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PUR water, now with added impurities!

PUR water wasn't content with removing impurities from your water so they decided that they would put some back in...and then charge you for it! I am talking about PUR Flavor Options. No joke, after they filter your water they add artificial flavors. All over the website are testimonials about how much "water" their kids are drinking now. One even has this to say: "My son asked for flavored water more than juice.". Great. First, I'm not sure it's a good thing that kids are loading up on a non-nutritive drink over juice. Now a lot of parents over do the juice, but if it's something like OJ in…

Don't bother trying to learn anything

I'm recovering from my first full call day in the medical intensive care unit, the MICU. Call in our MICU is a morning-to-morning shift, which means being awake all night, unless you can justify sleeping. It was a relatively quiet night for us, so we got about 5 hours of sleep-a full night's worth, more or less. I made my first death pronouncement at 10:35 p.m. last night after a family withdrew care from a woman who was only 48 years old. I hadn't taken care of the patient at all; I just pronounced her as practice. In the middle of the night, I mentioned to my residents that I was going to…

Two Cultures

Scientists, as a whole, are very reluctant to write novel ideas, hypotheses or data on blogs, and are very slow to test the waters of Open, Source Publishing. Most of what one finds on science blogs is commentary on other peoples' ideas, hypotheses and data found in journals and mass media. On the other hand, people in the humanities/literature/art/liberal arts side of campus have long ago embraced blogging as a tool to get their rough drafts out, to refine them upon receiving feedback from commenters, and subsequently publish them in peer-reviewed journals. If you follow History Carnival,…

Vote For My Nephew on XFactor!!!

Not that I'm trying to influence you or anything, but you BETTER DO IT!!! LeRoy Bell is clearly the best singer of the bunch. You can vote for him using any of five different methods. ... we are giving you a handful of ways to cast your votes for your favorite 12 finalists. And they are... 1) PHONE: You can vote via calling a toll-free phone number. Each act will be assigned their own toll-free number, which will appear on screen after their performance. 2) TEXT: You can vote via Verizon SMS/text voting. Each act will be assigned their own four-digit short code, which will appear on screen…

PNAS: Carl Knutson, Online Education Developer

(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Carl Knutson, who works for a company making online learning systems. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.) 1) What is your non-academic job? am the physics content project manager for an online homework and learning environment provider, Sapling Learning, located in Austin, TX. We offer online homework and tutorials for undergraduate…

What happens when you cross the streams?

What happens when you href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/quotes">cross the streams? Or, norms in online communities, how journal commenting is different, and waving the flag on potential issues when aggregating web comments with journal articles. There have been a couple of interesting discussions on friendfeed recently about commenting on journal sites vs. commenting elsewhere and about commenting anonymously, with an established online persona, or with the name on your drivers license. (I'm intentionally not linking to them, because the threads ended up in some less than…

ScienceOnline'09 - Danielle Lee in the media

Danielle Lee was profiled in The St.Louis American the other day. Among else, the article says: Recently, she was invited to co-moderate a panel on diversity in the sciences at the third annual ScienceOnline conference in Research Triangle Park, N.C. In January, scientists, science bloggers, journalists and students from around the world will meet to explore how online and digital technologies influence science communication and education, and vice versa.

More on Historical OA

As making historical papers OA is something I am very interested in, I am watching with great interest, as Jonathan Eisen attempts to make all of his father's scientific publications freely available. I think we will learn a lot from his experience about copyright, fuzzy laws, attitudes of different publishers, etc., and can use that knowledge to help more old papers see the light of day online for everyone to see, read and use.

Radio Discussion on Intelligent Design

I will be appearing on Jim Babka's Culture Repair show on the Genesis Communications Network on Sunday afternoon between 5 and 6 pm eastern time. You can also listen online by going to this page and selecting a feed at that time. I'll be on the show alone with Jim, no other guests, and we'll be talking about intelligent design from various perspectives. Please tune in if you get the chance.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The fifty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Testimony of the Spade. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 28 January, weeks from now. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The fifty-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at The Greenbelt. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 28 January, a bit more than a month from now. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.

Anthro Blog Carnival

The fifty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Cognition and Culture. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 31 December, less than a month from now. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.

Well, if it's new to you, it must be new ...

Denyse O'Leary is an ID shill and journalist. Today she's touting a "new evo devo spoof site". "New" as in online since at least 2001 and I remember seeing this in the late 90's. (The original "Science Made Stupid" book was from 1986, round about the time scientific creationism was morphing into intelligent design.) This is "new" in the same way the ID is a "new science for a new century."

Verbier Music Festival

The performances are online. I am watching Anoushka Shankar and Joshua Bell's performance on Aug 2nd. Great show. [thanks Ramya] While am passing on musical links, let me plug one of my favorite podcasts from NPR which has introduced me to so much of the wonderful music that I have come to enjoy: All Songs Considered hosted by Bob. The last one on Aug 30 was DJ'd by Anoushka.

Links

The Washington Post zings Lott for throwing stones at the New York Times from his glass house. Matt Welch also comments, while Greg Beato thinks that the New York Times has hit rock bottom when even John Lott is denigrating its integrity. Andrew Chamberlain invites readers to join in an online debate about Lott and scholarly integrity. Tom Spencer comments on the errors that Lott made on his blog.

Free Virtual Conference

A bunch of grad students at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) are organizing an online symposium in the Life Sciences. They've got a list of speakers and you can upload your own presentation. The conference runs from December 4-8, but I'm not sure how exactly this virtual conference works. If you're interested, check out their website and read what other people have to say. (Via Public Rambling.)

Blogging From Sea Round Two

From the 17th-27th I will b out to sea aboard the Western Flyer, technology and time permitting I will try to get post a couple entries here at DSN. You can read all about the cruise, check the updated logbook about daily activities, view pictures of the seafloor, and meet the people onboard online at MBARI's website. You can check the location of the ship in real time as well.

Calling it like it is

Two examples of why blogs are better than mainstream news coverage, when it comes to confronting reality and doing something about it, one from the climate wars, one from the front lines of women's health. First, Andy Revkin, a former New York Times journalist who still blogs there. He calls out a coal-industry-backed attempt to silence one of the world's leading climatologists as the "Shameful Attack on Free Speech" that it is. By launching a Facebook campaign to convince Pennsylvania State University to cancel a scheduled talk by Michael Mann, the coal interests have indeed shamed…

End World Hunger Vocabulary Quiz

tags: vocabulary, United Nations, free rice, online quiz This linked online vocabulary game has an interesting premise; for every correct answer you provide, ten grains of rice will be donated to the United Nations to end world hunger. How many grains of rice did you donate?

On the Novell-Microsoft Deal

I've been holding back on this one, but it is time to speak out.  On November 2, 2006, href="http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyid=2006-11-02T230517Z_01_WEN9025_RTRIDST_0_TECH-MICROSOFT-NOVELL-BALLMER-DC.XML">Microsoft and Novell announced a deal.  The deal involves Microsoft paying Novell, and the two companies working together to ensure a certain level of interoperability between Novell's Suse (a Linux distro), and Microsoft's Windows.  In return, Novell would get protection against intellectual-property litigation. By way of background…

Reading Diary: Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy by Gabriella Coleman and This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things by Whitney Phillips

Gabriella Coleman's Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous is largely a laudatory history of the Anonymous hacker activist movement with some anthropological and political analysis. Whitney Phillips' This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture on the other hand, is much more geared towards an analytical and philosophical analysis of past and present (and even future) of how online trolling relates to contemporary culture. Neither book is perfect, and both tend to falter where it comes to how closely…

paradigm shift: fact-checking (journalism) vs debugging (programming)

If you've been following the Jared Diamond/New Yorker controversy, or my ongoing posts on journalism vs. blogging (here, here, here, here, here), you might be intrigued by this conversation about the culture of fact-checking in journalism, between journalism professor Jay Rosen and programmer Dave Winer, in their podcast series Rebooting the News. Consider this riddle: how is fact-checking in journalism like (or unlike) debugging a computer program? Here's Rosen's take on it: One of the features of a rebooted news system would actually be borrowed from the tech world. And it's the notion of…

Proposed changes in the NIH grant process

Effect Measure has a good post about the NIH granting process. I'm not going to rehash what revere said, as far as the description of what happens once a grant application arrives at the NIH and how it winds its way through the Initial Review Group to one of many study sections through programmatic review. In any case, I agree that it's a crappy system--except for all the others. Certainly it has much to recommend it. Junior scientists compete for funds with more senior scientists on a more equal footing than perhaps any other nation in the world, and almost anyone can get a grant if they…

About Being Poor and the Cost of Money...

...well, it still sucks. And JPMorgan Chase isn't helping: The Washington State Department of Social and Health Services says it wants to know why JPMorgan Chase is charging welfare recipients 85 cents each time they withdraw money from one of its bank machines, according to Rebecca Henrie, a spokesperson with DSHS's Community Services Division. In the first four months of 2011, Chase, one of the nation's largest banks, took in a total of $465,000 in ATM fees from some of the state's poorest people: single mothers on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, a program that DSHS administers.…

Hello Maastricht

I like to travel light. My luggage for a five-day conference stay in the Netherlands barely fills a small back pack. Apart from what I wear and carry in my pockets, I've got: Netbook computer + charger Smartphone charger Camera + charger + transfer cable. The travel camera is pretty small, but its memory card is an old clunky format that won't fit into the netbook's flash reader. GPS navigator + batteries (gotta get some Maastricht geocaches) Two paperback sf books + one work-related book, the new Valsgärde volume Spare undies + socks, wash as needed Spare t-shirts. This time I decided not…

New Place

I'm typing this on my smartphone while digesting an evening meal of ramen noodles, egg and Chinese Sauerkraut from the tin. I'm in our new house. It's a mess, boxes everywhere. My wife is having a foot bath. Juniorette is playing with legos in her room. Both are singing in Mandarin. Yesterday a crew of about fifteen friends & family moved our stuff here -- many thanks guys! I am very proud to have so many good people in my life whom I can rely on. Today my wife and I skipped work and spent the day getting things into order. I've done some washing and assembled two book cases and a high…

Lisa Simpson Needs You

You're seeing other ScienceBlogs readers donate, now join the love train*. A rare serious post from Steve explains The Real Mozart Effect and why we should support music education with DonorsChoose. Playing an instrument has cognitive and developmental benefits. That reason formed an episode of The Simpsons, too: Lisa's Sax. Homer wants to buy an air conditioner but Lisa needs help to nurture her brain with more than Springfield Elementary has to offer. Unsure what to do, he walks out of Moe's toward It Blows, with $200 in his pocket. He sees a music store and says, "Musical instrument?…

BibliOdyssey: Must-have blog book

This brain map comes from The Book of Life: The Spiritual and Physical Constitution of Man (1912), by the obscure mystical philosopher Alesha Sivartha, who is sometimes referred to as a "grandfather of the new-age movement". The map is of particular interest, as it approaches modern neurology but still retains a few elements of phrenology, and is therefore a transition between the two. (Click on the image for a larger version.) It is based on the experiments of the pioneering Scottish neurologist David Ferrier, who functionally mapped the sensory and motor cortices by lesion studies and…

RPG Rules Sell Better Than Adventure Modules

Role-playing games of the Dungeons & Dragons variety come in the form of books that are functionally analogous to computer software. You get your operating system (core rule book) and then you can buy update packages (rule expansions), programming libraries (campaign settings) and application programs (adventure modules) for it. In this analogy, the computer that runs the software is you and your gaming buddies. A difference between RPGs and computer software is that once you have a secure installed base for your operating system -- that is, with RPGs, once you've sold enough core rule…

Cruel, cruel tease

If you're like me, you are eagerly awaiting the release of Dawkins' next book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and you've probably already put in your preorder at Amazon. It's kind of like the anticipatory excitement for the Harry Potter books, only for hardcore geeks. To whet your appetite, there is a short extract from chapter one available online. And alas, you have to wait until 22 September for the whole thing. We'll have it read by the 23rd, right? Want more? Here's an excerpt from chapter two.

Home, home on the range, where the deer and the catteleo play

It's true. Chimeras are out and walking among us. These aren't quite the chimeras that RPM is obsessed with, but they're certainly bothersome to some. From Genome Technology Online, we have a report that James Derr, at Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine, wants to sequence the genome from a real buffalo, but those buffalo are hard to find. To quote Genome Technology: Problem is, that legacy has been mingled with domestic cattle in efforts to "make a better beef animal." Meatier, more docile hybrids are known as cattelo, if you were wondering. Where do real buffalo roam? Maybe not…

Sweet, sweet memories

A few days back, I noted that January 5th 2006 marked my first post on Scienceblogs. And indeed it did. But I forgot that it was actually a back-dated post from my old blog. It was today - January 11th - one year ago that Sb launched with fifteen intrepid bloggers - Janet, Tara , Afarensis, Dave & Greta, Tim, Ed, RPM, Razib, Chris, GrrlScientist, Kevin, PZ, Chad, and myself - boldly going where no bloggers went before. For those of you who wish to feel nostalgic, the Wayback Machine has the front page from January 12th 2006 online. Oh, how far we have come!

