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eJournal browsing

so the Astrophysical Journal, Letters has gone online/print-on-demand and I kinda miss it, though I don't think I've actually picked up a printed copy for years the one thing us old fogeys keep reminiscing about, is how the old paper journals were nice for browsing. We'd wonder down to the library or reading room, and actually pick up the new journal and browse to the articles. The nice thing about that, is that you see the other articles in the issue, or some of the adjacent ones anyway. Those may be interesting, surprising and informative in a serendipitous sort of way. Can't do that if…

Separating the public and private spheres.

Depending on your blog reading habits, you may already have heard the news that feels almost like cosmic justice that a law firm has rescinded an offer of employment from a third year law student whose online activities the firm found troubling. The linked posts will give you some flavor for those activities (as will this post), so I'm not going to go into the gory details here. However, I wanted to say a few words about this comment Amanda Marcotte made on Sheezlebub's post on the matter: While it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, I simply have to voice my unease with the politics of…

Google eBooks: Will Printed Books Become a Quaint Memory?

Google announced yesterday that you can now access three million books from 4,000 publishers from their ebookstore. These eBooks can be read on an android, iPhone, iPad, iTouch, Nook and Sony bookreaders and - almost forgot - a computer. With this announcement, I wanted to share with ScienceBlogs readers an Op-Ed I published this Spring that discusses what we might be missing if electronic media were to replace printed media. What do you think? Please share your thoughts. Electronic books, like it or not, may eventually replace books in print. Borders launched an e-book store with more…

Links 7/27/11

Links for you. Science: Small amounts of antibiotics generate big problems Vaccine has nearly eliminated chickenpox deaths in children L'Eau Pour Chien: Why do dogs rub up against things that smell bad? Rule Changes Proposed for Research on Humans Other: Black Student Can't Be Valedictorian How a 1995 court case kept the newspaper industry from competing online A Vision for Economic Renewal -- An American Jobs Agenda Google's gormless "no pseudonym" policy BlaBlaMeter - how much bullshit hides in your text? Breaking: The President Has Options to Raise the Debt Limit Means Testing is a…

There is a reason Bush is not running on economy...

I heard this on NPR and now it is available online on Bloomberg.com: USA has slipped from 1st to 6th place in the World Economic Forum's annual rankings. As I have predicted immediately after the 2004 election, US is not going to survive another 4 years of Bush and retain primacy in anything - economy, scientific/technological leadership, military might, or moral high ground. Moral high ground is hard to quantify but do you really believe we are still Number One, the Shining Light, Beacon of Democracy, etc.? Military might - you decide. Now, economy is officially gone. Science/technology…

Nicholas Wade gets schooled, briefly

A few weeks ago, Nicholas Wade wrote a terrible review of Dawkins' latest book (it wasn't a negative review, but it just weirdly spun off into some half-baked philosophy of science). Now the poor guy has been publicly spanked. The NY Times published short letters of rebuttal from Dan Dennett and Philip Kitcher, and then published online another dozen letters. That last link is more of a mixed bag, with some good replies and some strangely skewed ones…but it's all fun anyway. Unfortunately, all the letters are necessarily short. This kind of corrective actually needs some longer discussion.

I'm off...

I am about to go offline now, early to bed, early to rise...travelling to San Fran tomorrow at dawn. Hopefully I'll be able to get back online by tomorrow afternoon. I have scheduled a lot of reruns of the old posts (twice a day) and new quotes (once per night), but I will post new stuff as well whenever I find time: the first day at PLoS, pictures from various blogger meetups (excluding the pictures of pseudonymous bloggers), pictures of my strange meal at Incanto...and on Monday morning something you'll probably find interesting but it is a secret right now.

