Search Content

Displaying results 101 - 150 of 87947

Extra, Extra

Links, links, and more links. Lots of good stuff this week. Science Brains and Beauty: a three-movement concerto was written inspired by a poem written by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, and set to images culled from the research of Hanna Damasio. How does beer become whiskey? At the Guardian Science blog, Andy Connelly describes this delicious transformation. Fascinating musings on comparative medicine from our friends over at the Dog Zombie. What is a wallaby? Blog bff Scicurious writes about PCR - a technique that shouldn't work, but does. In the NY Times, Carl Zimmer has probably the…

Change.gov, Boyle's Public Domain

Hope all the Americans had a good holiday, and that the rest of the world finds peace in a troubled week. To my friends in India and Pakistan, to my colleagues at the Internet Governance Forum this week in Hyderabad...my thoughts are with you all. Two quick links of much importance in my world: 1. Obama's transition site is under CC-BY. Via Lessig's blog: Consistent with the values of any "open government," and with his strong leadership on "free debates" from the very start, the Obama team has modified the copyright notice on change.gov to embrace the freest CC license. Wow. Obama's team,…

Beer

Daniel Davies stakes out a controversial position at Crooked Timber: I tend to regard myself as Crooked Timber's online myrmidon of a number of rather unpopular views; among other things, as regular readers will have seen, I believe that the incitement to religious hatred legislation was a good idea (perhaps badly executed), that John Searle has it more or less correct on the subject of artificial intelligence, that Jacques Derrida deserves his high reputation and that George Orwell was not even in the top three essayists of the twentieth century[1]. I'm a fan of Welsh nationalism. Oh yes,…

Blue Brain

My article on the Blue Brain project is now online*: It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them. "The column has been built and it runs," Markram says. "Now we just have to scale it up." Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. "If we build this brain right, it will do everything," Markram says. I ask him if that…

An award and some announcements

We won an award Some of you may know that I write for another blog - Cancer Research UK's Science Update blog - as part of my day job. There, I write about new cancer research together with my colleagues Kat and Henry. Tonight, we won a Science Communication award from the Association of Medical Research Charities (AMRC) for our work on the blog, in the category of Online Research. Blogging for an organisation is a very different ball-game to this - you have to still be readable and engaging while exercising a certain amount of restraint in order to maintain the charity's reputation and…

Grape seed extract active against human colon cancer xenografts in mice

The real news in this story is how the lead researcher responsibly tempers the interpretation of his 15 October report in Clinical Cancer Research. From United Press International: Grape seeds may help attack colon tumors DENVER, Oct. 18 (UPI) -- Chemicals found in grape seeds have been found to inhibit growth of colorectal tumors in both cell cultures and in mice, say Colorado researchers. "With these results, we are not suggesting that people run out and buy and use grape seed extract. That could be dangerous since so little is known about doses and side effects," said Rajesh Agarwal of the…

Luxury Goods

Saks and Barneys and the rest of those luxury retailers have discovered that nothing destroys a luxury brand like a sale: All around Saks Fifth Avenue, merchandise is sold out. The $2,520 Marni shearling vest? Gone. The $5,295 Brioni leather bomber jacket? Only one left. The $1,995 over-the-knee Christian Louboutin boots? The $1,995 over-the-knee Christian Louboutin boots at Saks have sold out, unless you can wear the only pair left -- a size 11. "All gone, except for this," said Nick Passerelli, a Saks employee, dangling a size 11 boot from his fingers. After a brutal year in which the…

My Kid's an Anglophone Spaceman

My kid's spacy English writing assignment makes me so proud! He's nine, he's only been once for a few days to an Anglophone country, and we rarely speak English at home. Yet he seems to have picked the language up from on-line gaming, and he's long been able to read e.g. the Harry Potter books in English. With his permission, here are his ideas about space colonies. I think that in the future those who want to will be able to move onto another planet, or into a space station. People will breathe using space suits, and at home they will have air inside their houses. They will get food by…

ID in 2007 - from the horses mouth

In the shadow of The Year in ID, Dembski gives us his predictions for ID in 2007. Three simple things: A new ID friendly research center at a major university. (This is not merely an idle wish -- stay tuned.) [Prediction by me: This will be at Baylor and no biology will be involved.] The publication of Michael Behe's book with Free Press: THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION. [Prediction by me: No new science here, shoddy peer review, and Behe will ignore previous criticisms.] The publication of the sequel to OF PANDAS AND PEOPLE, authored by Jonathan Wells and me and titled THE DESIGN OF LIFE:…

