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In Defense of Homeopathy

Jeanette Winterson offers her "defence" in the Guardian, and I can't wait for Ben Goldacre to rip into it. She starts with this classic argument from anecdote: Picture this. I am staying in a remote cottage in Cornwall without a car. I have a temperature of 102, spots on my throat, delirium, and a book to finish writing. My desperate publisher suggests I call Hilary Fairclough, a homeopath who has practices in London and Penzance. She sends round a remedy called Lachesis, made from snake venom. Four hours later I have no symptoms whatsoever. Dramatic stuff, and enough to convince me that…

Influenza models examined by IOM

by Revere, cross-posted on Effect Measure On December 11, The Institute of Medicine, one of the four constituent parts of the National Academies of Science, released a "letter report" reviewing the scant information on effects from non-drug measures to slow or contain spread of an influenza pandemic (available as a free download here). The report was produced after a special workshop on October 25 in which the panel participants heard from a variety of experts, with subsequent deliberations that produced the summary letter report and its recommendations. "Letter Reports" are mini-versions of…

Sea lions really are quite impressive

Well done and many thanks to everyone who tried identifying the mystery skull published on the blog yesterday. And as several people correctly worked out... .... it belonged to a pinniped, and more specificially to an otariid, and to a sea lion. Well done in particular to Andrés Rinderknecht and Rafael Tosi: it is indeed the skull of a Southern sea lion Otaria byronia (more appropriately termed the South American sea lion or Patagonian sea lion), and a big old gnarly male at that (like the one pictured in the adjacent image). The specimen was collected from the Falkland Islands in the 1930s…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

On Fridays I usually take a look at new papers in all seven PLoS journals. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Circadian Clock Genes Contribute to the Regulation of Hair Follicle Cycling: The hair follicle renews itself by repeatedly cycling among growth, regression, and rest phases. One…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 20 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: A Fish Eye Out of Water: Ten Visual Opsins in the Four-Eyed Fish, Anableps anableps: The "four-eyed" fish Anableps anableps has numerous morphological adaptations that enable above and below-water vision.…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

I'd like to start today with Big Congratulations to the amazing PLoS IT/Web team for finishing the complex and long task of migrating all seven PLoS Journals onto the TOPAZ/Ambra platform. This week, the last of the seven journals, PLoS Biology, was successfully moved. This means that you can now rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks to articles in PLoS Biology just like you could do it on the other six titles that were migrated over the last couple of years. While I don't know exactly what is in the planning, I am sure that the team will continue to make regular…

New and Exciting in PLoS this week

So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens, PLoS ONE and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Copying and Evolution of Neuronal Topology: We propose a mechanism for copying of neuronal networks that is of considerable interest for neuroscience for it suggests a neuronal basis for causal inference, function copying, and natural selection within the…

Soapbox for Puzzle-Solving: Interview with Tom Levenson

Tom Levenson is the author of three cool books so far: Measure for Measure: A Musical History of Science, Einstein in Berlin and Ice Time: Climate, Science, and Life on Earth and has recently taken the science blogging world by storm with his new blog, the Inverse Square. We finally got to meet at the second Science Blogging Conference four weeks ago. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real Life job? I'm Tom Levenson - and my career feels to me much more as a…

Birds in the News 71 (v2n22)

Winter Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes. Image source: Lincoln Karim, Pale Male. Birds in Science Scientists have successfully tested their ability to identify and DNA "barcode" entire assemblages of species -- the prelude to a genetic portrait of all animal life on Earth (original article). They report having assembled a genetic portrait of birdlife in the U.S. and Canada, and announce the startling discovery of 15 new genetically distinct species, nearly indistinguishable to human eyes and ears and consequently overlooked in centuries of bird studies. The bird researchers obtained DNA from…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 32 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: Laetoli Footprints Preserve Earliest Direct Evidence of Human-Like Bipedal Biomechanics: Debates over the evolution of hominin bipedalism, a defining human characteristic, revolve around whether early…

