Search Content

Displaying results 8351 - 8400 of 87947

Dembski Delights in Domesticated Dogs.

This story in the Times of London (breathlessly titled "How man's best friend overcame laws of natural evolution"*) has been linked to by Dembski over at his blog and by a number of other creationists around the web. I guess they think it somehow disproves evolution or problematizes natural selection. It discusses an article in Genome Research which used mtDNA analysis to examine selection in dogs and wolves and notes (according to the article) that natural selction was relaxed when dogs became domesticated. Living with people allowed harmful genetic variations to flourish that would never…

Blogs to Books: My First Session!

This might sound narcissistic, but ever since some time early in high school, I've believed that someday, somehow, I will write a book. What kind of book keeps shifting as I grow up and my outlook on life changes, but the overall theory that I will eventually be an author has persisted. So of course, when I saw that there was a session about how to create "a popular science book: using the Web from the initial idea to pitching to writing to selling," I simply had to attend. The session was moderated by blogging, book-writing superstars Brian Switek (Written in Stone), Sheril Kirshenbaum (The…

The loss of Dr Anita Roberts

[A regular reader, SciMom at Doubleloop, thanked me for putting up this post on my old blog this past Wednesday. As I don't believe that any of my new SiBlings here covered the passing of this amazing scientist, I am reprinting it here for our new and more diverse audience.] Cancer research and the cause of women in science and medicine lost a true leader and shining example last week with the passing of Dr Anita Roberts to gastric cancer. She was only 64. From her Washington Post obituary: Dr. Roberts, the 49th most-cited scientist in the world and the third most-cited female scientist,…

Sheril is a First Author in Science

So this is the first bit of news that we've been promising.... In the latest issue of Science, we--the ScienceDebate2008 crew--have a policy forum article that lays out how this all got started, its implications, and where it's going. Doing the article was Sheril's idea, and she did a great deal of the work, as a consequence of which she is now a twentysomething first author in Science...not bad, huh? I am not sure yet whether we can link to the article in a non-password protected way. There will also soon be some press releases; we'll throw those links up shortly. But in the meantime, let me…

Christopher Reiger

Between meaning and material (h.H.R.) Watercolor, gouache, graphite and marker on Arches paper 32 x 32 inches Christopher Reiger, 2007 My friend Christopher Reiger is appearing in several group shows this summer, so I thought it was a good time to spotlight his work. Above is one of my favorite pieces, between meaning and material (h.H.R.). I actually got to know Christopher online through his writing - he maintains a blog, Hungry Hyaena. He's written a number of provocative essays on the changing relationship between humans and nature, drawing on his extensive personal experience as an…

Googling for Diseases

I noticed this a few days ago and meant to comment on it.  Then, I noticed href="http://scienceblogs.com/drcharles/2006/11/attention_paging_dr_google_1.php#more">Dr. Charles beat me to it.  He even gave some examples in actual use.  If you've already read his, skip the excerpt and go directly to the few thoughts I've added at the end. href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/547620">Web-Based Search Engines Help Diagnose Difficult Cases NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Nov 10 - Using Google to conduct web-based searches on the internet can assist in the diagnosis of difficult cases,…

Swim with Whale Sharks... at the Aquarium?

A novel approach to connecting people and animals while generating new revenue or exploitation and poor judgment from those who should know better? The Georgia Aquarium announced this morning a new program that allows regular Joe Public to swim with their famed whale sharks, among other critters, in their largest tank. For the low price of $199 a swim or $290 for a SCUBA dive (actually quite a deal compared with traveling to the Philippines or one of the other exotic locales where you might get a chance to dive with them), you get a guaranteed swim with these biggest of all fishes. It looks…

I get email

Just for something completely different, here's an email I just got that isn't threatening me with death or causing me to choke while laughing because of its absurdity. Dr. Myers, Over the last several years I have been "converting" from a once very strong evangelical faith to atheism. It was a long road and involved many different facets, one of which was a steady tide of atheist reason and thought I received online. And my main source, well none other then you, Dr. Myers. My first movement towards rationality came when I started researching evolution and what do you know, it was true…

About that Arctic sea ice ...

