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After school experiment: make your own indicator.

Yesterday, we had an urge to do some experimentation and I had a red cabbage that had overstayed its welcome in the refrigerator crisper drawer. So of course, we made cabbage-water indicator. An indicator is a substance that produces a color change that gives you information about whether the stuff you're testing with it is acidic, basic, or neutral. Some indicators have just two states. For example, phenolphthalein, the indicator beloved by chemistry students (in part because of the fun of spelling it), is frequently used to find the equivalence point in acid-base titrations. In acidic…

Book review: Storm World.

When I was growing up in New Jersey, hurricanes were "on the radar" for us, one of many possible (if infrequent) weather patterns during summer and fall. Later, in my first semester of college in Massachusetts, the morning of my first broadcast on the college radio station was made memorable by the landfall of Hurricane Gloria; I remember the name of the storm because I closed my show by playing the U2 song "Gloria" before signing off the air at 7 am. (The governor of the Massachusetts had just declared a state of emergency, although it wasn't until some 30 minutes later that the trustees…

And while we're admitting you to college, let's throw in the Ph.D. program too!

Another article from Inside Higher Ed that caught my eye: The chancellor of the City University of New York [Matthew Goldstein] floated a unique approach this week to dealing with the long lamented problem of low enrollments in the sciences: Offer promising students conditional acceptances to top Ph.D. programs in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) as they start college. ... In a speech Monday, Goldstein envisioned a national effort in which students identified for their aptitude in middle school would subsequently benefit from academic enrichment programs…

Friday Sprog Blogging: fossils.

Dr. Free-Ride: What have you been learning in science? Younger offspring: I've been learning how to make fossils, and imprints. Dr. Free-Ride: Tell me how. Younger offspring: Well, we got some salt dough -- Dr. Free-Ride: What's in salt dough? Younger offspring: Flour, water, and salt. Dr. Free-Ride: OK Younger offspring: And we made it into thick circles. Dr. Free-Ride: And? Younger offspring: And then we got either a shell, a leaf, a stick, or this seed cone, or conifer needles, and we pressed it down in the salt dough. Dr. Free-Ride: And then what happened? Younger offspring: And then it…

Twelve reasons to finish writing your dissertation.

The other day, it occurred to me that I have a goodly number of friends who have been in Ph.D. programs (and may still be "in" the program in some more or less official way), and who have more or less finished their graduate research, but who haven't managed to get their dissertations written. (I'm not going to name names; you know who you are.) In this post, I want to offer these friends (and others in this situation) encouragement to get that dissertation written! Yes, I know, you have your reasons for not finishing. Yes, I know writing a dissertation can feel like the hardest thing ever…

Letters to Our Daughters.

Dr. Isis asked me to write a letter for her most excellent Letters to Our Daughters project, which she describes as follows: When I was a graduate student, I took a physiology class in which I was given the assignment to recreate my scientific family tree. When I did, I found that my family tree is composed some brilliant scientists. But, my family tree is also composed entirely of men, plus me. The same is true of the tree from my postdoc. I have scientific fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, but no aunts, grandmothers, or mothers. As I considered my career path in science, I…

Expelled!, anti-vaccine style, 2011 edition

It's happened again. Remember how I've said time and time again that the anti-vaccine movement is very much like a religion, a cult even? One of the key attributes of religion is an intolerance for heretics, apostates, and unbelievers. The usual approach to unbelievers is either to try to convert them and then, failing that, to shun them (fortunately in most civilized countries Inquisition-like reactions are no longer common) or to skip the attempt to convert them and jump straight to the shunning. More evidence of just how true that is was presented on a silver platter to me at the anti-…

Lamprey skeletons

Bone is a sophisticated substance, much more than just a rock-like mineral in an interesting shape. It's a living tissue, invested with cells dedicated to continually remodeling the mineral matrix. That matrix is also an intricate material, threaded with fibers of a protein, type II collagen, that give it a much greater toughness—it's like fiberglass, a relatively brittle substance given resilience and strength with tough threads woven within it. Bone is also significantly linked to cartilage, both in development and evolution, with earlier forms having a cartilaginous skeleton that is…