Elvis is still dead. Oh, and evolution is a fact.

Some press releases get the right money quote: "The bottom line is that the world is round, humans evolved from an extinct species and Elvis is dead," Weissmann said. "This survey is a wake-up call for anyone who supports teaching information based on evidence rather than speculation or hope; people want to hear the truth, and they want to hear it from scientists." By asking the questions in a non-loaded manner, FASEB managed to ascertain that 61% of Americans actually do accept evolution as a fact. Oh, and the NAS has published the book online for free if you don't want a physical…

New Punk

Sb has a new guy who calls himself SciencePunk (aka 'Frank Swain'). He's from the UK and claims a history of 'making zines, being a filthy scenester, stage-managing burlesque shows, climbing buildings, hanging out with strippers, arguing the toss and generally being a force for good.' I haven't followed his stuff, but the way this reads, we'll either get on like old friends from Gilman Street or fight like hipsters for the last pair of black rimmed glasses. So welcome to the Sb blogosphere Swain. As for our online relationship, only time will tell... But for now, this goes out to you:

Immortal Animals and Other Curiosities

Can animals be immortal? This question is explored by RocketBoom in an interesting way - providing examples of regeneration in nature, from fungi to jellyfish to...well, I'll let Molly explain. Nothing lasts forever, but the animals on today's episode stick around a lot longer than the rest of us. Molly In case you're not familiar with their website, it provides fresh perspectives to a wide variety of topics: Rocketboom is a daily international news and entertainment network of online programming based in New York City. We cover and create a wide range of information and commentary from…

Around the Web: Breaking up with ebooks, Blogging in the classroom and more

I’m breaking up with eBooks (and you can too) Ebooks Choices and the Soul of Librarianship Blogging in the classroom: why your students should write online The Last Future Uncovering the world's 'unseen' science (preprint) HBO Rightly Decides Not to Cater to Cord Cutters In Virtual Play, Sex Harassment Is All Too Real High and low: what RIM's failure is doing to the people of Waterloo The Online Pecking Order: 'Conventional' online universities consider strategic response to MOOCs Digital Deadline (campuses will be completely digital in 3 years, textbooks that is) Supporting Public Access to…

A job opportunity for a grad student

Position Description: Communications Assistant Chicago-area communications firm seeks communications/journalism/PR undergrad or grad student for part-time position, 10-15 hours per week at $20/hour. This is an exciting opportunity to be part of a team that is building a cutting-edge new-media communications platform for a New York health-care client. The work is varied, but includes helping maintain a website and blog, copy writing and editing, assistance with online video projects and support for special projects. You will have a high level of autonomy and can work flexible hours online - no…

Global Hunger Games

Hunger Games - World Food Programme. Hunger Games portrays a grim future in which the "bottom 99%" must ration their food to reduce the chance that their children will be sent as "tributes" to compete in a game to the death. But - What if, together, we can identify thousands of new paths out of poverty around the world in just 48 hours? Imagine thousands of Katniss Everdeen-inspired avatars battling hunger - for real. {Today} the Rockefeller Foundation and the Institute for the Future (IFTF) will join forces with people across the globe and ask them to help solve global poverty through…

Scientific American Blogs Responds

UPDATE: Happy to announce that @Dnlee5 post is now back up: http://t.co/XVentvp35T #SciAmBlogs — Bora Zivkovic (@BoraZ) October 14, 2013 This just in... A Message from Mariette DiChristina, Editor in Chief Scientific American bloggers lie at the heart of the SA website, pumping vitality, experience and broad insight around the community. Unfortunately our poor communication with this valuable part of the SA network over the recent days has led to concerns, misunderstandings and ill feelings, and we are committed to working to try to put this right as best we can. We know that there are real…

Did the Far Left Blogs Turn Lieberman Into a Republican?