KITP: Cancer Clone Wars

Clone Wars: how are stockbrokers like colorectal cancer cells? The Kavli Institute has a very interesting biophysics program series... This weeks colloquium: "Physics and Mathematics of Cancer Metastasis" - Robijn Bruinsma, UCLA, explains (NOT ONLINE YET podcast, video, slides) excellent colloquium on "cancer for theorists" including discussion of the basics of cancer and metastasis, mathematics of cancer epidemiology, including the Master Equation for microevolution of cancer cells, and open questions soon likely to be a KITP program... bottom line: everyone will get cancer, eventually,…

Evolution for you, for everyone, and for the spiders

I have a few items for you from the Evolution Front. First, you can have a free copy of an excerpt form the book Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating by Leslie Brunetta and Catherine L. Craig: Click here for the PDF file. That was complements of the NCSE. Speaking of the NCSE, you can also have the latest copy of the Reports of the National Center for Science Education in its new on-line format: CLICK HERE And when you are done reading that, you can watch this: "What Americans Think of Evolution"

How evolution works, sometimes.

A Sequence of Lines Consecutively Traced by Five Hundred Individuals is an online drawing tool that lets users do just one thing - trace a line. Each new user only sees the latest line drawn, and can therefore only trace this latest imperfect copy. As the line is reproduced over and over, it changes and evolves - kinks, trembling motions and errors are exaggerated through the process.* Once an accidental feature shows up, subsequent tracers try to reproduce it like good little replicators. Eventually you get a dancing chihuahua. A Sequence of Lines Traced by Five Hundred Individuals from…

New Wilco Album Online Streaming and Concert Tour

Last week I bought my tickets for the Wilco concert in July at Wolf Trap. The "alt country rock" band from Chicago has sired two of the best albums of the last decade, starting with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and followed by A Ghost is Born. (Best heard on vinyl.) I saw them in concert last year at the 930 Club and have eagerly awaited their lastest album release which fans will be happy to know is now available for free online streaming in its entirety. There's a citrus clean sound to this latest release, perhaps reflecting a lifestyle change for the band.

Linn(a)ean quote of the day

From 1788: "I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character, by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. I wish somebody would indicate one to me. But if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I should have fallen under the ban of all the ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I ought to have done so." And still the Institute for Creation Research sees Linnaeus as a fellow traveller. (And as an aside, Edmund Hovey's The Bicentenary of the Birth of Carolous Linnaeus [1908] is freely available online in multiple…

Hanging out at the Science Blogging Conference '08

And wouldn't you know it, we're supposed to get 2-4 inches of snow. In NC. I lived here for 8 years and saw hardly any snow, and what we got didn't last but for a day or two. At any rate, I'm having a good time. Getting to meet a bunch of colleagues from Seed again, and attending some good sessions on Public Heath and Medicine, and also Gender/Minority issues. We've had sessions on the uses of technology and also using blogging as a resource for K through Ph.D. education! Bora's got more on how you can check the conference out online. So, check it out!

iBioSeminars, an online library of seminars

iBioSeminars, a free online library of seminars aimed to spur students in India. They are soliciting feedback on the service before wider deployment. Bangalore's National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) will provide the servers. "Many bright students in science institutes and colleges in India do not always have access to the latest breakthroughs in research in the areas that they are interested in. An exposure to this information at an earlier stage, say at the B.Sc. level, will help students get a better grasp of their subject and make decisions about future study and work," says Prof…

Trouble with the IPCC; trouble at the homefront

In case anyone is wondering why I haven't posted anything for the past few days, what with all the fuss over the IPCC and all, it's not because I'm reluctant to comment on it. It's just that my little piece of western North Carolina is only now recovering from an ice storm that knocked the power to my house out last Friday morning. I've only been back online for a few minutes and trying to catch up with all the happenings. Of course, I'm horribly behind in work that pays, so it may be a while before I get back to blogging regularly. Stay tuned.

Getting Out of the Bushes

I just did an online commentary for The Guardian's science site about just how bad Bush's presidency has been on science, and particularly stem cell and climate policy. It starts out like this.... The presidency of George W Bush is waning and laming. The time has come to think about the future and when it comes to policies for US science and to the use of science in US policy, let's put it bluntly, pretty much anything will be an improvement. ...and it only gets meaner from there. So I'm sure you'll enjoy it. Click here to read the whole thing.

