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Digital DNA Could Reveal Identity of Harry Potter Leaker

tags: Harry Potter, leaker identity As you all know by now, the last Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was leaked recently to the internet. The leaker meticulously photographed every page in the book and posted those images to the internet where most of them are clearly readable. However, according to experts at Canon, an imaging company, the identity of the person who leaked the book could be revealed by tracing the digital camera that was used. Basically, the vital information contained in each photo, known as Exchangeable Image File Format (Exif) data, revealed that…

Citizen Reporting: Bill Clinton's Value to Hillary's Presidential Bid

tags: citizen reporting, politics, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, US Presidential bid, WNYC, Brian Lehrer Show, Ethan Hova, Huffington Post This morning, I was listening to WNYC, the local NPR affiliate and my favorite radio station in the world. On the Brian Lehrer Show, he was interviewing Ethan Hova, a reporter at the liberal online newspaper, the Huffington Post. Hova is organizing a "citizen reporter" story where a group of us get together and determine the value to Hillary Clinton of having a former President of the United States as a spouse. To do this research project, Hova has…

Weekend Diversion: 8-bit glory for a rainy day

"A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long." -e. e. cummings While the rest of the United States gets swept over by a heat wave, the weekend here in Portland, OR gives us an all-too-familiar sight. But I have found the diversion (for myself, at least) for the rainy weekend. I'm listening to The Detroit Cobras' version (they're a cover band) of the soul classic, It's Raining.And what is it I've found for entertainment? My favorite old nintendo games, available (at last!) to play online in…

Merovingian Motorway at Grez-Doiceau

[More blog entries about archaeology, Belgium, Merovingian, burial; arkeologi, Belgien, folkvandringstiden, vendeltiden, gravar.] Belgian Dear Reader Bruno is one of the astronomy buffs behind Blog Wega (in Dutch). A piece about Bruno's nearest archaeological site wouldn't fit that blog, but I'm happy to have it as a guest entry. Rich 1st Millennium graves, what more can you ask for? This is the sixth entry I receive for the Your Nearest Site carnival. Gimme three more NOW, people, and I'll put it on-line! Merovingian Motorway at Grez-Doiceau By Bruno Van de Casteele Yes, this is my…

ADHD Resource

I got an email that I almost deleted without reading, thinking for a moment that it would be spam. It turned out not to be. Since the author appears to be well-intentioned, I'll go ahead and post it here. He mentions some on-line resources regarding the diagnosis and treatment of adult ADHD. Based upon the title of the email, I thought it was going to be one of those pitches for Internet drug sales. It is not. Instead, it promotes a site put up by an independent ADHD coach. Presumably, the main purpose is to promote his business. I have no particujlar objection to that. I have no…

Diversity in Science: Lewis Latimer

DLee has started a new carnival to highlight the contributions of awesome scientists and engineers, with the first one being focused on the contributions of African-American scientists and engineers (it being Black History Month and all). (By the way, does anyone else think it is supercool to have a Black History Month when we finally have an African American president? I think so. Way cool. We're watching history being made!) So. I want to profile someone I just learned about this very week, and who I have already talked about with my first-year students. So. Have you ever heard of…

What are your favorite iPhone apps?

The other day, author pal and PharmFamily friend Rebecca Skloot sent out a Twitter request for iPhone app suggestions for her new gadget, particularly those that might be of greatest use on her upcoming, self-supported book tour for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Let me first congratulate Ms. Skloot on ditching that CrapBerry and adopting a technology that is as superior as her book. Rebecca got me looking at my iPhone and made me realize that, well, it sort of has that not-so-fresh feeling. I've got a few tried-and-true apps that I've shared with our Twitter followers but I even feel…

Haeckel on film

Proteus is a film about the 19th century biologist and artist Ernest Haeckel. It's almost a few years old now, and has already worked its way through the blogosphere. But, given Dave's interest in Haeckel and the recent uptick in Haeckel-talk at the blogs, let me bring it up again. Haeckel and his assistant, 1866 (no, not a still from the making of Deadwood) Slate had a beautiful slideshow of Haeckel's images a while back. The Panda's Thumb made note of it. Haeckel's famous for his amazing artistic abilities, and the unbelievable wealth of imagery he left us (well, and being tagged…

