? Project Exploration wants to know about it! Project Exploration is seeking Midwest programs to include in Discover Your Summer, a free resource guide of summer science…

Archaeology is Chocolate, not Potatoes

Back in February I posted snippets of an opinion piece I'd been asked to write about the current state and future prospects of Swedish archaeology. Now the thing has appeared on-line in Antiquity (behind a pay wall, but see below), though the journal's autumn issue has not reached subscribers on paper yet. For you nat-sci types, I should probably explain that Antiquity is my discipline's equivalent of Nature. So, getting to inaugurate a new recurring heading there, "Prospects", is something I'm very proud of. Archaeology should have a popular/populist slant designed to please tax-payers. We…

Going Broad with Terminator Salvation: Can McG Teach Us Something about Artificial Intelligence or Cyborgs?

So I scanned the reviews for director McG's Terminator Salvation at the Washington Post, New York Times, and New York Magazine, and it turns out not unexpectedly that in the words of my hometown Buffalo News' critic Jeff Simon that the film "is a remarkable looking piece of work. And you'll find gobs and gobs of action in it at least half of the time. Bullets fly, so do people. Things blow up and, yes the people do, too." But reading the reviews left me thinking: There's so much visual, so much wider audience engagement with a film like Terminator Salvation, that the underlying themes of…

Keeping Up with Michael Pollan

In the essay I wrote for the HSS Newsletter about blogging (here) I noted in passing that one virtue of the blog space was that it provided a place to store notes. It is an electronic version of note cards. This post is one example, a placeholder that I'll come back to. Let's hope. Pollan's Farmer-in-Chief essay in the New York Times Magazine two weeks ago brought together many of the points he's made in the past few years about the role of food and agricultural policy for environmental, political, and health outcomes. His overarching point: [M]ost of the problems our food system faces…

Let the YouTube Election Begin

As I've previously written, expect 2008 to be defined as the YouTube election, as campaigns generate online and conversational buzz by placing innovative ads on the video sharing site, amplifying attention to the ads by way of free media publicity at the Drudge Report, online newspapers, and blogs (sites that can channel millions of readers directly to the ad.) The latest in this trend is the high-concept anti-Clinton/pro-Obama "1984" spot. Released this weekend, the ad is linked to by the Drudge Report and major newspapers, and has been viewed at YouTube more than 500,000 times. The ad…

Egyptian blogger identifies his torturer

Abdel Monim Mahmoud, an Egyptian journalist and blogger, has identified (in Arabic and English) a prison officer who allegedly tortured him for 13 days at a state security headquarters back in 2003.  27-year-old Mahmoud is a member of Ikhwan Muslimin (the Muslim Brotherhood, MB). The MB is the world's first Islamist movement - it was founded in 1928 - and its early ideology is what inspires most of today's Islamists, including al-Qa'eda. The MB has always been, and remains, Egypt's biggest and most popular opposition party. It is officially illegal, but is tolerated by Egyptian president…

Wednesday Whatzits: Icelandic sagas, Chaiten, Erta'Ale's lava lake and a volcano simulator

Did I mention its a busy week? The lava lake at Erta'Ale in 2008. Image courtesy of Stromboli Online. Our Icelandic saga continues, with more earthquakes and more speculation/information on the parts of Eruptions readers. Keep up the discussion - I'll be fascinated to see who turns out to get closest to what actually happens, prediction-wise. The seismicity has quieted somewhat again in the last 12 hours, so we wait eagerly to see what comes next. Remember, Iceland is the land where volcanoes helped change history, so it is always fun to talk Icelandic volcanism. The NASA Earth Observatory…

SEED

Brummell continues to review the last issue of Seed Magazine. Part III is here and Part IV is here. You can read most of the articles online now - just go to the very bottom of my blog and click on the links on the bottom bar.

Feedback

If you were at the conference on Saturday, please take a couple of seconds to let us know what you think about it by filling this short feedback questionnaire. And if you post stuff online (blogs, podcasts, photos, videos), do not forget to use the Tag: sciencebloggingconference

Food Storage and Preservation Class Starting Tomorrow!

I still have two remaining spots in my online food storage and preservation class, starting tomorrow! If you'd like to join us you can read about the class and the syllabus here, and email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com to reserve a spot or ask more questions! Cheers, Sharon

BluSci interview now online

Mico Tatalovic of Blue Sci, the Cambridge's popular science magazine, interviewed me back in April 2007 and wrote an article on science blogging based on that interview. It came out in the Issue #9 as a PDF in October, and is finally found online on Blue Sci.

New in OA

Charles Leadbetter: People power transforms the web in next online revolution Anna Kushnir: Science Participation and Going Incognito Wobbler: Digital Scholarly Communication & Bottlenecks Jonathan A. Eisen: Open Evolution Peter Suber: Aiming for obscurity (the links within are important) Stian Haklev: A "Fair Trade" logo for academic research?

