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Upstream Issues

Oh, I just know this is going to get enmeshed in arguments about framing, but I don't care. A new movement in the UK, home of democracy as we know it, involves scientists getting out there and active in public engagement. So what? I hear you ask. This is old stuff. But what is new here is that it is the scientists who start the debates, before the public has a chance to react and set up the framing issues, to ensure that a reasonable and informed debate is had. It is called upstream public engagement. I think this might be a useful modus operandi for other public intellectual domains;…

Good Golly from Bali

I'm preparing for a KPFA radio interview this morning, and so have had to brush up on precisely what went down in Bali over the past week. In essence: Everything, and nothing. Global delegates agreed to a plan that (we hope) will eventually lead to a successor to the weak tea and expiring Kyoto Protocol. That successor treaty will be negotiated in late 2009 in Copenhagen--two years from now. In Bali the U.S. was essentially browbeaten by the rest of the world--global moral suasion proved powerful enough to get State Department negotiator Paula Dobriansky to stop blocking the development of…

Implicit Understanding and Inference in Language

The following is a guest post by Joshua Hartshorne at the Cognition and Language Lab. The first scientific paper I wrote states, in the second paragraph, that "language depends on two mental capacities with distinct neurocognitive underpinnings": vocabulary and grammar. To understand cats are mammals, all you need to know are the definitions of CATS, ARE and MAMMALS, plus the grammar involved. This was how I was trained to think about language. I knew that there were probably some other aspects of language (like phonology), but they seemed peripheral. That worked well enough until I came…

Women-in-geoscience and blogs presentation: the blog version

I've been reading both geoblogs and women-in-science blogs for a while, and watching the support networks grow around them. So when I looked through the Geological Society of America's list of session topics for the 2009 annual meeting and saw one about "Techniques and Tools for Effective Recruitment, Retention, and Promotion of Women and Minorities in the Geosciences," I asked Anne Jefferson (who blogs with Chris Rowan at Highly Allochthonous) whether she would be interested in submitting an abstract with me. We didn't know whether blogs were really useful or not, though, so (with the help…

National Parks Failing African Wildlife

Tim Caro from UC Davis and Paul Scholte from Leiden University wrote a "policy piece" , a sort of editorial in the September issue of the African Journal of Ecology, bringing up some surprising trends regarding the decline of antelope populations within national parks. We hear enough about poaching outside of the parks certainly, but this is news to me. Conservation efforts may need some tweaking. Of late, antelope have been doggedly tracked - by air, through scat sampling, etc. - due to insufficient data in the past and their reduced numbers are revealing three anthropogenic, "proximate"…

More on the science writing and the internet

Over at the Cambridge Science Festival blog, there's a great write-up of the science journalism event that Heather and I attended last week. Author Jordan Calmes* has good summary and a lot of praise for the panel discussion, but also notes some potential shortcomings: The panel convinced me that social media is helping both journalists and scientists. And yet, I never felt like they delivered on the second half of the title. How is the Internet changing science writing? What is it really accomplishing in terms of reaching out to a wider public. The panel mentioned that social media is often…

The digital revolution and the mainstreaming of arthropods

[This is a repost from the Myrmecos Blog, originally published February 2008] In 1934, a diminutive book by an unknown author seeded the largest conservation movement in history. The book, Roger Tory Peterson's A Field Guide to the Birds, pioneered the modern field guide format with crisp illustrations of diagnostic characters, all in a pocket-sized read. The Guide sold out in a week, but the book's effects are ongoing. To understand the magnitude of Peterson's impact, consider how naturalists traditionally identified birds. They'd take a shotgun into the field, and if they saw something…

Elsevier's New Open Access Policy...

...apparently involves reposting others' blog posts without permission or proper attribution. I'm being facetious here, of course, but it is quite ironic that Mike Dunford of The Questionable Authority just caught anti-open-access warrior Elsevier copying the majority of one of his blog posts and posting it on a freely available site without attribution to him (although there is a link to his original post) or his permission. Click here to see his original post and here to see Elsevier's reposting (Mike also saved it as a pdf). Although it is common practice within the blogosphere to quote…

Big Open Lab Announcements!