Sadventists, badventists

This afternoon, a couple of smiling, glassy-eyed young ladies stopped by my house to talk about Jesus. I was delighted, but I made the mistake of telling them up front that I was an atheist, and didn't believe in their religion…and they backed away slowly, said "goodbye!", and scurried away. It's so hard to bait the trap when you insist on using honesty. Anyway, I did get a little online satisfaction reading this great ferocious rant about Seventh Day Adventists. The Seventh-day Adventist cult's "prophet" and founder, the alcoholic, masturbation-obsessed habitual plagiarist Ellen G. White,…

JOURNAL WATCH: New Study Finds That As of 2003, The Most Consistent Predictor of Citizen Activism in the Stem Cell Debate Was Church Mobilization

A pre-publication release of a study I did with Kirby Goidel of LSU is now available at the website of the journal POLITICAL BEHAVIOR. Analyzing national survey data collected in 2003, the study finds that the most consistent predictor of citizen activism in the stem cell debate (measured as donating money, contacting officials, writing letters to the editor etc) is church-based mobilization, including the distribution of materials at church, and requests to participate from church leaders. Below is the abstract and article information. Readers at universities should be able to download…

Staging, Self-Shaping, Starting Small: Not Important?

An early classic in computational neuroscience was a 1993 paper by Elman called "The Importance of Starting Small." The paper describes how initial limitations in a network's memory capacity could actually be beneficial to its learning of complex sentences, relative to networks that were "adult-like" from the start. This still seems like a beautiful idea - the cognitive limitations of children may somehow be adaptive for the learning they have yet to do. And Elman is not alone in proposing it; a number of other researchers have proposed that a lack of cognitive control or working memory…

Should You Eat or Drink Your Fruits and Veggies? An Experiment

From the Obesity Panacea Archives: The following post first appeared on January 11, 2010. In the past year or so I've seen lots of online discussion about the nutritional value of juice, and the role that it may play in obesity and weight management.  Although there are a lot of good nutritional arguments against juice consumption, they are all a bit abstract (for a quick review of the main arguments, click here).  We can tell people again and again that orange juice is the nutritional equivalent of Coke, but when they look at at a glass of orange juice, it still looks like a glass of…

White Americans and Resistance to Affirmative Action

From the Chronicle of Higher Education daily update yesterday: The strongest source of white opposition to affirmative action today is neither racism nor a sincere conviction that any favoritism, even if compensatory, is wrong, but rather a "desire to protect fellow whites," three scholars argue in a paper released last week by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. That finding, the authors contend, offers a new window into white opposition to affirmative-action programs. The Chronicle article needs a subscription but the paper it refers to, Why White Americans Oppose Affirmative Action…

Ethics under climate change - competition

This announcement of an essay competition at Inter-Research, a German-located research group, may be of interest to students: Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics Ethics of Climate Change CALL FOR ESSAYS Major consequences of climate change are now predictable to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty. Many of these consequences will be experienced within the next 100 years - on time scales relevant to emergency preparedness, medical responses, infrastructure alteration, financial investments, treaty negotiations, etc. These changes will impact the globe, geographically,…

On censorship

The internet filtering debacle raises some more general issues I have with my nation's governments' tendency to censor ideas it doesn't like. Sure, there's the "Won't somebody think of the children" justification, which is a Good Intention (suitable for paving roads), but surely the best bet is to go for the producers of child pornography through legal sanctions and encourage parents to take responsibility for their children's internet habits by using family clean feeds and monitoring their behaviour rather than penalise everybody to suit a few religious interests. In a democracy, under…

Colors can tell us a lot about how we recognize shapes

The Beck effect is difficult to replicate online, because it involves testing reaction times. However, I think I've figured out a way to approximate the effect. This movie (Quicktime required) will show you how it works. Just follow the directions on the opening screen: Now, which letter did you see first? Let's make this a poll: If we manage to replicate the effect, there should be a bias in the results, which I'll explain below so everyone has a chance to try it out before learning the "answer." In the 1960s, Jacob Beck found that when searching arrays of letters like this, viewers were…

