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Infinite Jest: My Favorite Footnote

The Infinite Summer people got me to start re-reading Infinite Jest, but I'm not really going to attempt to hold to their proposed reading schedule. Not because I find it hard to find time to read, but because I have trouble putting it down to go to sleep, let alone in order to keep pace with an online reading group. I've been reading a bunch of the commentary that's already been posted (see here for an early round-up, and here for the thoughts of a bunch of political bloggers), and I have to admit, I find a lot of it baffling. There's a lot of hating on the footnotes, and while I will admit…

The Myrmica Phylogeny

The online early section of Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution this week has the first comprehensive phylogeny of a rather important genus of ants: Myrmica. Myrmica is ubiquitous in the colder climates of North America and Eurasia, with a few seemingly incongruous species inhabiting the mountains of tropical southeast Asia. The genus contains about 200 species, many that are common soil-nesting ants in lawns and gardens, and at least one damaging invasive species, M. rubra. The taxonomy ranks among the most difficult of any ant genus, as workers of different species tend to be numbingly…

A Plague of Bed Bugs

Cimex lectularius - the common bedbug Bed bugs are back.  The resurgence of these blood-feeding pests is perhaps the biggest entomological story of the past decade.  Take a look, for instance, at the Google search volume for "bed bugs" over the past few years: Google Trends shows an increase in bed bug interest relative to other pests, 2004-2009 Why am I telling you all of this? I've just posted a new online bed bug photo gallery.  I was fortunate to get my hands on a vial of live bed bugs recently, and it turns out that the little guys are excellent entomological models. Cute, cuddly…

Public high school student takes top national science prize

[Welcome mental_floss blog and Daily Kos readers. After you read about this outstanding young woman, you can learn more about me, my life story, and this blog here.] If you read elsewhere at ScienceBlogs.com, you'll know that several bloggers have been discussing race and gender issues in the scientific and medical research communities as well as the challenges facing young scientists who pursue academic research careers. So, I was overjoyed this morning to see this glowing face on Shivani Sud, a local young woman of Indian heritage who took first prize in the Intel Science Talent Search (…

End of Year Roundup

It's that time of the year again, the time to complete the end of year blog meme. Here is last year's entry. Rules are simple - post the first line of the first post for every month. I've omitted my Monday Mustelid, Today In Science and Friday Poem (semi-)regular posts, so it actually means this is the first post for December. January: It's not like ASU did wonderfully against Texas (losing the Holiday Bowl 52-34), but at least they turned up to play somewhat (albeit not in the first quarter). February: PZ has noted that the boyos over at Uncommon Descent have deep-sixed a comment thread…

Statement regarding the use of bisphenol A

The LA Times has an interesting story about a statement regarding the use of bisphenol A, a compound that has many uses in the plastics industry and also happens to have estrogenic effects. The scientists -- including four from federal health agencies -- reviewed about 700 studies before concluding that people are exposed to levels of the chemical exceeding those that harm lab animals. Infants and fetuses are most vulnerable, they said. This is an important point. Organisms in utero can be exquisitely sensitive to growth factors and hormones, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of times…

Psychology Wiki (poll)

An emailer made me aware of a nice new resource: the Psychology Wiki. From the home page: The Psychology Wiki started on 21st January 2006 and is now one of the largest psychology resources on the internet. We currently have 12832 pages and are working on 8,061 articles and have over 45 MB of content. Here's their summary of the site's mission: The Psychology Wiki's mission is to create an online resource placing the entire body of psychology knowledge in the hands of its users, be they academics, practitioners or users of psychology services. In doing so we are looking to address three…

Science + 1

In my latest "Science Progress" online column, I've tried for something a little bit off my beaten path. The piece takes, as its starting point, a recent Urban Institute study suggesting (among other things) that contrary to many lamentations from the science community, the real issue is not the failure to produce enough scientists and engineers to keep competitive, but rather, the fact that we don't even have enough jobs for the scientists and engineers we're currently producing. Of course, I do not therefore argue that we need less scientists--but rather, that the scientists we're producing…