First, the first couple of reviews of the 2010 anthology are now out: by Dr. Alistair Dove at Deep Sea News and by Ariel Carpenter at USC News. Check them out. If you have read the book and have a place to publish a review, we'll appreciate it - just send us the link. Second, I am very excited to join Bora in announcing the Guest Editor for the 2011 edition: Jennifer Ouellette (blog, Twitter). I am sure that Jennifer will do a fantastic job putting together the sixth edition of the anthology! I couldn't be more thrilled. Third, after five years of self-publishing the anthology through Lulu.…

Superbug 2.0: An introduction

So, hi, Scienceblogs. I'm thrilled to be joining the conversation here. By way of introduction, I'm Maryn McKenna, journalist and author and sole proprietor of Superbug, which has been running for 3+ years at Blogger but moves over here today, thanks to an invitation from the Sb staff and some extremely kind support from friends and colleagues who are already here. Superbug began as online notes and digital whiteboard for my new book, SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (Free Press/Simon & Schuster), which is a narrative investigation of the international epidemic of drug-resistant staph.…

The Scent of a Man...or a Monkey.

I previously confessed that I subscribe to that glossy hardcopy glut of advertising called Vanity Fair. Invariably, the mag contains photo spreads of ripple-ab'ed dudes hawking various men's cologne. All this to mask delicious or stinky or neutral 5alpha-androst-16-en-3-one (androstenone); based on one's genetic variation in the olfactory receptor that binds this steroid, it will smell sweet or icky or not at all. Razib at Gene Expression already covered the recent article in Nature - please see a world of sensory difference. The Nature article addressed genetic polymorphisms of the…

Experimental Philosophy

No, it's not an oxymoron: philosophers have discovered the virtue of experimentation. Now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually think and say about our thought experiments. The newborn movement ("x-phi" to its younger practitioners) has come trailing blogs of glory, not to mention Web sites, special journal issues and panels at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association. At the University of California at San Diego and the University of…

How Can a Boycott Actually Work? The Failure of Consumer Activism

Admittedly, some boycotts have worked: Glenn Beck seems to have been seriously harmed by the boycotts against his advertisers. But what happens when the corporations you want to boycott have massive market share? The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a corporate-backed lobbying group that has essentially written many laws at the state level, including Wisconsin, Florida, and Michigan. One-third of all state legislators (overwhelmingly Republican) are members of ALEC, and ALEC has pushed some really awful legislation, including limiting consumer rights, environmental…

We Are Worrying About the Wrong Deficit

We should be worrying about the employment deficit. Instead, we are worried about the budget deficit. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Nate Silver has a very good post detailing how the Republicans in Congress have positioned themselves to the right of....everybody. But what struck me is that nowhere in the poll would one have even been given the option of responding that the budget deficit is not a serious problem (really, look it up. You can't answer that). I want to nip one common complaint in the bud: if our GDP-debt ratio soars, no one will buy our debt (T-bills). This is…

Congress Refuses to Make Credit Available to Most Americans

Admittedly, you won't hear credit card companies call Congress' failure to cap credit card interest at 15% annually (which is what credit unions are forced to do) that, but, as Ian Welsh notes, that is exactly what Congress' inability to enact a cap means: The Senate just stopped limits on credit card rates. Sometimes it takes a socialist to say the obvious: "When banks are charging 30 percent interest rates, they are not making credit available," said Mr. Sanders, who noted credit unions are limited to 15 percent. "They are engaged in loan-sharking." The banks have been given, loaned and…

Stretching stockpiled H5N1

A few weeks ago an FDA advisory committee recommended approval of Sanofi-Aventis's prepandemic H5N1 vaccine, despite data that it required very large amounts of viral antigen (90 mcg) in two doses. At the time it seemed there were far better vaccines available or about to be available. What set this vaccine apart was that Sanofi had been making it to fill an order placed by the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and there was enough for 3.75 million people in the US stockpile, although because of elapsed shelf life that was down to about 3 million. Ninety micrograms is a lot…

Poultry company priorities: Vegetarian meals for the chickens, but their workers still can’t use the bathroom

This week’s announcement by Allen Harim Foods offers another upsetting example of a poultry company that cares more about its chickens than its employees. The Delaware-based company broadcasted that it “…is one of the first companies in the nation that has moved to a 100 percent vegetarian feed for its chickens.” The firm says the move responds to “…what our customers are telling us” about wanting to buy healthy chicken products. I can’t help but wonder how their customers would respond if Allen Harim posed this question to consumers: “Should the employees who skin, debone and package our…

Low Hanging Fruit: A Very Healthy Diet for The Planet Earth

Michael Mann has an editorial on Scientific American's site putting the well known 2.0C limit in perspective for the upcoming climate talks in Paris. Mann makes a number of important points in his essay (read it here: Meeting a Global Carbon Limit Is Cheaper Than Avoiding One) but there is one point that I want to underscore. The key factor is that there are technological innovations and economies of scale that emerge only in the course of actually doing something. Here's the thing. Let's say you were suddenly in charge of one trillion dollars of money that could be used to address climate…

Desecration: it's a fun hobby!

