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FDA moving on Plan B

Suddenly, the FDA has decided to allow over-the-counter sales of the Plan B contraceptive. They've imposed an age restriction—you must be 18 or over to buy it—but it's a smart move in the right direction, and it's about time.

Science Online 2012: Library and librarian sessions

With the final countdown underway and the conference less than a week away, this post follows my post on library people in attendance at Science Online 2012 from a few weeks ago. And I'd like to start off with another best-tweet-ever, this time Marieclaire Shanahan retweeting Colin Schutze: + they'll be fascinating! RT @_ColinS_: #Scio12 Newbie Tips: You will meet more librarians in one day than you thought existed in the world. And that's long been one of my goals, to promote the integration of librarians into faculty and researcher conferences and social networks. And Science Online has…

China Not That Excited By Overpriced Appliances that Do What Sun Does Anyway

I think the first time I really seriously reconsidered the American ubiquity of the dryer was when I was in college, and a friend of mine made a list of ten things she considered hysterically funny about Americans. Number 3, after paying more money for milk with the fat pulled out and something about our worldview, was that we consider it perfectly normal to buy an enormous box at great expense to do precisely what the air will do for you anyway. Put that way, and with her performance of "American justifying why they need a dryer," it was pretty humorous. It isn't like I even had one much…

Apple Pulls Anti-Gay App

Following an online petition and a wave of complaints, Apple has removed a so-called "gay cure" app from its App Store. Launched last month by Exodus International, a ministry that encourages gay people to seek "cures" for their homosexuality, the app triggered a huge outcry from Two Wins Out, a nonprofit group with the stated goal of fighting anti-gay religious extremism. Read the rest here

Study finds dozens of health, medical organizations take soda company money

After years of alarming increases in child and adult obesity and billions spent to treat related medical problems, one might think health organizations and soda companies would be on firmly opposite sides of the fence. But a new study finds that a surprising number of health groups accept soda sponsorship dollars, inadvertently helping to polish the public image of companies that actively lobby against obesity prevention efforts. “To be honest, it was really shocking,” study co-author Michael Siegel, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health, told…

Around the Web: What is the Internet of Things and other reports relevant to libraries and librarianship

I'm always interested in the present and future of libraries and higher education. There's a steady stream of reports from various organizations that are broadly relevant to the (mostly academic) library biz but they can be tough to keep track of. I thought I'd aggregate some of those here. Of course I've very likely missed a few, so suggestions are welcome in the comments. I've done a few similar posts recently here, here and here. What Is the Internet of Things? Innovation Study: Challenges and Opportunities for Australia's Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums Project Information…

The Generation Clash on Facebook

Jim Buie asks: I received a query from CBS News technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg about "the older generation" on Facebook. Do you have a story to share about your experiences on Facebook, particularly in relation to teens, many of whom call us over-40s "the creepies"? Or do you know teens or twenty-somethings willing to say how they feel about parents and geezers coming online and inspecting their Facebook profiles? CBS News will sort through the responses and may seek to interview some of the respondents. Post your responses at the link below: http://www.togetherwhileapart.com I have…

Nigerian T-Shirt Scam?

The t-shirt deal is starting to look like a Nigerian scam. The original offer was that I would get some free printed t-shirts from Ooshirts.com if I advertised about their site. Now have a load of this: Do you have an American credit card? ... I know that you're getting the sponsorship amount off your order, but our site automatically charges every customer one cent as a security measure no matter what their total. Even my boss has to do this when ordering with the company card. I should have mentioned this earlier but did not think of it at the time. It's a feature that some people find…

Quantized Poker?