The Letter Collector

 When I was about eleven years old, I loved to draw intricate ornamental initials with sea serpents twining all over them and castles sprouting out of them, etc. Sometimes my friends would have me draw ink letter "tattoos" on them, but really, the only way I could get satisfactory resolution on my letters was to use a fine tip pen on a full sheet of paper. One letter = math class. (No wonder I don't know calculus). That's why this new group show at San Francisco's Gallery Hijinks has me smiling with nostalgia - it's a full alphabet (plus) of letter-themed artworks. The organic,…

Lord Winston: "science is just one of many truths"

One of the guests on tonight's edition of the One Show, BBC1's highly enjoyable magazine programme, was Lord Winston, the famous fertility scientist and TV presenter. Discussing a segment entitled "Are we ashamed of God?", Lord Winston said that science was only one of multiple truths, or words to that effect. The programme goes out live so I won't be able to check until it's posted online. Yeah, I know if I had Sky+ or some fancy crap I could stop it, replay it, Photoshop goatse images all over the place, but I don't so bah humbug. EDIT: The footage is now available here (from around 07:…

Eco-sexy

How many times have you seen pallets of bottled water coming off the forklift at the grocery store, and felt your stomach turning in disgust? Never? Not once? That's not enough! You should be sick. When you see soccer coaches and construction workers throwing cases of little plastic water bottles into the back of their SUV, your stomach should turn. Bottled water is sooo not sexy. Bottled water is plastic-wrapped with more bacteria than regular tap water, and less fluoride, according to university researchers. More than 60 million gallons of petroleum are used annually to make the 38 billion…

Challenger Expedition

The Challenger expedition of 1872-76 marks the transition form Victorian to modern science: from the world of the gentleman naturalist to the of Big Science, with its requisite institutional, collaborative and multidisciplinary framework and national funding support -Koslow in The Silent Deep Out of this 3.5 year, 69,000 mile expedition came 50 volumes of numerous pages covering every known phylum of organisms collected during the trip.  Yesterday a reader noted, and I very excited to pass on, a link for the Challenger Reports.  This online gift is the full 50…

Abiogenesis as a Tetris game!

So Spawn the Elder (my son) is an avid gamer in such milieus as World of Warcraft, Halo, Civilization, and Lord of the Rings Online, the latter of which, errr, I might have indulged in a few times -- I'm pretty hopeless with gaming so my foray into Middle-earth was an unmitigated disaster. So the elder Spawn was pretty excited to nab the Spore Creature Creator this summer, but he is really jazzed with the prospect of getting his nerdsome hands on the full-fledged game to be released on Friday. Erstwhile Science Blogger Carl Zimmer covered the impending release of Spore in his excellent NYT…

President's plan for energy: Unrealistic and the status quo

The energy portion of the State of the Union is online. As promised, no cap-and-trade. As expected, it emphasizes ethanol. Within ten years, the President proposes to replace 15% of gasoline with alternative or renewable fuels, equivalent to 35 billion gallons of ethanol per year. For comparison, ethanol producers cranked out about four and a half billion gallons of ethanol in 2006. Doing so is estimated to have consumed 20% of the corn crop. If we converted all the corn grown in the US into ethanol using current technology, we wouldn't be able to meet the stated goal. And while…

Fame!

One of my colleagues from Scienceblogs.com.br contacted me a week or so ago to talk about creationists and global warming deniers, and I just checked and his story for Brazil's largest paper is online. Frankly, I think I gave him one of my juicier quotes: "Dos negacionistas do aquecimento global, a maioria é motivada principalmente pelos negócios e pela polÃtica. Um número chocante de pessoas parece se opor à ideia porque não gostam de Al Gore. Muitos trabalham em empresas petrolÃferas ou pertencem a indústrias que teriam de pagar pela mitigação do aquecimento", diz Rosenau. "Então…

Linear Logic

[Monday][yesterday], I said that I needed to introduce the sequent calculus, because it would be useful for describing things like linear logic. Today we're going to take a quick look at linear logic - in particular, at *propositional* linear logic; you can expand to predicate linear logic in a way very similar to the way we went from propositional logic to first order predicate logic. So first: what the heck *is* linear logic? The answer is, basically, logic where statements are treated as *resources*. So using a statement in an inference step in linear logic *consumes* the resource. This is…