99% Evil

I have finally accomplished something of value; using the the infallible methods of Gematria developed by Mr. Ivan Panin to determine how good or evil a web site or a text passage is, I discovered that the gematriculator has declared Scientific Life to be 99% evil. . tags: online quiz, silliness

MarshaMarshaMarsha

You Are Marcia Brady Confident yet kind. Popular yet down to earth. You're a total dream girl. You've got the total package - no wonder everyone's a little jealous of you. What Brady Are You? Hahaha. Inaccurate, as usual, but I like what it said, anyway. tags: online quiz

Are You Stupid??

tags: educated, online quiz This quiz is actually is a lot more fun than than its name implies. You Are Not Stupid You got 10/10 questions right! While acing this quiz doesn't prove you're a genius, you're at least pretty darn smart. Are You Stupid?

Living Bird Magazine Now Available Online

tags: Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Living Bird magazine The quarterly magazine, Living Bird, that is published by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, is now available online for free. It includes stories (some are "web only"), streaming video and lots of wonderful images for you to enjoy.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The Four Stone Hearth blog carnival lives on without a hitch thanks to Afarensis, its new editor! The one hundred and first instalment is on-line at Sapien Games. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Let me remind you, though, that "sapiens" is not a plural.

Tonight's Framing Science Talk at Cal Tech

Here are the details on the talk I am giving with Chris Mooney tonight at Cal Tech. Also online are the syllabus and readings for the science communication workshop we are running on Tuesday. For readers in the Los Angeles area, we hope to see you tonight!

WashPost Chat

Once again, folks, I'll be doing an online chat at WashingtonPost.com today--in about two hours, or at 11 am ET--and I would love to hear your questions. I'll answer as many as possible. Blogging will resume here after I'm done posting over there....

Free Audiobooks

A site called LibriVox now has a catalog of over 1,000 free audiobooks.  They are all in the public domain; all have been read and recorded by volunteers.  It's a nice supplement to the 20,000+ free books in the href="http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page">Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog. HT: href="http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/2007/11/librivox-releases-its-1000th-free.html">Open-Access News

Vintage psychiatric drug advertising

This gallery is sweet! The Online gallery of modern and vintage psychiatric drug advertising has a large selection of some pretty scary old drug advertisements and packaging. Like these: I wonder what the people of the future are going to say about our current psychiatric system? HT: Dave

North Carolina

I'm off today for North Carolina, where I'll be doing some library research, some talks at UNC and at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, and then a couple of sessions at Science Online. Expect blogging to be spotty, and I hope to see you at #scio11.

Science Blogging - what it can be

From quite early on in my blogging endeavor, I was interested in exploring science blogging, what it is, what it can do, and what it can become. So, check out some of my earliest thoughts on this here and here. Then, over about a month (from April 17, 2006 to May 17, 2006) I wrote a gazillion posts on this topic, and many science bloggers chimed in in the comments or on their own blogs. The repost of all of them together is under the fold. Check the originals (and comments) here: April 17, 2006: Publishing hypotheses and data on a blog - is it going to happen on science blogs? April 20,…

What the NY Times Presidential Endorsements Say About the Traditional Media

If you're like most sentient humans, you don't care whom the NY Times editorial board decided to endorse for president. But the 'logic' behind the endorsement of Clinton is revealing. The Mandarin Class still doesn't get it. About Clinton's foreign policy experience, the Times editors write: It is unfair, especially after seven years of Mr. Bush's inept leadership, but any Democrat will face tougher questioning about his or her fitness to be commander in chief. Mrs. Clinton has more than cleared that bar, using her years in the Senate well to immerse herself in national security issues,…

The Mad Biologist's Gas Tax Plan

We should make gas taxes part of a car's purchase price. It would certainly beat Transportation Secretary LaHood's proposal of a vehicle mileage tax (and is there any stupid idea that Republicans won't embrace?): Some surprising news out of the Department of Transportation today as Ray LaHood suggests that the Obama administration is considering taxing people based on how many miles they drive. A vehicle miles traveled tax, as the proposal is often called, has been under consideration in states like Rhode Island and Idaho and has, not surprisingly, proven pretty unpopular. First, it's a tax…

The Gaza War: Answering the Wrong Question

Gideon Lichfield has an excellent op-ed which gets at the core of why Israel doesn't seem to be winning the PR war--Israel hasbara* is answering the wrong question (italics mine): But the deeper reason is this: Israeli hasbara is perpetually trying to answer the wrong question: "Why is this justified?" Of course, it's natural for either side in a conflict to try to explain why it, and not the other side, has the moral high ground. But, especially in a conflict where both sides have been claiming the moral high ground for decades, nobody in the outside world is all that interested. From a…

Why Economic Natural History Matters: Mathematical Theory Can't Encapsulate This

I've argued previously that economics needs to learn from biology and incorporate more of a data-driven, natural history approach. While mathematical models have their uses, it often comes down to those stupid natural history facts. The first example is given to us by Christian Wyser-Pratte by way of Floyd Norris: ....you work at an investment bank for 30 years, have a reasonable draw and cash bonus, build up stock in the firm as most of your bonus, and when you decide to retire you request of the partners their permission to go limited. If they assent, you get to withdraw your money over…