A Century of Nature

Just published by University of Chicago Press is A Century of Nature: Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed Science and the World. The book contains seminal Nature papers published over the last 100 years, each of which is accompanied by commentary from a leading scientist in the field. Included in the book are the 1953 paper in which James Watson and Francis Crick reported the structure of DNA and 1980 paper in which Christiane Nusslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus report homeotic mutations in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Some of the book's content has been made available online for…

Daniel Gilbert teaches Colbert how to be happy

Although I do not own a television set, my wife and I watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report every night, online. A couple of days ago Colbert had Daniel Gilbert on. Gilbert is a professor of Psychology at the Harvard main campus and has recently written a great book, Stumbling on Happiness. I had met Gilbert last year at a Seed dinner and saw him speak at an Edge/Seed sponsored round-table. His studies into happiness and affective forecasting are very insightful. To read previous posts on this subject click here, here, here and here. (The clip from the Colbert Report is bellow the fold…

Free advice for would-be plagiarists.

Disclaimer: Plagiarism is bad. A quick search for "plagiarism" on this blog will demonstrate that I've taken a clear stand against plagiarism. That said, if one were, hypothetically, planning a little online-copy-and-paste plagiarism, and if one's instructor has earned a Ph.D., in Philosophy, from Stanford, one might reconsider using the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as the source of several uncited sentences. There is a better-than-average chance that the instructor is familiar with SEP -- indeed, even with the specific entry you (hypothetically) are tempted to plunder. Even if she's…

Resveratrol: Not Just For Your Grandmother

How long before professional cyclists start swallowing concentrated resveratrol? And will we ban red wine as an illegal performance enhancing substance? An ordinary lab mouse will run about one kilometer -- five-eights of a mile -- on a treadmill before collapsing from exhaustion. But mice given resveratrol, a minor component of red wine and other foods, run twice as far. They also have a reduced heart rate and energy-charged muscles, just as trained athletes do, according to an article published online in Cell by Johan Auwerx and his colleagues at the Institute of Genetics and Molecular and…

Rage 2.0

Why Rage? Because Henry inspired me (though Mrs.Gee made him edit out the 'excessive' language). Why 2.0? Because I am all gung-ho about everything 2.0. So there! So, like Henry, I will now proceed to rage about something.... Hotels I've been traveling a lot lately, often staying in some very top-of-the-line hotels around the USA and Europe. Lovely hotels. Very comfortable. Very clean. Great service. Good food. Lots of cool amenities. More and more environmentally friendly. Nothing really to complain about. And I certainly do not want to single out Millennium UN Plaza hotel just…

The Anti-Consumerist Gift Files: Seedy Stuff

Ok, those of you who know me know that I am not much of a consumer. If I can buy it used, make it myself, or make do with something I've already got, I'm pretty good. I hate the frenzy of shopping that accompanies the "Holiday" season, and I think the most awesome thing about being Jewish is that Chanukah is a minor holiday, and generally I'm sitting around with my feet up while everyone else is racing around. I'm a big fan of homemade gifts - this year most of the grownups in my family got homemade jams and such, and a bunch of meat chickens, raised at home at my house. Now I realize…

NASA: Augustine Reports

"Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation" Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee The Augustine Report on Human Spaceflight is out: all 157 pages of it (pdf), with press conference starting at 1 pm today. As you know, Bob, the committee, chaired by Augustine of the Augustine Report, and a list of impressive members (and, as you know, the output of a committee can to some extent be determined by the choice of membership...), had a mission to sort out the unsustainable and vague ambitions for human exploration in space that was the legacy of the last 20 years of…

Being All That You Can Be...In The Health Care Industry

I don't particularly enjoy having needles poked into my scalp and neck and shoulders and temples and I especially don't like having them poked into my forehead just above my eyebrows. Yet I allow my neurologist to turn me into a pincushion every three months because regular botox treatments subdue my migraines, and nothing else does. I like my neurologist; I trust him, and we have a good doctor-patient relationship. On this last visit we discussed my current medications and how they're working, and agreed that I could probably start scaling back one of them. My neurologist is at a…