A bibliography that's Too Big to Know

David Weinberger of Everything Is Miscellaneous">Everything is Miscellaneous (review) fame is working on a new book. It's going to be called Too Big to Know and over the last year or two he's blogged quite a bit of the thought processes that have gone into the writing of the book. Here's a brief sort-of description of what the book's going to be about from way back in December 2009: The opening looks at the history of information overload, going back to the book Future Shock, and pointing to the coining of "sensory overload" in 1950. I look at how pathetically small was the amount of info…

The Best Science Writing Online 2012

I've been practicing little idiosyncratic rituals on this corner of the web for years: learn something new, obsessively research, get lost in the idea, scribble, converse endlessly, then write. This blog, Universe, has never been about garnering hits or materializing an audience because, for me, thinking and writing about science is a personal tic. I can't help but yell into the void; I understand science as a poetic language for explaining reality, and when I see changes in that language all I want to do is unfasten myself into them. I definitely don't seek any form of recognition for what…

Chronicle on askjohnlott.org

Scott Carlson at The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story (subscription required) about askjohnlott. He quotes Lott: "Someone called me up a couple of weeks ago, very angry, claiming that they got an e-mail from me, telling them that I was advising them to do illegal things," like buy guns illegally, he says. "I just thought the person was joking. After I was done talking to them, I found this crazy Web site." This doesn't make sense. If the person believed that the email was from Lott, the natural thing would be to reply to it, not phone Lott.…

Online Life Is Real Life, Aleph-Nought in a Series

Back before The Pip was born, our previous departmental administrative assistant used to bug me-- in a friendly way-- about how Kate and I ought to have another kid. (She had two kids of her own, about two years apart in age.) "When are you guys going to have another baby?" she would ask, and I always said "We're thinking about it." About a week passed between the last time we had that exchange and the day I came in and taped ultrasound photos of the prenatal Little Dude to my door. "You sonofabitch!," she said (again, in a friendly way), "You were expecting this whole time!" "Yeah," I said…

Berenstain Bears co-creator, Stan Berenstain, dies

Link to CNN story. Stan Berenstain, who with his wife created the popular children's books about the Berenstain Bears, has died. In more than 200 books, the Berenstain Bears, written and illustrated by Stan and Jan Berenstain, helped children for 40 years cope with trips to the dentist, eating junk food and cleaning their messy rooms. The first Berenstain Bears book, "The Great Honey Hunt," was published in 1962. The couple developed the series with children's author Theodor Geisel -- better known as Dr. Seuss, then head of children's publishing at Random House -- with the goal of teaching…

Alternaworld Redux or World of Warcraft Ate My Wookie

I talked before about how I think the Internet represents the possibility for Alternaworlds -- worlds facilitated by social interaction on the Internet with their own rules and standards. Well, this World of Warcraft business may be rapidly careening out of control, but it is beginning to fulfill most of the criterion for what I would call an alternaworld. MSNBC gives this rather late-to-the-party or Dad-has-just-discovered-how-the-mouse-works description: In the physical world we vainly scrounge for glory. Bin Laden still taunts us, the bus doors close before we reach them and leave us…

The Open Laboratory 2009 - It is Live!

Yes, the day has finally arrived! The anthology is now up for sale! Just go ahead right now and click on this link right here, then click on the "Add To Cart" button and one copy (or more!) of this amazing book will be yours! SciCurious did a fantastic job as this year's editor - and it shows. You'll see when you get your copy. Really. Also, huge props to Blake and his LaTeX and generally tech-savviness for putting the book together so it looks really good (and is actually loaded on the site!). Cover art was done by Glendon Mellow who used the cover design by Dave Ng. The list of judges is so…

The Future of Terrorism

The July issue of Discover Magazine has an excellent article on The Future of Terrorism. You should readthe whole thing, online or in hardcopy. Here are some choice quotes by people interviewed for the article: "The war on terrorism is really a proxy for saying what is really a war on militant Islam. If we can't confront the ideology, if you're not willing to take on the ideology and try to develop a reformist, moderate Islam that makes militant Islam a fringe element, we haven't much hope to stamp it out." Andrew C. McCarthy, former federal prosecutor who led the case against Sheik Omar…

The Open Laboratory 2008 is here!