The Register, an occasionally accurate online IT newspaper, has been running a series of warming denial pieces, by one Steven Goddard. Goddard has been trying to cast on temperature and ice data. Unfortunately, he does a whole lot of cherry picking. For example: A second important issue with NASA's presentation is that they use the time period of 1951-1980 as their choice of baseline. This was a well known cold spell, as can be seen in the 1999 version of the NASA US temperature graph below. Why use a graph of US temperatures instead of world temperatures? The "cold spell" is more…

Why not bail out the porn industry?

As much of a completely disgusting sleazebag as I think he is, at some level I grudgingly have to admire Larry Flynt. He never misses an opportunity for self-promotion and annoying the hell out of politicians, and he's back now, promoting himself and annoying the hell out of politicians. This time, he's asking for a $5 billion bailout for the porn industry: Another major American industry is asking for assistance as the global financial crisis continues: Hustler publisher Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis said Wednesday they will request that Congress allocate $5 billion for a…

The Return of "Ethically Sound" Stem Cells

Back in August, I and several others in the scientific community expressed skepticism over Nature paper (subscription required) describing a new technique billed by the media as generating "ethically sound" stem cells. The technique involved removing a single cell from an eight-cell blastula and using this cell to derive a line of stem cells while allowing the remaining cells to grow and develop normally, without any apparent damage to the embryo. This "watered down" approach to generating stem cells didn't seem to convince other scientists, and it apparently (although not surprisingly)…

Ant Colonies & Metabolic Scaling, Part 2

In a recent post, Dr. Dolittle reviewed some of our recent findings about the metabolic rate of ant colonies. We focused on the harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex californicus, a species with wide geographic distribution across the southwestern United States: If you are interested, there is a large collection of Pogonomyrmex resources available online thanks to Bob Johnson and the Social Insect Research Group at Arizona State University. From this website, you can find out about how to identify seed harvester ants, find detailed range maps, and also learn how to culture colonies in the lab.…

Models, photons, and more

Quantum mechanics is not my area of expertise. Really, I have no area of expertise. However, I think it is time to bring the whole photon thing back up. Yes, I know I was a little harsh before. Maybe I should start over. First, models. Yes models. I think science is all about models. Scientists build models that attempt to agree with observations. These models could be mathematical, physical, conceptual or numerical (like a computer program). For example, take Newton's Law of gravity (which isn't really a law). It says that the gravitational force between two objects has the…

Scientific Prose

There's an interesting review on prediction errors and temporal difference learning theory in the latest Trends in Cognitive Sciences. (Really, it's fascinating stuff.) But I don't want to talk today about the content of the article. Instead, I want to discuss its form. The vast, vast majority of science articles follow the same basic pattern: abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion. (Update: As bsci points out in the comments, review articles obey a slightly less strict pattern, but they're still pretty predictable.) There are no stories, no narrative, no amusing anecdotes. (…

Drug Shortages Reveal the Free Market is Failing Our Sickest Patients

**Update, the NYT has an editorial in their Sunday edition recommending the passage of two bills in congress requiring advanced notice from drug manufacturers in event of likely shortage. Health affairs discusses the increasingly frequent shortages of critical, life-saving, generic drugs. This is a serious problem that seems mostly limited to the U.S. healthcare system, and may adversely affect you or someone you know. Many of the same drugs are not in such short and unpredictable supply in Europe, where in some cases they carry higher prices. This provides one major clue to the root cause…

Recipes for GE eggplant

Eggplants are found in many colors: green, white, purple, yellow, even striped. They are shaped like cucumbers or apples. They are eaten in Italy as melanzane alla parmigiana, in France as ratatouille, and in the Middle East as baba ghanoush. My husband Raoul usually grows Imperial Black Beauty, Rosa Bianca, and the hybrids Beatrice and Nadia. We cook them shortly after harvest: Spicy Eggplant 2 Eggplants, diced into 1/2" cubes 3 tbsp Olive oil 1 Clove of garlic, smashed and chopped 1/2 tsp Chile flakes 1. Sauté smashed and chopped clove of garlic in the olive oil. 2. Add the chile flakes…

The Anti-Consumerist Gift Files: Righteous Giving

The second night of Chanukah, my sons got clothes from their great aunt, which they received politely but unenthusiastically. As we were heading to bed that night, after a late night at our synagogue's annual Chanukah party, six year old Isaiah asked me "Mommy, will tomorrow night be another clothes present night?" When I told him I suspected not, since the next night's gift would come from Grandma, who likes to give toys, he sighed and said "It is ok if there's clothes, but I just needed to be ready for them." It can be tough to have good manners when you are little. We expect the kids…