Donors Choose - Coming Down to the Wire

We're now in the last two days of the DonorsChoose Bloggers' Challenge. As things currently stand, this blog is now $88 away from my $2,500 fundraising goal. Unfortunately, we've been more or less stalled for the last couple of weeks, so I'm going to add an incentive to see if we can get over the top. DonorsChoose has generously committed to give blogs that hit their goals with a 10% bonus that can be used to fund additional projects. I've already contributed some to my own challenge, but if we have met the goal by 10 pm tomorrow night, our family will also contribute 10% of the total…

Jonah Lehrer: he's baaaaack

Lehrer has landed a new book deal. This has sparked justifiable disgust: Maria Konnikova explains why. Lehrer is not the writer who simply made up a few Bob Dylan quotes and self-plagiarized (the way he’s portrayed in recent accounts of his latest book deal). He is the writer who got the science wrong, repeatedly, who made up facts, misrepresented information, betrayed editors, and lied, over and over and over again, for many years, in multiple venues, not just in a single book. He is, in other words, the writer and journalist who went against the basic tenets of the profession, and did so…

Once again, Facebook reporting algorithms facilitate harassment of pro-science advocates by antivaccine cranks

Nearly eleven years ago, back in April 2005, I opened my work e-mail (I was working at a different university back then) and saw an e-mail from someone whose name I had seen before, one Mr. William P. O'Neill. Opening the e-mail, I was shocked to find an e-mail to Orac; worse, the e-mail was cc'ed to my cancer center director, my division chief, and my chairman. In it, O'Neill outed me as Orac and was threatening to sue me over a post I did. Naturally, it was interspersed with accusations of my being a "pharma shill" and having lied about him. Now here's the odd thing. This is the post that…

What's New On ScienceBlogs.de, 3.20-3.26

These stories made headlines during the past week at our European partner site, ScienceBlogs.de. GM Potato Goes to German Bundestag Tobias Meier, who has posted before at his blog WeiterGen about his concerns regarding the EU procedures for authorizing genetically modified food, is amused to find that the German Parliament's FDP (Free Democratic Party) faction is now asking more or less the same questions. "Only just in my blog," he writes, now in German Parliament... The German FDP party now questions the scientific basis of German ministers' ballot behaviour in EU boards, as exemplified by…

Health care deform

We are on record as favoring single-payer health care and taking certain things like vaccines out of the market system, but beyond that we don't do much health care politics here. But we have opinions, like everyone does, opinions formed by working for more than four decades within the health care and public health professions. Other than that, we are like most of you. Consumers of health care with our own particular view of the world. And since everyone else seems to be talking about it, so will we. At least we will today. Everyone knows that what Republicans hate and fear about health care…

Joel, Mitch. Six pixels of separation: Everyone is connected. Connect your business to everyone. New York: Business Plus, 2009. 288pp.

I was chatting with a colleague during the long commute home the other day and he noticed I was reading this book. "What's it like?" he asked. "Clay Shirky lite," I replied. And that's about right. In Six Pixels of Separation, Mitch Joel comes to grips with the effects of social media on marketing, media, sales and promotions, he covers a lot of the same ground as in Clay Shirky's classic Here Comes Everybody (review). Glib, conversational, fast-paced bite-sized -- an easy read for sure -- Joel does a solid job of translating Shirky's more scholarly approach to a business audience. Which…

Never Say Goodbye: Hawai'ian Goose

tags: Hawaiian Goose, Nene, Branta sandvicensis, Joel Sartore, National Geographic, image of the day Hawaiian Goose or Nene (Branta sandvicensis) 2,100 (Estimated 2,000 wild and 100 captive). Image: Joel Sartore/National Geographic [larger view]. Joel Sartore has shared some of his work on this blog before, so I am thrilled to tell you that National Geographic also appreciates his exemplary work. You can view more endangered animals of the United States that were photographed by the talented Joel Sartore here at National Geographic online. All images appear here by permission of National…

Never Say Goodbye: Mexican Spotted Owl

tags: Mexican Spotted Owl, Strix occidentalis lucida, Joel Sartore, National Geographic, image of the day Mexican Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis lucida) An estimated 1,000 to 2,000 remain. Image: Joel Sartore/National Geographic [larger view]. Joel Sartore has shared some of his work on this blog before, so I am thrilled to tell you that National Geographic also appreciates his exemplary work. You can view more endangered animals of the United States that were photographed by the talented Joel Sartore here at National Geographic online. All images appear here by permission of National…

