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Brains at risk

The Lancet has just published (NOvember 8, 2006, online publication) a major review of the scientific evidence suggesting developmental disorders in children traceable to chemicals in the environment is significant and largely overlooked. Authored by two internationally recognized scientists, Philippe Grandjean (Harvard School of Public Health and University of Southern Denmark) and Philip Landrigan (Mt. Sinai School of Medicine), the paper identifies 201 industrial chemicals with the capacity to cause a neurodevelopmental defect (NDD) such as autism, attention deficit disorder and mental…

Are colleges and universities making the grade in flu planning?

Sometimes my flu obsessed readers think no one is paying attention but it isn't true. Beneath the surface of a spasmodically and superficially interested mainstream media, various institutions are worrying and grappling with the enormity of the consequences of a pandemic. Colleges and universities have the special problem of large and dense communities of mobile and active young adults, the ones in the cross-hairs of the current pandemic candidate, influenza A/H5N1. Many, probably most, colleges and universities have not done much. But a significant number have. The University of Minnesota is…

Sixteen years ago today

March 9, 1991 was the first, and the most violent day, of the five-day protest in Belgrade (then Yugoslavia, now Serbia). This was the first anti-Milosevic protest in Serbia, just a couple of months after the first multi-party elections that he stole. About 100,000 people gathered in the center of Belgrade. Soon, the police moved in and the fight started and spread around town to several different venues, especially in front of the state TV. One teenage boy and one policeman were killed (the former was shot by a moving cordon of police, the latter was thrown over the fence onto the street…

Student guest post: Cancer isn’t contagious…or is it??

Student guest post by McKenzie Steger Off the southeastern coast of Australia lies a small island that in the 1700 and 1800’s was inhabited by the very worst of Europe’s criminals and is now the only natural home in the world to a species named after the devil himself. Decades later beginning in 1996 Tasmanian devils were going about their nocturnal lifestyle in normal devilish fashion feasting on small mammals and birds, finding mates and reproducing, occasionally fighting with one another and so on. (1) Just as criminals divvied up their booty hundreds of years before, the devils were…

The things women do for beauty--or, beware the bikini wax

Women do some rather insane things to achieve modern standards of beauty. We wear shoes that do terrible things to our feet. We don bras that dig into our chest and push our breasts into strange conformations. We slide on pantyhose to firm our stomachs, makeup to hide our imperfections, and hair dye to diminish our grays. And we have this strange habit* of yanking other body hair out from the root, be it our eyebrows, underarms, legs, or pubic hair. Yes, I do have a point here (besides making men squirm). The August issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases has a forthcoming article…

Does Evolution Support Any Particular Political View?

Last Thursday the American Enterprise Institute sponsored a debate on the subject of Darwinism and Conservatism. A video of the debate is available online, but I haven't had a chance to view it yet. In the meantime, I'll have to make do with this article from The New York Times. Over the years evolution has been used in the service of a great many political viewpoints. In Darwin's time, what we might call the “pro-Darwinian right” argued for Social Darwinism. You can still find strains of this thinking in the political right today. Nowadays, however, the pro-Darwinian-right, as…

Campaign for a Reality-Based Reality

"You are entitled to your own opinions. You are not entitled to your own facts." -Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up to provide a way for leading scientists to sit down together, evaluate all of the available data on climate change, and present the public and policymakers with the best possible overview of the current state of the science. It exists to assess and present the facts. We need to know the facts. We need to know what has happened, what is happening, and what is likely to happen in the future. Without that knowledge,…

Out of town for three weeks: A request for our readers

I'm about to head out of town for three weeks. You may have noticed posting getting lighter the last couple weeks as I attempted to tie up loose ends before the trip. Posting will be getting even lighter for the next three weeks as I head west to visit family. Then, a week from now, Nora and I will be heading out into the true wilderness, miles out of range of any cell phone tower, and certainly out of reach of the internet. Here's a description of part of our route: One of Washington's granddaddy trails, Boundary Trail runs across the entirety of America's largest wilderness, the Pasayten.…

But do chimps look forward to sex?