How the 'Rocket Boys of the NIH' Sparked a Commitment to Science and Medical Research

Even as a child Terence Boylan was a dreamer with big ideas. Collaborating in 1957 with his friend, nine-year old Terence made plans to build a rocket that could carry a mouse into the sky and bring it back safely. But Terence did not have the money to buy the aluminum they needed so he asked his father (a physician and medical researcher at the University of Buffalo), where he got his research money. Dr. Boylan told him the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to whom the boy then wrote to ask for $10 to build the rocket. The request reached the chief of NIH Grants and although the NIH…

Dr. Donald Thomas--Astronaut now investing into the next generation of great minds

I think at some point most kids think: I want to be an Astronaut!! How cool would it be to be launched amount the stars and see the Earth from space? Many kids go through this phase, they might buy a telescope and dream up moon landings, but very few at the age of 6 decide: I'm going to be an Astronaut and actually go on to be one. But Dr. Don Thomas did just that. He was a mere six years old on May 5, 1961, when the first Americans went into space and he thought: I want to do that. He served as an astronaut between 1994 and 1997 flew as a mission specialist on four different Space Shuttle…

Climate Change Deniers Being Led by...Climate Change Believer?

Mother Jones notes that in private interviews, Glenn Beck, fiery loon of the right, privately seems to believe in anthropogenic climate change. Last week he mocked climate scientists for being "alarmists" who believe that "we're all going to die in a fiery flood." Not long ago he touted the global warming chapter of his An Inconvenient Book as "kryptonite against your Gore-worshipping psycho friends." And in May 2007 he hosted an hour-long television special, Exposed: The Climate of Fear, featuring an all-star lineup of climate change denialists and promising the "other side of the climate…

Why Don't All Smart People Make Smart Choices?

tags: reasoning, Wändi Bruine de Bruin, behavior Have you ever known someone who is intelligent but still makes astonishingly stupid decisions again and again? According to a recently published study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, reasoning is a distinct skill, and not everyone possesses it in equal measure, even those people who are thought of as being intelligent. A "decision scientist" at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh claims that while reasoning abilities are influenced by intelligence and socioeconomic status, reasoning ability may also be a skill that…

More Poker Arrests

This is becoming a far too familiar story. The police all around the nation are committing enormous resources to stop consenting adults from wagering on a game of skill and it's getting entirely out of hand. On a busy night at the New York Players Club in upper Manhattan, vice squad officers wearing bulletproof vests and raid jackets dealt the underground poker scene a losing hand. The team entered unannounced at 11 p.m., detaining dealers, snatching up piles of cash and sending dozens of card players home with empty pockets. Downtown, another popular card club, Playstation, also was…

Beer and Evolution

Here's an unusual couple of stories, coincidentally brought to my attention within days of each other but apparently unrelated. The first is that a brewing company in Utah, irritated by Sen. Buttars' attempts to weaken science education in that state by attacking evolution, has renamed one of its brews "Evolution Amber Ale": Wasatch Beers is changing the label on its 2002 Unofficial Amber Ale -- a title that once raised a ruckus with Olympic officials -- to "Evolution Amber Ale." The company says the change is inspired by Utah legislators and the debate here and nationally over whether public…

Nooz

Last night, a Minneapolis woman gave birth to twins. Two of them. But labor was tough. The first one was born just before 7PM on December 31st, 2011. The second one was born just after midnight, Januray 1st, 2012. This will get interesting in about 12 years.* The following tragic news story appeared on this morning's WCCO Web Site. I've highlighted certain parts of it: Are you tired of Tebow Tebowing? Well, one answers a gesture with a gesture, a symbol with a symbol. Next time you score at Touchdown during an NFL game, or whatever the normal human equivalent of that might be (…

Point and laugh

Sometimes, people wonder if criticizing creationists brings more attention to them than they deserve — it's a weird dynamic on the web, where we measure popularity by traffic (unfortunately), so referencing the bad guys sends them traffic, which seems to increase their apparent popularity. There's no way around it, because that's the way it works. So we've always got people urging stasis — don't raise a ruckus, keep mum, hush, don't draw more attention to the crappy, crazy creationists — and they mean well, but they're wrong. I say we need to be loud and tell everyone about them. We need to…

Links for 2011-12-11

Tom Stites: Taking stock of the state of web journalism » Nieman Journalism Lab The buzz about how bloggers and citizen journalists will save the day, once almost deafening, has died down to a murmur, although the buzz about Twitter, Facebook, and cellphone video cameras saving the day has picked up thanks to their powerful contributions to coverage of major breaking stories, from the Arab spring to Occupy Wall Street. But the triumphant march to the digital future, at least when measured in terms of original reporting, has yet to lead anywhere near triumph. Yet the picture is not entirely…