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College Bloggers Vie For $10,000

Just got a nice note from Daniel Kovach of CollegeScholarships.org announcing their blogging scholarship competition. As is well-known to ScienceBlogs.com readers, our own Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle! won the $1,000 runner-up prize last year. All the details and eligibility requirements are here, including the nomination form. Unfortunately, the contest is only open to US college bloggers. The deadline for nominations is midnight (PST) on 6 October. You can nominate yourself or a fellow blogger. The top 10 finalists will be announced and public voting will commence on 8 October.…

Clever clinical trials redirect

When readers are looking for clinical trials information, particularly for cancer therapies, I often refer to the NIH-operated clinicaltrials.gov: ClinicalTrials.gov provides regularly updated information about federally and privately supported clinical research in human volunteers. ClinicalTrials.gov gives you information about a trial's purpose, who may participate, locations, and phone numbers for more details. The information provided on ClinicalTrials.gov should be used in conjunction with advice from health care professionals. The other day, I accidentally typed in clinicaltrials.org.…

Sunday Function

This rather striking image is the imaginary part of the Airy function. Rather than a lot of words today, I'd like to just present this mathematical function as art. I've always disagreed with Whitman in his assessment of science, but it is nonetheless a good thing to occasionally look up in silence at the stars - or function plots. WHEN I heard the learn'd astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the…

More stem cell talk

DarkSyde is on the stem cell story, and he uses Neurotopia's summary of the biology. I just don't understand the other side's argument. Adult stem cells are not a substitute for embryonic stem cells, at least not yet. The anti-stem cell research crowd wants to claim that we don't need ES cells, that AS cells will do everything we need, but they don't think it through. If we want to make AS cells that are functionally equivalent to ES cells, we need to understand ES cells—but they want to deny us the ability to look at ES cells. Furthermore, if we could convert an AS cell line to totipotency…

Vote for your story of the year - final mopping-up round

This is the final round of voting for the NERS stories-of-the-year polls. So far, there have been eight polls, each covering a different scientific field and I'm going to collate the results of these in the next couple of days. But before I do, there have been a few straggler stories that may deserve a place on the list. Here's your pick: You're having fun when time flies Ballistic penises and corkscrew vaginas - the sexual battles of ducks Groovy teeth, but was Sinornithosaurus a venomous dinosaur? Even on mute, TV can perpetuate racial bias One gene stops ovaries from turning into…

Vote for your story of the year - social science

Thanks to those of you who've been taking part in these polls. For anyone who's just turned up, I've been trying to collate the best stories from this blog over the last year by asking people to vote in a number of different areas. This is the penultimate one and we're looking at social science (a fairly broad category, I admit). Hidden beliefs in science stereotypes predict size of gender gap across 34 countries Simple writing exercise helps break vicious cycle that holds back black students Enter Adam, the Robot Scientist Ballet postures have become more extreme over time Attendance…

Vote for your NERS story of the year - medicine

This is Round Three of the NERS Stories of the Year Reader's Poll. In an attempt to find the most interesting posts on this blog over the last year (leave me the illusion that there were some), I'm doing a series of nine polls, each focused on a specific field of science. So far, we've had animal behaviour and palaeontology. Today, medicine. Here's your selection: Rapamycin - the Easter Island drug that extends lifespan of old mice From Spanish to swine - how H1N1 kicked off a 91-year pandemic era Fishing expedition reveals unexpected link between Alzheimer's and prion diseases Genome…

The Cartography of Sweet Tea

Holy cow, what a fascinating site! It maps the availability of Sweet Tea at the McDonalds' of Virginia, and shades and bounds and draws the surely-soon-to-be-infamous "Sweet Tea Line." Yellow dots have Sweet Tea, black dots don't. Said Sweet Tea Line is south of the Mason Dixon line, south of Virginia's border, but north of Richmond, the old confederate capital. I was especially intrigued to read that "Sweet Tea grew in popularity with it's public introduction at the 1904 World's Fair." It is now a staple of the Southern beverage diet. You gotta follow the lead from the site, and click…

Reproduction in Ireland

It's all very confusing, and I'm not quite sure how they managed all these years…all those Irish children must have been the product of some amusing and peculiar accidents. At least the quacks are profiting from the confusion — here, for instance, is a mysterious bottle of an over-the-counter "organic" menopause relief remedy. It's the limitation that is the stumper: "Do not use if pregnant." Are there many women bumbling about in the pharmacy thinking that they need to be relieved of this problem of menopause? And then there's this headline, "I'd lost my baby then somehow fell pregnant…

It is an act of terrorism to write a NYT op-ed.

