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Ask Jenny McCarthy a question!

Thanks to our "friends" at the Age of Autism, I've learned something interesting. I knew that antivaccinationist "mother warrior" and Indigo Child Supreme Jenny McCarthy was slated to appear tomorrow, September 24, on the television show that arguably serves as the most powerful and pervasive promoter of woo, magical thinking, and dubious health advice in the world, The Oprah Winfrey Show. I hadn't actually planned on watching it (I'm never home when it's on anyway), and setting the DVR to record it for later viewing seems more than I'm willing to do to expose my brain to the neuron-…

Examining the nursing faculty shortage

There is a need for nurses with higher degrees to serve as faculty and train the future generation of nurses. A study published in the May issue of the American Journal of Nursing (AJN) examined the availability of nursing faculty in North Carolina. It found that nurses are not pursuing advanced degrees in sufficient number to meet the demands for nurses in faculty and advanced practice roles. According to the paper schools of nursing cite a lack of qualified nursing faculty as a primary barrier to program expansion. The study followed a total of over 8,000 nurse graduates from North…

Exploring physician-pharmaceutical industry relationships

The latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reports that 94% of physicians in the U.S. receive gifts and benefits from pharmaceutical companies in the form of free food, drug samples and sports tickets, to name a few. Despite efforts by several organizations to regulate these relationships they appear to be quite common and may underscore doctors' professional decisions. The authors of the study sent out a survey to which over 1500 physicians responded. Most physicians (94%) reported some type of relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, and most of these relationships…

Ask the Experts: Is it true that honeybees can survive freezing?

I was recently sent this intriguing question from a reader: Dear Dr. Dolittle, I heard in my science class that because honeybees have such high blood sugar levels, they can survive freezing...is that true? To answer this question, I turned to expert Dr. John G. Duman from the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame who studies antifreeze proteins in insects. Here is what he had to say: In short, no. Insects generally survive subzero environmental temperatures by evolving one of two strategies. Some are freeze tolerant, meaning that they can survive the freezing…

USA Today conflates science manipulation, political considerations

This morning, hotel guests across the country this morning woke up to a chronicle of the divide between science and poltics in USA Today's "Science vs. politics gets down and dirty." There's no need to hit the complimentary continental breakfast for a second cup of coffee when your morning news starts The relationship (between the Bush administration and the nation's scientific community) hit a new low last month when Richard Carmona, surgeon general from 2002 to 2006, lashed out at his former colleagues in testimony before a House committee. Normally, I'd think the nation's most circulated…

Dear Neurontic

Recently I discovered that my therapist is taking an anti-depressant for depression. I also suffer from chronic depression and understand that, if properly treated, depression doesn't jeopardize the ability to do one's job. (I, for one, am successful despite my condition.) But since my discovery, I am more reluctant to trust his judgment. Is this a case of the blind leading the blind? Sincerely, Anxious Analysand Dear Anxious Analysand, Let me start by saying that your reservations are perfectly reasonable. When someone initially seeks treatment for depression, he's generally hoping to find a…

"The greatest revolution of all"

Think neuroscience is boring? Think again, says V.S Ramachandran, director of San Diego State's Center for Brain and Cognition. In the coming years, Ramachandran says, neuroscience promises to revolutionize the way "we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos." (BBC Reith Lecture 1) If he sounds less like a neurologist than a new-age prophet, don't let that surprise you. Ramachandran--one of the few scientists just as likely to quote the Upanishads as he is to cite the research of Richard Dawkins--is on a mission to tear down the walls that separate science and philosophy. According to…

What can search predict?