Deep Rifts among the wingnuts

Quite the little hissyfit is brewing on the far right. One one side is Joseph Farah, lunatic publisher of the online teabagging journal, World Net Daily, better known as Wing Nut Daily to rational people. Farah organizes something called the "Taking America Back National Conference", in which the not-very-bright half of America gets together to piously discuss how they can complete the total trashing of the country. On the other side is crazy flaming psycho goon Ann Coulter, who would have been a headliner at the WND conference — she's exactly the kind of nut WND loves. Unfortunately, Coulter…

Colors can tell us a lot about how we recognize shapes

[This entry was originally posted in April 2007] The Beck effect is difficult to replicate online, because it involves testing reaction times. However, I think I've figured out a way to approximate the effect. This movie (Quicktime required) will show you how it works. Just follow the directions on the opening screen: Now, which letter did you see first? Let's make this a poll: If we manage to replicate the effect, there should be a bias in the results, which I'll explain below so everyone has a chance to try it out before learning the "answer." In the 1960s, Jacob Beck found that when…

What will academia (need to) look like when gas is $20/gallon?

Gas prices keep going up, and don't kid yourself that they're going to go down again anytime soon either (enjoy those profits, ExxonMobil shareholders...). Some places in the US are looking down the road at $5/gallon, and of course Europeans have been paying vastly more than that for years. The news is rife with stories of police departments worrying about going broke because gas is too expensive, and schools that can't afford the food they cook to give kids lunch at school because food costs are going up too much (which of course hits the poor kids more than the rich kids - yeah, that…

Making a clean getaway

I'm taking a vacation next week. For real. Miles from anywhere. We're headed to the isolated Isle Royale National Park, which is the island in Lake Superior that is the eye of the wolf, as it were. We take a boat there Monday, and come back on the next boat, which runs on Friday. Guess what else? There will be no Internets. I wanted to write a similar post to ScienceWoman on my reflections on my first year, but I feel I need a little space to be able to do this first. My head is so full of static - what to read next, should I really read that next, shouldn't I work on the revisions for…

Depression Induces Bone Loss: My thoughts

Jonah Lehrer, at href="http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2006/10/depression_induces_bone_loss_1.php">The Frontal Cortex, points out a recent PNAS article (published online ahead of print) that indicates an unexpected finding.  Using a mouse model or depression, they find that the risk of osteoporosis is increased.  Furthermore, they find that treatment with an antidepressant reduces the risk. href="http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0604234103v1">Depression induces bone loss through stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system Raz Yirmiya, Inbal Goshen, Alon Bajayo, Tirzah…

The impact of blogging on me (a meme).

Dave Munger tagged me with a meme about (among other things) the effect blogging has had on my life. The questions seem worthy of relection, so I'm game: What have you learned so far from visitors to your blog? I've learned that there are a lot of people who aren't paid to "think for a living" who think for fun and do it quite well. I've learned that people with strong opposing opinions can still have rational discussions with each other. And, of course, I've learned that what my kids say is more reliably fascinating than what I say. If somebody offered to pay for a course (or more) for…

Chicago Magazine on Lott vs Levitt

Via Eli Rabett I find a long article by James L. Meriner in Chicago magazine on the Lott-Levitt lawsuit. There's some new information on the history of Lott and Levitt such as this: Just when and how the Lott-Levitt feud started is not clear -- neither man would directly comment on the lawsuit for this article. Levitt's friend Austan Goolsbee, also an economics professor at the U. of C., remembers when Levitt, then a junior fellow at Harvard, visited Chicago in 1994 to present a paper. Lott had just been named a visiting professor. "Even before Steve was on the [academic] job market, John…

What is it about Winona, MN and antivaccinationists?

A couple of weeks ago, I linked to an amazingly ignorant antivaccination screed published in the Winona Daily News. In the comments, I was made aware of another antivaccination screed in the form of a letter to the editor to the Winona Post. (Unfortunately, I am unable to locate it online.) Now, today, I find that there are people in Winona who are trying to outdo Jim and Laurie Jenkinson (the authors of the first article) in serious stupidity in the form of a letter to the editor published in the Winona Daily News entitled It Is Important to Learn More About Vaccinations. I'd normally agree…

Israel

Recent weeks have brought a steady stream of interesting reports about Israel's internal politics and how those politics relate to the rest of the world. To whit: Israel Roiled After Chomsky Barred From West Bank: Front-page coverage and heated morning radio discussions asked how Mr. Chomsky, an 81-year-old professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, could pose a risk to Israel and how a country that frequently asserts its status as a robust democracy could keep out people whose views it found offensive. ⦠The decision to bar him from entering the West Bank to speak…