I am appalled. A man in New York was arrested for throwing a copy of the Quran in a public toilet. He deserved arrest—everyone knows it is vandalism and criminal mischief to clog a public toilet with debris. Oh, hang on — the guy was arrested for a hate crime? Are toilets now on the list of victims targeted by fringe fanatics? What's their slogan: "Bring Back the Open Trench!"? It is a shame to see innocent and useful toilets persecuted in this ghastly way … Wait, never mind. He was arrested for being mean to Muslims, which also makes no sense. He destroyed a book and clogged a toilet. If…

The All-Important "House Band" Question

Ben over at the World's Fair is looking for a house band for ScienceBlogs. He goes on for a while about Phish, which is kind of bizarre-- you can't be stoned enough to appreciate Phish while also retaining the ability to do math. He also suggests a few slightly more obvious nerd bands-- Devo, They Might Be Giants, Weezer-- before ending up with Wilco. Which I also don't really understand, unless it's because Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is about as much fun as vector calculus. If you want to suggest a "house band" for this mob, the obvious direction to go would for people like They Might Be Giants,…

Happy New Year!

Real-life physics can be a pain. New Year's Eve I went with an old high school friend of mine to meet some people and shoot fireworks. This concluded at a little before one in the morning, and after that we left. We wanted to catch up on what had been happening some more and so we drove around town for a few minutes before heading to our respective homes. Unfortunately we hit an unfamiliar gravel road (this is kind of a rural area) and in the process of turning around we got stuck in the mud. Well, I say "we". Both of us were stuck by virtue of being in the same vehicle, but he was…

Ghosts in the E. coli machine

In today's New York Times I have an article about the quest to create a virtual organisma sort of digital Frankenstein accurate down to every molecular detail. The creature that the scientists I write about want to reproduce is that familiar denizen of our gut, Escherichia coli. There are two things about this enterprise I find particularly delicious. One is that this little microbe is just too complex for today's computers to handle. For now scientists are just laying the groundwork for a day that might come in 10 or 20 years when they have enough processing power to handle E. coli. Another…

Mothership over Montana: Surreal Supercell Stormcloud

APOD got some attention yesterday with this stunning photo of a supercell thunderstorm several kilometers wide, brooding over a Montana field: Mothership Sean Heavey, 2010 I'm not sure it's possible for a work of art or photography to more effectively convey the grandeur of nature and the awesome power of physics. The image is simply unreal (which is why the title "Mothership" works so well). But Montana photographer Sean Heavey has a whole gallery of these stunning storm photos. I'm especially nuts about the ominous, Tesla-esque drama of "Base Reflectivity": And for all you would-be storm-…

The Ballad of Greg Laden

So, the other day, I was trying to find some links to podcasts that I'd done to put on my media page, so I did something that I would never otherwise had thought to do; I entered my own name in the search box at Apple's iTunes store. Everybody has entered their own name in the Google Search box, right? But who thinks of searching for themselves on iTunes unless you are a musician. Or, looking for your podcasts. Which I found, by the way, so that was good. But there was also a thing called The Ballad of Greg Laden. So my brain started ticking away and it pretty much figured out that…

Why does Tim Blair hate America?

American student Kunthea Ker wrote how she was verbally abused at Sydney's New Year fireworks because of who she was. Tim Blair's response? He accuses her of lying. Her story: We [her family] are American but we are also Asian, and the crowd seemed full of people making racist, disparaging comments about Asians - not only within our hearing but to our faces. When we found a spot to sit, one woman remarked loudly that she didn't want to sit next to Asians. Another man shouted at us "I hate Chinese!" We are not Chinese. ... Finally, as the fireworks began, a young man tried to push past us to…

Canadian Cancer Care Update

Ever wonder what happens when you live in a parsimonious country that isn't willing to spend any money on new treatments against cancer? "Cancer patients having to dig deep for new drugs" TORONTO -- Whether patients survive cancer increasingly depends on where they live and how much of their own money they can afford to spend on the latest drugs, an advocacy group reported Monday. "Essentially, we will continue to ration life-saving cancer treatment, and some Canadians will live and some will die simply because of where they live," said the Cancer Advocacy Coalition of Canada report. Ever…

Where Scientist Meets Spiderman...