Why I ate a Pangolin

The Lese people practice swidden horticulture in the Ituri Forest, Congo (formerly Zaire). Living in the same area are the Efe people, sometimes known as Pygmies (but that may be an inappropriate term). The Efe and Lese share a culture, in a sense, but are distinct entities within that culture, as distinct as any people living integrated by side by side ever are. The Efe are hunter-gatherers, but the gathering of wild food part of that is largely supplanted by a traditional system of tacit exchange between Efe women and Lese farmers, whereby the Efe provide labor and the farmers provide…

Slumming around The DCA Site (TheDCASite.com), the finale (for now)

I've probably beat this one into the ground over the last couple of days; so this will be uncharacteristically brief, because it's time to move on. Also, it was fun to see DaveScot go into paroxysms to try to justify the dangerous, unethical, and reckless actions of Heather Nordstrom and her stepfather in setting up The DCA Site and its sister site, BuyDCA.com, where Heather et al are selling "Pet-DCA" in a ludicrously obvious (and probably ineffective) ploy to be able to claim to the FDA, "Hey, we're not selling this for human consumption." One wonders, perhaps, if DaveScot may actually have…

The DI's Legal Counsel

Astute readers who have followed the Discovery Institute and the Intelligent Design Creationism movement may have noticed a relatively new name cropping up in the recent press releases concerning the Cobb County case, that of Seth Cooper. Cooper is a recent law school graduate who is now a legal counsel for the Discovery Institute, and he was recently lauded in one of their own press releases as an "expert on the legal aspects of teaching evolution". It turns out that Mr. Cooper also has a blog, SharksWithLasers, and that blog sheds a bit of light on Mr. Cooper's expertise. On March 15th, Mr…

The Swiftboating of Obama Has Begun

By way of maha (and also Roger Ailes the Good), I came across this screed from the conservative National Review's website (italics mine): ... Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City--a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but…

Loving the polar bears to death

"I thought I better come see the bears because the next time I am in this country they will be all gone." -- Polar bear tourist in Churchill, Man. Ecotourism. Sounds so responsible, or least, non-exploitative. But let's face it: Anyone who flies long-distance to get close to some endangered piece of nature at risk from climate change is doing their bit to push those species that much closer to extinction. A paper published recently in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism tries to quantify the irony. "The carbon cost of polar bear viewing tourism in Churchill, Canada" (Subs req'd) looks at the…

OSHA's Foulke Flops on 60 Minutes

OSHA's Assistant Secretary Edwin Foulke flopped and fumbled during CBS's 60 Minutes "Is Enough Done to Stop Explosive Dust?" which aired last night.  Correspondent Scott Pelley pressed Foulke to explain how the 50 OSHA inspectors who have been trained to identify combustible dust hazards will be able inspect the estimated 30,000 worksites with this dangerous volatile hazard. "We're not gonna get in every work site every year. It would be physically impossible from a monetary standpoint and on a personnel standpoint to get in every facility once a year. Or even every five years." Foulke said…

A Food Activist with Farm-State Cred

Our food production system is unsustainable, but those who advocate for healthier agriculture and diets often find themselves dismissed as elitists. While I think this is often an unfair criticism , itâs clear that it hampers advocatesâ effectiveness. So, I was delighted to read in the Washington Post this morning about a good-food advocate from an Iowan farming family. Jane Black writes: Dave Murphy is the founder of a food advocacy group. But he wants you to know, "in no uncertain terms," that he is not a foodie. Foodies are people who obsess about the perfect apple tart. Not that there's…

The Invisible Gorilla

I'm sure by now you've heard about inattentional blindness, as I've posted about it a million times since this blog began. It's an amazing effect! It shows us that we really aren't as aware of the world as we think we are. If you haven't heard about it by now I encourage you to go right here to try out a demo on yourself! Inattentional blindness isn't the only time this happens though, there are a number of cognitive illusions that make you realize you're a lot stupider than you thought you were. There's a brand new book out today by the semi-discoverers of inattentional blindness (well…

Chocolate really does make us feel better

Cognitive Daily would not exist without chocolate. Every week, I buy a bag of chocolate covered raisins, and I portion them out precisely each day so that I've finished them by all by (casual) Friday. I try to time my consumption to coincide with the most difficult part of the job: reporting on peer-reviewed journal articles. The little news items, Ask a ScienceBlogger responses, and other miscellaneous announcements can be completed unassisted by chocolate, but then there wouldn't be much reason to visit the site. Sometimes even the chocolate raisins aren't enough, and I head for the nearest…

Should Scientists Blog?