I like poker and I like quantum computing and lo and behold here is a paper with both: arXiv: 0902.2196 Title: Quantized Poker Authors: Steven A. Bleiler Poker has become a popular pastime all over the world. At any given moment one can find tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of players playing poker via their computers on the major on-line gaming sites. Indeed, according to the Vancouver, B.C. based pokerpulse.com estimates, more than 190 million US dollars daily is bet in on-line poker rooms. But communication and computation are changing as the relentless application of Moore'…

An ugly pointless poll

It's become standard in the US for polling places (real polling places, not the online kind) to hand out little "I voted" stickers after you've made your contribution. This is a totally meaningless act; the stickers aren't used to actually track who has voted or not, they're just there to make you feel good and allow you to display to everyone you meet that you've done your civic duty. Unfortunately, when the bureaucracy gets their hands on this trivial little detail, they can't leave it alone. It's got to be made more elaborate; it's got to become an ideological statement. So the state of…

Tuesday Tidbits

Anak Krakatau erupting as seen from Rataka Island. Image taken by Marco Fulle of Stromboli Online. I frequent the Astronomy Picture of the Day website run by NASA on a daily basis. Yet somehow today I didn't check the site until well into the evening and was greeted by one of the best astronomy-volcano images I've seen in a while. Marco Fulle of Stromboli Online captured this image of Anak Krakatau erupting (in 2008 or 2009 ... its unclear in the caption) with Ursa Major rising over the volcano. There have been quite a few volcano-related images on APOD, but alas, they don't have a "volcano…

Impeach Bush Yard Signs: Update

The style="font-family: helvetica,arial,sans-serif;"> Impeach BUSH Yard color="blue" size="5">Signs color="blue" size="5">.org site is back online.  It was href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/09/impeach_bush_kerfuffle.php">shut down for a few days because it was hosted on a site that got the Internet bandwidth from the County government.  Now it is on a private server.

What Belief System Most Closely Matches Your Own values?

tags: religion, belief system, ethics, values, lifestyle Here's my results from Belief-o-matic, an online questionnaire that uses a series of 20 questions to help identify your belief system; What did this quiz tell you your belief system should be?

Circadian Meditation?!

How does one fisk a medical quackery when there is no attempt whatsoever to explain what it is all about - not even a string of New-Age mumbo-jumbo, nonsensical, vaguely English-sounding words. All it says is: Buy The Book. Yeah, right... Related: Circadian Quackery

Should Steve buy the iPhone

I need a new phone and it just so happens that the new iPhone is coming out very soon. So the question is... http://killersurvey.com/survey_code.php?sqs=1&id=677"> Here's some stats that might help you decide: Feel free to leave comments telling me why not to buy it as well ;)

Joy of Science - Books

See Bill Hooker's comment about finding books for the course here. Bill's comment got held up a day or so in junk comments because of all the links in it. Sorry, Bill! But this would be helpful for anyone trying to find/buy the books.

Haven't Bought Open Lab Yet? 20% off of Lulu purchases thru Monday 6/13

Looking for a great Father's Day gift? How about the gift of Open Lab? Get it for 20% off if you buy it by Monday, June 13. Click the graphic below to head straight to the Lulu page for the 2010 edition of The Open Laboratory.

Gender Difference in Skepticism?

Are women less skeptical than men? Follow that link to find Stephanie Zvan's analysis of the recently reported study that is making its way around the Internet. Stephanie seems to buy into the study uncritically, you know, like chicks tend to do ...... NOT!

Friday Deep-Sea Picture (05/18/07) Challenger Report Illustrations

These beautiful illustrations are from the Challenger Reports available online. The first is of the very large, deep water, pycnogonid sea spider, Colossendeis gigas. The second (below the fold) contains Octopus levis and Octopus bermudensis both new species described on the expedition. The last contains at center a gastropod from the genus Xenophora that glues other shells onto its own shell as it is produced. Around the edge are various species from the genus Natica.

New York Times adopts medical establishment line on personal genomics

The NY Times has an article entitled "Buyer beware of home DNA tests" that adopts the paternalistic party line of the medical establishment: taking DNA tests without a doctor's advice is hazardous to your health. Remarkably, the article acknowledges that qualified genetic counsellors are few and far between and that "most practicing physicians lack the knowledge and training in genetics to interpret [DNA tests] properly", and yet still suggests that customers should "take the findings to a qualified expert". Begging the question: which qualified expert should customers be taking their test…