You've all heard about how you can predict all sorts of things, from movie grosses to flu trends, using search results. I earlier blogged about the research of Yahoo's Sharad Goel, Jake Hofman, Sebastien Lahaie, David Pennock, and Duncan Watts in this area. Since then, they've written a research article. Here's a picture: And here's their story: We [Goel et al.] investigate the degree to which search behavior predicts the commercial success of cultural products, namely movies, video games, and songs. In contrast with previous work that has focused on realtime reporting of current trends,…

The Centrosome and the Spindle Pole Body

Yes I wrote about centrosome kissing and then ... another paper appears in Nature Cell Biology. But this time it's not in mammalian cells but in yeast. Remember what I once said: prokaryotic (bacterial) strategy: out-multiply your neighbors eukaryotic strategy: out-sophisticate your neighbors yeast strategy: shed many of your eukaryotic tools and go back to out-multiplying your neighbors Durring cell division in eukaryotes, microtubules that eminate from two centrosomes form a spindle. The spindle microtubules act to yank the duplicated chromosomes to each daugther cell. But microtubules are…

NOAA Great Lakes Ships Move To Be A Little "Greener"

NOAA Great Lake Environmental Research Laboratory ships: Laurentian, Shenanon and Huron Explorer. In 1998, President Clinton enacted Executive Order 13101 for government agencies to reduce waste, recycle and use environmentally friendly and sustainable products including bio-products. Fast forward to 2007 and NOAA has heeded the call to reduce its environmental footprint by replacing petroleum-based fuels and lubricants with bio-based ones. In a press release from the NOAA website, Richard Spinrad, NOAA assistant administrator for Ocean and Atmospheric Research, commented that, Our…

Gold rush to the deep seafloor

Hydrothermal vents have given us many things, including new autotrophic paradigms, new species, a new appreciation for seafloor spreading centers, some cool websites and a best-ever IMAX movie . But the fact that seafloor massive sulfides can precipitate a king's ransom in gold, silver, copper, and zinc was an unexpected boost to the cauldron-like charisma of hydrothermal vent ecosystems. Deep Sea News first started reporting on Vancouver based company Nautilus Minerals' intention to mine extinct hydrothermal vents in Papua New Guinea back in November of 2005. Big-time scientific weeklies…

A Sale of Two Titles

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was.. Oops. Sorry, already been done. Start again. The other day I brought up some thoughts concerning the high cost of college textbooks. In the arena of science and engineering there are issues with the fairly narrow audience and resultant low volume, and some difficulties with the used book market. There is, of course, the issue of the publishers. I am going to risk having my snout slapped by biting the hand that feeds me, but hey, I noticed something the other day that has my head spinning anyway. I teach an introductory course in…

Fast Food F(r)iends

Yesterday, I mentioned the Fast Food Friends program at Gardendale First Baptist Church in Alabama. Here is how they describe it on their website: It is a creative way to show people in our community the love of Christ. You ask how does it work? The next time that you go to your local fast food resturant (sic) drive thru, tell the cashier that you would like to pay the bill for the car behind you. Simply pay their bill and leave a fast food friends card for the cashier to give to them. Next, you drive off praying that God will use that act of kindness to bless the recipient of your…

A Household Master Clock

They say that a man who owns a clock knows the precise time of day, but a man who owns two is never quite as sure. In my case, that implies complete temporal confusion. I wish my house had a master clock, sort of like the clock in my computer, which would serve as the time base for everything held within. I love the concept of daylight savings time, but the manual change of the clocks has become large and bothersome. When I was a child, we had four clocks in the house: one in each of the three bedrooms plus one in the kitchen. All analog, all easy to change. Last night I did an inventory as I…

Carolomics?

I just got a copy of this paper in my email, straight from Santa Claes, and it's a good thing, because when I checked our library didn't have a subscription to PNAS NorthPole. I think it was sent to me because I've been such a good boy this year (oh, you didn't get one? We've found the naughty children, then!) They've associated a 7-character amino acid sequence (for instance, FALALAA or NAVIDAD) with a common Christmas carol ("Deck the Halls" or "Feliz Navidad"), and searched GenBank for all instances, and they're calling this the Carolome. I know, that's all Jonathan Eisen wanted for…

Unbridled Laughingstock

I've been poking fun at Kentucky this week, which is easy to do — investing in a theme park that has Biblical literalism as its centerpiece is embarrassingly ridiculous. But let's be fair. Ken Ham could have landed in Minnesota, if instead of aiming for a location within a day's travel of 40% of the nation's population, he'd wanted a place within a day's travel of North and South Dakota, and then we'd all be laughing at this rural assembly of yokels. And also, of course, Kentucky has plenty of smart, aware, rational people, as we can see from this editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal.…