I know you have all been trembling in anticipation! But the day has finally arrived - the third science blogging anthology, The Open Lab 2008, is now up for sale! This year's guest editor, Jennifer Rohn, did a fantastic job of putting together the best anthology ever! Thank you, thank you, thank you! Jennifer is a pro, so she assembled a team: Richard Grant was the assistant editor (yes, the posts were really, professionally edited this year, and thus much improved in the process). Maria Brumm did the technical part, the typesetting, starting out with the template designed last year by…

Stupid legislature tricks: Tennessee

There's a lot of stupidity in state legislatures, and the responsibility for that stupidity rests squarely with the people who voted for these morons. Take Tennessee. Please. Combating music piracy at Tennessee's public university system is more important than hiring teachers and keeping down tuition costs. Just-signed legislation requires the 222,000-student system to spend an estimated $9.5 million for file sharing "monitoring software," "monitoring hardware" and an additional "recurring cost of $1,575,000 for 21 staff positions and benefits (@75,000 each) to monitor network traffic" of its…

"Do you honestly believe God would allow humans to destroy the earth He created?"

Chis Allen is a weatherman for WKBO in Kentucky. He is also an idiot. Witness: My biggest argument against putting the primary blame on humans for climate change is that it completely takes God out of the picture. It must have slipped these people's minds that God created the heavens and the earth and has control over what's going on. (Dear Lord Jesus...did I just open a new pandora's box?) Yeah, I said it. Do you honestly believe God would allow humans to destroy the earth He created? Of course, if you don't believe in God and creationism then I can see why you would easily buy into the…

scio10: Online Civility and its (Muppethugging) Discontents

Dr Free-ride, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and Isis the Scientist SK â definition of civility at your site â if you want children to feel welcome, for example. You have to set the tone. Some topics seem more important to be civil about. F-r -  politeness or is it being a decent human â in philosophical circles someone may rip your heart out and jump on it in perfectly polite language â so itâs not just being polite. Itâs more like taking each other seriously, assuming good faith, considering others feelings. Hard to engage when you donât feel welcome.* Hard to engage when you donât feel welcome â…

Not the Eye of Argon!

No, it can't possibly be true! Jim Theis's masterwork, The Eye of Argon(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), has actually been published? As a book? With pages and a cover and all of that? I've known of this legendary monstrosity for years, and have read it online and as a tattered and stapled faded photocopy, but to actually have a publisher commit resources and money to it … truly, we are in the End Times. You too can read it, but don't buy it: get it for free, and even then you are paying too much for it. This is what you get when you give a teenager a thesaurus, insist that every noun must have an…

Playing with the Truth

I recently landed a gig writing how-to articles aimed at college students for a website that shall remain nameless. The site is predicated on the notion that recent grads are hapless fools, incapable of grappling with real world responsibilities, like renting an apartment or choosing an appropriate 401K plan. As it happens, I really was this clueless at the age of 21. What a brilliant idea, I thought! Sign me up. The first article I was assigned was called something along the lines of "Online Dating: It's not just for losers anymore." Beyond sending the message that cyber-hookups had gone…

A paucity of inconvenient proof

Laurie David claims that National Science Teachers' Association (the NSTA) is inconveniently hooked up with big oil because they won't spend the money to send out 50,000 copies of the "An Inconvenient Truth" DVD. If I do the math and estimate that it costs $4 to mail each DVD, that includes packaging, mailing, the costs of hiring a distribution center, I get $4 x 50,000 = $200,000. I think that's an expensive gift. Is there really a smoking gun? For the record, I saw the movie and personally, I would like a large number of teachers and students to see it, too. But, I'm bothered by Ms.…

Holiday chemistry shopping on a budget.

I was marveling at the Chemistry gift guide at MAKE. It has lots of cool items for your budding chemist/mad scientist of any age looking to equip his or her basement/garage/treehouse laboratory. (It's pretty hard to get fume-hoods installed in a treehouse, but who are we kidding? Most people who dabble in chemistry at home don't have fume-hoods either.) The glassware in the pictures is so bright and shiny. (Flashback to the "breakage book" in my high school chemistry class. Also to the hours upon hours of washing glassware in grad school. Still: shiny!) The kids in the pictures from…

Links for 2012-02-20

Online Python Tutor Gives a nice visual representation of what's going on in a Python code snippet. If only it handled VPython... Chip MacGregor .com: Does the publisher lose money if my book doesn't earn out? Remember, every business can lose money. Retail shops, service business, even publishers. I mean, if you own a shoe store, you order in shoes that don't sell, and you have to drastically reduce prices, you can lose money on each pair of shoes sold. Publishing is no different. The publishing house pays out advances, they pay an editor, hire a cover designer, buy ink and paper, then pay…

Look out, Phoenix!