A historical perspective on Ebola response and prevention

Yambuku, Zaire, 1976. A new disease was spreading through the population. Patients were overcome by headaches and bloody diarrhea. The disease was spreading through entire families and wiping them out. Eight hundred and twenty-five kilometers to the northeast, a similar epidemic was reportedly raging across the border in Maridi, Sudan. Were these outbreaks connected? Despite enormous challenges trying to navigate both the logistics of crossing a landscape of unpaved and unmarked roads, as well as the political difficulties of an attempt to enter and collect samples in an area marked by recent…

Two decades after welfare reform, more deep poverty and fewer college degrees (rerun)

The Pump Handle is on a holiday break. The following, which was originally published on August 29, is one of our favorite posts from 2016. by Liz Borkowski, MPH Two decades ago, President Bill Clinton signed the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act” (PRWORA) and heralded the end of “welfare as we know it.” The law lived up to that promise, but the outcomes for families who depend on it have been problematic. "If the goal of welfare reform was to get rid of welfare, we succeeded," the University of Wisconsin’s Timothy Smeeding told Vox’s Dylan Matthews. "If the goal…

Life During Wartime

There are two main reasons why I don't write a great deal about politics here. The first, and most important, is that I tend not to like the way that I end up sounding when I go off on political topics. The second, only slightly less important, is that I rarely feel like I have anything worthwhile to add to the discussion that a hundred other homebrew pundits won't also say. This is one of the exceptions. A good friend of mine from college-- the best man at my wedding-- is a journalist working for the French wire services in Baghdad. He sends occasional email updates about what's going on…

On a Mission from God

Lately I've been reading the 19th and early 20th century traveler's accounts of what is now known as the Western Rift Valley and the Ituri Forest, Congo. Some are written by the famous 'explorers' such as H.M. Stanley, others written by scientists on expeditions in the area, and still others by missionaries. Reading these accounts puts me in mind of my own experiences, as a scientist working in that same area, with the missionaries that live and work, or sometimes just visit, there. So, a few missionary stories are in order. There were several different 'kinds' of missionaries working on…

IP: Real or Bogus?

There's been some talk among the sciencebloggers about the idea of intellectual property, and href="http://www.scienceblogs.com/clock/">Bora over at "A Blog Around the Clock" asked me to convert my thoughts into a post. It's a serious topic, which is worth giving some deep consideration, and it's something that I've given a lot of thought to. Back when I was at IBM, I worked on some projects that were internal and confidential, and also spent several years working on open-source. I've got two software patents to my name. I didn't do any of that lightly; I spent a lot of time thinking…

The importance of big ideas

One of the things that impressed me about Obama when I met him in 2006 was his nearly palpable intellect. In a situation like that interview, a five-minute session with a little blogger in Kansas, wedged between a private chat with Governor Sebelius and an address to the state's Democratic powerbrokers, it'd be easy for him to have gone on autopilot, giving canned answers with his mind elsewhere. Nonetheless, I got the genuine feeling of the gears whizzing, working through my questions, turning them around in his head and genuinely engaging me and them as he answered. It's possible that…

The Macroeconomic Effects of Scientific Research

One of the points about science funding I've tried to make over the years (we have been blogging a long time, haven't we?) is that the overheads and indirect costs associated with federal grants drive a lot of university decisions--there's a lot of money there. But this funding also has significant macroeconomic effects, especially in research-heavy states like Massachusetts. A local paper, The Boston Courant, describes the effects of the coming NIH cuts, due to the ending of the ARRA and the coming budget cuts, to the Boston economy. I'm quoting extensively from the August 12, 2001…

Who Will Be the Next Academy Award Winners? Who Was the Best Basketball Player of All Time? The Answers Can Be Found in Mathematics, Says Tim Chartier

The ‘Nifty Fifty (times 4)’, a program of Science Spark, presented by InfoComm International, are a group of 200 noted science and engineering professionals who will fan out across the Washington, D.C. area in the 2014-2015 school year to speak about their work and careers at various middle and high schools. Meet Nifty Fifty Speaker Dr. Tim Chartier As a mathematician and researcher par excellence specializing in numerical linear algebra, Tim Chartier, Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Davidson College, is known for pushing the boundaries of…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Female Antarctic Seals Give Cold Shoulder To Local Males: Female Antarctic fur seals will travel across a colony to actively seek males which are genetically diverse and unrelated, rather than mate with local dominant males. These findings, published in this week's Nature, suggest that female choice may be more widespread in nature than previously believed and that such strategies enable species to maintain genetic diversity. How Badger Culling Creates Conditions For Spread Of Bovine Tuberculosis: A stable social structure may help control the spread of bovine tuberculosis (TB) among badgers…