Kansans back embryonic stem cell research

SurveyUSA polled 500 Kansans on behalf of KWCH. Asked "Based on what you know today, do you support or oppose embryonic stem cell research?" the research had 60% support, 32% opposition. The poll follows suggestions that Kansas pass an amendment like the MIssouri stem cell amendment. The Wichita Eagle's blog points out that such an amendment isn't going to move because it requires 2/3 support in the legislature, which it won't get. What's interesting is that these poll results are lower than a poll a year ago commissioned by the Kansas Coalition for Lifesaving Cures. That poll asked a…

Kansas 9th district: Otto vs. Shirley

We covered a debate between the candidates for the state house in the 9th district (which includes Iola). Thanks to j.d., we now see that a Republican county vice-chair has endorsed the Democratic candidate, Bill Shirley. Both candidates are clearly pretty conservative, but that's to be expected. The last time a Democrat represented the entire area was 1913 (two others have represented part of the district when the lines were drawn differently). The area is a microcosm of Kansas. As the Iola Register observes: Republicans outnumber Democrats about two to one in the district. Consequently…

So you think slavery wasn't at the heart of the Confederacy…

Then you must read this wonderfully written piece in the Atlantic. The author's argument is powerful, but the section with the excerpts from the declarations of seccession by various southern states settles the facts of the case. Here's what Mississippi had to say: …Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an…

Crazy Connie just won't go away

A year ago, Kansas Board of Ed. member Connie Morris got in hot water. She went to a conference on magnet schools, stayed in a hotel that charges as much per night as lots of people spend on monthly rent, and she doesn't even represent any magnet schools. In the midst of a scandal about the thousands of dollars the state was spending to import creationists, Connie was compelled to pay back some of the costs, especially when her receipts didn't add up. If she stayed in a hotel close to the conference, why did she need to spend money on a rental car? Having lost her bid for re-election,…

Final tallies: Science wins in Kansas

Reposted from the old TfK, where it was picked up by the Dailykos, MSNBC, and many others. For the Board of Ed: Waugh won re-election. There's no Republican challenge, so that seat remains safe. Cauble appears to have beat Morris! Only 68% of the precincts have reported (with several urban centers that will back Cauble experiencing technical problems), but the trend seems to be holding. If so (keynehore) a lightning rod on the conservative side got burned. Apparently it doesn't cut it to badmouth your colleagues and use government money to fund a Florida vacation. Tim Cruz will still…

The Boneyard #22

Amphicyon Welcome to the 22nd edition of The Boneyard, marking the long-awaited return of the blog carnival all about paleontology. Much has happened since the last iteration, so there's plenty of new blogospheric specimens to peruse; Are there different "rules" of classification at work for fossil mammals than for. non-avian dinosaurs? Zach considers lumping and splitting at When Pigs Fly Returns. Traumador reports on a new bit of titanosaur discovered in New Zealand. Mo presents a specimen of one of my favorite "early birds," Confuciusornis, along with some new artwork. A DC…

Book progress #4

True to my word, I worked for about 5 hours on my book today. As always, I didn't get as much done as I would have liked, but I figure another 2 and 1/2 pages in Word isn't too bad. The main difficulty with the writing I did today involved correcting some mistakes and incorrect interpretations in an earlier draft concerning T.H. Huxley and the origin of birds. Working from books like Taking Wing by Pat Shipman, I naively accepted a bit of textbook cardboard, which Adrian Desmond's Archetypes and Ancestors and some original source material helped set straight. This slowed down the writing…

An Iguanodon with flippers

Gerhard Heilmann's often-reproduced illustration of running Iguanodon. This is the version I am most familiar with, but there was actually an earlier version in which the dinosaurs lacked the crest of scutes they possess in the above drawing. Last night I picked up Gerhard Heilmann's The Origin of Birds and rediscovered a passage that is one of my favorites in the whole of paleontological literature. Addressing an absurd hypothesis for the origins of birds (and flight), Heilmann sarcastically tears down the fanciful speculation and provides a wise warning about books written by authors…

"Problem" Wolves in Alaska?