Our closest extant relatives have received a fair bit of attention in the past few days, with the publication of two new studies which have been picked up by numerous news outlets. First came the study by Fraser et al, which shows that chimps, like humans, console each other with physical contact following bouts of aggression. This was found to occur more often when a fight between two chimps was not followed by reconciliation, and was more likely to take place between individuals that share a close relationship. This study was quickly followed by that of Townsend et al, who show that…

Lemur Week: Numerical Cognition and Hidden Grapes

Behold! The second installment of the Science Online Lemur Cognition series. If you missed the first installment, you should check out the cyborg lemurs of the Duke Lemur Center. There's some pretty good evidence that numerical cognition emerged fairly early in the primate lineage, at least, if not significantly earlier in evolution. Most of the work on numerical cognition in non-human primates, however, has focused on a handful of monkey and ape species. The prosimian suborder of primates, however, which includes lemurs, diverged from the main primate lineage some 47-54 million years ago. If…

Good Wi-Fi, Bad Wi-Fi

It's rare for me to be gone so much in such a short period of time. Two meetings in two weeks, one in San Diego and one in Washington, DC, and I'm bushed. One thing that continually irks me on the two or three occasions each year when I go to meetings is how blatantly hotels rip customers off for high speed Internet access. Most of the hotels that I end up staying at for these meetings are pretty nice hotels. Some of them are even very nice. You'd think that they'd throw in high speed Internet access and/or wi-fi as part of the package. After all, even a budget hotel chain like the Baymont…

Egypt

A year ago, I was at a conference in Alexandria, Egypt, and then spent a few days in Cairo. I got to experience the Egyptian culture, to see antiquities, and to meet some amazing people. It was my first trip outside the bubble of Western developed democracies, and was an eye-opening experience. Cab drivers and others I talked with all remembered President Obama's speech in Cairo and seemed to think highly of him and of the US. Despite my fairly Jewish looks and inescapably American affect, I never detected any animosity. Even the panhandlers and minor scam artists on the streets were…

How To Kill a Plant

After all, we've already figured out how to kill a human being. All you need are trillions of dollars, the willingness to sacrifice the lives of countless civilians and military personnel, and a total disregard for natural resource consumption, and hey, after a decade or so, you can kill a guy. Am I sorry he's dead? No, of course not. Does this resolve much of anything? Not that I can see. So let's talk about how to kill plants, which is way easier, especially when you don't intend to. I offer this information up for several reasons. First, I'm an expert. You might think this wouldn't…

Are you a real skeptic? I doubt it.

I mean, you might be, but I'm certainly not going to take your word for it.... I have an email from a blogeague (that's a colleague in the blogosphere) asking for clarification on the use of the word Skeptic in relation to climate change. This is a person very much involved in ocean conservation who had understood the word "skeptic" to mean a person who "does not believe in" anthropogenic global warming, but I had used the term in a blog post to describe a person who is not an AGW denialist. We have a commenter on this site who seems to have been pretending to have just woken up one recent…

WSJ: Incompetent Ranting

At first, I was going to title this post WSJ: Incompetent Ranting. Then I decided that was too strong.  Then I read the article again, and went back to the original title.  Mind you, this is not intended to be an ad hominem attack.  The author, href="http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/history/faculty/facultyprofiles/shorter.html">Edward Shorter, has been the Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine since 1991, and in 1996 was cross-appointed as Professor of Psychiatry (at the University of Toronto).  He has written some good books, including A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the…

Test essay 5: Design a system to find potential collaboration partners for scientists

This is the 5th of the test essays in preparation for comps.  This question was posed by my advisor.  I opened it and went, "wow." It's sort of like the perfect storm of question.  When I first finished it, I thought I did really well, but now it seems less than completely satisfying.  So here's the essay written in 2 hours, timer started prior to opening the question. Question (IR 1) Informal interpersonal communication is very important among scientists. Describe a retrieval system to identify collaborators. Include the following in your answer: a. Knowledge representation to enhance…

Conceptual Metaphor Comment by Dr. Gibbs

In the previous entry, I made some disparaging remarks about conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), and George Lakoff specifically. I also noted that, in my experience,, the psycholinguist Raymond Gibbs, Jr. is the only one in the cognitive linguistics who seriously addresses the evidence and theoretical arguments against CMT from outside cognitive linguistics. As he's done before, Dr. Gibbs dropped by and left a lengthy response in the comments, which I'm reposting here in its entirety (edited to remove some HTML problems, but not for content). At the end there is a long list of citations. I…