No Way Home

When wildebeest, such as those famous for crossing the Mara River in Tanzania during their annual migration, run into a crocodile or some other danger it is often the first time they've seen that particular thing. This is because most wildebeest don't live very long so many are on their very first migration. One wonders what would happen if you killed all of the wildebeest migrating in a particular year and set new ones out on the landscape to take their place. Would the migration continue? Probably not, initially. Something like this did in fact happen on the Botswana-South Africa-…

Lakes

Where I grew up, lakes were important. We would spend considerable time driving to them, and once there, camp next to them for a couple of weeks. Every now and then we'd go and camp next to the really really big lake. The one with England on the other side, or so my brother would tell me. All the lakes had these big chairs along the swimming areas that lifeguards sat in. The really really big lake had extra tall chairs. I remember thinking that they could probably see England from up there! But despite the importance of lakes in our recreational regime, lakes were actually fairly…

Flight 103 from Frankfurt

Scene: Berkeley, California, April 1986. A bar. Five conference attendees, myself included, grabbing a hamburger and a beer in a fern-bar on or near Telegraph. All eyes are on the TV’s mounted over the bar, where we watch footage of an air strike against Libya. This is the retribution by Ronald Reagan against Insane African Leader Muammar al-Kadafi. The White House was issuing statements about al-Kadafi’s involvement in bombings in Europe, the OPEC oil ministry kidnapping, linkage to the infamous Jackal, and so on. Nikki, a friend and colleague, said something, and I remember asking…

"I only fish for the fishing, not the catching"

There are two lies you will hear from anyone who is into the sport of angling. 1) "It was THIS BIG!" and 2) "Catching fish isn't the point. It's the experience of fishing that matters." Saturday is Reposted Essay Day! The Mocking Bass. For four years this fish watched me cast lures and live bait from the end of the small dilapidated dock in the lagoon behind the cabin, without ever showing interest in what I had to offer. Two weeks ago I dropped a plastic worm on his head. The worm slid off and rested on the bottom. The mocking bass reoriented towards the worm and took a sniff. I…

A run in my stocking is not a worn out salmon: Response to Mark Liberman

I'm very please that my discussion of the "we can't ever know what a word is" Internet meme has elicited a response from Mark Liberman at Language Log. (here) Mark was very systematic in his comments, so I will be very systematic in my responses. 1. Without a careful definition of what you mean by "word" and by "language X", questions like "how many words are there in language X" are pretty much meaningless, because different definitions will yield very different numbers. This is very much off the mark. I can measure the distance from the earth to the moon using a variety of techniques,…

The Landscape of Obesity: considerations of race as a factor

SciCurious has written a review of an interesting paper suggesting a correlation between obesity and city vs. non-city life. As usual, the review by Sci is excellent, but I have a comment or two to add. Having read the review and then the paper, I had to ask if it might be possible to conclude based on the data presentation that "race" (and thus "genetics") underlies the observed effect. This is because of this graph: The results as depicted here divides the population into black vs white, making it appear that skin color is a major factor. The paper does not make that specific argument…

Help out a guy looking for a job

This person needs a job. This individual seeks an executive position. He will be available in January 2009, and is willing to relocate. (Resume below the fold) RESUME GEORGE W. BUSH 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, DC 20520 EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE: Law Enforcement: I was arrested in Kennebunkport, Maine, in 1976 for driving under the influence of alcohol. I pled guilty, paid a fine, and had my driver's license suspended for 30 days. My Texasdriving record has been "lost" and is not available. Military: I joined the Texas Air National Guard and went AWOL. I refused to take a drug…

Turning the informed consent tables on the anti-vaccine movement

One of the major tactics of the anti-vaccine movement has been a disingenuous demand for more "informed consent." Of course, their idea of "informed consent" is anything but informed. Indeed, I have referred to it as "misinformed consent," because what the anti-vaccine movement does is a pathetic parody of the "informed" part of informed consent. The reason is because the anti-vaccine movement exaggerates the risks of vaccination beyond what science supports, and it does it intentionally. Autism, asthma, autoimmune disease, neurodevelopmental disorders, all of these have been blamed on…

Woo: The future of American medicine? (revisited)

As a blogger, every so often I come across a link, file it away, and then when I look through my link collection looking for topics to blog about I rediscover the link but totally forget where I got it from. This is just one of these times. However, since it's less than three weeks until the event being promoted, I thought it might be entertaining to write about it. Unfortunately, it requires revisiting a topic that I've written about a few times before, albeit not recently. I'm referring to the American Medical Student Association and its embrace of woo, i which it has even gone so far as…

Guilty, guilty, guilty: The mother who relied on prayer instead of medicine for her child

About a year ago in Wisconsin, an 11-year-old girl named Madeleine Neumann died of diabetic ketoacidosis thanks of the irrational religious beliefs of her parents, who prayed for her but did not take her to a physician even as Madeleine became weaker and more ill, her deterioration leading to a most unpleasant death. Highly unusual in such cases, the DA actually prosecuted the parents for second-degree reckless homicide. Given the unjustifiably privileged position irrational religious justifications for doing horrible things have in our society, I was even more shocked that this case went to…

Roy Spencer's questions answered

Roy Spencer takes a break from his parody writing with a new column at Tech Central Station. He has some questions for Al Gore. I think he should have just used Google to find the answers, but what the hey, I'll do it for him. 1) Why did you make it look like hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, floods, droughts, and ice calving off of glaciers and falling into the ocean, are only recent phenomena associated with global warming? You surely know that hurricane experts have been warning congress for many years that the natural cycle in hurricanes would return some day, and that our built-up…

Frolicking in the shadow of hell

While I happen to have found myself back on the subject of the Holocaust and Holocaust denial again today, I thought I'd mention this, something I've been meaning to blog about since I found out about it last week. Beginning this week, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum will start featuring a display that, to me at least, is almost as disturbing as the usual pictures of the horrors of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps with which we've become so familiar and to whose horrors we have perhaps become inured. Basically, it's a recently discovered scrapbook with photos depicting the daily life of…

You want to know how to make a surgeon angry?

Vacation time! While Orac is off in London recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on June 3, 2005. Enjoy! Grrr. I was browsing one of my favorite science blogs, Pharyngula, enjoying PZ's evisceration of a clueless creationist foolish enough to resurrect once again that long-debunked hoary old creationist canard that evolution is somehow not consistent with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, when I saw this in the…

A chip off the ol' block?

I've written before about Hutton Gibson (Mel Gibson's father) and serious crank, conspiracy theorist and proud Holocaust denier. I even speculated, based on Mel's cagey answers to direct questions about the Holocaust, speculating about whether he shares some of Hutton's beliefs. I ended up guessing that Mel just didn't want to criticize his father, no matter what a loon he is. I've also pointed out Mel's anti-evolution beliefs. Well, during an arrest for drunk driving, Mel gave some evidence that perhaps the apple didn't fall too far from the tree after all. During an arrest for drunk driving…

Grading the News: Toxicologists will continue killing animals edition

Reading my Chemical and Engineering News (nerd alert!), I came across the article: "Toxicity Testing Without Animals" by Celia Henry Arnaud. "Oh no, here we go again", I thought. It may come as a surprise to some of you but cells in a dish don't equal whole bodies and even more shocking, we don't know everything about how bodies work and how they are disrupted. So what does the article have to say? It starts off with the normal animal testing is long, expensive, a pain in the butt, and restrictive to the number of chemicals that can be evaluated. Fair enough. Then it points out that The…

More problems with Kleck's DGU estimate

"Eugene Volokh" writes: I should say that I agree with some of your criticisms of the Kleck & Gertz results, and of the 1.5 million count arrived at by the NSPOF study; In case anyone remains who finds the Kleck estimate credible, let me make a couple more observations: On page 170 Kleck "generously" estimates that there are about 550,000 gun crimes each year. According to his survey, in about 18% of his 2.5M DGUs, the offender was armed with a gun. That's about 450,000 gun crimes. Apparently we are supposed to believe that in 90% of gun crimes the victim gets to use a gun for…

Encephalon Goes to Paris (Hilton)

Welcome to the most recent installation of the neuroscience blog carnival, Encephelon, here at Of Two Minds! Steve and I thought we would mix things up a little bit and let a guest blogger summarize the best brain blogging (submitted to us (this week)). That guest is none other that famed socialite Paris Hilton, who wished to take this opportunity to attempt to change her image from fashionista to neuronista. Please welcome Paris! Hi neurokids, Paris here. While I'm sure that you have already formed an opinion of me due to the massive media coverage of my escapades and foibles, hopefully…

Lecture 1: Why is Science Awesome? #Emerson #SC214

[This fall, I'm teaching a course at Emerson College called "Plagues and Pandemics." I'll be periodically posting the contents of my lectures and my experiences as a first time college instructor] Lecture 1 That was a scene from Monty Python's Holy Grail, demonstrating the lighter side of the plague. Who knew there was a lighter side of plague? Of course the darker side is easier to envision. This is a graph showing estimated human population over the last millenium. That enormous dip during around 1350 is not a result of people having less babies - as much as 10-20% of the entire human…

I'm Too Sexy for Your... Virus? Or, Immunity as it Relates to Peacocks

I know something's amiss when my google news alert returns headlines like these: Why women who lust after Brad Pitt may just fancy his immune system It's His Immune System That You Actually Want to Sleep With The key to male sexiness: A powerful immune system? and my personal favorite Antibodies, Not Hard Bodies: The Real Reason Women Drool Over Brad Pitt These snazy headlines are all pointing to a recent paper in Nature Communications. The paper's methodology is pretty simple: They took 74 Latvian men and immunized them against Hepatitis B. Later, they measured the participants' blood for…

The Science of Political Correctness

In the recent articles, blog posts, and comment threads about possible biological reasons for the continued gender disparity in tenured math and science faculty positions, the discussion seems to be divided between two groups: those who emphasize the social and cultural aspects involved in gender and intelligence, and those who emphasize the scientific evidence of standardized test performance. The science team rails against "political correctness," claiming that by questioning the merits and motives of scientific hypotheses of differences in innate intelligence between different groups of…

Biology is Technology

"The history of any given technology is extraordinarily complex." --Rob Carlson, Biology is Technology. Analyzing the history of a technology requires a complex look at the social, economic, and political context in which it emerged, and the reciprocal influences that the developing technology exerts on these factors. Predicting what the future of a technology will be like, how it will affect the economy and understanding the potential risks and payoffs is much much harder. Rob Carlson's new book, Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of…

Observations on the "incidentalome"

Harvard biostatistician Peter Kraft (co-author of an excellent recent article on genetic risk prediction in the New England Journal of Medicine) has just added an interesting comment on his experience of this week's Consumer Genetics Show: I just wanted to share what for me were two stand-out moments at the CGS. First was Zak Kohane's discussion of the "Incidentalome"--a great turn of phrase that captures something I've been mulling over myself. (A less eloquent statement of this idea made it into the recent Nick Wade NYT article on genetic risk prediction). Basically, the idea is that even…

Your Brain on Fast Food

Some kids more readily recognize Ronald McDonald than the President of the United States of America. Sad, right? Check out this exchange, from the 2004 movie Super Size Me: Morgan Spurlock: [to kids] I'm gonna show you some pictures and I want you to tell me who they are. Children: OK. Morgan Spurlock: [Showing a picture of George Washington] Who's that? Child: George Washington? Morgan Spurlock: Good. Who was he? Children: He was the 4th president. He freed the slaves. He could never tell a lie. Morgan Spurlock: [Shows picture that you can't see] Who's that? Child: George W. Bush? Morgan…

Obedience, Longevity, and Domestication: Why I'm Confused (Monday Pets)

Lately, a paper to be published in the June edition of the American Naturalist has been getting some attention. The findings that are getting reported out of this paper didn't make sense to me, but I wondered if this was an issue with accuracy in reporting. So I went and found the paper. Turns out that the reporting is accurate, its the actual findings from the paper that confuse me. I really wanted to make sense of this paper, so I've been waiting a while to blog about it. But I can't make sense of one key finding. Figure 1: An artist's rendition of me, being confused. If, you know, I were…

Monday Pets: The Russian Fox Study

I've decided I want to cover some recent research on social cognition in domesticated dogs. But first, we need some background. So here's a repost from the old blog. Today I want to tell you about one of my most favorite studies, ever, of animals. Are you ready? It's a FIFTY YEAR LONG longitudinal study of captive silver foxes in Russia. Gather around, pour yourself a cup of your favorite beverage, get comfortable, and enjoy storytime. In 1948, Soviet scientist Dmitri Belyaev lost his job at the Department of Fur Animal Breeding at the Central Research Laboratory of Fur Breeding in Moscow…