Birds in the News 126

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter "Thy Fearful Symmetry" Male greater Prairie-chicken, Tympanuchus cupido. Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU. [larger view]. More of Dave's Greater Prairie-chicken images. Birds in Science Seven feathers that either belonged to a non-avian dinosaur or an early bird have been discovered encased in amber in a remarkably vivid state of preservation, according to a recent Proceedings of the Royal Society B study. The 100-million-year-old amber, excavated from a Charente-Maritime quarry in western France, was found near the…

Anonymity, openness, safety, and responsibility.

This week, the National Review Online's media blogger revealed the secret identity of dKos blogger Armando, who says that this unwanted decloaking probably means he will no longer blog. While I'm not heavy into the political end of the blogosphere (until someone can provide me with more than 24 hours per day), Armando's story resonates with me because one of my favorite science bloggers, BotanicalGirl, had to stop blogging when members of her department became aware of her blog. So I've been thinking a lot about blogging anonymously versus blogging under one's own name, not just in terms of…

fukushima questions of nippon

there are a number of questions that need answer regarding the situation at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, aka Fuk-D. As a starting point, here is an amateur online feed of radiation in Tokyo (Park18). It is a geiger-counter, the normal count rate is 10-20 cpm, around noon on march 15th the count rate peaked at about 120 cpm, the counts then dropped before there was another broad rise on march 16th to about 40 cpm. The first question is: why am I having to link to an amateur with a geiger counter? The Japanese Atomic Energy Authority has four online environmental radiation monitors.…

I knew it!

This one seems to be making the rounds among blogs that I frequent. Given that it's Saturday, when I usually don't post anything that requires serious writing, it's a perfect day to let the sheep in me have free reign and follow the flock, taking this test: Your Score : Robot You are 100% Rational, 0% Extroverted, 42% Brutal, and 28% Arrogant. You are the Robot! You are characterized by your rationality. In fact, this is really ALL you are characterized by. Like a cold, heartless machine, you are so logical and unemotional that you scarcely seem human. For instance, you are very…

Teachers Gone Wild

My wife, a biology teacher, gets crazy in the biology classroom. She is famous for her interpretive dance renditions of numerous cellular processes. The students in the first class of the day reportedly stare in disbelief and roll their eyes, but the students in the other classes throughout the day seem to love it. Several of her students have taken to filming her pedagogical paroxysms, and you know that some day, Amanda will be a YouTube Star. ~ a repost ~ But this brings up the interesting and difficult mixture of students, personal technology in the classrooms, teachers, schools,…

Teaching Biology Lab - Week 1

I am teaching the Intro Bio lab right now and thought it would be appropriate to schedule this post to appear at the same time. I wrote it last time I taught this, but today's lab will be pretty much the same. Being second summer session, the class will probably be really small, which will make the lab go even faster and easier. Yesterday I had my first class of the semster of the BIO Lab at the community college. This is the first time with a new syllabus, containing some new excercises. At the beginning, we took a look at some cartoons, as examples of Inductive and Abductive Arguments,…

Knitting for the Apocalypse

This is a repeat, but it is at least three years old, and I haven't done a fiber arts piece in a while, so I thought I'd get us chatting. The cooler weather certainly makes me want to knit! The title here is somewhat tongue in cheek, of course, but I do think that we knitters and crocheters, spinners and weavers have something useful to contribute to a lower-impact future - warm fingers and toes, homemade reusable cloth bags, beautiful clothing - all made from local or recycled or otherwise sustainable materials. So I thought a discussion of how to knit (and all the other useful fiber arts)…

Circumcision & AIDS

William Saletan has a roundup and commentary on the ruckus surrounding circumcision and HIV transmission. There are two issues here, The health & public policy The cultural angle The think the evidence is pretty clear from individual studies and cross-cultural comparisons: all things being equal, circumcision cuts down on the rate of HIV transmission (especially from female-to-male). On the other hand, there are the important cultural issues that are often not mooted with clarity, especially in the United States. You see, the USA is one of the few nations where adult circumcision…