Plant biologists in Sweden speak out about the importance of plant genetics. ”Populistisk miljörörelse demoniserar gentekniken” - DN.SE

It seems that plant biologists just cant take the misinformation about genetics any longer. First we had the moving and informative video from the Rothamsted Research Group  and now an elqouent article from two professors from Swedish agricultural university. You can read their story here: ”Populistisk miljörörelse demoniserar gentekniken” - DN.SE. Is the tide turning in Europe? Are consumers now able to more easily access knowledge-based information on genetically engineered crops? Can we finally move on from from talking about how the seed was made and instead focus on what really matters?…

"Alcohol was the weapon of choice for these men": Peer groups may be key to stopping campus rape

On NPR's Morning Edition earlier today, Laura Starecheski reported on efforts to use peer groups to prevent young men from becoming rapists. She set the stage by talking with psychologist David Lisack about a study he (and colleague Paul M. Miller of Brown University School of Medicine) conducted among male University of Massachusetts Boston students and published in Violence and Victims in 2002. Knowing that the majority of rapes are never reported to authorities, and wanting to know whether serial rapists were responsible for many of them, Lisack and Brown took a direct approach: They asked…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Patty Gainer

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Patty Gainer from Radford College, VA, to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? Hi, I'm…

On science blogging and mainstream science writing...

In which, having largely stayed out of it, I wade into the ongoing rivalry between bloggers and more mainstream forms of science writing... The latest round in this seemingly endless debate was a review by New Scientist of Open Lab 2008, an anthology of the best science blogging from the last year. Others, including Brian Switek and SciCurious, have touched on the specific criticisms levied by the review, but I wanted to pick up on the more general issue it raised - namely the relative merits and pitfalls of science blogs compared to mainstream science writing. I am increasingly uneasy with…

On The Lesser-Spotted ID Paper

In April 2005, I posted a piece (reproduced below the cut) that discussed Evolutionary Monographs as the putative outlet for Paul Nelson's 1998 Ph.D. thesis, a thesis that argues against common descent. In comments over at the Panda's Thumb, Nelson noted that: Bill Dembski and I have been working on a shorter article, with some of the monograph's main points, which we plan to submit to the best peer-reviewed biology journal we can find. (Comment of May 2nd 2005) We're still waiting, and considering Dembski's proclivity for posting papers online to get comments from detractors, this is all…

Science Fair Data Analysis - a proposal

Previously, I talked about science fairs. One of the problems is that students don't really have a good understanding of data analysis. For me, statistical analysis is just something to do with data. It isn't absolutely true. So, it doesn't really matter that students use sophisticated tests on their data. The important point is they use some type of test to compare data. I just made up some arbitrary data analysis rules. Maybe if students and judges accept something like this, it could really improve science fair projects and judging. To explain my analysis, I decided to have my own…

ScienceOnline'09 - Interview with Henry Gee

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Henry Gee, the senior editor at Nature and blogger at I, Editor and The End Of The Pier Show , to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Thank you. It's nice to be here. Nice decor. Hessian up the walls. Very 1970s. I like the lava lamp. This sofa needs re-uphostering, though. The smell. I think…

Birds in the News 153

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Whimbrel, Numenius phaeopus at Bolivar Flats, Texas. Image: Joseph Kennedy, 2 July 2008 [larger view]. Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/2000s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400. Christmas Bird Count News The Annual Christmas Bird Counts are rapidly approaching, so I am publishing links to all of the counts here; who to contact, and where and when they are being held, so if you have a link to a Christmas Bird Count for your state, please let me know so I can include it in the list: Alabama (Thanks…

Shortly After Hell Freezes Over: Interview with Elisabeth Montegna

Elisabeth Montegna is quite a prolific blogger, with SECular Thoughts being just one of her virtual spaces. We finally got to meet at the second Science Blogging Conference in January and took a tour of the Museum of Natural Science in Raleigh together. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your scientific background? What is your Real World job? I'm a senior graduate student at the University of Chicago. Since I get a stipend, I consider that my real world job. I graduated college from Boston…

Tagged to "fix" the NIH

It looks as though I've been tagged by Drug Monkey, who apparently thinks that I might have something worth saying about the state of the NIH and its peer review system, about which the NIH is presently soliciting comments, as pointed out to me by Medical Writing, Editing, & Grantsmanship. Why Drugmonkey might think this to be the case, I have no idea, but presumably it has something to do with some previous posts that I've made about the NIH, how biomedical research is funded in this country, and the disconnect between vision and reality at the highest level of the NIH. Although I used…

A "teachable moment": Guggie Daly goes full Orwellian to promote antivaccine beliefs

As hard as it is to believe, I've been writing about the antivaccine movement for over 12 years now, and dealing with it online for close to 17 years. If there's one thing that all that exposure to the pseudoscience, logical fallacies, misinformation, and outright hatred spewed forth by antivaccine activists on a daily basis, it's that language matters. Antivaxers know this and are constantly trying to twist language to their ends. For instance, other than hard core antivaxers who are refreshingly honest, most antivaxers really, really hate being called "antivaccine." I like to think it's…

Books: "Coming To Life" by Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

Several ScienceBloggers are reviewing Coming To Life today (see reviews by Janet, Shelley, RPM, Nick and PZ Edit: Razib has also posted his take), each one of us from a different perspective and looking from a different angle, so go read them to get the full scoop. PZ Myers reviewed the book a few weeks ago. Someting that struck me was that PZ said that the book : "....assumes nothing more than that the reader is intelligent and curious. Seriously, you don't need a biology degree to read it!" ...while a reviewer, Edward F. Strasser (a math PhD whose hobby is reviewing books from this angle…

The Kasich/Ham/Krauss Instatranscript

Tonight's edition of The O'Reilly Factor featured a discussion of the brand new creation museum outside Cincinnati. Guest host John Kasich was sitting in for Bill O'Reilly. Representing darkness and ignorance was creationist impresario Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis. On the side of sunshine and puppies was Case Western physics professor Lawrence Krauss. Here's how it went down: KASICH: In the back of the book segment tonight, the twenty-seven million dollar creation museum opens today in Kentucky. The museum is designed to convince visitors that the Biblical story of life on…

Teaching Ambiguity and the Scientific Method

As a sort of follow-on from yesterday's post, thinking about the issues involved reminded me of a couple of browser tabs that I've had open for a while, namely this story about an education session at the AAAS meeting, and this Inside Higher Ed article on "Teaching Ambiguity". From the IHE piece: Tidy may be comforting, but it is also banal, boring, conventional and unrealistic. That's why I have been asking faculty to infuse their classes with the element of surprise. By surprise I do not mean mysteriously taking a rabbit out of a hat, but rather incorporating experimental, untidy open-ended…

Is Tenure Worth It? (updated)

Steven Levitt from the Freakonomics blog has started a discussion about whether the tenure system is worth it. His argument is that the tenure system supports the mediocre and should be scrapped: If there was ever a time when it made sense for economics professors to be given tenure, that time has surely passed. The same is likely true of other university disciplines, and probably even more true for high-school and elementary school teachers. What does tenure do? It distorts people's effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career (and presumably work very hard early on as…

Re: Kleck data "discredited"\xe2\x80\xa6.

Kleck reckons that 97% of defensive gun users lie to the census bureau about it. Are we to suppose that 97% of the people don't believe legal guarantee of confidentiality? And yet those same people will tell a complete stranger (who may be a government agent posing as a pollster working for Kleck) about it? Come now. John Briggs writes: Careful, please, I cite you in another post. Are you saying that Kleck actually says this or are you interpreting his criticisms of the NCVS as compelling this conclusion about his "reckonings". p 168 Kleck says "only about 3% of DGUs among NCVS Rs are…

Deep-Sea Reading List

I have finally gotten around to creating a list of deep-sea themed books, with some others thrown in at Amazon. Some of you will recognize a handful of the titles that have been reviewed here. Others will be new. As I find new books, and feel free to recommend some, I will post here noting I updated the list. The list includes in no certain order: 1. Deep-Sea Biology: A Natural History of Organisms at the Deep-Sea Floor "The 'blue bible' of deep-sea biology. Despite it being 15 years old, still an authority. Great for the educated public, undergraduates, graduate students, and Ph.D.'…