[This post was originally published at webeasties.wordpress.com] Considering the forum, you can probably guess my answer, but it seems the editors at Nature agree... sort of: Institutions need to recognize and to encourage such outreach explicitly -- not just as a matter of routine, but specifically highlighting and promoting it at times of relevant public debate or when the interests and voices of scientists need to be promoted. Web 2.0 doesn't yet have what it takes to add significant value to open academic discourse, but it can surely make a difference to the public accessibility of…

Friday Incoherent Rambling

I'm slowly turning into a cyclist. I currently own three bikes, but that number may change when I buy the fixed gear I've been longing for. I bought a mountain bike a couple of years ago for commuting to and from campus. It's a little over a mile from my front door to my building, but I lost the patience required to walk that distance and driving was out of the question. I was now riding a bike regularly for the first time since the eighth grade. Last summer I picked up a used Cannondale CAD3 road bike from a guy who had only ridden it indoors on a trainer. The bike was in near mint condition…

Conservatives for Hillary?

John discusses an argument by Bruce Bartlett that it made sense for conservatives to support Hillary Clinton in 2008, based on the following reasoning: Surveying the political landscape, I [Barttlett] didn't think the Republican candidate, whoever it might be, was very likely to win against whoever the Democratic candidate might be. Therefore I concluded that it was in the interest of conservatives to support the more conservative Democratic candidate . . . Hillary Clinton . . . probably would be governing significantly more conservatively than Obama. I'm surprised to hear this, because I…

Independence Days Challenge

Note: Most of the Independence Days material will run at ye olde blogge , but I wanted to post the year three start up over here too, since my readership isn't entirely overlapping. If you want to post status updates, the weekly thread for that will be at my other blog, but you can sign up here too! I hope you'll join us! Many of us need nothing in the world so much as more time. Adding new projects is exhausting - and stressful. And yet, we know that there are things we want to change - for example, most of us would like to grow a garden with our kids, or make sure that we know where…

Tree or Trellis

Over the weekend I was part of a panel at the American Anthropology Association, the topic of which was "Updating Human Evolution." I got to listen to ten presentations by scientists, each offering a look at how our understanding of our ancestry is changing with new research. While they were all interesting, I was particularly eager to hear one: Alan Templeton of Washington University. Templeton. Having just finished a book about human evolution, I knew that Templeton has been doing some groundbreaking work to figure out what our DNA has to say about our evolutionary history. I was looking…

Talking Gun Control At Scienceblogs

Matt Springer has written a post Against the gun control that won't work, and he correctly points out that previous gun control efforts have been little more than shameless demagoguery, including the totally-worthless assault weapons ban. People must understand that the previous major legislation the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 was an atrociously-stupid piece of legislation. The weapons that fell under the ban were not banned because of function. As Springer points out, the ban focused on cosmetic elements of weapons so that lawmakers could put them on a table and describe how they…

The comic and the box of blinking colored lights

The last couple of days have been a bit surreal, haven't they? After all, how often does this box of blinking lights get into a blog altercation with a Libertarian comic over global warming? Actually, it was a commentary on bad reasoning, but global warming happened to be the topic. In the aftermath of my referring you, my readers, to comic Tim Slagle's blog piece "rebutting" me and to another piece by him in which he used some--shall we say?--creative chemistry and thermodynamics to support a political argument, I'm not sure if I should feel guilty or not. This guilt exists mainly because I…

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (and Neighbors)

This is a revised version of a post that appeared three years ago, towards the start of the recession. It seems just as relevant, maybe more relevant, now. A while back there was a study that suggested that it is more expensive to be poor in the US in some ways, than it is to be rich. And to anyone who has actually been poor, this probably made perfect sense. Among the ways that being poor cost you money: 1. Your infrastructure is limited, so you are limited to what fits in your infrastructure - for example, you don't have a car, so you can only shop at the convenience stores or those on…