More on what US scientists can learn from the Canadian War on Science

I've been thinking a lot about this the last week or so, with media appearances already out there and more to come. The list of links I've amassed is quite impressive, a significant number to add to the post highlighting Sarah Boon's advice. But that was a week or so ago, which seems like an eternity in Donald Trump years. So perhaps it's time to take another look at the issues around science advocacy and politics in the Canadian context. My advice? Don't bring a test tube to a Bunsen burner fight. Mobilize, protest, form partnerships, wrote op-eds and blog posts and books and articles, speak…

Last Week on ResearchBlogging.org

Researchers observed tiny voids forming in silicon used for solar panels; these voids provide physical evidence of the Staebler-Wronski effect, "which reduces the solar cell efficiency by up to 15 percent within the first 1000 hours." Using an online avatar with a skin color other than your own makes you less racist in real life; playing a hero makes you less cruel, and playing a villain less benevolent. Old mouse muscles exhibit "elevated levels of activity in a biological cascade called the p38 MAP kinase pathway" which prevents stem cells from dividing and repairing muscle damage.  By…

Did she or didn't she? Genetic testing and virgin birth

'Tis the holiday season and, according to ancient lore, the time when miraculous events are most likely to take place. One of those well-known and miraculous events of ancient days was the birth of a son to a young girl, who, although she was married (Okay, I'm not sure about this part of the story) she was said to be a virgin and the birth to be a miracle. Hmmm. How do you think the news would be received if that sort of thing happened today? Certainly, if the young girl were to produce a grilled cheese sandwich with a burn spot that vaguely resembled a woman in a robe, someone might be…

Mananimals in the news again

Not just in the USA. Visceral queeziness coupled with religious sentiment coupled with scientific ignorance appears in other parts of the world as well, as in the UK The Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, a professional group based in Edinburgh, has published a report on the ethical implications of the practice in the journal Human Reproduction and Genetic Ethics. The report is online at www.schb.org.uk. The article lists some examples of research: Later research has spawned human-animal creations, the report said. These usually die at the embryonic stage, but often survive if the…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Storing Digital Data In Living Organisms: DNA, perhaps the oldest data storage medium, could become the newest as scientists report progress toward using DNA to store text, images, music and other digital data inside the genomes of living organisms. In a report scheduled for the April 9 issue of ACS' Biotechnology Progress, a bi-monthly journal, Masaru Tomita and colleagues in Japan point out that DNA has been attracting attention as perhaps the ultimate in permanent data storage. More..... Epigenetics To Shape Stem Cell Future: Everyone hopes that one day stem cell-based regenerative…

Mental health research and a bikesharing system

DC's Capital Bikeshare program has had a fantastic first year. Stations full of sturdy red bikes have been popping up all over the city, and the system logged its one millionth ride one the eve of its first anniversary. Members can take a bike from any of the more than 100 stations, and the ride is free if they return it within half an hour to any station. (The system is still figuring out how to keep the most popular stations from being emptied out or completely full at rush hour, but the new stations that will come online over the next year should help.) Now I learn that Capital Bikeshare…

Yet more Exxon drivel

The drive to distract us from reality continues. Quite why otherwise sensible people are so keen on stuff like Pressure on Exxon Over Climate Change Intensifies With New Documents - I saw it via Stefan Rahmstorf's fb feed - I don't know, because it is utter drivel. To let Exxon have their rebuttal first, because they are right, Alan Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, called the new allegations absurd. "To suggest that we had definitive knowledge about human-induced climate change before the world’s scientists is not a credible thesis," he said. And now to quote the other side talking…

Anthony Watts Starts Up Cloud Based Anti-Science Organization

The Open Atmospheric Society Climate science pseudo-skeptic Anthony Watts recently bought and registered the domain "theoas.org" and has just announced the formation at that Internet address of a new society explicitly designed to organize people in meteorology and related areas intent on opposing the scientific consensus on climate change. And yes, there is a scientific consensus on climate change. Dr. Roy Spencer once said to me that trying to organize climate skeptics would be like “trying to herd cats”. While this Society is not trying to “herd” anyone, nor is it specifically focused on…