In a few weeks, on January 3-7, I'm going to be attending the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Phoenix. I'm going to be part of a panel in a Media Workshop, along with a few other names you might recognize: Blogs are online "diaries" that are growing in popularity. Popular political and social commentary blogs are making the news, but is there more out there than chatty gossip and collections of links? How about some science? Can this trendy technology be useful for scientists? Come to the Media Workshop and find out! Experienced science…

Pain, privacy, and safety

Abel over at TerraSig dug up an interesting story about a man who was "murdered" killed rendered not-living (in the moral if not legal sense) by a "fake chiropractor" (although it's not clear to me what science separates a "real" from a "fake" chiropractor). One of the commenters wondered if lack of health insurance had driven the man away from standard medical care. Another bemoaned the inadequacy of treatment for chronic pain conditions. This got me thinking... In the case of the fake chiropractor, I'm guessing that many factors went into the decedent's seeking this particular care.…

Cephalopods: Octopuses and Cuttlefishes for the Home Aquarium

It's December, and Squidmas is coming. Maybe you're like me, and the kids have all moved out, so you're thinking having a little intelligent life at home would be nice. Or maybe you're kids are still home, and you think they'd love a pretty pet. Or maybe you just love cephalopods, as do we all, so you're thinking, hey, let's get an aquarium and an octopus! What a fun idea! One word of advice: NO. Don't do it. You can't just rush into these things. Here's a positive suggestion, though. Start reading TONMO, the octopus news magazine online, regularly. If you haven't been reading it already, you…

A new method of colon cleansing?

When I first saw this, I thought that it had to be a joke, but now I'm not so sure. I'm guessing you've all heard of ear candling, which can supposedly cure tinnitus, clean the ear canal of wax buildup, relieve vertigo, cure swimmer's ear, and provide a variety of other supposed health benefits? Well, an orifice is an orifice, so are you ready for....ButtCandlesâ¢? (I don't think that I am.) According to the web page: ButtCandles⢠are an exciting, and time honored, device for internal cleansing. We encourage you to peruse our site, read the referenced medical literature, and then make an…

Why I'm boycotting Hasbro and their Scrapulous app

This morning, Hasbro finally intimidated Facebook and Scrabulous into suspending the popular word game app. I love Scrabulous, and I'm mad as heck - not least because in my current game, I'd scored a whopping three Bingos (words in which you use all 7 letters) and was routing the usually dominant competition (my staffer). Scrabulous is an online pseudo-Scrabble - a godsend for those of us who can't meet to play real games in meatspace, but can squeeze in a word here and there over the course of the week. But Hasbro, the company which has the rights to most of your typical-American-childhood…

Boardgaming Groups and Game Stores

Listening to the Dice Tower and Spiel podcasts and reading forum entries on Boardgame Geek, I've come across two central aspects of US boardgaming culture that have me kind of baffled. One is the ubiquity of open-to-all gaming groups, and the other is the emphasis on the FLGS, the Friendly Local Gaming Store. * To begin with the gaming groups, to me gaming is something I do with my friends at our houses - usually mine. The varying cast of gamers having tea at my table once a week are my guests. A recent Dice Tower episode (#205), however, featured a long discussion about what to do if your…

Shhhh! Let's meet in the city this weekend

It appears that a number of bloggers who write under the ScienceBlogs.com masthead will be converging on New York City this coming weekend. For those of you who know my background, I simply call this "The City." I mentioned earlier that it was unlikely that I would be there due to family and job commitments (and the fact that my sister and her family were elsewhere that weekend when we could've otherwise had a lovely family gathering). But with the generous blessings of PharmGirl and PharmKid, I will indeed venture to New Amsterdam for about 32 hours that will include the highly-touted 'meet…

Can't Blaspheme Any More!

Have you been to Pandagon lately? Have you seen the brand new look, design and layout? Cool! Which reminds me that I have read Amanda's book, It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments, on my first 2-3 flights in Europe last month. I left it with my cousin - let's spread the new, fun kind of feminism to the Balkans! I have been reading Amanda Marcotte online since before she joined the crew at Pandagon and I have to say that, as a white, middle-aged, middle-class man, I learned from her blogging a lot about things I used to take for…

Change.org Picks Up On The "Carwash" Story

Tim Foley at Change.org has picked up on the post I wrote about the Bridgeville shooting victim whose friends and family sponsored a car wash to help her pay her medical bills (with a link to a news story about the car wash). His take on the story is well worth reading. Meanwhile, on my original post, commenter ABM gripes: What if that uninsured shooting victim wasn't a young woman shot by a misogynist, but a grumpy, sexist, racist old man with no friends who didn't attend church and was generally unliked by all his neighbours? He doesn't get helped out because of who he is? I doubt the…

Google Play Books Ate My Apostrophes

Update 10 April: It pays to report problems like the one described below to Google's customer support. Seven weeks ago I discovered the problem. One week ago I reported it. Today the problem was suddenly gone, probably because Google updated the two ebooks involved and pushed new versions of the files to my phone. I usually shop around for a good price when I buy e-books, and lately Google's bookstore has received my custom. It's not a very high-profile store – you see, this isn't the well-known Google Books, where they offer scanned paper books in your browser. This is something called,…

Temptations that might become irresistable

... as a result of the incessant drive to make learning too darn safe. Not that this is a terribly new development (I wrote about this sort of thing here and here), but it appears that anxieties about terrorists and meth-labs are sucking all the chemically goodness out of chemistry sets: Current instantiations are embarrassing. There are no chemicals except those which react at low energy to produce color changes. No glass tubes or beakers, certainly no Bunsen burners or alcohol burners (remember the clear blue flames when the alcohol spilled out over the table). Today's sets cover perfume…

Free IS and CS books online

One of the great things about my interests overlapping computer science is that computer scientists believe in self archiving and making their work freely available on the web. The scientometric parts of IS are that way, too, but the L of the LIS... well, that's just sad (except for Dorothea, her stuff is available). I still hope to write a review of one of these books because I'm really enjoying it. Here are a few: Hearst, Marti (2009). Search User Interfaces. Cambridge University Press. Available from: http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/. Sure there are lots of books on information…

From the Archives: Interview with CJ Rayhill, Senior Vice President at Safari Books Online

I'm on my annual summer hiatus for the month of July so I'll be only publishing my weekly Friday Fun posts as well as re-posting some of the interviews I did a few years ago on the old blog with people from the publishing, library and science worlds. Not that my posting of late has been particularly distinguishable from the hiatus state, but such is the blogging life after nearly ten years: filled with ups, downs, peaks, valleys. This interview with CJ Rayhill, then of Safari Books Online, is from September 27, 2007. ===================================== Welcome to the latest installment in…

Our High School Science Teacher Conference - It Rocked!

So, this is one of the things that has been keeping me busy the last couple of weeks. Essentially, the lab hosted a largish conference for high school science teachers (about 95 registrants) - as well, we took the tact of blogging the conference so that almost all of the content is already up (by my calculation, all content will be up by week's end). Here are some highlights: - We had 4 great talks (available to view) by William Rees, Hadi Dowlatabadi, Patrick Keeling, and Brian Ellis, who covered a wide range of topics, but all (fittingly) involved elements of sustainability, education,…

Seeing a laser from the moon

There was an xkcd feature a while back which asked the question "If everyone in the world shined a laser pointer at the moon at the same time, would we be able to see it?" The answer was no. A laser pointer doesn't put out much light, and even seven billion of them doesn't represent a whole lot when spread over vast areas of the lunar surface a quarter million miles away. Even if you ramp up the light source to those helicopter-grade searchlights, no dice. On the other hand, it's asking a lot for a beam of light to make it to the moon, bounce off in all directions including mostly into empty…

Rumors about the Internet's demise have been exaggerated

Everyone seems to be worried about when the Internet will implode. From the Economist Tech.view: And not just because of the popularity of such file-sharing programs with music fans. The sizes of the files they handled increased dramatically. Music tracks and podcasts used to be offered for streaming at 128kbps; versions at 256kbps or even 320kbps are now common. Video has an impact, too. Though online video-rental and distribution has only recently begun in earnest, all those HDTV sets sold over the past few years will shortly make high-definition downloads the norm. Meanwhile, waiting in…

In Which I Am Grumpy About Education

In comments to Friday's snarky post, I was chided for not engaging with the critique of standardized testing offered by Washington Post education blogger Valerie Strauss. I had intended to say more about the general topic, as there have been a bunch of much-cited articles in a similar vein crossing my RSS reader recently, but I sprained my ankle playing basketball at lunch, which kind of blew a hole in my afternoon... Looking at her posts, though, it's hard to really engage with her critique, because there's next to nothing there to engage with. In the most recent post, the closest thing to a…

New Reviews of the BMHB and the BECB

The Big Monty Hall Book is now more than three years old, but new reviews still appear occasionally. The latest one comes from the magazine Significance, published by the Royal Statistical Society. The reviewer is Tom Fanshawe, a statistician at Lancaster University in England. Alas, the review is not freely available online, so permit me some excerpts: [The Monty Hall problem] will be familiar to most people who have studied probability, and, given a modicum of probability theory, it is not a difficult problem. Does it really warrant a whole book? It is a credit to Jason Rosenhouse that…

A To-Do List For Reducing Plastic.

This Friday is World Ocean Day and to get the week going I thought I would start with a practical "what can I do post". Peter already discussed why plastic is a bad thing for the ocean. I will focus on what you can do to reduce your plastic waste and consumption. Let's face it...you and I my friend are both lazy. Potentially if you're reading this then you're an American, like I, and even lazier than the rest of the world. We need things easy and spelled out for us. So here is a list.   No plastic grocery bags.  Obviously the easiest one and the one you already know about.  Ask for paper…

The Irritation of Being a Captive Market

Two annoying technology moments yesterday: 1) Kate and I got cell phones when we bought this house, and have been overpaying for them for quite some time. We rarely use them (partly because we get no signal inside the house), and have never come close to using our monthly allocation of minutes. Verizon now offers pre-paid plans, which would save us a good deal of money that could then be spent on baby toys, so we went to the local Verizon store to switch over. And immediately got told that they couldn't guarantee that we could keep the same numbers. And then that it would take an hour or so…

"Mary Rosh" proves Lott lied

Kevin Drum suggests that the large scale of the Lott/Rosh deception suggests that Lott maybe could have carried off a conspiracy with this witness. Sorry, but I still don't buy it. Lott's a liar, but he's a clumsy one. He could have saved himself most of the embarrassment of this Mary Rosh affair, if he had lied and had "Mary" admit to being Lott's wife. Kevin also comments on Lott's fishy statistics. Tom Spencer also doesn't think Lott is off the hook and seems rather unimpressed by the silence of Clayton Cramer and Glenn Reynolds. Over in the…

Recent Events in Stem Cell Research

Since the discovery of IPS Cells, the stem cell field has exploded. Here's a few links on the latest developements. First, two cool papers came out recently. In the first from the Jaenisch lab, mouse IPS Cells were differentiated into erythrocytes and used to cure sickle celled anemia in a mouse model. This would be a first application of these IPS cells in a therapeutic setting. In the second paper from the Yamanaka group, mouse and human IPS Cells were created by overexpressing 3 of the 4 genes used in the original protocol. In fact the gene that was omitted in this new protocol is myc,…

A Science Film Festival in Saint Paul (Get a discount from me!)

Ever been to a CON? Like, ComiCON, or CONvergence? One of the best parts of a CON is the science, often involving panels with interesting science experts, or perhaps even a film or two. Well, Twin Cities denizen Ryan Johnson founded and organized a new thing, which is set up as a film festival, to provide these fantastic CONnish features in a very attractive package. Admission is by the day, and thus less expensive than the average convention. Also, you can get a 15% discount if, when you go online to buy your tickets, you use the code "laden" The Northstar Science Film Festival is a new…

How to discourage scientific fraud.

In my last post, I mentioned Richard Gallagher's piece in The Scientist, Fairness for Fraudsters, wherein Gallagher argues that online archived publications ought to be scrubbed of the names of scientists sanctioned by the ORI for misconduct so that they don't keep paying after they have served their sentence. There, I sketched my reasons for disagreeing with Gallagher. But there's another piece of his article that I'd like to consider: the alternative strategies he suggests to discourage scientific fraud. Gallagher writes: There are much better methods of subverting fraud. There is little…