Where Do Babies Come From? Find the Answer and More in Coming to Life

Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development by Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Kales Press: 2006. 176 pages. Buy now! (Amazon) If you examine yourself in the mirror, take a closer look at your favorite pet, or even contemplate that pesky fly that just won't leave you alone, it's difficult to not come away with a starry-eyed appreciation for life. With their overwhelming complexity and astonishing consistency, but seemingly endless diversity, these everyday animals are almost enough to make you believe in God. And, I don't just mean some vague modern spiritual presence. No, I'm talking…

Scientists, religion and politics

Sunday and The Reveres have discharged their pastoral obligation to do a Freethinker Sermonette but there is other news on the religion front so we'll do a religious twofer. We've already discussed the nomination of Francis Collins to be NIH Director a couple of times (here, here and here; one post was linked in a Wall Street Journal online column by Steven Waldman, much to our surprise). Collins has religious beliefs that are quite different than most scientists because he has them at all. Just how different that is was revealed by a recent Pew Poll on public views of science, one section of…

How to test for counterfeit Tamiflu

There are a lot of open questions about the influenza antiviral drug oseltamivir ("Tamiflu"), among them whether it works at all for bird flu (highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1), and if it does, whether resistance will develop making it ineffective. But all the questions have a common assumption: that the patient is actually taking Tamiflu. How would you know if you were or not? Because the bottle says so? Not necessarily. In December 2005 U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Officers seized 51 shipments they said were counterfeit Tamiflu pills at their air mail facility in San Francisco…

Haskell Preliminaries: Implementations and Tools

Before getting to the meat of the tutorial, I thought it would be good to provide some setup information in a distinct, easy to find place. This short post will tell you where to find a Haskell implementation and related tools. Haskell Implementations I'm testing my examples for these articles using two different Haskell implementations: Hugs A very nice interactive Haskell interpreter. Hugs doesn't quite implement everything in the current Haskell specification, but it's limits shouldn't affect anything I'll cover in this tutorial, and probably won't affect any moderate-to-large size…

Why does Open Access matter to you? A blogging contest

Open Access Day is on October 14th (don't tell me I did not warn you in advance!). The day will be marked with lots of events, online and offline (if you are local, you may choose to go to Duke, for instance) so watch my blog for more information on Tuesday. What you as a blogger will probably be most interested in is the Blogging Contest! How does it work? Well, you are all supposed to synchroblog on Tuesday (but NOT before) on the topic:"Why does Open Access matter to me?" Write a post and publish it on October 14th, and you will be entered in the competition and you can win a bag of swag…

Do we need a bloggers ethics panel?

Remember this? Well, apparently that blog post (not mine, but the source) raised quite a lot of hackles, so much that the PBS Obmudsman had to step in and try to explain: But, I have serious problems with the episode that unfolded recently in which a journalism student at New York University, Alana Taylor, authored a Sept. 5 posting as an "embedded" blogger on MediaShift, writing critically about her class content and professor at NYU without informing either the teacher or her classmates about what she was doing. The headline read: "Old Thinking Permeates Major Journalism School." This…

My picks from ScienceDaily

New Evidence That Humans Make Aspirin's Active Principle -- Salicylic Acid: Scientists in the United Kingdom are reporting new evidence that humans can make their own salicylic acid (SA) -- the material formed when aspirin breaks down in the body. SA, which is responsible for aspirin's renowned effects in relieving pain and inflammation, may be the first in a new class of bioregulators, according to a new study. Warmer Temperatures Could Lead To A Boom In Corn Pests: Climate change could provide the warmer weather pests prefer, leading to an increase in populations that feed on corn and other…

Those on the Losing End are always the Loudest

And they also make themselves look silly in the process. This time, it is the dinosaurs of journalism, putting out all the old anti-Web canards. Perhaps we should compile an Index of Old-Journalist Claims similar to the Index of Creationist Claims (on TalkOrigins.org). Two examples this week: First, (via Ed Cone) Jay Rosen rips into this article by Neil Henry: My impression: we're at the twilight of the curmudgeon class in newsrooms and J-schools. (Though they can still do a lot of damage.) You know they're giving up when they no longer bother to inform themselves about what they…

