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Links for 2010-08-11

Crowd Sourcing Loses Steam - Newsweek "There's no shortage of theories on why Wikipedia has stalled. One holds that the site is virtually complete. Another suggests that aggressive editors and a tangle of anti-vandalism rules have scared off casual users. But such explanations overlook a far deeper and enduring truth about human nature: most people simply don't want to work for free. They like the idea of the Web as a place where no one goes unheard and the contributions of millions of amateurs can change the world. But when they come home from a hard day at work and turn on their computer…

Links for 2010-06-17

The Virtuosi: How Long Can You Balance A (Quantum) Pencil "In this post I'd like to address a fun physics problem. How long can you balance a pencil on its tip? I mean in a perfect world, how long? No really. Think about it a second. Try and come up with an answer before your proceed. What this question will become by the end of this post is something like the following: Given that Quantum Mechanics exists, what is the longest time you could conceivably balance a pencil, even in principle? I will walk you through my approach to answering this question. I think it is a good problem…

New ideas in vaccine design: HSV-2

Lets say Im holding in my hand, a syringe. In this syringe is an experimental vaccine for HSV-2. The dreaded genital herpes. The vaccine is a live HSV virus with one gene deleted, ICP0 (free paper about this virus). When ICP0 is gone, the virus can still establish life long infection (if you get this vaccine, you will be infected with HSV), but the viruses produced from this infection will be extraordinarily susceptible to interferon. This means that rather than getting a freak-out-inflammatory response where your immune system goes nuts when the vaccine virus reactivates (causing painful…

Links for 2009-09-22

blarg? » Can I Get A Witness "Look, if you want to save journalism, if you want to be a journalist, you need to actually perform the act of journalism. The kind of writing that we desperately need, that we may be well-informed and responsible citizens, not these bullshit celebrity-noise puff pieces. Leave that crap to transient rags like Gawker; it's their métier, says so right there on the label, and shouldn't be yours. Go find something out, something important, and tell us. It might be complicated, it might need to be explained at length, contextualized and clarified, sure. It might be…

Links for 2010-09-06

Why do we get Labor Day off? - By Brendan I. Koerner - Slate Magazine "Though President Grover Cleveland declared Labor Day a national holiday in 1894, the occasion was first observed on Sept. 5, 1882, in New York City. A parade was organized by the city's Central Labor Union, a branch of the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, a secretive labor union founded in 1869 by a clique of Philadelphia tailors. Historians still debate over whom, specifically, to credit with the idea of a holiday dedicated to the workingman." (tags: history us politics culture society slate) "Some Enchanted…

Amy Bishop UAH case: What role should personality or collegiality play in tenure decisions?

Valued commenter wc just left us a link to one of the most insightful articles to date on Dr. Amy Bishop, the University of Alabama in Huntsville biology professor charged in the shooting deaths of three colleagues where two other professors and an administrative assistant were injured. In today's Decatur Daily, staff writer Eric Fleischauer has an extended interview with UAH psychology professor Eric Seemann. You really should read the whole thing because it provides an inside view of Bishop's personality and relationships. But here is a critical passage: Despite her excellent research…

Pandora Radio and the Music Genome Project (repost)

Science journalist, Steve Silberman, just brought to my attention that Rob Walker at The New York Times wrote an article that last week on the method behind Pandora online radio. The article, The Sound Decoders at Pandora, made me go back through my archives to my own visit three years ago with Pandora founder, Tim Westergren. Tim, together with musicologist Dr Norman Gasser, has applied science to music by cataloging songs based purely on musical attributes (over three dozen criteria) and providing the listener with a program of music similar to one's liking of a band or even a particular…

Dr. Vandana Shiva: Very cool.

So, on Sunday and Monday, I had the privilege of hanging out with Dr. Shiva. And she was an absolute joy to host, and I can't tell you how wonderful it is to see students come away both enthused and provoked by the interaction. In case, you're not in the know, Dr. Shiva is: "is a physicist, ecologist, activist, editor, and author of many books. In India she has established Navdanya, a movement for biodiversity conservation and farmers' rights. She directs the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy. She is one of the leaders of the International Forum on…

Fmr. NYTimes Editor on Exxon and Gas Price Coverage

Is ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson a PR juggernaut who takes advantage of the ideological innocence of general assignment and TV reporters? In his regular column at Portfolio magazine, former NY Times editor Howell Raines observes that market ideology and the absence of an energy beat (see this post), are combining to give the oil companies a free pass when it comes to news coverage of gas prices. Raines was interviewed last week by NPR's On the Media about his column (transcript, audio above). As Raines defines the problem, general assignment reporters--lacking a specialization with the…

Human Eggs for Sale!