Public health vs. the mosquito: Pushing back against dengue

by Kim Krisberg A couple weeks ago on the southern-most tip of the continental United States in Key West, nearly 70 residents gathered at a town hall meeting to talk about mosquitoes. And not just any mosquito. A special, genetically modified mosquito designed to protect people's health. While the modified mosquito has yet to make the two-mile wide island its home, local mosquito control officials are busy making the case that its intentional release will help safely contain the risk of mosquito-borne dengue fever, which made a startling reappearance in Key West in 2009. The male mosquito is…

U.S. workers remain at risk from potentially deadly paint-removers

If you’re in the market for a paint remover and head to your local hardware store, most of the products you’re likely to find will contain methylene chloride. These products’ containers promise “professional results” – that they remove paint “in 10 minutes” – and that they are “specially formulated for antiques and fine furniture.” One called “Dad’s Easy Spray,” suggests it can be used to remove paint from fabrics and rugs. Also available are adhesive removers and “prepaint” products that contain methylene chloride. Some of these come in aerosol dispensers. These products all carry hazard…

User:William M. Connolley/The science is settled

User:William M. Connolley/The science is settled is a copy that I made of a wiki article that got deleted. I think I'd stick now largely with what I said then, 8th February 2007: Keep: its not the worlds greatest page, but its useful. Lee Vonces vote is a good example of the reason for keeping it: the page as it stands is substantially correct, but if it wasn't there the opposite misinformation would accumulate. Unfortunately, since the article was deleted, it's history isn't conveniently available. You may take it for granted that it was something of a war-in-progress when removed, but a…

John Lofton Debates over Debating

I've been having an amusing exchange with John Lofton, the theocrat who owns The American View. You'll recall that he left a comment at Positive Liberty with his phone number and asked me to call him. I politely said no, but that he is welcome to leave a comment objecting to anything I've said that he disagrees with, but in public where everyone can see it. So this afternoon, he emails me again with the same message in his comment, his phone number and a request that I call him. I'll paste the exchange in here so you can all can have a good laugh. Each line is from a separate email. Ed: No…

Why Anti-Gay Politics Will Inevitably Fail

Jonathan Rauch has a terrific column on the politics of the Federal Marriage Amendment (now apparently called the Marriage Protection Amendment). Why would the Republican leadership bother to bring up a bill for a vote that they know has no chance of passing? Pure demagoguery: The MPA would amend the U.S. Constitution to forbid gay couples to marry. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., says he will bring the amendment up during the week of June 5. It has zero chance of passing by the required 67-vote majority, as Frist knows. In 2004, the amendment garnered only 48 Senate votes, and…

August Monthly Anomaly Smashes Previous Record

August sea ice extent in the Arctic this year was 640,000 square kilometers below the previous record set in 2007.  It is also already a record monthly low for any month, though that record will not last as it is going to be broken this September when the lowest extent of the year is normally reached. In less than the last two months, multi-year ice declined by 33% and the oldest ice (over 5 years) declined by 54% (and that ice ain't coming back).  While the unusual Arctic Cyclone probably had a noticeable impact on the evolution of this year's (still deepening) record ice loss, it must be…

Messier Monday: A High-Flying Cluster in the Winter Skies, M36

“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the Earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” -Leonardo da Vinci Welcome back to another exciting Messier Monday here on Starts With A Bang! As Comet ISON dives towards the Sun and a nearly perfect full Moon towers overhead, it's easy to forget about those wondrous deep-sky objects that are fixed, but the 110 prominent members of the Messier Catalogue are always on tap for dedicated skywatchers. Although the extended objects -- galaxies and nebulae -- are difficult to view with a…

Messier Monday: The Pinwheel Galaxy, M101

"I should like to lie at your feet and die in your arms." -Voltaire Every object that we look at for Messier Monday has its own flavor, its own qualities, and its own unique characteristics. By far the most numerous of the 110 deep-sky objects making up the Messier catalogue are the galaxies, of which there are 40. It's best to observe them on moonless nights, as their surface brightness is spread out across a large area, and even a crescent Moon's presence in the night sky can make all but the brightest of these galaxies invisible to the eye, even in good equipment. Image credit: Mike Keith…