The Prez, the Press, and Solis' MSHA

One trait of a good reporter is providing facts---facts that may make us uncomfortable, but ultimately force us to ask "is this really true?"   That's what happened to me on Friday when I read the Charleston Gazette's Ken Ward's piece Solis plays fast and loose on MSHA budget, in which he accused the new Labor Secretary of spinning the data on mine safety enforcement spending---reminiscent of  Chao and Stickler.  He wrote: "...what should I make of the way Labor Secretary Hild Solis tried to spin the Obama administrationâs proposal to â when adjusted for inflation â pretty much…

A Mathematical Meme from Janet

Janet over at Adventures in Ethics and Science has tagged all of us newbies with a Pi meme. As the new math-geek-in-residence here, I'm obligated to take on anything dealing with Pi. 3 reasons you blog about science Because I genuinely enjoy teaching, and the one thing that I regret about being in industry instead of academia is that I don't get to teach. Blogging gives me an opportunity to do something sort-of like teaching, but on my own terms and my own schedule. Because I'm obsessed with this stuff, and I love it, and I want to try to show other people why…

My picks from ScienceDaily

No Sponge In Human Family Tree: Sponges Descended From Unique Ancestor: Since the days of Charles Darwin, researchers are interested in reconstructing the "Tree of Life", and in understanding the development of animal and plant species during their evolutionary history. In the case of vertebrates, this research has already come quite a long way. But there is still much debate about the relationships between the animal groups that made their apparation very early in evolutionary history, probably in the late Precambrian, some 650 to 540 million years ago. Beverage Consumption A Bigger Factor…

Very young people blogging about science

Mason Posner is a professor of Biology at Ashland University in Ohio. He also blogs on A Fish Eye View (though I notice he did not update it in a while). About a year ago, and inspired by some discussions emanating from ScienceOnline'09, he decided to try using blogs in his teaching. He did it last spring. And he is doing it again this spring. You can check out his Marine Biology Course class blog, where he and the students are all posting in one place. But also check out his Senior Capstone course in Biology and its class blog - he is the only one blogging there - the students are required…

links for 2009-04-28

Acephalous: Concerning the inherent superiority of printed text to irresponsible online drivel. "Is it absolutely necessary for the image gracing the cover of the most recent issue of the official mouthpiece of my professional organization to depict something that, when seen on my desk by a colleague from another department, compelled her to ask where a viper fish would even get a detachable penis to whack off against a shrimp-wielding toucan? Do other departments not laugh at us enough already?" (tags: blogs academia silly art humanities acephalous) Intimate Homicide | Mother Jones "I'll…

The Pseudonymity Laboratory: The Home Stretch - Blogging About the Research Grant Process

Well, PalMD and I have been working tirelessly on putting together a plan of discussion for the upcoming ScienceOnline'09 session on Anonymity and Pseudonymity - Building Reputation Online. Over the last several months, we have had a tremendous outpouring of comments on our own blogs and numerous other blogs that gives us far more fodder than could be discussed in a 75 minute unconference session. (Pal, I foresee a palcast on pseudonymity.). I still contend in all seriousness that the following 18 October 2008 quote from PhysioProf (cross-posted on his solo site) deserves to be the opening…

Leaping into the void: On apples, frogs and rockets

A new essay is out at TheScian.com. It is about why apples fall downwards, why frogs leap and why we fly rockets. In other words, it is about the force of gravity. It's written by a non-scientist, so there are no discussions about strings tangled in eleven dimensions, tensor calculus or fluxions that made Newton's mama proud. In some ways, this essay started two years ago while I lived in Atlanta. I was wondering about how easy it is to move horizontally but not vertically (prompted by what JRD Tata had said). Since then it has slowly grown, shed words, morphed, evolved and finally has seen…