The NYTimes has an interesting article on the increasing amount people are willing to pay for donor eggs: A survey published this month in the journal Fertility and Sterility, "What Is Happening to the Price of Eggs?" found that the national average compensation for donors was $4,217. At least one center told the authors of the paper that it paid $15,000. Many centers did not respond. Though laws prohibit the sale of transplant organs, sperm donors have always received small payments, and prospective parents in the United States are allowed to compensate women for their far greater…

Rewind: The Dalai Lama Speaks to Neuroscientists

The 2006 Society for Neuroscience Meeting is approaching (in October), and I just wanted to repost this about the Dalai Lama's speech at SFN last year, from the "archives." First, this post is a summary of online accounts from people that heard the Dalai Lama's speech at the Society for Neuroscience; I was unable to attend his talk (blame my laptop!). The Lama's speech was entitled "The Neuroscience of Meditation," it was one-hour long and was followed by a question and answer session. A blog run by Neurodudes posted a 'blow-by-blow' account of the talk. This writeup in Science 'Dalai Lama…

At The Scientist, A Cover Feature on Framing

Appearing as the cover story for the October issue of The Scientist, I've teamed up with my colleague Dietram Scheufele to pen a 4,000 word feature that expands on the Framing Science thesis previously introduced in short articles at Science and the Washington Post. There's a great deal of context and research outlined in this article, so I hope everyone gets a chance to read the full text. (Currently, it's subscription protected.) Allowed the luxury of space, we provide a fuller discussion of the origins and nature of research on framing. We then describe a common set of frames that…

Live Polar Zones

Upon my father's recommendation, I have recently picked up C.P. Snow's essay "The Two Cultures," a mild-mannered examination of the growing chasm between scientific and literary intellectual communities. Despite the fact that Snow's evident bias towards the sciences betrays his claims of existing in the two spheres himself, and despite the unenlightened connections he makes between the Modernist movement's emphasis on alienation and the advent of 'imbecile expressions of non-social feeling," i.e. Nazism, (I find this very unfair considering the scientific community's involvement in say, the…

HBO Series on addiction

On Thursday, March 15, HBO will premier an ambitious series of documentaries entitled Addiction. Although HBO is a premium cable service usually costing an extra $10 or more per month, they are offering their service for free to regular cable and satellite subscribers during the four-day weekend beginning March 15, and all the shows will play at some point during that time. According to the press kit they sent me, you'll also be able to stream the shows from their website. (It's not clear whether all 14 programs will be available in this form. Right now all that's up is a short teaser video…

The glacial pace of sea-level rise

"Flow velocities of ocean-ending outlet glaciers would have to be about 49 km/yr, 70 times faster than those glaciers move today" for Greenland to raise sea level 2 m, says Tad Pfeffer about his new research in Science. That's three times faster than he and his colleagues have ever observed an outlet glacier to move. This doesn't mean sea level isn't rising due to glacier melt. Actually, the oceans could rise more and faster than International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists believed possible. Image from Free Geography Tools There is a nice write-up on the latest and greatest…

Scifoo - Day 2 - Science Communication

A big topic of conversation at Scifoo seems to be the future of scientific communication. I have renounced using the term Open Access, this term has been applied to so many different aspects of scientific publishing that it is utterly worthless. It's a buzz word. It's cool. But what does it mean? And instead of talking about the practicalities, much of the conversation is ethereal. We need to define the real issues. What scientists want. What scientists need. How does science publishing impact the lives of scientists, both as a producer of scientific data and as a consumer. After a session on…

My Friday with Darwin

OK, people, this is too cruel. I was gone all day yesterday, traveling to the Twin Cities for this Darwin Day event, and the site gets 37,000 visits. Are you all trying to tell me it's better when I'm not around to clutter it up? If I take off for a week will traffic climb to Daily Kos-like proportions? (There was a link from fark that might actually explain the sudden surge.) Anyway, I'll give a quick summary of what I was up to yesterday. I started with a 3 hour drive to Minneapolis, which was very exciting. High winds, blowing snow, near whiteout conditions. The weather was bad enough that…

Convert a dive light into LED

This is not really physics stuff. Well, it could be, but I am not going to take it that way. This is just a post that I consider to possibly add to the usefulness of the internet. When ever I want to do something, I always search online first. Suppose I want to make one of my dive lights into an led - if someone has done it that will help. So, I am super pumped up. I am getting ready to dive the Oriskany (off the coast of Pensacola) soon with some of my old dive buddies. Will I need a light? You bet. Do I think led lights are awesome? Oh, yeah. Do I want to spend tons of money on a…

Time to Riot!

The Riot for Austerity came about this way. In 2007, after the release of the IPCC report, and a number of books drawing attention to climate change, a friend of mine and I were discussing our frustration that no political organization was considering any kind of emissions cuts that even resembled those necessary to limit the damage from climate change. In fact whenever we discussed the 90+% emissions cuts required to give us the best chance of a reasonable stable climate, the immediate reaction was "that's not going to happen!" Stealing a great line from George Monbiot's wonderful book…

Birds in the News 182

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Sandwich Tern, Sterna sandvicensis, photographed at the Bolivar Ferry, Texas. Image: Joseph Kennedy, 4 August 2009 [larger view]. Birds and Technology Rather than searching for weird weather or enemy missiles, some satellites are helping researchers to track -- and predict -- the spread of deadly diseases. With the pandemic spread of H1N1 swine flu and the continued advance of the H5N1 avian flu, scientists are anxious to better predict the spread of infectious diseases and are looking for new tools wherever they…

Birds in the News 55 (v2n6)

Male magnolia warbler, Dendroica magnolia. This image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Pamela Wells. Click image for larger view in its own window. Birds in Science Spring is the season for flashy mates, at least for house finches, Carpodacus mexicanus (pictured, right). It is only later in the year that the females choose based on genetic diversity, according to new research from two scientists at the University of Arizona. Their 10-year study of a colony of 12,000 finches in Montana has revealed the seasonal dynamics of finch attraction and thereby resolved an…

Open Lab Entries So Far: Five Days Left!

There are only FIVE DAYS left for submissions! Dig through your archives, through other people's archives and submit! Note: if you have recently moved your blog, please e-mail Bora the corrected URLs for your entries The list is growing fast - check the submissions to date and get inspired to submit something of your own - an essay, a poem, a cartoon or original art. The Submission form is here so you can get started. Under the fold are entries so far - almost 700 of them, with more coming in each day. The instructions for submitting are here. You can buy the last four annual collections…

'Virtual' Communication During Social Distancing: How We Change When We Know We're Being Seen

Social distancing due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the threat of COVID-19 has meant online communication is more popular than ever, with even casual parenting groups discovering the previous enterprise video conferencing tool Zoom. But how will that affect communications? Have you ever met someone who is stiff in person but great on camera or the other way around? Neuroscientists study brain and behavior and in a recent study found that a person's gaze is altered during tele-communication if they think that the person on the other end of the conversation can see them. People are very…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Despite Their Heft, Many Dinosaurs Had Surprisingly Tiny Genomes: They might be giants, but many dinosaurs apparently had genomes no larger than that of a modern hummingbird. So say scientists who've linked bone cell and genome size among living species and then used that new understanding to gauge the genome sizes of 31 species of extinct dinosaurs and birds, whose bone cells can be measured from the fossil record. Human Pubic Lice Acquired From Gorillas Gives Evolutionary Clues: Humans acquired pubic lice from gorillas several million years ago, but this seemingly seedy connection does not…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Massage After Exercise Myth Busted: A Queen's University research team has blown open the myth that massage after exercise improves circulation to the muscle and assists in the removal of lactic acid and other waste products. --------------- Kinesiology MSc candidate Vicky Wiltshire and Dr. Tschakovsky set out to discover if this untested hypothesis was true, and their results show that massage actually impairs blood flow to the muscle after exercise, and that it therefore also impairs the removal of lactic acid from muscle after exercise. Spontaneous Activity Found In The Idling Brain:…

EuroTrip '08 - Belgrade, fish soup

I was kicking myself all day yesterday because I forgot to take my camera with me for most of the day. First, my mother and I went to the bank to do some business which, of course, made us hungry so we stopped by a bakery and got fresh djevrek (no, although it looks like a sesame bagel, it is not - it is much lighter and crispier). Mmmmmm.... Then we went to the main building of the Natural History Museum and made some contacts there. The Director was at a meeting, but the secretary is smart, hip and on-the-ball and will be a great contact for the future as they try to design a new website…

New and Exciting in PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology

There is new cool stuff published last night in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine, including: Here is a write-up: Do Abstinence-Plus Interventions Reduce Sexual Risk Behavior among Youth? And this is the actual paper: : In an extensive search for existing abstinence-plus studies, the researchers identified 39 trials done in high-income countries that compared the effects on sexual behavior of various abstinence-plus programs with the effects of no intervention or of other interventions designed to prevent HIV infection. All the trials met strict preset criteria (for example, trial participants…

London's congestion charge and Seattle's affordable transit

In 2003, the city of London took a dramatic step in the battle against traffic congestion: It implemented a congestion charge of £5 for those driving private vehicles into an eight-square-mile central congestion zone on weekdays between 7am and 6:30pm. The fees were increased twice, and since 2011 have stood at £10. Drivers purchase day passes online, and a camera network and a license-plate-recognition system allow for enforcement and penalty collection. Motorcycles, bicycles, taxis, and buses are exempt from the charges. An essential aspect of London's system is that it invests the revenue…

First question!

Dave, one of my online chessplaying buddies, asked me this question (edited for appropriateness): Now this speeding up of the expansion of the universe: Do I understand correctly that one of the theories to explain why relates to "dark matter"? In real simple terms, what in the dark blue blazes is dark matter, and why and how (and I think the "how" is what keeps you boys up late at night) does it cause this increase in speed? So Dave gives me the opportunity to, first off, make the distinction between dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is, quite simply, matter that doesn't emit…

May Pieces Of My Mind #3

This writer knows what glass cutters are for but doesn't know what they look like. She's having somebody behead plastic dolls with one. You know suits of armour? Almost all are Early Modern LARPing costumes for festive tournaments. Not Medieval, not used in battle. Not having any teaching gig this semester is straining my finances. But I also miss belonging. Really enjoyed lunch & afternoon snack with colleagues at the Swedish History Museum today as I was there to look at finds. Trying something I should probably have done many years ago: looking at a form letter when writing a job…

Towards a Social Theory of Sites We Haven't Found

Jean François Revel once wrote, "Let there be no discussion about methods except by those who make discoveries". As may have become apparent at one time or another on this blog, I don't share a number of the ideals prevalent in current academic archaeology in Sweden. Post-modernism has become unfashionable, so my resistance to that movement is no longer very controversial. But my disdain for "theoretical archaeology" is still something that sets me apart from many university-based colleagues. Now, most archaeologists are not university-based, so my opinions are in fact in tune with the…

The sense of being stared at ...not

Time was when I wouldn't have cared much if my alma mater had invited a New Age quack to give a lecture on the university's dime. That was then. This is now. Under the very clever headline of "Pitching Woo-woo," Vancouver's online newspaper, The Tyee tells us that the University of British Columbia last week provided a platform for Rubert Sheldrake, he of the "sense of being stared at" theory of telepathy. How sad is that? The thing that really gets my goat is that UBC is trying very hard to be a top-rate research school. Its new tag line is "Canada's Leading Edge." The university has…

iPad, therefore iKludge

  Don DeLillo's Players, as marked up by David Foster Wallace.Courtesy Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. I just sat down to air a complaint about reading on the iPad when I discovered that Sue Halpern had done much of my work for me: For all its supposed interactivity, the iPad is a surprisingly static machine, especially for reading. ... One of the guilty pleasures of an actual, ink-on-paper book is the possibility of marking it upâunderlining salient passages, making notes in the margins, dog-earing a page. While itâs true that some electronic book platforms for…

Encouraging Results with Stem Cell Treatment of MS

This needs to be replicated before any conclusions can be drawn, but it is encouraging.  21 patients with relapsing-remitting href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/multiple-sclerosis/overview.html?scp=1-spot&sq=multiple%20sclerosis&st=cse">multiple sclerosis, in whom conventional treatment failed, were given a stem cell treatment.  17 patients improved; 16 had no relapse at all; none got worse.  They were studied over a period of two to four years.  The study was published in The Lancet Neurology, ( Early Online Publication, 30 January 2009) $ for full access:…

A Note on Centrioles, Basal Bodies & Cilia

CCP asks What is the phylogenetic distribution of centrioles? Does it match that of cilia / flagella? Just to summarize what all these cellular structures are, centrioles are distinct structures found in most eukaryotic cells. They are composed of nine microtubule triplets and two of these centrioles come together to form a centrosome, a structure which often sits at the microtubule organizing center (MTOC). Microtubules radiate out of the MTOC to form an aster (see images in this post). Remarkably, in most tissue culture cells, the MTOC sits near the cell centroid where as the nucleus lies…

Wakefield's "monkey business" hepatitis B vaccine study withdrawn?

Kim Wombles over at Countering Age of Autism pointed this out: Why, you ask, is this whole 13 monkeys, 14 monkeys irrelevant? Well, see, here's where it gets really interesting. If you want to read this study, you go here: the 14 studies site by Handley. Thoughtful House has a press release on how it was published online in Septermber 2009. I went to the journal itself, though, straight to Neurotoxicology to look for the article since it's getting all this attention from the anti-vaxers as proof that it is proof of mercury causing autism. Guess what? It isn't there! Don't believe me? It's…

The Exxon funded swift boating of James Hansen

James Hansen replies to the deceitful IBD editorial: The latest swift-boating (unless there is a new one among seven unanswered calls on my cell) is the whacko claim that I received $720,000.00 from George Soros. Here is the real deal, with the order of things as well as I can remember without wasting even more time digging into papers and records. Sometime after giving a potentially provocative interview to Sixty Minutes, but before it aired, I tried to get legal advice on my rights of free speech. I made two or three attempts to contact people at Freedom Forum, who I had given permission to…

Can't find your disease gene? Just sequence them all...

A paper just published online in Nature Genetics describes a brute force approach to finding the genes underlying serious diseases in cases where traditional methods fall flat. While somewhat successful, the study also illustrates the paradoxical challenge of working with large-scale sequencing data: there are often too many possible disease variants, and it can be extremely difficult to work out which are actually causing the disease in question. The authors looked at 208 families where multiple members suffered from mental retardation and where the family history was consistent with the…

Arrogance, thy name is JAMA (I'd toss in stupidity for good measure)

The current insanity at JAMA has been well reported elsewhere (also see these links: here, here, here, and here). I'll give you a thumbnail sketch. A professor from a small university wrote to JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) to let them know that an author of an antidepressant study appeared to have an undisclosed conflict of interest (COI). When he didn't hear back from JAMA he wrote to a more prestigious journal, the British Journal of Medicine (BMJ) who published his letter. This caused the editors at JAMA to completely lose their shit, threatening the letter…

Just Science #5: Sediment Transfer To The Deep

[For the 5th installment of Just Science, I asked Brian Romans a PhD candidate in the Department of Geological & Environmental Sciences at Stanford University to post on his research. You can catch his blog at http://bromans.blogspot.com/] As we all know, the deep sea contains fantastic records of ancient oceanic conditions. The deep sea also holds clues about the continents. In this case, we can use deep sea sediments to better understand how Earth surface systems respond to climatic fluctuations. The inherent relief between continental and ocean plates drives the transfer of sediment…

Tribes, Classes, and Networking

Via Jessa Crispin on Twitter, there's a really excellent article in the Paris Review about Harvard and Class: When I applied, I thought it would be great because I would get to meet lots of smart people. Those were the kinds of people I liked to be friends with, and I thought there would be more of them there. That was the main reason I thought it would be a fun place to be. I don't think I was super ambitious or professional minded or even a very good student. The thing I figured out soon after I applied was that, on Gilligan's Island, it wasn't the Professor who went to Harvard, it was Mr.…

What's A Gene For?

There was a time not that long ago when sequencing a single gene would be hailed as a scientific milestone. But then came a series of breakthroughs that sped up the process: clever ideas for how to cut up genes and rapidly identify the fragments, the design of robots that could do this work twenty-four hours a day, and powerful computers programmed to make sense of the results. Instead of single genes, entire genomes began to be sequenced. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of the first complete draft of the entire genome of a free-living species (a nasty little microbe…

Hemlines Don't Rape People, Rapists Do

While one might think that would be pretty obvious, this article suggests otherwise. Whenever when there are discussions online about rape, particularly 'date rape', there is usually someone who implicitly or explicitly blames the victim. What has always puzzled me is the emphasis on the rape victim, instead of the rapist. No rapist that I've ever heard of ever slipped on a banana peel and 'accidentally' raped someone: the decision to rape is a conscious, deliberate act by the rapist. Here's the thing: I've lived long enough to accumulate some gray hair, and I've successfully managed…

Spotlight on X-STEM Speaker Kevin Kinsella

X-STEM - presented by Northrop Grumman Foundation and MedImmune - is an Extreme STEM symposium for elementary through high school students featuring interactive presentations by an exclusive group of visionaries who aim to empower and inspire kids about careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). These top STEM role models and industry leaders are sure to ignite your students’ curiosity through storytelling and live demonstrations. Our spotlight on our X-STEM Speakers continues with Venture Capitalist and Broadway Producer, Mr. Kevin J.Kinsella. He's sometimes called…

How To Read ScienceBlogs

ScienceBlogs is, without question, the largest online conversation about science. We have 71 blogs, almost 70,000 posts and 850,000 comments. How does one reader keep up?! One of the easiest ways is to subscribe to the ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap, a fun email newsletter that summarizes the previous week's happenings. Find out more ways to read—with and without RSS feeds—below the fold. If RSS feeds aren't your thing, then I'd suggest starting on the ScienceBlogs homepage and checking out: the Buzz (the topic that's featured at the very top of the page); and a bit further down the page, the "…

New study on evolution of vision

For easy-to-understand quick look at the evolution of vision I have to refer you to these two posts by PZ Myers, this post of mine, and these two posts by Carl Zimmer. Now, armed with all that knowledge, you will curely appreciate the importance of this new study: Compound Eyes, Evolutionary Ties: Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered that the presence of a key protein in the compound eyes of the fruit fly (which glow at center due to a fluorescent protein) allows the formation of distinct light gathering units in each of its 800 unit eyes, an evolutionary…

ScienceOnline2010 - introducing the participants

I have to say I am myself enjoying doing these introductory posts. I get to Google people, see who they are and what they've been up to lately, discover stuff about friends' past careers I did not know, find them (and follow/subscribe/friend) on Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook, and generally get all starry-eyed about the amazing group of people who registered for the conference and who I can't wait to see. So, without further ado, here are a few more of them: Beth Beck is the Outreach Program Manager for Space Operations at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC. And no, she is not a rocket…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: Anyone? Anyone?

Let's face it. The US education system sucks. The public school system was a great historical achievement, producing high literacy rates, but in the 21st century the US is increasingly at a competitive disadvantage compared to other industrial nations. Instead of investing more we are investing less while promoting privatization, a recipe for mediocrity. This is seen most clearly in . . . anyone? what kind of eduction? . . . science education, where false ideas like . . . anyone? anyone? . . . evolution are rammed down the throats of helpless students, producing . . . anyone? faithless what…

ConvergeSouth05 - first impressions

ConvergeSouth06 is on October 14th. So, in anticipation of the event, I will repost, in rapid succession, my coverage of the last year's ConvergeSouth (October 7-8, 2005). Perhaps this will whet your appetite and you'll decide to register (for free) and show up this year. Here is the first of eleven posts... Taking a little break between the end of the ConvergeSouth conference and dinner, enjoying Dave's hospitality, here's just a quick post on the conference - apparently there is something wrong with my online access back at home, so I may not be able to blog tonight once I get there. My…

Update on "I Want This Job!"

Blogs! A new world! Breaking new frontiers all the time! A few days ago, PLoS ONE posted a few job ads, including this one. A friend of mine saw it and thought the job-description was pretty much a Bora-description (another friend wrote in an e-mail that all it is missing is a clause "must be a Red-State Serbian Jewish atheist liberal PhD student"), so he sent me the link. Some people like to keep secrets, but I like to air my thoughts in public (why have a blog otherwise?) so I posted my thoughts about it late on Friday night and decided to sleep on it, think about it over the weekend,…