A Universe of Black Holes: VII

Final day of the "A Universe of Black Holes" workshop with a session: "Modeling Black Hole Accretion and Outflows" - all MHD sims today... Chris Reynolds (Univ. of Maryland) starts with - The temporal variability of model accretion disks Had to miss this. Go check it online, Chis gives fab talks. Julian Krolik (JHU) "The Bardeen-Petterson effect in magneto-hydrodynamics" Krolik demonstrated large Reynolds stress... cf " Alignment of supermassive black hole binary orbits and spins" - Miller & Krolik 2013 Jim Stone (Princeton) "New magneto-hydrodynamic simulations of radiation pressure…

Ten Years Of Portable Internet Access

My 2006 smartphone, a Qtek 9100 On 2 February 2006 I took delivery of my first smartphone, or handdator as I called it in my diary – “hand computer”. On the following day I got the machine on-line. It was a Qtek 9100, with a slide-out mechanical keyboard that I still really miss, a tiny screen, a stylus and a crappy camera. Since then I've had portable Internet access. I was already a self-described “net head”, and a particular reason for me to get a smartphone was that I'd started blogging a few weeks previously: I wanted to be able to post no matter where I was. On 8 February, for…

What Will Michele Bachmann Do Next?

As you know, Michele Bachmann, Congressperson for Minnesota's Sixth District, has announced that she will not seek re-election to her seat in Washington DC. Bachmann almost lost her re-election to challenger Jim Graves last year. I'm convinced that had the election been held a few weeks later, Graves would have won. Recently, internal polling data from within Bachmann's campaign became known, and showed that as of a couple of weeks ago Bachmann was actually behind Graves. Bachmann's response to this polling was an ad buy; the Bachmann campaign started up early with local ads, clearly…

Radical Transparency

This article is almost two years old, but it is perhaps even more current today than it was when it first appeared: Pretend for a second that you're a CEO. Would you reveal your deepest, darkest secrets online? Would you confess that you're an indecisive weakling, that your colleagues are inept, that you're not really sure if you can meet payroll? Sounds crazy, right? After all, Coke doesn't tell Pepsi what's in the formula. Nobody sane strips down naked in front of their peers. But that's exactly what Glenn Kelman did. And he thinks it saved his business. ----------snip----------- The…

Gosh - I am so cheap!

I guess I am the cheapest of all my sciblings - better get me while I am still alive, as I appear to be pretty worthless as a corpse: $3540.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth. From Mingle2 - Free Online Dating

Sidr strikes

Sidr is currently officially a Category 5 cyclone, and is about to make landfall in Bangladesh…and has also finally made the top news story at CNN. You can get more timely info from a Bangladesh blog and the Bangladesh online news agency.

New Seed Article

My new Seed article is now online. I wanted to use the neuroscience of learning to draw some connections between a lot of different things, from mirror neurons to Algebra teachers to Toyota factories. Take a look, and tell me what you think.

Not that the godly can't share our opinion of those two things, of course

Julia Sweeney has audio samples from her new CD online—and gosh, she seems to have the same opinions of Intelligent Design and Deepak Chopra that I do! It must be something correlated with godlessness…like brains. (Thanks to Hank Fox)

Long article on Lancet studies in Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine

Eli Rabett has some extracts from a 5,000 word article by Dale Keiger on the Lancet studies that appeared in the Johns Hopkins Alumni Journal. Keiger says that it will be available online in a few days. Update: Here it is.

Ontario Library Association conference presentation: Altmetrics in Action: Documenting Cuts to Federal Government Science

As I mentioned last week, I did a presentation at the recent Ontario Library Association Super Conference using my work on Canadian science policy as a case study in altmetrics. Here's the session description: 802F Altmetrics in Action: Documenting Cuts to Federal Government Science: An Altmetrics Case Study The gold standard for measuring scholarly impact is journal article citations. In the online environment we can expand both the conception of scholarly output and how we measure their impact. Blog posts, downloads, page views, comments on blogs, Twitter or Reddit or Stumpleupon mentions…

Science Bloggers: Help a Biology Teacher!