Apparently the Department of Defense’s claim this week that “61, in all, former Guantánamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight” is purely imaginary. States Professor Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall University: They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo—much less were they released from there. They have counted people as 'returning to the fight' for their having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. The DOD has revised and retracted their internally…

Who's to say he's not a terrorist

Meet Kirstie Hartle, registered Democrat, Clinton supporter, and "a Republican all the way now": She said she doesn't like Obama's name and thinks he has a questionable background. She also said she thought Obama was deceitful when he broke from his church after it hurt his campaign, and she doesn't trust him to handle the Iraq war. "It sounds to me like a Middle Eastern type of name and whether or not he's born here in the United States, he doesn't seem like, to me, somebody who is trustworthy ... You can't trust anybody these days, so who's to say he's not a terrorist and we just don't…

Quantum Police, Arrest This Woman

Okay this one from ScienceDaily made my day. No it made my week. The title is "Police Woman Fights Quantum Hacking And Cracking." Intriguing, no? Who is this mysterious police woman in quantum computing? I don't know many police offers involved in quantum computing, but yeah, maybe there is one who is doing cool quantum computing research ("cracking?" and "hacking?" btw.) I open up the article and who is the police woman? It's Julia Kempe! Julia was a graduate student at Berkeley during the time I was there, a close collaborator of mine, and well, last time I checked, Julia described…

Asteroids!

A widget to watch out for wayward asteroids: JPL's Asteroid Watch Widget tracks asteroids and comets that will make relatively close approaches to Earth. The Widget displays the date of closest approach, approximate object diameter, relative size and distance from Earth for each encounter. The object's name is displayed by hovering over its encounter date. Clicking on the encounter date will display a Web page with details about that object. The Widget displays the next five Earth approaches to within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million kilometers or 19.5 times the distance to the moon); an object…

Moore Calculation

If only there had been open access, maybe it wouldn't be called Moore's law: I didn't go to Midland after all, but went instead to the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, which has roughly the same relationship to Johns Hopkins that JPL has to Caltech, and where I could continue to do basic research in areas related to what I had done before. But I found myself calculating the cost per word in the articles we published and wondering if the taxpayers were really getting their money's worth at $5 per word. Just as I was starting to worry about the taxpayers, the group I was…

Zotero 1.5 Beta and More

Zotero, a Firefox extension for managing research sources, has announced the release of Zotero 1.5 beta. I've heard good things from those who use Zotero. This major update adds some nifty synchronizing and automatic backup. The next step after this for Zotero, I believe, is adding sharing capabilities. By the way does anyone know what happened to arXiv on you harddrive? It's not been updated in over a year, which is a shame. Personally I find the arXiv's lack of publicity accessible methods for obtaining the full text kind of a bummer. There is so much fun you could have given the…

Dad - 5 Years On

It is nearly impossible for me to believe that five years have passed since you passed away. And hey, we're still waiting for Mt. Shasta to explode, could you get working on that? One day, when I was an undergraduate at Caltech, I received a package in the mail from my father. In it was a small yellow squash with red dots painted onto it along with a strip of paper which read "what is this?" Well, Caltech is full of some pretty smart people, so we spent a few days trying to reason what this strange package that my father sent was. Small. Yellow. Squash. With red dots. Huh? After a…

3.14159265 is Approximately 1

Happy Talk like a physicist day, Happy Pi day, and Happy birthday dear uncle Albert. So how does one talk like a physicist? I mean its hard for me to say, because I'm a physicist (or was, or am, or was molded into who I am by physicists.) But one can certainly sing like a physicist! Here is a song from grad school: Schrödinger's cat, is getting rather fat He wants to play, must way for radon decay Why is he trapped in that box (clap, clap, clap) He would rather be alive than dead Schrödinger's kitten, stuck their sittin' Stuck in a superposition, a quantum mechanical prison Why is she…

Why, Charlie Brown, Why?

Mondays are my long, long days — this is the day I get to spend 3 hours talking to students in small groups about cancer (they're young and invincible, so so far it hasn't been as depressing as I feared.) And they teach me stuff! Among the things I learned today is that there was a Peanuts special from the 1990s about cancer, titled "Why, Charlie Brown, Why". I was incredulous — it doesn't sound like the kind of thing I'd expect on Peanuts — but I looked it up, and there it was on YouTube. So I'll share. It's not bad. The class is operating on a much higher level than this special — it…

I get email

Every time I mention the fact of global climate change, the denialists start sending me furious emails. (By the way, I know that AGW is "anthropogenic global warming"; what is CAGW?) I think we can safely say that AGW believers are clinically psychotic The psychosis of the CAGW cult is total. Rational thought is not possible. It's like watching a freak show from the asylum. Not ONLY must you never be near the reins of government, you should never come out of your padded room. Right. So all the scientists who are citing the evidence and presenting the logic of greenhouse gases are the…

New Quantum APS Fellows: Lidar, Lloyd, and Terhal

Congrats to Daniel Lidar, Seth Lloyd, and Barbara Terhal, for becoming the first three APS fellows selected through the APS topical group Quantum Information, Concepts, and Computation (GQI). Citations below the fold. Citations from the aps website: Lidar, Daniel University of Soutern California Citation: For his contributions to the theory of decoherence control of open quantum systems for quantum information processing, especially the decoherence free subspace method. Nominated by: Quantum Information, Concepts, and Computation (GQI) Lloyd, Seth Massachusettes Institute of Technology…

That's our Michele!

Michele Bachmann opened her mouth again. She compared increasing the tax rates for the rich to the Holocaust. She said she was shocked to hear that many Americans weren't aware that millions of Jews had died until after World War II ended. Bachmann said the next generation will ask similar questions about what their elders did to prevent them from facing a huge tax burden. "I tell you this story because I think in our day and time, there is no analogy to that horrific action," she said, referring to the Holocaust. "But only to say, we are seeing eclipsed in front of our eyes a similar…

Recommended Books on Science Communication

I recently received copies of two relatively new edited volumes on science communication and public engagement. The volumes include research and perspectives from an interdisciplinary collection of mostly European scholars. I am preparing a review essay on these books for the journal Political Communication, drawing connections to research on policy debates, communication influences, and citizen engagement generally. I will post a draft of this review when complete. In the meantime, these twin volumes are strongly recommended, and are perhaps the best introduction to the major issues in…

Another Reason Corporations Really Should Not Run the World

As much as I abhor war, the way that the military handles soldier deaths is (usually) quite admirable (although the same might not hold for its handling of post-service medical problems). When a soldier is killed in service, the family gets a personal visit and often one or more personal phone calls from higher officers, congressmen, or even the President. Earlier today I heard an interview on our local NPR interview show with the father of an engineer who was killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion. He said that BP had not spoken to him nor contacted him or his family in any way since…

Sabbatical home exchange - tricks of the trade?

So I'm based in Vancouver, Canada, and will be heading off to London, UK in July 2010, and I'm curious to hear any advice on how to best increase your chances for that low maintenance sabbatical house swap. I've done the sabbaticalhome.com thing (link), posted on craigslist, will put stuff up on websites I have access to, have found a notice board at my own institution, but I have to admit it still all seems very much like a "shot in the dark" thing. So, I'm wondering if the comment thread can be used to highlight any other tricks of the trade, or general advice about figuring out that…

The difference between how we see things when we're home and when we're away: an aloof problem of knowledge (Days at the Museum #4)

If you know where the Spy Museum is, I encourage you to read "Days at the Museum #4: International Week" over at McSweeney's. If you don't know where the Spy Museum is, well, help me help you find out. Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada, California,1868 (from the Smithsonian website) Some other things you may find in this column: Italian food in Chinatown; Japanese tourists; Albert Bierstadt in Rome and California; a French fellow; green denim on Germans; the serenity of a virtuous public space; and Obama's "Hope" poster. It's part four of Days at the Museum. Part I was noted here;…

The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations: Seshadri's "Memoir"

Memoir Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations. If I wrote that story now-- radioactive to the end of time-- people, I swear, your eyes would fall out, you couldn't peel the gloves fast enough from your hands scorched by the firestorms of that shame. Your poor hands. Your poor eyes to see me weeping in my room or boring the tall blonde to death. Once I accused the innocent. Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty. I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow. And one October afternoon,…

When Readers Comment (1/30/08)

My Friday rant about intellectuals triggered lots of interesting comments, both positive and negative. Treb: I know it was a "rant", but, wow, is it ever funny to hear someone rant that they are open-minded and someone else is not. Sounds like a high school column about trying to be cool. caynazzo: I think many of your many generalizations apply equally to Med students. And Jennifer Jacquet from Shifting Baselines: Two wise men once wrote, "A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content." I liked that line (by Sokal and…

That is either a very small monkey or a very large ponytail

This dude got arrested because he tried to smuggle a monkey on an airplane in his ponytail: A passenger who originally departed from Lima, Peru, and connected in Fort Lauderdale had been hiding the small monkey in his ponytail, under his hat, according to Spirit Airlines spokeswoman Alison Russell. During the flight, the monkey crawled out of its hiding spot, forcing the owner to hold it in his hands, where the unexpected visitor was soon spotted by fellow passengers and crew members, Russell said. Awesome. I mean every time I think the human species cannot become more ridiculous, they just…

Top Ten Best April Fool's Day hoaxes

From AFP: -- Discover Magazine announced in 1995 that a highly respected biologist, Aprile Pazzo (Italian for April Fool), had discovered a new species in Antarctica: the hotheaded naked ice borer. The creatures were described as having bony plates on their heads that became burning hot, allowing the animals to bore through ice at high speed -- a technique they used to hunt penguins. -- Noted British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on the radio in 1976 that at 9:47 am, a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event, in which Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, would cause a gravitational alignment…

Another clueless Christianity Today book reviewer

Christianity Today has published a review of Behe’s The Edge of Evolution. The reviewer is Stephen Webb, a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College, and Jason Rosenhouse wonders: Why would a serious magazine like Christianity Today ask someone so obviously unqualified to review so technical a book? Could it be that they had no serious interest in assessing the book’s arguments, but instead just wanted an opportunity to stick a thumb in the eye of establishment science? Of course, this isn’t the first time that Christianity Today has had a book reviewed by someone who knows…

Friday Poem (0111)

Continuing from Monday’s mustelid ... River-MatesI’ll be an otter, and I’ll let you swim A mate beside me; we will venture down A deep, dark river, when the sky above Is shut of the sun; spoilers are we, Thick-coated; no dog’s tooth can bite at our veins, With eyes and ears of poachers; deep-earthed ones Turned hunters; let him slip past The little vole; my teeth are on an edge For the King-fish of the River! I hold him up The glittering salmon that smells of the sea; I hold him high and whistle! Now we go Back to our earths; we will tear and eat Sea-smelling salmon; you will tell the…

Coulter on those "cosseted, pussified, subsidized" professors

I really have to stop paying attention to Ann Coulter, but this quote that Steve highlights just shows her as the ignorant troll she really is: Professors are the most cosseted, pussified, subsidized group of people in the U.S. workforce. They have concocted a system to preemptively protect themselves for not doing their jobs, known as "tenure." They make a lot of money, have health plans that would make New York City municipal workers' jaws drop, and work -- at most -- fifteen hours a week. Were that it be true that I worked "at most" 15 hours a week! But there is a certain irony in this…

A new date for chimp/human divergence

According to this paper, a hidden Markov model of the divergence between humans and chimps finds "a very recent speciation time of human-chimp (4.1 ± 0.4 million years)". This would put the last common ancestor with Pan after a previously reported date of between 4.98 and 7.02 million years. (TimeTree reports the weighted average for the time of nuclear divergence to be 5.56 million years). The age of 4.1 million years would apparently put the split during the time of such taxa as Australopithecus anamensis, A. afarensis and Kenyanthropus platyops. It will be interesting to see how this…

Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882)

As most readers are no doubt aware, Charles Robert Darwin, the discover of descent with modification by means of natural selection, was born on this day in 1809. It is probably safe to say that the science blogosphere will be jam packed with posts in Darwin and his ideas and meatspace will be hosting various "Darwin Day" activities. For my part, I will be introducing Darwin's ideas to my Origins, Evolution & Creation class this afternoon before we sit down to watch the PBS documentary "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" from the 2001 Evolution mini-series. Rather than waxing poetically about…

Winning the "War" - ID style

Dembski predicts: This war will not be decided by courts, legislators, or school boards, but by young people as they wake up to the fact that dogmatic Darwinists have been systematically indoctrinating and disenfranchising them. Just as the counterculture of the 60s overturned the status quo, so a new counterculture, with high school, college, and university students taking the lead, will overturn the Darwinian status quo. [Uncoomon Descent, "Why student activism is the key to winning this war", August 2, 2006] Whatever happened to the "war" being decided in peer-reviewed science journals? Oh…

Drunk Man Bites Panda, Tussle Ensues

What happens when a Chinese man drinks 4 jugs of grog and decides to jump into a panda pen at the Beijng Zoo? Well, a tussle of course, and I'll let you read who got the worst of it. The Beijing Youth Daily quoted Zhang as saying that he had seen pandas on television and "they seemed to get along well with people." "No one ever said they would bite people," Zhang said. "I just wanted to touch it. I was so dizzy from the beer. I don't remember much." "He felt a sudden urge to touch the panda with his hand," and jumped into the enclosure, the newspaper said. The panda, who was asleep, was…

Free-Access Stem Cell Resources from Nature

I found an amazing plethora of free-access articles and resource material on stem cells (from the journal Nature). The author of one (Sean Morrison) is a very well-known researcher here at UM Neuroscience. (Links below the fold). A glossary for stem-cell biology Austin Smith Nuclear reprogramming and pluripotency Konrad Hochedlinger and Rudolf Jaenisch Asymmetric and symmetric stem-cell divisions in development and cancer Sean J. Morrison and Judith Kimble The stem-cell niche as an entity of action David T. Scadden Stem cells, ageing and the quest for immortality Thomas A. Rando…

Technically Difficult: fMRIs on the young

The title of this pre-publication paper is, "Evidence on the emergence of the brain's default network from 2-week-old to 2-year-old healthy pediatric subjects." The authors put kids in functional MRIs to measure resting state activity and detect the emergence of the default network. While I am certain that it is very interesting research, I have a more technical question: minus sedation, how in Heaven's name did they get the kids to sit still long enough to collect the data? An fMRI is hardly a crib decorated with puppies and ducklings. You feel like you are about to be shot out of a…

Hungover Bats Crave Food Just Like Humans

Apparently after a long night of drinking, Egyptian fruit bats wake up craving particular types of sugar. In a recent study, Francisco Sanchez from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel) showed that the bats prefer foods high in the sugar molecule, fructose, after eating slightly fermented figs and dates. Fructose is known to reduce the toxicity of ethanol. After eating the alcoholic fruit, the bats even show visible signs of inebriation, such as bumping into objects and having a higher susceptibility to predators. As of yet, Sanchez has not witnessed a group of bats singing "Tiny…

42% of Dartmouth Seniors Say They Don't Believe in God

Today I received the latest issue of Dartmouth Alumni magazine to discover inside an interesting poll of graduating seniors at my alma mater. Long branded a conservative campus--with notable right wing alumni from the 1980s including Dinesh D'Souza and Laura Ingraham--perception these days doesn't seem to fit the reality of the student body. According to the survey, when asked "Do you believe in God?," 42% of those surveyed answered "No." When then asked "Have your religious views changed while you've been at Dartmouth?," 25% answered "Yes." In terms of partisan identity, among seniors…

On the Darwin Photo

My post on the Darwin photo was picked up by Nick at the Panda's Thumb. Yesterday, I contacted Kevin Repp, Curator of Modern European Books and Manuscripts at the Beinecke and I received this reply today: Many thanks for your query. As it turns out, the photo in question is indeed of Mr. Princep. How it came to be cataloged as one of Darwin is a mystery. The inscription business makes it all the more curious. In any case, I have alerted our digital library cataloging staff, and the record will be corrected promptly. Thanks again for pointing this out to us. Mystery solved ... well sort…

E. coli, Nastier Than Ever--Cause for Comfort?

Well, we're down now to seven weeks till Microcosm hits the book stores. Here and elsewhere I'm going to discuss some of the fascinating things I discovered about E. coli--and life in general--while working on the book. For instance, I came to have a grudging respect for the vicious strain of E. coli known as O157:H7, which has caused outbreaks in recent years in contaminated foods. The weaponry it uses to attack and subvert our cells is quite impressive. But my respect went up a notch more when scientists recently reported how E. coli O157:H7 has been continuing to evolve into an even…

I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a Vicodin today

Just a couple comments on Tara's situation. Firstly, check that the pharmacist doesn't have a little Vicodin habit of his or her own. Probably not, but I've lost all faith in humanity. Secondly, this situation is deplorable. If a veterinarian at an academic research facility intentionally withheld post-op painkillers from animal subjects larger than a rat-- especially a dog, cat, or monkey-- without a justifiable experimental purpose**, I have little doubt that said veterinarian just set in motion a series of events that would result in termination of his or her employment. I find it…

A giraffe says "hum"?

By Taken by fir0002 | flagstaffotos.com.au Canon 20D + Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 L (Own work) [GFDL 1.2 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html)], via Wikimedia Commons Researchers at the University of Vienna are studying vocalizations from giraffes. They captured recordings of the animals "humming" during the night at local zoos. Zookeepers were surprised to learn the animals made such noises as they are not heard during the day. Researcher Dr. Angela Stöger remarked to the New Scientist, "I was fascinated, because these signals have a very interesting sound and have a complex…

Death by boa constrictor

New research from Dr. Scott Boback and colleagues at Dickinson College (Pennsylvania) shows that boa constrictors do not use suffocation as a primary means of killing their victims. Rather, by measuring blood pressure and heart activity of the prey, they were able to determine that the snakes restrict blood flow in their victims causing circulatory arrest and a lack of oxygen delivery to vital organs. By preventing blood flow to the brain, the victims faint within mere seconds. Dr. Boback was quoted in BBC News saying , "...an absence of blood flow will cause death more rapidly than…

I wish I had the memory of a dolphin!

  Kai, a dolphin involved in the study, was able to recognize the whistle of a fellow dolphin that Kai had not seen in years. Image by: Jason Bruck Another reason to marvel at dolphins. As a follow up to the previous blog on dolphins calling each other by name, new research from Dr. Jason Bruck at the Institute for Mind and Biology (University of Chicago) shows that dolphins have the longest memory known in animals. In addition to Kai, shown above, a dolphin named Bailey recognized the whistle of Allie, even though they had not seen each other in more than 20 years! I am fairly certain I…

Venezuelan poodle moth and others

I was browsing through The Scientist and came across this image of a Venezuelan poodle moth that I could not resist sharing: Image by: Arthur Anker on flickr   What is interesting about this particular moth is that scientists are currently trying to figure out exactly what type of moth it is (its phylogeny). Needless to say, the image of this fluffy moth has gone viral. The flickr website by Dr. Arthur Anker, a Zoologist, contains photos of numerous other beautiful butterflies and moths.   Other favorites:   Leucanella maasseni, which looks like it could be related to batman (from this…

Quick tidbits

* Baby Jane is walking. I'm thrilled. And panicking. Luckily, she's still slow, but given how fast she can crawl....well, let's just say I fear for my future. * I'm working on Part 3 in the series Is Computer Science a Science? (parts 1, 1a, and 2 here). Part 3 will cover computer science's relationship to engineering. At the very least, it will serve as a welcome break from my bitching and moaning about the state of children's clothing. * Also brewing in the "future posts" category: reflections on my first year of motherhood and the school year, and the whole adjustment to the working…

Lott continues to avoid the main issues

Lott has an update to his 6/13/03 post where he responds to this post. He writes: An e-mailer asks about whether the Ayres and Donohue piece in the American Law and Economics Review was refereed. While the original papers in that journal are indeed refereed, their piece was a review article and my understanding from Ayres was that it was not refereed. It seems that Lott is unable to admit to even the smallest error. He claimed that they had not published it in a refereed journal, when in fact they had. Instead of admitting to the error he pretends…

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and Skloot on ABC World News Tonight! Plus Lots of Review Love

A quick post as I run out the door for the teeveey studio: Set your TiVos and your DVRs, mark your calendars: Tonight I'll be on ABC World News talking about my new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.  The segment will also feature members of Henrietta's family, and Vincent Racaniello with lots, and lots of HeLa cells. ALSO:  The first reviews of The Immortal Life are starting to hit newspapers.  There's a terrific review on the front page of the Washington Post Outlook section today, and another great one in the St. Petersburg Times.  Update:  This great review just in from the…