Wolves have always had a bad reputation, often being cast as bloodthirsty villains despite their relatively shy demeanor when humans are around. Indeed, of all the large carnivores present in North America, wolves are among the least threatening, and people generally have more to fear from moose than from any carnivore in the United States. Still, wolves (and even coyotes) are not as shy about dogs as they are about people, and it seems that there has been a rash of attacks on dogs in recent weeks in Alaska. A recent report in the Anchorage Daily News provides a review of recent incidents,…

Gone crazy, be back soon

I apologize, dear readers, that today I probably won't be able to keep up with my more usual prolific rate of posting. The reasons for this today are as follows; I have two major exams today, one in my "Soils & Water" "Soils and Society" class and my Computers midterm (which for some reason was scheduled to start at 10 PM). I occasionally experience dizzy spells/lightheadedness during this time of the year, today being one of those days. I have a weekly presentation to give tomorrow about meat-eating in early hominids that I haven't started yet. I have no doubt that I'll be able to…

A small duct tape mistake

Yes, I am going to talk about the MythBusters latest duct tape episode. A couple of pre-post points: They call it "duct" tape. I call it duck tape. It doesn't work very well with ducts. Also, it is good for water proofing stuff - you know like a duck. For the rest of this post, I am calling it duck tape. (Wikipedia agrees there is some naming problem) You know I love the MythBusters - right? I hope you don't think I sit around waiting for them to make a mistake so I can pounce on them (I save that for ESPN Sport Science). In this case, they just made a small mistake. A mistake that…

Basics: The electric field

Suppose I take a 1 kg ball and hold it near the surface of the Earth. What would be the gravitational force the Earth exerts on this ball? And I could say "g" is: The magnitude of this force would then be 9.8 Newtons. And, if I replaced the ball with a 10 kg ball, the force would be 98 Newtons. What does this have to do with the electric field? Well, you are probably already familiar with this idea of the gravitational force. Guess what? "g" is the gravitational field. Basically, it is the force per unit mass due to the Earth. This is only approximately constant. If I get very far…

Student Evaluations

Female Science Professor has been talking about student evaluations lately. (here are some other Student Eval posts - post 1 post 2 post 3). I had some ideas on student evaluations, and here they are. One Question A friend of mine likes to say that student evaluations should just be one question: "Do you like this instructor?" Maybe that is the only reliable information you can get from a student. Perhaps that can even be useful. Here is an indication of the problem. We have on our evaluation form (which is filled with useless questions) the following question: Agree-Disagree:…

Cramster.com - what is the point of grading homework

I am pretty sure this came up on some email discussion listserv. Someone mentioned that students could just look up the answers to homework on cramster.com. Maybe you are more with it than I am, but I had never heard of this. Of course I had to check it out. At the basic level, cramster gives solutions to homework problems. I was surprised how many introductory physics texts were available. They even had Classical Electrodynamics by Jackson. They did not have the text I use for calc-based intro physics, Matter and Interactions. So, I tried it out. The site is pretty nice. They have…

In which I reject the sage advice of my elders

Jerome Armstrong sez: Pull off the blinders that have you supporting a particular candidate, while being blind to the bigger issue. If progressives are not going to have the guts to call out those who foster divisive talk, and demand their renouncement, no matter where it comes from, it's a bigger loss than an election. I think we can fairly refer to this as divisive talk. He is dividing the progressive movement into the group who will renounce certain people and those who will not. And yet, I will not renounce Jerome Armstrong. He's a good guy, wrong on this issue, but with his heart in…

Florida passes new science standards

The Florida Board of Education passed new science standards on a 4-3 vote. The old standards got an F in a national survey by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which noted errors like the claim that "a thermometer measures the amount of heat absorbed by an object," that "The classification of simple machines is naive…[e]nergetics of phase change is presented misleadingly; treatment of electricity and magnetism…is minimal… The treatment of chemistry content in K-8 is scanty; but—as one reviewer observed—"Even less is required in 9-12." They concluded "The superficiality of the treatment of…