The Evolution of My Thinking about the Evolution of Gene Regulation

...or how a learned to stop worrying and love evo-devo. As my mind gets a chance to process some of the stuff I heard and talked about at the meeting I just returned from, I'll post some thoughts that will help me organize my ideas (hopefully better organized than that last sentence). This is the first (of perhaps few, perhaps many) of those (possibly incoherent) ramblings -- interrupted by as few paranthetical remarks as possible. In this post, I'll try to tie together: A talk by Sean Carrol on the evolution of wing pigmentation. A talk by Peter Andolfatto on the evolution of Drosophila non…

Homosexuality and evolution

I made the mistake of reading some of the comments on those last youtube videos. There were some good ones, but they were also laced with the usual grunting assholes complaining about gays and "trannies" and quoting the Bible and making racist remarks about Africans. Let us pass over those contemptible arguments; there's no dealing with them rationally. Spit and move on. But there's another flavor of argument that annoys me to no end: people who cite science and evolution to support their ignorant misconceptions about human nature. I want to address two, one anti-gay and the other pro-gay,…

Creationist Canard #2 : "Evolution isn't a proper science, you can't do experiments"

This is my second post where I'm writing, for my own reference, the response to one of the old and hoary creationist canards that are brought up in response to things like my long letter to the editor published in the Tennessean, as part of a segment on the question "should you take your kids to the Creation Museum?". I will quote from one of the letters I received to give one version of this argument: Science, by definition must be observable, measurable (testable), and repeatable (reproducible). Neither creation nor evolution can be observed. Both are done. By evolution, we must specify…

Creationist Canard #1 : "Evolution is a theory, not a fact"

I had a long letter to the editor published in the Tennessean, as part of a segment on the question "should you take your kids to the Creation Museum?" I receive a fair amount of e-mail. This has motivated me to put up, so that I can reference it from now on, my own rejection of a couple of creationist canards. Doubtless you can find huge numbers of rejections of this elsewhere, since these are canards that creationists bring up all the time. "Evolution is a theory, not a fact." Strictly speaking, that statement is true. However, this statement is always raised by those who would then…

Copyright and scientific papers

Scientific papers, like all other sorts of writing or creative expression, are covered by copyright. And, this is potentially a very bad thing. Copyright grants a lot of sweeping rights to the writers of a paper, or the producers of any creative work. Often, those rights get signed away to a publisher or a distributor, but they are still there and enforceable by law. Among those rights is the right the term "copyright" is named after: the right to make copies of the work, but more significantly, the right to prevent anybody else from making a copy. There's another right that goes even…

Global Warming, the Blog Epic ~ 01 ~ Introduction

This is the first in a series of reposts from gregladen.com on global warming. The IPCC report is out, "An Inconvenient Truth" has been honored by the academy, a sea change is happening in the way that climate change news is being reported, and you can bet the Right Wing and the Ree-pubs are as we speak working up new Talking Points and Spins to deflate the urgency of the issue. It is an axiom that in reporting science, there are two (not one, not three or four, just two) sides to every issue, and one side is the plank nailed to the Democratic Party Platform, and the other side is the…

Primitive Cultures are Simple, Civilization is Complex (A falsehood) II

In the first part of this discussion, I reminded you that we are talking about "falsehoods." "Falsehood" is a term I and others have co-opted and have used for well over a decade in courses across the land on evolutionary biology and related topics. The idea is to identify a statement that, when uttered in some particular demographic or sociocultural context, invokes a relatively consistent set of meanings in the minds of those present, such that those meanings are at least iffy, probably wrong, and often (but certainly not always) offensive and destructive in some way. Such a construct…

Stupid, stupid burning brightly, or how not to win an election

Ed happened to beat me to this one, which I saw on Orcinus. If you want a lesson on what not to do to get elected, here it is, courtesy of Tony Zirkle, candidate for the Republican nomination to run for a seat in his House district in northwest Indiana: Don't show up at a white supremacist commemoration of Hitler's birthday. Don't give a speech about white women being taken into sexual slavery in Israel to a white supremacist commemoration of Hitler's birthday while standing under a large portrait of Adolf Hitler. Don't talk about sexually transmitted diseases supposedly being encouraged…