As I chug along on my thesis and manuscript-writing, I'm often reminded what it means to "see your name in print." There's something about that feeling of being responsible, in front of the world, for your words and thoughts. However, not all first publications are of strictly scientific merit, as a friend of mine recently relayed to me: As a neuroscientist in grad school finishing up my dissertation, my mind drifted recently one night to thinking of the first time my name was in print. Circa 1992, I was pretty nerdy as a youth (still nerdy now but proud of it), and I was "that kid" who…

The Personal is Political, Earth Day Edition

Happy Earth Day, everyone. Or, if you're on campus here, Happy Earth Week, complete with live bands at noon every day and a really weird papier-mâché tree ball thing oh, apparently that was a pomegranate to commemorate the Armenian genocide. Earth Week means I've got three more days to write about the relationship of geology, as a science and a profession, to environmental politics... which is good, 'cause I'm distracted today by larger-scale theoretical considerations: In the end, the root of the problem lies with culture. If we can change the culture, then we may win. If we cannot, then…

Obama and McCain Highlight Health Care Plans in NEJM

I was excited when I saw that The New England Journal of Medicine had today published summaries by Obama and McCain of their health care plans, expecting something quite detailed to appeal to a highly critical expert audience. However, their summaries were still as general and vague as ever. Regardless, these new write-ups are still a nice resource for people interested in the two candidates' plans. You can read Obama's plan here, McCain's here, or see a pdf of both side-by-side here. On many aspects, both plans--at least as they're presented here--are quite similar. Both stress…

Books of the Ocean, One Accurate and One Not

Proper preparation for deep-sea research requires a great deal of equipment, which can cost hundreds of thousands of money. Happily, due to government ignorance and the treachery of accountants worldwide, most equipment can be written off at tax time..." As April approaches and I prep my taxes, I am thankful for this information. Those things deductible? Sombreros, crutches, massages, air tanks, wire cutters, gas to get to the ocean, etc. Those things not deductible? Robes, sunscreen, plastic ficus, bolo tie, etc. The humor continues is Volume 3 (No. 164 of 307) of Haggis-On-Whey's World…

Credit

Tyler Cowen weighs in on the latest twist in the bailout plan, which involves funneling money to credit card companies. Tyler asks if the Feds should really be in the business of encouraging more credit card borrowing. (I've actually been enjoying getting fewer credit card offers in the mail.) His answer: No, and especially not with federal dollars. We're talking about credit card debt as a means of financing consumption expenditures. I am not sure what is the going credit card interest rate for the marginal borrowers who will be aided by this new change in the Paulson plan, but I believe it…

McCain and the Straight Bullshit Express

Snuggles McCain demonstrating his vaunted 'independence' It seems more and more people are finally paying close attention to Mitt Romney and John McCain. While I've talked about Romney's idiocy before, The Boston Phoenix did a great job of skewering McCain, so I'll turn it over to them: Arizona senator John McCain appears to be the nation's most popular Republican. That, at least, is what most polls show. It's not entirely clear why. He has authored little noteworthy legislation during his 20 years in the Senate and, in fact, has accomplished almost nothing beyond co-sponsoring the McCain-…

Wet or dry ear wax?

Life can be really funny. When I was in college I was incorrigibly curious and I asked a Korean American friend if his ear wax was dry (I'd read that East Asians had dry ear wax once) and his response was, "Isn't everybody's?" When it comes to interpersonal differences there are many things we take for granted and extrapolate to others that aren't necessarily true.1 Nick Wade in The New York Times has an interesting write up about the genetics of the ear wax phenotype. While the populations of Europe and Africa have wet ear wax, those of East Asia have dry ear wax. Other populations are…

More on IKEA: Mistaking What Is Legal with What Is Ethical

A few years back, Dick Cavett made the following observation about the misuse of the phrase "presumption of innocence": Cast your mind back about a dozen years to Tonya Harding. For the newly born, she was the young skater who hired a goon acquaintance to lurch out of the shadows and whack rival skater Nancy Kerrigan in the leg. The attack effectively put Nancy out of commission and delivered to sportsmanship a black eye the size of Cleveland. Despite all this, gritty Tonya's fanatical admirers remained loyal. On the TV news one of these ardent supporters -- in this case an adenoidal female…

Park 51: Lessons for the War on Science

Amanda Marcotte makes a very astute observation about the opposition to the non-mosque not-that-close-to-the-former-World-Trade-Center* that has arisen over the last month (italics mine): Make no mistake---all soft language about how it's just too close to the WTC or how this is an assault on 9/11 victims is just crap to keep this whole controversy going, and to gin up more paranoia about Muslims in America. This is very classic behavior for conspiracy theorists, to roll up what they're really trying to say and put it in softer terms. They feel that most people aren't "ready" for the real…

PT-141

Sciencebase has a short article on a potential new aphrodisiac. It's called PT-141, or bremelanotide, or Ac-Nle-cyclo[Asp-His-D-Phe-Arg-Trp-Lys]-OH ("PT-141" is the useful search term if you want to hit up PubMed), and it's a melanocortin agonist that works directly on the brain. It can be delivered as a nasal spray. It works on men, promoting erections, and it also seems to be effective on women, increasing sexual appetite. "A dose of PT-141 results, in most cases, in a stirring in the loins in as little as 15 minutes," reports Julian Dibbell, "Women, according to one set of results, feel…

The Toll of Coal

By Nathan Fetty Every so often, my wife and I take our daughter, whoâs now two-and-a-half, on one of our favorite walks in the country here in central West Virginia.  To get there, unfortunately, we have to pass by torrents of orange acid mine drainage (photo examples here and here) and through a landscape brutalized by mining.  But the woods and streams beyond this devastation are as prime as any in West Virginia. Thatâs why we keep going there.  We want our child to know these kinds of special places. Our daughterâs becoming more and more verbal. She loves to point out things as sheâs…

100,000,000,000

One hundred billion. One hundred thousand million. That is a lot, in most contexts. Astronomical even. Apparently, if you ask nicely, know the right people, you can have it, in cash. US dollars. Off budget, no questions asked, no supervision, no audits. What could you do with that? It is both a lot, and a little. It is a little bit less than the combined gross worth of the two richest people on the planet. So a single charity foundation, the very richest, might have that much money, soon. It is a bit less than the current capitalization of google; but it is more than the gross domestic…

HORSE Event at World Series of Poker

This is a post about the World Series of Poker, but there are no spoilers in it Today began one of the most interesting events at the World Series of Poker, the HORSE event. One of the complaints about the growth of the WSOP over the last few years is that the main event, with so many players involved, has become much more of a crapshoot and thus led to a dimunition in the importance of poker skill. But if you're looking for a real test of who is the best player in poker, this event is more likely to provide it. The buy-in is $50,000 and it's a mixed game. In regular intervals, the game…

Attn Professionals: There is NO REASON to go on the Dr. Oz show

Lets say you are a professional/expert on Topic X. One day, you get a call from an Emmy winning, top day-time talk show. They want you to come on their show to talk about Topic X! "OMG!!! YAAAAAY!!!" you would surely be thinking. "A platform to educate the public about Topic X! Millions of people via TV, internet, just the exposure for Topic X, this is FANTASTIC!!!" Now, lets say that Emmy winning, top day-time talk show is "Dr. Oz". That 'opportunity to educate millions of people'? If you are a regular reader of SciBlogs, you know that Dr. Oz utterly wasted our Pam Ronalds time when he had…

Jake and the Overly-Analytical Parents

SteelyKid has recently become obsessed with the Disney Junior show Jake and the Never Land Pirates, demanding to watch it all the time. Thanks to her two recent bouts with this year's stomach bug, I've had to watch, or at least listen to her watching in the next room, every episode that Time Warner offers on demand. Being a scientist, and thus inclined to over-analyze things, this has, of course, raised some questions: -- The show focuses on the title character, Jake, and his friends Cubby and Izzy, who live on Pirate Island off the coast of Never Land, and spend their time thwarting the…

Greek yield curves

The Greeks certainly yielded, but that's not what I'm talking about. No, this is about bond yields, specifically the inverted yield curve that Greek bonds show at the moment. And its jolly interesting (no, really, don't go... oh). I should begin by saying I don't know what I'm talking about. I started off thinking I did, a bit, and then I read NOTES ON THE BANK OF ENGLAND UK YIELD CURVES and realised just how little I knew. But I discussed the Greek stuff a bit in the previous post, and the inverted yields came up, but not with a good explanation. The convention answer to an inverted bond…

Why Go to Concerts?