On the heels of David Warlick's session on using online tools in the science classroom and the student blogging panel, here is the opportunity for some of us (that means YOU!) to actually do something about science education online: Elissa Hoffman is a high school teacher and she has started a blog for her AP Biology class at Appleton East High School in Appleton, WI. She would like it to be a platform with which she can introduce her students to current science research and scientists. One of the things she'd really like to do is find people who'd be interested in "guest blogging" on…

A survey on Lottâs honesty

kuro5hin has a story on Lott/Rosh. There is even an on-line poll. At the time of writing the results were: John Lott is.. .. a fraud. 50% .. a good researcher who made some mistakes. 5% .. victim of a vast left-wing conspiracy. 13% .. transgendered. 30% Of course, the results from an on-line poll like this have no more scientific validity than Lott's 98% statistic. Blogroots also mentions the unmasking of Rosh. The High Road (a pro-gun message board) has a discussion on Lott. I think this comment is interesting: My problem with Lott now is his "the dog ate my…

A brief fable about a pharmaceutical company for the benefit of believers in "alternative" medicine

Here's a little thought experiment for proponents of "alternative medicine." Imagine, if you will, a small pharmaceutical company. Founded in the 1970s, it has starts out with only one product, a drug that its founder thought to be a very promising anticancer agent. So enamored of this particular drug was the founder of the company that he left a job with an academic medical center, founded his own clinic, and then his own research institute and company to manufacture the new drug. After first having painstakingly isolated the substances that make up his drug, he later started to synthesize…

Car Buyers Are Dumb v.2

In response to my blog yesterday about America's continued love affair with horsepower and V8 engines, I recieved an excellent comment. It's worth a read: If you ask people why they drive 4WD SUVs you get a number of answers, usually associated with safety, or power and control. While many early SUV models were available in 2WD versions, people overwhelmingly prefered 4WD. Yet repeated usage surveys in the 90s showed only about 10% of SUV drivers ever used 4WD. What gives? Why are people buying the extra design, precision engineering, and transmission weight and buying the extra gas to haul…

Unconscious Shopping

Another week, another fascinating seminar over at Mind Matters. The paper in question concerns a topic near and dear to me: decision making. Here's the abstract: Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious deliberation before choosing. On the basis of recent insights into the characteristics of conscious and unconscious thought, we tested the hypothesis that simple choices (such as between different towels or different sets of oven mitts) indeed produce better results after conscious thought, but that choices in complex matters (such as…

Internet Dating Addiction?

I am going to start a category for the random, stupid things people believe you can get addicted to. Here is a good one: internet dating. A researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Australia argues that perceived popularity in the online dating scene can lead to Internet dating "addiction" and multiple relationship failures. "At first blush the person seems very popular -- they might receive 200 replies so they get a lot more attention than if they had walked into bar. It gives a feeling of being powerful. The online environment doesn't have the conventions and context of a real…

Public vs. Publicized: Future of the Web at WWW2010

It is somewhat hard to grok how much a Big Deal the WWW2010 conference is when it's happening in one's own backyard. After all, all I had to do was drop the kids at school a little earlier each morning and drive down to Raleigh, through the familiar downtown streets, park in a familiar parking lot, and enter a familiar convention center, just to immediately bump into familiar people - the 'home team' of people I have been seeing at blogger meetups, tweetups and other events for years, like Paul Jones, Ruby Sinreich, Fred Stutzman, Ryan Boyles, Wayne Sutton, Kim Ashley, Henry Copeland and…

Subversive chemistry

I must urge you to steal buy this book: Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). The description makes it sound perfect. Laboratory work is the essence of chemistry, and measurement is the essence of laboratory work. A hands-on introduction to real chemistry requires real equipment and real chemicals, and real, quantitative experiments. No existing chemistry set provides anything more than a bare start on those essentials, so the obvious answer is to build your own chemistry set and use it to do real chemistry. Everything you need is…

lateral thinking for small broke countries

So... these credit default swap thingies, they pay out if some credit instrument goes bad, like a bond issue, and, famously, financial companies buy them as side bets hedges against financial "events", including betting against instruments they are promoting to clients, and deals they have no involvement in at all and they are not regulated Soooooo........ countries can play this game also, right? So, Iceland owes a few $billion or so. It faces sovereign default in 2011 unless a miracle happens. CDS spreads right now are about 5-6% for Icelandic bonds, which is huge, yet way too small - 1-…

Fermi Scientific Linux. What is it?