That's the take in this recent profile at New York magazine. The far left blogosphere first stung Lieberman when his 2004 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination fell flat but then really turned him towards the GOP following his 2006 Senate primary race. In Lieberman's view, powerful bloggers have hijacked his party, especially on foreign policy. From the article: The 2004 debacle was Lieberman's first introduction to a new force, the netroots, a loose collection of leftist blogs including MoveOn.org and DailyKos. The way the senator sees it, those groups have been "taking the party in…

The Exporatorium: Science Communication Innovators

I'm back in DC after spending the previous two weeks in San Francisco as an Osher Fellow at The Exploratorium. It was my second visit this year to the world's greatest science center. Each time I go out there I tell my friends that I feel like Tom Friedman in The World is Flat, trading ideas with really smart and innovative people. (I'm not the only one to offer high praise for The Explo, check out this rave from Jennifer Oullette at Cocktail Physics.) During my two weeks, I held several brown bag lunch discussions with staff on topics including science and the media; the effective use of…

Why I now pay for online news, in two words: Mark Henderson

The whole idea of actually paying to read mainstream news online is rather alien to me, having grown up immersed in a world of free content readily available via Google News. Indeed, I can't help but see free news as some kind of inviolable human right. Thus when the Times recently set up a paywall blocking free access to all of its online content (including its blogs), I was faced with a serious dilemma: there are only a few mainstream science journalists in the world who write sensibly about genetics, and my favourite example (Mark Henderson) was now locked away behind a web-form requiring…

PLoS In Nature : The Big Picture

OA pillars The following are excerpts from the journal Nature regarding the Public Library of Science. These were located with a simple search for the phrase "Public Library of Science." For each item, I provide the source, and a selected bit of text. I have no selection criteria to report, but I do have a reason for doing this: To give an interesting view of the history of PLoS as a concept and an entity, and to some extent, the reactions to PLoS from various quarters. I ignored passing reference to PLoS or redundant items. Personally, I find this textual sequence fascinating. I…

Links 6/11/10

Have a Fabulous Friday. Links for you. Science: The Human Phenome Project Ten things you didn't know about bees The ASCO Meeting: The swag disappears! (2010 edition) Snakes in mysterious global decline Other: Like Glenn Beck, Ayn Rand Peddled Garbage As Truth -- Why Did America Buy It? Rand was mediocre. But she had a preternatural ability to translate her sense of self into reality. Doomed Pelicans: British Petroleum Neglecting Booms in Pelican Rookery Americans want to Soak the Rich MMCCLXXVII

Arctic Sea Ice Retreat: When Will the Arctic Ocean be Ice-Free During Summer?

Asks climatematters@columbia. But they ask it in a way that suggests they think the trend is going to be steep. So I offered them the standard bet. We'll see. Meanwhile, anyone interested in whether 2009 is likely to be a record can get some action over at ipredict (thanks Gareth). I've bought some; current price is about 0.23. I'm not really sure what a fair price would be; I have some buy orders in. Its quite educational.

I'm going to ruin the punchline for you

Scott has discovered an odd little book: The Faith Equation: One Mathematician's Journey in Christianity. Yeah, another guy finds Jesus and uses math and science after the fact to claim Christianity is the one true answer. What, you may ask, is this wonderful faith equation that leads directly to one of the Abrahamic religions? Faith = (Mind) + (Heart)+ (Will) Hey, who knew you could make pablum out of crap? At least now nobody needs to buy the damn book.

The Environmental Cost of Physics Research

I burned out some diode lasers a while back, and needed to buy replacements. Here's one of the replacements on top of the tube containing the other, with a US quarter for scale: Here they are, with the box and packing material used to ship them to me: I realize that this is probably due to somebody at the laser company deciding to save money by standardizing on a single size of shipping container. Still, this seems just a tiny bit excessive...

Reading in the USA

Seen via Boing Boing: 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school. 42% of college graduates never read another book. 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year. 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years. If these statistics indeed represent the state of reading in this country, they go a ways to explaining why anti-evolutionism and ID have gotten a toe-hold.

Mmmm...tasty.... clown brains

A boingboing reader visited Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus recently and discovered some absolutely crazy dessert delivery devices... Clown and Horse Brains! If anyone happens to take their kids to Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus we here at Omni Brain would be eternally grateful if you'd buy us one of the clown heads! (You don't have to send along the accompanying snow cone - the FBI or whoever might think it's some sort of terror device)

The Weakling Dollar: Expected but Embarrassing

In the land of the euro, the dollar is treated like a banana republic(an) currency. The devaluation of the dollar isn't such an awful thing: it was long overdue. We can't have a $9+ trillion dollar debt (almost half of which was accumulated in the last seven years), a humongous trade deficit, negative personal savings, and an economic recession, and still expect our currency to be worth something. But this is embarrassing: The U.S. dollar's value is dropping so fast against the euro that small currency outlets in Amsterdam are turning away tourists seeking to sell their dollars for local…