PCS

I'm guessing (hoping) that some of you might have noticed my lack of recent blog activity. There are a few reasons for this, but the big one is that since very shortly after my my wife got home, we've been in a state of military life known as "PCS." For most people, "PCS" is the acronym that Sprint uses when it describes its cell phone network. For those in the military, it means something different: Permanent Change of Station. PCS combines all of the wonderful fun of moving with the joy that comes from repeated adventures into the Kafkaesque military bureaucracy. At the best of times, a…

A quick eye-exercise can improve your performance on memory tests (but only if you're right-handed)

Several studies have confirmed this bizarre proposition: If you're taking a test of rote memorization, like words from a list, move your eyes from side to side for about 30 seconds before you start. Really. Researchers have found, with relative consistency, that if you saccade from left to right and back several times before a test of simple recall, you're likely to do better. Why? It may be that this quick activity helps facilitate interaction between the brain hemispheres. Since split-brain patients have more difficulty recalling words than people with normal brains, any activity that…

Stream of (un)consciousness linklove.

You know how I was sick last week? I was all responsible and stuff, drinking lots of green tea and getting to sleep early and all, and over the weekend I actually felt reasonably healthy for like a day and a half. And now? I seem to have caught another nasty cold. Which is to explain that this post may reflect my current state of not partaking as fully of consciousness as I generally like to. Also, in the interests of your own health, you should avoid licking the screen while reading this. *Belle Waring has been sick, too, and it sounds like her bug is nastier than the one I have now,…

#scio10 preparation: What people might have in mind when they say they want online civility.

In preparation for our session at ScienceOnline2010, Dr. Isis asks: I talked to my two lovely, delightful, and beloved comoderators last night, I couldn't help but think that we were approaching this from different experiences and, potentially, with different goals. That made it hard for me to figure out what having me there might add to our discussion, other than to cross the line in some way. I realized that some of my discomfort might come from the fact that I'm not sure that we are all defining "civil" in the same way. ... [T]o get the discussion going here and help me in crafting my…

Do Prayers for the Sick Make a Difference?

Da mihi, Domine Deus, cor pervigil, quod nulla abducat a te curiosa cogitatio: da nobile, quod nulla deorsum trahat indigna affectio; da rectum, quod nulla seorsum obliquet sinistra intentio: da firmum, quod nulla frangat tribulatio: da liberum, quod nulla sibi vindicet violenta affectio. Do intercessory prayers (those said on behalf of another person and no, I'm not talking about having your friends quickly pray that the approaching police officer doesn't give you a ticket) have an effect on the recovery from illness above and beyond what medical treatment can provide? Answer: Some say…

Friday Fractal VI

When I joined the crew here at ScienceBlogs, I was given a pledge name: Fractal. Now, you can see why: I'm in love with fractals. As a close friend of mine put it, a fractal is essentially "a tangent off on a tangent off on a tangent off on a tangent...," which described me rather well. It describes nature rather well, too. In living beings or solid rock, there are often many layers of complexity, each reliant on other layers. I used this idea with today's fractal, by layering two separate Julia sets on top of one another. In the upper set, I used a formula which masked certain areas,…

The Great California Shake Out, and the World Series Quake... 20 years later

There's a lot going on the online geo-world tomorrow. It's Blog Action Day, and the subject is Climate Change. It's Earth Science Week's first Women in Geoscience day. And, at 10:15 am Pacific time, it's California's second annual earthquake drill - the Shake Out. I don't live in California, but I might crawl under my desk tomorrow morning just to be part of the action. Because there's a big anniversary coming up on Saturday, and I'll be busy in Portland, Oregon, without the time to post. At 5 pm on Tuesday, October 17, 1989, I was just settling down to do my Chinese homework. (Yes, I had…

What Color Was Ailuropoda microta, the Pygmy Giant Panda?

From ScienceDaily/Press TV: The ancestor of today's giant panda really was a pygmy giant panda, says Russell Ciochon, UI professor of anthropology. Ciochon is a co-author of an article published in the June 18-22 online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Previous discoveries of teeth and other remains made between 1985 and 2002 had failed to establish the animal's size. Ciochon says that the ancient panda (formally known as Ailuropoda microta, or "pygmy giant panda") was probably about three feet in length, compared to the modern giant panda, which…

Global Warming, Creationism, and Religious Nutcases

Since I've been on the road so much lately, I haven't really had a chance to follow up on some of the more interesting links forwarded to me lately. Each probably deserves its own post... but I'm going to dump them all into this post anyway. Besides, there seems to be a common thread running through all of them. First up is an interview with climate scientist Ben Santer in Environmental Science & Technology. Santer was a lead author on the president's recent Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) and has been a target of anti-environmental groups since he was a lead author on a 1995…

Bedazzled Neurons

Anyone with a young daughter knows about "bedazzled." When I first saw these images of intact, single neurons capable of generating electrical signals, "bedazzled" came to mind. The figure above was kindly provided by Dr. Bruno Pichler at The National Institute for Medical Research in London. According to the paper in Nature Neuroscience: Single-cell genetic manipulation is expected to substantially advance the field of systems neuroscience. However, existing gene delivery techniques do not allow researchers to electrophysiologically characterize cells and to thereby establish an…

With or without health care reform, doctors' jobs get harder

Early in the prolonged economic crisis a patient who had lost his factory job came to see me. He no longer had insurance, but he had plenty of health problems. Our office normally doesn't see uninsured patients (we simply can't afford to) but from time to time we make exceptions. I changed his prescriptions to the cheapest possible effective medications and gave him an online resource for the meds that did not have inexpensive alternatives. I referred him to a clinic that has the resources to care for the uninsured and that may be able to help him get his diabetic supplies. By doing this…

More fake news: No, the Trump administration is not going to remove all vaccine-related information from the CDC website, but that doesn't mean science advocates shouldn't worry

Last night was a bit weird. I think too many days of only getting a few hours of sleep finally caught up to me, and I crashed by around 9:30 PM. So, contrary to usually happens, when I say this post will be briefer than usual, I actually mean it; I have even less time this morning than usual to pump out a quickie post. However, this is the perfect time to look at one thing that probably doesn't rate a full heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence but that I'd like to take note of anyway. It's a bit of fake news that's been making the rounds similar to the fake news a couple of weeks ago…

Kansas Board of Education: Still Battles to be Fought

August 1 brought a thrilling result, the overthrow of the creationist majority on the Kansas Board of Education. Unfortunately, there remain two races where creationists won and where we need to take the seat in the general election. The picture above shows 4 of the 5 Democrats in the race. Two are working to unseat the remaining creationists on the Board (Don Weiss, right and Jack Wempe, who had yet to file when this picture was taken at the Kansas Democrats Washington Days), two who will be having serious, thoughtful debates about education with the moderate winners (Kent Runyan, left,…

Surgery Checklists

The brain is a careless beast. Mostly, I blame my carelessness on the limited capacity of working memory - it can hold seven discrete items, plus or minus two - which means that we're constantly forcing ideas to exit the stage of awareness. And so thoughts come and go, as we try to juggle the demands of the real world with the feeble processing powers of the mind. For instance, as I was packing for my latest work trip, I went into the bathroom to grab my toothbrush and toothpaste. I grabbed the toothbrush, opened up the drawer to get the toothpaste, but then I noticed all these other things…

Atheist Evangelists

Richard Dawkins has been everywhere lately. Dawkins is even keeping an online journal while on his book tour. It's full of amusing, if slightly mean-spirited, vignettes like this: The large hall at Randolph Macon Woman's College was packed. I gave a fairly short program of readings from The God Delusion, and then the bulk of the evening was given over to much more than an hour of Q & A. The first questioner announced himself as coming from Liberty (Falwell's 'University'), and he began by saying he had never been so insulted, yet simultaneously so amused, by any lecture. Many of the…

Urban Innovation

I'll have more to say about cities and the brain in the coming days, but I thought it was worth highlighting this thoughtful post by the economist Edward Glaeser on how NYC is "America's most resilient city": When other cities, including Boston, experienced significant population declines from 1950 to 1970, New York City still grew, albeit modestly. Only during the 1970s, the years of my Manhattan youth, did the city a suffer major population decline. However, New York managed to come roaring back, while other cities have just continued to fall. The secret of New York's post-1970 reinvention…

2012 Predictions: The More Things Change...

First of all, I owe y'all an apology for the radio silence. Somehow this month I've felt a deep need for some quiet, rest and offlineness. It was quite an autumn here - it started with the destruction of Irene and Lee (and dealing with those disasters are still a major part of life in our community although they've faded from public focus), included the usual autumn and holiday rush, our usual sequence of family events and birthday parties (three kids have birthday in six weeks, right after the high holidays wind up), ASPO, my book, two foster placements and the loss of M., and the wind up…