Messier Monday: The Farthest Messier Spiral, M109

"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." -Joseph Campbell It took Charles Messier and his assistant, Pierre Méchain, a lifetime to scan and survey the sky for all the permanent deep-sky objects visible in their telescopes that could possibly be confused for comets on first class. More than 200 years later, these 110 deep-sky objects are among the best seen and most wondrous sights of the Universe, accessible to anyone with a decent telescope and dark skies. This Messier Monday, let's look the farthest into the…

Messier Monday: The Last 'Original' Object, M103

"Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." -Winston Churchill To kick off every week for nearly a year now, we've begun it with Messier Monday, where we take an in-depth look at the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the first elaborate catalogue of fixed night-sky wonders that could possibly be confused for transient comets. Originally, when first published, this catalogue was made up of 103 objects; the final 7 were added posthumously. Each one tells its own unique story, yet all of them tell a sliver of our own story,…

Messier Monday: The Methuselah of Messier Objects, M56

"There is an ancient saying among men that you cannot thoroughly understand the life of mortals before the man has died, then only can you call it good or bad." -Sophocles Imagine looking up at the night sky -- able to survey the full depths of space -- with eyes the size of saucers instead of our paltry, few-millimeter-sized pupils. What do you suppose you'd see? Well, here on Messier Monday, we take a journey through the first catalogue to effectively do just that! Charles Messier catalogued, over many years in the late 18th Century, 110 deep-sky objects, each unique, and each telling its…

"Let me introduce you to my little friend": 2014, warmest year

Andrew Revkin has this commentary at the New York Times: How ‘Warmest Ever’ Headlines and Debates Can Obscure What Matters About Climate Change. I will argue below that Revkin has, inadvertently or not, linked a science denialist trope to the important scientific finding that 2014 is the warmest year on record, as part of his presumably well intentioned effort to focus on trends rather than individual points. (See his comment on this blog below.) Yes, the trend is more important than a given data point, but the headline does not really obscure, but rather, underscores. I'm afraid the…

Ebola Will Not Become Airborne And Here Is Why

This discussion has been going on for some time, and a handful of recent events have prompted me to jump into it (beyond a simple comment or two). First, I saw a bunch of yammering among various biology teachers about this topic. Then Michael Osterholm wrote a well intentioned but seemingly deeply flawed opinion at the New York Times, then Dina Fine Maron wrote an excellent piece at Scientific American deconstructing Osterholm's piece, then the latter two (and more) were summarized and expanded on in a post by Ann Reid at the NCSE. Here, I will expand on this by applying first principles…

On Being What You Want, and Bigotry

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery For me, personally, it isn't the endless immensity of the seas that calls. It's the endless immensity of space, the Universe, and the stars. Image credit: NASA, ESA and A. Nota (STScI/ESA). And I try to not just share my passion for it with my readers and students, but to encourage all of you (and all of them) to follow their passions. Perhaps it's physical science that excites you, like it…

Out of the gate, Bret Stephens punches the hippies, says dumb things

Right in the middle, between the Trump-inspired March for Science, and the Trump-inspired People's Climate March, the New York times managed to come down firmly on the side of climate and science denial, in its editorial pages. This week sees the first NYT installment by the ex Wall Street Journal columnist and author Bret Stephens (also former editor of the The Jerusalem Post). He is a professional contrarian, well known for his denial of the importance and reality of climate change, as well as other right wing positions. I assume the New York Times added Stephens to their stable of…

ID's Latest Trojan Horse Strategy

As I've discussed many times, the ID movement has changed its strategy regarding the policies they are advocating to be adopted by school boards and legislatures. They know that any hint of the phrase "intelligent design" is going to be struck down by the courts, especially in light of the Dover ruling. In fact, they knew this before the Dover ruling ever came down. The big switch really began in Ohio in 2002 in an attempt to make the target too small for our side to attack successfully. Thus, you now have them advocating policies that would not teach ID explicitly. In one place they may…

We have the brains of worms

Way back in the early 19th century, Geoffroy St. Hilaire argued for a radical idea, that vertebrates and most invertebrates were inverted copies of each other. Vertebrates have a dorsal nerve cord and ventral heart, while an insect has a ventral nerve cord and dorsal heart. Could it be that there was a common plan, and that one difference is simply that one is upside down relative to the other? It was an interesting idea, but it didn't hold up at the time; critics could just enumerate the multitude of differences observable between arthropods and vertebrates and drown out an apparent…

Basics: The pharyngula stage

My previous contributions to the basic concepts in science collection were on gastrulation and neurulation, so let's add the next stage, and the one I named the blog after: the pharyngula. First, though, a few general remarks on developmental stages. In some ways, these are somewhat arbitrary: development is an ongoing process, a real continuum, and what we're doing is picking recognizable moments where we think we see real transitions and highlighting those as significant markers. They can be somewhat fuzzy, although in early development in particular, when the organism is simple, we can…

Entanglement Is Not That Magic

One of the things that made me very leery of the whole Brian Cox electron business was the way that he seemed to be justifying dramatic claims through dramatic handwaving: "Moving an electron here changes the state of a very distant electron instantaneously because LOOK! THE WINGED VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE EINSTEIN-PODOLSKY-ROSEN PAPER!" On closer inspection, it's not quite that bad, though it takes very close inspection to work out just what they are claiming. That said, though, it's fairly common to hear claims of the form "when two particles are entangled, anything you do to one of them…

Jim Benton on the Atheist / Agnostic Issue

The Sage of Brooklyn, Jim Benton, returns with a guest entry after months of blogging silence. This piece originally appeared as a two-part comment on Debunking Christianity. I am both an agnostic and an atheist. You see, I make a distinction between a 'deistic God' (i.e, a 'Creator') and a 'theistic God' (i.e., one which has in some way interacted with humanity, who has communicated with us.) As for a deistic God, there are three main possibilities: The Universe is self-existent. The Universe was created by someone who is himself self-existent. The 'demiurge' hypothesis: the Universe was…

The Bottleneck Years by H. E. Taylor - Chapter 26

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 25 Table of Contents Chapter 27 Chapter 26 A Quiet Sunday, November 28, 2055 Sunday is a day of rest --- theoretically. I had intended to have a quiet day, do some yard work and maybe touch up my Amazon report for Doc Y. I was awakened early by a crying baby. I didn't want to get up, but I was not going to fall asleep again, so I washed up and dragged ass upstairs to the kitchen. Edie was heating milk in a saucepan and Anna was crying her lungs out. Edie looked like she had not slept all night. She gave me a strained look as I entered the…

Virginia School Prayer Bill

The Virginia assembly is considering a bill, HJ537, which would amend the Virginia constitution's provisions concerning religious liberty and disestablishment, provisions that were taken directly from Thomas Jefferson's Act for Establishing Religious Freedom. Currently the Virginia Constitution, in Article 1, Section 16, contains the following language: That religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and, therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion,…

Hammering Rusty Nails

Rusty Lopez has reacted to my post about Bush backing away from the Federal Marriage Amendment with this strangely myopic post. He says: Speaking of venturing out of the "ghetto," Ed Brayton, over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, seems to think that because President Bush is now not pushing for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, that he has somehow taken conservative Christians for a ride. Has the fact that constitutional amendments are extremely costly and time consuming evaded Ed's notice? If one can achieve a similar goal, without the expense involved in amending the…

Book Bytes #2: Mencken on Men and Women

For my second Book Bytes entry, I'm going to continue the male/female theme, but from a more personal level than a political one. This will not be one continuous passage, however, but bits and pieces of various essays that Mencken wrote over many years, and from his 1918 book In Defense of Women. I don't think anyone ever accused Mencken of being a feminist by any stretch of the imagination, but he did have a shrewd eye for human interaction. He observed, for instance, that though it is commonly thought that women were more compassionate and sympathetic than men, they could also be more…

Peter Irons takes on Uncommon Descent

I know there are a few fans of Peter Irons out there — and maybe some of you agree that he ought to have a blog. Since he doesn't, though, I'm posting a little email exchange he had with Denyse O'Leary and William Dembski, by his request and with the permission of the participants. There's a disturbing--but highly revealing--footnote to Bill Dembski's crusade against Baylor University and its president, John Lilley, for removing the "Evolutionary Informatics Lab" website of Professor Robert Marks from the university's server. By way of background, Marks had hired Dembski as a "post-doc" in…

The Republican Convention

Anyone surprised by how the Republican Convention is going? The McCain campaign to this point has been nearly one hundred percent negative, and the convention has continued that trend. There are several reasons for this. One is simply that they have nothing to run on, having made a hash of everything they have touched for the last eight years. But the main reason is that mindless venom is something that comes naturally to the leaders, strategists and pundits in the Republican Party. It has become a cliche of modern political life that Republicans “play the game” so much better than…

Basic Concepts: Numbers

Many of my SciBlings have been doing posts in which they define basic concepts in various scientific fields. For example, physicist Chad Orzel has done posts on Force and Fields, biologist P. Z. Myers has covered Genes, computer scientist Mark Chu-Carroll offers up wise words on Margin of Error and Standard Deviation, and philosopher John Wilkins discusses fitness. And, in the few minutes it took me to put together that list, I notice that Wilkins has just put up this post, gathering all of the basic concepts posts together. I figured it was high time I weighed in with some basic concept in…

Collins on Evolution/Theism

Christianity Today has posted this interview with Francis Collins. Collins' goal is to persuade us that evolution and Christianity are compatible. Let's see if he's right: How does evolution fit with your Christian faith? [Evolution] may seem to us like a slow, inefficient, and even random process, but to God--who's not limited by space or time--it all came together in the blink of an eye. And for us who have been given the gift of intelligence and the ability to appreciate the wonders of the natural world that he created, to have now learned about this evolutionary creative process is a…

Homework Is Evil?: "The benefits of completing homework for students with different aptitudes in an introductory physics course"

One of the perennial problems of teaching intro physics is getting students to do their homework, so I was very interested to see Andy Rundquist on Twitter post a link to a paper on the arxiv titled "How different incentives affect homework completion in introductory physics courses." When I shared this with the rest of my department, though, I got a link to an even more interesting paper from the same group, on the effect that doing homework has on student performance. This has an extremely surprising conclusion: for the weakest students in introductory physics, doing more homework actually…

Science and Faith at the World Science Festival

Last year I attended a paleontology conference in Cincinnati. While I was there I attended a session on science and religion, during which a parade of people trumpeted the warm relationship between the two. Predictably, there was much bashing of the New Atheists, with Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Stenger all specifically called out by name. There was a lot of preening about how it is only clueless atheists who blur the lines between science and religion. This, remember, at a paleontology conference. The session consisted of a series of fifteen minute presentations with no Q and A's…

Lewontin on Darwin

The current issue of The New York Review of Books features this essay, by Richard Lewontin. Officially it's a review of three recent books about Darwin and evolution. But since this is the NYRB we are discussing, the essay doesn't really say much about the books themselves. The essay is disappointing, since for the most part I can't fathom Lewontin's point. Let's take a look: Why do we call the modern theory of organic evolution “Darwinism”? Charles Darwin certainly did not invent the idea of evolution, that is, of the continuous change in time of the state of some system as a fundamental…

Obama talks science

We still aren't going to get a presidential debate devoted to science. So far, though,we have the Democratic nominee's elaborated responses to 14 questions put to him and his Republican counterpart by the Science Debate 2008 group. Here's two of Barack Obama's responses, with italicized annotation from me, on the subject of climate change and energy, which really should be considered one topic. 2. Climate Change. The Earth's climate is changing and there is concern about the potentially adverse effects of these changes on life on the planet. What is your position on the following measures…

Neuroeconomics: the Utility of Dread

Are there neurobiological correlates of economic behavior such as utility seeking? The answer is yes, as demonstrated by some very elegant work by Berns et al in Science. Bern et al. wanted to establish what areas activate during the feeling of dread. Dread is defined as the feeling during the wait for a bad outcome that one knows is going to be inevitable. Why would we have dread? What is the purpose of dread? Well, the decision about whether to delay a bad outcome or get it over with quick is determine, in their view, by a comparison of the utility of the time during the delay to the…

"Pithecophobes of the World, Unite!" (Part I)

Nearly ten years ago I started a book on Creationist misuse of intellectual history. I never finished it, which is probably for the best. The file is unfortunately MIA and all I have remaining was a section that I turned into a talk that I gave at ASU in 1999. Over the next few days, I'll be posting the text of that talk. Enjoy and feel free to comment. "Pithecophobes of the World, Unite!" Revisionist 'History' and Creationist Rhetoric. "This monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, pills, prophylactics, perversions, pregnancies, abortions, pornography,…

Deconstructing Social Darwinism - Part I

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 Social Darwinism is one of those concepts that everyone knows what it is but few can define. I myself have sometimes reflexively used the concept without fully knowing the history of the term or its use as a political theory. In this series it is my goal to raise some questions about the usefulness of social Darwinism and the way it has been applied. This is a history that is full of contradictions (as history often is) and I encourage people to both challenge and offer suggestions as I develop these ideas. It is first important to point out that Darwin…

Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity

I've been informed that I've been at war for a while. I was surprised. Apparently, Perry Marshall thinks he's been firing salvo after salvo at me…I just hadn't noticed. https://twitter.com/cfingerprints/status/685936085998829568 Oh, OK. I would just ignore him, but he's presenting some fascinatingly common misconceptions. One of his boogeymen is chance, and I've noticed that a lot of people hate the idea of chance. Uncle Fred got hit by lightning? He must have done something very bad. It can't just have been an accident. There are no accidents! Yes, Virginia, there are accidents, chance…

Overstimulation

This post has been resurrected from my old blog's location. I've copied the 2006-03-19 post as-is, and I've added a few addenda at the bottom. I overstimulate fairly easily. This is a serious social disadvantage. I don’t know how much there is really to this, but I’m attracted to the notion of the Highly Senstiive Person (HSP). (Also see the links from that Wikipedia article, which is really just a stub.) It doesn’t completely describe me– for instance, I am quite enamored with excessively violent video games, and even many excessively violent movies. However, in almost every other way,…

Why do women cry? Obviously, it's so they don't get laid.

Photo by Sara LeeAnn Banevedes I don't think Brian Alexander is a bad guy or a misogynist. He writes the Sexploration column for MSNBC, so sure, his job is all about selling sex stories to the public. He even wrote a book about American sexuality. But I don't personally think he has a burning hatred for women, or views them as objects placed on this Earth for the sexual satisfaction of men. However, I very easily could, given how he chose to report on a recent study published in Science about men's physiological responses to the chemicals present in women's tears. The headline alone…

Live through this: post-Katrina medical infrastructure in New Orleans

Reading the paper this morning reaction to murder charges being brought against a New Orleans doctor and two nurses post-Katrina makes me want to read a little more into the facts of the cases. However, my SiBling, Prof Shelley Batts at Retrospectacle, points out correctly that the circumstances surrounding the delivery of health care in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina may have led to the deaths of the patients involved. Most certainly, those levying the charges had likely gotten out of town and were enjoying drinks, air-conditioning, and putting their feet up on a soft bed…

The Proper Way To Be A Woman In Science

Though university administrators seem to be widely reviled among faculty members, one of the best jobs I ever had was in administration. Many wonderful opportunities came my way; possibly the most mind-stretching, exhilarating, and rewarding of these was the chance to spend four weeks attending the Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education Administration, held at Bryn Mawr College. Just imagine spending four weeks with several dozen intelligent, interesting women from colleges and universities all over the U.S., from a range of administrative areas (including faculty members looking to…