"Home Stoned in Race Row"

At about this time in 1931, a black family moved into an all white neighborhood. The resident whites tried to stop it from the beginning, even offering to buy the house at a price over that paid by Army vet Arthur Lee and Edith Lee. When these early efforts failed, the denizens of the segregated neighborhood found the solution that what was most obvious to them: Thousands of them surrounded the home, screamed racial slurs and threw stones at the house and family until they finally moved out. Except that last part didn't happen. Arthur and Edith stayed, and the racist citizens of this…

Pandora Radio and the Music Genome Project

This post should actually be called, "Driving Mister Tim," in recognition of the delightful day I just spent here with Pandora Internet Radio founder and chief strategic officer, Tim Westergren. Tim was in the area for a couple of town hall meetings and chats with groups in the Raleigh-Durham community, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. What is Pandora Internet Radio? Before I talk more about Tim, let me tell you about Pandora if you have not yet experienced it. Their thumbnail give you a good idea but here is my view as a user: Pandora is a streaming…

Best Social Media Books 2011: Frogloop

Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Five Social Media Books you Should Read. Yeah, I know this really isn't science -- and I'm not even labelling it as such -- but this is an pretty good list of books from a marketing blog for non-profits so I do see it as being for…

Friday Fun: Some amusing pre-Scio11 tweets

As you read this, I'm on a plane winging my way to the ScienceOnline 2011 conference. It's a great learning, sharing and networking opportunity for anyone interested in the way science happens online. It's highlight of the conference year for me. It's also a serious hoot. A blast, a party, off the chain. And it's reflected in the Twitter traffic. Here's a sampling from the last little while. avflox A.V. Flox Research indicates you can basically think yourself to orgasm. I didn't believe it either until I started to follow the #scio11 hashtag. BoraZ Bora Zivkovic I set up my #scio11…

Evidence-based teaching, open access, and the digital divide

I had some strange notions when I made the jump from working at the lab bench to teaching at the white board. I thought good teaching meant interesting lectures. And I was completely unaware that people actually conducted research in science education. If I had been asked about education research, I would have replied that it was largely anecdotal, probably limited to sociologists and primary grades, and as far as I was concerned, useless. And, honestly, to me it was useless. I never saw any of science education articles or journals. No other instructors every discussed them and…

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. Stacy Baker has changed schools since last year, but she's coming back nonetheless, again with eight of her students. As you may remember, her session on the use of the Web in middle/high science classroom from the perspective of the Facebook generation was the Big Hit of ScienceOnline09. Miss Baker has developed a classroom website and blog, she tweets and also…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Adult Male Chimpanzees Don't Stray Far From The Home: When it comes to choosing a place to live, male chimpanzees in the wild don't stray far from home, according to a new report. The researchers found that adult male chimps out on their own tend to follow in their mother's footsteps, spending their days in the same familiar haunts where they grew up. Male chimpanzees are generally very social, but how they use space when they are alone might be critical to their survival, the researchers said. Solving Another Mystery Of An Amazing Water Walker: Walking on water may seem like a miracle to…

Hummingbirds' Brains Have DIfferent Structure than Other Birds Brains

After comparing the brains of hummingbirds to those of other birds, scientists found that a specific nucleus (in this case, a "nucleus" refers to a distinct brain region) that detects any movement of the entire visual world. They found that this brain nuclei was two to five times bigger in the hummingbird than in any other species, relative to brain size. "We reasoned that this nucleus helps the hummingbird stay stationary in space, even while they're flying," said said Doug Wong-Wylie, Canada Research Chair in Behavioural and Systems Neuroscience and psychology professor at the University…

linkedy links xv

yup, I'm doing a lot of these, moon, high school, hard sci-fi and california among others some randomly interesting stuff out there, some of which I mean to blog about meself, but real life interceded click to embiggen Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Photographs Apollo landing sites - this is all over the blogs, Starts with a Bang has it impressive imaging LRO does 112th Carnival of Space - bunch of lunatics if you ask me... The Angry Physicist is back - still angry online Feynman lecture videos - via the Pontiff, so I do not have to link directly to M$ - I sat through a number of…