Blog-post as a scientific reference

The post coming immediately after this is, as far as I know, the only blog post so far that appeared in the List Of References of a scientific paper. A guideline for analyzing circadian wheel-running behavior in rodents under different lighting conditions by Corinne Jud, Isabelle Schmutz, Gabriele Hampp, Henrik Oster and Urs Albrecht is an excellent article on methodology (and reasoning behind it) of basic circadian research. It was published in an online open-source journal Biological Procedures Online. I strongly recommend it to my readers. The Reference #16 is to this post on Circadiana…

Shopping for a graduate school?

Have some money to burn? Don't get enough creationist readings on teh intraweb? How about getting a Master's Degree in "Creation Science?" After all, it's academically rigorous: Each MS candidate is required to take six science education courses, three science courses and two electives. Applicants must already possess a bachelor's degree in a field of science or in science education. All 11 courses will be offered online. Or, not: Each online course approaches the content the same way ICR's scientists approach the study of origins: if an idea, scientific or otherwise, is contrary to God'…

Poll: Why Are You In It?

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Excellent list of neuroscience blogs

The Neurophilosopher has a great list of neuroscience blogs. The ones I've added to my RSS feed are listed below. Neuroevolution. Madame Fathom. Channel N. Also via Neurophilosopher: This firsthand account of having electrodes implanted in the brain to combat Parkinsons' disease. How some brains "rewire" themselves. When assessing research conclusions, consider who funded the work. Homework studies: Different countries offer different results. Today's college students: more narcissistic than ever? Online research: it's not just for Casual Fridays anymore. One lab at Harvard hopes to conduct…

US College Degrees

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Bartlett Is Half Right About Those Refund Checks

In the NY Times, economist Bruce Bartlett opposes the refund stimulus plan: WITH unusual speed and cooperation last month, George W. Bush and Democrats in Congress agreed to a tax rebate set to be paid out beginning in May. Families will get checks for $300 to $1200 or more, and it is assumed that they will all rush out to spend this money immediately, giving retailers a boost that will raise economic growth. Despite the bipartisan support for the rebate, few economists have supported the idea. They note that we have tried rebates in the past -- most recently in 2001 -- and there is no…

Don Herbert, 1917 - 2007

Don Herbert died yesterday, just short of his 90th year. Don Herbert was host of television's Watch Mr. Wizard, a Saturday morning live TV show that had a run of 547 episodes from 1951 to 1965. He was an important figure in the youth of many of today's scientists. The weekly 30-minute show featured Herbert as Mr. Wizard with a young assistant who watched while Herbert performed interesting science experiments. The experiments, many of which seemed impossible at first glance, were usually simple enough to be re-created by viewers. The show was very successful. (Wikipedia entry on Don Herbert…

scary shorts for faculty

seasonal snippets for our seniors your calendar shows more hours in committee than class this week the papers need to be graded before the next assignment is due oh, we charged a different overhead on that grant, a higher one 4070 unread e-mails ...including yours not including the 1600 from mailing lists that are automatically filtered to archive 146 of them have .doc attachments at the current rate it will take 37 weeks to catch up on arXiv again, but at least the time is now finite and positive yes, we are more than halfway through the semester "I just need your signature on…

Breaking News: George W Bush Presidential Library in Planning Stages

According to information leaked this week from the White House, planning is underway to design the George W. Bush Presidential Library, despite the fact that Bush has reportedly never read a book in his entire life. This library will include the following: The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room, which no one has yet been able to find. The Hurricane Katrina Room, which is still under construction. The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you won't be able to remember anything. The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don't even have to show up. The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they…

Greek PM drops trousers

Or rather, drops euro referendum plan1 but the effect is much the same. When the referendum was announced a few days ago, some thought he had played a blindingly good political hand. Which just goes to show that economists aren't so great at politics and the cobbler should stick to his last. Which is why I'm commenting, obviously. But the argument - that he had magically got out of a difficult position (the Greek public didn't like the deal that was struck, this was he evaded responsibility, and maybe the need to buy off the public might result in a better deal) sounded quite plausible to me…

Ah, Home Again

Or for the first time, in this case. All the big stuff is moved and my living room is full of boxes, most of them full of books. I went out and bought a couple of bookcases and I think I'm gonna need a couple more. The one thing I don't like about my new house is the size of the kitchen. It doesn't have a separate dining room, so there's a dining room table in a kitchen that was already too small to begin with. For someone who loves to cook, this is a problem. On the good side, it has about a 400 square foot deck, and since I do a lot of my cooking outdoors, this is a good thing. I'm also…

I'm like "Joe the Plumber?" WTF, John McCain?

John McCain has got to be the biggest moron this side of stoopidville. For so many reasons. The latest is his very public cozy-ing up to the now famous "Joe the Plumber." We are at war in two countries. The economy is in a state not seen since the beginning of the Great Depression and no one really knows why. America's standing in the world is at a nadir, at a low point never ever seen in our entire history. And the best John McCain can do in the final debate with his Democratic opponent is to leverage the yahooistic ramblings of a man named Joe who claims to be a plumber but is not,…

Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman Series

One of the very best treatments of the scientific method in fiction that I've read-- I suspect it may be the best, but years on the Internet make me want to hedge everything-- is the Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein. The main character, Rowan, is a Steerswoman, a member of an order dedicated to collecting and sharing knowledge of the quasi-medieval world in which she lives, and over the course of four books she puzzles out some amazing things about the secret origins of her world and society. It's a joy to watch the scientific reasoning process Rowan follows, and the plots have plenty…

Many Worlds, Many Comics

The Digital Cuttlefish looks at the Archie comics, and waxes poetic: Two paths play out in a comic book, When Archie walks down memory lane "The road not taken" is the hook; So now, the writers take a look And re-write Archie's life again, This time with Betty as his bride; Veronica the woman spurned, Who once upon a time, with pride, Was wed to Archie. Thus allied, They lived while many seasons turned. Why am I commenting on this, given that what little I know about Archie I learned from The Comics Curmudgeon and Chasing Amy? Because he goes on to talk about the Many-Worlds Interpretation…

Hugo Nomination Suggestions

As Kate notes, I am a paid-up member of this year's Worldcon, and thus entitled to nominate works for the Hugo Awards. Of course, there are a zillion categories, and I'm not entirely sure what to nominate for any of them. So, if you are a reader or watcher of science fiction and/or fantasy, this is your opportunity to influence my nominations. If there's a book, story, tv show, movie, editor, or artist that you really, really want to see on the ballot, drop me a comment and let me know. I'll look at the work, if I have time, and give it proper consideration. If you are a person who cares…

Where did Cain get his wife?

People keep asking me this question after the creationist event here in town — Mortenson spoke about how creationism is so much more egalitarian than evolution, and how the Bible talks about these wonderful things people did in the book of Genesis, like Cain going out and founding a whole city, by himself! At a time when the world population was 4, however, that doesn't seem like a great accomplishment. Anyway, some people thought that far, realized that in the creationist conception of an entire world population arising from two people only, there was an obvious problem in the second…

Universe Event in NYC Tomorrow

I'm flying out to New York City on Sunday to participate in the very exciting BRAINWAVE series at the Rubin Museum of Art. BRAINWAVE, which is in its third year, brings thinkers from different disciplines to sit down with scientists to wrap their (and our) minds around the things that matter. Past pairings include Composer Philip Glass and astronomer Greg Laughlin, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and physicist Brian Greene, and performance artist Laurie Anderson with astrophysicist Janna Levin. Needless to say, it's a fascinating series, and I'm honored to be involved. I'll be talking with…

The Lorax Was Wrong: Skyscrapers Are Green

I've been harping on this for years: To live easy on the earth, live densely -- which is to say, in densely built neighborhoods. This Times Economix column describes a study showing just that. Other studies have shown living more densely creates richer social lives and stronger communities. Yet we continue to spread out willy-nilly. I see this to my dismay here in Vermont, where I live, in Montpelier -- the country's smallest state capital, and the only one without a McDonald's -- in a neighborhood of single- and multi-family houses so densely built that today you couldn't build it here,…