An insane audiophile of my acquaintance recently remarked (in a locked LiveJournal, otherwise I'd link to it) that while live classical music is clearly superior to recorded classical music, it's crazy to go to a live performance of pop music because "you're not hearing actual instruments/voices, you're hearing them miked and amplified through speakers just like you would at home," and if speakers are going to be involved, you might as well not be there. This is space-alien logic, of course, but not all that far out there as insane audiophilia goes. Remember, kids, friends don't let friends…

Hugo Nominees: Best Novelette

This is the last of the short fiction categories. You can read my comments on the Best Novella and Best Short Story nominees in the archives. This means the only fiction nominees I have left to read are Blindsight and Glasshouse. The nominees in the Best Novelette category (the full text of all the stories can be found via the official nominations page) are: "Yellow Card Man,"Paolo Bacigalupi "Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth," Michael F Flynn "The Djinn's Wife,"Ian McDonald "All the Things You Are,"Mike Resnick "Pol Pot's Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy),"Geoff Ryman Best…

Leave the Swans Alone

I flagged this Matt Yglesias post about post-mortem examinations of the financial crisis as something to respond to. Matt writes: I was at an interesting discussion with an ideologically diverse group of people last night of the future of financial regulations. One thing that there was broad agreement on that hadn't really snapped into focus for me previously is the idea that doing rigorously precise forensic work on how to understand "what went wrong" and then design the rule that would have prevented this is neither necessary nor sufficient to improving things going further. The basic…

Understanding and Enjoyment are Orthogonal

In a comment to Friday's classical music post, Chris Evo recommended a TED talk by Benjamin Zander that has the goal of convincing his audience that they love classical music: If you're not able or inclined to watch it, he goes through a Chopin piano piece in detail, and explains how it plays off our expectation of a particular chord sequence. He's a charismatic guy, and it's a great presentation. It does not, however, convince me that I love classical music. This isn't a problem that's limited to music, of course. As a general matter, a lot of people confuse lack of enjoyment with lack of…

Monday Miscellany

A bunch of smallish items that have been failing to resolve into full-fledged blog posts for a little while now, thrown together here because I don't have anything better to post this morning: -- When is doubt, start with self-promotion: Physics World includes How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in their holiday gift books guide, and says wonderfully nice things about it: Chad Orzel talks to his dog about quantum physics. It is not clear what the dog gets out of this arrangement, but the rest of us ought to be grateful for it, because Orzel's book about their "conversations" is sure to become a…

Twenty-Five Things

Since everybody I know on Facebook seems to have done this, it seems I'm obliged to post a list of twenty-five random facts. I wouldn't want to have my Internet License revoked, or anything. I've always been tall-- I'm not one of those tall people who was 5'7" in the tenth grade, and then shot up a foot over the next two years. I was always one of the three or four tallest kids in my class in school. I haven't been skiing in at least fifteen years, but every year at this time when the radio station I listen to in the car goes into the all-ski-area-ads format, I wonder about trying it again.…

PLoS and Creative Commons

This morning I had to deny a scientist permission to use my photos of her ants in a paper headed for PLoS Biology.  I hate doing that.  Especially when I took those photos in part to help her to promote her research. The problem is that PLoS content is managed under a Creative Commons (=CC) licensing scheme.  I don't do CC.  Overall it's not a bad licensing scheme, but for one sticking point: CC allows users to re-distribute an image to external parties. In an ideal world, non-profit users would faithfully tack on the CC license and the attribution to the photographer, as required by the…

Kodak Zi8 Love-Hate Relationship

Purty, innit? I got the raspberry one pictured above. Disclaimer: This is not a corporate product review. I purchased my Kodak Zi8 for full retail price two months ago for $179.95. However, you can get it now for $129.95 at Kodak and everywhere else on the web. It was a fantastic deal at the old price - an incredible deal at the new price. It allows one to take fantastic quality, image-stabilized, 1080p HD movies that you can then watch on the TV. However. Editing the movies for posting on the blog is pissing me off no end. I have a 24-minute interview with University of Pennsylvania…