Short Story Club Wrap-Up

The first rule of Short Story Club is that you must talk about Short Story Club... So, the Short Story Club run by Niall Harrison over at Torque Control is finished, and Niall's asking for concluding thoughts. I meant to write this up last night, but SteelyKid had a major meltdown just before bedtime, so everything got scrambled. A perennial topic of discussion in science fiction and fantasy fandom is "the death of the magazines," with lots of hand-wringing about how nobody reads short fiction any more, and short fiction is where the novelists of tomorrow hone their craft, etc. This never…

Be afraid. Be very very afraid

In a story that caught the attention of only the more astute climate science journalists a few weeks ago, one of the more experienced oceanographers of our time, Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University, reported that the Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than we thought. How much faster? So fast that the rate made the story seem too alarmist to take seriously. As MSNBC's Alex Johnson reported, Scientists had previously predicted that the summer sea ice would disappear from the Arctic by 2040. But Wadhams' measurements indicate that the thinning was already approaching 50 percent and that…

Darwin Bibliography (Courtesy of Adam Gopnik)

Adam Gopnik writes in the Oct. 23rd New Yorker about Darwin's writing period after the Beagle and before Origins (which is to say, roughly through the 1840s and into the later 1850s). His essay is more or less an appreciation for Darwin's literary skill, that skill being that he could present his points in Origins in just the right way. Such a task was not trivial. With Gopnik's appreciation - which, I don't know entirely why Adam Gopnik, who generally writes about other stuff (you know, like France and stuff) is writing this, but be that as it may - you get a nice feel for the importance…

The Game is Over

John Maynard Smith has died. While many people know who Stephen Jay Gould was or Richard Dawkins is, Id bet few would be able to identify Maynard Smith. Thats a shame, because he played a key role in building the foundations of modern evolutionary biology. (Underlining this point, I only learned about his death from Science's online new service. As far as I can tell, no one else has run an obituary.) Maynard Smith came to evolution from a previous career as an engineer. In World War II he measured the stress on airplane wings. When he moved to evolution, he brought with him a gift to see the…

Like-Minded Discussion and Attitude Extremity about Science

Several colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have a new study out that shows not surprisingly that like-minded conversations drive attitude extremity relative to science policy. Analyzing data from a national panel survey conducted between 2002 and 2005, graduate student Andrew Binder and his collaborators find that after controlling for demographics and news use, like-minded discussion pushed respondents' position on stem cell research to the extreme ends of the distribution, either towards strong support or strong opposition. The study comes out of the research group at…

Does technology enhance or detract from the wilderness experience?

As an avid lover of the outdoors, I was super excited to see that there was an entire session at Science Online 2011 dedicated to discussing technology's place in the wilderness. All of the panelists are well versed in taking tech out of the city. Miriam Goldstein has used technology on multiple expeditions to study the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, taking the internet audience with her across the Pacific in search of trash. Danielle Lee is a passionate outdoor enthusiast, encouraging people in urban areas to experience the wilderness. Karen James is perhaps best known for her work with the…

#scio10 aftermath: my tweets from "Talking Trash: Online Outreach from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch".

Session description: Debris in the North Pacific Gyre received unprecedented attention in 2009 with voyages from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, Project Kaisei, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Each voyage integrated online outreach into its mission, but emphasized very different aspects of the problem. What are the challenges of creating a major outreach effort from one of the most isolated places on earth? How can scientists, journalists, and educators balance "exciting findings live from the field!" with "highly preliminary unpublished non-peer-reviewed data that our…

An Amazing Feeling of Power

Nine times seven, thought Shuman with deep satisfaction, is sixty-three, and I don't need a computer to tell me so. The computer is in my own head. And it was amazing the feeling of power that gave him. -from "The Feeling of Power" by Isaac Asimov Before spring break, I received a packet in the mail from one of my readers--a member of the faculty. Inside I found a photocopy of "Superiority", a science fiction short by Arthur C. Clark, a memo from the FSU bookstore to the faculty addressing textbook ordering protocols and a note from the professor, believe it or not, that tied it all together…

Why you should read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

This is a special shout out to the doctors and scientists out there. Everything we do in our fields has repercussions, often unexpected ones. Because of this, we strive to practice ethically to help prevent or minimize negative repercussions. This discussion comes up specifically as an epiphenomenon of the release of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (my full review can be found here.) How one reacts to this book would, I suppose, depend on your perspective. A neighbor of the Lacks's might react quite differently than a 22 year old doctoral student. And that's really the point. This…