O'Reilly Blowing Smoke

I know, I know. This isn't exactly surprising. You might have heard that Bill O'Reilly claimed recently that the FBI had visited him to tell him he was on an Al Qaeda hit list. I laughed when I heard it, knowing it was probably a bunch of crap. Turns out it was, according to Radar Online. But the reaction from some of his colleagues sounds more like disbelief. "I've never heard that before," says a correspondent for Fox News, who added that neither he nor anyone he's spoken to at the network has been warned by the FBI. "I do know the government has warned Fox about threats in the past, but I…

WEPAN's Knowledge Center: Share with and learn from others

A couple of weeks ago, I "attended" a webinar hosted by WEPAN (Women in Engineering ProActive Network) on their recently unveiled Knowledge Center. I had never participated in a webinar -- I called up a conference call phone number, and logged into a website, and saw what the presenters had on their computers. Different presenters at totally different locations could also take charge of what everyone was seeing; it was a neat experience. I was attending with participants from a few other organizations, including MentorNet, the Association of Science-Technology Centers (which is the…

How Battlestar Galactica Lost Sight of Its Realism and Disappointed Fans

When I was in graduate school at Cornell, David Kirby was a course mate while he was working on a post-doc in science studies. Kirby was re-training from his former field as a geneticist, researching the influence of science consultants on major motion pictures. One of his conclusions--published in a paper at the Social Studies of Science--was that science consultants are important to filmmakers because they can help lend a sense of realism and perceived legitimacy to a film, especially among the opinion-setting audience base who shape the success of a film via word-of-mouth and online buzz…

SLA2009: Random Vendor Updates

One of the main reasons I go to SLA is to catch up on what all of the journals, databases, and research tool providers are up to. Sometimes they save the big announcements for ALA and sometimes they make them at SLA. Other years I've spent a ton of time at the exhibits, but this year it was a bit truncated.  I also didn't go to any breakfasts (even free food doesn't get me into downtown DC at 7am!) and only a couple of other things put on by the vendors. Here are a few things that I remember: Springer's bringing out an image database which seems to combine some medical image database they…

Early review of the "$100 laptop"

Fox News has a very detailed review of the so-called $100 laptop, officially called the XO. The technology sounds quite impressive: Even though bright sunshine is beating down upon the laptop screen, you're having no trouble reading the display. But the sunlight is OK, since it's powering your system through a small, low-cost solar cell. And the XO doesn't need much power since it runs at a fraction of what laptops that are considered "green" run at. The review only gets more glowing from there: I expected to be impressed simply by the economic, low-power capabilities and wireless mesh…

New Scientist Cover Story on Tornadoes and Global Warming

I didn't realize I was going to have the cover story of the latest New Scientist with this in-depth article I did about the climate-tornado relationship. Essentially, the bottom line is this--it's even more complicated than the climate-hurricane relationship. And so for all those politicians, environmentalists, and bloggers out there who want to use tornadoes (and especially this extremely active U.S. tornado year) as an excuse to talk about global warming...well, the science provides a slender foundation for them indeed. You can't read the full New Scientist article online, but let me lay…

Thanks a lot, Tim

Normally I like Tim Gueguen. He's an old trenchmate from Usenet and has been blogging longer than I have. But about a week ago, he commented on my facetious piece about a "celebrity nutritionist" with some odd ideas about medicine dating back to the 16th century and involving including dessicated animal "glands" in the supplements that he sells and how he's been rewarded with wealth, hobnobbing with rock stars, and marrying a porn star: Deliberate attempts at generating blog traffic have never really worked for me. On the other hand I often get hits for folks looking for porn for cartoons…

Dr Isis discusses conference blogging

Readers who haven't seen it already may be interested in the post and subsequent discussion on conference blogging taking place on Dr Isis' blog. I feel that Dr Isis' post misrepresents my position in several ways (see this clarifying comment from me), but she does provide an interesting argument against the notion that "open tweeting" should be the default position unless the presenter explicitly states otherwise. The discussion has given me an opportunity to clarify my thoughts on a few issues. Below the fold I've pasted some snippets from my comments on Dr Isis' post summing up some…