How science has shaped global health

Vaccines, indoor plumbing, antibiotics and a better understanding of geography. These are some of the responses I obtained when I posed the following question to a panel of scientists, journalists, authors and public health experts: What scientific advancements do you think have made the greatest impact on global health and why? Their responses, I hope, will initiate and engage conversation about the impact of science on human life. Do you agree, disagree, have anything to add? Your opinions are always welcome. 1. Ruth Levine Ph.D. Vice President for Programs and Operations, Center for…

Chapter 3: Struggle for Existence

If, so far, you've been finding Mr Darwin's book tough going (it's OK, there's no shame in admitting it), here's what you should do: skip all that flannel about variation, and start here. This is where it gets serious. Chapter 3 of the Origin, as its opening pages explain, faces in two directions. In chapters one and two, we've established the fact of variation, and the fluidity of living forms -- both in space, as shown by the blurry boundaries between species, and in time, as shown by the effect of artificial selection on domestic species. In the chapter to come, says Darwin, we'll be…

The violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement, VAXXED edition

Back in December, I wrote about a phenomenon that I had observed from the very beginning of my sparring with those who promote antivaccine pseudoscience and thoroughly debunked idea that vaccines cause autism. It was a phenomenon that seemed to get a lot worse last year, almost certainly due to the impending passage and then passage of SB 277 in California, a bill that eliminated nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates in the state beginning this month. So it was that I came to describe the violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement, complete with examples of such rhetoric, as well…

Will climate change have negative effects on deep-sea corals?

a special guest post by John Guinotte, Marine Conservation Biology Institute The answer is uncertain as very few manipulative experiments have been conducted to test how deep-sea corals react to changes in temperature, seawater chemistry (pH), water motion (currents), and food availability. It is likely that the effects of climate change will not be positive for deep-sea corals, because they are highly specialized and have evolved under very stable (cold, dark, nutrient-rich) conditions. Temperature, salinity, seawater chemistry, and light availability control calcification rates in shallow…

DIY Neuro-Motor Asymmetry Experiments

Owing to an overuse injury that has curtailed my running, I find myself gravitating toward my other main avocation, the drums, in order to maintain my sanity. These two things are at opposite ends of the spectrum: one is all about fitness, the other, skill. In the past couple of weeks I've been performing a little experiment on myself. I'd like to invite other Sciblings and readers to consider joining in with their own self-experimenting and report back their initial findings and then again weeks or months down the road. This could be interesting. It all has to do with the body asymmetry of…

Bush (n) - An unregulated biohazard

I have little doubt that George W. Bush likes to think of himself as a protector of the good and a promoter of life. As evidence, I offer his recent veto of HR 810, the stem cell research bill. His remarks indicated that he was concerned about destroying human life. So concerned, apparently, that it caused him to cast the first veto of his presidency, some five and a half years after taking office. A closer look, however, reveals that Mr. Bush is not so much a defender of life but a destroyer of it. I don't mean to imply that he wanders around with a gun shooting people, after all, he has a…

Lives of the Saints of Science: Darwin

Part of my socialization into the world of science and engineering was, of course, the worship of great and important historical figures in the professions who, naturally, just happened to all be white males. This socialization was an informal, even casual, process - passing references in the introductory matter of various textbooks; framed portraits and busts on the walls and in the halls of university buildings dedicated to science and engineering; and the ubiquitous idolatry of a few key figures, e.g.: Galileo, Newton, Mendeleev, Darwin, Einstein. As an acolyte of science, I was more…

Rainforests

Ask A ScienceBlogger: The destruction of the rainforest was a hot-button topic in the early '90s, but I haven't heard anything about it in ages. Are the rainforests still being destroyed wholesale? Are they all gone? Is it still important? Is the coffee I drink making it worse, and is "free trade" and/or "shade grown" coffee any better? It is still a problem, and I've been remiss in not answering this question. The simplest guide can be seen in this satellite image of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. On the Haitian side, where forests nationwide have declined 5% between…

The "framing" flap continues

Although the initial flurry of posts about framing has died down, the debate about what framing is, is not, or should be continues. In an effort to go back to square 1, Chris has posted up a basic rundown of why framing is important, item #6 on the list getting to the heart of why this issue is so controversial; Rather, you have to pare down these highly complex issues--or "frame" them--selectively highlighting just those aspects of the issue that will resonate with the core values of the particular audience (and there are different audiences, of course, and different frames will work for…