Disco's Rob Crowther can't read (or just doesn't want to)

There's a Simpsons episode where Bart manages to make tons of cash off of Homer by betting on the outcome of (IIRC) the chariot race in Ben Hur. "He has to lose eventually," is roughly Homer's response when asked to explain why he'd keep betting on the losing horse. I keep thinking of that scene as I read the Disco. Inst.'s attacks on NOVA's Judgment Day documentary about the Dover trial. They seem to have hoped that a documentary reenacting the court case would somehow be less embarrassing to the DI and it's senior fellows than the trial and resulting legal ruling were, an error of…

Bush "double down" strategy means military gravesites must "double up"

Salon observes: Sens. Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts have written a letter to the Department of Veterans Affairs urging full funding for a new cemetery at Fort Riley in Kansas. The reason: With an influx of casualties from Iraq, the existing cemetery at Fort Riley is now full. Well, not entirely full: A spokesman for the facility tells Reuters that bodies can be buried on top of other bodies if family members want to share plots. Thank heavens we have such stalwart men looking out for our troops. It would be horrific to force families to have to share their grieving space with other people.…

Heterodox Economists, Kuhn and Prediction

So there's an interesting debate over at TPM Cafe about this article in the Nation, which argues that neoclassical economics (the mainstream) suppresses its heterodox alternatives. If true, this would be a classic case of a Kuhnian paradigm, in which the entrenched dogma resists any alternative explanation. The anomalies are ignored, until there are just too many anomalies, and then the whole edifice comes crashing down. That, at least, is how "normal" science is supposed to work. But my problem with economics isn't that it ignores its heterodox alternatives, which is what the article tries…

Proustian Hotels

We all know about Proust and his madeleine. One whiff of that buttery cookie, shaped like a seashell, and Proust suddenly remembered his long forgotten childhood in Combray. Proust makes it clear that his sense of smell was the trigger for his memory. He knew that our nose bears a unique burden of memory: "When from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping,…

You Always Get What You Pay For

John Strassburger, the president of Ursinus College, a small liberal arts institution here in the eastern Pennsylvania countryside, vividly remembers the day that the chairman of the board of trustees told him the college was losing applicants because of its tuition. It was too low. So early in 2000 the board voted to raise tuition and fees 17.6 percent, to $23,460 (and to include a laptop for every incoming student to help soften the blow). Then it waited to see what would happen. Ursinus received nearly 200 more applications than the year before. Within four years the size of the freshman…

Mapping the Human Brain

The Allen Brain Atlas just launched their first set of gene expression maps in the adult human brain, based on microarray data from over 700 different anatomical locations. It promises to be an invaluable resource for scientists trying to figure out how a text of base pairs constructs the most complicated machine in the known universe. I wrote about the construction of the human brain atlas last year in Wired, if you'd like to learn more about how the map was made. Although these genetic maps are just a first draft - one researcher at the Allen Institute compared them to those 15th century…

The Soda Tax

Mark Bittman wonders if soda is the new tobacco, and explores the possibility of a tax on sugary, carbonated beverages: A tax on soda was one option considered to help pay for health care reform (the Joint Committee on Taxation calculated that a 3-cent tax on each 12-ounce sugared soda would raise $51.6 billion over a decade), and President Obama told Men's Health magazine last fall that such a tax is "an idea that we should be exploring. There's no doubt that our kids drink way too much soda." But with all the junk food and U.F.O.'s (unidentifiable food-like objects) out there, why soda? Why…

The Middle Way

I found this minor anecdote, from Peter Baker's authoritative NY Times article on Obama's decision-making process for Afghanistan, to be quite fascinating: On Oct. 9, Mr. Obama and his team reviewed General McChrystal's troop proposals for the first time. Some in the White House were surprised by the numbers, assuming there would be a middle ground between 10,000 and 40,000. "Why wasn't there a 25 number?" one senior administration official asked in an interview. He then answered his own question: "It would have been too tempting." General McChrystal, it turns out, is a shrewd student of…

Stress, Poverty, Working Memory

A new study has demonstrated, once again, that being poor is stressful, and that chronic stress is poison for the brain. Here's the paper: The income-achievement gap is a formidable societal problem, but little is known about either neurocognitive or biological mechanisms that might account for income-related deficits in academic achievement. We show that childhood poverty is inversely related to working memory in young adults. Furthermore, this prospective relationship is mediated by elevated chronic stress during childhood. The scientists measured stress by looking at the "allostatic load"…

Babies and Morality

In the Times Science section today, Natalie Angier discusses a fascinating-sounding new book, by the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. The book, "Mothers and Others," argues that humans evolved a powerful set of moral instincts - a set of instincts that far exceed those of our primate relatives - because we depend on others to help us rear our helpless infants: As Dr. Hrdy argues in her latest book, "Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding," which will be published by Harvard University Press in April, human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for…

Finally, an answer on "preconditions"

I've long wondered about the pseudo-debate over whether the next President should meet foreign leaders with or without preconditions. Obama has said "without," observing that the whole point of meeting with hostile leaders is to get them to agree to important changes; a meeting is not enough of a reward to compel someone to make major policy changes. McCain-Palin have been opposed, but I've been frustrated that no one ever asked for clarification of what pre-conditions they'd want to impose. At last, Brian Williams came through for me: WILLIAMS: — that you both have been hammering the…

Nevada

Obama's big bet on Nevada: a secret weapon for the Democrats may be the legions of Bay Area liberals who have been making weekend migrations to Reno to canvass for Obama. Although the Obama campaign was cagey about the numbers, Alise Moss, 53, a healthcare consultant from Sparks, Nev., who has hosted several groups of California volunteers at her house, claimed that on a recent weekend the campaign had 400 volunteers show up. "We love those crazy Californians," said Moss with a laugh. "California's navy blue, and they don't mind coming over here and knocking on doors, and all those rejections…

Bailout fails

With a majority of Democrats in favor of it and a majority of Republicans against it, the financial bailout plan negotiated over the weekend failed in the House. Not being an economist, I can't say that the plan was good or bad, but the consensus of smart people I'm reading seems to be that it was good enough. Allowing it to fail was foolish not just because it created the largest drop in the Dow – bigger than that following the 9/11 attacks – but because the best excuse the Republicans could come up with for voting against it was that Nancy Pelosi hurt their feelings. There are plenty of…

Why professors are liberal

Another idea, Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left: The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by everything from outright bias to higher I.Q. scores. Now new research suggests that critics may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of looking at why most professors are liberal, they should ask why so many liberals -- and so few conservatives -- want to be professors. A pair of sociologists think they may have an answer: typecasting. Conjure up the classic image of a humanities or social sciences professor, the fields where the imbalance is…

The less intelligent you are, the more bored you are

The Audacious Epigone has an interesting post up, Burden of boredom borne by blockheads: This isn't just me speaking from personal experience--the data confirm it. The GSS asked respondents in 1982 and again in 2004 how often they have time on their hands that they don't know what to do with. Using the familiar categorization method employed here before*, the following table shows the percentage of each group's members who reported to "almost never" be without something worthwhile to do in their free time: He presented his data in tabular format. I decided to use the variables he kindly…

Back the Lawrence Domestic Partner registry

The Lawrence City Commission will be considering a proposal to maintain a registry of domestic partnerships. The state attorney general has reviewed the proposal, and feels it's probably legal. All the registry would do is provide a place for people (possibly restricted to Lawrence residents) to write down that they have made a lifetime commitment, and then their employers can check that registry to see which employees actually made that commitment. No employer would have to do anything, and the registry would not have any special meaning to the government or to anyone other than the…

Irony

Stay Red Kansas couldn't write about guns yesterday because, well, there was a massive shooting: Today, Stay Red had planned to discuss Governor Sebelius' unnecessary veto of the House's firearm legislation. Due to the previously referenced events, we felt it appropriate to move today's coverage to a later date. That firearm legislation would have forbidden local communities from passing their own laws restricting concealed weapons. Concealed weapons were already banned on university campuses, courthouses and state facilities, but were not banned in municipal facilities like ballparks.…