My inner Bennett Cerf

These will keep you groaning all day. A fellow accidentally ingested some alpha-L-glucose and discovered that he had no ill effects. Apparently he was ambidextrose. A bloke walks into a pub, and asks for a pint of Adenosinetriphosphate. The barman says "That'll be 80p (ATP) please!" (note 100p = £1, and ATP is short for Adenosinetriphosphate, but you already knew that.) Some genetic researchers were studying Acinonyx jubatus to find out why he had a high abnormal sperm count. They gave a group of these animals a histocompatibility (tissue-type) test. "This is singular," observed one…

I Was Wrong About Book-On-Demand

Here's a fun case of me not anticipating an imminent technological development, not thinking that last centimetre of far enough. In July of 2007, six years ago, I wrote: Lately I have come to think of books as computer devices, combining the functions of screen and backup medium. All texts these days are written and type-set on computers, so the paper thingy has long been a secondary manifestation of the text. People like publisher Jason Epstein and book blogger the Grumpy Old Bookman have predicted that we will soon have our books made on demand at any store that may today have a machine for…

Google to Address Ad Heavy Web Sites

People look at Fox News and wonder how the heck it manages to be taken seriously. Most of what is done on that station is not news, and it isn't even commentary by any reasonable journalistic standards. Fox News is much of the time a mouthpiece for the Right Wing and the Republican Party. The rest of the timt, Fox News, astonishingly, seems to be giving the Right Wing and the Republican Party its marching orders. It seems to me that we can have news agencies that range across the liberal-conservative spectrum that also carry out their activities in a professional manner. In the old days…

An Interesting Take on New Atheism

The latest issue of Free Inquiry magazine turned up in the mail this week. Lots of interesting material, as always. One article that caught my eye was “Building on a Religious Background,” by C. L. Hanson. Hanson grew up as a Mormon, but is now an atheist. She currently lives in Switzerland and has a blog. Hanson writes: One of the most important lessons I've learned is that a single claim can seem either obviously crazy or perfectly reasonable, depending on how you have been exposed to it. Consider the Mormon belief that God was once a human and that humans can become gods. As a…

Iloperidone, Approved For Treatment Of Schizophrenia

The new drug is called iloperidone; the brand name in the USA will be Fanapt.  It is yet another antipsychotic that blocks D2 and 5HT2 receptors.  Although there is no universally accepted way of classifying drugs into families, it will be referred to as an atypical or second-generation antipsychotic.  This designation will indicate a loose kind of similarity to risperidone, aripiperazole, ziprasidone, quetiapine, olanzapine, clozapine, and paliperidone.  It turns out that there is a Wikipedia page for href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iloperidone">iloperidone.  It is not one of the…

Not turning up our noses

I gave a talk for PALINET some little while ago about institutional repositories. The audience had been primed by the fantastic Peter Murray to think about looking after digital content as the "fourth great wave" of library work. (I wish that talk was online. It was absolutely brilliant.) But not everyone was entirely onboard with that. I recall distinctly one distinguished-looking white-haired gentleman raising his hand. "We in libraries," he said (paraphrase mine), "have historically been purveyors of quality information. Authoritative information. On what basis should we jeopardize that…

Observations on managing big interface changes in electronic resources

In the past few years a number of large electronic resources have gone through rather dramatic interface changes - mostly for the better, mostly desperately needed. Some typical things added are faceted presentation of search results, more personalization options, better ways to save and share items, cleaner design, green. I don't know why but everyone is changing their logo and site theme to some combination of green (kelly or lime), orange, and blue.(ok, I can't wait for this phase to be over!). We could talk about the various qualities of each of these design choices, but instead, I want…

Hits of the week past

Hits of the week: Savage Minds (with a spiffy website redesign) asks Why is there no Anthropology Journalism? Jerry Coyne takes sharp exception to both a paper and a SciAm Mind Matters article by Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson arguing that depression might be an evolutionary adaptation. Dr. Pangloss punches back. (NB: 1. I was founding editor of Mind Matters, but no longer edit it, did not edit the Andrews/Thomson piece, and don't know any of these people. 2. While my recent Atlantic article presented an argument for how a gene associated with depression (the so-called SERT gene) might be…