I had promised a little more info on Scientific Linux. This is a form of Linux with a name that changes faster than my shirt when I realize I've got it on inside out. Form the Fermi LInux site: Fermi Linux is the generic name for linux distributions that are created and used at Fermi National Accelerator Lab. These releases have gone through different names: Fermi Linux, Fermi Linux LTS, LTS, Scientific Linux Fermi, SLF. At the time of this writting, the only officially supported Fermi Linux is Scientific Linux Fermi. But the inside story is both less and more interesting than you might…

I think we've been insulted by American book publishers

Richard Wiseman, the fabulously funny and enlightening skeptical psychologist, has written a book called Paranormality which is a fabulously funny and enlightening dissection of paranormal claims; I got an advance copy because I'm special and I recommend it highly, and so do Skepchicks. However, something strange happened. Wiseman is British, and he published in the UK, but when he tried to get it picked up in the US, publishers balked. The book has done well in the UK and has been bought by publishers in lots of other countries. However, the major American publishers were reluctant to…

Ferrofluids (MoTD Science Club time again...)

These are great: ferrofluids are stable suspensions of ferromagnetic particles. Typically, the liquid is something organic and nonvolatile, and the magnetic particles are iron oxides (such as Fe2O3 or Fe3O4). Why so neat? Look here. Magnets, moved around near a ferrofluid, can create beautiful patterns that are a direct effect of the field lines. Image courtesy Flickr User Steve Jurvetson. It's tricky stuff to make: generating liquid colloids is hard enough, but making one that's stable for any appreciable length of time is even harder. Over time, the particles tend to settle and aggregate.…

The Prius Needs a Gas Tax

That didn't take long. As soon as a gallon of gas stabilized around $2 and change, hybrid sales started to flatline. Now Toyota needs to use incentives to push the Prius: In April, Toyota will begin its first national advertising campaign for Prius since it began selling the hybrid in the United States in 2000. Ads will begin appearing in local markets before then. Toyota has also started offering the first incentives on the Prius, including some no-interest financing, and lease deals of as little as $219 a month. The moves by Toyota come amid flat sales last year for Prius, whose first six…

OADay winner: My Father the Anthropologist; or, What I Offer Open Access and Why

Here is the other one of the two winning posts in the Open Access Day blogging competition: My Father the Anthropologist; or, What I Offer Open Access and Why by Dorothea Salo: In 1980 or thereabouts--I was eight or nine--my father the anthropologist started yet another rant about serials cancellations at his university's library while he drove the family somewhere in the family car. He thought the problem an artifact of library underfunding, I remember. I don't recall that he ever did anything about it save rail bitterly on the subject to us, his captive, powerless, and resentful audience.…

What use is a redundant cologne?

You can now buy scents on the web that are inspired by HP Lovecraft. For instance, you could get Cthulhu: "A creeping, wet, slithering scent, dripping with seaweed, oceanic plants and dark, unfathomable waters." But what if you already smell like that all the time? (via io9)

Denialists' Deck of Cards: The 10 of Hearts, "You Don't Understand Us"

An industry lobbyist can buy time by becoming petulant. After throwing a temper tantrum, the next step is to play the 10 of Hearts. Play this card by saying that your industry is misunderstood. It is a sophisticated, nuanced entity that needs more understanding before any proposals advance.

Darwin Quotes

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life. - Charles R. Darwin, Support The Beagle Project Read the Beagle Project Blog Buy the Beagle Project swag Celebrate Darwin Day Prepare ahead for the Darwin Bicentennial Read Darwin for yourself.

Hot New Science Blogging Anthology

The Open Lab 2009 science blogging anthology has been published and is available as a paperback book and a PDF file. There's a piece of Aard in there among many fine contributions. Tell me what you think and what e-reader you're using if you buy the PDF!

Cool Resource

The NY Times has a pretty cool resource available on their website. It has the first chapters of hundreds of books that they have reviewed, split into fiction and non-fiction categories. Great way to get a gist of the book and whether you'd want to buy it.

Hacking Your Kindle

The other day when I was not hacking my kindle, I discovered that it ran on Linux. Or at least, when I went to "status" and typed in 411, the OS details came up and that is what it indicated. So, should I really be impressed buy this? I love this punchline: